Part 20 (1/2)

I RAN THEN, AND KEPT RUNNING, WITH THE SOUND OF Leon's fall at my heels like a black dog. Here my knowledge of the roof came into its own; I loped, monkeylike, across my rooftop circuit, cat-leaped from the parapet on to the fire escape, and from there regained the Middle Corridor by the open fire door, and thence, the open air.

I was running on instinct by then, of course; everything suspended but the need to survive. Outside, emergency lights still strobed mystically red and blue from the fire engines parked in the Chapel court.

No one had seen me leave the building. I was clear. All around me, firemen and police, cordoning off the area against the little group of gawkers that had collected on the drive. I was clear, I told myself. No one had seen me. Except, of course, for Straitley.

Cautiously now, I made for the Gatehouse, avoiding the parked fire engine with its bank of red-blue lights and the hopeful ambulance sirening its way up the long drive. Instinct drove me. I made for home. There I would be safe. There I would lie under my bed, wrapped in a blanket, as I always had on Sat.u.r.day nights, door locked, thumb in mouth, waiting for my father to come home. It would be dark under the bed; it would be safe.

The Gatehouse door was wide open. Light came from the kitchen window; the lounge curtains were open, but light shone from there too, and there were figures standing against the light. Mr Bishop was there, with his megaphone. Two policemen were standing by the patrol car that blocked the drive.

And now I could see someone else there, a woman in a coat with a fur collar; a woman whose face in the lights seemed suddenly, fleetingly familiar-- The woman turned, full-face to me, and her mouth dropped in a great lipsticked 'Oh'.

'Oh, sweetheart! Oh, love!'

The woman, running towards me on kitten heels.

Bishop, turning, megaphone in hand, as a cry went up from the firemen at the far side of the building. 'Mr Bishop, sir! Over here!'

The woman, hair flying; eyes wet; arms like batwing doors to scoop me in. A sensation of shrinking; a tickle of fur against my mouth; and suddenly there were tears; tears boiling out of me as everything came back in a tidal wave of memory and grief. Leon, Straitley, my father - all forgotten; left far behind as she gathered me into the house, to safety.

'It wasn't supposed to be like this, love.' Her voice was haking. 'It was going to be a surprise.'

In that second I saw it all. The unopened plane ticket. The whispered conversations on the phone. How much? Pause. All right. It's for the best.

How much for what? To give up his claim? And how many scratchcards, how many six-packs and takeaway pizzas did they promise him before he gave them what they wanted?

I began to cry again, this time in rage at their joint betrayal. My mother held me in a scent of something expensive and unfamiliar. 'Oh, sweetheart. What happened?'

'Oh, Mum,' I sobbed, sinking my face into her furry coat, feeling her mouth against my hair, smelling cigarette smoke and the dry, musky scent of her as inside something small and clever slipped its hand into my heart and squeezed.

IN SPITE OF MRS MITCh.e.l.l'S INSISTENCE THAT LEON WOULD never have gone on the roof alone, her son's best friend the boy she called Julian Pinchbeck - was never found. School records were searched; door-to-door inquiries made, but to no avail. Even this effort might not have been undertaken if it had not been for Mr Straitley's insistence that he had seen Pinchbeck on the Chapel roof - though sadly, the boy had got away.

The police were very sympathetic - after all, the woman was distraught - but secretly they must have believed poor Mrs Mitch.e.l.l to be slightly off her rocker, for ever talking about nonexistent boys and refusing to accept her son's death as a tragic accident.

That might have changed if she had seen me again, but she didn't. Three weeks later I went to live with my mother and Xavier at their home in Paris, where I was to remain for the next seven years.

By that time, though, my transformation was well under way. The ugly duckling had begun to change; and with my mother's help it happened fast. I did not resist it. With Leon dead, Pinchbeck could not hope or wish to survive. I disposed rapidly of my St Oswald's clothes and relied upon my mother to do the rest.

A second chance, she had called it; and now I opened all of the notes, the letters, the parcels waiting in their pretty wrappers under my bed, and made full use of what I found inside.

