Chalk Read online

  Waggoner was shown the shape of the downs that night. He walked the bounds of the hill fort itself. He saw where those who stood guard on that special night were hiding, ready to emerge when the time was right. He exchanged a few words with one of them. She told him she was the one chosen to go ahead, that she was ready to do her duty in the next life. He was shown what I called the quarry, where some workings had once been cut into the hill fort, and a little water comes to the surface and winds down through the gravel, and the grass around is soggy, apart from at the height of summer. Here it was a rough pool of wet grass, desperately lapped from when those who were trapped there couldn’t venture beyond the hill fort. Outside the bounds of the fort, he saw an ancient chalk horse, just a cluster of wild lines, a horse undreamt of by archaeologists, where there was now the newer, more polite one. Its eye shone with potency. He was taken to the bowl barrow, far from the hill fort, and found it was now a round barrow, with something inside waiting to be born. He saw a small, shiny rock in its own crater, the edges of which were worn down by ritual, the rock itself polished by the same care. It was what we’d call a meteorite, missing completely from the modern downs, perhaps taken by some collector. Dried blood covered the ground all around, but the rock itself was kept pure, a prized possession of the people. At a lesser distance from the hill fort itself, he was shown the round house of sacrifice, a hut with the door locked, with desperate cries coming from inside.

  Waggoner was given several things to take back with him. He solemnly put them in his pockets.

  * * *

  When Mum came in in the morning, she found that the curtains were open. She closed them quickly, then opened them again. I was already awake. I told her I’d washed the clothes overnight. She told me off for a bit, talking around and around it, frightened . . . but she didn’t ask any questions. When she’d gone, I looked under the blankets, and pulled my pyjama trousers down. I hoped it would all be gone, that I’d be whole again.

  I wasn’t. There was the wound that I would live with all my life.

  Then I realised. Someone was in bed with me. Waggoner was lying there. He was real. I wasn’t inside his head any more, like I’d been when I was asleep. He pulled down his pyjama trousers and showed me he was whole.

  ‘Why wasn’t I healed?’ I asked.

  ‘You can only be healed when your revenge is complete.’

  I didn’t know if I believed him. I was afraid of what he was planning to do when we went back to school, because he was free to do what he liked.

  * * *

  On the Friday of half-term, November fifth, Dad brought a box of fireworks home from work, and set them off in the garden using the long blue taper provided in the box. They had been very expensive. Mum and I watched. Some of them were duds. Mum grabbed Dad by the arm and told him not to go back to them, please Frank! There were two rockets, which went up high over the lane, as if they were heading for the darkness of the downs. I closed my eyes so as not to see them against the hillside.

  Waggoner was with me all the time that week. Finally, in bed the night before we went back, lying awake, I found something I could say to him. ‘I’ll tell,’ I said. ‘If you promise not to do it, I’ll tell on them instead.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Try.’

  Seven

  On the first day back after half-term, it took an effort for me to get on the bus. For the first time, I was going to experience a school day with Waggoner.

  How can I even begin to describe Waggoner? He looked and sounded exactly like me. He was also a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. When Mum had laid out my uniform on the bed that he and I had started sharing a week before, he was suddenly wearing one too. He was also going to Fasley Grange school.

  Mum hadn’t had to feed and clothe him throughout the holiday. He would just suddenly have what I had. He would find space to sit beside me even if there was no space. It was like the world kept bending out of shape just enough to let him in. Dad took us both in the car to the steps of the town hall. We both sat in one seat in the front.

  We sat next to each other on the school minibus. I kept looking at Waggoner’s face. I was wondering if I was good and he was evil, or maybe it was the other way round. His arrival hadn’t made what Drake had done to me better, it had made it more frightening. There had to be rules against him existing, laws. So I was going to tell everything about what had been done to me to the first responsible adult I could find. That would make Waggoner vanish. That was the sort of story this was.

