Sons of Fortune (7 page)

The beam was filthy. His hands were at once black with soot and dust—the black, oily dust of gas jets. So, too, he imagined were his buttocks and scrotum. Steadily he worked his way back until he felt the book touch the base of his spine. He breathed out his relief and sat upright, reaching a hand around for the book. The movement unbalanced him.

For a moment his legs flailed wildly and he knew he was going to fall. The gallery shouted
whoo-oo-op!
and parodied imbalance to one another.
God, let me fall where the rope will be shortest,
he begged. His ears were filled with a great wind. He saw the apex of the roof turn and tilt at a crazy angle. He saw faces, laughing—hooting with laughter. He prepared himself for the tug and burn of the rope about his chest.

Then there was a searing pain at his ankle. It had caught a notch checked into the beam by a carpenter, perhaps to house the calipers when the beam had been lifted up here. If it would hold! If flesh would not protest too much! If it would only hold! His fingers spidered over the top of the beam. Then over the edge. Now he had two holds—two bits of flesh to divide the agony. Arm and leg muscles took the strain. He was going up. He was not going to fall. More strain. Surely a bone must snap or a tendon wrench free from its attachment? The pain was intense. How could he stand such pain? But slowly he was recovering his position on the top of the beam. The hooting and the barracking did not for one moment let up.

Inch by torturing inch he regained his balance. When finally he sat upright he was bathed in sweat. Ironical cheers greeted the achievement. He looked around that cruel sea of faces and could not help smiling his relief. More carefully this time he felt behind him. No book. The book was not there!

“Fly, man!” a boy cried, giggling and flapping his hands. He jumped up and down on the spot. Others joined in, jumping and flapping their arms, laughing. “Fly!” they chorused. “Fly!” He could feel the tremor of their jumping, shaking in the beam, as he frantically groped behind him for the book.

“Fly down!” one boy cried and pointed over the gallery rail.

Unthinkingly Boy glanced down. There was the book, battered and open, on one of the oak tables. It was all he saw, and he saw it for only a flash; but that was enough. The entire hall spun in a shower of flying black darts, swirling in a maelstrom about his head. Mindless now of the scorn of others, he hurled himself forward and clutched at the beam, eyes tight shut against the black whirlpool that sought to suck him down.

Again the chorus of boos—and this time, something more: missiles. Books, rocks of stale bread, rolled-up clothing, a kale stalk, bits of kindling, whizzed past him or struck him hard where he clung for dear life to the beam. Someone out there was a wizard with a peashooter, too.

It will not do,
he told himself.
You must face them. You must see it through.

Caspar, sick himself with pity for his mad, brave brother, followed his progress by changes in the tone of the shouting and derision.

“It’s to do with going out on one of the beams, isn’t it?” he told Causton.

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“You have no idea what torture that would be to my brother.”

Out on the beam Boy was slowly but resolutely raising himself upright again. A book caught him across the nose with a flash of searing light and a salty, hollow sharpness in which his head rang. Two images of the hall spiralled over one another. But still he went on raising himself upright.

When he made his first move back he discovered what all new boys who tried to go along the beam at the straddle discovered—he was going against the grain of the wood. A long splinter of pitch pine pierced the heel of his right hand, another his left thigh. He had no choice but to kneel or get turned into a pincushion of splinters. He began another painful move to the new position. The sweat now made him feel deathly chill.

Everyone had been waiting for the discovery: they howled with laughter and pricked one another’s bodies with imaginary splinters. Boy searched for one kindlier face in all that unrelenting mob and found none. What he did find made him freeze halfway up into the crouch: Blenkinsop was unfastening the tethered end of the rope!

Moments later the free end swung loose, a whippy pendulum, from the neighbouring beam. Boy was paralysed, one foot in the crouch, one still hanging down. He could not move; he could hardly breathe. His eyes bulged.

Now the silence was complete. Blenkinsop looked around, grinning, ready to ward off a shower of laughing congratulation. He faced nothing but blank, horror-stricken silence. Boy realized that he had not been alone in depending on that rope; it had been every fellow’s licence to mock and jeer. But now, to a man, they sat-crouched-hung there with him, appalled at his danger, willing his muscles to move until their own ached.

