S-K absented himself from morning prayers, which should have felt like a bigger relief. The Flea read announcements as if the previous day had never happened: Laundry for REN’s House would not be ready until teatime. Games would commence half an hour early and would consist of two steeplechases, junior and senior. A murmur of protest from the Fourth and Remove went unremarked by the Flea, who dismissed them with the air he adopted when he was too fed up to bother.
In History, Grieves made them read a dense chapter on the Hundred Years’ War and write out the answers to questions from the blackboard, as if they were Third Formers. The Flea oppressed them with an unseen, and so the morning progressed, punishing them with work and silence. At break, Colin approached with the latest rumors, but Morgan scanned the crowd for Spaulding … there amongst friends, sovereign with loyal retainers. Standing in the tuckshop queue, Morgan watched him, but Spaulding never once looked his way. When his turn came, Morgan bought a kill-me-quick and ate it without tasting. Across the quad, Spaulding laughed in a way that made Morgan want to go and—
—Get your skates on, Laurie said.
The bell was ringing, but rather than ignore it, Nathan crammed two kill-me-quicks into his pocket.
—What’s the idea? Morgan protested.
Nathan took his arm and broke into a jog.
—Keep up, Wilber. Didn’t you hear?
Morgan hadn’t heard a word, and he couldn’t bring himself to care. At the toilets, he broke away:
—Meet you.
—REN! Laurie called after him. Lines!
The concerns of aliens. He inhabited a different world, one in theirs but not of it.
* * *
Was it too much to jape Spaulding a second day? If he tried and Spaulding refused, yesterday’s world would disintegrate, leaving him prisoner in a flat and lethal land. The heaviness of nightmare pressed on his shoulder, which throbbed from being slept on wrong. He splashed water on his face. One didn’t make a try every time one had the ball. To do so guaranteed defeat.
The cloisters had cleared as if the entire school had spontaneously acquired the habit of punctuality. It granted sixty seconds’ peace and quiet, anyhow. He ambled down Long Passage, but just as he reached the classrooms, someone appeared on the center grass, exclusive preserve of prefects and masters. He couldn’t endure bollixing from the JCR, but it was too late; he’d been seen. He braced himself for censure.
Except it wasn’t a prefect. It was Alex. Morgan groaned.
—Released or evicted?
—What’s it to you? Alex retorted.
—You’re an impertinent little sod.
—Such is my aspiration.
Alex hopped off the grass and stood before him, a taunt. Morgan seized him by the collar and pulled him into the alcove beneath the library:
—Don’t suppose you heard about S-K last night.
—You suppose wrong, Alex said. Old Howitzer’s gone off his dot. I’m certainly not impressed.
—If you’d heard S-K, you wouldn’t talk that way.
—I suppose you’re going to set me straight.
—You suppose right.
Alex relaxed against him:
—Get on with it.
—I think, Morgan said, twisting Alex’s arm behind his back, you had better start by telling me what you’re going to do about this whole mess.
—Nothing, Alex said serenely.
—Someone has to own up or we’ll never get any peace.
—Hurrah.
Morgan kicked him.
—What if someone else confesses to S-K?
—If they do, they’ll be killed by the Covenant.
—Someone outside your Covenant.
Alex wriggled away:
—You?
Morgan scowled.
—You’d best look after your own skin, Alex said, straightening his jacket. You can start by keeping your nose out of other people’s affairs and your arse out of other people’s changing rooms.
—Pardon? Morgan responded with his best imitation of Grieves in a strop.
Alex did not flinch:
—And remember what happens to people who interfere with the Revolution.
A smirk:
—They find their necks under the falling blade of the guillotine.
* * *
—Wilberforce! REN bellowed as Morgan let himself into the classroom.
—Good morning, sir.
—Don’t you give me cheek, young man. Just what do you have to say for yourself?
—Only what a pleasure it is to see you, sir.
—Sit down, reprobate. I suppose you’ve an elaborate excuse for your tardiness?
—Not at all, sir.
—Then you may do me the honor of three hundred lines, by Primus tomorrow, if you please!
—It will be an honor, indeed, sir.
Morgan sat.
—And another fifty for your impudence!
Morgan nodded, as to the victor in a fencing bout. The Fifth chortled. REN relieved his frustration with several minutes of invective, but Morgan calculated he had come out ahead. His cheek had amused the form, and his sangfroid in the face of three hundred and fifty lines had drawn grins from Nathan and Laurie, so presumably it was a reasonable facsimile of the Morgan Wilberforce they expected.
The lines themselves were an inconvenience. He loathed lines on every ground and had not actually done any the entire term. He could not abide being chained to a desk writing useless words when he ought to be out doing something, though of course lines were intended to produce just such irritated discomfort, to waste one’s time, and to force a sort of manual obedience. They lacked the Sturm und Drang of corporal punishment and deprived one of the praise that came with courageously enduring the cane. One had to complete them alone, excluded from general attention and interest, and then, when one submitted them, the master or prefect typically tore them up before one’s eyes, emphasizing the futile nature of one’s labors. This, the gesture said, was for nothing. You suffered for nothing. You sacrificed time and effort, and you have absolutely nothing to show for it. The mental suffering of watching one’s labors destroyed, however meaningless one considered them whilst doing them, always struck Morgan more deeply than he expected. The first time it had happened to him, in prep school, he had actually burst into tears, to his mortification. He hadn’t blubbed over lines at the Academy, but he had felt several times that he could.
