The Detective's Daughter

4

January 1985

A tufty man called a Head Master squeezed his shoulder, bunching his blazer and pinching his skin, before pushing him into a steamy room of staring faces. Jonathan did not like to be touched and squirmed out of his grip. The faces fuzzed and zoomed before him, until a round pudgy one came into focus and Jonathan landed in a chair beside him. A woman’s voice called this boy Simon. Later he found out that the boy’s other name was ‘Stumpy’, the same as the brother of Pigling Bland who was taken off in a wheelbarrow. The voice whispered that Simon knew the ropes and would look after him. He did not need rope and waited for his daddy to say so.

The chair had rough edges which scratched the backs of his legs. He was told to sit right up to the table. He looked to see where Daddy was sitting.

He had gone.

Jonathan tried to get up but the Simon boy was in the way. The name ‘Justin’ was on the blackboard and the voice, which he saw belonged to an old woman, told the boys to greet the new boy:

‘He-llo, Just-in,’ they chanted in straggling unison.

Jonathan said nothing because he was not Justin. This mistake made him hopeful he was in the wrong place and that soon his daddy would come for him. Anyway, the boy who was Justin would want his chair back. He tentatively raised his hand to explain this but the Simon boy grabbed his wrist with nails as sharp as Brunel’s claws and left four marks like smiles on his skin. Surreptitiously – or the boy might see – he licked them. They tasted of pocket money, which was no comfort. If he tried to leave again the Simon boy would make more smiles.

The teacher said she was Miss Thoroughgood. Jonathan imagined the name as a great nodding daisy with splaying petals. He associated names of things and people with colours, creating disparate groups according to their hue. After this, his first day at boarding school, the process would also work in reverse: white daisies would evoke the overweight woman in her late fifties who had been his form teacher, and lower his mood.

Miss Thoroughgood wrote her name on the blackboard in squeaky letters. The other boys already knew it so they watched him, snorting behind their hands and pulling faces while the teacher had her back to the class. The name – being long – went on and on and he blushed, growing hot as he tried to copy it on the cover of the exercise book on his desk. His fingers slid down his pencil and, scared to look up, he made up the rest.

Thorpettitoes.

The name of the mother of the eight little pigs in The Tale of Pigling Bland. Jonathan felt a dull foreboding in his tummy and to make it go away he imagined the birthday cake his mummy had made. Open mouths around the table ready to gobble him up. He screwed up his eyes.

The other boys had already been at the preparatory school in the Sussex countryside for a term. The little boy understood, more or less, that it would be better for all concerned that he come here. The headmaster had said he was ‘the spitting image of his lovely mother and going to be tall like his father’. These facts were important to Jonathan: such are the facts and phrases small children overhear and collect to form an incoherent reality.

Another fact: he was not Justin and, certain of this at least, Jonathan believed that once he explained the Daisy-Lady would let him go home.

Forty-five minutes went by. The seven-year-old was proficient at reading the time and no longer talked of big or little hands. Justin did not come and nor did his father.

The lady said it was Morning Break. This he knew about: he sang it with his mummy:

The teacher told the boys to form a crocodile. Now the mistake would come to light; Jonathan sprang up and tucked his chair in.

‘File out two by two,’ Thorpettitoes demanded shrilly.

Jonathan was bewildered. Other boys jostled, and shoving him into line the boy called Simon took his hand. ‘Now Pigling Bland, son Pigling Bland, you must go to market. Take your brother Alexander by the hand. Mind your Sunday clothes, and remember to blow your nose.’

Miss Thoroughgood, presuming insurrection, commanded that at the end of break, at the first whistle they must be still as statues and at the second whistle, walk sensibly to the classroom.

Jonathan gazed disconsolately at colourless sky through a window above a map of the world stuck with drawing pins. Fact: he knew the names of eleven countries. The boys were shouting; the teacher was at the head of the crocodile.

The daisies in the garden reached his shoulder and were gold in the middle before they disappeared. His daddy said they were spreading and that grass was less trouble to maintain so he did not mention that his mummy had planted them or that he did not like green grass however little trouble it was to maintain.

Crocodiles were green and slid secretly underwater after their prey. The classroom door bashed him when the boy in front let it go. He held it for a boy with a runny nose who stepped on his heel, pulling off his shoe. The boy did not say sorry. Jonathan bent to do up his laces.

‘We are going to be last.’ Simon squeezed his fingers tight.

