Rhinoceros 1
Alan Scope, like nearly everyone else, knew to give Ryon a wide berth, to shrink towards the institutionally bright, smudged paintwork of the walls. Nearly everyone knew not to stare him out, or mutter something in passing. Everyone, that is, except the new boy.
“You want to watch out,” Ryon muttered. His voice deep, emotionally illiterate. It had the resonance of a distant rumble of thunder. He put his foot out and hooked it under the new boy’s leg. The new boy stumbled, yelped like a whipped dog, and frowned at Ryon.
“Clumsy twat,” Ryon muttered; he loped down the corridor both pleased and bored at the same time. It’s all in the walk, thought Alan, watching from the entrance to the dining hall: shoulders slouched, monkey legs, elbows out, hands in hoodie pockets fingering lighter and fags. Gangster walk. Or is it gangsta?
“Ryon?” The boy stopped and peered around his hood at Alan. “You’ve got big feet. You want to be more careful.” His teachers knew that it was best not to tackle him head on, but rather allude to his misdemeanours.
But already he was gone, stocky yet lithe, like an overweight cat. Alan held the new boy’s shoulders. What’s his name? Something unusual. What? “You OK?”
The new boy peered at the teacher for a brief calibrated second. “Gonna crack his head open with a brick, man, gonna kill him ‘til he’s dead.”
“Right,” Alan said, and let go of him. Bilal, that’s it.
The corridors cleared as the boys moved, grudgingly, hungrily, argumentatively, to their food, all thirty-nine pence of it allocated by the city council. Little Alix grabbed long-faced Kerin by the arms and pretended to shove him into a tray of fish fingers. “Do that again and I’ll put a knife through your fucking ugly rat-face.” Alix merely looked delighted – “Only messing,” he sniggered – and he and the teachers and the lunchtime supervisors and the other grumbling pupils all washed along with the hours of the day like flotsam on the stormy swell of a sea.
Alan Scope knew what people might say about him. Teacher of English, shabby coat shaped to his thin, slightly stooped, torso like a second mangy skin, face imprinted with a life sentence of mild disappointment. Past it, in other words. Left back. He completed the remainder of his dinner duty in a state of remote distraction and then used his fob to leave the realm of the pupils – checking that none were lurking ready to nip through the door with him – and entered the collection of rooms the staff tried to claim were the preserve of sanity.
The staffroom was cluttered but empty. The teachers and TAs had already shuffled off to their rooms and post-dinner confrontations. Everywhere Alan’s eye tried to rest was cluttered, busy, and yet somehow instantly filtered out by Alan’s brain. The hats from a forgotten party, folders for courses completed, Tupperware, newspapers, confiscated toys, a hockey stick, mugs, dog-eared books, sweet wrappers, remaindered items from the Book Club – all the peripheral detritus of unthinking working life. Alan Scope should have been doing something, anything, but instead he placed the palms of his hands on the worktop and breathed deeply. In the sigh of exhalation he whispered, ‘I need a life’. But at least he smiled.
***
“Does anyone want to read the first sentence?” Alan gazed at the small collection of bamboozled faces. One boy was sawing the table with a ruler, behind him sat Ewen, twirling his chair on one leg. Four other boys sat at individual tables working hard at not working hard. “There goes the tumbleweed,” he said to himself. “OK, I’ll volunteer: ‘I live on the Meadows Estate.’ Is there anything wrong with that?”
“This is boring,” Ewen said.
“We’re doing opinions tomorrow, Ewen. The sentence I just read out. Is it OK?”
“No,” Mikey said. He had been sticking his middle finger up at the window, but clearly listening. “You don’t live there.”
“What?”
“You said you live on the Meadows, an’ you don’t.”
Alan took a deep breath. “I know I don’t, it’s a sentence. Here’s another sentence for you: ‘I am losing the will to live’. Better?”
“What we doing this for?” Ewen said.
“Because it’s English, the stuff with which we speak and write and read. So seeing as that is likely to occur in your daily life for the rest of your existence on earth it would be useful to become functional in it. Agreed?”
“Don’t have a spaz fit,” Ewen said to the class, grinning.