—Amaurotic ambitions of amoeba, REN spat.
Morgan was fed up to the back teeth with talk of the Fags’ Rebellion. He would have liked to spend Prep in the Hermes Balcony with Spaulding or, failing that, in Fridaythorpe talking with Mr. Grieves. But Spaulding was refusing to know him, and Grieves had that morning treated him as coldly as he treated anyone else.
—Rampant as rhizobium, REN continued.
Morgan needed to rein himself in. Grieves was his history master, not his Housemaster, not his father, and certainly not his friend. The sooner Morgan’s mind grasped that fact and adjusted his behavior accordingly, the better he would be, all of him—heart, mind, body, even soul if he possessed one. As for Spaulding, Morgan had better not deceive himself. He might lie to other people, and increasingly it was of the utmost necessity to lie to an increasing number of people, but he could hear his father now: You can lie to other people, boyo, but not to yourself. Actually, Morgan retorted, you could very easily lie to yourself. Most people did. You know what I mean, his father’s voice replied. Don’t be contrary.
It was the height of absurdity to speak obstreperously to oneself in one’s head, even if one imagined one side as one’s father. And at any rate, he agreed with his father. He didn’t want to lie to himself. He wanted to know the truth, and the truth was he had yesterday endowed a chance encounter with inflated significance. Spaulding had paid him attention for less than half an hour, and he had leapt to exaggerated conclusions about his exaggerated self, his exaggerated purpose, and his exaggerated place in the vacuous world. He had permitted a bit of changing-room-style muck-about to raise in him the most callow of hopes. He had lapsed into the naïve. Such was the bald truth. The sooner he detached himself from Spaulding—memory of him, sight of him, thought of him—the sooner he could recover his sanity. Lines that evening would therefore prove a boon. An irritation certainly, but perhaps after all a salutary irritation.
A knock interrupted REN’s diatribe. The laboratory door had no glass; they heard rather than saw the intruder.
—Pardon, sir. The Head to see Wilberforce.
REN perked up at the ominous announcement.
—Off you go, Wilberforce.
Morgan’s stomach sank.
—Put your things away, REN told him cheerfully. I shouldn’t think you’ll be back.
A low chortle from the form, this time not with him, but against him. He closed his exercise book and deposited it on the shelf.
—Lines at Primus, REN chirped. Wouldn’t want to have to double them, would we?
Morgan ignored the gibe and with iron dread departed REN’s chlorine-scented realm. He shuffled down the corridor, through heavy doors, and—
Spaulding.
Fire.
Spaulding.
Spaulding gestured to the chapel and disappeared up the stairs.
It was real.
He wasn’t naïve.
Everything good was real.
He dashed up the stairs and found Spaulding beside the panel that guarded the Hermes Balcony.
—Wasn’t sure how you’d jimmied it, Spaulding said.
Morgan sprang the lock. They ducked inside. Spaulding sat down. Morgan sat down, fought for breath.
Then Spaulding was pushing him against the railings and opening his trouser flies. Morgan reached for him, but Spaulding pushed him onto his back. He lay there, heart racing, cock hard—immediately, immediately—thrill at being overpowered, at allowing himself to be overpowered. Spaulding pinned Morgan’s free hand, his other imprisoned in the sling. Thus bound, Morgan surrendered himself to Spaulding and whatever he wanted to do.
* * *
Time cut loose. For a spell, he felt nothing besides Spaulding’s knee in the palm of his hand, Spaulding’s green eyes upon him, and Spaulding’s fingers doing what they were doing. He thought of nothing besides the one thing his brain could think: I want it.
—Don’t, Spaulding warned. Not until I say.
Spaulding held him still, warm, strong, smelling of something Morgan knew but couldn’t name. Just as the torment began to ease, Spaulding touched him again:
—I’ll tell you when.
He spoke sharply, but the kaleidoscope of his eyes darted in and out, green rings flecked with brown, an amber fire warming that most human miracle. Morgan wanted wholly to please him, to honor him with obedience, to encourage him in this and everything by playing entirely along.
—When? Morgan groaned.
—Hold still.
Warm, wet, flicking the spot that pushed him with the force of every temptation onto the edge. Straining, hungry for the next stroke. Then the warmth withdrew.
—I said I’ll tell you when.
Spaulding grinned, looming over him.
—Please? Morgan begged.
Spaulding was enjoying this, perhaps even more than he was. Morgan reached again, but Spaulding took his hand and held it down.