“You blithering fool, Blenkinsop!” Swift hissed in that straining silence. But there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do to retrieve the loose end now. Boy had to make it back to the gallery alone.

No one looked at either of the senior men; no one could take his eyes off Boy, still rigid in the middle of the beam.

“Come on, Stevenson. You can do it!” someone said.

“Yes, come on, man!” Several took up the shout.

Boy opened his eyes then and saw smiling, fearful encouragement on every side. He saw, too, that someone in the hall below had dowsed the gaslights in the lower gallery and the main body of the hall. Only the upper gallery was lit. The height, the sickening, headwhirling height, had gone.

This beam rests two feet above the floor,
Boy told himself.
Stand up!

He stood. He could smile. He smiled at the silhouettes that thronged the rails, knowing they were smiling, too. One, two, three, four easy steps brought him to the safety of the upper stiffener, but now he did not pause. He swung himself around it and, thrusting an arm through the rose-shaped hole, made the easy leap for the railing, catching hold of it without difficulty. If the move had been made upon the ground, no one would have turned to watch; yet now a great roar of relief rang from every throat there. Boys clustered around to haul him in over the railing and slap him on the back. “Well done, man!” they cried.

Over,
Boy thought, close to tears.
It’s over!

“You’ll only get a light drumming-in after that,” Swift promised.

“What?” Boy was incredulous.
More? After that?

Swift laughed, not quite wholeheartedly. “Oh yes. That”—he pointed airily at the beam—“was a fraud. No one escapes a drumming-in, however well they do the beam.”

Several lads around giggled at the trick, but the mood was friendly.

Only Blenkinsop looked peevish as he came forward to Boy.

“Come on,” he said roughly. “Get that rope off. It’s time for your little bro.”

“Let me do it again,” Boy said. “In place of him.”

Swift shook his head. “Can’t be done, young sport.”

Blenkinsop was very rough in getting the rope off. They swung the loose end over the beam, fished it in with one of the poles for opening the upper windows, swung it over the next beam, fished it in again, and tied it to the railing. Swift checked the knot and then looked at Blenkinsop as if he had needed all this time to reach a decision. “You’d better come and see me in my study when this is over,” he said.

From the change in the hubbub outside, Caspar guessed that his turn had come. He stood, with pounding heart and lost stomach, and dropped his blanket. Causton stared at his tiny erection.

“Why that?” he asked, his eyes wide in disbelief and delight.

Caspar looked down and blushed. “That always happens when I have to think about cruelty. Like whipping slaves and things. Doesn’t it with you?”

“I should say not! Not thinking about
that
,
anyway!”

With only the upper gallery lights on there was too much shadow for many to notice Caspar’s strange condition. But Blenkinsop saw it. He brushed his hands down there many times as he tied the rope. In the end he was quite excited. Caspar was more bemused than embarrassed. He kept looking at the beam, working on how best to clamber up the stiffeners and walk along it.

Someone thrust a book into his hands.
Eating Exercises
it said on the cover; the spine, more truthfully, said
Latin Exercises.
“Take it to the middle of that beam and put it down. Then come back,” Swift said.

“Leave it there?”

“Yes. If you do it fast enough, you’ll escape your drumming-in.”

Right,
Caspar thought.
This isn’t so bad.
His erection fell. He clamped the book between his teeth, knowing exactly the route he was going to take.

He sprang up onto the broad wooden handrail that capped the gallery railings, steadied his balance in a trice, and then made a further diagonal leap straight onto the collarbeam, crouching down at once to get under the slope of the rafters.

There was a gasp from those who saw the move from the side where he made the leap. Fractionally later, so quickly had he moved, there was an answering gasp as those on the other side saw him appear, miraculously, above their heads.

