The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  Nothing could have saved him. In Year Six, I might have thought there was a heaven somewhere with fluffy clouds in it and angels and all that stuff. But really, like, even if I try hard, even if I want to, I don’t believe that any more.

  I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry in school, we can’t be soft. I wanted to turn over straw bales myself with my arms, my own bare strength. I went about turning over chairs, banging doors and windows instead. I got back to school and burned up the corridors with my swagger. And later, not long after the funeral but when I was still steaming, just for devilment, just for rage or fury or badness or fuck knows what, when we were on our own in the Design Tech room, she was trying to talk to me, trying to console me, I suppose, she was a bit too close, her face was close to mine, she was practically sitting on me; I got hold of Joanna Lavender and I tried to kiss her and I sort of grabbed her, shoved my hand a bit inside her shirt and got hold of something hot under the material, I managed to grab and squeeze just in this random way, before she slapped me across the face, slapped me so hard, and we broke apart and she burst into tears and that was that. That was Permanent Exclusion. That was Year Ten over for me.

  I tell you one thing. Maybe she wouldn’t want me to know. Her heart inside that shirt, inside that lace stuff, was beating fast.

  Act first, think later: heat and blood and anger. If only, as Mum said, I’d engage my brain first. Maybe I got it wrong: the way Jo was breathing in my ear, the mix-up of what she was trying to say. There was mess and ugliness mashed together. Because another teacher, this one we all hate, the Geography teacher, Mr Tansley, goes and sees Joanna slap me. And Tansley marches us both off to the Head. And Joanna is crying, my face is red and mine is stung and we’re in that office and the Head tells Tansley to leave, to allow her, please, to get to the bottom of things. And Tansley is furious, he is, like, five foot six, tops, and he sort of tries to tower over us and he doesn’t want to leave and goes instead: ‘I saw her! I saw a member of staff assaulting a boy! A – recently bereaved boy! This is no way to handle pupil discipline! This is an issue for the School Governors.’

  And so the Head is closing the door, and saying to Joanna, ‘Did you strike him, Miss Lavender?’

  And Tansley goes: ‘I saw her! I was passing the Design Tech room—’

  ‘Yes,’ whispers Miss Lavender, ‘I did slap him.’

  And I see Jo’s career is about to slip down the pan and this Tansley the Pansy hates her and she’s not going to expose me and it’s going to be up to me to save her and what the fuck what do I have left anyway? I love her. I don’t even care. I just say it.

  ‘Miss. She did slap me. But I’d tried to – I done something first. I grabbed her. She whacked me in self-defence.’

  Tansley is stunned. He stands there, huffing and puffing, and his glasses in his shirt pocket rising and falling, and Mrs Miller, the Head, says, ‘I think I should perhaps get to the bottom of this, Mr Tansley, on my own, thank you. I’d appreciate it if you said nothing to anyone at this stage, please. Until I do. That will be all.’

  Tansley doesn’t want to leave. He’s breathing hard. He must hate Joanna – maybe he fancies her and she – I don’t know – turned him down or something and he must be thinking he’s got her now. Assaulting a pupil. But you can see Tansley’s mouth working, like the penny just dropped, and the fizzing feeling that it’s something – disgusting, something unmentionable. That’s the moment he backs out the door. Joanna is still crying, and Mrs Miller offers her a tissue.

  ‘Dear me. I take that as a confession, Drew? You – assaulted Miss Lavender in some way? Is that right, Joanna? Can you confirm this? This might well be a matter for the police, Drew, if what you say is true.’

  ‘Oh, don’t, don’t!’ Jo says. ‘He didn’t mean it. He didn’t know what he was doing. He’s – he’s not himself . . . I slapped him out of panic, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .’

  And so it goes on. It’s choking in that room. The shame, the shock, the feeling that no one can breathe. Jo wants to stick up for me; I want to protect her. And in the end it seems that Mrs Miller understands exactly what happened and that it was, as she puts it, ‘sexual in nature. A sexual assault on a teacher. This is a very serious matter indeed, Andrew.’