Nothing had ever been this good, not even in his imagination. I couldn’t have dreamed you up, Morgan wanted to say. Who could have guessed a person would exist to conquer him so? This wasn’t Silk. This was free and joyful surrender, to something more thrilling than the world had ever before shown him. Nothing had the power to kill it now that he knew it, and nothing he could do, nothing he could say—
—Now.
Now. A thousand, rushing—now!
* * *
Lungs, air, in, out, green-and-brown still trained upon him. Even now, when no eyes should look, they looked on him. They looked on him because they desired him, even as he lay conquered and drained. The ruins of the Hermes Balcony lay around them, relic of another age. This green-and-brown lion had crashed through every wall, not to savage, but to sit as he did now, with the one he had wanted all along. Shadows, trenches—all swept aside by this new and real life.
Green-and-brown still held him in its ray, even as Spaulding took a handkerchief and did what one used to do to oneself, in the age when one didn’t look. A wave of sleepiness brushed across him, but he clung to the green-and-brown, which burned on him now with a homecoming he had craved as long as he knew.
Spaulding did up Morgan’s flies and buttoned his jacket, those hands straightening his tie, those fingers brushing against the stitches in his chin, a minuscule kind of pity.
Time, having nearly perished in the deep, regained its stay. From the steeple above, it tolled, a terrible pulse that wrenched them back to the morning hour, to the school, to the damp and dreary March of their year.
Spaulding looked up, no longer as he’d been, and as he slid off Morgan’s knees, an abysmal sorrow stabbed. This harbor did not belong to him. Spaulding was preparing to depart, to cast the green-and-brown on another, on that most loathsome creature the earth had ever belched up.
—What about Rees?
Spaulding’s face darkened. Morgan wished he could take back the question and the sour voice that asked it. Spaulding looked away, pulled away, leaving Morgan unweighted and cold.
—He says he’ll …
—What?
Spaulding moved to the corner of the balcony and peered over the rail, his whole self consumed with Rees.
—Who cares what the brute says? Morgan protested. He’ll say anything under the sun, and none of it true. You should’ve seen him doing Guy Fawkes in class. It was enough to make you sick.
Spaulding looked back at him, pity, sorrow, disappointment:
—He says he’ll hang himself.
Morgan caught his breath, at Rees’s nerve, at Spaulding for believing him and for looking at Morgan as though—
—Has he got any rope?
Spaulding drew back. The crass weight of material fact had apparently not occurred to him.
—Just what is it he wants you to do? Morgan asked.
Spaulding blushed:
—I don’t fancy trekking back to the barn just now, with everything.
—Good.
—But if I don’t go, he says … that’s where we …
Morgan’s tongue soured. The vileness that followed pleasure now pounced, clamping him in its jaws all the harder for having been delayed. Spaulding and Rees were We, and they went to lengths far greater than the Hermes Balcony to achieve it. The balcony was cold, drab, and scruffy, the green-and-brown a figment of his imagination.
Morgan got up and dusted his clothes.
—You’re clever, Spaulding said. What would you do?
—I would never have messed about with Rees in the first place.
Spaulding winced:
—I know.
It didn’t sound like affirmation. It sounded as though he knew Morgan lacked some essential human capacity.
—Still? Spaulding said.
Spaulding stood between the broken chairs, a gray-suited schoolboy, mostly grown yet unprepared for what stalked him. His humility and his need melted everything, until Morgan was weak again before him.
—I don’t know what I’d do, Morgan said at last. But if you give in to him today, he’ll only carry on with it tomorrow and the next day, as long as he likes.
Spaulding’s shoulders tightened:
—I know.
* * *
The morning was interminable, but at least it had spared them yesterday’s trials. John’s classes behaved themselves. S-K had not yet made an appearance, and John wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if the man became seriously indisposed. Burton-Lee normally stood in when the Headmaster was obliged to be elsewhere; he would surely serve as Deputy Head if S-K fell ill for an extended period, a notion, once conceived, that stirred John’s unease. While it was true that Burton shared John’s ambition to elevate the intellectual attainment of their pupils, rather than the usual public-school aim to churn out good sports with good manners, John suspected that Burton unleashed would make life unpleasant for everyone, most especially for him. Burton’s vision for the Academy would certainly be filled with athletic and disciplinary excess, a vision unmoored in its enthusiasms from the Academy S-K was trying to conserve. Not that John approved of the Academy as it operated presently, but when he had first come, a mere seven years previous, S-K’s Academy had still lived and breathed, a world of loyalty and faith, one that would accept a pacifist into its midst not because it in any way approved of his pacifism, but because it respected his having withstood attacks on the basis of conscience.
The Lower Sixth were writing a short essay. A knock at the door revealed Rees, looking flushed and worse for wear.
—Head to see Spaulding, sir.
His voice was raspy, as confessing a secret in stage whisper. John gritted his teeth at the manufactured melodrama of it all. He had no notion why S-K should want to speak with Spaulding—John would have interviewed several others in the Lower Sixth first—but apparently Rees had himself been confronted. John regretted ever having made Rees the center of attention. It had only egged him on, and now he was attempting to drag Spaulding into his misfortunes. Hopefully S-K had rattled Rees, if not on the grounds he deserved. John bade Spaulding go and waved Rees back to wherever he belonged.
