Passing through the playground’s crematoria-style entrance gates, Patrick’s eyes flitted round the darker recesses as he headed for the front doors.
A few teachers said hello as he flew down the corridor, their greetings falsely chirpy. That part-timer in Humanities, a knock-kneed knob-end from Wood Green who looked as though his haircut had been bought over the internet, even had the audacity to ask him how his holiday had gone. A nameless teaching assistant whose wonky face was saved by inappropriate décolletage probably tried to smile at him, but it looked for all the world as though she was about to start crying so he hurried embarrassedly on.
The final flight of stairs was always trickier than the three previous, usually more on account of the accumulating chewing gum on his soles than Patrick’s deteriorating levels of fitness. Through the rear windows, he saw Charlotte’s effete, little car and was momentarily dumbstruck. It was in exactly the same position as they’d left it two weeks ago. The snow must have prevented it from being fixed before she flew off to Barbados or Bilbao or Bilauktaung. But seeing the car brought the events back home. Even the snow now seemed like it was returning properly after its own holiday, fluttering back onto the grassy verges, the basketball court, and those weeks off suddenly seemed inconsequential and forgotten.
He decided against turning the light on in the Art office. There was no need to advertise the fact he was there to anyone.
Patrick stared into the slowly dawning sky to find himself wondering whether his son thought about him much, or whether he thought more about Spiderman, or the Gruffalo, or jamon. ‘Danny’s Tune’ was still very much a work in progress, but it had gained verses in his mind, and a middle eight. The problem was, it was now replete with his son’s fresh absence and had morphed from rousing stadium anthem to the lonely plink-plonk of a nursery-room pullstring.
Danny was probably on the plane, right now. Patrick searched the pregnant snowclouds for his boy. He’d heard of refugees falling to their deaths from the wheel housings of aircraft, frozen and asphyxiated, in a desperate attempt to flee their war- or economy-ravaged countries. He believed he had some idea of that kind of desperation, and right now would gladly have taken the risk of falling to his death from Danny’s plane.
Patrick slouched to the far side of the office and tugged his electric guitar out of the mire of other formerly loved bric-a-brac. He had more of a history, more of a relationship, with that instrument than the flesh and blood who shared the office with him. He knew its sounds and feels and emotions and, once upon a time, it had responded in kind to his. Though scratched and dusty, an object drawn by hundreds of children unaware of its pedigree, its weight against him felt good and he fastened the strap across his shoulder.
Adam had always been fiercely jealous of this guitar, coveted it the way Patrick had coveted Ana. Now both acquisitions were covered in dust, the poetic thing to have done, rather than let it rot in a London secondary school, would have been to send it to his former bandmate. But Patrick doubted Adam wanted anything from him these days and as he hugged the guitar close, breath coming in thin gasps, he hovered his right hand over the strings and cautiously strummed a slow E chord.
The note sagged derisorily out of tune.
‘Morning.’
Patrick jumped a foot in the air as Harriet entered the office, accompanied by a drawn-out sigh which didn’t herald from the door’s stiff hinge. She wore a long turquoise skirt with a turquoise jumper, both the exact same shade as one another, and further betrayed her age by accompanying the combination with a gold floral brooch.
‘Hi Harriet,’ Patrick tendered, trying to sound normal. He replaced the guitar. ‘Good Christmas?’
‘I didn’t sleep well last night. I never do before the first day back. Too nervous. You?’
‘Not a wink.’
He had the Elevens period four.
Deny everything, right down to the bruises on Denis’ face. Nothing happened. Just deny it, utterly. And make sure you’re in a public place at all times.
‘The kids will be bonkers,’ Harriet mused, looking out the window at the kids beginning to limp into the playground. ‘It’s snowing again. Is the heating on?’
‘Not that I can feel.’
‘There’ll be complaints about that.’ She said this with genuine concern, grimacing so hard Patrick worried about being sucked into the corrugated fissures around her eyes. ‘It’s like Mr H is desperate to alert Ofsted again.’
The inspectors were overdue as it was and Highfields hadn’t performed well previously. The climate around the school had been one of unparalleled anxiety since the September kick-off, a death row atmosphere hardly conducive to the teaching of children, and even Harriet, who’d seen off several such inspections in her time, wasn’t immune to the panic. In fact, she suffered it worse than most.
‘Charlotte’s paperwork’s all over the place and her GCSE grades are fucked up,’ she confided quietly. Patrick had long ago become used to hearing someone his mother’s age swearing so readily. ‘She hasn’t a clue how to control the youngsters. You remember what happened last time she was observed?’
