The One Safe Place Read online

  He'd barely reached the Wilmslow Road when boys from the school, some of whom he hadn't realised he even knew, began to pump him about his day in court. "What did they give him?" "Did they put handcuffs on him?" "Was it like on telly?" "Did you have to swear?" "Did he attack anyone?" "Was it like in the films?" Marshall answered these and many other questions as best he could, wishing he could feel like the celebrity they seemed to take him for. He'd reached the pedestrian crossing nearest Bushy Road when a car even blacker than the July sky squealed to a halt scant inches from him.

  As the green guardian of the crossing turned red the car roared away, driven by a brawnier version of Billy Heathcote, presumably the security guard whose job had put him in hospital. Billy stood by Marshall and bumped him negligently with an elbow. "I hope you got him put away for as long as they're allowed to lock him up."

  "We don't know yet."

  "You know what you did." Heathcote followed him across the road as cars began to bully slowpokes off the crossing. "You know that, I reckon."

  "My best."

  "I should bloody hope so. If I'd been you I'd have said he did as much as they couldn't prove was wrong and landed him in Strangeways till his hair turned white."

  "Or looked a fool when his lawyer kept after you."

  "Eh? Half the time I can't tell what you're on about with that accent of yours."

  "I thought you and your dad were supposed to believe in the law?"

  "Don't you say that about my dad." Heathcote must have felt he'd made clear what he took Marshall to have said, because he went on, "You'd be quick enough to scream for him if you needed him. Or maybe you think you don't need the law, maybe you want the man who nearly shot your dad wandering around loose. I bet you'd rather the police never made up any evidence even if it got scum like him locked up. I bet you'd like the social workers and all the rest of the do-gooders to send him on a holiday to, to Florida."

  Marshall had rather lost track of all this, which felt as though a large dog was panting in his face while trying to knock him over. "Why Florida?"

  "Never mind bloody laughing about it. That's what they do these days in case you didn't know, send scum to Disneyland because they're so deprived."

  "It's Disneyworld in Florida." Marshall was trying to control his mouth, having seen how it aggravated Heathcote's all-embracing anger. "Look, this is crazy. What are we fighting about?"

  "I'm not fighting, lad. You'd bloody know if I was."

  "Like Tom Bold did," Marshall said, experiencing a sudden urge to throw all his weight behind a punch in Heathcote's face. The ease with which he could be driven to pointless violence dismayed him. Why hadn't he been capable of violence when Fancy had been lying in wait for his father? "I'm not arguing with you any more," he said. "Keep your nose out of my business before it gets hurt."

  "Here it is." Heathcote lurched in front of him, poking his own nose almost flat with a forefinger. "What are you going to do about it? Have a go, I dare you, unless you're a queer."

  Marshall stepped around him, which brought him in sight of the schoolyard and a teacher. "Is it dark up there?"

  Heathcote crowded him as far as the gates and shoved in ahead of him, then turned on him. "Where?"

  Marshall walked away before muttering, "Up your ass." Saying it made him feel less satisfied than lazy, no longer taking the trouble to invent a substitute for profanity as his parents did, and not having said it to Heathcote's face smacked of cowardice.

  Before long the bell which he imagined earning curses from any night shift workers who lived nearby went off to herd all the boys into line, where they had to stand still and stop talking and then troop class by class into the school. Several hundred of them thundered at the pace of prisoners returning to their cells along the gloomy corridors that smelled of sweat and chalk and floor polish, and into the hall crowded with rows of inseparable folding seats with too little leg room. The last of the boys barely had time to be seated when everyone jumped or reared or lolled or staggered to their feet as Mr. Harbottle strode onto the stage, followed by his staff.

  After the morning's token nod to religion the headmaster lectured in his high sharp disappointed voice on bullying and how it must be reported to a member of the staff. "Bullies must learn that being bigger and stronger gives them no advantages in this school." Marshall saw several contradictions in that, but it seemed like the rest of the school day—a dream from which the verdict of the court would awaken him. Classes began with a double dose of French. Comment t'appelle-toi? What work does your father do? And your mother? What job will you have when you grow up? Marshall was unable to think that far. "I'd have expected better of you, Travis," the French master said, tapping the desk beside Marshall's exercise book and leaving a chalky fingerprint on the gouged wood etched with fading ink, and strode to the front of the class as a boy peered rodent-like through the glass of the door and knocked timidly on it. "Tingay, isn't it? Yes, Tingay?"