John was inordinately hungry. Had he remembered to eat breakfast before departing his digs this morning? There had not been anything, he remembered now. He had returned much later than planned, the shops had been closed, and—he simply couldn’t keep track of housekeeping details in the face of midnight visitors, improvised bonfires, unexpected duty hours, complex bicycle arrangements, not to mention the ever-shifting developments each day seemed poised to inflict.
The lesson was almost over. Shortly luncheon would bring relief, provided S-K hadn’t again mandated a meal more Spartan than inmates could expect in York Castle Prison. He ought to mark at least two more exercise books in the eight minutes that remained. Why did he set so much written work? Here before him was the mere tip of the iceberg, the Fifth’s prep from last night, their surely unsound arguments on the evidence for Guy Fawkes and his apostasy (short answer: fat chance). He couldn’t do it. Not just now. Tonight he would do it. He was off duty tonight. He would return to his digs in time for tea. He would purchase biscuits. He would even, he decided, treat himself to shepherd’s pie and parkin at the Keys. Then—post steeplechase, post shower, post parkin, nursing a pot of tea in the warmth of the Keys—then he would storm through the abysmal pile of compositions. He would work like the motor of a Halford Special. He would dust through the Fifth and consign memory of the entire Guy Fawkes lesson to the bin; then he would devour the tepid study questions of the lower forms and the tangled paragraphs of the Sixth. In fact, he vowed he would not turn out the light until his satchel was fully addressed, and tomorrow night he would cycle home unladen! He could hear his Magdalene supervisor now: He ought to make a start on the pile in the last moments remaining to the morning. To refuse would be to encourage the demon sloth. Even if he only skimmed the contents, it would be easier to face them later. His supervisor had been correct in everything (save his disapproval of pacifism), but still, John felt the urge to sulk in the face of this man summoned by mere thought. John sighed aloud and opened the top book in the pile. It belonged to Lydon. John flipped through it but did not find the assigned composition. Joy blended equally with outrage. He tossed the book aside and addressed the next: a mere five sentences! He would savage it later. The next four revealed equally paltry efforts. In the final minutes of lesson, he surveyed the entire pile from the Fifth and discovered only five that required marking, the remainder having declined to complete the assignment. Among the five he was pleased—disproportionately pleased—to find Wilberforce, who usually numbered himself amongst the idle. For Wilberforce to have done the prep last night indicated genuine effort, especially as Pearl and Lydon had returned blank books. Wilberforce’s composition (and on quick glance it appeared worthwhile; at least it stretched to two sides) felt to John a vote of confidence. Wilberforce was saying to him, in the only language available, The things you teach us matter, sir. I understand you.
* * *
Morgan was starving. He had by stroke of genius deflected Nathan’s and Laurie’s horrified interest in his summons to the Headmaster. It was, he told them, another of the Academy’s howlers. S-K hadn’t sent for him; Matron had sent for him, to administer one draft in advance of the other directly before lunch. Who could make sense of it? He wasn’t supposed to be lying to them anymore, but he couldn’t get into Spaulding, especially not with the glance Alex was throwing him across the queue (keep your arse out of other people’s changing rooms), threatening to puncture his composure and leave him spewing the truth (I couldn’t have dreamed you up!). But then S-K materialized, led silent procession into the refectory, and pronounced grace with record coldness. Morgan glimpsed Spaulding three tables away: flushed, distrait, and blasting him with the green-and-brown.
How was he meant to survive this cloak-and-dagger of glances? Noise exploded through the hall, harsh and nauseating. It didn’t help that the soup was greasy, that Laurie made lavatorial jokes about what was floating in it, or that an aroma of onions pervaded the air. Morgan scanned the hall for Rees; he’d been absent from the last lesson and was absent now. Morgan hadn’t seen him in the Tower when he’d gone for his aspirin just before the meal. He choked down the soup and pulled himself together. Only in the pages of a penny dreadful would Rees go and hang himself. Obviously he was sulking somewhere.
Madness could not reign unchecked forever. Even the Jews got out of Babylon eventually. The trick to an impossible mess, his mother taught him, was to begin in one place and refuse to be discouraged by the enormity of the thing. He couldn’t repel a whole army of evils, but he could, if he chose, take Rees down a peg and curb his infernal nerve. He could do it easily. Rees would collapse like a matchstick tower in the face of the technique. Given quarter of an hour and some privacy, Morgan could put an end to Rees’s infuriating threats and beat back the column of insanity.
The problem was getting Rees alone. He was too old to be forcibly abducted and too hostile to come willingly. What’s more, Morgan felt he had exhausted the Head-to-see ruse. He could explain to his friends only so many aberrations.
