The Four Last Things Page 10

  Once Eddie had reached puberty, his father did not want him there at all. On one occasion he plucked up his courage and knocked on the basement door. He was fourteen, and his father was about to photograph the latest LV, a girl called Rachel with light-brown hair, wary eyes and a freckled face. His father’s feet clumped slowly up the stairs. The key turned in the lock and the door opened.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wondered if I could –’ Eddie looked past his father into the basement: the camera was on its tripod; Rachel was fiddling with the dolls’ house. ‘You know – like I used to.’

  Stanley stared down at him, his face moon-like. ‘Better not. Nothing personal. But for child photography you have to get the atmosphere just right.’

  ‘Yes.’ Eddie backed away, hot and ashamed. ‘I see that.’

  ‘Young children are more artistic.’ Stanley rarely missed an opportunity to stress that his photography was driven by a high, aesthetic purpose. ‘Ask any sculptor from the Classical world.’ At this point he glanced behind him, down into the basement, as if expecting to see Phidias nodding approval from the Victorian armchair, or Praxiteles leaning on the workbench by the window and smiling encouragement. Instead, Stanley looked at Rachel, who was pretending to be absorbed in the dolls’ house. ‘Children are so plastic.’

  As a very young child Eddie had admired Stanley and wanted to please him. Then his father had become a fact of life like the weather – neither good nor bad in itself, but liable to vary in its effects on Eddie. Then, with Stanley’s lecture on the aesthetics of his hobby, came the moment of revelation: that Eddie hated his father, and had in fact done so for some time.

  The strength of Eddie’s hatred took him unawares and had a number of consequences. Some of these were trivial: he used to spit discreetly in his father’s tea, for example, and once he took one of his father’s shoes and pressed the heel into a dog turd on the pavement. Other consequences were more far-reaching, and affected Eddie rather than his father. It was Stanley’s fault, in a manner of speaking, that Eddie became a teacher, and Eddie never forgave him for that.

  In his final year at school, Eddie told his father that he thought he might like to be an archaeologist. This was a few months before Stanley retired from the Paladin.

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said his father. ‘There’s no money in archaeology. I bet there aren’t many jobs, either. Not real jobs.’

  ‘But it interests me.’

  ‘That’s no good if it won’t pay the mortgage, is it? Can’t you do it as a hobby?’

  ‘There are jobs for archaeologists.’

  ‘For the favoured few, maybe. Top scholars. One in a million. You’ve got to be realistic. Why don’t I arrange for you to have an interview at the Paladin? There’s a chap I know in Personnel.’

  The upshot of this conversation was that Eddie attempted to lay the foundations for a career in archaeology by studying for a degree in history at a polytechnic on the outskirts of London. It was not a happy time. As a student he floundered: it was not so much that the work was too demanding; it was more that there seemed such a lot to do, and it was difficult to know what was important and what wasn’t, and besides, his mind had a tendency to drift into daydreams. He lived at home, which distanced him from the other students. In the first summer vacation he spent a fortnight on an archaeological dig in Essex, where he began to grow a beard. It rained all the time and the work was hard and tedious. Eddie’s interest in the subject never recovered.

  He kept the beard, however, wispy and unsatisfactory though it was, primarily because it annoyed his father. (‘Makes you look a scruffy little wretch. You’ll have to shave it off if you want to find a proper job.’) As a token of rebellion, the beard made a poor substitute for a career in archaeology, but it was better than nothing.

  Stanley continued to badger Eddie about the Paladin, showering him with information about vacancies for graduates.

  ‘I’ve already dropped a word in the right ear,’ he said towards the end of Eddie’s final year. ‘Or rather ears. It’s never a bad thing to have a few friends at court, is it? And naturally, anyone who’s the son of a former employee is bound to have a head start. But you’d better get rid of that beard.’

