Black Chalk (14 page)

My eyes found their way to a familiar sequence of worlds. Graham Greene's spies in smoky rooms, from the heat of Havana, to the humidity of Saigon; strolling down broad empty streets, a thousand eyes following my back. Joseph Conrad's gut-wrenching dilemmas, choosing between stern and bow in a sea of grey; I drifted down a brown river past logs bloated with meaning. At the end of the shelf lay Hemingway. I picked up
A Farewell to Arms
, and descended into the living room, my body slumped across the cold leather of the sofa. Soon, I was in wartime Italy and Catherine Barkley was straddling me, her face inches from mine, her blonde hair a curtain shielding me from the outside world. As the days passed, I kept on choosing books set in faraway destinations. At home, a man was bound, but in those distant places, a man could do things, and, more and more, the urge to do something was building inside of me.

I look back at those youthful readings with an ironic smile. To my dreams of the Italian front, Mexican provinces, and the Congo, I'd like to add the crusts of dust and dirt the road piled beneath my runny nose. I'd like to add corrupt border officials asking for bribes with a smile and a gun. And I'd like to add the hours I spent crouched over a Turkish toilet in the Sudan, as all the water in the Nile poured straight through me.

In those moments, my thoughts wandered back to the comforts of Hornsbury: the old sofas, the working chimney, the safe food, and, with a frown, I told myself how lucky I was to have seen so much of the world.

***

From the moment my mother told me she'd booked me in for my first interview, scheduled four days after I came out of hospital, I stopped telling myself that the hours I'd spent each day at my desk were in any way fruitful. Three pages of laboured notes didn't count as an achievement. And I started to picture myself walking on a sharp ridge: on the one side was home, its slow way of doing things, A-levels, and a scree that I needed to clear; the other side was hazy, but I was sure that it hid waterfalls, palaces, harems. The world of television belonged to the haze.

In the car on the way over, I tried to think of the glamour ahead, to piece a picture together from the few times I'd watched morning shows.

‘What sort of questions are they going to ask me?' I asked my mother, when we were at a traffic light on the outskirts of London.

She glanced at me, her hand toying with the gear stick.

‘They'll want to know about your experience. What you felt, what you saw, things like that,' she said. ‘We don't have to go. I can call them now and cancel.'

‘No, I want to go.'

The light turned green and her attention was back on the road. A little unease marred my excitement. I could feel her wanting to cancel and I wasn't going to give her an excuse. I kept on smiling excitedly. Half an hour later, we were there.

Four lanes of asphalt separated a broad span of concrete from a broad sweep of bricks. A tower loomed over the studio's revolving doors. I looked around the spacious lobby in awe: this was where it all happened. Three minutes after giving the receptionist my name, a girl who looked about my age but who had to be older, introduced herself with a wide but short-lived smile:

‘Hello, my name is Chloe. You must be Nate, and you must be Liz. I'll be taking care of you today.' Before she had time to finish, she walked to the reception desk, and scribbled on a piece of paper. Coming back to us, she asked: ‘Is this your first time on TV?'

The question reminded me that I ought to be nervous, and my shoulders knotted up.

‘Well, yes,' I said. Her voice grew even more excited.

‘You'll love it!' she said. ‘Come with me, we'll get you ready!'

We followed her through a maze of corridors.

‘Chloe!' I called.

She turned, surprised to see me ten paces behind.

‘I can't walk fast.' I waved at my stomach, a general expression of pain on my face.

‘Oh, of course!' she said, and proceeded to walk only five steps ahead.

She zigzagged down grey corridors with PVC floors, her toes squeaking with every step, until we reached the right door. We walked into a wide vestibule, five red raincoats ranged against the wall to my left, and three large framed pictures of beautiful people laughing to my right. Chloe ushered us into a room directly opposite the entrance – she called it the green room, even though there was nothing green about it. Inside, strangers talked and laughed.

‘Only minutes away, Nate! We'll call you when we're ready. Ask me if you need anything,' said Chloe before she hurried away into another room. My mother took a second to take in her surroundings, and, with a nod, she told me to wait while she went and talked to the hosts.