I never saw my father again. The investigation into his conduct was only a formality, but his manner was odd, and it aroused the suspicion of the police. There was no real cause to suspect foul play. But he was aggressive under questioning; a breathalyser test revealed he'd been drinking heavily; and his account of that night was vague and unconvincing, as if he hardly recalled what had happened any more. Roy Straitley, who confirmed his presence at the scene of the tragedy, had reported hearing him shout, - 'I'll get you' - at one of the boys. The police later made much of this, and though Straitley always maintained that John Snyde was running to help the fallen boy, he had to admit that the Porter had had his back turned to him at the time of the incident, and that he could not therefore have known for sure whether the man was trying to help or not. After all, said the police, Snyde's record was hardly untarnished. Only that summer he had received an official reprimand for attacking a pupil on St Oswald's premises; and his uncouth behaviour and violent temper were well known around the School. Dr Tidy confirmed it; and Jimmy added some embellishments of his own.

Pat Bishop, who might have helped, proved strangely reluctant to speak on my father's behalf. This was partly the fault of the New Head, who had made it clear to Pat that his princ.i.p.al duty was to St Oswald's, and that the sooner the Snyde fiasco was cleared up, the sooner they could distance themselves from the whole sorry affair. Besides, Bishop was beginning to feel uneasy. This business threatened both his new appointment and his growing friends.h.i.+p with Marlene Mitch.e.l.l. After all, he was the one who'd befriended John Snyde. As Second Master, he'd encouraged him, believed in him, defended him, knowing that John had a history of violence against my mother, against myself and on at least one doc.u.mented occasion against a pupil of St Oswald's - which made it all the more plausible that the man, goaded to breaking-point, had lost his head and chased Leon Mitch.e.l.l across the rooftops to his death.

There was never any real evidence to support the clai m. Certainly Roy Straitley refused to do so. Besides, wasn't the man afraid of heights? But the papers got hold of it. There were anonymous letters, phone calls, the usual public outrage that acc.u.mulates around any such case. Not that there ever was a case. John Snyde was never formally charged. All the same, he hanged himself, in a bed-and-breakfast room in town, three days before we moved to Paris.

Even then I knew who was responsible. Not Bishop, though he was partly to blame. Not Straitley, not the papers, not even the Head. St Oswald's killed my father, just as surely as St Oswald's killed Leon. St Oswald's, with its bureaucracy, Us pride, its blindness, its a.s.sumptions. Killed them and digested them without a thought, like a whale sucking up plankton. Fifteen years later, no one remembers either of them. They're just names on a list of Crises St Oswald's Has Survived.

Not this one, though. Last time pays for all.

Friday, 5th November 630 p.m.

I Pa.s.sED BY THE HOSPITAL AFTER SCHOOL, WITH SOME flowers and a book for Pat Bishop. Not that he reads much, though perhaps he should; besides, as I told him, he ought to be taking it easy.

He wasn't, of course. I arrived to find him engaged in a violent discussion with the same pink-haired nurse who had dealt with my own problem not long before.

'Christ, not another one,' she said, on seeing me. 'Tell me, are all St Oswald's staff as awkward as you two, or did I just get lucky?'

'I tell you, I'm fine.' He didn't look it. He had a bluish tinge, and he looked smaller, as if all that running had impacted him somehow. His eye fell on the flowers in my hand. 'For G.o.d's sake, I'm not dead; yet.'

'Give them to Marlene,' I suggested. 'She could probably do with cheering up.'

'You could be right.' He smiled at me, and I caught sight of the old Bishop again, just for a moment. 'Take her home, will you, Roy? She won't go, and she's tired out. Thinks something's going to happen to me if she gets a good night's sleep.'

Marlene, I discovered, had gone to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of tea. I caught up with her there, having extracted a promise from Bishop that he wouldn't try and check himself out in my absence.

She looked surprised to see me. She was holding a crumpled handkerchief in one hand, and her face unusually clear of make-up -- was pink and blotchy. 'Mr Straitley! I wasn't expecting--'

'Marlene Mitch.e.l.l,' I said sternly. 'After fifteen years, I think it's time you started calling me Roy.'