  * * *

  On the way into my class’s form room, I saw Drake’s lot from behind. I sucked in a breath. I had to grab Waggoner to stop him from bellowing something at them. He was baring his teeth, his eyes were fixed on them, looking like my eyes never could: certain and fearless and rough.

  Something made Drake’s lot stop and look around. They saw me there, but not Waggoner. They pointed and laughed to each other, all five of them, curled up around it, a laughter so big they couldn’t let it all out there. They waggled their hands in front of their bodies and made mock anguished expressions. They used my name like a football chant. I had imagined they might be worried or scared about what they’d done, that they would keep away from me.

  They hadn’t noticed the big change.

  It was good when they didn’t notice the changes. It paralysed you when they did. It made you hate getting a haircut. You never wanted them to see you in your normal clothes. Your normal clothes weren’t like their normal clothes.

  I just about managed to hold Waggoner back. I staggered with him into the form room. Waggoner thumped down between me and Fiesta, somehow creating a third chair at a double desk. I looked to Fiesta, and he looked puzzled back at me: What? He was ignoring Waggoner. So couldn’t anyone see him? Why was I afraid of what he could do if they couldn’t see him?

  I was still afraid.

  Mrs. Mills, our form teacher, started calling out the register. She looked tired in the first moment of the first day of this half-term. Could I tell her my incredible story? Could I just shout it out now, like I wanted to?

  I couldn’t.

  She called out the one name that stood for both of us, and we both said, ‘Yes’.

  * * *

  The first lesson of the week was double Woodwork. I’d completed just three woodwork projects in my time at school. I’d start whatever Mr. Sedge, who was some sort of handyman for Mr. Rove, told us to start, and then I’d spend two hours every week shaving it. Waggoner, to my surprise, turned out to be good at it, turning the lump over quickly in his hands, chiseling and planing. It was because he didn’t care about anyone’s reactions to a mistake, so he could have a go, see what worked. I kept looking between him and the others. So could they see what he was working on hovering in mid-air, like something out of Rentaghost? No. The alteration had been stranger than that. I couldn’t keep on limiting what Waggoner was by describing him using the language of children’s television.

  Drake and the others kept their secret chant going, looking over and laughing. If any one of them had stopped, maybe the others might have got scared of what they’d done. Except Drake. They’d have been on the phone to each other, talking about me.

  I think Mr. Sedge liked it when the boys in his class picked on each other. It was what boys were supposed to do. While we did woodwork, the girls did cookery. In the fifth year, boys could choose to do that too. That was when you could announce your plan to be a poof. Mr. Sedge wore an off-white apron; his hair was just a few curls at the back of his head. He looked at everything every boy was making, and he nodded with his mouth open, so you could see his little teeth.

  Could I tell Mr. Sedge? No. Boys will be boys. He would look puzzled: why was I bringing something to him he wasn’t qualified to consider?

  Drake and the other four got Waggoner and me into a corner, because it turned out I didn’t want them to touch me. They were asking whispered questions that didn’t seek answers, or maybe this time they did, nudging at me, making
the chisel I was trying to work with miss the wood. I was half hoping they’d do that to Waggoner, but no. Mr. Sedge walked past, his grin fixed in place. Waggoner was saying, I will kill you, you bastards, I will kill you. They weren’t paying attention.

  The chisel missed again. It ripped my hand, up the right thumb. They all stepped back and sniggered. They’d done it to me again.

  It was all I could do to stop Waggoner from lashing out with the chisel. I fought and I fought. I stared at the rip in the skin. He finally relented. That was the extent of his promise: that he would relent, only for today, while I tried to find a way to tell.

  Mr. Sedge turned back to us and with a big theatrical sigh told me I’d have to go and get that seen to.

  * * *

  I went to the school nurse’s office. Angie Boden was sitting on the bench outside.

  I hesitated, but then, when she didn’t acknowledge my presence, I sat down. Waggoner sat beside me, making space for himself, and she moved up an inch or two. For a moment, I thought she’d seen Waggoner. But no, of course not. I was wondering about telling my story to the nurse, of letting my problem move from the thumb to the more serious matter.

