Black Chalk Read online

  I’m starting to think that my psychiatrist was right, that I was fleeing it all. And yet, such things affect us differently. My reactions were just as right as those of snarling mothers and pontificating principals.

  ***

  My parents moved to Hornsbury when I was four. A year before I was born, my father had left London and, teaming up with two colleagues, started a management consultancy. As luck had it, my mother was made a fellow of her college just as his business was becoming viable. Tired of their small Jericho flat, they decided to move out of the city and into the country. The way she tells the story, it sounds like it was my father who wanted to raise his children the way he was raised. But when I asked him about it, he explained in his careful, measured voice that he’d had a slight preference towards staying in Oxford, while my mother had had a strong preference for a garden: hence, as couples ought to do, they’d looked for a house in the country, and found what they were looking for in Hornsbury.

  Now that I’ve heard stories of others’ childhoods, I realise how good mine was: I had a spacious garden, and up until my brother was old enough to play with me, a father who happily taught me how to juggle a football, catch a cricket ball, swing a racket. During the winter season, my mother drove me to football games, and my father took me along to his squash tournaments. In the summer, I followed him around the county’s cricket fields, at first cheering his every run, and then playing alongside him.

  I still remember the day I first came on the field. I was eight, and it was only as a substitute fielder, but to me that didn’t take anything away from the moment: I was all of a sudden in the middle of everything. Every time a bowler ambled to the crease, I expected the ball to come my way. I walked in as I’d seen internationals do on television: my hands on my knees, a smile betraying my otherwise focused face. Thinking about it now, I realise they’d put me at short forty-five, where the ball would never come fast, especially given the pace of our attack. I still see Garry, the wicketkeeper, crouching over his large belly, and turning to me every third ball to check that I hadn’t moved, and happy I’d stayed where he wanted me, giving me one of his cavernous smiles before smacking his gloves together, and telling the bowler to bowl full and straight. And Garry calling to my father, telling him to warm up, and my excitement at the prospect – even then, my father didn’t bowl much. And I still remember my father’s off-cutter – it was in either his first or second over – and the burly batsman’s wild swish, the ball looping ever so high (to my eight-year-old eyes) in my direction, Garry’s call of ‘Catch it, mate!’, the fear that gripped me, my legs suddenly unsteady, and the ball arching down towards me. The sting of leather hitting my palms, the ball rebounding, and my desperate lunge to grasp it before it hit the floor. I’d made the simplest of catches look difficult, but that didn’t matter. It seemed that the whole team was as happy as I was – they were shaking my hand just as they did when adults took a good catch. Even my father offered his hand, gripping mine harder than any of the others, so that I had to massage my palm when no one was looking. I fell asleep reliving the moment for weeks afterwards.

  Perhaps I am looking back on my life through rose-tinted glasses, for school also seemed to have gone well. My mother tells me I was a sweet child, content to stay silent when left alone, but ready to break out of my reverie with a wide smile whenever someone talked to me. I found the first few days of school difficult, but I never locked myself in the toilets at home the way my brother did, and I don’t remember any problems with the other students until the third grade, when Andrew joined our class.

  To the teacher, he was a bright, jovial child with a penchant for practical jokes. To me, he was a selfish brat who wanted to be the centre of everyone’s attention. When he walked in one day and, taking on a deep voice, pretended to be the principal, I didn’t laugh the way my teacher did. I’m not sure why, but I decided that what he was doing was wrong, and that he needed to be punished. With Jeffrey, I chased him across our primary school’s courtyard, caught him, pinned him down and spat in his face. It was a fitting lesson, I thought.

  My mother had other ideas: never have I seen her so angry as she listened to my teacher over the phone. She hung up, walked over to where I was sitting, and slapped me. The pain shocked me; the shame had me in tears. She pointed at my room, and in a tone that expected no argument, told me to go and wait for her.