Of course he did. His only regret was that he hadn’t been there to see Charlotte’s lesson first-hand. ‘The odds of another heron flying through the window are highly unlikely, Harriet.’
‘How were my kids in my absence?’ Harriet checked her timetable above the kettle.
‘Awful. Charlene was stealing other pupils’ school bags and filling them with water at the sinks.’
She nodded. This kind of behaviour was hardly news.
It was good to have Harriet clocking in again. Her demeanour was no fresher but her pained-yet-defiant air was somehow reassuring. Patrick noticed, not for the first time, just how truly knackered Harriet looked. Her top lip sported a thicker wisping of hair than usual and she’d been scratching at her cheek, leaving it with the thin traces of sadistic fingernails.
‘You… alright?’
‘I’m counting the days.’
‘Afraid there are still six weeks before half term.’ If she looked this awful on the first day back there was no chance she’d last till then.
‘I’m thinking beyond that, Patrick. I’m looking forward to retirement.’
‘You’re not going anytime soon, are you?’ he asked with what he hoped she’d take as a flattering dismay. Charlotte hadn’t mentioned anything about interviewing for a vacant post.
‘Less than two years.’
‘Doesn’t sound long.’
‘Not compared to the thirty I’ve already done, no. There have been good moments, don’t get me wrong, but it’s never been easy. In fact, it’s got harder. The moment I feel on top of my job the curriculum changes or the government introduces something to pull the rug from under my feet. Twenty years ago, I considered leaving but thought I’d be unable to retrain. The irony is you have to retrain every five years or so to remain in this job, or you get left behind. I was scared the money would be less if I went somewhere else, that I’d lose a secure career, that the holidays would be impossible to do without… I’m in the twilight of my career now. You’re comparatively fresh. Trust me, Patrick, if you’re not one hundred percent happy, get out.’
Patrick stared across the grey playground. There was little he felt he could say to a colleague who’d just admitted to being trapped in her job for a working lifetime. The Monday morning blues. They both had it.
But she hadn’t punched a pupil.
Don’t go anywhere near him. Don’t look at him. Don’t even say his name in the register.
Harriet was still looking at him, in that odd way. He tried to sound breezy, normal, but knew he sounded like the drunkard who attempts to overcompensate by adopting an unconvincing impression of sobriety. ‘Why did you stay at this school?’ he asked.
‘They’re all the same,’ she whistled through three decades of throat polyps. ‘I’ve got a Year Team meeting this week. It’ll be full of keen newly-qualifieds with plans to be more positive with the youngsters. Letters of praise sent home when they fail to hit each other, that sort of thing… I just feel like I’m out of my depth sometimes, Patrick. Do you know what I mean?’ She seemed to be prying for something. Perhaps she’d sensed his discomfort, his fear.
Three storeys beneath them, he saw Denis.
He parted the legions of huddled lower years as he swaggered through his jungle, bobbing like a rap star, a newly rethroned king. Patrick couldn’t make out his usual expression of lofty enmity, or even if his face was bruised or not, but saw only the muscles in his neck, the firm lines of a prematurely broad back.
‘I’m beginning to,’ he replied.
Charlotte entered as the morning bell went.
‘Good morning,’ Harriet and Patrick both chimed.
‘No it isn’t,’ she spat.
Patrick opened up the pouch linings in an old body warmer with a rusting scalpel and carefully inserted ceramic tiles from the bottom shelf of the kiln into the slits. They wouldn’t stop a bullet but he doubted a knife could pass through, unless Denis was supremely lucky. In case the boy was after a kill, Patrick double-tiled the area in front of his hammering heart. He tried it on, beneath his jacket. It looked ridiculous, and was insanely heavy, but he would take no chances.
His teaching plumbed new depths. Fortunately, the kids were equally depressed to be back and were just about manageable. Some asked about the body warmer under his jacket but the lack of heating forgave him. Sometimes the tiles clanked together and, each time, to cover himself, he stamped down on the flooring as though it might be coming loose. He was vaguely aware that the kids were looking at him more strangely than usual.
When the time came, the Elevens began lining up. Sophia now had Miley Cyrus hair. Carlo’s chin looked like he’d glued individual hairs onto it. Jenna’s skirt had lost another two inches.
And there he was, near the back, alone.
He looked straight ahead, unreadable, untouchable. He seemed to have grown again, out as well as up.
‘Come in,’ Patrick squealed, standing at the door until the last few were due in and then slipping inside, so the majority of the class formed a human shield alongside him as Denis entered. His jacket clanked.
Denis found his seat, shrugged his bag off onto the floor.
