Schooling (22 page)

10

Détente?

Stop for a moment.

A relaxing of tension between rivals.

I have to open the window.

Thews? It’s freezing.

Sit on the radiator then.

It burns. Thews?

Don’t flash me, Yank I’ve no interest in your underthings.

Muscular power or strength.

I knew that one. Tell me—

Desist?

About Paul.

Desist, Brickie.

I won’t.

Husbandry?

Don’t care.

Indolence will—

Why did you go out that night?

We have insular lives here, that being. What night?

Drop the sham. I know what happened last term.

How would you know?

I can keep a secret. But I have a theory, that being a speculation or assumption—

A proclivity toward—

That you wanted Paul to attack you.

Wanted?
Maudlin?

Did you?

Calumny, that being—

Damaging talk about another. Answer me.

Don’t be stupid. The consequences seemed—

Abstract?

Yes, muddy.

Actually, it’s Without Reference To A Specific Instance.

I thought I had to do it or I would always hear him, think about him.

It was your own despair you went for. What are you doing?

Radiator’s hot. Desultory?

I give up.

Disconnected, random. Oligarchy?

Obstinacy, no routine, no idea.

Ruling by a very few.

Betts, for example.

Exactly. Sully?

To rifle through the belongings of another? To mar or defile part of the school’s heritage?

I wouldn’t put that on the test.

Might, to watch him detonate.

It’s time that you Clarify, Brickie, that is inform.

But you failed to find it.

And this is where you tell me.

What now?

Yes.

Say you can’t do it alone.

I can’t do it alone.

But you don’t really believe that.

I would have found out.

Not without trouble. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t really seen trouble. If I have to tell you, well, it’s a matter of our background yes history a matter of trouble encountered years ago in black and white.

Go on.

Certain?

Yes.

If you’re ready for the blood, the scene of us revising vocabulary in Follyfield 4 dissolves to show a boy—

TELL ME.

Stokes has one eye.

Yes, yes.

Your father took the other.

Go to hell.

There was a gun—

Prevaricator. Mendacious—

Ambassador saw it all.

He was wrong. A case of mistaken identity.

Why didn’t Cyclops go to Wales? He was in hospital, bleeding out his eye.

My father did not shoot Mr. Stokes.

Come back, I haven’t finished. I am undone, arrested, partial.

Partial to insanity.

Your father, mine, Stokes, Chambers, an accidental meeting on the playing fields. The night, you see, the night was dense with fog—

Day, Brickie. It must have been day.

Day, then. How about evening?

Alright, evening.

It was grey as coal that evening years ago when the boys met over by the copse, a winter evening wherein the moon—

Not full.

It’s my story. Half a moon was beginning to rise, an early moon, so the effect was the ending of a stormy day, half a pellucid moon oh shut up, a
thinnish
moon then, not giving enough light for say, silhouettes. Armand Stokes, seventeen, kneels to grind out his cigarette in the damp ground.

Cyclops doesn’t smoke.

Well he did back then. Anyway, he’s been waiting for Teddy Evans. Stokes has sent Mercury to fetch the lad. There he comes, young Evans on the horizon.

Horizon?

Stokesy’s butting out his CIGARETTE, we see the moon gleam off the silver—

Gleam?

—of a trigger.

It’s not dark.

Horror, for a rifle—

How could it gleam in the evening?

Shut up.

Well, get it right.

Doesn’t matter. Stokesy’s got a rifle and Teddy’s by his side. Evans, Stokes says, It’s like this. I’m seventeen and about to be conscripted and this is a matter not about courage or the country’s honor let’s not question whether or not I’m crapping myself about going over what I want you to do is take this and shoot me in the leg make me that is render me incapable of going over. Teddy Evans, hair wild, manner insubordinate—

Brick—

—begins to walk away. Oh no, he says, a moral lad he, I will have nowt to do with this.

Nowt?

Well he says something with a Welsh flair and begins legging it over the field. Without thinking it through, young Stokes, the same Stokes now our Head and spiritual leader, hefts the rifle up to his shoulder. But what’s this, up from behind a knoll, Ambassador and Chambers back from a smoke. Against the backdrop of the school, what do they see. Your father. Stokes with a gun aimed at him. Then.
Boom
.

Cyclops shot my father?

It’s true. And the bullet. Speeding through the air toward your father, the bullet checks the angle Stokes has given it. Angle of a man with unsteady aim. The bullet peels away and strikes a lawn roller leaning against the cricket pavilion. Bullet ricochets off the metal. Heads straight back whence it came. Hello. No time for Stokes to think or duck. The bullet bows, Pardon me, may I have that eye?

