"The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13" - читать интересную книгу автора (S S S, J J J, Kidd Chico, Fowler Christopher, Campbell Ramsey, McAuley Paul,...)

I: Finchley Road to Swiss Cottage

London has the oldest underground railway system in the world. Construction began in 1863 and was completed in 1884. Much later it was electrified, and since then has been periodically modified. A great many of the original stations have been abandoned, renamed or resited. A partial list of these would include Aldwych, British Museum, Brompton Road, York Road, St Mary’s, Down Street, Marlborough Road, South Kentish Town, King William Street, North End and City Road. In many cases the maroon-tiled ticket halls remain, and so do the railway platforms. Even now, some of these tunnels are adorned with faded wartime signs and posters. Crusted with dry melanic silt produced by decades of still air, the walls boom softly as trains pass in nearby tunnels, but the stations themselves no longer have access from the streets above, and are only visited by scuttling brown mice. If you look hard, though, you can glimpse the past. For example, the eerie green and cream platform of the old Mark Lane station can be spotted from passing trains to the immediate west of the present Tower Hill Station.

‘You know what gets me through the day? Hatred. I hate the little bastards. Each and every one of them. Most of the time I wish they would all just disappear.’ Deborah fixed me with a cool stare. ‘Yeah, I know it’s not the best attitude for a teacher to have, but when you know them as well as I do. ’

‘I think I do,’ I replied.

‘Oh? I thought this work was new to you. Being your first day and all.’

‘Not new, no.’

‘My boyfriend just decided he wants us to have kids. He never liked them before. When he was made redundant he started picking me up from school in the afternoons, and saw them running around my legs in their boots and rain-macs asking endless questions, and suddenly he thought they were cute and wanted to have a baby, just when I was thinking of having my tubes tied. I don’t want to bring my work home with me. We still haven’t sorted it out. It’s going to ruin our relationship. Hey, hey.’ Deborah broke off to shout at a boy who was trying to climb over the barrier. ‘Get back down there and wait for the man to open the gate.’ She turned back to me. ‘Christ, I could use a cigarette. Cover for me when we get there. I’ll sneak a couple in while they’re baiting the monkeys, that’s what all the other teachers do.’

Good teachers are like good nurses. They notice things ordinary people miss. Ask a nurse how much wine she has left in her glass and she’ll be able to tell you the exact amount, because for her the measurement of liquids is a matter of occupational observation. The same with teachers. I can tell the age of any child to within six months because I’ve been around them so much. Then I got married, and I wasn’t around them any more.

But old habits die hard. You watch children constantly, even when you think you’re not, and the reflex continues to operate even in civilian life. You bump into pupils in the supermarket. ‘Hello, Miss, we didn’t know you ate food.’ They don’t quite say that, but you know it’s what they’re thinking.

If there’s one thing I know it’s how children think. That was why I noticed there was something wrong at Baker Street. My senses had been caught off guard because of the tunnels. Actually, I sensed something even before then, as early as our arrival at Finchley Road Tube station. I should have acted on my instincts then.

God knows, I was nervous enough to begin with. It was the first day of my first week back at work after twelve long years, and I hadn’t expected to have responsibility thrust at me like this, but the school was understaffed, teachers were off sick and the headmaster needed all the help he could get. The last time I had worked in the education system, the other teachers around me were of roughly the same age. Now I was old enough to be a mother to most of them, and a grand-mother to their charges. I wouldn’t have returned to Invicta Primary at all if my husband hadn’t died. I wasn’t surprised when the bank warned me that there would be no money. Peter wasn’t exactly a rainy-day hoarder. I needed to earn, and have something to keep my mind occupied. Teaching was the only skill I was sure I still possessed.

Which was how I ended up shepherding twenty-seven eight-year-old boys and girls on a trip to the London Zoological Gardens, together with another teacher, Deborah, a girl with a tired young face and a hacking smoker’s cough.

