The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Part 35

SOMEONE TAKE THESE DREAMS AWAY.

Marc Werner.

WHEN CONTROL OPENED at the Cornerhouse, the nights were getting longer. Most days, it was dark by half past four. Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis was the film of the year; everybody went to see it (apart from me), even Nick. But while the rest of our colleagues from English and Film would have allowed themselves to become immersed in Corbijn's recreation of late 1970s Manchester, marvelling at Martin Ruhe's black and white cinematography, Nick would have been sitting there in the dark thinking of another British film with only a handful of scenes shot in black and white, the rest in colour.

Nick has a thing about black and white. He's fond of quoting Christopher Walken's line from Donald Cammell's Wild Side. "Life is black and white. Have you ever seen grey squares on a chessboard?"

I'm sitting in front of his computer in the office we've shared since I recommended him for a vacant lecturer's post, and I'm wondering where to look first. I don't even know how much stuff he keeps on his desktop machine. I hardly use mine at all, preferring my laptop. The office is tiny the university has a problem with overcrowding but it's surprising how sitting at Nick's desk gives me an entirely different perspective on it. The difference between it and the view from my desk is like the difference between the way to somewhere and the journey back. I spin slowly round to look at Nick's shelves. Two books by Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema and The Ambiguous Image. Roger Manvell's New Cinema in Britain. Danny Peary's Cult Movies. (I have a copy of that somewhere, too.) A few annual-sized hardbacks Thriller Movies, A Pictorial History of Crime Films, Photoplay Film Yearbook 1976. I was struck by how many of these t.i.tles dated back to the 1970s. Among the newer stuff: Chris Darke's Light Readings, Ali Catterall and Simon Wells' book about British cult films Your Face Here, and a recent edition of the Time Out Film Guide. An eclectic library.

It's very quiet in the office, which it rarely was when Nick was around. He'd either be banging away at his keyboard ("Touch-typing's for puffs. No offence!") or complaining loudly into his phone about the standard of the technical equipment in the lecture theatres. Or he'd have a student in for a tutorial. Three people in an office designed for one. Admin, teaching, dealing with students that's only half of what we're supposed to be doing. The rest our so-called research is what brings in the real money. But if we want a quiet s.p.a.ce in which to write, there's no point looking anywhere near the university.

18.8.87 [morning]

In a TV studio where I've been interviewed. The Queen turns up. Then we all go out to a tube station. The Queen looks nervous. On the train a man is smoking a cigarette and a cigar. His fat cigar looks like a k.n.o.b with the foreskin pulled back. Arriving at Cambridge University (!?) I am shown with one other person (?) to my room, which is room B at school. I am given keys, though the door is of the saloon bar type.

On the upper shelves behind Nick's desk, the beautifully tactile, plastic-sheathed cases of DVDs. Elephant, Old Boy, If . . . ., Zero de Conduite. Beautiful things, DVDs. Simple, full of promise. How many have you bought and never watched? In case you ever needed to see something again, to write about it, you told yourself, but really it was just to possess them. Like a director h.o.a.rding prints of his own films. A sense of owners.h.i.+p, a piece of marketing genius. At least half the DVDs in anyone's collection have never been watched.

I notice the line from Wild Side written on a yellow sticky note stuck to the side of Nick's inkjet printer. Also, on another note alongside: "When do we live? That's what I want to know." I knew the quote. It was a line spoken by Mick Travis, the Malcolm McDowell character in If . . . ., near the beginning of the film. I might not have known it had it not been for Nick's interest in the film. His obsession with the film.

I've been covering for him for a week now. Delivering a lecture to undergraduates, running a workshop with his MA students. His absence has been noticed, but has not yet become a serious problem. It will, though. The conference he's organized Run in the Corridor: the Politics of School Shootings on Film, which he's been working towards for several months is only a week away.

