I was summoned to Mr Treadstone’s office at ten o’clock the following morning. The bus driver had reported me, of course, as had several passengers on the lower deck. When you live in a village (and have been hit by a meteor), most people know your face and name. In hindsight, I never stood a chance.
When it came to discipline – when it came to most things – Mr Treadstone had a meticulous attention to detail. By ten o’clock, one hour into the formal investigation, he had already amassed a wealth of information concerning the previous day’s ‘incident’. He’d spoken to the bus driver (a short, frustrating conversation, I imagine) and gathered statements from two of the civilians who’d phoned the school to register their complaints. Two of my more pliable peers had also been called in for questioning: Amy Jones, whose father was a school governor, and Paul Hart, whose mother taught art. From these interviews, Mr Treadstone knew all about the fight. He knew that I had tried to claw Declan Mackenzie’s face off, and he knew that in the ensuing struggle some property of mine had been thrown overboard. The plain facts of the conflict were easy to establish. Only the motives remained unknown, and these would be uncovered soon enough. Mr Treadstone was very big on uncovering motives. He always said that the only way to kill the weed was to kill the root.
The weed was a metaphor for deviance.
As with every trial that had ever taken place in Mr Treadstone’s office, ours was to be a swift, no-nonsense affair. Since the legwork had already been done, and the verdict was already known, there was little that could delay the keen sword of justice. Charges would be levelled, statements read, explanations demanded and rejected, and punishments meted out. These accelerated proceedings would be bookended by the rather lengthier pre- and post-trial lectures, which Mr Treadstone believed to be the most crucial part of any disciplinary hearing. These lectures provided the opportunity to make sure that everyone understood the nature of the weed, and was fully committed to stopping its spread.
Strangely enough, Mr Treadstone’s views on crime and punishment were not unlike my mother’s – though in all other ways, they were as different as two people could be. Criminality, impropriety, scruffiness, poor diction – Mr Treadstone treated all these things as if they caused a kind of cosmic disorder, a general untidiness, that
had
to be rectified. And punishment by numbers was never enough. The books had to be balanced in the appropriate manner. Mr Treadstone, too, was a great believer in fitting punishments and public displays of remorse. When, for example, it was discovered that Scott Sizewell had been making an obscene gesture in the school photograph (this was an exceptionally dumb crime), Mr Treadstone hauled him up in assembly to make a dramatic apology before all six hundred of his fellow pupils. And this was no simple ‘sorry’. Scott Sizewell’s speech – prepared under strict supervision – lasted four minutes and was more akin to the statements made by disgraced politicians.
When it came to fistfights, Mr Treadstone believed that there was only one satisfactory resolution to such an infringement. Each party had to apologize – first to Mr Treadstone, then to each other – with what was deemed to be an adequate degree of sincerity, and then they had to shake hands (firmly, with eye contact; this was
always
the correct way to shake someone’s hand). It was a solemn ritual, which was supposed to signify a definitive end to hostilities – a return to civility and the rule of law.
Civility was also to be the major theme of our pre-trial lecture, which began promptly at 10.02.
‘We live in a civilized society,’ said Mr Treadstone, ‘and in a civilized society we resolve our differences in a civilized manner. We do
not
solve our problems with violence.’
Mr Treadstone was speaking hypothetically, of course – about ideals rather than reality. Or I supposed he was talking hypothetically. Otherwise, this would have been, as Mr Peterson would say, Grade A Horse Shit. At that very moment, we, the civilized world, were mired in two major wars in the desert, and from what I’d seen on TV, the men fighting these wars were widely regarded as heroes. We had nuclear submarines armed with bombs that could flatten cities, and many extremely civilized people agreed that this was only prudent – given how
un
civilized many other countries (and all of their inhabitants) were known to be.
I should probably tell you that I had a lot of pent-up hysteria that morning. I had spent most of the previous night awake. By daybreak, I had suffered three seizures – two partial, one convulsive; all three kept secret from my mother – and felt physically and psychologically frazzled. Without wishing to be overly dramatic, my mind felt like a saucepan full of writhing snakes, and the only way I could keep the lid on was through unwavering, single-minded vigilance. All my well-honed meditation and distraction techniques came into play. There was no hope of cultivating my usual sense of calm, so I aimed instead for a kind of detached numbness – layer upon layer of thick insulation to protect me from further injury. And for a while, this worked reasonably well. There were only one or two moments when I felt like laughing or crying or both.
