JONAH WASN’T AWARE OF IT, but he had been dawdling on the walk to school, taking his time even more than usual. He was always unwilling to get to school, and this morning there happened to be much to see on the way, much to divert him, much to dawdle over.
It was almost a clear morning, a few white puffy “Simpsons” clouds – as Jonah thought of them – against the deep blue of the sky. Across the fields he spotted a rust-brown deer grazing at the edge of the woods. She hadn’t seen him. He stayed still, watching her. It was a bounding rabbit that disturbed her in the end. The deer sprang away, vanishing into the woods. The countryside seemed suddenly empty when she was gone.
But then the swallows were there, swooping down over his head, skimming the fields. The hedgerows all around were alive with birds: blackbirds, sparrows, chaffinches, wrens, and the pair of flitting goldfinches he so loved to see. The air was full of birdsong.
Jonah found himself singing out loud with them as he walked along the lane – this time it was “Here Comes the Sun”. He knew every word, heard the accompaniment in his head. Yes, he thought as he sang, maybe this is going to be one of the good days. After all, the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and he had his play rehearsal first thing with Mrs Rainer to look forward to.
Mrs Rainer was far and away the best and most inspiring teacher he had. Everything about her was sharp: she had a sharp quick mind, sharp pointed shoes – always green – a sharp nose, and sharp darting eyes. And she was fair too, scrupulously inclusive. So in Lord of the Flies, the school play they were rehearsing, everyone had a part to play, though not necessarily the part they wanted. Mrs Rainer had created a musical adaptation of the book, and composed the songs herself. The pupils could help play the music, make scenery or costumes, or act in it. Valeria was almost the Pied Piper of the play. She played her clarinet on stage, drifting through and around the action, weaving the story, making the magic, setting the tone and mood. She played quite beautifully.
Jonah loved to act. He came alive in the character of others, leaving all his shyness behind. He had wanted to play Ralph, the main – heroic – part, but even in the auditions, he’d known he wasn’t right for the role. In the end Mrs Rainer had chosen him to play Piggy, and he was happy enough with that, proud of it too. It was a big part, important in the story. And he had the best song. Mrs Rainer told him that his singing voice was the main reason why she had given him the part.
Jonah liked the character of Piggy, empathized with his bewilderment, his apartness, his longing to belong and his inability to do so. He didn’t like what happened to Piggy in the end, of course, but he knew from school how cruel some people could be, and how right the author, William Golding, had been about the power of the mob.
No one was about as Jonah came wandering across the playing fields and through the iron gates. Every time he came into school, even though he’d been there nearly a year, Jonah was amazed at the sheer size and grandeur of it – especially after his little village junior school. There were acres and acres of playing fields and woods, and a wide gravel driveway that swept through wrought-iron gates and into a great courtyard with the school buildings all around. Impressive though it all was, Jonah found the place too huge, too austere, too stark. He loved only the chapel, which stood in the middle of the courtyard and had so often been his refuge from all the noise and clamour of the school, a sanctuary from the sadness of both his worlds. This was where he went when he wanted to be alone, when he needed to gather courage enough to face his worlds again.
The chapel, big enough to seat all seven hundred pupils, was just a small part of this great country house of a school, a place of towering chimneys, magnificent red-brick buildings and pillared cloisters. And this was a school with a story. Like everyone else, Jonah knew well enough what this place had once been, before it had become the local secondary school – they were all told its history by the headmaster at their very first school assembly, in the chapel. Jonah had never forgotten. His school had been built originally in 1935 to house the children from the Foundling Hospital in London, which was a kind of orphanage. For nearly two centuries the lives of tens of thousands of poor and starving children had been saved by this Foundling Hospital in London. The children had been fed, cared for, educated, given a chance in life.
But as the years passed, the headmaster had told them, the city became too crowded and dirty for the foundling children. So this new school had been built out in the Hertfordshire countryside. Thousands more of these foundling children had lived here, in Jonah’s school, boys in one half, girls in the other. They never mixed; they were hardly allowed even to speak with one another. They ate in one dining room – the dining room that was still used today – but in separate halves, at long tables and in silence, and they had to march everywhere, into the chapel, into meals.
Jonah made his way along the same wide echoing corridor where the foundling children had walked all those years ago, past the black and white photos of them on the walls, and imagined again how their lives must have been, this place their whole world, with no home to go to, no mother that they knew of, no father.
The school was quiet, Jonah thought, too quiet. Then he realized. Late, he was late again. Outside the rehearsal room he took a deep breath, dreading all eyes on him as he walked in, as he knew they would be. He knocked, went in, said sorry to Mrs Rainer, who waved him to his seat.