  "Mumble mumble bottle," Marshall heard, and "Mumble Travis mumble," and his pen described a squiggle like a lie detector's peak before the teacher hooked a finger at him. "Well, Travis, you've been honoured with a summons to the presence."

  Marshall banged his knees on the underside of the desk as he stood up, but managed not to stumble as he made for the door, though by the time he reached it he was bearing the weight of the gaze of the entire class on his back. Tingay had fled on another errand, and the corridor the length of the school was deserted. As Marshall trudged along it he heard someone scraping Bach off a cello, the shout of a master echoing over a stampede in the gymnasium, two boys yelling insults at each other in what sounded like a scene from a murder play—Shakespeare, to judge by the odd audible word. All the way along the corridor a charred sky paced Marshall.

  Three older boys were wailing haphazardly outside Mr. Harbottle's office—three hindrances to Marshall's learning why he had been sent for. One he'd seen twisting earlobes in the schoolyard to extract lunch money from their owners. All three stared at Marshall as though he had no right to stand near them, and he'd positioned himself diagonally opposite them when the door beside him opened and the headmaster's secretary poked out her head, bristling with bluish curls. "Is Travis here yet?" she demanded, and caught sight of him. "Aren't you Travis?"

  "Yes," Marshall said, uncertain whether she was supposed to be a Miss.

  "Why are you hiding round there? Come along, step lively. Head's got other people besides you to see," she said in the process of hustling him across her office, and swung her knuckles so close to his head that he thought she meant to rap on it rather than on the inner door. "Travis, Head."

  "Send him in."

  Marshall didn't have time to breathe before the door was open and then shut behind him. The room resembled a very large oak chest whose interior was decorated with plaques and diplomas, their metal and glass gleaming with electric light. A sharp smell of metal polish snagged his throat. Mr. Harbottle was frowning over a letter and displaying his bald pate, which appeared to have forced its way between the twin leaves of his glossy black hair. As he raised his head with its broad nose and thick pink lips, the light slipped off his scalp like oil. "Ah, Travis," he said as if he either had to remind himself why he'd sent for him or was only now able to put a face to Marshall's name. "How are you finding it?"

  His guarded friendliness would have struck Marshall as ponderous in any case, but now it seemed the worst possible omen. "Yes, sir, I am," Marshall stammered. "Fine, thanks."

  "I'm led to understand you've found your feet."

  This was beginning to seem like a lesson in a foreign language, and Marshall wasn't sure he was expected to answer. "Yes, sir," he said when the silence got to him.

  The headmaster passed his right hand over that wing of his hair as though to check he hadn't lost it. "Your performance on television was brought to my notice."

  Was that why he'd sent for Marshall? Did he feel that Marshall had somehow let the school down? The disappointed
tone had crept into his voice, but then he said, "I'm told you're quite the reader."

  "I guess. Sir."

  Mr. Harbottle looked askance at him and apparently decided that was sufficiently disapproving. "I suppose that follows from your father's way of life. And does your mother discuss the films you watch with you?"

  "She does, sir, and my dad," Marshall said, feeling defensive on behalf of both of them.

  "We must hope you are given a suitably critical view of them." The headmaster let his gaze gather on Marshall, who shifted his feet and glanced down to quell them. "As it happens, I was just speaking to your father."

  Marshall's nerves dragged at the corner of his mouth. "What about? Sir."

  "You and he were both in court, I hear."

  "Only because we were witnesses."

  "Oh, utterly. It wasn't my intention to suggest you'd been hauled before the beak for watching gruesome twaddle." The headmaster pursed his lips in appreciation of his flight of wit and went on. "Your father sketched the case for me. Most deplorable. Very much the kind of situation I had occasion to refer to at assembly this morning. Or to be more precise, an example of how it develops in adulthood if it goes unchecked. I trust you've suffered nothing of the kind at Bushy Road? No undue hostility to your origins, for instance?"