And now in the middle of the meal, S-K was descending from the masters’ table and extinguishing conversation as he swept between the benches and came to a halt before REN’s junior table. There he spoke to three boys, who turned red as though seized by fever. Then S-K returned to the masters’ table, noise resumed, and the objects of S-K’s address were devoured by the surrounding boys; Morgan half expected to find their bones after the meal, cleaned dry and spread across the benches. As the table fags cleared, Burton-Lee called for silence and announced new arrangements for the afternoon’s steeplechases, none of which mattered to Morgan since Matron had confirmed that he was forbidden to run. He was to spend the afternoon in his study, she said, or he might if he wished take light exercise in the—
Some ideas shimmered, but others blasted through darkness like the Eddystone Light. Matron had ordered him to forgo the steeplechase. She had restricted him to the Academy while the rest of the school took to Abbot’s Common. He was at liberty for almost two hours, free to track Rees to his bunker, be it study, dormitory, even changing room (Alex!). The Eddystone Light overflowed the gloom: he would uncover Rees this very day, and once he had him alone, he would roll up his sleeves and set the stockfish straight. Technique, and more technique. Rees thought he’d blackmail Spaulding? Morgan would sort the sprat out before the first runners hit Nut Wood, and then—then! There was a gully just beyond the last turn on the course, a gully he could achieve in some few minutes at a light jog—Eddystone, Holyhead, all paled beside this! If, after dismantling Rees, he could achieve the gully, and if Spaulding could achieve it with him, what a quarter of an hour they might spend! Spaulding would have to give his lieutenants the slip, but certainly Spaulding possessed the necessary cunning. Morgan had only to tell him of the plan. In a minute luncheon would end, and they would drift en masse to the final lesson of the day, after which they would repair to changing rooms for the run. What he had to do was to slip Spaulding a note, now before lessons resumed. He had to jumble against Spaulding as if by accident and in that one jarring moment, he had to tuck the note into Spaulding’s pocket, slipping his fingers into the fabric of his—
A voice within him bellowed in despair. Morgan, filing out of the refectory with his friends, wondered just what demanded such vexation. The tide was turning, dangling before him a glorious opportunity to do for Spaulding what Spaulding could do not for himself in the life-giving radiance of Eddystone—the voice exhorted him to untangle his metaphor and reattach his brain. He proposed passing Spaulding a note? A note? Notes could be found. Notes could be read. Notes were off the agenda.
Morgan deflated as the crowd swept him into the washroom. There Laurie clambered onto the basins to address the mob about what he’d learned in the refectory:
—Someone has gone to S-K and confessed.
Shock and consternation from the assembly.
—S-K told three of REN’s fags to come to him after lunch.
—Which ones?
Laurie reeled off two names but couldn’t swear to the last.
—So the fags were behind it! someone cried.
—Do you think so? Laurie retorted.
Nathan glowered in the doorway. Morgan knew what he was thinking: Someone had confessed to S-K, but Alex had not been summoned?
—I’d hate to be the one who peached, someone else said.
The assembly murmured and began jointly to imagine an array of punishments inflicted by the Headmaster on the guilty, and by the guilty on their betrayers.
Had Alex sold his comrades? Morgan couldn’t believe it. What would he gain?
The bell rang, and Morgan was propelled out of the washroom to French. He had not worked out how to tell Spaulding about the gully, but at least the fever that had gripped the school would shortly break. More confessions would ensue, tears, recriminations, punishments, perhaps even expulsions, but then S-K would stop holding grudges against the rest of them. Term would end in a few days, and they could depart for Easter cleansed. Come summer, everything could return to usual—as long as someone put Rees in his place and foiled his extravagant plot against Spaulding.
A knock at the classroom door once again disturbed their lesson. One of the fags from lunch entered, eyes bloodshot; he handed Hazlehurst a note and fled. Hazlehurst opened it with relish.
—Ah! It appears that our esteemed Headmaster wishes to speak with Wilberforce.
—Again? Laurie hissed.
A current coursed through the room. Nathan turned to him, astonished and betrayed.
This was the true summons, one direct from the Head’s study given the messenger, one that could testify only to involvement, complicit or direct, in the abysmal matters that beset their world. This was the destruction he had been sensing, waiting to take him when he was weak and unsuspecting.
He floated out the classroom door and along the corridor towards the Headmaster’s house. One of the fags must have seen him going out or coming in and had peached to curry favor with the Headmaster. He made a decision: whatever S-K knew or demanded, Morgan would not implicate Grieves. He had gone to Fridaythorpe and changed his mind. That was all. And he would not implicate Spaulding or Rees, since it was a damnable fact that he could not expose the latter without the former. The important thing was to hurry the interview along so S-K would release him (to what end he didn’t care) before the lesson finished. Once dismissed, if only temporarily—O Eddystone Light!—he could position himself in the cloisters to collide with Spaulding after the lesson and deliver the note he would now have time to craft with perfect clarity and anonymity: Fern Farm Gully, solo. Surely Spaulding would catch the drift of that!
At the turn by the chapel, something seized him from behind, a hand over his mouth. He knew its scent, its texture. He surrendered to abduction.
