Silent Noon, page 18
“Sir,” said Barney, his throat now quite dry.
“Hands on the desk, Holland.”
There are worse fates, he told himself, as Runcie sliced the air behind him in two deft practice strokes. Death marches through the jungle. Bamboo shoots under the nails. Watching a Jap slice your gut open and eat your liver right in front you…
The first cut was sharp, but the second landed with razor precision. Barney gritted his teeth, sucking in his cheeks and refusing to make a noise. They would be listening upstairs, taking grim pleasure in the sounds of muffled yelps or sobbing, and it was for them, more even than for Runcie, that he refused to show weakness.
Mass graves filled with decapitated bodies. Samurai swords filleting a man as if he were a fish. Faces shot off, sending teeth into the back of blown-in skulls. Fly-blown heads rammed on pikes…
He heard himself whimper, and at the next stroke he cried out. It was too much now: he would be severed in half…
“Up you get.” Runcie returned the cane to the umbrella stand and opened the door. He stood by as Barney shuffled past him into the dark hallway, each motion shooting pangs of agony down his legs. Master and pupil heard the creak of springs overhead as five bodies scrambled beneath the covers, the excited whispers and impatient admonishments to be quiet, but neither gave any indication that they knew what awaited upstairs: the excruciating process of undressing against his classmates’ taut silence, the awkward tumble into bed, and eyes that ached with the swell of tears that wouldn’t come.
~
She did not ask him why he suddenly wished to go now: if anything, she seemed relieved, eager to join him. It was only when they were halfway down to the shore that she suggested Ivor might have wanted to come along as well.
“Ivor can go to hell with the rest of them,” said Barney.
“Why?”
They had stopped at the edge of the beach, and the sand under their feet crunched with broken shells. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said.
“You can’t go all that way on your own. You’d never make it.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to see any of them ever again…”
“What about Robin?”
“Robin most of all.”
“But why?” She squinted at him, hands on hips. “Have you two fallen out?”
“I’ve had enough of people not telling the truth. Miss Duchâtel and Ivor and even you.” He could see that she was hurt, and ignored this. “I had to take the blame for that stupid prank on Cowper, even though it was nothing to do with me. It would have been all right if one of you had bothered to tell me.”
“He said he had. You should have told Cowper it was Ivor’s fault.”
“Bit late for that – and anyway, Cowper will believe what he wants to believe.”
“I’m sorry, Barney.”
He considered the almost imperceptible quivering of her irises, the tufts of black hair that had begun to grow back feathery and untamed about the tops of her small, white ears. For some reason at that moment she reminded him of a baby bird.
“You don’t have to come. It’s probably better if you don’t. But don’t go back to him.”
He continued towards the kiosk, his satchel banging heavily with tins of condensed milk and a few apples they had stopped to collect from the wrong side of the garden wall. There was a bottle opener with which he’d make a harpoon to spear fish, and some matches to start a campfire. Doc Dower’s piastre, wrapped in his balled sock, was there too – a reminder, should he need it, that he was more than capable of building anything else he might require on the island. A moment later, he felt a hand on his arm.
“There,” she said, pointing. “We won’t have to drag it far.”
It made a terrible noise, the splintered wood shrieking against the pebbles. Barney tossed the satchel in beneath one of the benches and knelt to soothe his palms in the cold water while Belinda peered out across the sulphur-coloured sea.
“There’s a fog coming in,” she said.
Barney squinted at the horizon, willing the hump of land to reveal itself against the pale winter sky. “It will change in a minute,” she added, sensing his impatience.
Last year, there had been talk of delaying the St Mary’s boating trip to St Just because of high winds reported on the north side of the island. In the end, the morning had dawned warm and fair and there was no suggestion of any problem until much later, when the supper that had been laid out in the dining hall was discovered, still untouched, at a quarter past midnight by the last member of staff to secure the building.
“Let’s have one of those apples,” said Belinda.
“They’re meant for later,” said Barney, who nevertheless tossed her one of the smaller ones. She polished it against her tunic before biting in with a loud, satisfying crunch.
There had been talk of a storm, which another student, who had a ham radio, was able to infer from the shipping forecast. The late ferry had arrived as scheduled, which sparked off whispers that its wake might have forced the lightweight schooner to capsize. The owner, rumoured to have been found with the stink of alcohol on his breath, had been asleep below deck at the time, where the horrified cries of the girls on the shore failed to reach him.
“It’s starting to move, do you see?” said Belinda, tipping her head at the yellow haze.
“Hadn’t we better get started?” said Barney.
“Let me finish this.” She took another bite and tossed the core into the long grass. “We’ll have to aim for the north side,” she said. “The harbour still hasn’t been cleaned up from the floods, and there’s nowhere to dock on the south shore.”
Barney shunted the boat forward another foot. St Just was almost visible now: an eerie grey line on the horizon, surrounded by a strange, thermal haze. Elsewhere in the world, there were islands used as graveyards for broken ships, as quarantines for people with polio or tuberculosis. Islands for displaced tribes: places that turned out not to be safe but poisonous. The water in those lagoons could burn your skin right off.