Stokes aimed for my father—

Blood everywhere. I should think. Spattered, dripping.

It’s a bad story, Brickie.

Your father had a fondness for the old pavilion?

I never told him it burned down.

Well, Stokes didn’t serve, so his plan worked. Cost him, though. Half the world. Fool.

But imagine, and your imagination’s being tested, old Cyclops as a crack shot. Boom. No Father, no you.

11

There was a dog and birds. Gwydyr in winter like an apple. That cold. Or the smell reminded me.

Hamey, you left me too.

I drank with Americans on the train back. They’d give you as many cigarettes as you wanted. Reason enough to immigrate. I taught them songs. I had songs, you just had to ask. Dirge. Latin. Hymn. Drinking songs. I had learned a few at Monstead.

And before I walked back that muddy track home to where my father waited with his unreading eyes, I stopped by The Plough. A man remembered me and bought me a drink. Cheapskates faked amnesia. I couldn’t understand what people were singing. Fell off my stool after not too long. Sprained or twisted my knee and could barely manage the door alone. A woman with yellow hair offered me her arm, then her home. Thought I’d better convalesce, bear myself up for the reunion with Da. The lady was about forty, or so she seemed at seventeen and four pints. She may have been younger. She may have been twenty-five or eight. Edna. Edith. It’s not the passage of time playing tricks on my memory, for it is sharper now than ever, in fact I clearly recall that I couldn’t remember her name the next morning. She had a parakeet and I was reminded of the time my friend Hamey Rhys-Jones-Llwelyn ate a woman’s bird. This one was blue, named Popeye. I pressed my face against the cage to measure my mouth against it. I was never the type for a grand gesture, eating birds. Legends. Mam had legends, from her days of drinking and a handbag she had with fur on it. Thick suede or. Like a little dog. She called it Rudolph. Telling Da, I’ve got Rudy, clutching the rank mat to her chest as she went to meet Mrs. O’Brien who was Irish but had a cousin who lived in America. It was always America she wanted back to. During the course of the night Mam’d forget where she was and set the bag down in a thickening puddle of stout or vinegar or piss. Rudy. There were stories Rudy got up and barked, saved Mam from falling in the river. But I’m no good at writing it. Words have never been friends. Mam an American living in Wales saying her
a
’s wrong until the day she left. I went to school a Welsh-American, served time in England, then to the border for the war. I don’t know which words belong where. I confuse dystopia with dyspepsia. And whereas I suppose one might result in the other, these mistakes won’t take you far in academic circles. I never know if I’m being understood. I check myself even when I’m making sense, amalgamation amalgamation is that what I really mean?

When I woke up in the bed of Edith or Edna, there was nothing to tell me how we had spent the night. Conjugally or not. I assumed it was because she had the bread under the grill and sausages half unwrapped as I bolted out the back. Had it been a year later, I would have stayed for the sausages.

Da unstuck himself from the Bible to cut me some bread. The house was as I’d left it eight years earlier. He said I had English vowels. That’s enough to curb your hunger. Said he wished he had written more which was unusual in that he couldn’t write. We sat down. I had a few Do you remembers . . . ? I knew Da was pretending he did. I made some up for a test. At those he laughed the hardest. It was difficult to understand how he fared during my years away. And the war. That is if he even knew about it. I’m not one to make my own father out to be simple. Avoidance. I prefer that term. There was no one to say that Da had not moved from in front of the fire, first wood, then gas, the years I’d been at Monstead. And there was no one to say he hadn’t been enjoying the company of an Edith or Edna all this while.

He didn’t remember Rudolph. I knew it was somewhere in the house. She would have taken only the best things back to America, the dress she came in, her mousecloth shoes. Not a dirty Welsh dogbag answering to Rudolph. But the house was too small to hide it. You always found what you were looking for in Gwydyr. No one had a house big enough for secrets.

She would have a big white place of secrets in America.

Da couldn’t cook, I had to help him even with breakfast. I would have asked, what have you been living on these years? But he might have answered, I haven’t been at all. I’ve said it before, I’m no good at writing it.

Would ya marry me?

I left the sausages to blacken around the edges. But I let Da tell me how he wanted the eggs. That’s all the same to me, he said. I told him I hear you, though I didn’t know what exactly was the same as what. Home. Holding my words on the tongue a moment to fuzzy them. Instead of what I found at Monstead, to spit words out pearls. Or turds.

