Throw Me to the Wolves Read online

  Danny is at least considering the possibility that he might sometimes feel like someone else.

  ‘I’m joking …’ Ander repeats, though he wasn’t.

  Those are their introductions. After that, it’s intuitive, or at least unspoken. Neither asks the other who they are or where they come from or what they feel themselves to be.

  Danny and Ander gravitate towards other ill-fitted people: Gwil Isaac, the Welsh farmer’s son, and like Danny a scholar whose parents pay no fees; Neil Hall, gentle, gothic, interested in androgynous pop stars, make-up, paisley shirts, and slightly ashamed to be the son of a very rich lawyer; Richard Nicholson, the school intellectual who wears spectacles with plain glass because it makes him look like some poet he keeps mentioning who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Joining them when he remembers that he has friends is David Sweeting, an academic prodigy, but so quiet that you can’t tell if he’s just shy or if he thinks that anything that isn’t happening inside his head isn’t really happening at all. They like him, but they are not sure that he believes they exist.

  Both Ander and Danny are bad at sport, but in different ways; in their own ways. Ander is just bad: he can’t run fast, can’t catch things, kick things or hit them with a bat or racket. There’s a place for him, though, because, as they say, sport is inclusive, sport is for everyone. For inclusive read compulsory. It’s that kind of school, the mens sana in corpore sano kind. His place is at the bottom of the ladder, corpore sano-wise. He’s always the last to get picked for any team, after the puffy diabetic kid, George Cobbleson, the rake-thin club-footed boy Rupert Flynch, and even after Tristan with the ‘special suitcase’ that contains some sort of medical kit no one understands, and which Tristan himself can’t properly explain the workings of. ‘It’s got dials on,’ he says helplessly, opening it to reveal something that looks like a wireless radio from a war film with liver-coloured tubes. Tristan has a jaw like the broken bumper of a car, which is why he lisps. The front of his mouth is just out of reach of his tongue and his mouth is always full of saliva.

  He is hurt, he gives off hurtness: the hurt leaks from him, he walks through puddles of the stuff, it pools at his feet whenever he stands still. But no one hurts him, they just navigate around him without touching or talking to him; he has his own airspace and nobody strays into it. It’s the airspace you make around you when you’re in pain.

  Tristan gets left alone, even by the bullies. No bully wants to feel tautological.

  There’s Leighton Vaughan, a burly South Walian rugby player who hates Gwil because Gwil speaks Welsh. Vaughan is the tame Welshman; domesticated. His father is a town councillor from Newport, and Leighton is beloved of the sports masters because his dad sends them tickets to rugby matches at Cardiff Arms Park. Sometimes, when you catch him thinking, or moving his mind around in a grudging pastiche of thought, you see the melancholy that certain people have when they realise they are trapped in their own clichés but can’t quite see a way out.

  Vaughan spends most of his time with Hugh Lewis, who has the eyes of a boy planning a school shooting. Around them, they have gathered a posse of boys who resemble them and know them for their own kind.

  There are cruel words, most of them only half understood or not at all: ‘mong’, ‘spastic’, ‘abortion’ … Ander and Danny don’t use them, and no one uses the words on them. They’re more like background music to them, a song they catch snatches of as they move through the day: breakfast, class, break, class, lunch, class, class, class, sport …

  Then come the evenings, where time dilates and there’s nowhere to hide.

  But at the moment they don’t notice. They’re too busy just keeping hold of the changes happening inside them, in their bodies and their minds, wondering if it’s still themselves inside that head, on the end of that hand, if that skin really belongs to them or if it’s been replaced by a shirt made of flames.

  They’re thirteen, going on fourteen. Ander remembers that Greek myth, the one about the shirt that killed Hercules, the Shirt of Nessus, and that’s how he feels he’s wearing his own skin, wearing it to flaming rags. He thinks he sometimes smells it burning, and when he licks his arm and smells it, the way he does after swimming, to sniff the chlorine, he fancies he scents fire.

  *

  ‘Whoa!’ Gary calls out from the other side of the room. ‘Kinky.’

  I turn, and find him holding a black cloth, some kind of velvet hood or bag with a drawstring at the bottom.