He had started to heave at the resisting vessel when a voice called out from the bluffs.
“Well. Fancy that.”
There was barely time to scramble into the boat before Ivor had caught on to the stern with both hands.
“Let go,” Barney said.
“And be the last one to watch you two paddle off to your deaths? Get out of there.”
“Leave us alone.”
“Preston said he saw you skulking off together before the second bell. You stopped for apples at the garden wall, he said. Fine way to treat a friend.”
“We’re not friends,” said Barney.
Ivor turned to the girl. “Is that what you think?” he said. But before she could answer the bells of St Arras began to sound, making her hesitate. “So, you’re going to live in blissful nature, like Paul and Virginie?” continued Ivor. He stepped towards her. “You little tart,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed.”
“Don’t talk to her like that,” said Barney.
Ivor laughed – an awkward, sneering laugh – and said, “What a pair you are.”
He grabbed the satchel from Barney and pulled it open.
“At least you remembered the tin opener this time,” he said. He took out the matchbox and threw it into the water. “Shame those got wet, though.”
Barney lunged for the bag but Ivor pulled out of reach. “Catch,” he said, tossing one of the apples far over Belinda’s head. “No? Try again.” He lobbed another apple into the long grass, followed by a volley of three, four, five more.
“Stop it,” said Belinda, even now clambering out of the boat to chase after the apples that skittered across the pebble beach.
“Never mind them,” called Barney after her – but she wasn’t listening.
Ivor smirked, waiting until she had disappeared from view before rounding the rowing boat.
“How many’d they give you?” said Barney.
“Twelve of the best, my boy.” Ivor sat himself on the edge of the boat and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. “Listen, Holland…” He stared straight ahead to light the cigarette, which he didn’t offer to Barney. “You do know it didn’t mean anything, don’t you?”
“You might have told Runcie that.”
“Runcie knows it just as well as I do. You make things worse by going about looking so damned shifty about it all.” He blew a mouthful of smoke towards the sea, so that the wind lifted it like a piece of grey gossamer. “You’re not to know, I suppose, never having been away to school before: so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or ask Littlejohn. He knows more about it than he’s willing to let on. It’s faute de mieux.”
“Screw you.”
“Only you wouldn’t be able to keep yourself from thinking about the old geezers sitting round the pub in Camden Town – about what they’d say if they found out. There’s no such trouble for a toff like me.” Belinda had returned, apples gathered in the pouch of her tunic. “At least she’s not dead inside.” A nervous laugh. “She’s not dead, full stop…”
What an idiot he had been not to see it at the time. The girl, gamine and shorn-headed, as a substitute for the boys who had come before her: Henry Cray and Robin, and God knows how many others. He had redirected his love for his family’s sacked footman onto Henry Cray – and then, onto the fallen child, Belinda Flood.
“And to think, if I’d arrived here a minute later you’d never get to see this,” Ivor continued in a loud voice, pulling something from his satchel: a wind-up alarm clock with a couple of wires sticking out of one end. “You set the time as the alarm, and when the minute hand strikes an electrical signal is sent to the speaker, jumps onto the other wire and – provided there’s a spark – ignites it. Rather clever, don’t you think?”
“Let me see,” said Barney, grabbing the clock from Ivor before the older boy had the wit to resist. Instead he inched closer, looming over Barney like a protective shadow, while Belinda craned her neck from across the boat like some small animal sniffing curiously at the air.
Barney felt the weight of it in his hand, rolled the wires between his fingers. He turned from Ivor, resisting his overbearing hulk, his hot breath and salty musk. The wet sand beneath their feet had darkened: the wind nipped at Barney’s bare fingers, wrapped around the metal timepiece. There was a toxic, fishy smell, and he looked up to see that the yellow haze had not drifted but spread.
He did not know how many seconds passed before he hurled the timepiece at the water so hard that the mist swallowed it before it broke the surface. No sooner had he done that than something hit the pit of his stomach, and then he felt the sudden shock of cold. He was lying face up in the shallow water before he saw the older boy come after him again, and behind him Belinda with the paddle…
And then there were fingers around his throat and salt water pouring into his mouth, and all the while it was freezing. So this is how death starts, he thought. Will it feel like this until it’s over, or is there worse to come?
What happened next did not seem real – perhaps because they were both under water, perhaps because he was struggling for breath. But even if he had imagined Ivor’s teeth sinking into his cheek with the clarity of a sewing needle drawing stitches through flesh, there was no denying the plume of blood that spread about him in the moments that followed, or the ripping noise that made his insides heave.
He did not know what made Ivor detach himself so suddenly, but by then there was such terrible pain that he didn’t care. It was only seconds later that he perceived an outline against the setting sun, shouting and waving its arms.
Already the rowing boat had started to drift, teased along the shore by the uneven waves, and meanwhile Ivor had pulled Belinda away from it and was guiding her quickly up the slope towards the shouting man.