He barely paused, moving forward and rising as the slope allowed. When he reached the upper stiffener he leaped again, landing at a crouch three feet up; in the same move he dropped to his stomach and swung his legs down under the curve of the stiffener. He had judged it perfectly, for his feet came to rest on the midline of the beam. He swung the rest of himself under and once more crouched, this time beneath the curve. Again he went forward, rising as the curve rose until he was standing fully upright and sauntering out to the middle of the beam.

People were excited now, clapping and cheering and shouting encouragement. Caspar was as lithe and delightful to watch as an acrobat. Where he bent over to place the book exactly in the centre, a great sexual
whoo! whoo!
went up, almost unnerving him.

He stood again, smiling, and returned, almost exactly reversing the routine he had used in getting out. Just under thirty seconds from starting he was back again on the gallery, fighting off Blenkinsop, who had his hands all over him, trying to get off the rope. No one had ever walked the beam so quickly. Boy watched, regretting his jealousy but unable to master it as the congratulations showered on Caspar.

But there was already a move to form the gauntlet along the gallery for the drumming-in. Eager lads lined up, at three-foot intervals, legs apart to make a long tunnel. “
Drum drum drum drum…
”
they began to chant in a gleeful monotony. Grinning, they looked over their shoulders and invited Boy to go to the head of the tunnel.

Drained now of all feeling, he walked mechanically to the end of the gallery. Caspar watched him pityingly, still believing himself to be saved from the ordeal by the speed he had shown on the beam.

“You too,” Swift said.

Caspar looked up at him in astonishment. “But you said…”

Swift smiled. “Don’t worry. No one has ever done it fast enough. But they’ll let you off very lightly. Cut along!” He pointed to the end of the gallery, where Boy was beginning to crawl on hands and knees through the tunnel of trouser legs. As soon as his head was out of danger the rest of him became fair target; but the slaps he was getting were mere tokens—except from Blenkinsop, who had taken off a shoe and gave Boy two good belts with it before he had reached the sanctuary of the next fellow’s legs.

Caspar’s treatment was even milder, more like slaps on the back plus several quite tender caresses, especially from Blenkinsop.

But both the young Stevensons ended up with skinned knees and toes; all the goodwill in the school could not make the floor less abrasive.

Twelve minutes later, aching, sore of skin, but freshly bathed at the tap in the boot room and glowing in the sense of having gone through the fire, they fell into bed and settled to sleep. The gaslamp was never turned off, day or night; Boy lay watching it in those last drowsy moments of wakefulness, still doubting that Lorrimer had survived and wondering why no one but he seemed worried by the fact. In a frightening way that terrible business was beginning to appear almost normal in this place—too normal for the mind to dwell upon for very long.

Downstairs all the bucks had piled their mattresses at one end of the Barn and were raucously playing at what they called “Olympic games,” which involved leaping and somersaulting into the soft pile, the most agile being favoured with loud cheers from the rest. Less energetic souls read tales of blood and thunder aloud by the firelight. The lucky ones grilled chops and lumps of sirloin over the fire. The mouth-watering pungency of sizzling fat penetrated every corner of Old School, reminding most how hollow their guts were. The joke was then to wait until the lucky one sat down, with his chop between two trenchers of bread, and then to shower him with “squibs” of flaring lucifers; a chop in the hand could not honourably be snatched, but one dropped or put down while, say, part of a burning nightshirt was extinguished was fair booty. Not a boy there who would not far rather nurse blisters and the toothsome memory of the meat than go to bed unburned and grieve for its loss.

In Boy’s exhaustion the aroma of grilling meat delayed his sleep only by moments.

“
I
put out the downstairs lights,” de Lacy said, “when you were on the beam.”

Boy nodded as he fell asleep, hoping de Lacy had noticed the gesture.

Moments later, it seemed (in fact, it was almost forty-five minutes), he was awakened by Blenkinsop, who had come into the dorm to “see if Caspar’s knees needed any treatment.” The inspection had entailed several minutes’ groping under the blankets. Then he had remembered Boy.

He shook him roughly awake; Boy came spiralling up through seven hundred layers of sleep. The shallower he got, the more he ached.

“How dare you drop off to sleep, Stevenson ma?” Blenkinsop asked in a gentle, almost conversational tone.