school photos 13

My senses sharpened as if on the pointed end of a stick, slowly being turned, and hardened in the flames of a fire. Some part of me observed my body threshing on the pavement. The upper notes of bent-nosed cop’s jagged tone, registering on a see-saw scale, and showed the man beneath the uniform. What worried me was how dirty my Wrangler jacket had become in the muck and rain; how I couldn’t afford to get another and anyway, I didn’t want another; I wanted that one and it wasn’t fair. I felt the officer fiddling with the cuffs and them falling from my wrist. I got a whiff of the cop’s fear, recognised the dark shape of it, a nimbus hovering above his head. The wailing cry for ‘Jacqueline’ brought a pulse of some strong emotion, fire-bright sated lust and a divorce from my body. Tendrils of pliant plants grew, poking through my rib cavity, Jacqueline’s body calling me, calling her, back to the dry earth. Our bodies fused inside the tomb of an old air raid shelter filled with compost.  Across the ages, others the same as me, were holding flaming torches up against the stars in a clear night sky. Light flooded through my arteries and veins. My mouth couldn’t open wide enough; I cried out at so much light filling and spilling out of me

            ‘Get something in his mouth,’ said a face.

            ‘Make sure you get his tongue. You don’t want him swallowing his tongue,’ said a body.

            ‘He’ll bite his tongue off,’ shouted a dark shadow, screeching into a Walkie-Talkie and commanding an ambulance to appear out of the thin air.

            The school bell began to ring marking the end of playtime. I felt a kiss on my cheek and looked up into Lily’s face. Greed was a shadowed presence in a kaleidoscope of colour hovering above the halo of the little girl’s hair, emanating from the coven of adult faces surrounding us. Hate was an absence that dulled their eyes. I wet the corner of my lips with rainwater before mumbling, urging her away. ‘Run, little girl. Run.’

I sat up and watched her go back through the school gates. Brushing against the sooty-black roughcast of the back walls and windows of the school kitchens, her blue blazer merged with the damp colours of other coats, disappearing through the double-doors of the main school building.

Auntie Caroline bustled forward breaking through the circle of bodies that surrounded me. ‘You should be ashamed,’ she said to the cop that had handcuffed me, ‘scaring the boy like that. He’s never done anyone any harm in his life. Now because you’ve got a uniform you think you can go around beating innocent young boys up and bullying them.’ She grabbed hold of my hand to help me up. ‘Shame on you.’

Bent nose looked as if he was going to say something, but the other cop’s voice butted in with an officious voice meant to settle grievances. ‘There’s an ambulance on the way.’

I slouched back down back against the pavement as if hurt, glad of the distraction of their voices, because I’d peed myself. Getting to my feet the sticky warmth around my groin and legs crooked my back like an old man’s.

‘Are you alright son?’ Rain had slicked Auntie Caroline’s fluffy hair down, taken colour from her face and she’d never looked more like Vincent Price emerging from some twilight crypt, but it sounded like my mum speaking. I turned away from her because that voice could have made me cry.

‘Aye, I’m fine. Ah, just want to go home.’ And I could hear the wheedling boyish note in my voice as I looked round at the cop’s faces.

The sharp-featured cop spoke to me, but he was really speaking to the other policeman. ‘I’m sure that would be fine, but it would be best if you waited for an ambulance. We can’t force you to.  We’ve not formally charged you with anything, but you understand we’ve had a few complaints from the headmaster of the school about your behaviour.’ He looked at bent nose for reassurance.

The busty woman was standing a few steps away. Gloria spoke quietly to her and patted the side of her hand. A siren could be heard in the distance.  I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but whatever it was it wasn’t enough. She darted forward towards me, almost bowling over the cop shielding me from her. ‘What about my Jacqueline? What have you done with my Jacqueline?’  

‘Whoa. Whoa.’ The bent-nosed cop pulled at her elbow, but not before I saw something lurking in the soft blues of her eyes.

‘Ah think you should ask your husband, if that whit he is, where Jacqueline is. Piety hides depravity.’ The voice, the words, seemed not to be my own, but came tumbling from my mouth.

An ambulance with klaxon and  lights flashing cleared the streets of slow moving traffic and hurtled round the bend of Park Road, splashing up close to the kerb beside us. The two front doors simultaneously opened, but the passenger side window was down allowing the medic to flick his fag dout onto the road.

‘Where’s the body?’ The ambulance driver was a stocky man. He spoke in a jocular tone looking from face to face and settling on the sharp-faced cop.

The other medic, a small man that with his short-back and sides haircut looked a bit like a soldier, went round the back of the ambulance and swung open the doors. The bent-nosed cop nodded in my direction.

A hand went onto my back ushering me along to the edge of the pavement. ‘I’ll go with him.’ Auntie Caroline took the first step into the ambulance like a lady, not showing too much leg.

I screwed my face up and shook my head. ‘Nah, Ah’m not goin’. I feel fine now.’ Then looking over at the cops decided that the alternative might be worse.

‘Best get you checked.’ The ambulance driver ducked his head down to look at me over his square-type glasses made opaque by the smirry rain.

I didn’t want to make a fuss and allowed him to take my arm and guide me towards the ambulance and up the steps and inside. I perched side-saddle on one trolley, its wheels rolling towards me. Auntie Caroline sat opposite me on the other. The army-type medic stepped up and in beside us. ‘Best if you lie down. It might get a bit bumpy.’ I allowed myself to be strapped in and looked down with some amusement at my black Doc Martin boot and criss-cross stitching of yellow laces sticking up at the end of the trolley.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Auntie Caroline as the back doors banged shut.

I wasn’t. I lay back and kinda dozed, my body shuggling sideways with each corner the ambulance took and backwards in time to the jostling and the security of being firmly strapped into my crib. No siren sounded. The smell of fag smoke filtered through vents from the front of the ambulance reminding me of Mum leaning over my pram. The journey took a jiffy.

The two ambulance men wheeled me on the trolley into Accident and Emergency, Auntie Caroline stalking behind us. The casualty officer had been arguing with someone, another doctor, just before we’d arrived, but the anger bleached away from his voice, blending in with bouquet of strong disinfectant and wraparound screens at the foot of each bed, as he directed the ambulance men with a wave of his arm towards the corner cubicle.

I sat to the side of the bed, reading a Daily Record discarded on the chair, as if I was visiting.  They’d pulled the curtains round the bed, but a man-sized gap was left pegged open on the Accident and Emergency side and the Waiting Room side for them to escape through. Those that had not been brought in by ambulance had already failed the first test of triage. They sat smoking and chatting, waiting on banks of seat bolted to the floor. Auntie Caroline stood near the vending machine chatting to a woman with a crepe bandage over one eye.  The old man in the next bed begun coughing and clearing his throat into a cardboard hat, giving me the heebie-jeebies and making me feel sick.

The houseman a nervous looking man, not much older looking than me, arrived with a swish of curtains. A geriatric nurse, with a  piece of lace confectionary in the shape of a bonnet perched  on her head, followed like a faithful dog two steps behind him. 

‘Does this light bother you?’ he asked, bending over, propping my eye open with splayed fingers and shining a light in my eyes.

He didn’t bother waiting for my answer. He addressed what I took to be the charge- nurse or matron. ‘We’ll send him for some standard ECG tests. Keep him in overnight. Keep an eye on him.’