  ‘‘What d’you think that’s for?’ Gary asks.

  ‘Dunno,’ I say, and it’s true, up to a point. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Nothing, Prof, nothing at all. Fluff. Maybe a bit of hair …’ he turns it inside out and things that are too small to have names fall from it: ‘It was just there, folded up at the back of a drawer in his desk.’

  ‘Forensics?’ I ask.

  ‘Frenzics,’ confirms Gary.

  *

  Every Sunday night, for those boys who board and don’t get to go home and see their families, there is letter writing. They sit in the cold assembly hall, overseen by a resentful teacher whose turn of duty has come on the weekend rota, and write on the regulation paper using the regulation blue ink and fountain pen.

  What the boys express in their letters must be regulation, too, because when they finish them, add their kisses or hugs or their sad little ‘best wishes’ (best wishes? Ander thinks later, years later, ‘I was sending best wishes to my parents, the people who made me, whose flesh and bone I am, as if they were semi-strangers from the bank or the local council?’), they must leave the envelope open. If they really want to push the boat of their feelings out, they’re allowed to write ‘fondly yours’. Or as McCloud quips when he’s on duty: ‘fondlingly yours’.

  Later that night, every week of term, the letters are read by the deputy headmaster, Dr Monk.

  ‘The Doc’ is the only teacher in the school with a PhD, and he makes sure everyone knows it. If you forget and call him Mr Monk, you are given one of the Doc’s speciality punishments. You are ‘given’ them, but really it’s the Doc who gifts them to himself through you. The ‘curly-wurly’ is a favourite, in which he grips a cluster of your hair from the base of your neck or just above your ear between thumb and forefinger, and pulls it slowly, first in tiny circles, and then, tightly, in widening circles, the way you’d wave a sparkler in slow motion at a bonfire. He pulls higher and higher, raising his arm gently, so you have to get off your chair, then stand up, then stand on the tips of your toes to stay ahead of the pain. When you can rise no higher, he just pulls and turns and pulls and curls until your hair comes off in his fingers.

  The boys learn very quickly that the pain is worse the less hair there is – a fistful of hair hurts less than a precisely chosen, small patch in the places where the taut skin of the skull begins to loosen into the skin of the face – places where nerves start to crowd together. It is a raging, burning, meat-seared-in-a-pan pain, and the more you show your agony the likelier he is to stop: like all sadists, he likes the illusion of being merciful. If you keep shtum and don’t cry out, he keeps going until you do. Danny and Ander are pretty good at holding on; it is like that, holding on, a little rodeo of pain where you just cry out in your head and say fuckit and suck the air in and hold on as long as you can. But at some point they give in, as do Neil Hall and Rich Nicholson, they let the pain buck them though they all try out defiance for as long as they can. Defiance is always a good look, but you need to know when to stop before you over-defy and start to break. The only one to hold on until the Doc got tired and had to stop, or began to look stupid and no longer in control, was Gwil, the Welsh boy. But it cost him quite a lot of the hair around his ears and the top of his neck, where the skin is raw and puckered and pinpricks of blood clot the follicles.

  The punishment involves very little touching, too – the Doc is particular about that. Most of the teachers wallop the boys in messy, imprecise ways: a clip round the ear as they pass, a kic
k in the arse, forgetful brutality dispensed in flashes and with a randomness that is even sometimes reassuring because it suggests it isn’t you personally they want, just the fact of your body. Not the Doc: the Doc is scholarly in his approach to physical punishment. He is precise and attends to detail. The pain he inflicts has footnotes. The snap of the torturer’s glove is as pleasurable to a certain kind of person as the pain it presages, and the Doc is that kind of person. He even makes notes in a little book on his desk. The pages have three columns: date and name of boy, misdemeanour and type of punishment.

  Gwil says the Doc reads it at night and touches himself. ‘Don’t rule it out,’ says Danny.