A couple of times in the last few days I've been convinced things have switched around on his desk and have wondered if he's been in during the night. I know he has a good relations.h.i.+p with Byron, the dreadlocked security guard who wanders in from Moss Side towards the end of the afternoon. I've seen the two of them sharing a roll-up, huddled against the autumnal chill and standing a cautious distance from the main entrance to the building. One of them sources the gear and supplies the other. My guess is Byron is the supplier, if only because Nick, for all his strengths, is not very streetwise. But he can turn on the charm. One afternoon while he was waiting for a female student to turn up for a tutorial, he told me she was dyslexic. Listen to this, he said, reading from the student's Learning Support Doc.u.ment, "'Linzi has difficulty with planning work, prioritizing tasks and concentrating when there is background noise. She has poor short-term memory and may lose flow when interrupted.'" He looked up at me. "For f.u.c.k's sake," he said, "Do you think I'm dyslexic, then."

"Sounds like we all are," I said.

When Linzi came in and sat down across the desk from Nick, he held up a print-out and said to her, "This is your Learning Support Doc.u.ment." He immediately crumpled it into a ball and threw it at the bin. When she looked shocked, he said, "It's b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. I don't care how you spell encyclopaedia consensus liaison. Whatever. I'm interested in the content of what you write, not its appearance." She looked uncertain. "Don't worry," he said with a resigned smile. "I can always print off another copy."

In the quiet of the early afternoon, the phone rings on Nick's desk. I look at it, wondering whether to pick it up. I don't look at it for very long.

"h.e.l.lo? Nick's phone," I say, strongly hoping the caller will not respond by saying, "h.e.l.lo, Nick's phone."

"I'm looking for Nick," says a female voice.

You and me both.

"He's not at his desk at the moment, I'm afraid," I say. "Would you like to leave a message?"

"That's OK," she says, and before I know it she is gone.

I press 1471.

We are sorry. We do not have the caller's number.

I remember my own student days. One of my lecturers, Roger Huss one of the few I really liked had invited me to call him by his first name, and maybe I did a couple of times, but it never felt right somehow. Excuse me, Roger. Thank you, Roger. Now it's different. It's Hey Nick and Laters dude. Student reps sit on staff committees and complain bitterly if they think they're not getting their money's worth.

7.1.96.

At school, a gang of lads gathers round. I bristle but say nothing. Another lad comes in and tells us what we have to do look back over all the films of the year and see which one G.o.d would have made differently(!).

In my mind, as I hang up the phone, is a picture of Helena Swan, one of Nick's postgraduate students, a well-built and undeniably attractive woman in her early fifties. I've noticed her hanging around at the end of Nick's seminars, laughing at his jokes during a staff-students social event. I've had to start leaving the room when she comes for tutorials. It was her voice on the phone, I'm sure of it.

I switch his computer on. I know Nick's log-in because he dictated it to me over the phone one day when a system error was blocking mine and I couldn't use the photocopier. I enter it and the prompt asks for a pa.s.sword. I have a few weak guesses anderson, mcdowell, oldboy, elephant (if . . . . doesn't have enough characters, even with the four-dot ellipsis) but don't get lucky.

I stand up and go over to the window. Looking out at the windswept junction of side roads, I am reminded for some reason of another time I stood in exactly the same position and looked out to see Nick sauntering towards the building and talking on his mobile. He was smiling. I didn't often see him smile. As he approached the barrier, which was lowered to keep out unauthorized vehicles, he ended the call and dropped the phone into his jeans pocket. In front of him, the barrier suddenly rose as if, grandly, permitting him to enter. Nick looked up and gave a great guffawing laugh, which was even rarer than a smile and made him look a lot younger than his forty-five years. I could hear it, two floors up and through double-glazing. I laughed as well and felt momentarily light-headed as well as light-hearted. It felt like the first time we'd really connected in years, perhaps since school, though of course he hadn't seen me watching, and by the time he'd reached our office, his face had settled into its semi-permanent grimace of disapproval.

I go to the department admin office on the third floor. On the left as you go in is a series of filing cabinets. I open the one labelled SZ and flick through until I find what I want. I leaf through a file, make some notes, and leave.