  During the hour it took her before she came and spoke to me, I stayed glued to my bed and cried into my pillow. Whenever I tried to stoke my anger, to tell myself that I’d done nothing wrong and she was very mean to slap me, I remembered the paleness of her face and started crying again, feeling as though I deserved the shame. I’d almost exhausted my tears when she knocked on the door. She walked in with a solemn expression and sat next to me. Wanting to avoid her, I once again dug my head into my pillow. The smell of my tears on the cloth had me sobbing once again. I told myself that was a good thing, for it would make her feel guilty. But she didn’t seem aware of my pain as she spoke.

  ‘Do you know that Andrew lost his dad last year?’ she asked me. Her voice that evening, as she carefully explained what it meant, and her tender gestures – stroking my hair, or holding my hand, which to me implied that I was as much a victim as Andrew – left a lasting impression. For many years, whenever I didn’t like someone, I recalled a shadow of the Andrew episode and repressed my feelings. After my mother’s intervention, I sought Andrew out, invited him to my house, and set out to make him my friend. I remember thinking hard about what present to get him for his birthday, and settling on the very one I wanted most: a gold and black football that had been used at the previous European Championships.

  Andrew left Hornsbury the following year, but he was an exception. Most of the people who started primary school in my year stayed in the same track I was following, so that by the time I was in sixth form, I’d known many of my friends for over ten years.

  Jeffrey was foremost amongst them. We’d first met as preschoolers on the cricket field, haggling about which of our fathers was the better player. When the cricket season threw us together, we seemed to spend every weekend with one another. He even came to Sicily with us one summer, the year after I went to the French Alps with his family. The winters saw us drift away from each other, as I had squash and football, and he played rugby, but even if I didn’t see him outside school for a month, I always felt like I could call him and be at his house the next day, kicking a ball against the yellow-bricked wall at the back of his garden.

  Jeffrey never disliked Eric as some of the others did, but he never understood why I was friends with him either. One day soon after Eric arrived at our school, as Paul Cumnor was relating an anecdote about him – the startled look he’d had when a teacher addressed him, his stumbling answer – Jeffrey turned to me and, in his usual tone, told the others that I’d been to Eric’s the previous weekend.

  ‘What’s he like?’ he asked me. ‘What do you like about him anyway?’

  At that instant in time, Eric’s social standing was in the balance. He hadn’t come across as likeable. Had he been awkward, we would have happily cast him aside, but his case seemed more complicated. Only a week earlier, at lunch break, I’d been chatting with Jeffrey, Tom and the usual crew, when I saw Eric pace around the building, his head down, his floppy black hair covering his eyes. The second time he walked by, I tried calling him over to our group, but he walked on as though he hadn’t heard me, his eyes fixed on the pavement. Tom noticed and made a joke, but no one followed his lead.

  Opinions were still divided. One camp condemned him – Paul and Tom Davies were in that camp. If he hadn’t made it yet, he wasn’t worth the effort. And another, to which it seemed most people subscribed, Jeffrey among them, still hadn’t formed an opinion. Eric had just arrived and, despite his oddness, hadn’t done anything that deserved to be condemned yet.

  And in that moment, as Paul and Tom Davies smirked, hoping I’d give them some ammunition, as Jeffrey
looked at me, sincerely wanting to know what I thought, all I could do was shrug and smile.

  ‘I don’t know. He seems alright to me,’ I said.

  Paul looked at Tom and sniggered. And I laughed along, genuinely happy to share in the joke.

  ***

  The day after I first woke up, when the house and soot felt most distant, my mother grabbed my hand and talked to me. Her fingers squeezing mine comforted me more than her worried smile and the kindness in her moist eyes. She asked me how I was. Finding my voice strengthened, I told her the fever was gone. It had left me with an intense tiredness, deep enough that my lacerated stomach kept quiet.

  ‘That’s good, Nate. Good.’ She let go of my hand and leaned back far enough that I could no longer make out her familiar perfume.

  ‘Think happy thoughts. Are you seeing yourself on the cricket field?’

  ‘No, but you’re right,’ I smiled. ‘I should.’