‘You are ambassadors for the school,’ Mr Treadstone intoned. ‘When you are out in the local community, when you are travelling to and from the school grounds, you are still carrying the school flag – and you
will
behave accordingly.’
I stared solemnly at the floor and counted to fifty in Roman numerals. This was an acceptable posture given the circumstances. Mr Treadstone only expected eye contact when he was addressing you directly, by name or through a non-rhetorical question; and by the time Mr Treadstone addressed us that day, my mind was somewhere else entirely. (I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut in his meat locker while Dresden burned above him.) His demand for a response seemed to come from nowhere.
‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’
My numbed mind fumbled for thought. Declan Mackenzie reacted with the pin-sharp reflexes of a cornered weasel. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I know that fighting’s wrong. And usually no one dislikes violence more than me—’
‘More than
I
,’ Mr Treadstone corrected.
‘No one dislikes violence more than I,’ Declan Mackenzie agreed, ‘but this was self-defence. Ask anyone.
He
attacked
me
.’
He touched his hand to his left cheek at this point. Exhibit A: three or four angry-looking wounds. The scratches were now a reddish-yellow colour, and his left eye was puffy and purple. The wounds did look reasonably impressive, but I suspected they were actually quite superficial. In contrast, though much of my bruising was severe, it was all on places like my hips and buttocks – places I didn’t care to make public. And I suppose under questioning I would have been forced to admit that most of these injuries were
technically
self-inflicted, having been accumulated while I was falling down the stairs or rattling around in the doorway as the bus performed its emergency stop. Visually, Declan Mackenzie held a major advantage. He also had going for him the fact that his phoney-baloney ungrammatical speech at least
sounded
sincere. When I tried to riposte, mine was the hollow monotone of the clinically depressed.
‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I attacked first. But that’s pretty irrelevant.’ Mr Treadstone’s lip curled, perhaps because of my choice of modifier, perhaps because of my presumption in telling him what was or wasn’t relevant. I wasn’t sure which. ‘It’s not relevant,’ I continued drearily, ‘because he started it. He provoked me. This was his doing, not mine.’
‘It takes two to create a conflict,’ Mr Treadstone noted.
It was one of those statements that sounds true but doesn’t feel true. I was surprised to discover a small flicker of dissent somewhere in my gut. But my gut, sadly, was no public speaker. Whatever I wanted to express slipped from my grasp. I only managed to repeat myself, an atom less robotically. ‘This is his fault. He started it.’
‘I did not!’ Declan Mackenzie wheedled. ‘I was only messing around. It’s not my fault he can’t take a joke!’
‘Theft is no joke,’ I said.
I felt sure Mr Treadstone would support me in this sentiment. He did not. By then, he’d lost his patience. ‘That’s quite enough,’ he said, raising his hands. ‘This is disappointing, very disappointing . . . I can see that neither of you is willing to accept your share of the responsibility for yesterday’s disgraceful display. But I
am
going to get to the root of this matter.’
Mr Treadstone took a seat in his high-backed chair to show that he was prepared to wait for as long as it took.
‘I’m not interested in excuses,’ he said. ‘I want answers. Straightforward answers. Woods!’ His index finger swung dramatically in my direction. ‘Why did you assault Mr Mackenzie?’
‘He stole my book. He threw it out of the window.’
‘Mackenzie?’
‘I was upset. He attacked me!’ He touched his cheek again, close to his puffy eye socket. ‘He could have blinded me!’
‘It’s actually pretty difficult to blind someone,’ I pointed out.
‘He came at me with his
nails
!’
Mr Treadstone frowned, which was the only possible response to a disclosure such as this.
‘That was after you’d stolen my book,’ I pointed out.
‘Woods: you’ll address your answers to me, and speak only when I ask you to, not before. Mackenzie: why did you take Mr Woods’s book?’
Declan Mackenzie stared sullenly at the floor.
Mr Treadstone clicked his tongue. ‘Woods: why did Mackenzie take your book?’
‘I think you’ll have to ask
him
,’ I said.
‘I’ve asked him. Now I’m asking you.’