But then the ribald remarks came thick and fast. How often he wished his mother had chosen another name for him, and how he wished Jonah had not been swallowed by that wretched whale in the Bible. No one had made the connection until the headmaster had told everyone the story one day in assembly, so Jonah had him to thank for that. Once the story was out, there had been endless jokes on Facebook about it, about him, some of them so nasty it hurt. Almost overnight, his nickname at school had become Moby or Moby Dick.
“Evening, Moby,” someone sneered as he sat down.
“Dickhead,” said Marlon, so often his tormentor, and well cast as the bully Jack in Lord of the Flies.
To Jonah’s complete surprise, Valeria turned on Marlon. Speaking very slowly and deliberately in her halting English, she said, “I think you should not say this. It is not good. It is not kind.”
Her words fell on deaf ears.
“Blubber, blubber, blubber,” came the whispering chorus all around the classroom. That was the name that really cut him to the quick, and shamed him. He had always tried so hard to hide it, but they knew he cried easily. He felt the tears welling up, and tried desperately to hold them back, but he was failing.
Mrs Rainer saved him. She shut them up, withered them to silence. The tears were already in his throat, in his mouth too. He swallowed them, held himself steady, but all eyes were still on him. Marlon was smirking, waiting for him to crack. Jonah sang inside his head and kept the tears at bay, just. Suddenly the day was not going well at all.
But once the rehearsal began in earnest, he managed to ignore the jibes, become Piggy, and lose himself entirely in the story. He remembered his lines well, and Mrs Rainer made no secret of the fact that she liked the wholehearted way he was playing his part. He did worry, when the time came to sing his “Home again” song, whether his voice would hold, but somehow it did. He was singing it not as Jonah but as Piggy, and Piggy was singing loud and strong, and in tune. “Home again,” he sang. “When will I be home again?” Mrs Rainer was nodding her approval all the way through, and best of all he could see Valeria was enjoying the song, willing him to do well, and then, when he had finished, miming a little clap for him.
Now came the moment of high drama in the play, when the others turned on Piggy to attack and kill him. Mrs Rainer was at the piano. She had turned the murder almost into a ballet: for greater impact, she said. And it worked. Everyone had to slow their movements right down as they gathered round Piggy for the slow-motion kill. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” came the rhythmic chant, their feet stomping in time, building slowly to a thunderous crescendo.
But in among the chanting Jonah began to hear something else, a different chant, not rehearsed, not in the play at all. “Blubber! Blubber! Blubber!” He realized that all the slow-motion pretending, the simulated violence, was becoming real. It was Jonah they were attacking, not Piggy at all. This was personal now. He caught a glimpse of Marlon’s face, saw the venom in his eyes, his face twisted, grinning. Marlon wasn’t acting. He was enjoying it too much. The punching and the kicking might still be feigned, but they were meant. Now Marlon was kneeling on top of him, hand on the back of Jonah’s head, pushing his face into the floor. Jonah tried to squirm away, to curl himself into a ball, to protect his body, his face, his head. “Blubber! Blubber! Blubber!” came the chant again, Marlon’s voice loud in his ear.
Suddenly the chanting stopped, and Marlon was off his back. Jonah dared look up. Mrs Rainer was pulling Marlon away by the scruff of his shirt. Then she was crouching over him. “Are you all right, Jonah?” she asked. “Are you all right?” Above him, there was a crowd of faces looking down at him, breathing hard, all silent now.
“Just making it real, Miss,” Marlon protested. “You said we had to mean it, Miss. Mean it when you act. You said.”
Jonah could feel blood warm on his lip, dripping from his nose. Mrs Rainer helped him up onto his feet. Valeria was offering him her handkerchief, putting it to his face, making him hold it.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves! Sit down immediately, the lot of you!” Mrs Rainer did not hide her anger. “And not a word while I’m gone. I’m taking Jonah to see the nurse. Not a word! You hear me?”
The school nurse sat him in her room and told him to pinch his nose. She kept asking if he was feeling all right. Jonah nodded. He couldn’t speak. He wouldn’t speak. He just wanted to get out of this place and never come back. When the nurse was called away, Jonah grabbed his chance. He ran for it, taking the stairs in twos, and raced along the corridor to the front entrance. He wanted to go home, but knew how upset his mother would be. He had to give himself time to calm down, to stop his nose bleeding, before he could face her. She mustn’t see him like this. It would distress her too much.
“Nice day?” she would ask him. It was always the first thing she said when he got home.
“Fine, Mum,” he would reply, because he always did, because he couldn’t worry her, could never bring his troubles home. She could not cope with him being unhappy – he knew that. He had to be strong for her.
Jonah made for the chapel, the best place – the only place – to be alone, to have time to recover. He hoped it would be empty.