I stop by our office to pick up my bag and am about to leave when I have a thought. I walk over to Nick's shelves and take down the DVD of If . . . . and a couple of books and slip them into my bag.

22.1.96 [morning]

Attending hospital. Very soon it's become our old school it's a.s.sembly time. We're all in uniform. There's a boy in a wheelchair near me. He's got a gla.s.s of Coca-Cola with ice. Another boy comes along and sits in another wheelchair, sliding a big brown suitcase underneath the chair. I know the suitcase contains weapons.

The bus is full of students. I stare out of the window and find myself thinking about Iain Constable's recent lecture on research methods. He was coming across as rather pedantic with his insistence on correct presentation. Footnotes, quotations, bibliographies. Everything had to be just so, or the student would lose marks. "Right down to the number of dots in an ellipsis," he said, and Nick spoke up, saying, "What about If . . . .? What if you need to mention the t.i.tle of Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If . . . ., which famously has four dots in its ellipsis? What then?" Iain laughed and Nick said he wasn't joking, it was a serious point. Taking Nick's interruption as a challenge, Iain entrenched and said an ellipsis with four dots was a mistake and would be marked as such in any work he came across. "Good job I'm not your student, then," Nick said, as he got up and walked out of the lecture theatre.

I found him later in our office, in tears.

"What is it?" I asked, shocked.

"Nothing. Leave me alone," he snapped, then softened slightly. "Just give us a minute, Mike."

I went to see the head of department about a timetabling issue. When I came back, Nick had dried his eyes, but his face was red as it jutted towards his computer screen.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong or shall I mind my own business?" I asked.

"Something I read in here," Nick said, picking up Ali Catterall and Simon Wells' Your Face Here, which I knew had a chapter on If . . . . He opened the book and flicked through the pages. "Page sixty-four," he said and chucked the book across the office.

I caught it and turned to the right page.

"Last para," Nick said. "'There were plans for a school reunion'."

Writing about Anderson's idea for a proper sequel to If . . . . (as distinct from the fluff that was O Lucky Man!), the authors caught the reader up on what had happened to key cast members. Christine Noonan (the Girl) had left the profession and gone into teaching, David Wood had become a children's writer and McDowell, of course, had moved to Hollywood. Two, however, were dead. Richard Warwick (Wallace) had died from an AIDS-related condition in 1997, and Rupert Webster (Bobby Phillips) had been knifed to death on the New York subway in the 1980s.

I felt a lump in my throat as I instantly recalled one of their scenes from the film, shot in black and white, in which they slept side by side in Wallace's bed. Although Malcolm McDowell's scene with the Girl at the Packhorse Cafe, in which they had ended up play-fighting naked on the floor, again in black and white, had been remarkably effective in its insistence that fantasy was very much a part of the film's reality, it was clear where the director believed the emotional heart of the film was to be found. The camera's slow glide across the dorm, showing first Bobby Phillips and then revealing Wallace lying next to him, had made that very clear. Earlier, Phillips had watched admiringly as Wallace, after flas.h.i.+ng a smile at the younger boy, performed slow-motion acrobatics on the high bar.

Although the scene in the Packhorse Cafe was s.e.xually explicit, even allowing a glimpse of pubic hair, the film's erotic peak was to be found later, Nick had once patiently explained to me, in another black and white sequence. The one in which the blonde Mrs Kemp, housemaster Arthur Lowe's wife, played by Mary McLeod, walks naked down an empty corridor towards the camera, and then, away from the camera, through a boys' dormitory, trailing a hand along a line of washbasins and turning, finally, to look back over her shoulder at the viewer, her stance recalling that of the Girl in the cafe as she looked round from under a curtain of thick, dark hair while making coffee for Mick and Johnny. Mrs Kemp looked over her right shoulder, the Girl over her left. One of these shots looked as if it was meant to be erotic, but was merely a tease, a stock pose, a nod to the cla.s.sic black-and-whites; the other, exploiting the full-figured vulnerability of the childless and lonely Mrs Kemp, actually was and powerfully so.