“She’s safe,” the Mede was saying, in a clear, loud voice. “It’s all right. I’ve got her now.”
Barney rushed to his feet, only to be pulled back by the waves: he struggled, righted himself, stood again, clutching his cheek with one hand as blood ran through his fingers. The figure was still shouting, pointing at the boat which continued to drift farther down the beach. Ivor had flung his school blazer around Belinda’s shoulders and held her by the elbow, shielding the back of her head with his other arm as if to protect her from the soaked and shivering thing on the beach: a fayed spectre in dripping shrouds, blood spilling into his mouth, naked legs whipped raw by the wind, feet sinking deeper into the rushing sand.
~
He was put in isolation in the San and instructed not to touch the stitches. That was what came of playing in the water, Matron told him: the beach might look sandy, but the rocks beneath the surface were sharp. If it hadn’t been for Morrell, one shuddered to think what might have become of the poor girl.
There was only one other boy in the San at the time, in a bay on the other side of a curtained partition: Sanger, who was laid up with a throat infection. On his second morning Barney heard Matron tell him that he would be sent back to lessons that afternoon. Immediately he tore a page from the primer on his bedside table and scribbled a few lines in the margins. Once Matron had left the room, he tiptoed to the curtain and poked his head into Sanger’s bay.
“Give this to Littlejohn, will you?” he said.
Sanger stared up at Barney with eyes still ringed pink from all the hacking and wheezing of the last six days. He wet his lips and straightened himself beneath the covers. “What’s it worth?” he said.
“Next week’s tuck.”
“Two weeks.”
“Fine. But you have to give it to him straight away.”
The trick would be to laugh it off. If he played his cards right, Robin might ask to touch the scar, his war wound, and then Barney could take the watch out of his pocket and press it into his hand…
As a starting whistle shrilled from the games pitch that afternoon, he wondered if Robin had chosen to ignore him. Perhaps Sanger had never even delivered the message. Barney thought of Ivor in his set, revelling in the fact of being a hero, and Belinda recovering in her child’s bedroom, doubly scarred and never likely to trust him again – neither sparing a thought for Robin Littlejohn, who had only that minute excused himself from the sidelines complaining of a stomach ache.
He must have cut back to Medlar behind the old kitchens, which is why Barney didn’t see him as he watched the drive from the San window. Now as on every other day of the year, the horseman and his mount were emerging from the fountain’s green water: the rider still pointing at the moon, which wasn’t a moon now, but a brilliant white sun.
As Barney waited, he noticed how the water brightened as the noontime sun emerged from behind the clouds. The change filled him with hope. In a few weeks it would be Christmas and he would get to see Spike and Jake again. By the time the new term started, everyone would have forgotten the fuss with Ivor.
There is a fountain filled with blood
(filled with blood, filled with blood).
There is a fountain filled with blood
flows from Emmanuel’s veins!
He felt the silver watch through his pocket, this thing that had lived against the other boy’s skin and marked the seconds to the rhythm of his quick, adolescent pulse. In that moment he decided that he would return it to Littlejohn as soon as he arrived. Not as an apology, nor even as a gift. It was his, after all.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
lose all their guilty stains
(lose all their guilty stains,
lose all their guilty stains).
A bird shot out from the treetops seconds before the explosion, as if it had detected the first ripples of a collapsing star, sensed the death tremors before the final, violent event – and in the same moment, Barney heard the window shatter, felt his mouth filling with the taste of ash. On the lower playing field, boys and masters raised their eyes to the clouds, believing the sound to have been the roar of approaching thunder. But the sun was shining more brightly than ever before, and for several moments they chose not to believe the rising wail of the air-raid siren, the black plume unfurling against an untainted sky…
Once Swift had reported to the headmaster that Robin Littlejohn wasn’t accounted for, the entire school cleared to the lower pitch. Now only Pleming remained to consider the smouldering ruins: the unseated stone rider face down in the green water, its outstretched arm flung over the fountain’s edge as if grasping after his mount, which had fled. A monstrous crater opened up to the corridor that had once linked the main building to the old kitchens. Picking up a piece of metal casing that was still warm to the touch, he considered the surviving ironwork grilles that braced shattered windows, the contorted drainpipes and flooded gutters. It did not match any of these, either in colour or weight. The tragedy seemed to point to the explosion of a UXB.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Barney had already regained consciousness beneath a dusting of broken glass. He had fallen from the bed and was staring in bewilderment at the sparkling floor, unaware of the blood that trickled from his nose and wondering how to stop the ringing in his ears.
He was quickly transferred to a bed against the opposite wall, away from the window, and an hour later he lay beneath a fresh sheet that Matron had tucked tightly beneath his hips, so that at first it appeared to his housemaster that there was only half a boy there, severed at the abdomen.
“Well, Holland.” Runcie seated himself in the chair next to the bed. “You’ve had a lucky escape.”
