Blue-Eyed Stranger Read online

  “Three times this year and we are barely into May.” She levelled her chair off and skewered him with a gaze that was like an icicle driven through the eye. His lips went cold. “Last year it was twice before May, seven times over the summer, another three over the autumn term. I note therefore that it’s escalating. There is little point in retaining a teacher who can’t be bothered to be here.”

  “Bretwalda is young,” Martin said defensively. “My reenactment society, that is. This year is important for it to establish itself. But when it has—when it’s properly up and running—I’ll be able to ease back and let other people do some of the work.”

  The Head looked at him as though he had been trying to explain how the dog had eaten his homework. “The troubles of your private life do not concern me. I need to know that when you are employed by this school, you will actually be available to this school. I expect more from my team, Mr. Deng. I expect commitment, and I’m not sure you have it.”

  “That’s a bit rich. I spend hours at home, fact-checking the curriculum, figuring out how it can be tweaked to make it interesting and affirming for my class. I’m utterly committed to—”

  The Head raised her painted-on eyebrows at him. “And that,” she snapped, her voice so frigid it was a wonder the particles of dust in the air didn’t precipitate as snow, “that is my third point. Mr. Deng . . .”

  It was really beginning to annoy him the way she kept referring to him. Yeah, that’s my name. Don’t wear it out.

  “I must insist that you return to teaching the curriculum as it is set. No more of these wild forays into the realms of the outré. You’re giving the children a false impression of the past. A parade of freaks and exceptions do not constitute history.”

  Martin had taken the other two points relatively calmly, since they reflected on nobody but himself. Touching this one was like touching a match to petrol. He filled up with so much fire he could feel it squeezing out through his pores.

  “‘Official’ history—” Martin curled his fingers in the air to make the condemning quote marks plain “—the history they want us to teach, is nothing more than a tool designed to make every one of those kids think that if it’s not done by white men, it’s not important. You know what I found when I started looking? I found that people of colour had been here all along. We’d been doing amazing things all along, and someone deliberately took that knowledge away. Someone chose to cover those facts up to keep us in our place. I’m not teaching my kids exceptions. I’m teaching them the truth.”

  He had half risen from his seat, his fingers gripping the edge of the desk tightly as the flip side of Trisha’s joy scoured through him. Fury. Because finding out that you’d been here all along also meant finding out that you’d been lied to all this time. Deliberately lied to so you would carry on feeling small and worthless and foreign, so you would feel you had less of a right to be here than your neighbours.

  “That’s quite enough.” The Head had shrunk back into her seat. A shrill note in her voice sobered him up. He hadn’t meant to frighten her.

  She pulled a lace-edged handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her brow. “This school is in the business of making sure our children pass the exams they will need for their future. Regardless of your opinions on the veracity of the material, you will teach your class the curriculum as it is given to you. Do you understand me?”

  Oh yes, he understood. He thought again about Trisha, how her whole soul seemed to light up when she learned of Kandace of Nubia, of Nefertiti, and Hatshepsut. He would welcome an angry woman with a stone mace at his back right now.

  Could he do it? Could he teach the pap that was handed down to the kids here as history? Next year, could he watch the new faces stay closed, and live with himself knowing those kids’ hearts were withering inside with every iteration of the unspoken message that they weren’t interesting enough to make it into the books?

  But in this climate of recession, with jobs hard to come by and his father’s disappointment like Banquo’s ghost at his feast, could he refuse?

  Fury blazed and then burned out. He didn’t need this right now. He had a show to get organised. The rest of the garrison were depending on him. He could figure this one out later if he could only get away. “I understand.”

  “Good,” she said and smiled at him, driving a nail straight through his heart. “Then you may go.”

  Billy didn’t notice the light at first, as dark grey slid into pale. Mist pooled in the churchyard and dripped from yews and gravestones alike. Skeins of it floated into the porch and silvered his black trousers with dew. Every so often one of his hands lifted by itself and wiped the damp from a face that was no warmer than the stones on which he sat.