The playground was behind the neo-Gothic mansion and a trek from the classroom. The twenty boys crocodiled across a quadrangle of cobblestones. It was a flaw in the conversion from private house to institution that the cloakroom could only be reached by a circuitous route involving going outside without coats. The boys’ pinched faces were whipped by a harsh wind off the South Downs that swirled leaves and twigs around their grey-socked legs. They were not allowed to run.

Jonathan turned his ankle on the wet cobbles; his new shoes cut into his shins and rubbed the back of his heels. He longed to break free from Simon’s grip. An oblong of dry stones lay where his daddy’s car had been.

‘We eat here.’ Simon waved his other hand at a hall with a fireplace the size of a doorway. A table stretched away and high above were rafters.

‘I won’t be here,’ Jonathan informed him confidently.

‘Yes you will.’

Half of Simon’s finger was missing. Jonathan wrenched his hand away, revolted by what was not there, but Simon recaptured him and held him fast.

‘Don’t do that again.’

He concentrated instead on the ceiling beams. His daddy had told him about the principle of the Action of Forces. Fact: builders put a short distance between each beam to keep the load to a minimum. Jonathan would tell the boys this. He was startled by a clacking like bullets and saw the lady who had been nice when they arrived behind the counter. She was busy with her typing and did not see him this time.

The boys barged through a green baize door that closed by itself.

They clattered along a tiled passage with a vaulted ceiling, their voices deafening him. One boy exclaimed in disgust at the greasy cooking smell, the others imitated him until the teacher silenced them. There was no daylight and Jonathan pretended they were in a dungeon, the walls hung with chains. It was not hard.

The cloakroom smelled of cheese and the coats hung like roosting birds from giant hooks. Simon led him to one labelled ‘Justin’. Jonathan said nothing because he recognized his own coat.

They were on a stretch of grey asphalt with a gravel path around it and on one side a sloping grassy bank with a beech hedge with leaves of burnt umber: Jonathan’s favourite colour.

The Daisy teacher was chatting to a lady with a chin like the moon and Jonathan wondered if they were talking about him because suddenly they looked at him. He smiled but they did not smile back, and he took heart from this: perhaps his wish had come true and he was invisible.

Simon let him go and ran off to join in a game of football. Beyond the hedge, Jonathan saw hills speckled with frost and splodged with dark patches for woods. He trailed around the pitch gravitating towards a female blackbird hopping along the hedge with a stick the same length as herself in her beak. His mummy had called him Pig Wig for eating too much cake and he said that Pig Wig was a girl and the cake was his. The blackbird flew away over the hills. Pigling Bland and Pig Wig escaped from Thomas Piperson. Jonathan could be Pigling Bland and Pig Wig; that way he would not be alone. He wished for wings, but nothing happened because he had run out of wishes.

A football slammed into his chest. Jonathan kept upright and pretended he was fine, tripping over the ball at his feet. The boys were waiting for him to kick it back into the game but he could not breathe and his inaction decided even the kinder ones that the new pupil was after all an enemy:

‘Sissy.’

‘Four-eyes.’

He snatched at his spectacles but Simon threw them into the air. Eventually he discovered them in the grass. Mummy did not know about his new spectacles. He escaped up the slope to a flower bed with no flowers. He identified rosemary, lavender and rhododendron bushes and then found a gate in the hedge and, beyond, a muddy path with brambles that twisted out of sight. He gripped the top and fitted his foot into a space in the metal but then stopped. He would be quickly captured; now was not the time.

Jonathan returned to the flower bed where he found a spider completing a web strung between a seeding thistle, fluffy like sheep’s wool, and a tall cane. He counted the threads that connected the spans. There were ten on one segment, nineteen on another and twelve on a third. The number would relate to the stress on each section between its points of suspension. He nudged the thistle with his sore hand and the web trembled, making the spider stop its work. His daddy told him that spiders were natural engineers; their intricate structures of viscous material were wind- and water-resistant so that although the web oscillates in difficult conditions it remains intact. If there were boys here, he could explain: ‘You let out a thread until it floats and finds a petal or a wall or this wood. It is sticky so it will catch and hold, then you run along the line giving out more thread to make it strong. Once you have your baseline, it’s easy.’

He had lots of facts, he promised his audience: his birthday is on 15 March and he once had a hedgehog cake with lolly sticks for spikes. He has a train set with signals and a tunnel and his daddy builds bridges. His daddy was here but he has gone. This was not, Jonathan considered, strictly speaking a fact.