  ‘Yes, think about playing cricket with your brother and your father…’ Her voice trailed off as she edged a little further away. ‘Did you manage to fix your bat?’ she asked, her voice almost steady.

  ‘I think so. It took a few goes but it looked good in the end…’ The roundness of her eyes and the cock of her eyebrow made me feel as though I were lying.

  ‘Oh… I hope you didn’t spend too much time working on it. Dad can buy you a new one if you need.’

  ‘No, it’s alright. It only took a few minutes, but it didn’t work the first time, that’s all.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, nodding while her eyes looked at my feet.

  I extended my hand palm up hoping she would take it again, but she couldn’t have noticed for she turned around and made her way back to her chair.

  ***

  The world around me seemed to gather definition. Or perhaps I was now staying awake long enough to appreciate it, to expect its contours every time I broke through the lethargy.

  I was in a large room with yellow walls and no doors. Badges roamed along a corridor to my right. And a window spanned the entire length of the room to my left. When I crooked my neck, I could take in the whole of south-east Oxford. I could lose myself in Headington’s parks, and if I squinted hard enough, I could imagine my grandmother’s old house, the one she had before she moved to Cambridge, my grandfather died, and my mother found her a nursing home. It stood off a main road at the end of a hazy cul-de-sac. I remembered the Sundays we spent there well: in the winters, I would only breathe through my mouth, because there was something wrong with the sofas and it wasn’t just their flower print – no, if I breathed through my nose, their musky dampness would settle in my stomach and start breeding mould. Our summer visits were much safer: then, I could spend hours hiding with my cousins in the labyrinthine hedge that ran along the garden walls.

  To the right of my grandmother’s house, I could watch the traffic crawling on Cowley Road, and further right still, I could glimpse far-off Iffley and its lock. But I hardly ever looked. I preferred observing the people around me. When my mother was not sitting on a chair near me, when she wasn’t watching over me, reading through academic papers, jotting down her esteemed thoughts, I was left with three other silent patients, perennially waiting for something: nurses, meals, examinations, or the omnipotent team of doctors.

  I was luckier than most: my mother was with me throughout the entire visiting hours. She’d been spoken to – your son needs rest, he needs sleep, he needs calm. She’d nodded her head and made up her own mind. Her lab, her students, her colleagues, she told me, could go on without her, and plus, she pointed at her papers, she could work by my side too. A professor of experimental psychology. When I was little, I’d imagined patients reclining on a leather chaise longue while she fitted a flashing helmet on their skulls and jotted down the value of each dial. Even when she started taking me to her lab after school, on the first floor of a building that looked like an overgrown concrete bunker, I kept on believing there was something vaguely sinister about her work. It took me years to dispel that idea. Whenever I’d ask her about her work, she’d either give me an answer that was too broad or one that was too detailed – so that all I remembered was that she, and her lab, ran experiments on memory, biases, encoding.

  Once, as she sat by my hospital bed, I put down one of the books she’d brought me, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and I asked her what she was reading. She put her papers aside, stretched her arms out and, leaning towards me, asked me whether I really wanted to know. I hesitated but only for an instant: I hadn’t seen her so engaged for some time. She read out the title of the article she’d been reading: ‘Homocysteine and Cognitive Performance…’ She stopped halfway through the subtitle. ‘You don’t know what homocysteine is, do you?’ I could pretend to know what cognitive performance meant, but homocysteine was beyond me. ‘It’s an amino acid.’ She waited for a sign. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you?’

  The same day, after I’d lost her to her pile of papers, I asked her why she sat with her head resting against the window, when she could sit against the wall and enjoy the view over the town. I pointed at a spot right next to my bed, and I turned the cover of The Idiot towards her. We would discuss this book like we’d discussed most of the books I’d plucked from our collection at home – the rows of classic and modern novels that had left the upstairs bookshelves and littered my floor until they’d earned fresh creases. She would ask me what I thought, what I felt, and, talking to her, I’d work this book out like I’d pieced together the others.

  She waved at the door:

  ‘I like to be able to see who’s coming in and out,’ she said.