Would ya marry me, I said inside my head again and again. Was it a song I’d heard over the radio, on the bus. I don’t know. It was a refrain stuck in my head. Would ya marry me? I proposed to myself, something I put to the trees while I smoked. Please do.

You know Latin now do you, Teddy? Da said. Yes. Well then, he said, You can read the Bible to me because I haven’t been able to these years your mother’s been gone and I didn’t say your Bible’s English. I said, That I will, Da. But I was prone, forgive me I was seventeen, returning to a place I might have outgrown, I was prone to inserting short diatribes against religion, if you can measure it against philosophy, I said, And I think you can. Does God exist? I was seventeen.

Would ya.

My speech couldn’t find itself again, once you’ve heard yourself a foreigner, your voice stays strange.

If I was in The Plough telling stories, thinking I was home again, suddenly a fellow would turn quiet. Scotch is it? But if he knew me from being a child, it would be, You’ve spent too long away, Shed. And the ensuing sport would be to relate favorite English atrocities. Who can blame us, you always need a goat to send into the woods. Take the attention off yourself.

The war was over.

I was seventeen.

On my way back to Edna’s, I stopped to rip up hawkweed, tethering the stalks with a bootlace. Just because a woman has yellow hair and took advantage of you without too much provocation on your part, there was no call to walk away with her toast under the grill, the sausages half unwrapped. There was an obligation for the politeness your mother brought you up with, at least until the age of nine when she departed for her home country of America to find the man she really loved, the man married to a woman who was not she and the man himself she really loved, not your father. There was a need for that kind of consideration.

Would ya. Would ya.

Don’t need rumors haunting you on your first visit home. Rumors you left some woman with uncooked toast. That won’t do, as Mr. Mortimer used to say. No no no boy, that won’t do at all.

She came outside, standing at the top of the stairs. Hello, I said, waiting on a name until I was certain. What do you want? in her dressing gown and a pair of boots, hair all triangles. I felt a sudden fondness, her hair rebelled in the night the same as mine. Did she have similar difficulties taming it in the morning? I would ask over tea, while she grilled breakfast. Sausages I hadn’t stayed for. Toast. Homemade jams, certainly. Marmalade if I was lucky. Morning. I held the flowers to one side. But then, I dared not move, there was such a black look on Effie’s face. Granted it was early, for the visit was an idea which gripped me upon shaving, a ritual I had not undertaken, it should be noted—for fear of painting an inauthentic portrait—since my arrival home. I was more inclined to spend an hour attacking breakfast and, depending on how I felt about the day, questions of man’s ascent or descent. But this particular morning I had risen early, as much out of guilt as any sense of propriety, for my father was still working at the age of fifty-two, and over the shaving bowl, I was struck by the necessity of a call, an apologetic call, on Miss Effie. So there I stood at the bottom of the steps in the early morning, charmed by her crooked hair. The black look remained. It took some minutes to digest that the great muddy boots she had slipped into undoubtedly belonged to a man. And by the looks of it, a man two and a half times my size.

Placing the flowers softly on the lower step, I said, I’m sorry I was in such an awful rush the other morning. Please forgive me. I curbed neither inflection nor vocabulary. Effie said not a word, slamming the door behind her, but as I turned I heard from inside the house a great guttural sound. The window flew open, well I say flew but what with the damp winter just past, the condensation required some effort on her part. When Edna finally managed to heave up the window, she bailed out her reddened face and screamed, Fucking English prick English prick English prick.

I was seventeen.

I needed Rudolph. Woof woof. That would make her laugh. Though perhaps not the man in there with her. Not him.

It hadn’t been such a bad war for Da. I knew it when Jack and Gregor came over to have a look at me. They were glad to see Da still had some relations to speak of.

And we’re glad to have you back Sheddie, though you’re all caught up with your stupidself and speak like them.

I asked about the war but they turned to England and people they knew who’d died.

There’s a job for apprentice at the surveyors’, Jack said, I saw it yesterday on a card in the window.

I said, Is there. I didn’t mean to stay in Gwydyr. Do you know this lady Edna, or Effie it is, with bright hair hanging around The Plough? Athea? Jack said, That was quick. And Gregor laughed and laughed and finally shut up and got pale and started to cough. Athea, then.

