I gave a rather mournful sigh. Things are changing too fast aboard the dear old frigate. Johnny Harrington at the helm. Mulberry girls in the Sixth Form. Male cleaners, for gods’ sakes. I settled into my chair and took out the register for this year. At least my form remains the same. That counts for something, I suppose. Though members of staff may come and go, the boys remain a constant; vibrant and unquenchable; a reminder that Life goes on.

• • •

Today has been a long day. I got home late, well after dark. The central heating hadn’t come on. I must have forgotten to set the timer. I lit the living room gas fire and made myself some cocoa. In such familiar surroundings, it seems hard to believe that anything could be amiss. But that’s the danger of being in this job. That’s how St. Oswald’s draws us in. It makes us feel safe, cocooning us with the illusion of permanence. That’s why the Harry Clarke affair came as such a surprise to us all. Even Dr. Devine was rocked. Even Shitter Shakeshafte. It was as if something had died, slyly and unobtrusively, and the stench of it still lingers now, like the stench of poisoned mice behind a classroom skirting-board.

Oh, but I’m getting ahead of my tale. That’s what happens when you get old. You start to ramble. You lose track of time. Things that happened a long time ago suddenly seem so much closer than the things that happened yesterday. And things you thought you’d forgotten about suddenly pop into your mind, just as you’re about to drop off, making sleep impossible.

Today it’s a Public Information Film of the kind you saw in the old days, a film I haven’t seen in years, but which I remember clearly. A sinister, hooded figure watches a group of children playing beside a flooded gravel pit, waiting for the moment when the bank gives way, or the tree branch breaks, or the submerged, abandoned car inhales its youthful victim. A DANGER! NO SWIMMING! sign comes into view, but the children do not notice it. And now comes the voice-over; sinister, rasping out its challenge: I am the spirit of dark and lonely water—

Why remember that? Why now? What message from my subconscious is trying to rise to the surface? A pebble dropped into the dark and lonely water is still making ripples, twenty-four years on. And now, from the archives of memory, comes the voice of the hooded man . . .

Chapter 9

9

Michaelmas Term, 1981

Dear Mousey,

Goldie thinks David Bowie is gay. He said so today at lunchtime, in Harry’s room. Goldie’s dad sometimes preaches in Church; he thinks the Homosexual Stranglehold on the Arts is what’s holding Britain back.

I said: “I don’t think he’s gay.”