  With hindsight, Eddie agreed that a job at the Paladin might have suited both his talents and his needs. At the time, however, the source of the suggestion automatically tainted it. Desperate to find an alternative, he glanced round the room. His father had draped the Evening Standard over the arm of his chair, and one of the headlines caught Eddie’s eye: TEACHERS IN NEW PAY TALKS. Beside it was a photograph of a group of teachers armed with placards. Several of the men had beards. That was the deciding factor.

  ‘If my results are good enough, I’m going to be a teacher.’

  His father’s attention sharpened. ‘Really? I hope you’ve got the sense to teach younger children. If what you hear nowadays is anything to go by, older children are becoming quite unmanageable.’

  ‘Secondary education’s much more interesting. Intellectually, I mean.’ Eddie hoped this last remark would remind his father that he had left school at sixteen, and therefore lacked his son’s qualifications.

  ‘It’s your life,’ Stanley replied, apparently oblivious of his intellectual inferiority. ‘People don’t look up to teachers as much as they used to in my day. There’s the long holidays, I suppose.’

  ‘Teachers have to work in the holidays. It’s not a cushy job.’

  His father took his time over lighting a cigarette. ‘Yes.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Well – as I say, it’s your life. I doubt if you’ll be able to cope, but that’s your affair.’

  His mother had been in the room but contributed nothing to the conversation. Eddie still felt that if his parents had handled the situation more diplomatically, they could have helped him avoid the disasters which followed. Thanks to them, he forced himself to spend another year at college doing a postgraduate certificate of education. He was lucky – or perhaps unlucky – in his teaching practice: they sent him to a quiet, middle-class school where class sizes were small and his stumbling attempts to teach were carefully and even kindly supervised. At that stage, he had realized that he was not a natural teacher, but he had hoped that with luck and perseverance he might grow used to it.

  Nothing had prepared Eddie for Dale Grove Comprehensive. It was a school in north-west London, not far from Kensal Vale, in an area which even then seemed to be slipping away from the control of the authorities. He applied for the job because the school was an easy tube journey from Rosington Road, and without discussing the matter both he and his parents assumed that for the time being it would be best if he continued to live at home.

  Keeping order was by far the worst aspect of the job. His failure in this department affected his relationships with other teachers, who regarded him with a mixture of irritation and scorn. It was not unusual for Eddie to find himself trying to teach three or four children at the front, while in the rest of the room the remainder of the class split up into small noisy groups engaged in disruptive activities.

  He was scared of the children, and they knew it. He thought them outlandish and disgusting, too, with their croaking voices, their shrill laughter, their burps, their farts, their blackheads, their acne, their strange clothes and stranger customs. The girls were worse than the boys: strapping, big-boned brutes; delighting in mockery and subtler in their methods; scenting weakness as sharks scent blood in the water. He had fallen among savages.

  Matters came to a crisis towards the end of the summer term. There was no one he could talk to about it. There were problems at home, too: his father’s health was worsening, and his mother was never easy to live with. In the circumstances was it any wonder that things went wrong?

  Two girls orchestrated what amounted to a campaign of sexual harassment against him. Their names were Mandy and Sian. Both were taller than he was. Mandy was thin, with spots and lank red hair. Sian was overweight and unusually well-dev
eloped. They began with innuendo, with whispers at the back of the class. ‘Do you think sir’s sexy?’ Gradually the campaign picked up momentum. ‘Please, sir, there’s a word in this book I don’t understand. What does S-P-E-R-M mean?’

  After each of Eddie’s failures to control them, his torturers would take one small step further.

  ‘I can’t go to sleep without my teddy in my bed,’ Mandy confided to the class.

  ‘Me too,’ Sian remarked. ‘Mine’s called Eddy-Teddy. He’s so warm and cuddly.’

  Eddie found repellent drawings on his table when he returned from the staff room. Mandy, something of a raconteur in her primitive way, told dirty jokes to anyone in the class who would listen, which was most of them.

  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.’