Relatively Strange (8 page)

“Put me down.”

“’Snot me,” I murmured virtuously, “’Syou.” My father meanwhile, from my other side, was exerting firm pressure on his errant air-borne first born, but I couldn’t imagine why. It had simply never occurred to me I could take passengers and the idea held immense charm and endless possibilities. I think I might have started to try and explain this, but all of a sudden, I didn’t feel quite right. Somewhere, under all that pink lace, something ominously uncomfortable was stirring.

“Uh oh, storm brewing skipper.” I muttered and came, very abruptly, down to earth. My mother, touching thankfully down with me, took one look at my face and with a quick grasp of the situation and an impressive turn of speed, bundled me towards the Ladies just in time to avoid undue unpleasantness. I don’t recall much else about that particular wedding.

Chapter Nine

Miss Peacock came into and went out of my life very briefly, around 10.00 o’clock on a bitterly cold, late November evening. I was ten, just turning eleven and perhaps only with the chill wind of her passing, came my first inkling of just how thin was the curtain that separated my almost too comfortable daily existence, from a completely different and far more dangerous arena.

I was returning from a friend’s house, a journey permitted only because the 113 bus stopped outside her front door and deposited me practically in front of mine. Downstairs – where the conductor can keep an eye, was the rule, but climbing the stairs and installing myself in that nice little bit at the back, was what I usually did. On this particular occasion, there were just two other passengers up there, a woman about halfway down, middle-aged I thought, thin, even in a thick camel-coloured winter coat. Narrow shoulders, iron grey hair chopped uncompromisingly short and wispily showing below the type of unflattering, knitted, chocolate-brown pull-on hat, equally at home on teapot or toilet roll. She was knitting, not another hat I hoped. A few rows nearer the front and on the opposite side sat a bowler hatted florid-faced man, nose buried in an Evening Standard.

At the next stop, a group of youths boarded; eighteen or nineteen years old, creating the racket that boys in a crowd find obligatory. There were only half a dozen of them but they stormed the stairs like an army, laughing, shouting, swearing and filling the hitherto quiet space with noise and something else. Skin-tight jeans, creaking leather jackets, aggressively side-burned and fancying themselves something rotten. I wasn’t nervous, despite all my mother’s fears I was more than capable of looking after myself, but this lot had been drinking, the smell was tangible and that made me uneasy.

Most of them were simply silly and noisy. Moving in a pack, staking out territory, harmless enough. But there was one, plump belly overhanging a studded belt, tow-haired, pale and pock-marked who was wrong. Simmering sullenly beneath the surface, he was brim-full of anger and resentment. He was I’d have been prepared to bet, always angry. It’s a natural state for some people but with it goes the frustration of being unable to express it adequately in daily life. He’d had several more drinks than was good for him and he had a lot to prove, his need to impress his peers incidental, to reassure himself, overpowering. He it was who led the group, swaggering, towards the front of the bus where they spread over the seats like mould and lit cigarettes, holding them in identical fashion, twixt thumb and forefinger, to indicate just how non-conformist they were. I turned back to my Georgette Heyer, until an abrupt change in the atmosphere made me look up again a few minutes later.

Pock-face had moved to sprawl across the seat directly in front of Evening Standard man and was making play of scanning the football results on the back page of the paper. Huge amusement amongst the troops, but if he was looking for a reaction from the reader, he didn’t get it. This didn’t suit; successful clowning needs a straight man so, with a wink, he inhaled deeply and blew a deliberately insulting lung-full of smoke into the face of the older man. A curt,

“Cut it out laddie,” and the man continued reading. He honestly wasn’t concerned, certainly not in any way intimidated. He was, in truth, bone weary. He’d had a hard, unpleasant day, indeed a rough few months altogether at the office. Passed over for a desired and, in his opinion, well deserved promotion he was reading, but not absorbing the newsprint. His head was full of redundancy fears, bank managers and mortgages. He certainly wasn’t nervous or worried about the boys, they were just unpleasant, overgrown kids showing off, strutting their stuff, he didn’t feel threatened. Indeed at that point, he wasn’t wrong, but Pock-face was fast heading past unpleasant and teetering on the edge of something else altogether. Even then it might have been all right if one of the other youths, weasel-faced, duck-arsed hair, hadn’t laughed out loud. Now it was no longer the man who was the butt of the joke, control had to be taken back.

“’Ere,” said he of the pitted skin to weasel-face, “Wot you laughing at?” and in those few seconds the situation turned, fuelled by a volatile mix of testosterone, bravado, alcohol and adrenaline. Pock-face drew himself to his feet, turned and suddenly, ridiculously out of place on the 113 to Hendon Central, the overhead lights were glinting on a flick-knife blade, a vicious shine.

Weasel, as if attached to the other end of a tautened thread rose as swiftly, still smiling but with his lip curling back from his teeth and a hand moving to his own pocket – I didn’t think he was reaching for a comb. The group, leather creaking, shifted and in an instant there were two clear sides. It was beginning to look like something out of West Side Story lacking only Chita Rivera wading in with a song. Pock-face was still angry but also now frightened at the situation he’d so quickly provoked, thus making him far more dangerous. I really was going to have to do something, I could hardly stand by and watch gang warfare break out round me.

“Young man.” A clear, irritable voice. “Put that away immediately and both of you sit down and be quiet.” The woman passenger several rows in front of me had looked up briefly as she spoke but now, matter settled, she continued knitting, I don’t think she’d even dropped a stitch. Newspaper man having sized up the new situation and not finding it to his liking, utilised the gawp-filled pause that followed to move swiftly out of his seat and down the stairs, leaving just the woman in the centre of the bus and me, sitting unobtrusively at the back. Weasel and Pock, shocked at being spoken to like that – did no-one have any manners nowadays, were instantly united and gleefully in their element against this common and comfortingly unthreatening enemy.