“Right,” Alan said with an effort, “we are all agreed that the sentence I read out was perfectly alright, as far as it went. But – “
“Can I have a sausage sandwich for break?”
“You can have oyster on a bed of lettuce if you can find it and pay for it. BUT… the trouble is the sentence does not contain much information. It lacks detail. It is not… Mikey, what’s the keyword? It’s in the learning objective. Yes?”
“Eh?”
“It’s there, on the whiteboard, begins with a ‘k’ sound.”
“When’s it break?”
“There are whole minutes left in which we could achieve our aims, Mikey.”
“I don’t need English, I’m gonna fix up bikes when I leave.”
“Let’s just agree to differ. Many people find being able to string together a few words in English useful. You may not, Mikey. But here we are. I’ll keep it simple. There are two types of sentence. Simple ones, like the one I we started with.”
“Now you go too fast, man”
“Let’s just go with it. Then there are the bigger sentences full of detail, sometimes separated into chunks by commas. They give us a lot more information. We call them…. Any suggestions?” Alan looked around the room. It lacked inspiration, if he was honest. Most of the blinds were broken, the lock on the door was splintered, and the displays seemed tired, curly-edged, lacking the sharpness of newly stapled backing paper. None of the boys seemed to know how to occupy a chair properly, or what to do with their limbs, their mouths, their eyes. Alan was poised with the whiteboard pen so long his arm started to ache. “Well?”
“Cock.” Ewen sniggered. Here’s a trigger, Alan thought, and rested his arm.
“You’re the cock,” Mikey said. There was an expectation around the room now of an impending incident, or at least a diversion.
Porl seemed to wake up from his land of dreams. He often spent the lesson in a cupboard, where he felt safer, and had his work posted through the door. “Gay bastards!” he announced, and Alan moved to the middle of the room, blocking the sight lines of at least two contenders.
“Alright, alright,” he said, and quickly tried to grab the last flailing thread of the lesson. “A quick check of the learning objective tells us that the keyword is not cock.” They giggled, but took a modicum of interest again. “Therefore it must be another word beginning with the ‘k’ sound – and don’t even think of it Ewen. Put that smirk away and grace us with your usual scowl, please. Any takers? Opposite of simple?”
“Hard.” Mikey seemed genuinely pleased with himself, and it seemed to Alan such a shame to show disappointment. But he sighed and ran his hand through his hair and felt the life drain from him into the fabric of the building.
“Not even for bonus points?” Alan weakly added, looking from one unregulated face to another. Their eyes in particular seemed unable to fix on anything, but flickered around the space like moths at a lit window, searching for stimulation. Alan felt that if photographed they would always be indistinct, a blur of unfocused activity. Alan moved back to the whiteboard hoping to make a last ditched attempt to dredge the lesson from its mire of distractions, and took the top from his whiteboard pen full of hope.
But the bell sounded down the corridors and they stood up and pushed and jostled each other around the room and out of the door. Alan took the grubby cloth and wiped the board, slowly erasing all the words except one in the middle at the top: ‘complex.’
***
Alan found that work, once he had become, in his own mind, competent, served to separate the other elements of his humdrum life neatly enough. Not that he was a man prone to depression, just a sense of weariness, as though life had presented itself as a long and repetitive obstacle course. Most of it was passably okay, and the bits that were didn’t last for long. If Alan were to quantify, somehow, the collection of experiences, habits, acts, feelings and patterns that wove the fibre of his life he would find it a bland item, with little texture in it.
On the way home he found that he was travelling through junctions and around roundabouts with no conscious effort or will. An inner voice rose to the surface of his being and held a jerky conversation in the fullness of his world, right there in the confines of the old Ford Focus (rear offside stop light not working, dint on boot lid from stone thrown at him by Ryon). This voice was vague, yet capable of haranguing him distractedly. Occasionally Alan would snap back to the surface, and generally into a realisation that he might be about to crash, but then the voice would return to the echo chamber of his cranium. His father, amongst many other jobs, had been a lorry driver, and in the school holidays Alan went with him, delivering pine furniture all over Yorkshire and Midlands. And often Alan would watch him, in a world of his own, traversing junctions, squeezing through tight gaps, making cars brake or swerve, with utter fluency and unconcern. Alan would be digging his heels into invisible pedals and gripping the seat in panic beside his oblivious, whistling father.