Spaulding dragged him up the stairs as if hauling him off for a thrashing. Who knew salvation would arrive with such force? He’d always thought of good things as benign, almost anodyne, but now he understood that the really good things—things capable of remaking a life—tore into existence with power and might, with pain even, but rather than destroying, they turned their teeth against every cord that bound them. Spaulding wrenched his shoulder at the top of the stairs, and he understood that the best things would hurt, in the best possible way.
Bypassing the Hermes Balcony, Spaulding dragged him to the light at the end of the corridor. There he produced a piece of paper and held it, trembling.
It was starting, it had already begun, the life more thrilling than any he’d imagined, a life full of goodness no shadow could ever take. Morgan took the paper and unfolded it.
A wild script scrawled in pencil. Its author could no longer endure. Its author was not made of the stuff of giants. Its author had a heart that bled when stabbed. If Spaulding had been able to remove himself even briefly from his great, great height to condescend to the poorest of the poor, the author’s life would have taken a different course. The author had reached his limit, and the time had come, the time had long come—Spaulding handed Morgan a second sheet, where the missive continued—long, long, longtime come for the author to Go into Night. Death would not be proud but would have Pity, he hoped, upon him, upon his soul, and upon the soul of Spaulding. The author hoped that Spaulding would find peace once the author had gone from his realm, no longer a cankerous sore on his gleaming future and dazzling present. The author wanted Spaulding to know, whatever life might bring in distant years, that he, the author—a third sheet—had loved Spaulding, truly and rightly and in the best manner known to man. His sentiment would not waver. It would continue into always. That was the last word of his earthly testament. Spaulding must not think of trying to stop him. He would have accomplished his dark work long before Spaulding read this, and Spaulding must on no account distress himself. Spaulding must only remember that he had been loved once perfectly. Spurred, Love departed this world for a better one. He would see Spaulding on the other side.
Morgan’s chest seared. He burst out laughing.
—This is priceless!
Spaulding tensed as though he’d been punched:
—It isn’t funny.
A wave of shame, which had the inconvenient effect of making him laugh more.
—I know.
—Then stop laughing!
Morgan rallied rational thought: Spaulding had abducted him from lessons to show him Rees’s maudlin suicide note. To be brutally honest, they would all be better off without Rees. The world would be one soul deprived, and who knew what Rees might contribute to society once he’d grown out of the worst of his appalling tediousness, but really. If Rees succeeded in killing himself (a mighty if in Morgan’s opinion), the school would be shocked, Spaulding would feel awful, even Morgan would feel awful. There would be a tremendous furor, which would drain attention from the wretched Fags’ Rebellion, to Alex’s everlasting fury. Ha! Two tasks accomplished at once: an end to the suppurating splinter that was Rees, and the terrific, unanswerable thwarting of Alex!
Such thoughts were awful, of course, simply inhuman. He couldn’t quite abandon them, but at least he knew they were wrong.
Spaulding was still shaking as he took back the pages.
—I’ve got to try and stop him, Spaulding said. I was with him just before lunch. He can’t have got far.
He was with Rees just before…? Rational thought. Rational thought.
—You say he threatened to hang himself?
Spaulding dug in another pocket and produced a stub of rope a couple of inches long.
—Don’t tell me that was with the note?
Spaulding nodded, looking greener by the moment. Morgan groaned in exasperation. Despite his colossal ineptness, Rees had managed to create a crisis. He’d thrown Spaulding—Spaulding—into a panic. He’d even raised dread in Morgan. Rees—damn him!—had made himself the center of their attention, he’d made them rush after him, he’d made Spaulding care.
—Where’s he going to do it?
Spaulding appeared to be struggling not to retch. His eyes watered.
—Not McKay’s barn! Morgan protested.
Spaulding nodded.
—Bloody Christ!
Spaulding looked shocked, at Morgan’s anger or his blasphemy, he couldn’t tell.
—I was thinking, Spaulding quavered, if I could get away during the run …
—Don’t be daft. If he’s going to do it, he’s doing it now. How long does it take to get to the barn?
Spaulding thought Rees couldn’t get there in less than an hour.
—He’ll be there any minute now, Morgan said. Reckon quarter of an hour to sort out his rope work, at least the same again to think about it. We might just make it.
Morgan couldn’t remember Spaulding looking so baffled, or so childlike. Morgan took him by the wrist as if he were an actual child and without explanation led him down to Morgan’s House, where they barged through the green baize door and into his Housemaster’s study.
—He doesn’t keep it locked? Spaulding asked, astonished.
Morgan released that wrist—so warm, so wide—and preceded him out the French windows, across the garden and the playing fields, and up to the ruined walls of the lodge.
—Wait, Spaulding said. Explain.
—You can have an explanation, or you can get there before Rees tops himself.
—But the barn’s in the other—
—Raise your right hand, Morgan commanded.
Spaulding was too surprised to argue.
—Repeat after me.
Morgan pronounced the vow the Keeper of the poacher’s tunnel was bound to impose on all who accompanied him through it. Spaulding repeated it.
