Black Chalk (35 page)

I stopped by a new sign: ‘Hornsbury Sutton School'.

They'd changed the name. It made sense, I nodded to myself. I hadn't planned on going to my old school – I wasn't capable of planning anything – but I'd ridden on the windy road escaping Headington Hill, and now, there it was – it'd changed its name but I'd found it anyway. I turned my bike into the lane leading up to the school. The road had been freshly relaid; new white lines shone on its sides. My wheels glided silently over the dark bitumen. I heard nothing but the tyres' gentle hum and the deaf sound of the wind pressing on my ears, until I reached the crest where the side hedge turned into a woven-wire fence and my old red bricks rose from the hillside. Just before the bus circle stood a discreet sign: ‘Hornsbury Memorial' and an arrow pointing down a path once only used for June Jamborees.

I put my bike on my old rack, the closest one to the stairs – since it was half-hidden by a hedge, there was always a free spot – and I stood at the bottom of the main steps, longing for a pair of heavy doors I could blast open. Hornsbury School's master was returning home, I laughed at the renovated façade. They'd removed the black crust that used to pile on the bottom of each brick, so that the white bricks interlaced in between the red bricks finally showed their pattern. Getting it pretty for my return; that was even funnier. I felt like a madman thrown into his dream world. If only I had two guns on my hips, I could kick the doors open and swagger my way home.

Instead, I walked up the steps and two automatic panes silently slid open. A woman with a ponytail glared at me. It was 2.30 p.m. If I remembered the timetable right, students would finish their current period in five minutes. I walked down the lino-lined corridors and came out exactly the same door Jeffrey and I used to take to go down to our physics class on Thursday mornings. The neo-gothic archway still left the building to finish abruptly halfway down the hill. I followed it until there was a gap between the trees and I saw the glass spire Leona had talked about. It spanned twenty yards above the ground, and at its end, it opened into a glass flower, as if its nectar could attract dead souls back to Earth.

I turned around. Students in their green blazers, the boys' ties tighter than I used to wear mine, girls still pushing the rules a button at a time, swarmed out of the main building's back doors. Yes, with two guns, I could spray bullets until thirty were down, march to the memorial, pray, and die a fitting death. A group of sixth-formers strolled down the archway, looking at me funnily. I'd show them. Perhaps it was because I wasn't wearing a uniform, I thought, and for the first time, I took a second to notice what I'd put on. Brown sandals, paint-stained jeans, a business shirt opened to my breastbone, plus a five-day beard. I would have stared too. If I lingered any longer, a teacher would come and ask me to leave the premises. Impulsively, I made my way towards the spire: as I came closer, I saw its fat round base, also made of glass. All together, it looked like a pimple shooting pus at the sky. It was probably meant to symbolise something, perhaps hope. I skirted around the flower beds that surrounded it and went right to the centre of the sports ground.

The football posts were already up, the white lines already painted, but a wicket the groundsman must have used in August still looked playable. I took guard at the crease and pulled a long hop, cut a throat tickler over the slips for four, backfoot drove like I'd never backfoot driven before.

‘Oye!' I heard behind me. A black dog was running towards me, its nose tickling the grass. The groundsman followed in his green sleeveless jacket. His two gardening gloves in one hand, he was waving me off with his other hand.

‘You're not allowed to be here. I can report you to the Dean.' He stopped a few yards away. His dog came to smell my hand. ‘Are you a student? This is private property.'

‘Mr Rivers?' I asked, smiling at the normality of the moment. He'd shouted me off his field just the same way before.

He squinted: ‘Yeah?'

‘Nate. Nate Dillingham.'

He pursed his lips and eyed me up and down.

‘So you are. You've got hair all over your face now. Hard to recognise you.' He fidgeted with his gloves, his eyes on the grass, on his dog. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I don't know,' I said with a wide big smile.

He looked at me like I'd said something strange.

‘Are you on something? Acid, LSD?'

‘No.' I couldn't stop smiling.

His eyes on his hands, he put his gloves on and took them off again.

‘What have you been doing since… since you left school?'

