A Week in December Read online

  Moving Miranda back out of the room with the D and C keys on her computer, Jenni got her on to the terrace, where she pressed the E to fly away, high above the city of Caracas, through the beautiful moonlit night and back to her sparkling new house.

  In reality, or True Life as his fellow gamers called it, Jason Dogg was a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher called Radley Graves. He taught English at a comprehensive school in the Lewisham/Catford overlap.

  He stared at the screen of his computer, from which Miranda Star had so rudely vanished. Bitch. His flat was in a modern development that overlooked the Thames near Kingston Bridge. Though small, it was bright and well looked after. When he’d been for his run on a Saturday, Radley vacuumed it and made sure his books and DVDs were in order; once a week, a man came in to give it what Radley called a ‘deep clean’.

  When he discovered that Miranda Star had logged off, he was angry. He was hoping that she’d be impressed by him and would want to see him again; he’d meant no harm by having sex in the nightclub: it was just a bit of fun. He sensed Miranda was a prude, and this made him more intrigued by her. Most of the women in Parallax had breasts the size of cantaloupes, held in place by strips of bright material; they favoured rings through every visible cartilage. Radley had never looked at the female ur-maquettes, but he guessed this one was pretty much off the shelf: an entry-level model barely improved by her real-life godmother. She excited him.

  Why had she vanished? Most people he’d met online were blasé about sex, which – apart from hard-core paedos or whatever – was something gamers pretty soon grew out of, once they’d tried it a few times. Also, the other people in Parallax admired his bespoke genitals, which had cost 300 vajos; Miranda hadn’t even commented.

  Although it was late, Radley went out to take a night bus into town. The double-decker was empty apart from a few fifteen-year-old drunks. They didn’t frighten him. Radley’s regular visits to the school gym had layered muscle on to his back and shoulders. He could bench-press more than any of the other teachers, including Paul Watts, the PE man. He didn’t smoke, and although he drank a fair amount to help him through the day, he jogged in Bushy Park three times a week with a twenty-pound pack on his back.

  Teaching wasn’t a career that Radley Graves had foreseen when he left school with a handful of exam passes and a desire to travel. An only child, the by-blow of a sales rep on a one-night encounter, he had been brought up by his mother in a pebble-dashed house in Malden. His natural father made small, rare contributions to the housekeeping, as did his mother’s live-in lover, a Scotsman called Colin, who ran a ‘self-storage’ warehouse off the A3. For weeks at a time Colin would ignore Radley. When he came home from work at about five, he sat in the lounge in front of the only television, smoking efficiently and drinking tea. On Fridays the adults went to the pub and Radley was able to watch a programme of his own choosing; sometimes on a Saturday Colin dragged Radley to see Crystal Palace at home and bought him a pie and a scalding cup of tea at the ground.

  The night bus took Radley to Southwark, where there was a pub he knew that stayed open. It had once been a haunt of lightermen and dockers from downstream; then, when that world had ended, they’d tried to make a feature of its waterside position by opening a dining room that sold fish and chips. The restaurant failed and the natural clientele remained the same: nightbirds who fetched up on the cold stone flags of the public bar when they’d finished their nocturnal business. Some were criminals and some just worked unsocial hours; porters from Borough Market went there from four in the morning. The room smelled of damp straw and hot animal, like a stable; customers endured the vindictive landlady and her husband because in defiance of the new law they allowed their regulars to smoke.

  Among the bedraggled clubbers, burglars and nightwatchmen, Radley Graves stood out in his neat sports-casual clothes. He sat with a pint of bitter and thought about his life.

  The problem with it was that the effort of living it – the early trains, the 8.30 roll call, the jammed timetable, the trying to protect his back, the weekend preparations – left him no time to climb outside and take a look at himself. He couldn’t think about a better job, a different life, because the alarm was always dragging him from sleep, the deadline for half-term reports was always yesterday. As for the drag of ‘coursework’ ... The ‘C-word’ they called it in the staffroom.