  There was no time. He’d left time behind with everything else when he sat down. Since then there had only been the creeping awareness of wet and cold and misery. The night was endless and Billy was captured by it, as dark and chill inside as the star-sprinkled void above.

  But now the sun was pushing its curves over the distant street of terraced houses where Billy lived. He could look out and see the footpath pass through the lich-gate, leap over the small runnel of water that moated the church, and widen out to run along parallel to his road. He could see the wall of his back garden with its blue-painted gate, the locked and shuttered windows of the ground-floor flat, and the marigolds in the window boxes of his kitchen.

  It was perhaps five hundred yards away. He was a well-fed, healthy young man of twenty-four, and it should be perfectly within his capability to get up, walk over to his back gate, let himself in, and go to bed.

  So do it, he thought, gathering his resolve for the thousandth time that night. Get up. Get up and walk to your house. Get up!

  But he didn’t get up. Somewhere between the intention and the action, a gear in his mind failed to mesh with its opposite. The cogs spun, but the clutch was disengaged.

  Get up!

  He pulled his knees in to his chest and rested his forehead on them. There was a brief billow of cold as the warm air he had generated around him was disturbed. It built up again slowly where he was folded in two, his belly still warmish, though there was no heat in his knees to soothe his numb face.

  This was bad. Worse than it had been for a while.

  Get up, damn you! Get up before you die of exposure. Get up. Walk home and have a bath. You can do it.

  That was a bloody lie. Other people managed to avoid spending the whole night zoned out because they’d reached the end of their strength. Other people had the resilience, the determination, to walk or even crawl to safety, when it was in sight.

  But you’re not other people. I fucking wish you were, you loser.

  Sunlight slid across the graveyard towards him, dissipating some of the mist, making the droplets glitter as they pitter-pattered from the trees. Yew berries glowed like blood spatter among the dark needles, and Billy looked at his cuffs, where the bloodstains were beginning to brown.

  He should get up.

  They’d called themselves “the beaters,” although that wasn’t at all accurate. He and Jimmy James and that fellow from the Black Bull, all employed for the day by Lady Harcombe to do the grunt work at a rabbit shoot on her estate.

  Billy had inherited his family house when he had to move his mum into the nursing home, his father long dead by that point. He had split it into three flats and kept the middle one for himself. The rent from his tenants now covered most of his bills and necessities, but he picked up work where he could to finance the rest of it—to buy little treats, to pay for lunches at fast-food vans during the summer season’s shows. To buy an occasional round, to keep the heating on an extra hour in the winter.

  So when Jimmy told him he could pick up sixty pounds for spending a day driving a party of toffs around the fields and woodlands of Harcombe House, he’d gone along like a dog to a walk, tail wagging. And yeah, there’d been something properly satisfying at taking part in such a country task, more or less
like his ancestors must have done since Anglo-Saxon times—because when the censors of the Domesday book came to Rosebery Wood, Billy’s family had already been there waiting for them.

  His mood had matched the bright morning as Mr. Carter, the gamekeeper, had given them a rundown on the task of rabbit hunting. He and Jimmy and Black Bull Man in a respectful row behind the Barbour-clad guns.

  “If you’re not sure you can get a clean shot to the head, don’t try at all,” Carter said for the third time. “We want a humane kill. The little buggers are undermining our land, killing our trees, eating the grass that’s meant to feed the deer, so they’ve got to go. That doesn’t mean we should be cruel. If you’re not confident of your aim, don’t shoot. Don’t go for any trick shots. There’s no bloody glory in bagging two at once if one of them’s suffering.”

  Carter shrugged apologetically. “Rabbit’s poor sport, I know, and we’ll set up to try for goose tonight, but at this time of year you have to take what you can get. Now gentlemen . . . and your ladyship. To your vehicles.”