"If only Mary McLeod knew how many adolescent boys' w.a.n.ks she was responsible for," Nick said.

This comment comes back to me as I get off the bus in West Didsbury. The anonymous Edwardian conversion across the road, once home to Factory Records, reveals no trace of its cultural significance. I cross Lapwing Lane and keep walking. The address I'm looking for is located within a grid of quiet residential streets to the west of Palatine Road. Helena Swan is not quite another generation, as Mrs Kemp had been to Mick, Johnny and the other boys ("Do you need this, Mrs Kemp," Mick had asked, in one of the refectory scenes, with a provocative thrust of the sauce bottle), but she is an apparently available woman some ten years older than Nick, of a similar build to Mary McLeod in 1968. She could easily be a stand-in, a body double.

Dusk is turning the lit front rooms of these imposing three-storey Victorian terraced houses into sound-stages, sets dressed and waiting for actors. A narrow footpath runs down the side of Helena Swan's property. Barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other, it offers a convenient spot from which to observe the back of the house. Some lights are burning; no noise can be heard. There must be a better way to go about what I'm trying to achieve. Do I really expect to see Nick suddenly appear silhouetted in a bedroom window? To knock on the front door and explain my quest would embroider unnecessary complications on to an already elaborate tapestry. I decide to wait for a while.

Wednesday, 15 January 1997 At a swimming baths, there are three pools but they're short and narrow, barely bigger than normal bathroom baths. The one in the middle has two people in it: someone on the left who remains still, and a young black man who is swimming lengths. There would just be room for me to swim to his right. I'm perched on the rim about to dive in but I worry that my arms or legs might disturb other diners because now it's a restaurant as well. Also the black lad has just smiled at me and he's naked and I'm worried there isn't enough room.

My thoughts turn to the DVD in my bag. a.s.suming a lack of success in my current endeavour, I will play the film when I get home. I've seen it a number of times and my familiarity with it has been enhanced by Nick's frequent allusions and references, but to watch it again under these particular conditions might just throw up an idea or two. I could never forget the grey echoing corridors down which Mick, Johnny and Wallace confidently stride, three abreast, to meet their punishment at the hands of the Whips. Vicious lashes of the cane in the school gymnasium, the wooden floor pounding with the lengthy run-up of the s.a.d.i.s.tic Rowntree. How similar that gym was to our own, in the grammar school. How different were the relations.h.i.+ps of abuse, yet how familiar, really.

I take out my notebook, then my mobile, and key in a number. I hear a faint ringing, then another light comes on in the kitchen window and Helena Swan appears. She picks up the phone.

"h.e.l.lo?" she says. "h.e.l.lo?"

I hold my breath.

"Who is this?"

Still I say nothing.

Then, her voice shrinking to a whisper: "Nick?"

I thumb the red b.u.t.ton to break the connection and breathe out and quickly breathe in again. I watch as Helena Swan turns away from the phone and stares into the air in front of her face, which looks as if it has just been slapped. I wish at that point I hadn't done what I have done, in spite of the information gained from it.

I asked Nick once if he was frustrated by the confusion surrounding the use of black and white sequences in If . . . ., for the most part a colour film. Every commentator seems to have a different take and all claim to be reflecting the position of director Lindsay Anderson. Some say it was done to save money, others that a consistency of colour tone in the chapel, with its great stained-gla.s.s windows, could not be achieved. Still others argue that the choice was aesthetic, that it had to do with reminding the viewer of Anderson's links to Free Cinema, that it was part of a general push for Brechtian alienation, that it was intended to heighten the tension between fantasy and reality.

"It's all of those things and none of them," he'd said. "Art's impossible without ambiguity."

4 May 1997 Standing at a urinal in our school, but in Scotland. A man stood too close to me so I moved along and he muttered that the only person I'd have something to worry about in that department would be Ian somebody. I challenged him. He shook water at me, which I soon realized was his p.i.s.s. I grabbed him and demanded to know his name and where he worked Iain Grant, lab technician, he said. Somehow I knew they were two different Ians and that this one spelled his name the Scottish way.