Over polystyrene cups of a peculiarly fishy-tasting tea, we talked. It's funny how our colleagues, those not-quite friends who populate our lives more closely than our closest relatives, remain so hidden to us in the essential. When we think of them, we see them not as people, with families and private lives, but as we see them every day: dressed for work; businesslike (or not); efficient (or not); all of us satellites of the same lumbering moon.

A colleague in jeans looks strangely wrong; a colleague in tears is almost indecent. Those private glimpses of something outside St Oswald's seem almost unreal, like dreams.

The reality is the stone; the tradition; the permanence of St Oswald's. Staff come, staff go. Sometimes they die. Sometimes even boys die; but St Oswald's endures, and as I have grown older I have taken increasing comfort from this.

Marlene, I sense, is different. Perhaps because she's a woman - those things don't mean so much to women, I've found. Perhaps because she sees what St Oswald's has done to Pat. Or perhaps because of her son, who haunts me still.

'You shouldn't be here,' she said, wiping her eyes. 'The Head told everyone . . .'

'b.u.g.g.e.r the Head. It's after hours, and I can do what I like,' I told her, sounding like Robbie Roach for the first time in my life. It made her laugh, though, which was what I wanted. 'That's better,' I said, inspecting the dregs of my now-cold beverage. 'Tell me, Marlene, why does hospital tea always taste of fish?'

She smiled. She looks younger when she smiles - or perhaps it was the absence of make-up - younger and not so Wagnerian. 'It's good of you to come, Roy. No one else has, you know; not the Head, not Bob Strange. Not a single one of his friends. Oh, it's all very tactful. All very St Oswald's. I'm sure the Senate were equally tactful with Caesar when they handed him the hemlock bowl.'

I think she meant Socrates, but I let it go. 'He'll survive,' I lied. 'Pat's tough, and everyone knows those charges are ridiculous. You'll see, by the end of the year the Governors will be begging him to come back.'

'I hope so.' She took a sip of her cold tea. 'I'm not going to let them bury him, as they buried Leon.'

It was the first time in fifteen years that she had mentioned her son in my presence. Another barrier down; and yet I'd been expecting it; that old business has been more than usually on my mind in recent weeks, and I suppose she felt the same.

There are parallels, of course: hospitals; a scandal; a vanished boy. Her son was not killed outright by the fall, although he never regained consciousness. Instead, there was the long wait by the boy's bedside; the dreadful, lingering torment of hope; the procession of hopefuls and well-wishers -- boys, family, girlfriend, tutors, priest -- until the inevitable end.

We never did find that second boy, and Marlene's insistence that he must have seen something was always taken as a hysterical mother's desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy. Only Bishop tried to help; checking School records and going over photographs until someone (maybe the Head) pointed out that his persistence in clouding the issue would almost certainly damage St Oswald's. Not that it mattered in the end, of course; but Pat was never happy about the outcome.

'Pinchbeck. That was his name.' As if I could have forgotten - a fake name if I ever heard one. But I'm good at names; and I'd remembered his from that day in the corridor, when I'd found him sneaking about near my office on some unlikely excuse. Leon had been there then, too, I thought. And the boy had given his name as Pinchbeck. 'Yes, Julian Pinchbeck.' She smiled, not pleasantly. 'No one else really believed in him. Except Pat. And you, of course, when you saw him there--'

I wondered if I had seen him. I never forget a boy, you know; in thirty-three years I never have. All those young faces, frozen in time; every one of them believing that Time will make the exception for them alone; that they alone will remain for ever fourteen . ..

'I saw him,' I told her. 'Or at least, I thought I did.' Smoke and mirrors; a ghost boy who dissolved like the night mists when morning came. 'I was so sure--'

'We all were,' said Marlene. 'But there was no Pinchbeck on any of the School records, or in the photo files, or even on the lists of applicants. Anyway, by then, it was all over. No one was interested. My son was dead. We had a school to run.'