The Black Halo (43 page)

The stage Mark turned away from the phone and said, ‘He says he wants to see you. He’ll give you an audition. His usual girl’s sick. She’s got . . . ’ Annie paused
and tried to say ‘laryngitis’, but it came out as not quite right, and it was as if the word poked through the drama like a real error, and Mark thought of the Miracle plays in which
ordinary people played Christ and Noah and Abraham with such unconscious style, as if there was no oddity in Abraham being a joiner or a miller.

‘Look, I’ll call you,’ said the stage Mark and the bell rang and the finale was postponed. In the noise and chatter in which desks and chairs were replaced Mark was again aware
of the movement of life, and he was happy. Absurdly he began to see them as if for the first time, their faces real and interested, and recognised the paradox that only in the drama had he begun to
know them, as if only behind such a protection, a screen, were they willing to reveal themselves. And he began to wonder whether he himself had broken through the persona of the teacher and begun
to ‘act’ in the real world. Their faces were more individual, sad or happy, private, extrovert, determined, yet vulnerable. It seemed to him that he had failed to see what Shakespeare
was really about, he had taken the wrong road to find him.

‘A babble of green fields,’ he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the
white In Memoriams which they could not read.

How extraordinarily curious it all was.

The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.

‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.

‘What is it?’

But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. And it took him a long time to decipher from her broken language what it was she wanted. She and the other actresses wanted an
audience. Of course, why had he not thought of that before? How could he not have realised that an audience was essential? And he promised her that he would find one.

By the next day he had found an audience which was composed of a 3a class which Miss Stewart next door was taking. She grumbled a little about the Interpretation they were missing but eventually
agreed. Additional seats were taken into Mark’s room from her room and Miss Stewart sat at the back, her spectacles glittering.

Tracy pretended to knock on a door which was in fact the blackboard and then a voice invited her in. The manager of the night club pointed to a chair which stood on the ‘stage’.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to sing, sir.’

‘I see. Many girls want to sing. I get girls in here every day. They all want to sing.’

Mark heard titters of laughter from some of the boys in 3a and fixed a ferocious glare on them. They settled down again.

‘But I know I can sing, sir,’ said Tracy. ‘I know I can.’

‘They all say that too.’ His voice suddenly rose, ‘They all bloody well say that.’

Mark saw Miss Stewart sitting straight up in her seat and then glancing at him disapprovingly. Shades of Pygmalion, he thought to himself, smiling. You would expect it from Shaw, inside inverted
commas.

‘Give it to them, sock it to them,’ he pleaded silently. The virginal Miss Stewart looked sternly on.

‘Only five minutes then,’ said the night club manager, glancing at his watch. Actually there was no watch on his hand at all. ‘What song do you want to sing?’

Mark saw Lorna pushing a desk out to the floor and sitting in it. This was to be the piano, then. The absence of props bothered him and he wondered whether imagination had first begun among the
poor, since they had such few material possessions. Lorna waited, her hands poised above the desk. He heard more sniggerings from the boys and this time he looked so angry that he saw one of them
turning a dirty white.

The hands hovered above the desk. Then Tracy began to sing. She chose the song ‘Heartache’.

It seemed to him that at that moment, as she stood there pale and thin, she was putting all her experience and desires into her song. It was a moment he thought such as it is
given to few to experience. She was in fact auditioning before a phantom audience, she and the heroine of the play were the same, she was searching for recognition on the streets of London, in a
school. She stood up in her vulnerability, in her purity, on a bare stage where there was no furniture of any value, of any price: on just such a stage had actors and actresses acted many years
before, before the full flood of Shakespearean drama. Behind her on the blackboard were written notes about the Tragic Hero, a concept which he had been discussing with the Sixth Year.

‘The hero has a weakness and the plot of the play attacks this specific weakness.’

‘We feel a sense of waste.’

‘And yet triumph.’

Tracy’s voice, youthful and yearning and vulnerable, soared to the cracked ceiling. It was as if her frustrations were released in the song.