  "No, sir," Marshall blurted, not caring whether that was true. "You said you'd been speaking to my dad."

  "That is so," the headmaster said severely, so that Marshall feared he'd provoked a lecture about interrupting. Instead, although after a weighty pause, Mr. Harbottle said, "You will be aware he went to court this morning to hear the verdict."

  Marshall couldn't speak, not least because his mouth had gone awry. "You may well smile, Travis," the headmaster said. "Your father asked me to inform you that the miscreant has been found guilty on all counts and sentenced to eighteen months in prison."

  Marshall's mouth went slack, but he managed a real smile before his jaw could drop too far. "Gee, thanks, sir."

  "Your father tells me that your testimony was instrumental in securing the conviction. I may very well cite your action in the near future as an example of the sort of behaviour I was urging earlier."

  Though Marshall felt he deserved not nearly so much praise, he didn't mind accepting it amid his euphoria. He walked out of the office feeling as though gravity had been reduced especially for him, and restrained himself from grinning at the three boys in the corridor, who had now become four. All the sounds of the school had acquired a brightness and immediacy which seemed to be addressing him; even the dark sky unspooling beyond the windows appeared as promising as a film yet to be exposed. "Notre ami américain a l'air très heureux," said the French master as Marshall returned to the classroom.

  "Bien sûr, monsieur," Marshall said.

  Now he was able to think what he wanted to be when he grew up, though he still wasn't sure if he would have time to be both a university librarian and a best-selling author. He settled for librarianship, since he didn't know if the French for "best-selling" was "best-selling." For the rest of the day he knew the answer to every question asked in class. The most gratifying moment, however, was in the dining hall, where everyone who hadn't brought his own lunch was doled out dollops of aggressively nutritious food to be eaten at tables as long as those in just about any prison dining scene Marshall had watched, and where he found a space a few feet away from Billy Heathcote. "Heathcote," he called through the mass of conversations and metallic scraping. "They gave him eighteen months."

  "Should have been twice that," Heathcote grumbled, but Marshall saw that his anger was no longer directed at him.

  When Marshall arrived home that afternoon just as the sky was beginning to let loose, his mother hugged him and said, "Well done." He accepted this and set about his homework to the sound of rain thumping all the windows, but when his father came home, drenched as he ran from the car to the house, and told him "Well done" as though he and Marshall's mother had rehearsed the phrase, Marshall couldn't take it: not when they'd both watched his performance in court. "I didn't do it," he protested. "I was, I was sewage. You saw."

  "We saw you take everything his lawyer threw at you."

  "You handled him at least as well as I did," Marshall's father said.

  "He still made me say things I oughtn't to have said."

  "But that's it, don't you see?" his mother protested, and his father explained, "The judge and the jury could see the lawyer was trying to confuse you because he hadn't any better defence. That's one of the things that went against our gun-toting friend."

  Marshall felt unexpectedly exhausted. Perhaps that was an effect of relief, or of his having worried all weekend for no reason. He slogged through his homework and ate dinner, then tried to read a novel whose cover would allegedly stick to his fingers like glue, until his mother brought into the front room a copy of I Spit on Your Grave, a rape and revenge movie one of her students had lent her so that Marshall's mother could grade her essay in defence of it. "I don't think you should watch this, Marshall."

  That made it sound more interesting, but he was too tired to argue. He went to the bathroom and congratulated himself on the size of his penis, and brushed his teeth until his mouth tasted like a large vanished mint, after which he wandered into his room and sat up in bed and read the same paragraph, and the same paragraph, and the same paragraph. At this point, admitting defeat, he switched off the light and lay watching as the night charcoaled the contents of his room, and listening to the rain around him and the screams downstairs, which seemed to be going on at considerable length, though maybe real rapes did. He found not being able to see the reason for the screams exciting for a while, then irritating, and wakened to find them still continuing, and then he didn't waken.