Feeling shy, I made my way towards a tray of neatly cut sandwiches artistically arranged around a pot of tzatziki and celery sticks. Trying not to upset the symmetry, I picked out four sandwiches, one from each corner of the plate, and scanned the room. A bald man with a double chin was sitting on the room's only sofa prattling to a white-haired man with a puffy nose. Something about their energy scared me towards the other side of the room. I chose a design chair, which managed to hold me despite the curvy holes in its wooden panels. Nibbling on my sandwiches, my eyes looking at everything but the people in the room, I eavesdropped on their conversations until my mother came back.

‘I had a chat to them. They know how you feel. They want to do a practice run now,' she said. ‘Don't forget to sit straight and articulate.'

The others gave me a sympathetic look as Chloe led us out. In the studio proper, my curiosity was first drawn to a messy wall of cameras and cables, looking clunky and dated, before I turned to what they faced: a red armchair, a Moroccan coffee table, and a lush two-seater. These images felt familiar: I'd watched the show once at Jeffrey's house, and the strongest memory I had of it was of a blue armchair. They'd changed the furniture, but they'd kept the cosy feel. The Thames shone through a long window behind the sofa set. For a second, I thought the window was a fake, but then I noticed that the wind was whipping water off the river's surface, and that three passers-by in thick coats were walking between the river and the studio. A fake would have looked more appealing.

Chris and Mary were sharing the sofa, leaning towards each other before they noticed me and smiled. He stood up and met me outside the furniture circle, while his wife smiled encouragingly.

‘Hello, Nate. How are you?'

‘Fine, thank you.'

‘Thank you, Mrs Dillingham. You can stand there if you want.' He pointed at a spot behind the cameras. ‘Sit down, Nate. Sit with us.'

He lounged back, threw a floppy arm over the seat's backrest, while his leg propped itself against the coffee table, and smiled at me as if we were old friends.

‘We're going to run through the sort of questions we'll ask you on air. Are you excited?'

‘Yeah.'

He nodded assuredly.

‘We always start with a few friendly words to introduce our guests to our viewers. Let me try something for you,' he said and turned towards the unmanned camera. ‘The Hornsbury School Shooting threw a chill over the nation, but as we struggle to understand what happened on the 10th of February,' he stumbled and immediately donned a thoughtful expression. Then, without anything changing that I could notice, he ran his hand through his hair, and started again as though he hadn't stopped. ‘As we struggle to understand what happened, and we've had a few memorable guests here to talk about it, at least we can say that one glimmer of hope came out of the events. And that's the actions of Nate Dillingham, the only pupil who survived the actual shooting. Nate, we're very grateful that you could come and talk to us so soon after coming out of hospital.' He paused and looked at me. ‘I'll say something like that on air. Is that alright with you?'

A vague unease started to take hold of me. Feeling he wasn't expecting an answer, I shrugged.

‘Alright, let's ask you a few questions. You've spent weeks recovering. How was that?'

The question threw me: I hadn't given much thought to my time in hospital by then. The oddness of the weeks I'd spent sequestered, and the impact they had on me, struck me much later.

‘It was… kind of boring.' They laughed at that. ‘I spent all day in bed, I drank a lot of tea.' Again they laughed. They were affable hosts. ‘I had to do a bit of rehab work, but not much.'

‘Are you still in pain?' he asked.

‘A little, but not anything like before.'

‘Thinking of the whole tragedy, I find it difficult to imagine that you're barely seventeen. But of course, that's precisely how old you are. Before this happened, I suppose you were preparing for your A-levels.'

His unctuous voice had me wanting to agree with everything he said.

‘Yes, exactly. We were all doing it. Just getting ready for our exams. Actually, I was thinking more about the cricket season than my exams.'

They laughed. Mary spoke for the first time.

‘We had George Hume here last Monday telling us a bit more about what happened. Could you tell us a bit about that?'