  His Tuesday had started well. He had an off-lesson and was able to prepare his other periods in the Communications Team staffroom. Anya, the new woman, had brought in some almond biscuits (they’d given her £10 each at the start of term to keep supplies up) and he made a mug of instant coffee, black. The departmental staffroom was strip-lit, small and gave off the kids’ computer suite, so privacy was minimal. Radley had preferred the old, gigantic all-staff place with carpets and a television, but it had been required for indoor sports facilities. The outdoor playground stretched as far as a twenty-foot-high wire fence; on the other side of it were the extensive playing fields, both AstroTurf and cropped grass, of the local private school. Days passed with no child of any kind seen on them, but their use was forbidden to the comprehensive, whose pupils could only gaze at them through their retaining mesh.

  Radley Graves taught the lower years mostly, though he had a Year 11, GCSE, set as well. English had been fused with modern foreign languages and media studies under the banner of Communications, and this was something Radley felt he knew about. His training had focussed on the politics of race, gender and class, with hardly a mention of pupil management or lessons. These things had to be learned on the job, and initially Radley had found it difficult. At his first school, he’d twice been suspended and sent to anger management courses. Eventually, a senior colleague took pity and explained the principle of control. ‘Never lock on. Never engage one-to-one. You can’t win a battle of egos. Speak softly. Stay respectful. Answer without sarcasm, and if they won’t co-operate, don’t rebuke them. Never, ever raise your voice above a four out of ten.’

  It took some practice. Radley didn’t approve of the system because he felt it admitted that the teachers had ceded control to the pupils. The kids were allowed to come in late to lessons; and, after having once been threatened with a sexual harassment suit, Radley never again asked a girl pupil what had kept her. They were allowed to talk pretty much unchecked throughout a class, though if you could quell the noise by a soft and a generalised appeal, that was all right; what was not permitted was to single out the talker by name. They were allowed not to work if they didn’t fancy it, though they could be gently reminded once. Swearing was permitted, unless it had racial or sexual overtones: Abir could call Radley himself a bastard but couldn’t call Mehreen, who sat next to her, a bitch.

  The corridors between lessons were a hard-hat zone, best avoided. The tiny first-year girls of barely four foot tall clung like shadows to the wall as raging fat six-footers of both sexes surged past them, heavy bags swinging, shouting down the length of the yellow and blue corridors. A bell rang, and Radley waited for the fireworks to stop going off in the stairwell before he made his way to the classroom. The moulded plastic chairs were set in twos at wipe-clean Formica-topped desks; only the carpet tiles, with brown mysterious stains, showed signs of the restless human traffic. The GCSE class came in, as it willed: Aaron, Abir, Alex, Arusha, Ben, Darryl, David, Ezra, Ian, Jasmine, Jordan, Ladan, Laila, Marcus, Mehreen, Michael, Nathan, Nawshad, Nooshin, Ocado, Paul, Pratap, Rubina, Ryan, Sangita, Sherin, Simon, Zainun.

  Radley wrote the names of the missing three on a whiteboard under the half-hearted word: Warning. He joined in the universal talking, then began to dominate – and slowly it became a lesson. He breathed deeply in order to keep his voice at four or less on the volume scale. This trick he’d borrowed from Anya, who did yogic breathing in the staffroom before class; Pat Wilder just took tranquillisers – little yellow ones from a rattling bottle.

  That afternoon the school was playing football against St Michael and All Angels, ‘
St Mick’s’ – one of the few fixtures to have survived the work-to-rule that banned teachers from staying after school. This meant that Ocado, the most brutally effective midfielder in the school, was allowed not to take his medication. Usually, this caused him to become uncontrollable and he had to be taken outside to a secure location before kick-off. So far today he’d been all right, Anya reported, though he’d used the internal window that divided all the classrooms from the corridor, to expose his genital piercing to the Year 13 French revision class.

  ‘Sir, you’re such a dork,’ said Sangita as Radley placed a photocopied sheet on her desk.

  ‘Really?’ he said, the model of mildness. ‘And what’s a dork?’

  ‘You know. Like a nerd?’

  ‘Dick more like,’ said David.

  Radley didn’t allow himself to hear, as ‘dick’ was arguably a sexual word. He went back with calm slow steps to the laptop at his desk and made a few lines of text appear on the whiteboard.