When I get back home, I pour myself a large gla.s.s of wine and watch the film again. Every shot of the school reminds me of the one Nick and I both attended, he five years ahead of me. A couple of years ago there was a reunion. It was the last opportunity to visit the school, as the governors had finally admitted defeat in a long battle against time and announced that the school would move to new premises at the beginning of the next academic year. I asked Nick if he was going.

"Am I f.u.c.k."

I went; I was curious. You were supposed to get a boy to show you around, but I slipped up the back stairs and prowled the upper corridors on my own. I wasn't hugely keen to catch up with old faces and was attracted more by the fabric of the building itself. There were textures and shapes I had forgotten, but which came back to me with startling clarity once I saw them again after two decades. The painted notice boards pierced by thousands of pin holes. The grey plastic roller doors on boys' lockers outside cla.s.srooms.

The swimming pool was unrecognizable. Gone were the cold, green tiles, the constant drip of freezing water from the concertina gla.s.s ceiling. The pool had always been my most hated part of the school, even after optional wearing of trunks was introduced half-way through my time there. Until I was fourteen or fifteen all boys swam naked, and all boys found it humiliating and degrading. Mature adolescents, late developers I was never sure which subset found it more embarra.s.sing.

In the refectory I saw Corky Mr McCorkindale, games master and felt a sudden jolt of discomfort. I hovered on the edge of a group of old boys to overhear the conversation between them and Corky, who looked older (obviously), but also considerably smaller, than I remembered him. I already knew that he had left teaching, and I heard him say he had retrained as a psychotherapist. One of the old boys burst out laughing. Corky laughed, too, but then asked what was funny.

"Well, you created your own client base, didn't you?" said the former pupil. "With the school's policy on swimwear."

We could see the funny side now, but it had been nothing to laugh about at the time. Some had got over it, others were left with intimacy issues. I know one old boy turned Sunday league footballer who has never felt comfortable showering with his teammates after a game. I just can't get naked in front of other men, he told me, paraphrasing Woody Allen. Not a problem I've ever had.

Nick never asked me about the reunion and I didn't volunteer anything. Part of me wanted to tell him that I had tried the door at the back of the school theatre, but that it had been locked.

Rewatching If . . . . reminds me of the importance of Bobby Phillips. Not only do he and Wallace share a bed but the younger boy finds himself up on the roof with Mick, Johnny, Wallace and the Girl at the end of the film, bristling with guns and ammunition. A loaded gun won't set you free? Depends who you're pointing it at.

Sunday, 31 October 1999 [Halloween.] I was back at school. The corridors and great hall were familiar, but everywhere there were orange plastic girders and supports appearing to hold up the ceilings. I knew these would be unsuitable to bear any loads, yet they could have no other use that I could fathom.

The film has given me no clearer idea how to find Nick. From my bag I take out the books I borrowed from his shelves a short BFI monograph on the film and his copy of Your Face Here, which falls open at page sixty-four and the paragraph about Rupert Webster and Richard Warwick. I have a look at the chapter on If . . . . and then the BFI book, by Mark Sinker, which is intelligently written and packed with ideas and different approaches to interpretation. I notice that Your Face Here records the location of the motorcycle showroom, from which Mick and Johnny steal the motorbike they drive to the Packhorse Cafe, as being in South Wimbledon, whereas the BFI book and other sources, both print and internet, maintain it's in Shepherd's Bush. I look up Your Face Here on Amazon and am interested to see it has nine five-star reader reviews, all posted by "A Customer". None of them goes into much detail. On a hunch, I Google Richard Warwick: died at the age of fifty-two with a form of dementia brought on by AIDS. For Rupert Webster, however, I find a couple of sources claiming he's still alive. Either Anderson or McDowell spread a rumour that he'd been killed, they said. The internet is notoriously unreliable and it's only sentimentality that makes me place more trust in the printed page. I don't know what to believe, but I do hope that the boys who wrote Your Face Here, a lively and enjoyable read, are wrong and that Rupert Webster, who for a short time forty years ago was Bobby Phillips, is alive.

