Black Chalk Read online

  Doctors swept through in the mornings. In packs, they discussed our bodies. Orders passed from old to young, from young to nurses, from nurses to patients. And we obeyed everyone: doctors, young and old, nurses, caterers, janitors.

  And once more, we were left waiting.

  The nurses fascinated me. I watched them, listened to them, and jotted down thought after thought. At first, I was amazed by their professionalism. They were dancers gliding through a routine. When, every quarter of an hour for a whole morning, the old lady to my left called her nurse to ask her the same question (where is Henry?), I was a little awed to see her nurse, a red-haired woman with a Polish accent, respond to each call with the same mixture of competence and care. It was in the way they never needed to run; they knew exactly how to do their job.

  Then I noted that my quiet little ward didn’t have a single male nurse, and I asked myself whether that changed their reaction to doctors. There were many female doctors walking around the hospital, but most of the doctors who came to our ward were men, and all of them were given an odd sort of impunity. When they weren’t there, the space firmly belonged to the nurses. But as soon as a man in slacks and a shirt appeared, a badge hanging from his neck, the place changed; even a student carrying his books under his arm could sidestep around three nurses, walk behind their station and consult a wad of confidential papers.

  The more I watched them, the less I noticed their work. I was certain of it: they were all avoiding Pauline, the cropped-haired, perpetually burned nurse, who talked loud enough that, deep in my corner, her voice still broke through the background whirl. They had a way of gathering in groups when she wasn’t there and splitting as soon as she came back, of sniggering, whispering and laughing that reminded me of Anna and Laura, of Jordan and Rebecca, and of all the other social queens I’d come across. Pauline, on her side, threw herself into her work. She was consciously conscientious, always commenting on how good her work was, how sloppy others’ was.

  From my bed, I tried to come to Pauline’s defence. One morning, when they were short a nurse and she was covering my bed, I called her over and told her I felt hot.

  ‘Hot, darling, of course you are. Look at how tight those blankets are! Who did that to you? You need to breathe. Here, let me get this right for you.’ She busied herself, shuffling my bedding, all the while telling me how much better it was going to be. ‘Some people don’t realise, but these blankets are heavy. You have to ask yourself what they’re thinking.’ She shook her head and tsk-tsked. ‘How’s it now?’

  ‘Much better,’ I lied.

  She put her hands on her hips:

  ‘Of course it is.’

  At the end of her shift, she was still mumbling sheets and blankets and her colleagues looked annoyed. My notebook on my lap, I gave each nurse a line and I followed their movements until I had a pattern in front of my eyes. Then, holding the paper at arm’s length, I searched the page. There was an eye and a nose here, an arm punching a wall there.

  ***

  Two weeks after I turned fifteen, I told my mother I was going to get a tattoo.

  ‘Don’t you need my permission for that?’ she asked.

  ‘Normally, but Tom knows a tattoo parlour where they don’t ask for your age.’

  ‘Is Tom getting one too?’

  ‘Paul, Tom, and me.’

  ‘And what sort are they getting?’

  ‘Tom’s getting a Maori design. And Paul’s getting the same thing.’

  ‘What are you getting?’

  ‘An eagle. Here.’ I tapped my shoulder. ‘I saw one I liked in the shop, but then I changed it. It’s better, I think. Do you want to see?’

  She studied my face. Then she turned away and I saw tears coming.

  ‘Nate, you don’t have to get one because Tom and Paul are getting one.’

  ‘I’m not! I want to get one for myself.’

  I watched her crying, and I felt like crying too, but the tears wouldn’t come.

  ‘What am I going to tell your father?’ she said.

  ‘I can talk to him.’

  She grabbed my hand:

  ‘Think about it first. Tattoos, they don’t go anywhere. You grow old, they grow old. Do you want the same tattoo when you’re sixteen, when you’re thirty, when you’re sixty? And you want to go to some tattoo parlour where they don’t check how old you are… How good are they going to be? What if they make a mess of it?’