I hadn’t been happy about handling the excursion on my first day back, especially when I heard that it involved going on the Tube. I forced myself not to think about it. There were supposed to be three of us but the other teacher was off with flu, and delaying the trip meant dropping it from the term schedule altogether, so the headmaster had decreed that we should go ahead with the original plan. There was nothing unusual in this; the teaching shortage had reached its zenith and I’d been eagerly accepted back into the school where I’d worked before I was married. They put me on a refresher course, mostly to do with computer literacy, but the basic curriculum hadn’t changed much. But things were very different from when I was a pupil myself. For a start, nobody walked to the school any more. Parents didn’t think it was safe. I find parents exasperating — all teachers do. They’re very protective about some things, and yet utterly blind to other, far more obvious problems. If they found out about the short-staffed outings, everybody would get it in the neck. The parents had been encouraged to vote against having their children driven around in a coach; it wasn’t environmentally friendly. It didn’t stop them from turning up at the school gates in people-carriers, though.

Outside the station the sky had lowered into muddy swirls of cloud, and it was starting to rain. Pupils are affected by the weather. They’re always disruptive and excitable when it’s windy. Rain makes them sluggish and inattentive. (In snow they go mad and you might as well close the school down.) You get an eye for the disruptives and outsiders, and I quickly spotted the ones in this group, straggling along at the rear of the Tube station hall. In classrooms they sit at the back in the corners, especially on the left-hand side, the sneaky, quiet troublemakers. They feel safe because you tend to look to the centre of the class, so they think they’re less visible. Kids who sit in the front row are either going to work very hard or fall in love with you. But the ones at the rear are the ones to watch, especially when you’re turning back towards the blackboard.

There were four of them, a pair of hunched, whispering girls as close as Siamese twins, a cheeky ginger-haired noisebox with his hands in everything, and a skinny, melancholy little boy wearing his older brother’s jacket. This last one had a shaved head, and the painful-looking nicks in it told me that his hair was cut at home to save money. He kept his shoulders hunched and his gaze on the ground at his feet, braced as though he was half-expecting something to fall on him. A pupil who hasn’t done his homework will automatically look down at the desk when you ask the class a question about it, so that only the top of his head is visible (this being based on the ‘If I can’t see her, she can’t see me’ theory). If he is sitting in the back row, however, he will stare into your eyes with an earnest expression. This boy never looked up. Downcast eyes can hide a more personal guilt. Some children are born to be bullied. They seem marked for bad luck. Usually they have good reason to adopt such defensive body language. Contrary to what parents think, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that’s Connor, he’ll give you no trouble. Never says a word. I forget he’s here sometimes.’ I bet you do, I thought. You never notice him because he doesn’t want you to.

‘Everybody hold up their right hand,’ I called. It’s easier to count hands than heads when they’re standing up, but still they’ll try to trick you. Some kids will hold up both hands, others won’t raise any. I had lowered my voice to speak to them; you have to speak an octave lower than your normal register if you want to impose discipline. Squeaky high voices, however loud, don’t get results. They’re a sign of weakness, indicating potential teacher hysteria. Children can scent deficiencies in teachers like sharks smell blood.

‘Miss, I’m left-handed.’ The ginger boy mimed limb-failure; I mentally transferred him from ‘disruptive’ to ‘class clown’. They’re exuberant but harmless, and usually sit in the middle of the back row.

‘I want to see everybody’s hand, now.’ Sixteen, and the four at the rear of the ticket hall. ‘Keep right under cover, out of the rain. You at the back, tuck in, let those people get past.’ Seventeen, the clown, eighteen, nineteen, the Siamese twins,twenty, the sad boy. ‘We’re going to go through the barrier together in a group, so everybody stay very, very close.’ I noticed Deborah studying me as I marshalled the children. There was disapproval in her look. She appeared about to speak, then held herself in check. I’m doing something wrong, I thought, alarmed. But the entry gate was being opened by the station guard, and I had to push the sensation aside.

Getting our charges onto the escalator and making them stand on the right was an art in itself. Timson, the class clown, was determined to prove he could remount the stairs and keep pace with passengers travelling in the opposite direction. An astonishingly pretty black girl had decided to slide down on the rubber handrail.

