Relatively Strange Read online

  Most of them were simply silly and noisy. Moving in a pack, staking out territory, harmless enough. But there was one, plump belly overhanging a studded belt, tow-haired, pale and pock-marked who was wrong. Simmering sullenly beneath the surface, he was brim-full of anger and resentment. He was I’d have been prepared to bet, always angry. It’s a natural state for some people but with it goes the frustration of being unable to express it adequately in daily life. He’d had several more drinks than was good for him and he had a lot to prove, his need to impress his peers incidental, to reassure himself, overpowering. He it was who led the group, swaggering, towards the front of the bus where they spread over the seats like mould and lit cigarettes, holding them in identical fashion, twixt thumb and forefinger, to indicate just how non-conformist they were. I turned back to my Georgette Heyer, until an abrupt change in the atmosphere made me look up again a few minutes later.

  Pock-face had moved to sprawl across the seat directly in front of Evening Standard man and was making play of scanning the football results on the back page of the paper. Huge amusement amongst the troops, but if he was looking for a reaction from the reader, he didn’t get it. This didn’t suit; successful clowning needs a straight man so, with a wink, he inhaled deeply and blew a deliberately insulting lung-full of smoke into the face of the older man. A curt,

  “Cut it out laddie,” and the man continued reading. He honestly wasn’t concerned, certainly not in any way intimidated. He was, in truth, bone weary. He’d had a hard, unpleasant day, indeed a rough few months altogether at the office. Passed over for a desired and, in his opinion, well deserved promotion he was reading, but not absorbing the newsprint. His head was full of redundancy fears, bank managers and mortgages. He certainly wasn’t nervous or worried about the boys, they were just unpleasant, overgrown kids showing off, strutting their stuff, he didn’t feel threatened. Indeed at that point, he wasn’t wrong, but Pock-face was fast heading past unpleasant and teetering on the edge of something else altogether. Even then it might have been all right if one of the other youths, weasel-faced, duck-arsed hair, hadn’t laughed out loud. Now it was no longer the man who was the butt of the joke, control had to be taken back.

  “’Ere,” said he of the pitted skin to weasel-face, “Wot you laughing at?” and in those few seconds the situation turned, fuelled by a volatile mix of testosterone, bravado, alcohol and adrenaline. Pock-face drew himself to his feet, turned and suddenly, ridiculously out of place on the 113 to Hendon Central, the overhead lights were glinting on a flick-knife blade, a vicious shine.

  Weasel, as if attached to the other end of a tautened thread rose as swiftly, still smiling but with his lip curling back from his teeth and a hand moving to his own pocket – I didn’t think he was reaching for a comb. The group, leather creaking, shifted and in an instant there were two clear sides. It was beginning to look like something out of West Side Story lacking only Chita Rivera wading in with a song. Pock-face was still angry but also now frightened at the situation he’d so quickly provoked, thus making him far more dangerous. I really was going to have to do something, I could hardly stand by and watch gang warfare break out round me.

  “Young man.” A clear, irritable voice. “Put that away immediately and both of you sit down and be quiet.” The woman passenger several rows in front of me had looked up briefly as she spoke but now, matter settled, she continued knitting, I don’t think she’d even dropped a stitch. Newspaper man having sized up the new situation and not finding it to his liking, utilised the gawp-filled pause that followed to move swiftly out of his seat and down the stairs, leaving just the woman in the centre of the bus and me, sitting unobtrusively at the back. Weasel and Pock, shocked at being spoken to like that – did no-one have any manners nowadays, were instantly united and gleefully in their element against this common and comfortingly unthreatening enemy.

  “Oy”, said Weasel, “You, droopy drawers,” guffaws egged him on, this was easy meat.

  “Nobody,” he said, jaw thrusting, “Talks to me and my mate like that.” This time she didn’t even bother looking up, although he’d risen from his seat and, following the pocked one was advancing down the aisle towards her.

  “Then it’s high time somebody did.” she said. Well, that’s it, I thought. I knew all about keeping my head down but I couldn’t just sit there and see this daft old bat insulted, assaulted or worse. She could have absolutely no idea what was going on in Pock-face’s head but I did and it wasn’t healthy. He’d gone way too far to retreat without losing face but more importantly, he really didn’t want to, he wanted to hurt someone, he wanted it so badly he could already taste it.

  He was still holding the knife, so it seemed best to deal with that first. I began to heat up the handle; he was too high on aggression to notice immediately so I turned things up a few degrees. That concentrated his mind. With a howl of pain and shock he flung down the offending object, now red hot and glowing from base to tip. I was just wondering if perhaps I hadn’t overdone it a wee bit, when a funny thing happened. His feet flew backwards from under him with great force, exactly as if he’d walked into a concealed trip wire or rather, as if it had walked into him. He landed heavily in the aisle, flat on his face. Then, startling all of us, himself I think most of all, he bounded smartly upright again as if jerked by an unseen string – you can’t keep a good yob down. His face was a comic mix of amazement and fear. His nose was oozing blood and he didn’t seem to know whether it was that or the painfully burnt hand which should be receiving priority attention. And then he began to march down the centre of the bus with a peculiarly odd lurching gait, for all the world as if someone had one firm hand on his collar and another grip on the seat of his grubby jeans. He appeared to be extremely preoccupied with the unexpected turn events had taken.

