WE WERE CAUGHT immediately. On Monday morning, before first lesson, I was frog-marched through the corridors by a teacher who had never actually taught in one of my classes. It was silent all the way down apart from the ominous clicking of shoes on wood. I felt like one of those guys being led down death row.
The teacher was just ahead of me and, when he reached the headmaster’s door, he opened it and I walked past. Of course I already knew that the game was up but, when I saw who was in the room with the headmaster, any remaining air of hope fizzled away. Sat in five chairs were Clare, Matthew, Jenny, Craig and, of course, Freddy. None of them looked at me as I took my seat.
The headmaster stared at us like he was somehow better than us. We didn’t believe that to be true (apart from maybe Matthew) because we knew the truth about most people. Everybody has a secret.
I grabbed a glance sideways at Freddy, who was gazing out the window, no expression on his face. You would never have guessed that somebody with his outward appearance would have done what he did to that bird.
At last the headmaster spoke.
‘So what have you got to say for yourselves?’
We all stayed silent. I got a few glances my way from Clare and Matthew.
The headmaster got up from his chair with one of those crushed-leather squeaky sounds and walked over to the TV stand like he was a high-powered detective from the Met. Far too much self-importance. He switched on the TV and pressed play on the video.
The screen faded in. It was a surveillance-camera shot of the falcon paddock. My gut turned to acid and sludge. It was dark but the moon was bright, and a crack of dawn was throwing a half-light in from the left. I had to sit there and watch as we all flowed into shot. We were done for, all lost at sea. My heart was beating hard as I watched the ghostly images of me and Freddy climbing over the fence and running over to the cage. The camera was high up and we looked small, like little matchstick men. But it was definitely and clearly us.
It didn’t bring back memories of the event; rather I just watched it without any clear thoughts registering in my brain. All I felt was a kind of numbness. At least this would show that Freddy was the one who was guilty and I would get away with nothing but a rap on the knuckles. It actually made me feel a little bit better.
I could sense the atmosphere in the room intensify, like the air was getting rarefied and more difficult to breathe. I found myself wondering what was going through Matthew’s mind – I didn’t want him to think bad of me.
On the screen, Freddy whipped open the cage and the bird came thrashing out, his wings all over the place. Jenny adjusted herself uncomfortably in her chair.
It was strange watching the event with no sound. The camera showed Bertie escaping my clutches and flapping towards Freddy. But then it all went wrong. Freddy suddenly turned his back away from the camera like it was the most deliberate thing in the world. Then I turned my face away from the camera and Bertie disappeared out of sight, obscured by Freddy’s, and my, body. My throat went dry. The next thing you saw was the limp corpse of the falcon being put back into the cage, still. And there was no way you could tell who had done it. As Freddy shut the door of the cage, so did the door shut on my life.
The headmaster was back in his chair, hands steepled under his chin. Smug. He didn’t care about the bird, I could tell. All he cared about was punishing us.
‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what this means.’
We were all silent.
‘Sir,’ I said at last. ‘We didn’t mean to hurt it.’
‘Save it, Harper. I don’t want to hear it.’ There was venom in his voice. He was genuinely disgusted with us. It was actually quite shocking. It kind of punched home how bad what we had done really was. He was especially disgusted with me and Freddy. He never liked me anyway. ‘How can you say you meant it no harm? You broke its neck.’ His face was going red and I could feel an explosion coming on. But it never arrived. He was deliberately hemming himself in.
The weird thing was that I wasn’t feeling frightened, which is what I should have been feeling. I was, in all honesty, feeling anger towards the headmaster more than anything else. I’m sure my reaction wasn’t rational, but that’s the way it was. I felt confrontational.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said to me and Freddy. ‘What have you got to say about this?’
I was only fifteen and I was already more intelligent than my headmaster, who didn’t realize that he had just told me to shut up and was now asking me to talk. Long service can get you a long way, you know? I’m sorry for saying that, but that’s how I felt. Something was stirring in me, and it wasn’t good. I knew what it was. It was the old me, the acerbic, ruthless Richard Harper that had been so horrendously behaved when his parents split up. I didn’t want him back. He was not welcome but he was still coming. I knew it.
‘Sir, we didn’t mean for it to happen. We didn’t want to kill it.’
‘Tell me which one of you did it.’ His voice sounded menacing.
‘It was me.’
Everyone looked at Freddy, who was fixing the headmaster’s stare.
‘I grabbed it and its neck just got caught and somehow . . . it happened.’
I was hugely impressed that Freddy had taken the hit. He knew I wouldn’t have said anything so he could have got away with it if he’d wanted, but he did the decent thing.
‘Sir, I swear I didn’t mean to kill Bertie. I was trying to set him free.’