  At letter-writing time, if what the boys write home is not, as the Doc puts it, mature, grown-up and showing you and the school in the best light, then they’re in trouble. Often Ander has his letters returned for rewriting. One of the Doc’s pleasures is to take someone’s letter and read it out in a childish voice, or in a theatrically tearful tone. It is one way of making sure no one says too much, puts too much of themselves onto the page. Shame their bodies, yes, but be sure to shame their souls, too. Or what they think their souls are. Ander thinks his soul is a mixture of him and what he’d like to be, plus (plus as Danny says) whatever he’d like to do, which is be an adult so he can get out of here. Plus all his thoughts, not just the complete thoughts but the hazy ones he never finishes thinking, and also the ones he’s slightly ashamed of, the ones he pushes to the side. The Doc looks at you as if he sees those thoughts, too, he looks as if he’s drilling into the boys, into the crude oil of what they are, the thick, unmixed, unfiltered stuff inside.

  To begin with, Ander was too sad even to finish a letter. He missed his parents, and told them so. He tried to tell them in Dutch, too, his language, his mother’s tongue and also – but not for long now – his mother tongue.

  The Doc returned the letter and told him to do it again – in English.

  The day his parents dropped Ander off at school: they pulled up in the car and left the engine on, as if to signal the briefness of the goodbye, the need to curtail it, to have a reason not to stand there watching as he put his arm over his eyes, hid his tears in the crook of his elbow, like someone trying to block out the sun. Those pillows, he thought that night, when he got to his bed in the dormitory with the saggy mattress and the metal frame with chipped paint and the springs rusty from generations of bedwetting … those pillows: do they still hold all the tears that have been cried into them? He puts his own ear to his pillow, the way he once put his ear to shells to hear the ocean, and he hears the tears of others, and cries his own, his little tributary that feeds into the sea.

  Ander wondered what he was doing here, speaking English laboriously and eating brown food in a scratchy uniform with boys who didn’t wash properly and teachers who checked that they were wearing pants with what seemed to him, even then, to be a kind of zeal disproportionate to the enquiry. He didn’t have the word zeal then, or disproportionate, or even enquiry, but as he grew older, as he learned the words in English, he went back over the moments when he had no words and slotted the words in: into the gaps, the blank bits where the feeling or the sensation was there but the word hadn’t been.

  The words are all in place now, but mainly because it’s too late, because they came after he needed them, like the fire brigade arriving to a smouldering rubble. The words are too much in place, even. Because now he often throws out the word and then waits for the feeling to pearl around it. Which he is sure is the wrong way around.

  Later, when he looks back over his childhood, he will think it was like a crossword: the gaps for the letters that would spell out the feeling he had, the sensation that passed through his body or across it; or that stayed in his body and wouldn’t leave. For a while at school he had no words because he was already too far from the old language and not yet close enough to the new one. Tussen twee oevers, he would say to himself in Dutch, and then in English: between two shores.

  Small things tug at him: the Dutch on the lorries as they head to the docks; the names of the ports, Ostend, Zeebrugge, Den Haag. What would happen if he hid in a lorry? Under one? One day, when he sees a Folkestone-bound HGV parked in the lay-by near the wasteland under the bridge, the driver sleeping in the snug little bed-length cabin draped with an FC Bruges flag, he crawls underneath it to see if there’s anywhere to lie down, anything to grip to. He wedges himself in between the bumper and the undercarriage; squeezes between the spare wheel and the floor of the lorry, held up by the straps that rock a little as he settles in. Then the engine starts and he scrambles down, rolls out and watches it go.

  Unmoored, he thought. Unmoored. Though he spent a lot of time unmoored before he learned the word unmoored.

  What order do the words come in, he keeps thinking: before or after the thing, the feeling? Does the feeling change suddenly because it has a name? Yes, he thinks, the name contains it, or gives it a border so it doesn’t spill and splash around into another feeling. Homesick, for instance: Heimwee. Home-ache in Dutch, Home-pain. Home-woe. It’s better than sick.

  He aches. He has home-ache.

  He wonders when they’ll build that tunnel under the sea that McCloud keeps talking about. McCloud says the trains will go underwater, that you’ll be able to drive to Europe without getting out of your car.