Then he thought that perhaps it was.

He scraped at the soil with a stick. A beetle made its way over the crinkly terrain of a leaf; tumbling, it tipped over, righted itself and scurried on. Jonathan captured it.

‘A spider can eat its own weight in food. This beetle is, as you see, nearly the size of the spider so will last it a long time. Fact: spiders can survive up to a year without eating.’

He held the beetle in his loosely clenched fist. Some children could not bear this, girls especially, he informed the boys. They thought him particularly brave when he told them that the six beetle legs tickled inside his hand but he did not care. He flicked the beetle at the web. It was heavy and fell short. Jonathan had not expected this and the flow of his lecture faltered. He tried again, bringing it closer and watched with satisfaction when the black casing opened and the whirring wings caught on the last span. The beetle tried to break free and only became more entangled. Jonathan, hugged his knees and breathing deeply, commented: ‘If it had not panicked it might be alive. This behaviour is common in humans.’

The spider moved inexorably towards its prey along the threads, landings and staircases, up-down-along-up-down-across. Jonathan’s new trousers were tight over his legs and made his skin prickle. His hand hurt only when he pressed the marks. The spider began work on the insect and soon its beetle-shape was lost in a silken bag like a well-disguised present. The spider crouched on top of the lump.

‘It’s sucking out the blood.’ Jonathan remarked airily.

‘He’s a nutcase, now he’s talking to himself.’

Jonathan pitched face forward on to the soil. His glasses ground into his eye sockets and he was pulled over on to his back. Simon bounced on his stomach, thrashing the air with the thistle stalk as if he was a riding a horse. Strands of cobweb floated around them. The beetle lay amongst the mulch of rotting leaves. The spider was dead.

Jonathan heard the whistle but did not obey the rule about being a statue; instead he limped away over the grass. The second whistle shrieked and he dreamed of flying over the hills and far away.

‘You are my prisoner.’

Simon tied his arms behind the goalpost. Jonathan interlocked his fingers and thought of his mummy.

‘Hold tight. Look right and left and right again.’

‘You are going to burn to death on the stake. Stay there while I get matches.’ Simon banged Jonathan’s head against the post.

‘We have to go in,’ Jonathan gasped.

‘You will die.’

A fact.

A cold weather front was heading in from the English Channel and the sky darkened, colours muted to greys and greens. In the silence of the empty playground the little boy listened for his father’s car, positive he would know it because of what his father called the dodgy exhaust.

Miss Thoroughgood was on the cusp of retirement. She had little appetite for exercising authority and had not counted in her charges, so she failed to see that the new boy was missing.

The wind ballooned the goal netting and rattled the beech hedge; it stripped the last leaves off the horse-chestnut tree and sent them swirling across the pitch. A thickening blanket of cloud descended. A master glanced out of the staffroom window and spotted a kid cutting lessons.

‘Hey you, young man! Get inside or I’ll serve you detention.’

‘What’s that, young sirs? Stole a pig? Where are your licences?’

Jonathan made a final wish and, wriggling, found that he was not tied up; he raised his leg and took a step. He could walk. He was free. He looked at the stake to which he had been tied and saw that there was no rope. A warmth was travelling down the inside of his thighs, like a flame licking, the material darker where the heat had spread. He ran along the path, his arms stiff like a tin soldier, his wool trousers chafing his inner thigh and the warmth turned to ice.

He flung open a door marked ‘Toilets’, smashing it against the wall, and skidded to a stop by the urinals. He fumbled with his fly although there was no point. When he twisted on the tap over the sink a deluge of water spattered up over his face, down his jacket and the front of his trousers. He was wet everywhere. Jonathan had enough presence of mind to see that this was useful. He raced through the smelly dungeon, pushed on the green door in the hall, ducked his head as he passed the high desk and burst out into the freezing entrance, all the time alert for an ambush.

He thought he had been away for a very long time but the crocodile was only outside the classroom door.

‘Justin! What did I say about two whistles? You’re soaking!’

‘I washed my hands after the playground.’ He was hoarse.

He threaded his way between the desks to the chair that was not his chair. The boy called Simon gestured with his stumpy finger and Jonathan looked down at the sodden fabric; he had forgotten to do up his flies.

‘Mummy’s boy wet himself!’

Jonathan sat up straight, waiting for Justin to come to claim his seat. He told himself that he could easily survive for a year without eating.