  Angie kept glancing across at me, frowning as always. It wasn’t a surprise to find her here. She was always missing lessons with notes from home, not doing PE, not running, sitting there with a book, not bowed down by her difference. She seemed more grown up because she didn’t have to do all the school things. She started humming something under her breath. Then she stopped. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked, then corrected herself. ‘I mean, what’s the matter?’

  Someone had asked. I was so thankful. That hurt. I almost told her, but I couldn’t get it out. I showed her my thumb.

  ‘That doesn’t look so bad,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ I said. It felt really strange to talk to a girl now, when I hadn’t done it much before. The door opened, and the nurse came out. She told Angie to come on in, and Angie did, without looking at me again.

  * * *

  At three o’clock that day, the bell rang for the end of French, and Mr. Coxwell muttered angrily to us to walk, not run, and we hauled our bags out into the corridor, Waggoner and me and all the other kids. I hadn’t been able to tell Mr. Coxwell. I had not succeeded in telling any teacher. I couldn’t think of any teacher on any day who would be any different.

  To get to the minibus, Waggoner and I walked from muddy tiles to rubber mud rug, to gravel and sunlight, out at the back past the science lab. I was walking with physical pain in the winter sunshine. There would even be pain in summer. I would never be able to tell. I’d have to hold Waggoner back all the time. Drake’s lot were going to keep doing things to me. I was going to work hard to allow them to continue.

  Or instead I was going to go home and kill myself.

  How to do that? I was examining it, a project to distract me. I think I would have kept on considering that forever too. I mean, come on, how many things had I succeeded in making in Woodwork?

  But instead, there was Angie.

  She was standing on her own, across from the biology classroom, looking away into the distance, concerned as always. ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ by The Pretenders. The guitar riff from the start of that is what’s on the soundtrack when I think of her in that moment. She had her enormous bag slung over one shoulder, with the Virgin Records slogan I’m a Virgin stenciled on it in red.

  I stopped. I decided. I was going to rush up to her and blurt out that since she’d asked earlier–

  But she was off, having decided something, marching, off behind the biology classroom, heading out towards the woods.

  Everyone else from my bus was getting on board. It would be minutes before it left. This was my last chance. I had to take it. I rushed after Angie. Waggoner followed.

  * * *

  Angie didn’t look back as she walked down the dirt track that led into the woods. I didn’t call to her. Maybe I felt like I’d scare her. I gave up walking properly and for the first time that day let myself limp, thump thump along the path, a monster’s gait.

  The low sunshine had made a big, hard line between the playing fields and the shadow of the edge of the woods. Above us was the school, emptying, becoming a home again for the night. Mr. Rove and his son Rove would be doing whatever they did, making use of lounges and kitchens that we didn’t get to see. I wonder if Mr. Rove was standing at one of his windows that afternoon, looking down at us, three small uniforms, the black and white of two boys, the blue-and-white stripe of a girl, moving from light to dark at the edge of the trees. Could he see all three uniforms? Maybe he might have for a moment, as we crossed the terminator, like a trick of the light.

  It’s hard to imagine him being uncertain.

  Trying to catch my breath to say something, to make her look, I watched Angie walk. The march. The swing of the bag on her back. Waggoner was looking too. He looked hungry like I could never be. Angie would understand my problem, being an outsider herself, but the teachers trusted her.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why, at the end of a school day, she was walking into the woods. Then I realised. This path was horribly familiar. She wasn’t just going into the woods.

  She was going to the clearing.

  I slowed down. She didn’t know anything about this, did she?

  I stopped. She vanished around the curve of the path.

  Waggoner looked at me. Shouldn’t we just go back? I could hear her, rustling leaves as she walked, heading into the clearing. I crept forward. Waggoner followed.