I looked at the green field around me, at the grass stubble poking through the square's mud. It was all so simple, all so real.

‘None of it matters,' I said. ‘I've been living in a dream.'

He nodded, his lips pursed. He didn't understand me, he couldn't understand me – for eight years, he'd been cutting grass, painting lines, rolling pitches, while his dog trotted around him. He'd stayed firm while I'd ran away. His life had flowed from his past, and now he could stand on his field, and he could say that he belonged. In the meantime, I'd reneged on what I'd done, what had happened to me. And I'd fled, I'd grasped at air, I'd come back a shell of a man.

Mr Rivers put his hands on his hips.

‘Well, don't stay there, you'll mark my pitch and the grass won't have time to grow before winter.'

‘Are you still playing?' I said, bending down so I could pet his dog.

‘As much as the body will let me play. My knees aren't what they were.'

‘You were never one to steal a quick single,' I chuckled.

‘No, no, but now I have a bionic knee, and this one's about to go.'

His voice hadn't changed: the same stout chat I'd heard behind the stumps when we used to play him in the OCA. In those days, everyone knew him as Johnny Cricket – the man who played four games a week, and who'd happily have played seven if it weren't for his wife.

‘Do you still keep?'

‘If the captain's smart, I stand at slip and that does me fine.' He smiled and looked around his field. ‘It's changed a bit since you left, hasn't it? They built the memorial—'

‘A monstrosity.'

‘Well, they consulted everyone. Three years of consultations. You could have told them. And they finally built a proper pavilion.' He pointed his thumb at a building I hadn't noticed, a modern take on a traditional pavilion, slick concrete walls rendered to look more like wood.

‘Looks nice, doesn't it?' I said.

He sniggered.

‘Typical of them, isn't it? The space I have in there, the tractor hardly fits anymore. Always trying to save money. That hasn't changed.'

Nodding, I wrestled a ball from his dog's jaw and threw it far. She ran after it.

‘Listen,' I said. ‘Do you mind if I stay here for a bit?'

‘On the square?'

‘No.' I moved off the square. The dog came back with the ball. ‘Just here.' I waved my arm at the field, at the trees.

He studied my face, and then he nodded.

‘Just don't get in the way when I'm mowing the lawn.'

As he turned around, I snatched the tennis ball out of the dog's jaw, and threw it the other way. She looked at the green ball travelling through the air, at her master ambling in the opposite direction, at the ball, at her master, and pounced after the ball, her thin legs heaving her big belly and its white under-fur across the grass. The ball dipped and bounced, and it dipped again, and her body flew angled across the ball's path, until they were travelling together, and she was turning around in a slow circle. She dropped the ball, heavy with her drool, by my feet and this time she didn't look at her master. A gentle breeze carrying the smell of freshly cut grass, the sun resolutely shaking off all troublesome clouds, I played with her while Mr Rivers cut the lawn. After what felt like a hundred throws, she brought the ball back and slumped to the ground, keeping the ball in her teeth. We were both tired. I sat next to her and petted her, my eyes closed, enjoying the singular beauty of the moment. Her whimpers, her uneven breath, they were all part of it. When Mr Rivers turned his tractor off, she rose replenished and ran his way. I lay still, facing the trees down the hill – the ones I used to fetch cricket balls from whenever the wicket was too close to the downhill boundary and a burly right-hander got stuck into our friendly spinners – but I didn't think of the past. An appreciative calm had taken hold of me – my view, the smell, the temperature, they were all perfect, and it was only now, when I had hours left, that I realised it. I breathed deeply, air swelling into my gut, and I floated happy in the moment.

At one stage, I heard two voices, getting nearer, shouting, perhaps at me. When I turned around, Mr Rivers was walking towards them. It was two young men, teachers I guessed, coming to investigate, to kick me off the school grounds. The three of them, pointing at me, spoke halfway between the memorial and my patch of grass. Then the teachers walked back towards the school, and Mr Rivers came by.

‘I'm going home,' he said.

‘Do you mind if I stay a bit longer?'

He took a second to answer:

‘As long as you don't vandalise my pitch.'