The voice soared on and then after a long silence the bell rang.

The boys from 3a began to chatter and he thought, ‘You don’t even try. You wouldn’t have the nerve to sing like that, to be so naked.’ But another voice said to him,
‘You’re wrong. They’re the same. It is we who have made them different.’ But were they in fact the same, those who had been reduced to the nakedness, and those others who
were the protected ones. He stood there trembling as if visited by a revelation which was only broken when Miss Stewart said,

‘Not quite Old Vic standard.’ And then she was gone with her own superior brood. You stupid bitch, he muttered under his breath, you Observer-Magazine-reading bitch who never liked
anything in your life till some critic made it respectable, who wouldn’t recognise a good line of poetry or prose till sanctified by the voice of London, who would never have arrived at
Shakespeare on your own till you were given the crutches.

And he knew as he watched her walking, so seemingly self-sufficient, in her black gown across the hall that she was as he had been and would be no longer. He had taken a journey with his class,
a pilgrimage across the wooden boards, the poor abject furnitureless room which was like their vision of life, and from that journey he and they had learned in spite of everything. In spite of
everything, he shouted in his mind, we have put a flag out there and it is there even during the plague, even if Miss Stewart visits it. It is there in spite of Miss Stewart, in spite of her
shelter and her glasses, in spite of her very vulnerable armour, in spite of her, in spite of everything.

They came in to the school through a window, Terry handing the can of petrol to the other two who were waiting on the floor of the boiler-room down below. It was the evening of
a fine summer’s day, and the school was empty, for it was the holidays.

Terry, the mad one, walked along the corridor first, the other two behind him as they always did, and always had done. Usually Terry was shouting and playing about but tonight he was quiet, at
least at first. It had been his plan, for he hated the school, he hated it with a bitter hatred and he wanted to destroy it. He hated the teachers, he hated his parents, he hated the whole world.
He was a burning simmering fire of hatred, always on the edge of explosion, and it seemed to him that fire was the only answer to the fire inside him. Time and time again he had been belted, for he
was either fighting other boys in the school – when the force inside him demanded violence, as if it were a demon from hell – or he was demanding money with menaces, for he was poor, or
he was creating some novel or ancient kind of trouble in the classroom. The very last day of term he had fought a boy in the cloakroom and had broken his nose. The boy had looked at him that second
too long, but it was enough. Terry hated anyone staring at him, as if he were a freak or something. He had been given six of the belt and that had been his farewell to the school, the headmaster
standing at the door shaking his dim wormy head, the belt in his hand.

Terry hated the school because he didn’t want to be there in the first place, especially after getting up in the morning to the interminable quarrels between his father and mother
(‘Get off my back,’ his mother would shout. ‘Why don’t you shove off?’), the crowded house where the other three children would fight each other as well. He never had
any money or if he had it was money he had screwed out of pupils, usually first year ones, who did not dare to report him to their parents, and usually said that they had lost it. He had a job in
Woolworth’s for three weeks before he was found carrying a hundred cigarettes home, concealed beneath his jersey. Sometimes he would go into insane rages and beat his fists against a stone
wall till the blood came.

He walked on, swinging his can, and suddenly out of the quietness began to shout obscenities, completely forgetting where he was or what the dangers might be: or maybe it was, thought Roddy,
that he didn’t care, that he wanted teachers to appear so that he could fight them.