  I heard a voice up ahead. I stopped again. I recognised the voice, and got sick.

  Drake.

  Through the foliage, I could see his shape in the clearing. I sat down at the side of the path, slowly and carefully as I had to, so I wouldn’t cry out, so I could hear, but they wouldn’t be able to see me.

  ‘You always want to come here.’ That was Angie’s voice. ‘Is this your special place?’

  ‘’Spose.’

  The two shapes moved together. They embraced.

  I had to hold in a noise. I tried to stand. I realised I couldn’t move without them hearing me. Waggoner was looking at me questioningly.

  ‘I told you,’ I said, whispering through my teeth. ‘I will find someone to tell.’

  ‘You wanted to tell her,’ he said, not whispering. ‘How about I do that right in front of him?’ Before I could reply, he’d leapt up, and burst through the bushes into the clearing. With a cry of pain, I hauled myself up and ran after him. Angie and Drake turned, startled, as we entered.

  Waggoner skidded to a halt, pointed at Drake and theatrically took a deep breath to speak. He knew I was going to stop him. I grabbed him. I wrestled with him in front of them. I got my hand over his mouth. He was yelling through it, muffled, unintelligible. I had no idea which one of us they could see or if it was both.

  Drake started to laugh.

  Waggoner contorted in my grip, trying to get my hand out of his mouth. His teeth were in my hand, and it was hurting like everything else about me hurt. I was going to injure myself. I twisted in my own grip.

  Drake was laughing and laughing. ‘Got summat to say? Sorry, we don’t understand you. You all right, then?’ He reached out for me.

  I jerked back, so fast his fingers missed. I found myself looking into Angie’s eyes. I was surprised at what I saw there: fear. She was as afraid of me as I was of Drake. I had no idea how that could be possible.

  I saw her lips form words under her breath.

  * * *

  I was running along the path back to the school. The bus was still there. I hauled myself up and stumbled into it. There was Waggoner, already sitting in the bus, looking around, startled, as if he’d just appeared there.

  I sat down beside him. My mouth and lips and neck were hurting as much as anywhere else on my body. I could taste blood where I’d bitten the inside of my mouth.

  Everyone was talking normally; they were late getting
off, waiting for Elaine, who’d now appeared at the door, having had to pick up something from the biology lab. Marie was in the front with Grayson, and Bradley was hitting his sister over the head with the tray from her cookery.

  I laughed. I stopped it. I started to cry. I stopped it. I tried to just be. I couldn’t. I wanted to shout. I wanted to tell them all. I’d been given one last chance to tell today.

  What about the driver? But she was already yelling at Bradley, in her powerless, not-a-teacher way, and saying in the end that it was none of her business what we did.

  Waggoner was looking at me again. He looked serious, worried for the first time, needing a little desperately now for me to let him do what he was here to do.

  I hadn’t been able to tell. I wouldn’t even let him tell. What exactly had happened back there? Angie had yelled at me, and I had run; of course that had been it. I still didn’t understand how she could be afraid of me. I didn’t understand how Waggoner could be worried about her. I didn’t yet understand what she could do.

  Someone locked the back doors of the bus. It drove off, and I looked behind as it went up the long drive, and turned onto the road outside the gates, leaving school behind.

  * * *

  When I got home, I told Mum the dressing on my thumb was for something small that had happened in Woodwork. I sat there through half an hour of her fear. I couldn’t deal with it, so I didn’t. I asked to go for a walk before dinner.

  I headed straight up the lane that led to the downs. I went up onto them, painful and slow as that walk was. I wanted to encounter for myself what Waggoner had met. I was too afraid to be afraid. I wanted to say I didn’t agree. I wanted to work out some sort of different deal. But what had been there for Waggoner wasn’t for me. Waggoner came with me, telling me that all the way. Then I couldn’t walk any more. I crumpled into the bowl barrow and lay curled there, with the winter sun low on the horizon. It was nearly dark. I was freezing, but I didn’t care.