The Four Last Things (14 page)

As the weeks passed, Sian hitched her skirt higher and higher. She and Mandy fell into the habit of sitting at a table near the front of the class. They would pull their chairs out and sit facing the front with their legs apart, forcing Eddie to glimpse their underwear, some of which was most unsuitable for schoolgirls, or indeed for any woman who wasn’t the next best thing to a prostitute. One day, early in July, Mandy sat in a pose which revealed beyond any possible doubt that she was wearing no knickers at all.

The crisis arrived late on a Friday afternoon. Eddie’s guard was down because he thought the children had gone; he was alone in his classroom, sitting at his table, trying to plan the next week’s lessons and feeling relieved that the teaching week was over.

Mandy, Sian and three other girls strolled nonchalantly into the room. Mandy and Sian came to stand beside him, one on each side. A third girl lingered by the door, keeping watch; the other two constituted an audience.

‘Wouldn’t you like to fuck me, sir?’ whispered Mandy on the left. She put a hand on the back of his chair and leaned over him.

‘No – me.’ Sian undid the top two buttons of her shirt. ‘I can give you a much better time. Honest, sir. Why don’t I suck your cock?’

Eddie tried to push back his chair, but it wouldn’t move because Mandy now had her foot behind one of the rear legs as well as her hand on the back.

The other girls were sniggering, and one of them said in a loud whisper: ‘Look – he’s getting a hard-on.’

Mandy was now unbuttoning her shirt too. ‘Go on, sir. Lick my titties. They taste nicer than hers.’

Eddie found his voice at last. ‘Stop this.’ His voice rose. ‘Stop this at once. Stop it. Stop it.’

‘You don’t mean that, sir. You like it. Go on, admit it.’

‘Stop it. Stop it. I shall report you to –’

‘If you report us we’ll say you were interfering with us.’

‘Mr Grace is a bloody pervert,’ said Sian. ‘We got witnesses to prove it.’

The latter’s shirt was now entirely unbuttoned. She pushed up her breasts, encased in a formidable black bra, and poked them hard into his face. The lace was rough against his nose. There was a smell of stale sweat.

‘Fuck me, darling,’ she murmured.

Eddie leapt up, knocking over his chair. Mandy shrieked and groped at his crotch. Abandoning his briefcase, he ran for the door. Their hands clutched at him. He collided with the sentry in the doorway, pushing her against the wall. The girls’ laughter pursued him down the corridor. As he ran across the school car park, scattering a knot of teenagers, the laughter drifted after him through the open windows. In a way it was a relief that the final humiliation had come at last. Failure had its compensations.

The following Monday morning Eddie phoned the school secretary and, having pleaded illness too often in the past, desperately invented a dying grandmother. The same day, he saw his GP, who listened to him for five minutes and gave him a prescription for tranquillizers. On Tuesday he wrote a letter of resignation to the head teacher.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Stanley said when Eddie told him the news. ‘I saw that coming from the start. I told you, didn’t I?’

‘You don’t understand. I’ve decided that I don’t approve of the philosophy behind modern education.’

His father raised his eyebrows, miming the disbelief he did not need openly to express. ‘What now? You’ve probably missed the boat with the Paladin, but if you like, I –’

‘No.’
Stuff the Paladin
. ‘I don’t want to work there.’

‘So what
are
you going to do?’

At the time Eddie could not answer the question, but over the years an answer had evolved as if by its own volition. First he had made a half-hearted attempt to see whether he could retrain as a primary-school teacher. But he could not whip up much enthusiasm even for teaching younger children. In any case, he guessed that the head teacher at Dale Grove would give him an unsatisfactory reference. Quite apart from the discipline problem, there was also the possibility that Mandy and Sian had circulated rumours of sexual harassment, with Eddie in the role of predator rather than victim.

