Pandaemonium (12 page)

Not that Rocks would be getting assigned to a high weight-class himself. If it turned out that the apparently demure Caitlin or Michelle
had
had their tits felt, then that would place them further up the sexual experience ladder than he had notched so far. (Unless you counted the time he got off with Christine Higgins at Dazza’s birthday party and managed a fleeting brush of her blouse before her hand shot up with the defensive ferocity of a karate block.)

It’s about lack of opportunity, he reckons, the absence of situations that would allow you to actually talk to lassies properly. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink: there were girls all around you in every class, every day, but when did you ever get the chance to be around them when you were both being yourselves, as opposed to just gender-regimented schoolkids? Plus, as he was latterly learning, there is a price to pay for being a mate of Big Kirk’s, aside from the standard one of perennially getting jumped by the Gleniston Young Team. The problem is that the girls tend to assume he is a bampot, and consequently he places a premium on potential opportunities to explain otherwise. That’s why he has high hopes for this retreat: it will take everybody out of the normal context. Nobody has to behave the way they’re assumed or expected to, which means the Michelles and Caitlins of this world might well get their tits felt, and the Paul Roxburghs of this world might be the ones doing the feeling.

His big brother had said as much, based on the experience of his own senior school years. Joe told him about weekend retreats to some place in Ayrshire called Chapelstane Hall: school trips that are no longer on offer largely due to the sorts of abuses in which Joe and his peers had enthusiastically indulged.

‘It was hilarious. The teachers thought they were really making a breakthrough because the likes of me and my pals seemed to have come over all happy-clappy, but we were only there for smuggled drink and the chance to meet lassies from other schools who would all be sleeping under the same roof. Or not sleeping, and not under the roof much either. Some serious action went on under the stars around that place, let me tell you.

‘This retreat should be a particularly valuable opportunity,’ Joe had encouraged him. ‘Sex and death always go together. Part of the natural rhythm. Believe me: it does something to people, especially girls. If you cannae get a burd pumped after some poor bastard’s just snuffed it, seriously: cut it off.’

Normally, there would have been a grace period of several months before the papers were permitted to salivate over such
sub judice
details, but Robert Barker denied them that mercy by killing himself so soon after killing Andrew Dunn. That’s when the tide of hearsay, distortion, simplistic psychobabble, revisionism and lies in Kane’s folder was truly unleashed. They painted a portrait of a monster, some apprentice Dahmer so deranged, sadistic and terrifying, the papers almost sounded disappointed he wouldn’t get the chance to fulfil his early promise. Every last piece of classroom tittle-tattle was blown up, picked apart and spun as an ‘insight’ into the mind of a psychopath. There were stories going right back to primary school. Christ, the kid fucking killed himself a few days after murdering a classmate. Did we need to excoriate his childhood to underline how troubled he was?

EVIL.

MONSTER.

How many times - or how few - did the kids of St Peter’s need to read those words before they became synonymous with Robert Barker and they started believing the dumbed-down, cheesy horror-flick version of their own narrative? Did those reversed-out block capitals in the headlines make the words more true? Maybe the textual equivalent of screaming them like that helped the editors compensate for how meaningless they were. Calling Robert Barker ‘evil’ told us nothing about him and nothing about evil. It read like some hysterical maiden aunt who can’t deal with this beastly, frightful notion. ‘He’s a monster, he’s
evil
, that’s all I need to know, so shut the book, don’t tell me any more.’

Kane is buffeted from his reflections as something suddenly hits the glass with a bang that makes him physically recoil. He hears a scuttling sound, a scraping of little claws on wood, and through one of the windows, he can make out the shape of a bird as it scrabbles drunkenly on the decking. He feels his heart race, with Blake’s muffled mumblings the only other thing audible in the vicinity. It was the silence that did it: the sound of the bang amplified in his ears by virtue of there being so little else to hear. Like a pocket torch suddenly shone in the pitch dark: the fact that it is light at all can be enough to dazzle.

A different kind of dark, a different kind of silent. He’s only a few hours from Glasgow, but it doesn’t feel like this is the same country; maybe not even the same world.

He has just about recovered from the initial fright when a second sudden sound has him close to levitation again. This time it’s a voice.

‘Dumb birds. They do that all the time.’

Sendak is standing a few feet behind him, apparently having materialised or emerged from a trap door. Kane didn’t hear one footfall, a swish of clothing or a solitary breath. Through the glass they both watch the bird take off with a slow and unsteady beat of wings.

‘I’ve heard that if you put the silhouette of a hawk on the window, it makes them avoid it,’ Kane says, figuring Sendak is the kind of man who will be able to confirm or debunk this theory.

‘Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?’ he replies.

They share a grin.

Kane is suddenly conscious of the folder, still open at an A3 photocopy of a
Sun
double-page spread. His instinct is to close it, but not only would this merely attract Sendak’s attention, it’s a cert he’s already clocked it, particularly as Kane has no idea how long Sendak has been standing watching him.

‘Something smells good,’ he says, by way of diverting small talk. It does too, particularly as all he’s had since leaving Gleniston is a Snickers bar.