  That night, I did as I promised her I would do: I thought about it. Every time I looked at my design (an eagle’s neck, head, and beak in as few strokes as I could manage), I yearned to have it on my shoulder. But then I remembered my mother’s words, and I told myself that she was right – it would wrinkle with age. By the morning, I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted one in the first place.

  ‘So you don’t want one anymore?’ she said.

  ‘No. I’m only fifteen. Who knows what I’ll like by the time I’m eighteen?’

  ‘Yes, exactly what I was thinking,’ she said quickly, but then she started again, a questioning, almost disappointed touch in her voice. ‘Are you sure now? You told me you were sure you wanted one last night.’

  ‘Oh, you know, that’s just Tom and Paul.’

  ‘Right, yes. You’re right, of course, tattoos look silly anyway.’ She glanced at me. When I nodded, she added: ‘You could get your ear pierced if you want.’

  ***

  I wasn’t a week in hospital by the time my mother made me watch television. She came to me, found an articulated arm tucked under the bed, and rotated it until a screen appeared in front of our eyes. Plugging in some earphones, she gave me the right, took the left, and turned the television on. It was all happening before I had time to say anything.

  ‘Daytime television,’ she said switching through the few channels available. ‘You might have to start watching Neighbours, or cooking shows even.’

  I thought of protesting but from the tense resolve in her face, I knew what she would say – this is very important, Nate, please do what I tell you, don’t argue now – at first with the same artificial ease, but as I pled my case, her words, her face would only harden up before they would budge. There was only one reasonable option: I turned away.

  We didn’t have a television at home. We’d never had one. As a child, I’d loved to visit friends’ places and sit in front of the flashing colours and brash songs. Very young, I felt left out and clamoured for our own, of course. My mother still laughs at some of the scenes I made then: the tears I shed squirming on the floor but only when my mother could see me. But I wasn’t very good at brooding. And soon I was rather proud of our lack of television. Friends would give me incredulous looks and I’d have offhand answers at the ready. Finding other things to do was easy enough: I read a lot, I drew, I played squash, tennis, cricket, football, I spent time with my brother and my friends.

  ‘There’s a special starting at 3 p.m. we should watch.’ My pulse quickened. ‘Is there anything you want to see beforehand?’

  I said nothing. Reading the dial of her dangling watch, I saw I had ten minutes to stave it off. A lot could happen in ten minutes – yes, the doctor would come and check on me. The television was showing an old American crime series, the dusty cars of my childhood shiny new on the screen, an old man inspecting a dead body, his face wrinkled in concentration. There was no doctor in sight; I decided to feign sleep and closed my eyes, letting my head sink into the pillow, hoping that my mother would leave. There was the sound of a car driving off, police sirens blared through, men shouted, a minute of theme music drew the show to its end. I turned my head away from my mother and caught my breath, as if my nose were a little blocked, and the earphone tugged at my ear before falling off onto my pillow. I couldn’t make out voices anymore but I could still hear music.

  I recognised the beat-raising tempo, the uplifting violins, the repetition and build-up. The news was on, and my heart was beating hard.

  I heard her voice: ‘Nate.’ At firs
t it was quiet, but then it was more insistent: ‘Nate!’ She knew I could hear her. ‘They had the same special yesterday. Don’t worry, it’s done tastefully. I know it’s not nice, but you need to watch it.’

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Here, put this on.’ She handed me the earphone. ‘I didn’t like it the first time either. Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’

  It was the note of hope in her voice which made me take the earphone. As if I could hear all her care and love in that note. She too feared for me, just like I did – of course, she was right, I decided; of course, she knew best. And it’s that same hope I ponder over now, as far from understanding it today as I was then. How I wish that my mother would have asked for my story outright instead of forcing me to watch it on television! I can only presume that the days she watched me with my eyes half open, staring at the ceiling, were to her a proof of my distance. Or that the hospital psychiatrist told her I wouldn’t open up to him, and that she assumed I’d behave the same way with her. But perhaps she was right to do as she did; perhaps I would have backed away had she extended an ear, in just the same way I yearned for the hand she wasn’t willing to share.

