The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  Ours, he said. He thought it was his because he loved it. Bread basket of Europe, the Fens, Dad would say. Black gold.

  So, that’s how I get into History. Jo teaches it and she tells me I’m clever and good at it and I start to like it, simple as that.

  One day she organises a trip for us to Ely Gaol. Ely Museum as it is now. We’re all arsing about. Stokey digs me in the ribs and says mature pussy in this stupid voice whenever she’s in view but I’m actually paying attention, I’m reading the little notices about the exhibits. The Bishop’s Gaol. The Felons’ Night Cell. And then I see this thing, this amazing eerie thing, and that’s it – that’s how I get it. A piece of wood. I read the notice:

  ‘This plank, showing plainly some carvings,

  presumably done by a prisoner, is of the old gaol-house

  bench in the early nineteenth century.

  PRAY GOD GOOD PEOPLE remember THE POOR PRISONERS.’

  There are these lines with crosses through them, someone crossing off the days. And this little drawing is carved into it: a stick man dangling from the gallows.

  We’re not allowed to touch of course. So I just stand there and this creepy feeling travels from my toes to the back of my neck and my skin prickles icy cold and then hot. I know without looking at my arms that the little hairs are all standing up on goose pimples.

  In our school we all have names like Rutter, Crow, Harley, Martin, Gotobed, Lavender, nothing much changes round here. Fen people don’t move away. So every one of us could claim it was their ancestor who carved the stick man, but I knew somehow with dread certainty that it was mine. Willie Beamiss.

  A stick man dangling from a gallows. Looked like a child’s drawing. But he was eighteen, older than me. It’s the start of Year Ten by now and I’m fifteen. And I get Miss Lavender on her own in one of the funny little corridors off the museum rooms and I tell her this, I tell her that I feel sure this carving was done by my very own great-great-great-whatever-grandfather and I think I’m actually shaking as I say this, the feeling is so strong, I’m all wound up and certain, and I expect her to say, ‘Don’t be silly, Drew, don’t you think every student in Year Ten thinks that?’ but instead she smiles and looks at me sort of slowly, and carefully, and says: ‘You might be right. Strange how strongly connected we sometimes feel to old things, isn’t it?’ I want to kiss her then. I almost do. We’re close enough in the corridor to touch, but then another teacher, old Tansley, comes by and sort of gets in the way, and Jo looks worried and scuttles off.

  I try and read some other stuff, notices and things. Stokey keeps coming up to me and saying, let’s get outside in the Felons’ Yard and smoke a fag? I shrug my shoulders, try and shake him off, jerk my head towards Tansley as if to say: he’d catch us. But the truth is, I want to look further at the piece of wood, think about this Willie Beamiss.

  It was Dad who told me the story ages back. I always knew about the Littleport riots, like I said. And I knew that we had not one but two ancestors involved: Willie Beamiss the father, and Willie Beamiss the younger one, who was not much older than me and spent a year in this prison. But knowing it and feeling it are different. This is the first time I’ve felt it.

  So now I read this notice that says that those stuck in here had to pay, they actually had to pay fees to their gaoler for beer or bread, their family had to bring the money in if they couldn’t. That bit I didn’t know. Any who couldn’t pay were stripped of their clothes or belongings. I look around me. It’s a tiny room. There’s a tiny window. And guess who owned the place? The Bishop of Ely. Who also had the right to arrest and imprison people under this thing called the Liberty of Ely. The bishop actually made himself a nice little profit from the gaol.

  I catch up with Jo again, say all of this to her. I’m angry, I’m actually panting, I don’t know why. I can hardly get the words out.

  ‘I know just what you mean,’ she says. ‘My Aunt Sarah was descended from another rioter who was hanged: Thomas South. Though of course names change when people get married.’

  Weird how mad I am. So long ago.

  ‘The Liberty of Ely Act was abolished some time in the 1830s, so his powers were reduced,’ Jo says. She seems to be smiling again; I can’t help thinking she’s pleased that I’ve got all roiled up.