More to the point, I hope Nick is alive.

I'm narrowing down my options. I realize I have to do something I should have done days ago.

I grab my stuff and leave the house.

The building containing Nick's flat is only a couple of streets away from Helena Swan's house. I'm wondering if she knows this, as I tell a resident on the top floor I'm delivering pizzas. The door clicks open while he's still asking his girlfriend if they've ordered any.

Sunday, 27 November 2005 Looking through old copies of the school newspaper, I see one with a picture of a girl on the front page. I recognize her, but the name given something Schneidor is not familiar. There are pictures of me, black and white, milking the applause from a huge crowd. There are other pictures of crowds on the fields at the front of the school, among them a young Mike, looking at me and waving. He moves as the picture comes to life.

I've never been to Nick's place he's never invited me but I know he lives on the first floor. There are two doors on the first landing. The one on the right has pounding music coming from within, so I knock once on the door on the left, wait a moment, then lean my shoulder against it. I feel it give very slightly, so I treat it to a shove, then another, and I'm inside. I push the door to behind me and lean against it as I wait for my heartbeat to return to normal.

Straight ahead is a tiny bathroom, to the left of that an equally small bedroom. Facing the bedroom is a combined kitchen and living room. The size of the flat, a professional would be able to toss it in two minutes and leave with either what they came for or the knowledge that it wasn't there to be found. I'm not a professional, but I do know Nick. I check out the bookshelves. More film books. Novels about cinema: Flicker, Throat Sprockets, The House of Sleep. A Halliwell's Film Guide. I take it down and look up If . . . ., which Halliwell appears to admire but still attacks for its "fas.h.i.+onable emphasis on obscure narrative", concluding that "the film as a whole makes no discernible point". Halliwell just couldn't help himself.

On the next shelf down are copies of Nick's books. His studies of Westerns and Eastern European SF and fantasy cinema for Wall-flower Press and the experimental novel that was published in a limited edition by a local independent outfit. There are not many of us who have read it.

There's a decent-sized plasma-screen TV, but nothing leaps out at me from Nick's collection of DVDs and tapes, and there's no sign of a laptop (and no room for a desktop). The bedroom is dominated by an unmade double bed, on the far side of which a fat, well-thumbed notebook sits on a little set of drawers. It appears to be a dream diary. I flick through it and read random entries.

24 January 2006 In school, towards the end of the day, I find myself near an empty staircase leading up, so I go up, thinking I'll just have a look around. I end up in a maths cla.s.sroom full of small boys. The uniform is different and there are variations. I see one boy in a tight-fitting blazer and trousers that's very dark grey with silver symbols in a regular pattern all over it. The boys are getting up to go. I want to leave before them. I pa.s.s the teacher who has grey hair and who I think I recognize from my time at the school. He has his back to me. Then I'm looking for the door and I can't find it. Finally I do, but it's hidden and to get through it you have to push drapes aside and step over a threshold of broken bits of wood it feels like a trap.

They're not all about school, but enough of them are.

I put the notebook back down. On an impulse I open the top drawer and immediately wish I hadn't.

I was going to hail a cab, but when I get back to Palatine Road there's a bus coming, so I stick my hand out. I imagine everyone on the bus can see the way my jacket is weighed down on one side, but I doubt I'm the first person to catch the forty-three bus with a loaded gun in his pocket. I wonder how he got hold of it, though when I think about it, there must be a hundred ways to get tooled up in Manchester these days.

I get off a couple of stops early and walk. I haven't been back since the reunion. The fence by the old biology block never was much of a barrier. I approach the main buildings from the side much less conspicuous than using the front entrance. I don't know what plans exist for the disused school. Demolition and a highly lucrative land sale, I presume. For now it stands empty. I enter via the ramp down to the bas.e.m.e.nt on the west side. One of the double doors at the bottom opens at my touch. If the signs posted by a security company are anything other than an empty threat, I'd be surprised. I pick my way past a line of toilets, not a single door remaining, broken gla.s.s on the concrete floor flas.h.i.+ng in the weak light of my mobile phone. I climb the stairs to the corner of the maths and geography corridors, where I stop and listen. All I can hear is the thumping of my heart and a steady drip-drip-drip somewhere behind me.