Round the ring road Alan trundled, past the tram stop for the university, the dead-looking trees and the brick Church of the Nazarene where he once gave ten percent of his earnings to the homeless, like the Muslims do. People watched the stream of traffic sullenly, their grim-jawed faces made sulphurous by the street lights.
It seemed to Alan that nothing really happened – nothing that deserved to be recorded, anyway. He had often considered writing as a profession, and had occasionally put down a page or two of autobiographical drivel, or it seemed to him. He was a slightly more active Bartleby, teaching instead of scrivening. He held the wheel by pressing his knees upwards into it, like his father used to when eating and drinking on the road, and rubbed his tired eyes. He looked out of his side window. Each steel and concrete countenance of Sheffield appeared blank. Light from various sources became diffused and rested aimlessly on cracked tarmac. Cars edged forward, then seemed to slip backwards in a kind of slow motion race to each set of traffic lights. Alan could feel his eyes drying up, like cement.
The uniformity of the city became a shadowy setting for his mental fatigue. The car was his shell. Alan the mollusc: homing instinct intact, all other desires subsumed. In this careless state of mind, Alan operated the machinery of his existence. By pressing pedals, turning wheels and clicking rocker-switches he could make events move forward, or so it seemed. He felt that time needed his personal intervention, however minimal; that, for example, switching the window demister on and off helped the universe to expand away from its source, the big bang, or whatever it was. In this way Alan tinkered without necessarily changing anything. And in doing so, tired and strung out by the cycle of days as he was, Alan smiled occasionally. Which was odd, all things being considered.
And as he drove into the car park for the flats he vaguely saw a light go out upstairs.
***
Alan locked his car and made ponderous steps towards the block of flats within which his one-bedroom ‘bachelor pad’ occupied a corner of the third floor, and he tried to focus on what could possibly be awry. He walked as heavily as a deep-sea diver into the pressure chamber of the gaudy glass entrance.
Within the dim awareness of his surroundings he sensed something was definately wrong. Not in the oily light of the stairwell, or the persistent drone of a fly in the casement, but in something slightly beyond his senses.
Climbing the stairs was harder than it should’ve been. Monday, start of the week, and already he felt tired beyond caring. Yet something was wrong, wrong, wrong. What, though?
At the top of the stairs he turned to find the door to his flat ajar.
He paused, as just about anybody else would’ve done. The drone of a fly. The hum of traffic on St Mary’s Gate. A siren. Filtered noises, there but not there, the silence of the modern world. Listen harder and the building seemed to be breathing, the pipes contracting and expanding with some kind of organic force. But the space beyond the door seemed to be a void.
He pushed the door open. His ears were ringing with the effort of scanning for sound waves. The hallway led to three doors, left, right and straight ahead. All were open and dark. As he stepped forward his shoulder bag caught the shelf with his messages and post and the scattering of envelopes avalanched to the floor.
There was the briefest of pauses, then a lot happened very quickly.
A thud from straight ahead, then the rapid squeak of trainers on lino. The noises were uncoordinated but rushing his way. He instinctively put his arms up to protect himself as a stocky figure burst from the darkness of the sitting room ahead and lunged at him. He shrunk against the wall. The youth – even in the broken second of accelerated time he saw the gait and clumsiness of youth – threw all his weight at launching himself for the exit. They came into contact chaotically, a foot, arms, shoulder. He heard the grunt of effort close to, his own pathetic, unfocused yelp, felt his head crack as it was jabbed by the shelf. He slid to the floor and the youth clattered out of sight; already Alan’s senses were making measurements in this suddenly very different world.
The back of his head felt soft and wet, and the angle made by the ceiling and wall opposite seemed all wrong, bent out of shape by a cataclysm, perhaps. His mouth was dry and tasted salty, and he could smell his own sweat, the smell of fear. In his ears the bells of shock and calamity rang in a distant, persistent, shrill note.
And even as he closed his eyes gratefully he thought to himself, ‘Ryon?’