  ‘Too late for Willie.’

  ‘Was he one of those who was hanged? Or did he have his sentence commuted?’ she asks.

  ‘My Dad told me it was Willie’s dad who they hanged. They didn’t have much on him but they wanted to make a point.’

  Jo nods. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘look at the riots this summer and the heavy sentences . . . same thing really. Had to be clamped down on to prevent future ones.’ Then she seems nervous again, looking from left to right, finding that we’re alone again and the other kids have moved into a different room.

  ‘Drew, we shouldn’t—’ she starts.

  ‘What, we’re talking. We’re talking about history, about politics, about work! Mr Tansley would be well impressed.’

  ‘I shouldn’t even – I’m probably encouraging you just by talking to you on your own like this —’

  She laughs. Then someone else is coming up the stairs and she moves away from me. Everyone in school knows I fancy her. But nothing inappropriate can happen, she says.

  It’s different now between us. It bothers me and it pleases me at the same time. It’s part of my story, of who I am, and she admits, it’s part of her story too. It’s like a lid has come off something. I feel different. It adds to my all-around feeling that everything inside me is shifting, bubbling up, and Jo, only Jo can see this, and let me be like this, and not tell me off about it.

  The next day I see her go into one of the empty labs and duck in after her. I feel sure she knew I was behind her: she must have heard the squeak of my trainers. Or maybe even smell me. I think I’m like an animal by now, tracking her.

  ‘I – someone left this Bunsen burner on,’ she says, wheeling around. She looks a bit caught out.

  Did she hope I’d come in after her? She always eyes the doors and windows and then the shoulders come down, the smiley friendliness comes back.

  ‘You made me jump,’ she says.

  I step towards her. I know she’s crossed a boundary no teacher should cross by letting me. Letting me flirt with her. Smiling at me. Widening her eyes. Taking her glasses off. Joking. Tossing phrases back and forth. Letting me know I exist, I’m me, I’m real, I’m not just a boy, a schoolboy, one of her pupils, I’m me. I already tower over her. Sweat springs on me, whenever I look at her. The awesome feelings she produces – hard not to believe they’re in here whenever we’re together, they’re so strong, they’re in the room with us.

  ‘Where do you think feelings are?’ I ask her, suddenly.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ She looks startled, but then cracks another big smile. She likes my challenging questions, she’s said, a while back, so here’s another one.

  ‘Well, are they, like, inside you? Do you produce them yourself? Or are they outside and they sort of get inside you from someone or somewhere else – like chemicals in the air or something? Or do you, like, inherit them, like genes or what?’

  Jo takes a step back. It’s as if she’s trying to work out if this is dangerous or not. If she should answer as a teacher – I just asked her a question – or as something else. She stares at the tap in front of her, fiddles with it. When she looks up again her eyes are shiny, like she’s trying not to cry. I wonder if I’ve made her think of her mum dying or her divorce or something, and I want to say sorry, but she carries on, ignoring that and trying to answer my question.

  ‘Well, the romantics would say they’re deep inside you, of course. In your heart. And these days I suppose it’s more likely to be a chemical explanation . . . neuroscience. People probably locate feelings more in the brain, not the heart. But . . . there’s a bit more to it than that, surely. I mean, there’s Freud and the unconscious and a whole host of other e
xplanations.’

  She stops then. A noise outside the lab. She moves a little, puts a proper teacherly distance between us. She was explaining something to me after all. No crime in that.

  No one comes. I put out my hand – I’m going to touch her cheek – but she shakes her head and this time we do definitely hear a door bang, and we both jump apart.

  The next day I think about cooling off a bit. Give her a taste of her own medicine, see if she can stand it. So I stay off school for a few days, tell Mum I’ve got bellyache. And I’m right: when I come back, Jo can’t wait to seek me out in the corridor.

  ‘Oh. You well, Drew? Not like you, to miss school.’

  Casual, oh so casual. I give her a big grin, I’m with mates, there’s nothing she can say. I stride off with my kit over my shoulder, on my way to rugby practice. I’m learning.