I creep past the Great Hall and main stairs. The shadows are grainy, alive with glittering motes. I hesitate outside the Masters' Common Room, the smooth stones of the corridor floor carpeted with white dust and flakes of paint. In the theatre, the individual wooden blocks that make up the parquet floor are all loose. The door at the back is no longer locked, but Nick is not inside. I enter a room I have not been inside for almost thirty years, at least not outside my dreams. Night after night, sometimes, for several days at a time, I have found myself back here. Twice, at the most, we were here together, but in my mind the narratives of those two occasions have become intertwined with the many, many times I have dreamed myself back. If the closest I can get to Nick in reality is sharing duties and an office, in my fantasy life we have remained locked into an infinite variety of positions on two turquoise vinyl-covered chairs pushed together as a makes.h.i.+ft couch in this tiny room props cupboard? Wardrobe department? at the back of the theatre. The first time, early May 1980, he had a little Philips ca.s.sette player and a badly recorded tape of ba.s.s-heavy music, dark and threatening, but utterly compelling. I asked him what it was and he smiled as he said it was called Unknown Pleasures. Even with the unsophisticated musical tastes of a twelve-year-old, I could tell it was special. The way the drummer played just off the beat, the fact that the ba.s.s player carried the melody more often than not. Nick described the singer to me, told me he suffered epileptic fits, sometimes during performances.

When he touched me, it felt both wrong and right at the same time, but he was tender and patient. I liked his smile and the smell of his neck. When he held my face with his hands and kissed me, I imagined the east and west wings of the main school building somehow wrapping themselves around this tiny room at the back of the theatre and keeping us safe.

The second time, just before the Whit week holiday, Nick told me that the singer from the band had killed himself. He played the alb.u.m again and we sat in the dark listening to it, the lyrics scattered with clues that should have foretold the singer's suicide. Nick also told me about a film he had seen on television just over a year ago in which four schoolboys and a girl staged a b.l.o.o.d.y revolution at their boarding school, shooting the headmaster and killing dozens of pupils and teachers. We're in that film, he told me. You and me. One day you'll see it and you'll see what I mean.

As I reach out an arm to steady myself against the wall, I feel the weight of the gun in my pocket.

I re-enter the auditorium and head for the swing doors that lead back to the main corridor. The eroded hollows in the steps cus.h.i.+on my footfalls as I climb the main stairs. The upper corridors are lit by moonlight. I stop and look out across the quad towards the windows of the adjacent corridor where a moving figure catches my eye. The pale, wide-hipped body, silvery white hair. Black holes for eyes. I don't need to be any closer to know that Helena Swan is playing Mrs Kemp, which would place Nick most likely at the end of her corridor at the junction with mine. I keep walking, the weight of the gun tugging at my right shoulder.

When I reach the junction of the two corridors, Nick is not there. I figure he'll be halfway up the next one, so that in a moment he can have Helena Swan walk away from him and look back, just as Mrs Kemp does. I doubt he's gone to the trouble of bringing a camera, but am aware that if I approach now I will ruin his shot. So be it.

He steps out from behind a bank of lockers twenty yards away.

"I wondered when you'd come," he says.

Helena Swan falters and stands still, uncertain how to react.

"You shouldn't be walking around with that in your pocket," Nick says calmly. "Give it to me."

I take the gun out of my pocket. Helena Swan, on seeing the dark shape in my hand, turns and runs towards the far end of the corridor.

"Who is it for?" I ask.

Nick smiles. "You brought it," he points out.

"I couldn't leave it in your flat with the door off its hinges," I say. "But if I give it to you, I'm worried you just might use it. Whether here and now or next week at your conference, in a dramatic re-enactment of a certain film."