  ‘Why aren’t you writing, Aaron? Is something wrong?’

  ‘To be quite honest wiv you, sir, I got writer’s block.’

  ‘Sir, is that a love bite on your neck?’

  ‘No. Now listen up, everybody. What can you tell me about Billy Elliot? Sherin?’

  ‘Is he like gay, sir?’

  In the break Anya discovered her mobile phone had been stolen, but was unable to search the suspect’s bag because it would be a ‘violation of his rights’, he claimed. A loud noise was heard coming from Pat Wilder’s classroom, where Ocado was banging Jordan’s head against a metal locker. Radley telephoned the gym and asked Paul Watts, the PE man, to take Ocado under his wing until kick-off at 2.30.

  ‘Can’t do that, mate,’ said Watts. ‘He’s only just back from a three-day exclusion.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Having sex in the toilets with Sophie Rees. It was five days but they got it down to three because it was only oral. Sorry, Radley. Your kid.’

  When Anya volunteered to watch Ocado, Radley made himself another cup of instant coffee. ‘What happened to your neck, Pat?’ he said. ‘It’s all black and blue.’

  ‘I was taking the Year 10 French group on the Tube to a French film,’ said Pat Wilder. ‘They said Tony had disappeared at Tottenham Court Road station, so I stuck my head out to check and they pressed the “Close Doors” button and they trapped my neck.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I couldn’t see. My head was stuck. There’s a note for you by the way.’ He stiffly handed Radley a piece of paper.

  ‘Dear Sir, I am sorry I behaved like I did. I was disrespecting you. I interrupted you and I should not of said what I said about sucking Ocado’s cock. I am tuely sorry. I don’t blame you that you walked out. I will show you I am better than this, sir. I am really sorry. You are a good teacher. Yours Selima Wilson.’

  The lesson before lunch was quiet and Radley escaped school briefly to the Lion’s Head, which he entered via the car park and the toilets to avoid being seen. He drank two barley wines and ate a chicken pie with gravy and frozen peas. He had only one more class, a cover for an absent colleague of a Year 12 group.

  The alcohol in his blood helped him to stay calm and he ate several strong mints on the way back to school. Two boys whose names he didn’t know had already locked horns by the time he arrived in class.

  ‘You’re gay,’ said one repeatedly.

  ‘Enjoyed your mum last night,’ said the other.

  This made the others, mostly girls, snigger. Radley had heard this taunt before; it wasn’t confined to children with young or tarty mothers, he’d noticed. In fact it seemed more effective when it wasn’t.

  ‘Gay.’

  ‘Your mum.’

  There was an explosive noise as one boy grabbed the other round the throat. The girls screamed in fear and enjoyment as the two boys rolled on the ground, punching and kicking. Radley hauled one off and slammed him back against the wall. Then he marched him to the back of the room and sat him down alone. The other boy, the mother-enjoyer, had a thin trickle of blood coming from the corner of his lip.

  ‘You sit over there,’ said Radley.

  ‘Sir, I need to go and—’

  ‘Do what you’re told,’ said Radley, his voice nearer to an eight than a four.

  The boy went.

  At the end of the lesson, Radley made them both stay behind.

  ‘I don’t want you doing that again,’ he said.

  ‘Mind your own fucking business.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. We know where you live.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Radley. ‘And in any case, I wouldn’t recommend it.’

  There was something in his voice the boys responded to; the air went out of them.

  ‘Anyway ...’ said one.

  They tried to find a surly way of leaving without losing face.

  ‘Yeah, exactly. To be honest wiv you ... Anyway,’ said the other.

  They shambled off.

  ‘Yes. Exactly,’ said Radley, loudly, so they heard.

  He felt a sense of power and determination. That Miranda tart, she’d disrespected Jason Dogg as well.

  V

  In Ferrers End, Ralph Tranter was busy knocking out a review for The Toad. It was of a book he’d already reviewed under his own name in Vista, a new monthly magazine, and he was keen to put the record straight for Toad readers, to sweep up any crumbs of comfort the author might have taken from his signed piece.