  ‘God, you’ve cheered me up,’ she says, another time.

  ‘Why, were you – like, depressed?’

  ‘I – Yes. I suppose I must have been.’

  And then it all pays off. It happens. Casual, but . . . One day, one day just like any other, she says I can come to the local history museum in St Ives, come ‘do some work’ with her there if I like. She says this easy, so easy, but I feel the room tremble and the walls of the school shine at me like a melting has begun.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘See you Saturday then. But I’d need a lift. And people would see me. In your car, I mean.’

  ‘You’re very naughty,’ she says, in a low, trembling voice, and I flood hot all over.

  Awesome. She’s flirting, no question. I could take her any time I like, I think. In my dreams she’s always rearing over me, shaking out those blonde curls, riding me like a horse, bucking; arching. Grinding down. And sometimes, dirtier dreams, I’m a fountain – a fierce force of water shooting up – and she’d be trying to ride that and it keeps gushing at her, an endless fountain; keeps on filling her and pushing her up, up, she’d never be able to squash it down . . .

  She arranges to pick me up out on the Great Fen road. I have to walk there.

  In the car she says: ‘It would be a terrible – it’s not just about the – about my job. It’s more than that. It would be wrong. You’re so young, Drew. You’re – handsome – lovely, you really are. You’re—Any woman in her right mind would be – I certainly am – anyone would be – flattered.’

  Oh, it’s what you do to me, it’s what you do to me . . . Is she in her right mind then? Who could expect me – at fifteen – to know?

  In the car, she asks me to pass her a packet of Polos from the glove compartment. And in there is a scarf and I have to move it, and it’s made of this silky stuff, it looks like underwear or something, and it gives off such a waft of her I want to pick it up and bury my face in it. She sees me touching it, rubbing the pale yellow and grey rose-spattered stuff between my finger and thumb. Looks at me. ‘Want a Polo?’ she says. But she saw.

  She admitted later she was ‘broken up in pieces’ about Bob, about her ex. She felt the lowest she’d ever felt, she said. Strange, she said, most people have no idea how long it takes to get over a relationship, even a bad one. Two years, she says, since they first broke up and she still feels lonely for him sometimes.

  But it’s the talking like this that’s whipping it up. She’s having it both ways. She’s saying no but she’s talking about things, broaching it, making it possible, making it shine for me: making it real.

  One time Jo puts that scarf on. Shakes out the fabric, rolls it a bit, circles it round her neck. She sees that I recognise the scarf – I’ve been in your car, I’ve seen your things – and she sees that I’m watching her and she doesn’t stop, or move away. No other teacher would do that. No way. It’s – out of order. The more she talks about how impossible it would be, the more possible it seems. To her as well as me, surely. Maybe I never really thought so until then. It was, like, a fantasy. A crush. That’s all. They were my feelings, they didn’t need to come out into the world and be anything else.

  Mum would have gone ballistic if she knew about those conversations. Miss Lavender – Jo – didn’t live near us then. Mum’s nursing job meant she worked shifts, she often didn’t see me in the mornings before school. Sometimes Mum would smile, running her fingers along my top lip and say: Look at that! Ah, Drew, you’re getting a moustache . . . and she always had a go at me for spending too long in the shower. But that was it. She had no idea what went on at school. She was pleased I was doing well in History, that’s all she knew.

  Another time, a day in the school library, Jo goes: ‘You’re vulnerable, Drew, though you don’t know it, you don’t think so. And so am I. I’m not myself. I’m thirty this year. It’s – well, I don’t think I’m the only woman in the world thinking: Will I ever find anyone? Babies. Time running out, you know?’

  ‘You want a baby, Miss?’

  She looks startled. Embarrassed, shocked, even.

