Different Class (34 page)

First he started to shake and cry, just like with the rabbits. Then he sat down and couldn’t get up; all he could do was shiver. I took him to the burnt-out car (I was feeling cold as well), and waited till he could talk again. It took a while. I watched the fire, which by now had died to orange and black, with the leaves of Poodle’s beefcake books curled up and red round the edges. I found a couple of cigarettes lying on the ground, and lit one each for Poodle and me. Poodle dropped his. I picked it up.

He said: ‘We’ll have to tell the police.’

I finished my cigarette. I said: ‘Really? You’ll tell them you pushed him?’

Poodle looked at me like a dog about to be put down. ‘Ziggy, what else can we do?’

I shrugged. ‘I know what
I’ll
do,’ I said. ‘I’m going home to watch TV. It’s
The Two Ronnies
on tonight. I’m going to watch TV, and eat leftovers, and maybe read a book, and – oh, probably
not
say I was with you today when
you
pushed that Sunnybanker.’ I flicked the cigarette end away into what was left of the fire.

Poodle looked at me with big eyes. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘Oh, grow up,’ I said. ‘Imagine what would happen if you actually told the police. Everyone would know about you. There’d have to be a trial. You’d get expelled from school, at least. It would be on your record for life. You’d never get into uni, or even get a proper job. You might have to go to a special school, maybe even Borstal. And even if they all
believed
that it had been an accident, what would your parents say? Your dad? What about the papers? What’s
that
going to look like, an MP with a killer son?’

Poodle began to cry again. ‘You can’t. We’ve
got
to tell,’ he said.

‘No, we don’t. And neither do you. You don’t want to say a single word. Because if you do, I’ll deny it. And that’ll make it even worse.’

He looked at me in misery. ‘I can’t.’

‘You can,’ I told him. ‘Listen to me. It’s not like you
meant
him to die, is it? It’s not like you
knew
he couldn’t swim. It was just an accident. Accidents happen all the time. He could have been standing there alone, and the bank could have given way under his feet. Or he could have slipped on the ice, or fallen when he reached in to pick something up out of the water.
Anything
could have happened to him. Anything at all.’

Poodle was watching me, glassy-eyed.

‘Think about it, Poodle,’ I said. ‘Telling people won’t bring him back. That would only cause trouble – for us, and for our families. You know what Sunnybankers are like. They all hate St Oswald’s. He’s probably got friends who’d tell the police we planned to get him from the start. They’d never believe what really happened. So even if the police let you off, the Sunnybankers would get you.’

That made him twitch a bit. I smiled and passed him half a cigarette.

‘Look, the worst is over,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is go home. Have your dinner, watch TV, forget this ever happened. You can do that, can’t you?’

Poodle didn’t answer. He just wiped his face with the back of his hand, turned and walked away from me. The last I saw of him, Mousey, he was heading down towards White City, looking like a dog with no tail. And that was how it ended that day. Not even with a whimper.

Dad’s already talking about sending me to another school. Perhaps he’ll wait till the end of the year, but then again, perhaps he won’t. He has a way of looking at me, when he thinks I’m watching TV. And I’m nearly certain that Mum’s been looking through my things again. She’d never say, of course. But there’s something about the way she goes through my books and papers, straightening loose edges that have been carefully left crooked. She may even have glanced at my St Oswald’s diary, which is why I’m going to hide these pages where no one will ever find them.

The thing about my parents is that they don’t
really
want to know. They’d rather live in ignorance, believing they’ve done all they could. Bring it into the open, and
everything
begins to stink. My parents; the Church; Goldie’s dad; Mr and Mrs Poodle. That’s why they won’t say anything. Especially not at school, or to me. Instead, they’ll pray, and light candles, and hold fund-raising coffee mornings, and shake their heads, and wonder why Poodle ran away.

We know, Mousey. Don’t we? But we’re never going to tell. Some things are too secret even to whisper to the reeds. That’s why I tore these pages out. I
was
going to burn them. But now I have a better idea. I’m making a time capsule. I’m going to leave some things inside – you know, to mark the occasion. The card I wrote to Mr Clarke. The pages from my diary. That copy of Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
. My list of special albums. I’m putting it all in a box. Then I’m wrapping it in plastic. Then I’m going to bury it, somewhere safe, by the clay pits.

After that, well, who knows? Maybe I’ll forget where it is. Maybe I’ll get on with my life, and take exams, and leave home, and get a job, and maybe one day get married, have kids, maybe even a cat or a dog. Sometimes I think about those things. Sometimes, it even seems possible to put aside my memories, to wrap them in layers of plastic; to bury them deep, where no one will look; where no one will
think
of looking.

Goodbye, Mr Clarke. Goodbye, clay pits. Goodbye, happy memories. Maybe I’ll be back for you, one day, when it’s safe to look. Till then, I’m putting childish things aside. Look after them for me, Mousey.

5

January 1982

I buried my father on January 6th, a Wednesday, in the morning. My mother was there, in a grey dress and two overcoats. She told me, very earnestly, that there was a thief at the Meadowbank home; that someone had been stealing her clothes.