  Soon he wished he'd stayed awake, when a bell began to shrill somewhere near him. Was it inside or outside the house? Was it the alarm? In that case, why wasn't the siren sounding in the hall, and why had nobody responded to it? He unstuck himself from his bed and stumbled out of the room, trying to grasp whether the house was lit by daylight or electric light and, whichever, how dim the slaty glow was. Leaning over the banister, he saw that the key was protruding from the alarm panel, which was turned off. Someone was in the living room; he could see more light beyond the door. He went downstairs faster than he'd known he could, and looked in.

  His father was sitting close to the dead television and brushing his hair, repeatedly dragging the brush across the crown of his head in an attempt to tame a tuft which refused to be flattened. At least, that was the reflection Marshall saw on the grey screen, but when he looked at his father he saw that not only was he absolutely still, the brush was lying on the carpet. "Dad," Marshall said.

  Perhaps his father couldn't hear him for the bell. Marshall stepped forward and picked up the brush and began to scrape at his father's scalp with it, only to notice that each movement of the brush enlarged a red stain that was pulsing up through his father's hair. "Dad," he pleaded in a voice which seemed to have exploded out of his control, and awoke.

  The bell stopped a second later. He heard his father padding heavily downstairs to the hall in the silence. The bedroom was almost dark, and appeared to be in the process of turning into fog. Marshall didn't want to be alone with his dream or without some reassurance that all was well in the house. He flung himself out of bed and hurried to the top of the stairs.

  His father was just removing the key from the control panel. It took Marshall a moment to realise that he couldn't have reached the panel to turn off the alarm while he was descending the stairs. Then the doorbell rang again, and his father plodded to the front door and set about unchaining and unlocking it, muttering, "Wrong house. Can't you stop for a minute? Trying to wake the dead?"

  Someone was trying to gain entry to the house before the sun came up—before anyone in the building was fully awake. Marshall saw the faces behind his parents in the courtroom, and remembered the words that had been mouthed at him
. "Dad," he cried in a voice far too much like the one he'd had to use in his dream. His father blinked over his shoulder at him, surprised to see him, but at the same time pulling the door open, and it was too late.

  8 Nasties

  Susanne fell asleep thinking about rape. Had the film really needed to show Buster Keaton's granddaughter being raped by one man and sodomised by another and penetrated with a bottle by a third? It was the only film Susanne had ever felt the need to take a shower after watching, but did that prove the film had shoved the reality of rape in her face? That had been Martha's experience, according to her essay in which she had also cited a study where a group of students had been set the task of constructing a scenario to communicate what gang rape was like for the victim and had found themselves making many of the choices apparent in I Spit on Your Grave. Martha had argued her case coherently enough to earn herself a high grade, and Susanne appreciated it was never a bad thing if her own assumptions were given a good shake. Apart from that, she felt so relieved that the court case was over and that Marshall no longer needed to pretend he wasn't anxious, not to mention that she and Don no longer needed to pretend they didn't know he was, she fell asleep almost before Don climbed in beside her and crooked one arm around her midriff.

  She had no idea how much later she was roused by an uncomfortable feeling that she ought to awaken. Don's arm was no longer around her, and she had the impression that something had taken him away. She widened her eyes, which persisted in blinking as though the dark was a heavy residue left by the night on their lids. Between the curtains in front of the balcony was a gap which hadn't been there when she'd gone to bed. She heard male voices muttering, several of them somewhere close, and she kicked off the quilt. Planting her feet on the yielding carpet, she padded to the window.

  Two cars were outside, their fenders almost touching her car and Don's, and the house had stretched its light along the path to them. The front door was open. The voices weren't in the street but downstairs. Had she heard the doorbell in her sleep? She was holding onto the handles of the windows while a moment of dizziness passed when she saw that the two vehicles boxing in the Travis cars bore police insignia. Everything would be all right—though what was there to be put right? The thought seemed to grab her by the groin and stomach and abruptly dry throat, and she wobbled across the room and unhooked her robe from the back of the door, and struggled into the garment as she wavered onto the landing.