‘Today, um… Well, today… Let’s see… Happy New Year…’
Denis sat inspecting his large, powerful hands.
Patrick tried to explain to the group that they were to begin their mock exam preparation today, showed them the paper, some past examples. He was pleased the pupils were listening, though it began to dawn on him that they were simply shocked by his appearance. As the clock ticked round, he waited for the insults, the threats, someone to throw a chair.
Nothing. Not yet.
Unusually quiet, the class began their brainstorms. Matthew Keane’s empty seat was a reminder of Denis’ unproved sociopathic tendencies, as the assailant in question sat there chewing the end of his pen, his eyes leaden with… Anger? Apathy? Hurt? It was like trying to decipher the soul of a statue. Nothing lurked within, and no clues gave anything away on the outside.
Sophia put up her hand.
‘Sir, can I make an appointment for Wednesday?’
Reluctantly, he slid the parents’ evening form round the room as the pupils selected an appointment time and jotted it down in their planners.
He hated parents’ evenings more than he hated marking. Or teaching. Or the getting out of bed.
Jenna looked at the paper, then at him.
‘Is there any point me filling this in, sir?’ she asked, her eyes round with sarcasm. ‘I mean, since you and my mother are…?’
‘Probably not, no.’
He passed the sheet on to Hamza.
Soon, all except Jenna and one other pupil had filled in their timeslot. It sat in front of Denis, unnoticed.
Patrick stepped forward to take it back as Denis snatched out for the form. Casting his apathetic gaze over the available times, the boy chose a slot before skimming it back across the table to the teacher without a word.
‘Thanks,’ Patrick said. The tiles in his body warmer ground together, then gave out a loud clink as one fell through into the pouch underneath. Jenna looked at him under heavy lids that seemed to confirm a mortal disgust.
‘Denis, you have thing on your face?’ Cosmo asked, in his delightfully mangled English.
The room, silent before, was an instant, fearful vacuum. Cosmo smiled dumbly at Denis.
‘I used to have a harelip,’ Denis stated, calm, composed.
‘No. Your eye.’ Cosmo pointed to his own, left eye.
Patrick saw now. The bruise had retreated over Christmas, but could still be seen around the socket in the form of a faintly blotched, rash-like contusion. Denis put his finger to it, then observed the sailing clouds out the window. Nothing was said.
Somehow, time passed.
When the class stood as one on the bell, Patrick jumped in shock. The pushing back of stools was the scrape of fingernails on chalkboards.
Patrick swam back to reality. It was lunchtime and he was sitting on the toilet.
He couldn’t remember the previous, sleepwalked lesson. He could barely remember the last seven years, how they’d passed in a drowned heartbeat of time.
What was he supposed to have made of that last hour? On the surface, nothing had changed. Denis wasn’t, for the time being, dragging Patrick’s broken body through the alleyways of Union City. But it was a false victory. The white bone of reality had been revealed to Patrick. He was a dead man walking.
Had Denis even spoken? Had he looked his way at all? What the hell had happened? And how long had the inevitable retaliation been delayed for? And why?
Patrick almost wished Denis had attacked him.
He stared at the back of the toilet door and listened without listening to the footsteps, the locking doors, the unbucklings. He considered, in that most unsanitary of environments, the infinity of time which had passed before his birth and the infinity of time which would follow his death. He considered the notion that he was here, by the remotest probability, at this living, breathing moment, this tiny, tiny snatch of time, and he screamed out silence. He knew he should have been out in the world, making things happen. Living his life. So much time had passed already.
It had been so promising, once. The move to London. The formation of the band. Meeting Ana. Then, ashes. What had happened to those dreams?
But dreams, of course, aren’t real. Civilisations aren’t built on fantasies and dreams can so easily dry up and blow away.
The footsteps. The flushes. The expulsions. Some of the staff washed their hands, some didn’t.
The snows came again, singing over the sharp lines of Union City, feathering the estate with the unfamiliar presence of nature.
Trudging home, Patrick rang Ana’s mother.
The harsh, intermittent buzz of an international call sounded, before being answered by a Spanish voice.
‘Ana?’
‘No. Lo siento. Esta es su madre. ¿Quién llama?’
The stupid cow knew exactly who it was. ‘It’s Patrick, Adana. Can I speak to Ana please?’ He didn’t want to speak to Ana, he wanted to speak to Danny. It felt to him sometimes that it had never really been Ana he’d wanted to spend time with, not once Danny had learned to talk and fight and draw and dream. That was almost definitely why they weren’t together any more.
‘She no here.’
‘Any idea when she’ll be back?’
‘She no say. She in England. They no here.’