  All I know for certain is that I was caught in my desire for time and more time. I wanted to eat, draw, and close my eyes. The days to pass and the hospital to fade away. I wanted to stay in bed and go to school. Shut my eyes and hit my brother’s leg-cutter over his head. I wanted time to stretch and protect me. I wanted the pendulum to swing into ash.

  Instead, I got a newsreader’s voice in my ear. Around me, the old ladies were fast asleep, the old man was looking out of the window, and two nurses were talking to each other. I could see no way out.

  And it started.

  A sandy-blonde woman announced the start of an in-depth segment on the Hornsbury School Shooting. The words jumped off her tongue and rolled off the screen. Hornsbury School Shooting. I knew that the words ought to have some meaning, that they should trigger something: ideas, emotions, sounds and smells. But perhaps because not enough time had lapsed, or perhaps because the name of my school already carried so much meaning for me, I dismissed the construction as preposterous. I wanted to scoff at the newsreader, to scorn her lazy journalism.

  The newsreader ignored me and a man appeared on the screen, a suit standing in front of my school, right between the bus stop and the bike racks. His creamy skin and pastel tie obscured the red-brick façade, the doors I’d entered hundreds of times, the steps on which I’d eaten two years of lunches. He finished his introduction and a clip took over with its own voice-over. It panned across a horde of police cars, some with their lights still flashing, television crews dragging black cables across the lawn, and a hastily erected police line, half enforced by officers, half by reticent onlookers unwilling to get closer. Past the line, there were ambulances and working uniforms. The camera zoomed in on the entrance to the annexe: the back of a paramedic was coming out, his hands holding a stretcher carrying a covered lump. The camera zoomed out, seeking civilians, and found three teachers looking at the bodies coming out of the annexe, their faces limp with shock. And a crying man, his bald head red and bent.

  Over it all, a man spoke:

  ‘…since Dunblane…’

  The reference to other massacres stood out but I wasn’t really listening. His even and correct voice was punctuating the remoteness of the coverage. I’d come out on one of those stretchers and I didn’t remember seeing any cameras. The crowd had been smaller. The images had to have been taken when I was already on my way to the JR. I was witnessing events I hadn’t been a part of, I told myself. Events that didn’t concern me.

  The feeling was reassuring. The film cut indoors, to a classroom I’d never been taught in, one of the large rooms on the ground floor of the main building. A man gave a news conference. He wore a dark suit and a sober tie. His large square glasses climbed up towards his forehead, which creased up and down as he answered a swarm of journalists. Someone asked a tough question. He turned towards him, twitched his thick eyebrows, and reached for his glasses with his right hand. For a second, he stood in front of the cameras, in front of the flashes, silent and tweaking the frame of his glasses. Then he took them off, and twirled them between thumb and forefinger in time with his answer. Det Ch Insp Andrew Hill, the caption read alongside a time stamp: 18/02/2000.

  The film cut his answer short and moved back outside, to the frosty grass and bare trees of our sports ground. The camera shot was still: in the distance, the Kemp Annexe loomed over the ground, framed by grey branches and dark bushes, two levels tall from this angle. The groundsman’s workshop occupied the ground floor, its metal shutters drawn down, red and blue patterns painted by a long-gone class. The top floor still counted three windows, one for each classroom, and another for a mysterious cupboard I’d never seen anyone use. There was no one on the field – I could imagine the groundsman barking at anyone daring to set foot on his turf.

  The picture looked right. When every shot before had been glaringly foreign, this one looked just as it should. On the right of the shot, I could glimpse freshly painted football posts. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the camera had turned around to show two football teams passing balls around in their warm-ups.

  I felt a surge of memories coming up, my eyes drawn to one of the windows, images flashing through my mind. Bangs, wafts. Tom’s soothing gestures. The taste of metal in my mouth. The sound of a chair falling behind me. Eric’s puzzled look. The memories rushed in; I tried to cut them short, remembering the shape of the command I’d burned into my mind: ‘Don’t’. The grass, the trees, the workshop, I’d played many a football game out there. Better, I imagined the sun shining on the field, Jeffrey running in, and me standing at gully, the very same scene behind the wary batsman, an edge flying my way, a successful dive, teammates surrounding me.