‘Thanks,' I said, and he called his dog to him.

I lay on my back and watched the clouds. With them, the beauty continued. They were thickening, cooling down the air, drawing patterns in the sky. If I'd worked at it, I could have learned to draw clouds. It was all about their shadows – easy enough for the eye to discern, hard to render with a pencil, with a brush. An enormous canvas of a cloudy sky, capturing its volume, its movement, the shades of blues and whites. There couldn't be a better picture than that. I didn't have the time to work on it now, but it didn't matter; a young man would stare at the sky one day, and dedicate his life to capturing that single beauty. It would be a life well spent. And it struck me as obvious: to capture beauty and give it to someone else was the only way to spend a life.

I remained there for hours, for soon it was dark, and I couldn't discern one cloud from another. My body was damp with dew and stiff with cold, but that was incidental. The field looked different at night, and so did the memorial. Dimly lit, its tip darker than the trees around it, it had a foreboding beauty. It stood exactly where the Kemp Annexe had stood. There was a ramp approaching it from the field and another from the school. I took the one from the field. Lights low on the walls lit the path like a plane's aisle. The flower beds sitting on the parapets were prettier for the half-light. I could make out handprints moulded into the wall, and small plaques beneath them. I bent down to inspect the one right by my foot: ‘I learned that nothing was for granted.' And the student's name: Harry Williams. The one student I'd disliked, for his petulant mouth, his spanky hair, and the way he'd always tried harder than he should. And in an instant, that image disappeared, replaced by one of a boy (a man now, I guessed) who had never fitted in, and who, when he'd lost people who hadn't cared about him, had still lost it all. I placed my hand over his handprint – his fingers were surprisingly long – and went inside the memorial.

Leona had described it as like being inside a stomach made of glass. At night, with the few lights making the glass walls a cavernous boundary, I understood her. The walls curved high towards the start of the spire, meeting it at least four times my height from the ground, so that the reflected light barely brushed the ceiling. Instead the spare lighting focused on a low wall, made of a damp yellow stone and angled like a lectern, which formed most of a circle and occupied the centre of the monument. I followed its inside, my fingers running over the stone: Graham Johnson, Tom Davies, Laura Clarkson, Jayvanti Patel, Jeffrey Baker, Satish Choudary, Edward Moss, Paul Cumnor, Grace Li, Anna Walker. They each had a simple gold-plated plaque with their name in a bare font, and underneath each plaque, I could feel it with my fingers, were a few handwritten words engraved into the stone. ‘No one will make us laugh like you' was written under Anna's name, and ‘The cats always sleep on your bed' underneath Laura's. The writing under Jeffrey's name was Amanda's. It said, ‘We think of you every day'. Ironic, I thought: Leona never thought of her brother. But there was beauty in her way too, I corrected myself, and I saw it clearly for the first time: her life had never been anchored by grief, and that was perhaps the freest of lives.

There was no plaque with Eric's name on the wall. Searching for one around the monument, I came across another yellow-stoned wall near the exit. It had the names of all those who'd come to our help. Batterthew, Elizabeth Batterthew, that was the name of the kind paramedic who'd taken me to hospital. I didn't know the other names, but I remembered the uniforms busying themselves around us in the room, and outside, in the sharp light. And, centred, alone, on the far edge of the wall, under its own heading – Wounded – a plaque with my name. If I had to have one, I preferred it where it was, isolated.

The space, cosy where I stood, but soaring at its centre, invited me to follow its contours. Walking along the glass wall, I almost missed it. It looked like dirt smeared on the ground, but there it was, on a small slab, like a saint's tomb in a cathedral: Eric Knight. Nothing but those two words. I was glad to see them, and I remembered the groundsman: three years of consultations. If anything had needed consultation, it must have been that name, which should have stood on the round wall, but which some would have never wanted in the memorial at all. I kneeled next to it and prayed, to no god in particular, but to the enclosed space, to the memory of those I'd let die, to Eric and his mother, and most of all, to a kindness that was spreading from my solar plexus like it would encompass all.