Worse was to come that summer – the unpleasant business at Charleston Street swimming baths. As a schoolboy, Eddie had learned to swim there, though not very well. It was an old building, full of echoes, with an ineradicable smell of chlorine and unwashed feet. In the first few months after he left Dale Grove, Eddie paid several visits to Charleston Street, partly to give himself a reason to get out of the house and away from his father, now a semi-invalid.

He disliked the male changing room, where youths who reminded him of the pupils at Dale Grove indulged in loud horseplay. The pool, too, was often too crowded for his taste. Nor did he like taking off his clothes in front of strangers. He was very conscious of the soft flab which clung to his waist and the top of his thighs, of his lack of bodily hair, and of his small stature. But he enjoyed cooling down in the water and watching the younger children.

He clung to the side and watched girls swimming races and mothers teaching their children to swim. Some young children appeared to have no adults watching over them, even from the balcony overlooking the swimming pool. Latchkey children, Eddie supposed, abandoned by mothers going out to work. He felt sorry for them – his own mother had always been at home when he came back from school and during the holidays – and tried to keep a friendly eye on them.

Sometimes he became quite friendly with those deserted children and would play games with them. His favourite was throwing them up in the air above the water, catching them as they descended, and then tickling them until they squealed with laughter.

On one occasion Eddie was playing this game with a little girl called Josie. She was in the care of her older brother, a ten-year-old who for most of the time horsed about with his friends in the deep end. Eddie felt quite indignant on Josie’s behalf: the little girl was so vulnerable – what could the mother be thinking of?

‘You funny man,’ she said. ‘Your name’s Mr Funny.’

He came back the following day to find Josie there.

‘Hello, Mr Funny,’ she called out.

They played together for a few minutes. As Eddie was preparing to throw Josie into the air for the fourth time, he noticed surprise spreading over her face. An instant later he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Beside him, standing on the edge of the pool, was one of the lifeguards, accompanied by a thickset, older man in a tracksuit.

The latter said, ‘All right. You’re getting out now. Put the kid down.’

Eddie looked from one hostile face to the other. Another lifeguard was walking towards them with Josie’s brother. It was unfair but Eddie did not argue, partly because he knew there was no point and partly because he was scared of the man in the tracksuit.

He climbed up the ladder. Eddie was conscious that other people were looking at him – the other two lifeguards on duty, and also some of the adults who were swimming. It seemed to him that everyone had stopped talking. The only sounds were the slapping of the water against the sides of the swimming pool and the rhythmic thudding of the distorted rock music coming over the public-address system. The two men escorted him back to the changing room.

‘Get dressed,’ ordered the older man.

One on either side, they waited while he struggled into his clothes. He did not dry himself. It was very embarrassing. Eddie hated people watching him while he was getting dressed. Gradually the other people in the changing room realized something was up. The volume of their conversations diminished until, by the time Eddie was strapping on his sandals, no one was talking at all.

‘This way.’ The older man opened the door. Eddie followed him down the corridor towards the reception area. The young lifeguard fell in step behind. Instead of leading him outside, the thickset man swung to the left, stopped and unlocked the door labelled MANAGER. He stood to one side and waved Eddie to precede him into the room. It was a small office, overcrowded with furniture, and with three people inside it was claustrophobic. The lifeguard, a burly youth with tight blond curls, shut the door and leant against it.

‘Identification.’ The manager held out his hand. ‘Come on.’

Eddie found his wallet, extracted his driving licence and handed it over. The manager made a note of the details, breathing heavily and writing slowly, as if using a pen was not an activity that came naturally to him. Eddie trembled while he waited. Their silence unnerved him. He thought perhaps they were planning to beat him up.

At last the man tossed the driving licence back to Eddie, who missed it and had to kneel down to pick it up from the floor. The manager threw down his pen on the desk and came to stand very close to Eddie. The lifeguard gave a small, anticipatory sigh.

‘We’ve been watching you. And we don’t like what we see. There’ve been complaints, too. I’m not surprised.’

Eddie’s voice stumbled into life. ‘I’ve done nothing. Really.’

‘Shut up. Stand against that wall.’