“Oy”, said Weasel, “You, droopy drawers,” guffaws egged him on, this was easy meat.

“Nobody,” he said, jaw thrusting, “Talks to me and my mate like that.” This time she didn’t even bother looking up, although he’d risen from his seat and, following the pocked one was advancing down the aisle towards her.

“Then it’s high time somebody did.” she said. Well, that’s it, I thought. I knew all about keeping my head down but I couldn’t just sit there and see this daft old bat insulted, assaulted or worse. She could have absolutely no idea what was going on in Pock-face’s head but I did and it wasn’t healthy. He’d gone way too far to retreat without losing face but more importantly, he really didn’t want to, he wanted to hurt someone, he wanted it so badly he could already taste it.

He was still holding the knife, so it seemed best to deal with that first. I began to heat up the handle; he was too high on aggression to notice immediately so I turned things up a few degrees. That concentrated his mind. With a howl of pain and shock he flung down the offending object, now red hot and glowing from base to tip. I was just wondering if perhaps I hadn’t overdone it a wee bit, when a funny thing happened. His feet flew backwards from under him with great force, exactly as if he’d walked into a concealed trip wire or rather, as if it had walked into him. He landed heavily in the aisle, flat on his face. Then, startling all of us, himself I think most of all, he bounded smartly upright again as if jerked by an unseen string – you can’t keep a good yob down. His face was a comic mix of amazement and fear. His nose was oozing blood and he didn’t seem to know whether it was that or the painfully burnt hand which should be receiving priority attention. And then he began to march down the centre of the bus with a peculiarly odd lurching gait, for all the world as if someone had one firm hand on his collar and another grip on the seat of his grubby jeans. He appeared to be extremely preoccupied with the unexpected turn events had taken.

Weasel and the others watched the jerky but rapid progress of their companion-in-arms with silent astonishment. I’ve never seen such a communal jaw-drop. They’d been a pretty gormless lot to start with but now even the ghost of gorm was gone. Still doing his jerky Bill and Ben imitation, Pock-face had now reached the top of the stairs where one arm was floppily raised to press the bell before proceeding hippety-hoppity, lippety-loppety down the stairs and out of sight. Of one thing I was certain, his exit was no doing of mine.

“And the rest of you.” said the brown hatted lady.

“This ain’t our stop.” Someone piped up. “It is now.” she said, quietly pleasant and she looked up. They were stupid these boys but not that stupid. Something must have looked out at them then which made any argument pointless. A glance out the window as we pulled away, showed a less than vociferous gathering at the bus-shelter. Sheepishly subdued I think would describe it best, with the exception of Pock-marked who was waving his burnt hand around and doing a bit of pain-induced hopping.

I moved forward, drawn implacably and sat on the edge of the seat across the aisle from her. My heart was thumping so hard in my ears I thought if she spoke I wouldn’t hear her. I knew exactly what I’d witnessed, but still doubted. She didn’t so much as acknowledge me and I couldn’t read her at all, her mind was totally silent, a smooth-surfaced, impenetrable grey against and around which, I slid helplessly. I don’t know why but I reached out my hand to her, she moved away fractionally, avoiding the touch – I felt like a kicked puppy.

“Can we talk?” I ventured.

“No.” No dithering there then, indeed she’d speared her wool decisively with her needles, stowed the knitting in a capacious, battered suede bag and was rising to leave the bus.

“What’s your name?” I said. Of all the hundreds of questions jostling that was, without doubt, the silliest and least vital. She looked at me, heavy lidded eyes muddied by the artificial lighting of the bus. A thin, narrow lipped, arrogantly high cheekboned face. She rose.

“Peacock.” she said, “Miss.”

“I’m …”

“I know.” And I felt her sweep briefly and thoroughly through my mind. She was pepperminty cool, sharp-green and fresh and she moved through my carefully nurtured defences as though they were non-existent. She nodded once, more to herself than me in acknowledgement of something, God knows what, she certainly wasn’t giving anything away. And then she was moving swiftly and surprisingly gracefully down the stairs. I watched her from the window as she walked briskly away, her camel coat orangey in the street-light, head bent against the November evening chill. She didn’t look back.

When I got home and recounted the tale, slightly modified to ameliorate parental alarm, they said they were positive I was mistaken. There was no doubt, my father said, filling his pipe, that those yobs came on strong but my Miss Peacock was probably a teacher or something similar and well used to dealing with troublemakers. A firm reprimand and somebody standing up to them was probably all they’d needed and I shouldn’t let my imagination run away with me. And, my mother added sharply, perhaps today’s unpleasant experience would bring home the sense of the sitting near the conductor rule. Unsatisfied, I reluctantly put the incident to the back of my mind and pretty soon there were other matters to claim my attention, but I knew what I’d seen and sensed.

Chapter Ten

A two-page letter in a brown windowed envelope franked Department of Education was the first intimation we had of The Survey. The DoE letter was accompanied by another from Miss Macpharlane, pointing out that whilst involvement was purely voluntary, only a relatively small number of pupils from the top year of our junior school had been selected. Indeed only a few schools had been chosen to submit candidates in the first place, and it could be nothing but beneficial were some of our children to participate in this ambitious project.

It seemed that a range of high academic achievers from all over the British Isles were being screened for selection and those chosen would become part of an ongoing educational and sociological study, the like and scale of which had never been attempted before. Taken from different economic, ethnic and social backgrounds and having recently passed the Eleven Plus exams, progress would be charted every four years from now on, throughout secondary school and into further education or jobs. Miss Macpharlane was at pains to emphasise that whilst participation did require an ongoing commitment, once selected, involvement was predicted to be just a day or two every few years.