‘The only way to stop them,’ she said, ‘is to wear
everything all the time
.’ She lowered her voice and smiled at me confidingly. ‘I’m wearing three pairs of tights,’ she said. ‘And look—’ She showed me her pockets, which, I saw, were bulging with socks. ‘Let’s see those fuckers steal from me now,’ she said, again with that childish, confiding smile. (My mother had once been a woman whose loathing of profanity had banned even the word ‘damn’ from our house. It was this, and not the fact that she seemed to have no idea of
whose
funeral we were attending, that finally brought it home to me that she and my father were equally gone.)

I put my arm around her. Under the thickness of the wool she felt like an armful of birds. She said: ‘Perhaps we’ll have rabbit tonight. You know how much you like it.’

I nodded and said: ‘That would be nice.’

I never saw her as lucid again.

The dead boy from the gravel pit was finally identified. He was a boy from Sunnybank Park, an undersized fifteen-year-old with the unpromising name of Lee Bagshot. He too made the
Malbry Examiner
– not the front page, but the third, next to the news of a series of burglaries in Pog Hill and a drunken driver in Huddersfield. I vaguely remember his photograph: the mullet; the V-necked pullover; the pinched and grinning little face.

Lee Bagshot was the son of Marie Bagshot (30), a shopgirl from White City, and John ‘Lefty’ Sykes (32), a self-employed plumber from Barnsley. Lee Bagshot spent his time between his mother’s house and his grandparents’, and due to a confusion over whose turn it was, his absence between December 30th and January 4th had gone unnoticed on both sides.

There were no tearful eulogies for Lee Bagshot; no vigils; no claims that he had ever been promising or popular. The mother appeared on
Nationwide
, pleading, a little shrilly perhaps, for the clay pits to be filled in. She was not a powerful advocate. She had bleached hair and too much make-up and seemed to be wearing every piece of jewellery she possessed. And yet there was something in her eyes that Nutter, MP, had never shown, not even at the height of the search for his son. At the time, I thought it was confusion, or guilt, or maybe just the excitement of being on TV. Now I think perhaps it was grief – the kind of grief that is hard and dry-eyed and belongs with those pebble-dashed houses with their bleak little squares of lawn and the steel shutters on the windows to make sure the stones don’t crack the glass.

‘He were allus going down to them pits,’ she kept saying, as if it excused the fact that for nearly a week she had partied, and gone out with her friends, and smoked, and drunk beer, and slept with several different men, and twice gone to the beauty shop without even knowing her son was dead, without even asking herself where he was—

‘I telled ’im,’ she said. ‘I kept tellin’ ’im. But he were a lad, they dun’t listen.’

He wasn’t the only one, it seemed. Nobody listened to Marie. If Mrs Nutter had spoken out – elegant Mrs Nutter, with her round vowels and her place on the governing bodies of the choral society and the Women’s Institute – then things might have been different. As it was, the clay pits stayed as they were for seven more years, after which the council had them filled in, and grassed over the place where they’d been to make a park that nobody used, except for youngsters up to no good. Lee Bagshot’s case was quickly closed. The coroner ruled it an accident, and life went on as usual.

Well, not
quite
as usual. The fact was that we’d had a shock. One of our own had disappeared, and so far, the grapevine had failed us. But one of the things about a school is that nothing stays secret for ever. Knowledge filters through in the end, searching out the weak links, following the path of least resistance. And our particular weak link was the Chaplain of St Oswald’s; a man whose goodwill was never in doubt, but whose ability to keep a secret, even when given in confidence, was very far from reliable.

St Oswald’s Chaplain has never been what you’d call a firebrand. Even twenty-four years ago, Dr Burke was more of a liberal than anything else, although this may have been because he never really believed in the world outside St Oswald’s. Devine, a Methodist who disapproves of the Chaplain’s High Church leanings, has been known to call him ‘that old Papist’, which is slightly unfair, given that he and Devine have only a few years between them. Nor is the Chaplain a Catholic, although his penchant for incense and candles might seem a little too florid for a plain old School Chaplain.

But this is perhaps what made Harry Clarke come to him with his secret; that comforting sense of authority; that whiff of the confessional. Harry
had
been a Catholic, once – he still took comfort in the Church, even though she had proved to be a rather judgemental parent. And the Chaplain kept his mouth shut for fully two weeks before he slipped – after which the news had spread all around St Oswald’s. Not only was Harry Clarke a practising homosexual, but for the few weeks preceding the Christmas break, he had befriended Nutter, talking to him, lending him books, even inviting him to his house. And that was where the boy had been found, a week after his disappearance . . .

6

January 1982

Harry told me the story himself. Of course I heard it later, in court, but by then it had bloated and festered, poisoned by time and circumstance. What Harry told me was simple: a single sequence of events, as yet untainted by the press. I had no reason to think it anything other than the truth: whatever else he may have been, Harry Clarke wasn’t a liar.

He’d come home late on New Year’s Eve to discover there’d been a break-in. A pane in his back door had been smashed, though there were no signs of a burglary. However, on entering the house, he found someone on the sofa: it was Charlie Nutter, asleep and bundled in a parka.

‘Why didn’t you phone the boy’s parents?’ It was the obvious question.

‘I knew there was trouble at home,’ Harry said. ‘I didn’t want to wake him.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

Harry shrugged. Then he took from his pocket a folded pamphlet, cheaply printed on pink A4 paper. ‘Go on, take a look,’ he said, and handed me the pamphlet. The title read:
HOMOSEXUAL, HELLBOUND
.