  And there’s more blubbing, by Jo again; she’s gone to pieces, it’s like that day I saw her doubled up laughing, there’s something wrong, something melting or breaking in her, like when the rivers burst their banks and the washes spread out, something gone all wrong and slippery, something losing its shape, flooding out.

  I’m dry-eyed, though. No one’s going to make me break my banks. Miller says I’m excluded for a week and that’s not the end of it. She will have to see if Miss Lavender wants to pursue criminal charges, but she strongly suggests that as a course of action worth considering. A fourteen-year-old boy – no, newly fifteen – is old enough to be held responsible. She is going to talk to Mr Tansley about what he saw. I’m told to wait in the secretary’s office while a letter is prepared for my parents. For my parents. I’m sorry. I mean your mother.

  And Jo sobs all over again and the room just washes with shame, disaster, and ugliness.

  That was the moment I knew I wouldn’t be here for ever – I mean, here on this earth. It went something like this. Just in case. In case you think we’re finished, we’re nothing, we’re nobody, Fen folk, from another era, people you can’t imagine in your modern life with your train travel and your ebooks and your slick city stuff; we’re the slype of the land at the back of Fen river banks – we’re earth, we’re bog oak, we’re dirt, from long ago, invisible. Still, we’re not finished, no way – you’ll find out. We matter too, you know. We’re the fucking Beamishes.

  And so I looked at the organ donor card and somehow in the middle of everything bad and shit I thought: Well, it’s not over. My life’s not over, though Jo was acting like it was with all her tears and shock about the trouble I was in at school. A temporary exclusion turned into a permanent one when I showed no sign of calming down, when the minute I was back in school I was kicking over tables in class, picking fights with my mates, posting things to Tansley’s Facebook account that amounted to ‘criminal offences’ . . . Yeah, they had to exclude me in the end. Regretfully, etc., etc. No other option, blah blah blah. Result.

  I wasn’t pleased for Mum – she’s the only part of this that didn’t feel good – but I was glad I made something happen, a dramatic thing that wasn’t Dad’s death but, just the same, was something. Sweet. Marked the end of things, or so I thought, at the time. The end of school. The end of seeing Miss Joanna Lavender every five minutes: popping up in classrooms and slipping through doors.

  Only that’s not it, for Jo. You’d think she’d be clever, being a teacher and all that, but no. She only goes and moves up the road from us. (She later tells me it couldn’t be helped, the council allocated the place; she’d applied for a council house when she broke up with Bob, she had no idea the one they gave her would be so close to us in Black Drove, and she’d waited so long, she couldn’t afford to buy, so she couldn’t turn it down, but I ask you. Does that sound – believable? Or likely? Maybe she half believes it. People have a weird habit of deluding themselves about themselves, if you want to know what I think.) She’s torturing me, is Jo. She’s only about six houses up from me and while I’m lying here listening to my iPod she’s taking off her blouse and lifting those epic tits out of that awesome bit of lace and she’s snuggling down in her pink and cosy bed . . . Fucking hell. She’s driving me insane, and at the first chance I get I tell her so.

  Am I to blame here? She’s a grown woman, and I’m a boy, as she keeps on telling me. If she was a man, she says, it would be commonplace. In fact her own teacher ‘harassed’ her in school and it’s far more common than parents think. That’s what she says. Double standards, she says, and gets herself all roiled up, with the unfairness of it all, because here she is, she says, being highly moral, and resisting, and men would just do it, take wha
t they want, ruin lives, do whatever they like whatever the consequences because, you see, they’re raised that way, to think that their feelings matter . . . Girls are raised to think endlessly about the feelings of others.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say when she goes on like this.

  I know she wants me, whatever she says. I know the worst part of it for her was what I discovered – how fast her heart was beating. She wanted me. She’s working herself up to it. She needs to screw her courage up. I keep replaying it. I remember that she was looking at me in a strange way. She even touched my cheek as if she was a blind person and feeling me; and told me how beautiful I was, how girls all over the world were going to melt at my feet one day. How much women know about boys, about young men, she said, once. How easy it would be. It’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often. But wrong of course. That’s not feminism, she says. To take on men’s values, to be as bad as a bloke.