  Billy hadn’t expected it to be so easy. His job was to drive a party of three guns on a predetermined route through the gorse and grass of the meadows to the west of the house, swinging round to take in a band of woodland before coming out on the emerald-green lawns that swept up to the great doors.

  Rabbits clearly did not recognise cars as a threat. They were lolloping about in the fresh May sunshine, nibbling on the lush grass, grooming their ears, and busying themselves with pressing rabbit concerns, when pfft went the silenced .22 rifles, like a man tutting against his teeth, and they fell over, quite silently.

  He had braced himself for the shots, but they were quieter than a polite lady’s sneeze. The shattering thing was the way some of the rabbits jumped when they had a bullet in their brain. Two feet off the ground, kicking wildly in an electric fit of death. Billy had watched in astonishment the first time, scarcely aware of the little snake of cold that entered his chest at the sight.

  “That’ll do,” Lady Harcombe had called when the field was pockmarked with furry corpses. She caught Billy’s uncertain eye. “You can’t risk spending too long on one field. If they notice what’s going on, next time you come they’ll all go underground at the first shot.”

  He moistened his mouth, swallowed at the thought that this happened regularly, at the thought that the animals were intelligent enough to get scared. “Right.”

  “Well, off you go and pick them up, then.”

  Perhaps that had been the most shattering thing, come to think of it—the warm paws twitching in his hands, the way the animals jerked as if they were trying to get away from him, though half their heads were gone. The warm spurting blood on his fingers, on his coat, on his cuffs.

  Billy hauled himself out of the memory, put his hands between his knees, and felt like a cancer cell in the body of the universe—something that needed to be destroyed. He was a country boy, through and through. How could he be so pathetic as to mind a little blood? Two of those rabbits were in his freezer right now, a bonus on top of his pay, and he was going to eat them. He was. Because what else was meat for?

  His dad would be ashamed if he were still alive to see it. His mum, who had raised chickens and wrung their necks when the time came, would also be ashamed. Billy was ashamed.

  He was ashamed, and that was why he couldn’t get up.

  But it wasn’t the only reason. After all, he had got himself back from the shoot okay, put the rabbits in the freezer, and started making lunch with something like a normal person’s aptitude. The church bells were the real culprit.

  Billy had checked his watch while he waited for his toast to pop and found out he was already ten minutes late for his regular slot showing the tourists around Rosebery church. He’d just turned the flames out under the beans in the pan and left.

  Generally he enjoyed the church, enjoyed showing visitors around it, explaining the differences between the very earliest Saxon stonework with its mock-wooden joists, the round-topped Norman arches and the later perpendicular architrave added on by Sir Hubert Harcombe when the abbey gifted the village of Rosebery Wood to the Lord of Trowchester in exchange for the eel-fishing rights on Peover Marsh.

  Billy had a fund of historical information and local folklore to draw on, and usually managed to inform and entertain the tourists enough to earn a fiver or two in tips from each party. But today the bell ringers had been practising for an upcoming wedding and the walls had shaken with the clamour of harsh metallic voices, bellowing.

  He’d had to shout his anecdotes until his head and throat hurt. People had shouted questions back at him, and he couldn’t pick out the words from the bellowing of the bells.

  He’d tried to keep it together, honestly he had. Not hard enough. But it . . . it shook him apart, all the noise. It got hooks into the fabric of him and teased and pulled all the threads until they began to unravel and unravel and fray and snap and . . .

  The noise, the clamour, the discord, had shaken his tight grip open. The world had fallen out from his grasp because his skull was splitting and the noises were everywhere and everything was cracking and he couldn’t fit it together again because it had shattered into too many shapes and there was no picture and there were no edge pieces and he couldn’t make his fingers close on them anyway because his fingers had burst into too many shapes too.

  So he’d locked the door behind the last curious couple and given them a perfunctory wave good-bye. Then he’d sat down.