‘Well…' I trailed off, trying to get my thoughts around the question. They were nodding me on. ‘I guess what he said…'

She leaned towards me:

‘Your story is simply extraordinary. As the shooting was taking place, you stood up and walked to Eric Knight, and you managed to disarm him.'

‘No, it wasn't like that,' I said before I had time to think. The uneasy laughter that had quietened was now gripping me tightly. A surge of memories was building inside me, and my mind was going blank in anticipation.

‘But you managed to wrestle a gun from him,' said Chris in his easy tones, ‘and then, and this must be very hard to think about, you had to shoot him so he wouldn't go and hurt more people. We were talking about this last night, weren't we?' he said to his wife. ‘In the end, we had to admit that we probably didn't have the courage to do what you did. It's not often we can say this, but it truly was an act of heroism. What was going through your mind then?'

I stared at them, past her lacquered curls and his perfect parting, past my mother's lengthening face, at a camera aimed at my toes, at the black curtains hanging behind it. And the memories came: Anna panting, her lungs rattling every time she gasped for air; Jeffrey on the floor next to me grunting; and Eric's brief shock when I fired first, before pain wiped off his last emotion. There was no heroism in those memories. Nothing but horror.

‘I…' I struggled to bring my voice under control. ‘Nothing, I didn't have time to think. It just happened. I don't know how to explain it.'

‘Anna Walker was your girlfriend, wasn't she?' asked Mary.

‘Ex-girlfriend.'

‘It was so sad. For some days, all of us here hoped she would make it, didn't we? But as she died, she had words for you, didn't she?'

I stared at her in silence, my eyes bulging out of my skull, my thoughts flaying my so-called heroism.

‘She thanked you for trying, didn't she?'

There were no traces of a smile left on my lips. Chris broke in:

‘This is all terribly hard for you, Nate. For weeks we've all been glued to our TV screens wanting to learn more, but this is far bigger than news. You've just been through hell. But you have a family, and they're all in it with you. You have a brother, don't you?'

At the end of the mock run, they leaned towards each other and whispered animatedly. My mother joined them. Feeling like I was intruding, I rose and moved towards the green room, hoping to see Chloe or the prattling man, but not daring to leave the studio until they'd told me I could. I saw myself in a mirror hidden in a nook – a toad, a cockroach, a bastard, a man who shouldn't have survived, who didn't deserve to be standing in this studio. A hero, I scoffed.

A man and a woman had joined Chris and Mary, and now I could hear parts of their conversation. It was about me. After a few minutes, the woman got up, and noticing me for the first time, came to me:

‘We'd still like to do the interview live. But we'd like to practise a few more questions. Is that alright with you?'

Wanting it to be alright, I agreed. We were on air fifteen minutes later. I was emotionally drained, and their questions, gentler than they'd asked me in the practice run, felt like they were about someone else. I heard later that some viewers lodged complaints with the television regulator anyway. There is a popular clip of it divided into two pixelated segments online. I guess it will pass down the generations over the cloud, so that in a hundred years, those interested in as grim a moment as that which made me what I am, will be able to turn to their computers, and see me lounging back as I discussed the massacre.

It's not the only interview they'll be able to find. I was scheduled for two more before the television men probed past the novelty. One with an earnest lady who almost cried with me, and the other which lasted thirty gruelling minutes, and was cut down to five when it was shown on television. By the end of the second, I felt like I'd risen above a part of my memories, the part people were interested in. Television and its glamour had switched from one side of the ridge to the other. No longer part of the haze, it was dragging me down into a world of fixed images, fixed memories. I needed to move on.

‘They all want to hear the same thing, but they expect me to tell them something new. What's the point?' I told my mother, before she called to cancel the other interviews.

***

As the days passed and I remained in the house, it became clear that I'd traded one confinement for another. In hospital, I'd been surrounded by a sea of strangers, directed by every uniform in sight, but at least there'd been the prospect of home. But now that I was home, I felt irremediably stuck. Everyone was tiptoeing around me. A mere weakling, I needed five inches of down padding me from the elements.