She’s a sister of Thomas who drowned off the coast a few years back who played football for England. Did she follow you home, Shed? Did she say, how does it go now, he looked over at Gregor but Gregor was looking at a china dog Da kept on the mantel. Turning back, Jack said, Did she say, You’re troubled and go mournful at the eyes?

I stood by the one window in the front room, the same window I used to watch Da set off from every morning, away to work while I stayed wrapped in my blanket lighting cigarettes for Mam with the lamplighter matches. Athea, then. I can’t remember a thing about her, I told Jack. But it came to me, yes yes I could recall her saying exactly that, that for all her yellow hair and wayward lip color and the nervous wobble to her heels, it was the recognition which made me follow Athea that night. She knew it was no good feeling troubled at home when all along you thought trouble came from being a stranger.

I turned to Jack. Where’s this surveyors’ then?

The office had the sweet rot of a rich man dying in a cabinet. He was English of course, as if I needed more associations. I couldn’t help my vowels coming out thin for him. Would you marry me? With the sound of the el. He drove me to the Algernon in Cardiff where these past years the English sipped brandies on the veranda and waited for the war to pass. I never expected to find anything like you in Gwydyr, he said driving up on the curb accidentally. I didn’t mention that, in terms of first impressions, it might be best to avoid hitting the biddies in their cardigan shawls and horsy teeth. But first impressions are never that if you belong to the club.

Watty had white hair in his ears. He was a better driver after two drinks, a worse one after three. At the hotel bar he bought me a brandy. I would have preferred gin. I tried to impress him by what I knew of surveying, only he turned out to be a barrister. I had never been inside the Algernon, having only been to Cardiff twice in my life. The lounge was dimly lit and smelled of cigars. I thought the lack of light might be related to the war just over, blackouts, conservation of resources. But it was dark for the biddies. Shadows are kinder on age.

I’m taking you on, Watty said. As my apprentice. Apprentice made it sound more like bricklaying which I appreciated. Though I also hated the reason for his charity. I was the closest thing he’d find to English in Gwydyr. Old Watty ate peanuts, cracking them open with his teeth. I’d have rather seen open heart surgery than watch that man’s stained teeth grasp the dimpled shell and peel it back like the skin of a banana.

I chose instead to watch two biddies play cribbage in front of the fire. They argued and the bigger of the two looked on the verge of throttling the slighter one. When I glanced back, Watty had finished disassembling the nuts and was now intent on some personal housecleaning. Finger edging up his nostril. Shell detritus trembled on his upper lip. I coughed, excused my drifting attention with a witty remark about the two ladies, and looking back at them, wondered the extent to which Watty would next take his diligent hygiene. I had another brandy, he disgusted me less. There was a daughter who remained in England. She was only twenty although he must have been close to seventy. Her mother, he bent to find a peanut in the carpet, we lost in childbirth. Ah, I said. My standard response to nonstandard remarks. Watty found his peanut and again I politely looked away.

The biddies did not spar as I hoped they might. Though I like to think that when we left, shawls were tossed aside and fists were raised. Watty drove back to Gwydyr with all the windows down. His hair wavered in the night breeze and snowed dandruff on his collar. I was reminded of a Rembrandt, a man in overcoat with thinning hair. Mr. Mortimer had the coasters.

Watty saved old flowers smashed between the covers of romantic books, poetry. Shakespeare. He pressed me to talk with him about Hamlet. I wouldn’t. Among the shelves of papers and files I deposited apple cores and pits of chewed-up paper in hidden corners. I would come across them days later, disgusted to realize that I had more in common with the old man than I might have liked. Only a matter of time before I was forcing brandy on a young idealist, skin of a peanut dancing on my lip, finger dug up my nose. Only time.

The bell above the door tranged. Thinking it was a client, I ignored it. Gwydyr was in a fever about the new barrister, all wanting to sue neighbors for the horse getting out and eating their carrots, or for libel which previously went by the name entertainment. Months since the end of war, enemies were scarce.

Trang. There she was. I loved her. I could have given her some free legal advice her in her long legs and clutch. Hat like a clam. I’d have advised. Well nothing.

Miranda, Watty doddered up, some piece of lunch stuck to his face. Oh, you’re the daughter, said I, making mental note to talk with him about Hamlet then if that was what the old man wanted. You’re English, she remarked over Watty’s shoulder as she was hugged. No. You sound it, she said. That’s a sore subject, Watty warned. I was thinking that the Barrister should drive us all over to the Algernon, buy a round of brandies and I could seduce his daughter under his very own eye. And then I was paralyzed.