  Weasel and the others watched the jerky but rapid progress of their companion-in-arms with silent astonishment. I’ve never seen such a communal jaw-drop. They’d been a pretty gormless lot to start with but now even the ghost of gorm was gone. Still doing his jerky Bill and Ben imitation, Pock-face had now reached the top of the stairs where one arm was floppily raised to press the bell before proceeding hippety-hoppity, lippety-loppety down the stairs and out of sight. Of one thing I was certain, his exit was no doing of mine.

  “And the rest of you.” said the brown hatted lady.

  “This ain’t our stop.” Someone piped up. “It is now.” she said, quietly pleasant and she looked up. They were stupid these boys but not that stupid. Something must have looked out at them then which made any argument pointless. A glance out the window as we pulled away, showed a less than vociferous gathering at the bus-shelter. Sheepishly subdued I think would describe it best, with the exception of Pock-marked who was waving his burnt hand around and doing a bit of pain-induced hopping.

  I moved forward, drawn implacably and sat on the edge of the seat across the aisle from her. My heart was thumping so hard in my ears I thought if she spoke I wouldn’t hear her. I knew exactly what I’d witnessed, but still doubted. She didn’t so much as acknowledge me and I couldn’t read her at all, her mind was totally silent, a smooth-surfaced, impenetrable grey against and around which, I slid helplessly. I don’t know why but I reached out my hand to her, she moved away fractionally, avoiding the touch – I felt like a kicked puppy.

  “Can we talk?” I ventured.

  “No.” No dithering there then, indeed she’d speared her wool decisively with her needles, stowed the knitting in a capacious, battered suede bag and was rising to leave the bus.

  “What’s your name?” I said. Of all the hundreds of questions jostling that was, without doubt, the silliest and least vital. She looked at me, heavy lidded eyes muddied by the artificial lighting of the bus. A thin, narrow lipped, arrogantly high cheekboned face. She rose.

  “Peacock.” she said, “Miss.”

  “I’m …”

  “I know.” And I felt her sweep briefly and thoroughly through my mind. She was
pepperminty cool, sharp-green and fresh and she moved through my carefully nurtured defences as though they were non-existent. She nodded once, more to herself than me in acknowledgement of something, God knows what, she certainly wasn’t giving anything away. And then she was moving swiftly and surprisingly gracefully down the stairs. I watched her from the window as she walked briskly away, her camel coat orangey in the street-light, head bent against the November evening chill. She didn’t look back.

  When I got home and recounted the tale, slightly modified to ameliorate parental alarm, they said they were positive I was mistaken. There was no doubt, my father said, filling his pipe, that those yobs came on strong but my Miss Peacock was probably a teacher or something similar and well used to dealing with troublemakers. A firm reprimand and somebody standing up to them was probably all they’d needed and I shouldn’t let my imagination run away with me. And, my mother added sharply, perhaps today’s unpleasant experience would bring home the sense of the sitting near the conductor rule. Unsatisfied, I reluctantly put the incident to the back of my mind and pretty soon there were other matters to claim my attention, but I knew what I’d seen and sensed.

  Chapter Ten

  A two-page letter in a brown windowed envelope franked Department of Education was the first intimation we had of The Survey. The DoE letter was accompanied by another from Miss Macpharlane, pointing out that whilst involvement was purely voluntary, only a relatively small number of pupils from the top year of our junior school had been selected. Indeed only a few schools had been chosen to submit candidates in the first place, and it could be nothing but beneficial were some of our children to participate in this ambitious project.

  It seemed that a range of high academic achievers from all over the British Isles were being screened for selection and those chosen would become part of an ongoing educational and sociological study, the like and scale of which had never been attempted before. Taken from different economic, ethnic and social backgrounds and having recently passed the Eleven Plus exams, progress would be charted every four years from now on, throughout secondary school and into further education or jobs. Miss Macpharlane was at pains to emphasise that whilst participation did require an ongoing commitment, once selected, involvement was predicted to be just a day or two every few years.

  My mother and father were not happy, not happy at all. As far as they were concerned, the less surveying anybody did of me, the better. On the other hand, they didn’t have a worthy excuse for my non-participation. With misgivings they reluctantly signed the consent form, reassuring me and each other that of the several thousand children involved, chances of my being picked as one of the ongoing group, were extremely remote and all the more so if I kept a low profile!

  *

  Several weeks later, packed lunch bag in hand and last minute exhortations hissed in my ear, I climbed the steps of the coach for the trip to the test centre in Oxford. There were, in addition to Elizabeth and myself, only five others from our school and whilst she and I stuck together, we soon lost sight of the others as children scrambled for seats in each of the three coaches assembled for the journey. I imagine there must have been around a couple of hundred of us all told, from schools all over London and on that blue-skied, cloud-studded day tagged on the end of a squally April, an outing atmosphere prevailed even amongst the half dozen or so accompanying teaching staff – after all a day off school is a day off school.