  The thing is, since my exclusion the Local Authority doesn’t really know what to do with me. I’m supposed to have a tutor. I’m allocated one hour a day, four days a week, with Mr Rutter. They even say, as I’m clever, I can try for a couple of GCSEs a year early and take them on my own in the Pupil Referral Unit, which is actually just some rooms in Littleport. There’s only twelve of us and most of the time we’re on our own with the tutor. Rutter is the English tutor.

  Rutter is OK. I like him. The days I see him are fine. He does this poet with us, John Clare, and his favourite novel of all time, he tells us: Tess of the d’Urbervilles. He reads us this bit he says is really chilling, when Tess suddenly wonders about the date of her own death, and he’s droning in his boring teacherly voice: ‘A day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?’

  Mr Rutter actually asks us: Has any of us ever had that thought? We all know our own birth-dates and we mark them every year, but what about the date we might die? Then he looks sort of horrified at what he’s saying, I think he remembers about my dad or something, and he quickly goes red and shuts up. But I have this weird thought and what he says catches hold. What if the date is the same? The birthday and ‘terminus in time’ day, I mean. And actually, you’ve been marking it with cakes and candles every year, without knowing it.

  I protest to Jo at the first opportunity. I see her out walking her dog Pippa along Twelve Mile Bank and chase after her. What about History? My best subject – why aren’t they giving me some help with that?

  She looks worried then. She tugs at her hair. She says that Mr Rutter would be able to put me in for the History exam and that maybe, just maybe, she could help me with the extra study. In her own time. But in deadly secret. I must on no account tell a soul.

  ‘Would you be in trouble if I did?’

  ‘We’d both be in trouble of course,’ she says, and sharply. People often act sharp when they’re in the wrong. I’ve noticed that. She knew – she must have known – but she puts it this way:

  ‘I can’t have you ruin your whole life, fail to get the History GCSE you so deserve, because of this – this incident, Drew.’

  And I nod, like, really seriously, and we carry on and arrange a time to meet.

  So on the way there, in the car, for the first time I mention it, this thing she calls the incident. ‘I’m sorry. I really am. Did I, like – assault you?’

  And she’s driving so she just looks straight ahead and says, ‘No, I don’t think you did, really. It – you misjudged things, that’s all.’

  She tells me about this tutor she had at university, this bloke they used to call ‘Peter the Wolf’ who offers her a lift to a lecture and when she goes to his house of course he’s there with the wineglasses out, and in his dressing gown.

  ‘His dressing gown, Drew! Can you imagine?’ She’s laughing when she says this. I feel a blaze of horrible jealousy, picturing her all little and blonde and friendly, clutching her file to her chest, this wizened old yellow-toothed Wolf with his great hairy knob hiding inside his dressing gown, answering the door. God, jealousy. It’s like a pain. It’s like a snake, whipping up. I never knew until then. I try and hide it. I keep my face straight but that snake is twisting around inside me.

  Jo gets bolder and bolder. She must be certain that everyone thinks the best of her and couldn’t believe it otherwise. Or else – and this feels true – she just can’t help herself. She gets me to call in at her house with her, during the day when she’s sure Mum is on a shift at the hospital and won’t be home. Pick up some paperwork for the museum which she’s forgotten. I stand awkwardly just inside the door, smelling her, smelling her private teacher’s life, her grown-up life away from me. She dashes in, I stand in the hall. She has this little dog, Pippa, and she’s left it tied up in the garden and it’s going berserk. She fetches something, she comes back, we walk to her car. Innocent enough. But . . .

  ‘Do you think women are made of different stuff, then? Like, you’re better than us?’ I ask her.

  ‘I think . . .’

  She knows I like talking, I like philosophy and politics and all the things that Mum used to like too, but that now feel too dangerous, like they might unhinge her, pierce the bubble we’ve surrounded ourselves in at home. Bring on a random fit of sobbing and shrieks of: ‘Oh I don’t know, don’t ask me – where is he, where’s your dad when you need him?’ Although if he was here I know he’d only say in his dry way: ‘Talk’s talk and changes nothing. Action’s the thing.’