  ‘Oh well, I don’t know. I just meant—’

  And I never heard what she meant, because that was the day. The day a pupil – Ellie Marsh – came to find me in the library and told me to come to the Head’s office. And the day sort of stopped and all colour bled out of it and I knew, I just knew, before the Head spoke, before the English teacher, Mr Rutter, was asked to drive me home to see my mother, that something so bad had happened that the blood in my veins was flooding icy and my strange mind was saying: I must tell him. Watch out for the bales, Dad. I must tell him: Heavy fuckers, they are. Remember, don’t let a bale fall on you.

  This was daft – random. I heard what the Head said, I heard her go: ‘I’m so sorry, Drew . . .’ I wasn’t bonkers, I hadn’t gone mad; I just couldn’t stop the other thoughts coming. He’d had a heart attack. Shock because of the bale falling; he wasn’t crushed by it. He’d died at the hospital. Mum was there, a teacher would take me to join her.

  It was too late for warnings but that was all I could think: must get home, and warn him. And I could see his docky on the table, cheese and Branston pickle sandwiches, wrapped in silver foil, and see so clearly his hand picking it up, and the fat belly with the checked shirt, the soft furry brown hair on his arms, car keys in his other hand, jingling. The sound of him, always keys and a big gruff laugh, and that smell – a smell like eddish, the first growth of grass after mowing – and hay and sun and tractor fuel and the radio in the tractor cab humming and me wanting to put out a hand and stop him, say to him: Don’t go, Dad, don’t go, I’m only young, I still need you, don’t go yet; and him leaving the biggin (that word he always used for our house); great solid oak that he was – too big to fell, surely? – him leaving our little house for ever.

  And Mr Rutter was kind, I remember that, he was nice enough. He seemed to be talking about birds, all the time he was driving, and mumbling something about his father and how sorry he was and even though I couldn’t really hear him or listen another part of me was registering that he’s OK, he’s not bad, he’s all right for a nervous tosser, is Mr Rutter. And I do remember this, we saw lapwings, we saw lapwings in the distant fen out towards Mildenhall, and the lapwings were dancing, with their wings spread and their perky little crests, their weird movements. There was a whole cloud of them in the field, lifting and reshaping from the grass, making signs. One minute an arrow, the next letters, a word. Shaping, forming, a message. Old and new, always the same. You can never miss a lapwing, can you, because of the weirdness of the tumbling flight they do. And I was saying in my head: Are you still here then? Where are you? And I looked and looked and the message came back: Yes, here I am, this is where I am. I’m in your heart.

  That was when I did it. I mean, not that day I didn’t, but soon. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell Mum, or Jo. I went online and filled in a form and it said if you were under eighteen you could still register as a donor but someone else, a parent, would have to give their consent. Eyes. Liver, whatever. I just ticked heart.

  The card came in the post with its big red h
eart on a shiny blue background, all lame and cheerful, you know, just to slip in your wallet, in your back pocket, until you flip it over and read that sentence: I would like to help someone live after my death. And I stared at it, and I still had no idea why I did it, why I registered; it made no sense at all. Because I didn’t know who I would help. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe Dad would have been saved if someone else’s heart had been up for grabs; I understood that heart transplants are for people with, like, heart disease – not for sudden attacks caused by shock, by losing your job, or a bale nearly crushing you, or because someone you love died. No. Heart transplants aren’t for what Dad suffered from, or me neither. That’s something totally different; that needs something else.

  He’d been laid off the week before by his boss, Farmer Martin. That was the point. And he was working out his notice. His heart attack came on him later because of a bale falling on him, caused, they said, possibly by a faulty gantry, by someone’s sloppiness in Health and Safety, somebody not paying attention – but in my mind it was all about the job ending. All about the end of his life’s work. I would like to help someone live after my death. Maybe I simply thought: Is this all there is? Is it going to be over soon, one day, and be like this, be so little, so short? What the fuck is a life – my life – for?

  Everyone thinks getting the donor card was a good thing. Like a really good thing, sort of unselfish, or saintly or something, I know that. I’m not so sure. I think it was another kind of reason, more complicated. It was something spooky. I was angry, at that time, that’s all I was, I was blazing. I signed up and I got this little blue card that says: I would like to help someone live after my death.