  I could breathe again. My thoughts temporarily tamed, I diverted them to the journalist’s concluding statement, to his open-ended remarks.

  ‘Let’s talk about some of these questions,’ the newsreader said from her studio, half the screen devoted to her correspondent, the man in the suit in front of bricks, doors and steps. ‘It’s been nine days. Why don’t we have a better understanding of what happened inside the Kemp Annexe?’

  ‘Sarah, we simply don’t have enough witnesses,’ his voice flowed, clear and concise. ‘Two students saw Eric Knight walk through the grounds with a blue sports bag, the same bag in which police found close to fifty unused bullets, and a teacher saw him enter the Kemp Annexe. The only survivor, Nate Dillingham, is in hospital, stable, but still too feverish to speak to the police. And we know that forensic evidence was compromised when paramedics came to the survivors’ rescue.’

  ‘That’s all well and good,’ said the newsreader, ‘but what about the police? Surely, they can tell us more.’

  My lower lip hanging loose, the words trickled into my mind.

  ‘Sarah, the least we can say is that the police are being tight-lipped. Inspector Hill, who is in charge, is holding press conferences every day, but he’s not telling us anything we didn’t already know a week ago. We understand that he wants to speak with Nate Dillingham before he releases any new information.’ He looked down at something off-screen. ‘We are learning more about Eric Knight, the presumed shooter. His peers describe him as a loner prone to violent outbursts. He didn’t take well to his mother’s recent divorce. And he was sanctioned for instigating two fights last year. But no one saw this coming.’

  ‘Yes,’ the newsreader said. ‘The least we can say is that Hornsbury is a community in shock.’

  A new clip started on the screen. It started with pictures of Market Street, of the Rose and Crown, of green hills and Cotswold cottages. A door slammed shut on a journalist.

  I was about to remove my earphone but something rigid in my mother’s stance stopped me. Her hardness felt brittle all of a sudden. It was all in that hopeful quiver. Disappoint her then, when we were so close to
her goal, and I’d be dealing her a wounding blow. So I listened to strangers dissecting my life, talking about an incident they knew nothing about and people they hardly understood.

  The clip moved to the front of Eric’s home, a sixties house a mile out of Hornsbury. To an aerial view of the house and gardens, zooming in to the shed at the bottom of the hill. And then we were looking at Harry Williams, at Harry’s petulant mouth, Harry’s spanky hair, Harry’s tidy eyes. Harry who’d missed class for an orthodontist appointment. He was relaying a conversation he claimed to have had with Eric. Harry spoke with obvious relish, spitting the words to the camera.

  ‘He said, “Just watch, they’ve had it coming”. He was well angry, so I thought it means nothing. He’ll calm down. But no, he said it. “I’m going to get them all, they f—.”’

  Harry held his ‘f’ for half a second.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to swear on TV, but that’s what he said. “I’m going to get them all, they eff-ing deserve it.” He was really angry. But, you know, he was angry all the time.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ the journalist asked.

  ‘Two weeks ago, during lunch.’ His answer was quick, as if he’d rehearsed it.

  ‘And did you think of reporting it?’

  Harry stumbled: ‘Well, no, you know, I thought he was just angry. I didn’t think he’d do anything about it. Didn’t think he was that crazy. Always knew he was crazy, everyone did. But I thought he was just weird crazy, not killing people crazy.’

  And as the clip cut away to the shot of two guns, the journalist sympathised with Harry, with what ‘no student could have seen coming’.

  I couldn’t focus anymore. The thought of Harry washed away all reason. If he’d been in the room, I’d have got up and punched him – I would have tried. He deserved that and more, the bastard. Trying to be famous, what right did he have! He hadn’t even been there when Eric walked in starved and mad. What would he have done? Nothing. He would have crawled towards a corner and died there, drowning in a pool of blood and piss.