‘Mm,’ Sendak agrees. He sounds noncommittal, like he’s not buying the change of subject. There’s a moment or two of that deep, enveloping silence, not even Blake’s voice audible, then it’s broken by a chant from the common-room congregation.

‘Got some important work ahead of you,’ Sendak says, eyeing the folder. ‘Half the battle can be just remembering the truth. All that bullshit sure don’t help.’

‘I’m guessing you speak from experience.’

Sendak nods sombrely.

‘Though in my case, it’s always been the “official” version that I had to purge. It’s gonna hurt those kids, but it’s a hurt they gotta endure, because it’ll save them from worse.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like guilt.’

‘That’s not such a big threat in this instance. I don’t think they’re under any illusions about who’s to blame.’

‘Yeah, but I didn’t say blame, I said guilt. When you’ve watched somebody die while fate chose to leave you standing . . . it does things to you. That’s why it’s vital that you hold on to a reliable picture of what really happened. Trust me on this. As you put it just now, I speak from experience.’

‘Lord, show us your mercy and love.’

‘
And grant us your salvation
.’

‘May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.’

‘
Amen
.’

They respond dutifully but with a glazed-over, dopey compliance so wholly lacking in any feeling that Rosemary can barely conceive of it being any further from a true sense of spirituality. It’s actually worse than when they were all younger and the usual numpties would amuse themselves by getting up to all sorts of childish carry-on throughout the proceedings. Now they’re more grown-up, more polite, so everyone is quietly and patiently sitting through it: tolerating it; enduring it. They’re not feeling anything, and what’s truly eating at Rosemary is that neither is she.

Father Blake looks slightly embarrassed, as though he’s feeling self-conscious about celebrating mass in such a huddled and in-your-face environment. Exacerbating Rosemary’s disappointment is that this last is precisely the aspect that ought to be making it special: that ‘mass unplugged’, as Father Blake had called it, would bring people together in contemplation and prayer, in the name of their shared faith, like nothing had since the tragedy. Instead, right now she’s feeling very apart from everybody, even her friends.

They’d all been given counselling, and warned that they might suddenly feel naked and vulnerable, especially in the midst of a noisy crowd like there had been on that awful day. They’d been warned also that there would be times when certain of their emotions seemed unbearably amplified. What had happened to her on the coach ticked both boxes. When Radar snatched her guitar, she was initially just annoyed and determined to get it back, but it was what followed that caused something to crumble. When the guitar started getting passed around, and by people she never previously suspected had anything against her, she felt no longer determined, just isolated. She suddenly wished she could feel part of the stupidity, and wished even more that it wasn’t her guitar that had provided the occasion, because that seemed more than anything to place her further on the outside of it all than where even the deputy head was standing.

She was feeling more composed by the time they arrived at Fort Trochart. The prospect of some heart-to-hearts after dark might offer the chance to resolve a few things. The rules here would be different, and maybe you could let your guard down without fear of it merely inviting attack.

Then she got her guitar out, just planning to test the tuning, in case it had suffered from its recent misadventures. That was when she saw the graffiti.

She used to have this Jesus fish sticker on the sounding board, but its colours faded quickly and it looked really scruffy, so she tried peeling it off. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the inking that proved cheap and nasty, as the glossy top level came away and left a rough paper layer stuck to the wood. Upon this blank off-white oval, someone had scribbled, in thick marker pen: ‘This machine kills heretics’. Someone’s idea of a joke. She didn’t understand exactly what the phrase was getting at, but she did understand that it was getting at her.

She flipped the guitar over and laid it on the bed so that no one might notice the sticker. Then she hurried off to the toilets and locked herself in a cubicle where nobody would see her cry, particularly not her friends.

It wasn’t just that they saw her as Miss Unflappable, the thick-skinned one who fought all their battles and whose faith was too strong to be concerned by what other people thought of it (especially when the other people were sophomoric mind-clones pathetically enslaved by the tyranny of cool). It was that, for quite a while now, she felt she couldn’t talk to them about matters other than those pertaining to school or church. Lately she had increasingly come to feel that the people who knew her best were the last people she would want to be aware of what was really going on inside her head.

More happily, at least Caitlin had ended up in the same bedroom.

Caitlin always seems hostile towards her these days, and Rosemary has never been able to work out why. She hates the idea that she has done or said something to hurt anyone, even unknowingly, and has felt driven to somehow make amends. However, the more she’s tried to seek her out, the more hostile Caitlin has become. It’s like throwing petrol on a fire, in fact. But as fate would have it, the only room with three free beds had been one with Caitlin already in it. Maybe her hopes of everybody pulling together this weekend were too much to ask, and this was God’s way of saying that it takes small steps. If this trip was the thing that pushed her and Caitlin closer together, then that would be something, wouldn’t it? Perhaps it was a sign.

She steals a look across at Caitlin, seated on the other side of the room. She is one of the few who seems to be paying any attention, intently following the celebrant’s words, unlike the majority of the small, zombified gathering. Yes. Maybe they were already closer in ways they didn’t quite know.