Eddie backed towards the wall. The man opened a drawer in the desk and took out a camera. He pointed it at Eddie, adjusted the focus and pressed the shutter. There was a flash.

‘You’re banned,’ the manager said. ‘And I’ll be circulating your details around other pools. You want to keep away from children, mate. You’re lucky we didn’t call the police. If I had my way I’d castrate the fucking lot of you.’

It was so unfair. Eddie had been only playing with the children. He couldn’t help touching them. They touched him, too. But only in play, only in play.

It frightened him that the people at the swimming pool had seen past what was happening and through into his mind, to what might have happened, what he wanted to happen. He had given himself away. In future he would have to be very careful. The conclusion was obvious: if he wanted to play games it would be far better to do it in private, where there were no grown-ups around to spoil the fun.

Summer slid into autumn. Goaded by his parents, Eddie applied for two clerical jobs but was offered neither. He also told them he was on the books of a tutorial agency, which was a lie. He looked into the future, and all he foresaw was boredom and desolation. He felt the weight of his parents’ society pressing down on him like cold, dead earth. Yet he was afraid of going out in case he met people who knew him from Dale Grove or the Charleston Street swimming baths.

While the weather was warm, he would often leave Stanley and Thelma, encased in their old and evil-smelling carcasses, in front of the television and escape to the long, wild garden. He listened to the trains screaming and rattling on the line beyond Carver’s. Sometimes he glimpsed Mrs Reynolds among the geraniums on the balcony of the Reynoldses’ flat. Once he saw her talking earnestly with a large, fat woman who he guessed was Jenny Wren. The ugly duckling, Eddie told himself, had become an even uglier duck.

Over the years the tangle of trees and bushes at the far end of the Graces’ garden had expanded both vertically and horizontally. The fence separating the back gardens of 27 and 29 Rosington Road had been repaired long before. But there was still a hole in the fence at the back: too small for Eddie’s plump adult body, but obviously used by small animals – cats, perhaps, or even foxes.

Thelma said that Carver’s was an eyesore. According to Stanley, the site of the bombed engineering works had not been redeveloped because its ownership was in dispute – a case of Dickensian complexity involving a family trust, missing heirs and a protracted court case.

‘Someone’s sitting on a gold mine there,’ Stanley remarked on many occasions, for the older he became the more he repeated himself. ‘You mark my words. A bloody gold mine. But probably the lawyers will get the lot.’

Time had on the whole been kind to Carver’s, for creepers had softened the jagged brick walls and rusting corrugated iron; saplings had burst through the cracked concrete and grown into trees. Cow parsley, buddleia and rosebay willowherb brought splashes of white and purple and pink. It was a wonder, Eddie thought, that the ruins had not become a haven for crack-smoking delinquents from the council flats or Social Security parasites in search of somewhere to drink and sleep. Perhaps the ghosts kept them away. Not that it was easy to get into Carver’s, except from the back gardens of Rosington Road. To the north was the railway, to the east and west were high walls built when bricks and labour were cheap. Access by road was down a narrow lane beside the infants’ school which ended in high gates festooned with barbed wire and warning notices.

Eddie was safe from prying eyes at the bottom of the garden. He liked to kneel and stare through the hole into Carver’s. The shed was still there, smaller and nearer than in memory, with two saplings of ash poking through its roof. One evening in September, he levered out the plank beside the hole and, his heart thudding, wriggled through the enlarged opening. Once inside he stood up and looked around. Birds sang in the distance.

Eddie picked his way towards the shed, skirting a large clump of nettles and a bald tyre. The shed’s door had parted company with its hinges and fallen outwards. He edged inside. Much more of the roof had gone. Over half of the interior was now filled with the saplings and other vegetation. There were rags, two empty sherry bottles and a scattering of old cigarette ends on the floor; occasionally, it seemed, other people found their way into Carver’s. He looked slowly around, hoping to see the paint tin that he and Alison had used for the Peeing Game, hoping for some correspondence between past and present.