  Back there in the then, he said what he felt, what he meant, didn’t use words to distance his feelings from the mouth he spoke them with, or from the places where he felt them. So his words were returned to him for rewriting. The same happens to Gwil, who writes home in Welsh and whose letters the Doc rips up and bins. ‘Do it again in English – you’re not with the sheep now.’ But Gwil is steely and refuses to give in. It’s a perpetual standoff: Gwil sits there with pen and paper before him; each time writes home and each time has his letters torn up. Gwil thrives on defiance. Eventually, he changes his method and writes nothing: hands over a blank sheet, though he always writes his parents’ address on the envelope. He might be a martyr, but he isn’t a fool: he has a phone card, which he uses to phone home, and which he lends other boys when they need it.

  The Doc hates Gwil, and he is suspicious of Ander, of Richard Nicholson, Neil Hall and anyone else who doesn’t arrive preconditioned to conform. But it’s Danny he goes after. Why? asks Ander early on, in the first term. ‘Because of the Irish thing,’ replies Gwil. Ander nods. Though he has no idea what Gwil means, he doesn’t want to look like he’s not in the know.

  But Ander pieces it together from graffiti and shreds of news overheard on the radio or seen on TV. The graffiti on the bridge, the graffiti at the bus stop, the graffiti on the toilet walls, the graffiti on Park Street, the High Street and near the bus station. He learns quite a lot of English that way, too.

  Hang the Birmingham 6.

  Starve Irish Scum.

  And Internment Now!, which he has to look up and thinks it describes something not so different from being in Chapelton.

  ‘Anything to do with the graffiti?’ he asked once.

  ‘What graffiti?’ replied Danny with a jolt. But Danny knew, he just didn’t want to know, didn’t see why it had to do with him.

  Ander and Gwil took Danny to the bridge and showed him:

  Starve Irish Scum.

  Gwil says: ‘There’s some on the bus stop on the green, too.’

  Danny looks at it. ‘Maybe it’s that,’ he says, trying to sound noncommittal.

  *

  It’s still there on the side of the buttress: Starve Irish Scum. The council tried to get rid of it but only managed to etch it deeper in. The stencil of Bobby Sands with a target on his forehead was easier to clean. That went sometime in the nineties. But Starve Irish Scum is now so much part of the stone it’s like letters in a stick of seaside rock. You could chip away at the bridge and it would still be there when the buttress was the width of a tooth.

  *

  The Doc dislikes scholarship boys because he is afraid of what they
know of the world outside school – farms or housing estates or big cities – and of what they might have learned there that makes them less malleable to the likes of him.

  ‘Let’s see what Fenians write home, shall we?’ he says, and snatches Danny’s letter from the table.

  In a mock Irish accent, as bad as it is exaggerated, he reads out Danny’s innocuous letter contemptuously, inviting the others to laugh. Many do. He makes the obligatory joke about hunger strikers, asking Danny whether his parents have eaten this week, this month, this quarter. Danny starts to dread any meal with potatoes, because the teachers and some of the boys, the ones who’ve read a bit, who know their current affairs, make jokes and point at him.

  The Doc reminds the boys that the bridge in town, the bridge they cross every day, was twice attacked by Irish terrorists: ‘Once in 1939 when we were about to go to war against fascism, and once again last year when our troops were fighting in the Falklands. I hope you remember that whenever you cross the bridge, Mr McAlinden.’

  So Danny learns the hard way not to say too much, not to cry onto the paper with his ink. Ander and the others learn by example.

  For Ander, English becomes the subterfuge-tongue, a place with words where he can hide, where no one knows him, where he is in disguise.

  Danny’s mother is ill, in ways they don’t understand because they aren’t really told, but they’re sure she won’t get better. A few of the boys make jokes about calling off the hunger strike. The Doc laughs. A teacher’s laugh is worth ten pupils’, so the joke catches on. Hunger, hunger strike, solid food, nil by mouth, force-feeding. Danny takes it all. He never hits out. He’s like a surface which absorbs light but doesn’t reflect it.

  A child with a sick parent, a terminally ill mother or father, always looks like he is carrying something heavy but invisible. So Danny is already guarded with most people. His mother’s illness is always there, like a late-afternoon shadow over their games and their talk. Danny’s letters must allude to the illness but not to its terminal nature. That is the English way.