I stayed silent, but it was soon clear that Mr Treadstone was not going to let this matter lie. He was still determined to uncover motives. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘I expect an answer, Woods. Why did Mr Mackenzie take your book?’
In my defence, this was a very stupid question to ask; and it was certainly the wrong question to ask
me
. I was no psychologist. Declan Mackenzie’s motives had always been a perfect mystery to me. How was I supposed to give a reasonable answer when I doubted that such a thing even existed? Who knew
what
went on in Declan Mackenzie’s mind? He wasn’t exactly the most rational member of the species. My vaguest intuition was that if he’d had a motive, it had probably been something to do with humiliation – with some kind of urge to make other people feel like something the cat had dragged in. But the more I thought about
that
, the more incomprehensible it seemed.
I spent what seemed like many minutes struggling with this mental block, my pent-up hysteria rising and falling in the background. Mr Treadstone raised his eyebrows and tapped the desk with his fingertips.
‘You want to know why he did it?’ I asked. ‘Why he took my book?’
‘Yes, Mr Woods. As we’ve established, some time ago. I’m not going to repeat myself. I want you to answer the question in plain English.’
The apposite word had by now found its way to the very tip of my tongue, and once it was there, I had little notion of calling it back.
‘It’s because he’s a cunt,’ I said.
The word kind of hung there in the air for a while, as if I’d somehow managed to render it in a cartoon speech bubble. No one reacted. No one had been expecting it, least of all me.
Then the bubble burst.
Mr Treadstone went the colour of a blood blister. Declan Mackenzie went the colour of mint ice-cream. And I think I probably managed to stay my regular colour. But on the inside – on the inside, something had shifted.
Let me tell you: there’s this state of mind that doctors call ‘euphoria’. Some temporal lobe epileptics can experience it during a seizure, when the brain’s emotional centres are suddenly overloaded with electricity and start to malfunction. Normal people can sometimes get it too, when they feel like they’ve achieved something magnificent or are on drugs. Well, anyway: I’m fairly sure that euphoria was what I was experiencing at that moment, and for a while, I thought that convulsions were imminent. There was the same sense of unreality, the same lifting feeling – almost of weightlessness. But at the same time, my aura was absent. There were no distractions, no hallucinations. It felt more like I was rising, as if from a dense fog, into clear skies and golden sunlight. My vision was sharp, and my head was clear, and I felt a calm that went far beyond normal calm.
‘What?’ asked Mr Treadstone. Not ‘Pardon?’ or ‘Excuse me?’ or any of the other polite alternatives that he drummed into us daily; and I knew from his colouring that he’d heard well enough the first time. But for some reason, he was giving me the chance to reconsider.
I did not want to reconsider.
My words now struck me as the only meaningful words that had been uttered all morning. I would not have taken them back for all the money in Robert Asquith’s bank account. Declan Mackenzie was precisely what I’d said he was, and I felt no reservations about having pointed this out. It wasn’t as if anything bad could happen to me now – or nothing worse than what had gone before. Mr Treadstone could expel me, I supposed – but that wouldn’t be so terrible a consequence. (I would be home-schooled again, which was a more efficient way to learn.) Declan Mackenzie could beat me up again – but that would hardly make my words
less
true. I realized at that point that I had no fear of Declan Mackenzie any more. Sitting there with his green face and his puffy eye and his cowardly evasions, he struck me now as a pretty insignificant figure. So, presented with the chance, I decided to repeat my assertion, adding nothing but the school motto,
Ex Veritas Vires
, which I thought made an interesting coda.
Declan Mackenzie’s jaw hit the floor. Mr Treadstone leapt from his chair like a firework.
‘Mackenzie: out! NOW! Woods: not another word! Not another BREATH!’
The lecture that followed was extremely animated, but also far too long and repetitious to report here. Once it was over, Mr Treadstone phoned my mother at work, and my mother pleaded for clemency based on the mitigating circumstances of my illness and previous good record. They eventually agreed that a week of detention – in conjunction with the additional discipline I’d be facing at home – would be the minimum punishment for the terrible thing I’d said. Declan Mackenzie, in contrast, received a single day’s detention. My crime in using
that
word was deemed to be five times worse than anything he could possibly have done to me.