  It was a sensible reason in theory, but in practice she rarely looked up from her reading stack.

  ‘It’d be easier to talk if you were sitting here,’ I said.

  She smiled, moved to a chair by my bed, and plunged right back into her papers.

  ‘Have you read this?’ I asked her.

  She took a few seconds to look up.

  ‘A long time ago,’ she said, and she looked down again, squinting.

  From the way she was reading her papers, I realised that her usual prompts – How far along are you? Are you enjoying it? – wouldn’t come. I lowered my voice until I felt sure that no one else would hear me. My words were travelling in a space that belonged to no one else but us:

  ‘Everyone loves him, but I’m not sure why.’

  She looked up sharply.

  ‘In the book, I mean,’ I said, lowering my voice further, so that she had to lean forward to catch my words. ‘They all pretend that he’s a fool, but they all love him. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She leaned back on her chair, glanced at the window, and plunged back into her papers, squinting hard this time.

  The lines of my book went blurry, and the house shone through the ash. I heard her chair squeal. Standing up, she squinted and pointed at the window.

  ‘Natural light’s better for my eyes.’ She moved her things to her old chair, and I didn’t mention it again.

  There were many hours when she was away and my body wouldn’t slip past slumber. My eyes ajar, I spent time looking at my three companions. There were curtains to divide the room into four but they were only ever drawn when nurses needed to undress patients. The rest of the time we were together because there was nothing to separate us.

  The man in front of me fascinated me – my diaries include three long entries on his actions. From the safety of my cot, I spied on him in his bed, on his feet, in his chair. But spying isn’t the word I’m looking for. I wasn’t impinging on his privacy and no one wanted to know what I saw. It would be more accurate to say that I watched him like one watches a street performer. Except that his was the only act. While the two women to my right were staying still for days on end, this man was taking control of his space. He was younger than they were, in his late sixties I would guess, still infused with the energy to rise out of his bed.

  The old man was a starer.
He would lie down and stare. And then he would move to his chair and stare. And he would stand up and stare – sometimes out of the window down at the city. I could see something of Mr Johnson in him. He would rest the back of his hand on his lower back and gaze out of the window quietly, just like Mr Johnson liked to do. But whereas Mr Johnson would look at the field for a few minutes and then turn back to us, the old man could stare for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, without registering an emotion. And then he’d sit and stare. He stared at nothing in particular – his eyes were open and they needed to rest on something. I can only presume that he didn’t need stark reminders to recall episodes of his life, that our mundane ward was enough inspiration. But he was certainly aware of what was going on around him. He knew I was looking at him – once, just as I was starting to think he’d lost contact with those around him, he looked into my curious eyes, batted his eyelid, and looked away. I felt an initial pang of shame, but that was misinterpreting the look he’d given me. There had been no judgement there, just acknowledgement.

  ***

  Eight years later, I can finally acknowledge it. While I was in hospital, my relationship with my mother changed in ways I still don’t fully understand. When I was lying in bed, and she was sitting by the window, I preferred to leave my raw emotions undefined. Every time pain made me wince, every time a memory had me slack-eyed, she was by my side, ready to adjust a pillow, squeeze my hand. But whenever my words circled around Eric and my physics class, I felt her grip loosen, her eyes shift, as if my allusions were making her uneasy, and I tried changing my train of thoughts until I had her comforting smile back.

  Now that I see her every day around the house, aged and mollified, I yearn for a time before the shooting. I would like to see her in her long green dress sitting on her grandmother’s old velvet armchair, shuffling through her papers, gold-plated pen in hand, pursing her lips and frowning in concentration, a soft ‘no’ or ‘yes, that’s true’ humming past her lips, her hair draping down to her chin before gathering on the nape of her neck in an unruly ponytail. I would like her to look up at James or me, and to see her eyes swim for half a second as she’d decide whether to give us instructions. I would like her to call me to her side so that she could explain what my big-brother role entailed, to hear her say that James looked up to me, only for me to turn around and see him plucking away at his guitar, oblivious to anything around him.