Sacrament

CHAPTER VI

i

He did not go up the hill the following day to look for Jacob, nor indeed the day following that. He came home to such a firestorm of accusations - his mother in racking tears, certain he was dead, his father, white with fury, just as certain he wasn't - that he dared not step over the threshold. Hugo wasn't a violent man. He prided himself on his reasonableness. But he made an exception in this case, and beat his son so hard - with a book, of all things - he reduced them both to tears: Will, of pain, his father of anguish that he'd lost so much control.

He wasn't interested in Will's explanations. He simply told his son that while he, Hugo, didn't care if Will went wandering for the rest of his damn life, Eleanor did, and hadn't she suffered enough for one lifetime?

So Will stayed at home and nursed his bruises and his rage. After forty-eight hours his mother tried to make some kind of peace, telling him how frightened she'd been that some harm had befallen him.

'Why?' he said to her sullenly.

'Whatever do you mean?'

'I mean why should you worry if something happens to me? You never cared before ...'

'Oh, William ...' she said softly. There was only a trace of accusation in her voice. It was mostly sorrow.

'You don't,' he sat flatly. 'You know you don't. All you ever think about is him.' He didn't need to name the missing member of this equation. 'I'm not important to you. You said so.' This was not strictly the case. She'd never used those precise words. But the lie sounded true enough.

'I'm sure I didn't mean it,' she said. 'It's just been so hard for me since Nathaniel died-' Her fingers went to his face as she spoke, and gently stroked his cheek. 'He was so ... so...'

He was barely listening to her. He was thinking of Rosa McGee, and how she had touched his face and spoken to him softly. Only she'd not been talking about how fine some other boy was while she did so. She'd been telling him what a treasure he was, how nimble, how useful. This woman who had barely known his name had found in him qualities his own mother could not see. It made him sad and angry at the same time.

'Why do you keep talking about him?' Will said. 'He's dead.'

Eleanor's fingers fell from Will's face, and she looked at him with tear-filled eyes. 'No,' she said, 'he'll never be dead. Not to me. I don't expect you to understand. How could you? But your brother was very special to me. Very precious. So he'll never be dead as far as I'm concerned.'

Something happened in Will at that moment. A scrap of hope that had stayed green in the months since the accident withered and went to dust. He didn't say anything. He just got up and left her to her tears.

ii

After two days of home-bound penance he went to school. It was a smaller place than St Margaret's, which he liked, its buildings older, its playground lined with trees instead of railings. He kept to himself for the first week, barely speaking to anyone. At the beginning of the second week, however, minding his own business at lunchtime, a familiar face appeared in front of him. It was Frannie.

'Here you are,' she said, as though she'd been looking for him.

'Hello,' he said, glancing around to see if Sherwood the Brat was also in evidence. He wasn't.

'I thought you'd be gone on your trip by now.'

'I will,' he said. 'I'll go.'

'I know,' Frannie said, quite sincerely. 'After we met I kept thinking maybe I'd go too. Not with you-'she hastened to add '-but one day I'd just leave.'

'Go as far away as possible,' Will said.

'As far away as possible,' Frannie replied, her echoing of his words - a kind of pact. 'There's not much worth seeing around here,' she went on, 'unless you go into ... you know...'

'You can talk about Manchester,' Will said. 'Just 'cause my brother was killed there ... it's no big deal to me. I mean, he wasn't really my brother.' Will felt a delicious lie being born. 'I'm adopted, you see.'

'You are?'

'Nobody knows who my real Mum and Dad are.'

'Oh wow. Is this a secret?' Will nodded. 'So I can't even tell Sherwood.'

'Better not,' Will replied, with a fine show of seriousness. 'He might spread it around.'

The bell was ringing, calling them back to their classes. The fierce Miss Hartley, a big-bosomed woman whose merest whisper intimidated her charges, was eyeing Will and Frannie.

'Frances Cunningham!' she boomed, 'will you get a move on?' Frannie pulled a face and ran, leaving Miss Hartley to focus her attention on Will. 'You are-?'

'William Rabjohns.'

'Oh yes,' she said darkly, as though she'd heard news of him and it wasn't good. He stood his ground, feeling quite calm. This was strange for him. At St Margaret's he had been intimidated by several of the staff, feeling remotely that they were part of his father's clan. But this woman seemed to him absurd, with her sickly sweet perfume and her fat neck. There was nothing to be afraid of here. Perhaps she saw how unmoved he was, because she stared at him with a well-practised curl in her lip. 'What are you smiling at?' she said.

He wasn't aware that he was, until she remarked upon it. He felt his stomach churn with a strange exhilaration; then he said:

'You.'

'What?'

He made the smile a grin. 'You,' he said again. 'I'm smiling at you.'

She frowned at him. He kept grinning, thinking as he did so that he was baring his teeth to her, like a wolf. 'Where are you ... supposed to be?' she said to him.

'In the gym,' he replied. He kept looking straight at her; kept grinning. And at last it was she who looked away. 'You'd better ... get along then, hadn't you?' she said to him.

'If we've finished talking,' he said, hoping to goad her into further response.

But no. 'We've finished,' she said.

He was reluctant to take his eyes off her. If he kept staring, he thought, he could surely bore a hole in her, the way a magnifying glass burned a hole in a piece of paper.

'I won't have insolence from anyone,' she said. 'Least of all a new boy. Now get to your class.' He had little choice. Off he went. But as he walked past her he said:

'Thank you, Miss Hartley,' in a soft voice, and he was sure he saw her shudder.