The other two, Roddy and Frankie, followed him as they had always done, Frankie indeed imitating Terry’s walk. Frankie was like a small cinder, ginger-haired and pale, without
Terry’s flamboyant madness but with hard deep cold eyes. The two of them admired Terry because he didn’t care for anyone, and if he was belted he never cried, he held his hand out
disdainfully as if belting were an awful bore which he despised. Nothing mattered to Terry, he was a spark of hatred, he was the king. Time and time again they had seen him do things that they
themselves would never have dared to do. They had seen him square up to Baney, the Chemistry teacher, and Baney had backed down, only saying weakly that he would send Terry to the headmaster, but
he never did. They had seen him break calmly in half the ruler the Mathematics teacher had given him and sit back in his seat arms folded. They had seen him setting fire to a girl’s hair at
the back of the Assembly when the headmaster had been going on about Jesus and the disciples who had been ordinary men. They knew very well what the headmaster had been really saying, they were the
ordinary fishermen and the headmaster was one of the top ones like Jesus. They weren’t stupid, they knew what was going on all right, they could read between the lines though they
couldn’t read the lines themselves very well. And that guff at the prize-giving by that fat git that there were some people who didn’t win prizes but that didn’t make them any
worse than the ones who did: they knew just the same what would happen if their mothers or fathers tried to get on to the platform where the women with the flowered hats sat, and the men with the
bald heads and blue suits.

They walked along the corridor as far as the Maths room into which they looked at the crummy equations which were still on the blackboard. The Maths room was not their target but nevertheless
Terry urinated all over the boxes full of exercise books in the corner. He did this patiently and steadily, playing arcs of water up as high as the desk and then onwards as far as the door.

‘Hey,’ he shouted to Frankie, ‘you get along to the Art room and get paper. We need paper for the fire. Piles of the stuff.’

Frankie turned and went, for he was used to acting as Terry’s message boy, he was like a legate sent to the provinces by his commander. The last they saw of him was when he swaggered
through the door of the Maths room on his way upstairs.

After he had urinated Terry got a piece of chalk and first rubbing the equations off the board began to draw what purported to be the teacher’s sexual organs in considerable detail. He
spent the whole fifteen minutes on this, his tongue stuck out, absolutely concentrated on his task, as if he were an artist who had forgotten where he was. At times not happy with what he had done,
he rubbed it all out, and began again. After a while he drew back from his masterpiece, studying it with an appraising scrutiny as if he were in an art gallery and said, ‘Hey, that’s
great, Rod, ain’t it? Ain’t that great?’ Roddy nodded for unlike Terry he believed that too much talking was sissy and he modelled himself on Clint Eastwood. ‘Ain’t
that great,’ Terry said again and began to dance up and down among the boxes of books like a Zulu. Sometimes Roddy thought Terry was crazy, like the time he had jumped off the bus which was
going at thirty miles an hour so that he wouldn’t have to pay his fare, and he had rolled over and over on the street like a cat. In his phantom Mexican hat and lethal black uniform, Roddy
wondered whether Terry would have done the same thing if a car had been coming, and concluded that he probably would have.

They left the Maths room, Terry giving a final look at his masterpiece as if reluctant to leave it, since no one would see it till the school started again after the holidays. The school was
ominously quiet and it bothered Roddy though it didn’t seem to bother Terry at all. Like Terry, Roddy was used to noise and movement, either the movement of the world outside – traffic,
shouting, fighting – or the noise of the family in the crowded tenement where he lived. He hated total silence about him though he himself never talked much. He hated those periods of silent
reading when that bag Simmons made them read
Kidnapped
or
Treasure Island
and you felt as if you could scream, the room was so quiet. The tension built up inside you so that you
had to clench your teeth to prevent yourself from howling like a wolf. He wanted to stand up and throw a brick at Simmons, to kick her in, to flatten her long quivering nose. Sometimes she would
look up from her own reading – for she read with them, ‘to set a good example’ – and a stare of naked hatred – the more bitter for being unseen by anyone except
themselves – would pass between them across the room. Oh, he knew she hated him all right and she knew that he hated her. She didn’t want people like him, she wanted people who were
interested in books, who did what they were told, who sucked up to her in their new uniforms. Who cared about books anyway, the letters of the words were so hard to focus on. It was like trying to
see the number of a bus on a wet day when the streets were glistening and your shoes and socks were soaking. The letters danced about in front of his eyes, like that red cloak he had seen them
passing in front of the bulls on the telly, he would like to batter them stupid so that they would stay still. He identified himself with the bull, not the toreador, he would have liked to sink his
horns into that dancing poof.