—Right, Morgan said hauling up the paving stone, mind your head.
He dove into the tunnel, wriggled through damp and mildew, and surfaced, not into a flea-ridden trench but into the bosom of Grindalythe Woods. Spaulding emerged muddy, detritus in his hair.
They ran up the path. Morgan’s school shoes slipped in the mud, and he fell hard on his hip, but Spaulding was there, pulling him to his feet. Changing their shoes would have involved detours to two changing rooms. As it was, their shoes would be wrecked, but at least term finished soon.
Morgan had no idea how they would explain their absence, but whatever Rees had in mind, they would stop him. There would probably be an interlude of argument, but eventually the three of them would trek back to the Academy. Morgan wanted urgently not to have to take Rees back through the poacher’s tunnel. Even if Rees could keep his mouth shut about it (a bigger if than his ability to hang himself—and how exactly had the horrible Rees found himself an actual length of rope and learned to tie it?), even if the suicide manqué kept mum about the tunnel, a bond would thenceforth exist between them, and Morgan wanted no bond with Rees. Of course, by the time they reached the barn and talked Rees down from his perch, the steeplechase would have begun, so there would be no rush to return and they could take the road. If they got back before the end of the run, they would only have to answer to their Games Captains. A brief, painful encounter, and the matter would be closed. No Housemasters, no S-K, no histrionics of any sort. Morgan would rather not have a JCR thrashing if he could avoid it, but in this case, he would probably not be able to avoid it.
At least he would be taking it for Spaulding. Spaulding would get worse since Burton’s JCR were savage, but Morgan would suffer alongside Spaulding, not literally alongside, but Morgan would suffer for Spaulding. Spaulding would know it, and Spaulding would remember.
A worse outcome would be finding the barn empty. Or finding Rees there but in no danger of suicide. Could he literally mean to kill himself? Rees was squeamish under the cane. He shied away from the scrum. He protested loudly when abused by his form-mates. In short, he was a big girl’s blouse. How could such a specimen monkey up the rafters of McKay’s barn, tie knots properly, and strangle himself willingly to death?
The whole thing was bunk, and Spaulding was running and slipping through the woods straight into it. Worse, by coming when pulled, he was showing Rees that he cared, that this was the knob to turn whenever Rees wished to control him. It was a disaster.
They arrived winded at the bit of wall that overlooked the barn. The building stood deserted, ramshackle, almost fragile at the bottom of the slope. Spaulding leaned against the wall, catching his breath, his cheeks and lips red, forehead perspiring, tie disarranged, breath fogging before his mouth, the mouth Morgan wanted to feel, doing what it had done before and rescuing the day from destruction.
—I’ll go, Morgan said.
—No.
—If he sees you, he might …
Morgan pulled his arm out of the sling to hoist himself over the wall, but Spaulding cupped hands beneath Morgan’s foot, those fingers gripping his shoe, fingers so able and knowing, fingers he hoped would touch more than his shoe, perhaps shortly, perhaps very shortly indeed! Spaulding lifted, and Morgan was over the wall, skidding down the slope.
At the barn, silence. A door hung uncertainly on its hinge. Morgan slipped inside.
Dim, mildew, decaying air. Then a rustling.
—Don’t come any farther, warned that unmistakable voice. I’ll jump.
Morgan craned to see into the rafters. Rees sat astride a beam, a flimsy rope connecting it with his neck.
—Rees, Morgan said, don’t be an idiot.
—Who is that? Rees demanded.
—It’s Wilberforce. Come down before you hurt yourself.
Rees shifted. The rafter creaked.
—I’ll jump.
Morgan tried to keep his voice calm:
—What do you want to jump for?
—You wouldn’t understand!
—That rafter’s only just got your weight, Morgan said. It certainly won’t hold if you jump.
—It will.
Clearly a logical approach wouldn’t work with someone like Rees, someone divorced at least from the laws of mechanics.
—If you’re going to hang yourself, Morgan said, you want to make a clean snap of it.
—I shall.
Rees squirmed as if to stand on the rafter.
—Hold still! Morgan shouted. If that breaks, you’ll fall but you won’t die. You’ll wind up paralyzed.
—I don’t care.
Morgan had never faced a more infuriating opponent. A buoyant stubbornness rose within him:
—Do you think you could wait just a minute?
The rafter swayed. Rees froze.
—If this is really it, Morgan continued calmly, what shall I tell people?
—I’ve put it all in a letter, Rees declared. Someone important is going to find it. He’ll tell everyone.
—If you mean Spaulding, he already found it and showed me. Why d’you think I’m here?
Rees teetered but caught himself:
—Where is he?
The voice urgent, plaintive.
—Not here, Morgan said. I came instead.
—But…?
He was enraged to feel a sliver of pity for Rees. Rees did love Spaulding, in his pathetic, unreciprocated way.
—Do you think a sorry old letter would get Spaulding to hack all the way out here?
Morgan knew what it was to love without reason. He steeled himself to kill in Rees the shoot that that lived in him.