‘We step off at the end,’ I warned. ‘Don’t jump, that’s how accidents happen.’ My voice had rediscovered its sharp old timbre, but now there was less confidence behind it. London had changed while I had been away, and was barely recognizable to me now. There were so many tourists. Even at half-past ten on a wintry Monday morning, Finchley Road Tube station was crowded with teenagers in wet nylon coats, hoods and backpacks, some old ladies on a shopping trip, some puzzled Japanese businessmen, a lost-looking man in an old-fashioned navy-blue raincoat. Deborah exuded an air of weary lassitude that suggested she wouldn’t be too bothered if the kids got carried down to the platform and were swept onto the rails like lemmings going over a cliff.

‘Stay away from the edge,’ I called, flapping my arms at them. ‘Move back against the wall to let people past.’ I saw the irritation in commuters’ faces as they eyed the bubbling, chattering queue. Londoners don’t like children. ‘We’re going to be getting on the next train, but we must wait until it has stopped and its doors are open before we move forward. I want you to form a crocodile.’

The children looked up at me blankly. ‘A crocodile shape, two, two, two, two, all the way along,’ I explained, chopping in their direction with the edges of my palms.

Deborah gave me a wry smile. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever told them to do that before,’ she explained.

‘Then how do you get them to stay in lines?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we don’t, they just surge around. They never do what they’re told. You can’t do anything with them. The trouble with children is they’re not, are they? Not children. Just grabby little adults.’

No, I thought, you’re so wrong. But I elected not to speak. I looked back at the children gamely organizing themselves into two wobbly columns. ‘They’re not doing so badly.’

Deborah wasn’t interested. She turned away to watch the train arriving. ‘Crocodile, crocodile,’ the kids were chanting, making snappy-jawed movements to each other. The carriages of the train appeared to be already half-full. I had expected them to be almost empty. As the doors opened, we herded the children forward. I kept my eyes on the pairs at the back, feeding them in between my outstretched arms as though I was guiding unruly sheep into a pen. I tried not to think about the entrance to the tunnel, and the stifling, crushing darkness beyond it.

‘Miss, Raj has fallen over.’ I looked down to find a minuscule Indian child bouncing up from his knees with a grin on his face. I noted that no damage had been done, then lifted his hands, scuffed them clean and wrapped them around the nearest carriage pole. ‘Hang on,’ I instructed as the doors closed.

‘Miss, how many stops is it?’ asked a little girl at my side.

‘We go to Swiss Cottage, then St John’s Wood, then Baker Street, then we change from the Jubilee Line to the Bakerloo Line and go one stop to Regent’s Park.’

‘Miss, is there a real cottage in Swiss Cottage?’

‘Miss, are we going to Switzerland?’

‘Miss, can you ski in Swiss Cottage?’

‘Miss, are we going skiing?’

‘We’re going skiing! We’re going skiing!’

The train pulled away and everyone screamed. For a moment I sympathized with Deborah. I looked out of the window as the platform vanished. When I married Peter we moved out to Amersham, at the end of the Metropolitan line, and stopped coming into central London. Peter was a lecturer. I was due for promotion at the school. In time I could have become the headmistress, but Peter didn’t want me to work and that was that, so I had to give up my job and keep house for him. A year later, I discovered that I couldn’t have children. Suddenly I began to miss my classroom very badly.

‘Miss, make him get off me.’ Timson was sitting on top of a girl who had grabbed a seat. Without thinking, I lifted him off by his jacket collar.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said Deborah. ‘They’ll have you up before the Court of Human Rights for maltreatment. Best not to touch them at all.’ She swung to the other side of the central pole and leaned closer. ‘How long has it been since you last taught?’

‘Twelve years.’

‘You’ve been away a long time.’ It sounded suspiciously like a criticism. ‘Well, we don’t manhandle them any more. EEC ruling.’ Deborah peered out of the window. ‘Swiss Cottage coming up, watch out.’