Charlie found me there, a quarter hour later. Time to watch the guards drag the body out from underneath the scaffold by its feet, wrap it in sacking, strap it to a plank, and carry it off. That, and to wipe my mouth. My sleeves were so Soot-stained, it was like dragging charcoal across your mug.

The taste of it, though, stayed with me all the way back to school. It’s still there in the morning, when the school bell pulls me out of a dream the only part of which I remember is a snowman, its button eyes slowly sliding down the blank of its face one by one. I make it to the toilet before I am sick.

And later — later I go to see Renfrew, for the first of many such sessions. “An intensive programme of reform.” Those were his words to Trout. It’s Cruikshank who fetches me, at five o’clock sharp. Renfrew does not say anything when I enter his office. That’s all right; I don’t need instructions to know what to do. The dentist’s chair is awkward to climb into but turns out to be surprisingly comfortable: upholstered red leather, turned dark and smooth where other boys have sat and squirmed and sweated, leaving behind the hazy outline of a ghostly boy into which I fit myself quite naturally.

“Do I put the straps on?” I ask, doing my best to sound calm.

Renfrew smiles.

“That’s what all the boys ask. I think secretly you really want to.”

And I relax a little. After all: Renfrew already thinks the worst of me. That I am growing murder inside myself, the way a woman grows a child.

Nothing I can say or do will ever disappoint him.

SWEETS

SWEETS

School is different after London. The change is everywhere and, as such, hard to pin down. Charlie tries to make an inventory, but the more he writes down the more he feels is slipping through the cracks, the gaps between words and lines, until he throws away the piece of paper in disgust.

For one thing, the upper-school boys are having dreams. Nightmares. Not all of them, naturally, and not the same ones night after night. Actually, nobody is sure they are nightmares, because nobody remembers a thing. But they wake up, these boys, with rings under the eyes, bruises almost, their pillowcases stiff with Soot. Renfrew does not punish them. This in itself causes a stir. A gentleman never smokes. He dreams, it is said, as he lives. In the lower school, by contrast, the pale grey smears found in the bedding in the mornings continue to exact their price: the boys are disciplined, if mildly.