‘What do you think your father will say about this, Mr Spaulding-Carter?’
Freddy’s face looked a little afraid now.
‘He’ll be upset,’ he said calmly.
I should say now before you get the wrong idea that Freddy’s father was not one of those strict fathers. He didn’t force him into doing anything that he didn’t want to do, like military school or something like that. I never actually met him, but I know that none of Freddy’s defects were caused by abusive parenting. Freddy was just plain nuts, I suppose. I guess you could say that everything he did tied in with his theory of motivation and how human behaviour can’t be explained away by cold, unromantic science. There was no reason for killing Bertie. None. It happened and there was no reason for it. A lot of life is like that.
Then, out of nowhere, Craig Bartlett-Taylor burst into tears. Just suddenly started crying a torrent. He was inconsolable. His face was all red and I felt an arrow of sorrow pierce my heart. How long had this tear-storm been brewing in his poor fractured soul? Since Bertie, since the pill incident, before that even? His whole life maybe. I wanted to hug him and protect him from the world, apart from, of course, there’s no protecting anyone from it – it will get you in the end, no matter what.
The headmaster’s face simply went blank, like he’d had a lobotomy.
‘Stop crying, boy,’ was the best he could manage. Cruel bastard.
It showed me there and then that some adults live their lives behind a veil. As far as I can see, they pretend for all the world that they know what they’re doing but they only seem so self-assured because they think they know what’s going to happen next. They are planning two steps ahead and living within certain boundaries. But it is when things happen that are sudden and unexpected – when genuinely good people step up to the plate and come to the fore – that these supposedly ‘confident’ people flounder. My God, I sound bitter. But I’m not. And I am. I’m both. People think you can’t have two feelings at either end of the spectrum towards the same thing, but you can. Why do people think that?
Clare and I both got out of our seats and went over to Craig. He wasn’t bawling like a little girl, he was crying with a real fucking tragic POWER. I’m sorry to swear but that’s what it was like. His entire body was aching up and down, heaving like an oak tree being uprooted. His pain was coming straight out of his skin. I noticed that his sweater was a bit too small for him and some of the scars on his arms were just poking out. I found myself holding his hand, which he gripped tight like a baby does. The headmaster actually got up and left the room. Not being able to deal with this amount of emotion, which I admit was intimidating, he had gone to fetch his secretary.
There was no way that he could have understood what Craig Bartlett-Taylor was going through. I could tell that he was the sort of person who had never known the deeper depths of the spectrum. He’d probably never even fallen in love properly.
I clutched Craig’s hand tighter and looked at Clare, who returned the stare. A bond burned up between us for a second. Suddenly we were all around Craig, all grabbing him and comforting him, telling him that it would be OK. Lying to him that it would be OK. How could it ever be OK for someone like him?
‘We’re going to be with you all the way,’ I told him.
Freddy was crouched down. He had put his hands on the back of his head and was staring at the floor. He lifted one of his hands and put it on Craig’s knee. And then he started patting it, kind of in the same way that a child would try to reassure somebody. And that was when I forgave Freddy for killing Bertie. I sensed, in a searing flash of clarity, that I knew what had happened. He had made a stupid mistake. That was all. He had lost his head for a moment and done something terrible. I had to forgive him. God knows, I had to forgive him for doing something like that. How could I not?
He sighed and stood up.
‘This is fucking bullshit,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out of here.’ He strode towards the window, quickly.
‘Freddy, hold on,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t go. It’s not worth it.’
Craig had stopped heaving now but the tears were still pouring down his face and he was making this odd groaning sound. His head was slumped over his shoulders and I wondered if he was about to break for ever, or if he was feeling some sort of catharsis. An image of his old parents flashed in my brain and I hoped that this outpouring of emotion would clear the skies and make everything nice and fresh for Craig and his family. I knew that it wouldn’t though. Nothing could change the fact that he wasn’t quite normal. That was it for him, the beginning and the end.
Freddy was on the windowsill and looked like a superhero, crouched and ready to pounce.
‘I’ll call you all at some point. I have an idea,’ he said. And he jumped out the window, just as the headmaster came back in.
His face was a picture, you should have seen it. It was pure astonishment mixed in with what can only be described as hatred for Freddy.
‘Get back here,’ he screamed. And I do mean screamed. Even his voice was angry because the air from his lungs split either side of his vocal cord and came out far too high-pitched.
But Freddy was heading across the lawns. I hoped to God that the headmaster would get out of the window and start pegging it after Freddy. But he didn’t. He let him go with a shake of his head. I assumed that Freddy was going to be expelled. Which he wasn’t. Our crime was deemed so heinous that we had a far worse punishment awaiting us.