  So we’re at the museum in St Ives, quietly working alongside each other, and Jo goes: ‘Well, you know, Drew, that there are far more criminal acts committed by men than women. Do you know how many men are in prison in Britain, compared to women?’

  I don’t know, of course.

  ‘It’s something like eighty-four thousand men, and around four thousand women. A tiny proportion.’

  ‘Sick,’ I say. Then, ‘Maybe the women don’t get caught. Might be better at not ending up in the nick?’

  She smiles at this. But she goes:

  ‘No, it’s probably the reverse. Women are often imprisoned for quite trivial, non-violent offences – shoplifting, prostitution, not being able to pay a fine. I think it’s safe to assume, Drew, that violent offences, aggression or acting out, lack of impulse control, whatever you want to call it, is much more a man’s problem than a woman’s.’

  ‘Is this about me getting excluded again? Not being funny but if you’re going to have a go, don’t bother. Mum’s already been on this morning.’

  ‘No, I think – I was just thinking. The people we’re reading about. Burning things, rampaging. But it’s – selfish, isn’t it? Your heart’s desire – might have an impact on others. Do damage even. We can’t always . . . no matter how much we might want something.’

  Oh, I don’t know. And then I kiss her, and it’s the first time, and she doesn’t move away. My eyes are closed and I just feel her mouth, her lips, her tongue, the warmth of her and the smell of her and she’s not moving away at all. The museum is dark dark with the tick-ticking of the clock and the dust and all those old Fen skates paused, those ones that will never skate again, and all those dusty green-glass bottles empty of Fen beer, that will never be drunk from again, and all those chain-suspended stuffed sea creatures that will never swim or crawl on their bellies through the icy galls ever ever again: hovering, hovering: time just blasted in there, time cracked and smashed and suspended, just waiting for a boy to fall out of love with his teacher. And it’s not going to happen. Not then. Not in this lifetime.

  It doesn’t matter what rules Jo sets, what ‘boundaries’ she tries to put around it. She finds me ‘unusual’. I’m so unlike anyone she’s ever met. She doesn’t think boys like me come along that often. Couldn’t we wait? Until I’m eighteen? Eighteen – fuck’s sake! Sixteen then. Until it’s legal. Sixteen, she thinks. Then she will feel
she did nothing wrong, she took nothing from me, her conscience is clear.

  She’s running her tongue over her mouth. She’s almost crying, she looks so sad, and tortured. I think this is a fucking mad idea. I storm out of the museum room. I rage and I bellow all the way down the street but then I reach her car and I have to wait for her, stand next to that stupid yellow Fiat; I can’t drive it, I can’t jump inside without her and her car keys to let me in. I’m a child here again. I’m almost in tears as she reaches me, running up to me.

  ‘Drew! We can be friends. Until then. We can see each other if it’s possible and – you should see girls. Try not to be so – you should – meet girls your own age. Go out with them. For you it’s probably just a crush. Who knows what it is for me? I hardly know myself but I’m promising you, Drew, I’m promising to stick it out and – if you can wait until you’re sixteen, it’s barely a year, I’ll wait too.’

  I kiss her again. An angry kiss; she doesn’t resist me. She lets me sort of push her into the car and I’m bigger than her and she’s small and hot and fucking fucking hell I really am crying at last, in the passenger seat, leaning over towards her, tears smearing into her mohair jumper and kind of wailing in a muffled way into her longed-for chest:

  I’ve got nothing and it’s so unfair.

  And, you know, there’s only us parked there and it’s a dark car park in the middle of a forgotten little town and tugging at that jumper she doesn’t stop me, it’s that one phrase, the thought of my dad dying and the sadness of that, and seeing my tears, my fury, seems to have done it for her: she’s letting me, is how I think of it, she’s pushing the chair back into the reclining position, letting me climb on top of her and unzip myself and she’s even guiding me, it’s quick, there’s no light in here and I can’t see her face, it’s so dark and yet it’s heat and fire, fire and heat like I’ve never known, she’s holding me like I’m a burning stock of wheat in her hand, she’s on her back in the awkward tight space on the seat and her skirt up and her jumper over her face and Oh God I love you, Joanna Lavender, I love you. Let me. Please.