I looked at the album cover. Well, I guess you know what it’s like. Strange and ugly and vicious and true and beautiful all at the same time. And he had seen it and thought of me, just as he’d thought of me when he’d chosen the ugly apple.

He gave me that smile. You know the one.

“Ready for me to blow your mind?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, Harry,” I said.

Chapter 6

6

Michaelmas Term, 1981

And that was how Harry and I became friends. Just like that, in room 58, with “The Laughing Gnome” on the turntable and the late-October sunshine coming in at the window. This may not seem unusual to those outside St. Oswald’s, but to me it came as quite a surprise. Apart from Eric, I had no friends, merely colleagues and pupils. Not that I cared. I’d never been gregarious—even as a young man, I was happiest with my books, my radio, and my solitude.

Harry Clarke changed that. Over the weeks and months and years we saw each other every day; not just in the mornings, but after School, where we would sit in Harry’s room and drink innumerable cups of tea, mark books, read the papers, and talk until at last the cleaner—­Gloria, with the Spanish eyes—would come to stand in the doorway, hands on shapely hips, and say: “Don’t you boys have a home to go to?”

What did we talk about? Everything. Politics; music; people; life. I learned that he voted Labour (I supported Edward Heath); he liked Monty Python and Doctor Who; he listened to music on Radio 1 and went to hear bands play in Manchester. He hated soccer, liked cricket; read Kurt Vonnegut and Muriel Spark. He lived alone, in a terrace house down in Malbry Village. He’d never married; as far as I knew, his family was St. Oswald’s.

Sometimes we would go out for a drink with Eric—who even then was fond of a glass or two of claret—to our local, the Thirsty Scholar, still reassuringly unchanged, with its leather armchairs by the fire and battle-scarred old tables. That was where all the Masters went—except perhaps for Dr. Devine, who either didn’t drink at all, or whose dignity forbade him to be seen in the company of lesser beings—and some of my happiest memories are of that place, and the three of us, and the laughter that came so easily whenever Harry was around.

Some exceptional teachers can inspire that kind of affection. Pat Bishop was one of them; so too was Harry Clarke. Some men you trust instinctively, wholly and without question; which was why, a decade later, when Johnny Harrington came to me with his sinister tale of possession, I went at once to Harry Clarke, certain he would know what to do.