‘You’re wrong. They flew back yesterday.’
It must be a translation issue, he told himself. Or maybe Ana was there in the room but just didn’t want to speak to him.
He hung up when he began receiving another call. It was Sarah. He deliberated, then answered.
He might have imagined it, but he thought she sounded relieved. ‘Hello. I thought you’d died.’
‘I was away for Christmas. Sorry, didn’t I tell you?’
She asked him how he’d been, enquired as to his holiday, and he asked her if she’d tried to call him often and she replied, ‘Only a couple of times’. He knew this was a lie; he’d counted at least ten attempts in the aftermath of their hotel date.
‘Jenna’s at her father’s tonight. Why don’t you come over?’
He paused, looked along the pathway that led to the end section of the estate, the ground upon which he’d stood and thrown his fist at his least favourite Year Eleven pupil.
‘What’s the address?’
He walked out onto Albert Road and hailed a minicab.
The driver had such tired eyes, and the luggage underneath them was so circular, it was as though he wore spectacles of flesh. ‘Where you going, fella?’
Patrick recited the address.
‘Bateman block? You must be kidding.’ He powered off, leaving Patrick by the roadside.
Assuming the journey was such a short one it wasn’t worth the boorish taxi driver’s time, Patrick tugged up the collar of his coat and headed into the estate on foot. He found a crude council map on the corner of Stetson block. Bateman seemed to be seven blocks on.
He’d never plunged so deep in-between the high-rise of Union City before and couldn’t believe how identical every block, quadrangle, alleyway and balcony looked. The corner of the estate he knew from his walk home had infinitely replicated itself, every confused and criss-crossing walkway an example in déjà vu, with only the names of the blocks and the graffiti changing. He might have been back where he started for all the variety he was afforded in the snow, slanting and drifting across a bloating moon. As water crept into his shoes through high-street stitching, he creaked hesitantly across packing ice in the manner of an octogenarian.
Unbidden, ‘Danny’s Tune’ sought Patrick out. He rolled it around his mind before humming it to life. It calmed him, and the woes of Highfields retreated like figures in the snowfall. He added another verse.
And though you’re hardly
Here with me
My love for you flows
Constantly
He was about four blocks into the conglomeration of shoebox silhouettes, very near Sarah’s flat, when he passed two hooded shadows.
He kept his gaze low and walked as fast as the snow would allow. Inevitably, dozens of snowballs, hardened into ice by hot mitts, pelted him until his song was lost.
Round the next corner, the rest of the gang lurked.
There were seven of them, liveried in tracksuits and attitude, and they waited like a checkpoint militia, silent, expectant. Most of them were tooled up: one held a golf club, another at the far end of the line had gone for the traditional baseball bat. They all wore bandanas across their faces, eyes showing in thin, ninja slits.
Patrick approached, keeping to what he assumed was the path. The tinny, rapid sound of hip-hop rang out from an iPhone as the snow gave out compacting squeaks beneath his shoes. Snowflakes were black ash against the white night sky.
The golf club kid, broad-shouldered and tall, stood up from his place on a low wall segregating refuse bins from the residential area, and walked slowly towards Patrick until he blocked his way. He wore a grey and white Palestinian-style scarf across his face and he bounced his club, once, twice, three times against his leg. The eyes were brown, cynical, familiar.
The taste of fear was bile in Patrick’s throat.
Denis sidled right up to a paralysed Patrick and grabbed him by the elbow, as one might an elderly relative. He steered him through the quadrangle. It was civil but urgent and Patrick had no choice but to obey.
As he was led through the masked gang he noticed a couple were female. One of whom quivered in her too-short school skirt, beneath a fur coat and a girly-pink bandana. He hoped Jenna wouldn’t recognise him in his own inadequate winter gear. Or maybe it wasn’t Jenna. Wasn’t she supposed to be at her father’s?
To Patrick’s surprise – and towering relief – the grip on his arm was suddenly lessened. The boy’s footsteps dissipating behind him, he squinted into the blizzard. The estate had transformed its dimensions in the snowy dark, and Patrick was no longer sure about the direction he was supposed to go. Crunching on, he pondered his release; the ironclad atmosphere hinted at something about to happen, something big, uncivil, dangerous – was his adult presence a threat?
As he mused, the word ‘Bateman’, writ large beneath graffiti on a sign half-screwed into brickwork, loomed out of the murk. He counted the door numbers up to Sarah’s flat and was about to mount the steps towards a fracturing balcony when the worry that Jenna was observing span him back to face the youths.
Dissolving in a filmic whiteout, the gang were already just formless spectres behind the soggy, bright night.