—Spaulding thought it was hilarious, absolutely sidesplitting.
—He didn’t.
—You should’ve seen him. We cut lessons and— What? You didn’t think you were the only one?
—I don’t believe you.
He could hear in Rees’s voice that he did believe, and he could feel the blade slicing into that heart, perhaps not perfect surgery, but with enough heat to cauterize the incision once done.
—It was a bit much, don’t you think? Morgan continued relentlessly. Farewell, adieu, auf Wiedersehen?
Rees had stopped fidgeting.
—He wanted to take it to your Housemaster and S-K, Morgan said. I convinced him not to.
—They’ll see it when I’m dead.
His voice did not carry the power it had.
—I made him burn it.
—You what?
The beam shuddered. Morgan pressed on brutally:
—If you jump now, you’ll die for nothing. Spaulding isn’t here. No one will see your letter. People will think you were wet.
—I’m the only person in this place who has the courage to end things on his own terms.
—You think suicide is courageous? Morgan balked.
—It’s better than living like dirt on everyone’s shoes.
—Is it? I thought it was a sin.
—You’re such a hypocrite, Wilberforce.
The second person in twenty-four hours to call him a hypocrite.
—I’m not saying I care about sin, but I certainly don’t think killing yourself is ending things on your own terms. It’s ending things on death’s terms.
—Wilberforce?
—What?
—I don’t care what you think.
With that, Rees swung his leg over the creaking beam, and his body slipped, falling in a breath.
Morgan shouted. He kept shouting. He lunged beneath the beam to catch Rees. Except the rope held. The beam sagged. The rope shifted around Rees’s neck, wrenching it back, biting into his throat and the underside of his chin, holding him above the floor just out of Morgan’s reach.
Then Spaulding was there, and Spaulding was shouting at Rees to pull himself up. Rees was kicking and scratching wildly at the rope to relieve the pressure around his throat. But the rope was accomplishing its work. Regardless of second thoughts, regardless of the worth of suicide, the rope did the thing it had been made to do: hold its fibers together and bear its weight, the weight of Rees, of his error, of his ill-conceived affection.
Morgan reached for Rees’s feet. Spaulding dragged a piece of wood for him to stand on.
—Stop kicking, damn it!
Every instinct in Rees’s body told him to kick, to protest this slow strangulation, but the sound of Spaulding’s voice and its far-reaching power made him permit the rope its grasp just long enough for Morgan to press upwards on the soles of his shoes and begin to relieve the pressure.
—For God’s sake, Morgan cried, hold still!
And Spaulding was climbing up to the rafters, crawling along the beam that was aiding the gradual asphyxiation of Rees. It shuddered and swayed.
—Don’t! Morgan called. It won’t hold you both.
—Just a second, Spaulding said.
He wriggled forward, reaching for the rope. Rees writhed.
—Hold still! Spaulding cried.
Morgan’s shoulder protested, but he pushed with all his strength, as if he would hold all of Rees’s weight in the palms of his hands.
Let him get the rope. Let Rees not die. Let this thing not come to pass. Please.
Nothing intervened. Except that Spaulding touched the fringes of the rope. Spaulding tugged at the knot. Spaulding opened his penknife and dug at the fibers, until they frayed, loosing their weight, which swayed beneath them, pulling tighter the loop around Rees’s throat, concentrating blood in his face, eyes bulging, hands grasping desperately to finish the divorce Spaulding’s knife had begun, until enough entropy ensued, and the beam itself—neglected in their suit—let loose its joints and sent its load crashing, in obedience to gravity, bringing Rees down on top of Morgan, knocking the wind from his lungs and kicking them both free of the rafter, which crashed to the ground with a mighty, unanswerable destruction.
* * *
Silence where it shouldn’t be.
Eyes open, so he thought. Brown. Dust. Something rolling off him.
—Rees?
A moan.
—Spaulding?
The iron present.
—Spaulding!
Morgan tried to sit up. His shoulder screamed, stabbing pain through—
—What happened? a voice croaked.
Rees, altered.
The pain seized all thought, until Rees wrenched him to his feet. Squinting through the dust, they took in the barn—changed, catastrophically.
Spaulding lay twisted beneath the rafter, mouth open, eyes closed. Morgan climbed through debris to reach for him.
The hand was warm. The arm was warm. The neck and the chest were warm.
But the chest no longer moved. The blood no longer pumped, except to seep out the back of his head. The color had drained from his face, leaving it a sallow, sickly white. Spaulding’s face looked now as lifeless as Morgan’s mother’s had looked when he had peered into her coffin. Hers, too, had looked as though it were sleeping, but her skin had been hard and cold, not like skin at all. Spaulding’s was still warm, still soft, like the skin of the living, like the skin of one who had risked himself for another. Except he wasn’t living, Morgan knew. He knew this wrongness.
The hurt returned—from his arm now dangling uselessly, from his head, from the bruises ripening across him, and most loudly from the interior, the marrow—bringing with it the taste of blood, and the euphoric horror of a life forever wrecked.