  He’d meant to sit down only for a moment, to use the peace for which he had been parched to refresh himself before he went home. But the thought of home was forbidding. When he felt this flayed, the mere living aura of his lodgers was like a cheese grater being drawn across his skin. Mrs. Webb’s heavy presence above his head was saddening but tolerable. Mr. Kaminski, in the flat beneath his, was not. The man looked like a threat, sounded like a Russian mobster. His pressed suits talked of civilization, but there was something about his eyes that spoke of having seen men die, maybe of having killed them himself. Kaminski looked at Billy like the guns had looked at the rabbits, like a man looks at a small, nervous thing he intends to kill cleanly when the time comes.

  Billy had taken a moment to nerve himself up to face that. And then . . . well. And then the black dog had come. It was sitting here with him, filling his mind with the fog of its breathing, sleeping heavy on his chest. So heavy.

  He should get up. Something, something was happening today, he could almost put a name to it. Would, if his head was not so weighed down by the claws of the beast.

  He didn’t understand why he didn’t get up when he knew he wanted to. He was a fundamentally wrong thing, a mistake, a freak of nature, and he was so tired. He was so tired of his miserable self, his miserable wretched self that could not get up.

  But thinking of freaks stirred something to life in his head. What was it he was supposed to be doing today? Something flappy, black like a crow, spiralling to the ground on broken wings. What was . . .?

  Creaking with the effort, like rusted train wheels grinding themselves loose, he thought, It’s Trowchester show tomorrow.

  Ten minutes later, when the sunlight had reached across the porch floor, groped up his body, and lain reassuring fingers on his cheeks, he added, And it’s tomorrow today.

  The words jogged something free. Wasn’t he supposed to be at the meeting point in Werrington, all kitted up and with the sticks, at half past nine in the morning?

  The warmth on his face lifted some of the mist inside him. He tilted his closed eyes up to it and opened like a sunflower.

  Fuck yes. Yes, he was.

  He checked his watch. It was eight fifteen. He had enough time. Just. If he ran to his house and changed his clothes, ate yesterday’s toast for breakfast, strapped the sticks on his bike and pedalled like mad, he might make it yet.

  First you’ve got to get up.

  He let go of his knees. He put his feet down on the ground and
slowly but surely he pushed himself upright until he was standing, cold as death and surprised as always to find out there was nothing physically wrong with him at all.

  He took a stumbling step forward, his ankles almost turning under him, and it worked. His body answered his mind’s commands again. He could walk.

  Shoving all the darkness back into its place, he stamped on the lid of it until he could latch it down with the faulty catch—the world’s least-entertaining jack put back into its box for the moment.

  God, don’t let them go without me! He took a deep, astonished breath, and started to run.

  An hour and a quarter later, Billy slammed on the brakes outside Werrington church hall just as the van was leaving the car park. He hurled himself off his bike and ran into the centre of the road, waving his arms. The minibus lurched to a halt with a grind of gears, and he saw Matt at the wheel, looking at him like a man who’s just woken up and realised he’s missing an arm.

  While the minibus backed apologetically into a parking space, Billy locked his bike to a lamppost and unstrapped the stick bag from his carrier. His back tyre looked considerably worse for wear after carrying the weight of twelve long ash sticks and a further six short ones. Billy’s legs weren’t too happy about it either. Next time, one of the blokes with a car could bring the sticks.

  “Sorry, Billy!” Parked again, Matt rolled the window down and hung a white-shirted elbow over it. “I thought you were on board already.”

  “No problem.” Billy smiled through the residual panic, disappointed but not surprised that nobody had noticed he was missing. “Can someone—”

  The doors at the back swung open, pushed by Graham and Pete. Billy passed them the sticks and clambered inside, over the dozen bags that cluttered the aisle and jingled when he nudged them with his feet. Nancy’s drum in its carrying case stood like a small table in front of the only spare seat. Both seat and drum had been piled with ragged jackets, Colin’s cameras, and the blacking kit.