  The journey from the terminal in Swiss Cottage took about an hour and a half, enlivened by a sing-song and some regrettably early investigation of lunch boxes. Just around the time we were starting to get bored, our coaches which had managed to travel in convoy the whole way turned through some open, impressively high, wrought iron gates. They trundled and bounced down a longish, winding drive bordered by high hedges through which we glimpsed lawns and flowerbeds and then jerked to a stop like well-trained circus elephants, one behind the other where the drive widened into a circular, gravelled area with a fountain in the centre that disappointingly wasn’t working. We’d stopped in front of an imposing, red-brick, multi-windowed building which even to my untrained eye had a pleasing symmetry only marred by a large, contemporary, glass and concrete extension which seemed to have attached itself to the left hand side and back of the building with no rhyme or reason. To the other side of the front doors and also looking as if they so didn’t belong, was a row of three, extremely large, grey-walled portakabins, each with half a dozen steps leading up to a closed door.

  We descended with relief, from the now stuffy coaches in a rowdy crowd and there was a fair bit of disorganised milling while abandoned blazers, coats or lunchboxes were reunited with careless owners. Then we were chivvied into a two by two crocodile and led through the high, oak double-fronted doors. Whilst the building had that unmistakeable institutional smell, rubber shoes, floor wax and elderly cooked cabbage, it still trailed traces of former glory. To our right an impressively sweeping, elaborately-bannistered staircase soared to a balconied landing whilst to the left, off the entrance hall area was a series of highly polished wooden doors gleaming in brightness shed from a stained-glass sky-light high above us. At the back of the hall there was a counter-style reception desk manned by two women. It all seemed to be very well organised, each teacher being issued with safety pins and paper labels to distribute to their charges. These, bearing our names and schools, were to be pinned to our uniforms and not, repeat not, removed until we were back on our coaches at the end of the day.

  As we waited for tardy badge-pinners, my eye was caught by a movement on the landing above. Looking down on the controlled chaos was a slim young woman with milk-chocolate coloured skin. She looked startlingly exotic in those surroundings in a flame-coloured, full-length silky dress, shiftingly spotlighted by the coloured shards of light from the skylight. Her black hair was braided thick and high on her head and a hoop of gold earring swung against an elegantly defined cheekbone in an oval face.

  She stood motionless, face impassive, leaning gently against the waist high balustrade, eyes moving slowly over us. In our regulation uniforms of greys, blacks and browns we must have looked a pretty dull bunch. For a moment I thought her gaze fastened on me as I gazed up and I smiled awkwardly, embarrassed to have been caught staring, but there was no acknowledgement so perhaps I was mistaken. My attention was momentarily distracted as the chattering died down and we were shepherded towards one of the doors off the entrance hall. Filing in, I glanced back, she was making her way gracefully down the stairs, hand lightly on the banister, back very straight. As she reached the bottom I saw the slim white stick extended in her other hand, tapping the ground before her.

  Chapter Eleven

  It’s always illuminating to look back on any experience with hindsight. The Survey, even viewed retrospectively was comprehensive, clever, well devised and should have been extremely successful and ultimately productive. That it wasn’t was directly due to some unscheduled interference, the existence and extent of which was never fully appreciated by the powers that be, nor by the gentleman responsible for creating and implementing the whole shebang. Given his somewhat alarming propensities, this was probably all to the good.

  Dr Karl W. Dreck had a curtly clipped South African accent, flat oily black hair and a smile which aimed but failed to project an easy charm, probably because it never reached grey-washed, sandy-lashed eyes. His face in repose lacked expression making the smile all the more disconcerting when it appeared, as if an unseen hand was working an on/off button. His larger than life image, whirringly projected on a screen at the front of the large room with blind-shrouded windows where we’d been seated in cross-legged rows, didn’t do a great deal to put anyone at their ease.

  In a short jerky film, his voice booming from a loudspeaker, he welcomed us to what we learned was called Newcombe Hall and told us how fortunate we were to have this opportunity of participating in one of the most ambitious social studies ever undertaken in Britain. However, he went on,
whilst some of us would be picked to continue, many would be eliminated for one reason or another although, (pause, smile,) this was in no way a personal rejection, merely an endeavour to obtain as complete a cross section of the population as possible. He said that he and his staff – shot of a group of people in white coats, also smiling – wanted us to truly enjoy all the various tests and games they had lined up for us today.

  Accomplished though he undoubtedly was in his field, Dreck was never what you might call a people person and his appearance, albeit onscreen, was more than enough to put a dampener on our previously rather noisy high spirits – a bit like finding Boris Karloff was going to be your party entertainer. Quieter now and with the promise of a refreshment break to follow, we were divided into alphabetically defined groups, mixing pupils from different schools so before I realised what was happening I was separated from Elizabeth and lost sight of her completely. The degree of efficiency with which this was achieved by staff members who had taken over from our accompanying teachers, spoke of long practice. I wondered how many children had already passed through the high oak front doors to earn a place in or be eliminated from The Survey.

  *