  He enjoyed reviewing, and over the years had developed a facility for it. One of the secrets was to allow your view of the book to colour your account of it, so that rather than have a schoolboy précis bracketed by an evaluation in the first and final paragraphs, the whole thing was a compound of description and judgement. Sometimes, of course, you had to stand back to make your points more firmly; such, for instance, had been the case with A Winter Crossing by Alexander Sedley. The derision that Tranter felt then couldn’t be contained within the usual framework. He felt obliged to draw the reader to one side to let him into the full horror of the con trick that was Sedley, A. He had given it both barrels, then sent out for another gun. ‘Provincial, narrow Englishness ... garlanded with praise from all the usual suspects of the metropolitan snob brigade ... workaday psychological observations ... unintentionally hilarious juxtapositions ... embarrassing purple passages.’

  Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked. While one or two other reviewers agreed that it was disappointing that Sedley seemed to have made nothing up, most of them had enjoyed the book and looked forward to more from a ‘promising first-timer’. Tranter wasn’t surprised by this supine response; it merely goaded him into further action. His Toad piece a fortnight later went through the reviewers one by one and pointed out that they were all Sedley’s old university chums (there was no need in an anonymous review to mention his own college connection to the editor of The Toad) and suggested that those Sedley hadn’t actually bribed were members of a loose homosexual coterie. The fact that Sedley, so far from being gay, was married to a notably good-looking consultant oncologist and was the father of four meant nothing to Tranter, since Sedley’s type were always on for some queer stuff; it was part of their education.

  But nothing, it seemed, could stop the bandwagon. A few weeks later, the wretched book made it into the preliminary list of six for that year’s Café Bravo first novel prize. This called for more intense guerrilla action, Tranter felt. From a listings magazine, he saw that Sedley would be reading from his ‘highly acclaimed’ novel at a bookshop in Hampstead at 5.30 on a Friday, and by 5.10 Tranter had placed himself on the end of a row of chairs in the centre of the aisle with a glass of free Rioja.

  Sedley arrived late, looking flustered. The traffic had been terrible, he explained to the bookshop manager, as he quickly downed a glass of wine before facing the dauntingly full book-shop.

  ‘Hello, Alexander,’ said Tranter, sidling in to where the author stood preparing himself behind the travel section. �
��How’s things? You’re a bit late.’

  Sedley seemed to gasp and swallow. ‘I ... er ... I didn’t expect to see you here. You know ... A ... er, a fellow professional, as it were. It’s normally just, you know, readers.’

  ‘Oh no, I really wanted to drop in. I only live just up the road.’ The A1 anyway, he thought.

  The strangest thing that Tranter had discovered over the years was that if at a party or a literary festival you accosted someone whose work you had slagged off in print, he didn’t punch your nose or pour his drink over you. On the contrary, he always wanted to be your friend. Presumably he felt that by kneeing you in the groin he might lose face; and for these ‘poor saps’, keeping face, or trying to recover what he’d tried to strip them of in print, was all that mattered.

  ‘Anyway, good luck,’ said Tranter and went back to his position in the aisle.

  Sedley went to the lectern and began nervously, with an explanation of why he wrote and how he had come to write A Winter Crossing in particular.

  Tranter began to yawn, aware that he was in Sedley’s eyeline. Then Sedley began to read in his posh, slightly tremulous voice, a description of his relationship with his stern father or something. Tranter raised an incredulous eyebrow and looked round the audience to enlist their fellow feeling. This chap had to be joking, didn’t he?

  Sedley took an admiring question from a sturdy woman in a bobble hat, then launched into a ‘party scene’ in which the blood-less hero proved unaccountably attractive to some willowy girl.

  During this sequence, Tranter upped the volume of his yawns so that they became more like groans of incredulity. Half the audience turned to look at him and he noticed Sedley’s eyes also lift from the page. There was an embarrassing hiatus when he tried to find his place again. As he resumed his reading, Tranter glanced round again and this time spread both his arms out wide in a gesture of ‘I mean, come on, what is this already?’ There was a slight answering titter from behind, and the reddening Sedley once again glanced up from his book.