The Collected Short Fiction

In The Bag (1977)

The boy's face struggled within the plastic bag. The bag laboured like a dying heart as the boy panted frantically, as if suffocated by the thickening mist of his own breath. His eyes were grey blank holes, full of fog beneath the plastic. As his mouth gaped desperately the bag closed on his face, tight and moist, giving him the appearance of a wrapped fish, not quite dead.

It wasn't his son's face. Clarke shook his head violently to clear it of the notion as he hurried towards the assembly hall. It might have been, but Peter had had enough sense and strength to rip the bag with a stone before trying to pull it off. He'd had more strength than... Clarke shook his head hurriedly and strode into the hall. He didn't propose to let himself be distracted. Peter had survived, but that was no thanks to the culprit.

The assembled school clattered to its feet and hushed. Clarke strode down the side aisle to the sound of belated clatters from the folding seats, like the last drops of rain after a downpour. Somewhere amid the muted chorus of nervous coughs, someone was rustling plastic. They wouldn't dare breathe when he'd finished with them. Five strides took him onto the stage. He nodded curtly to the teaching staff and faced the school.

"Someone put a plastic bag over a boy's head today," he said. "I had thought all of you understood that you come here to learn to be men. I had thought that even those of you who do not shine academically had learned to distinguish right from wrong. Apparently I was mistaken. Very well. If you behave like children, you must expect to be treated like children."

The school stirred;, the sound included the crackling of plastic. Behind him Clarke heard some of the teachers sit forward, growing tense. Let them protest if they liked. So long as this was his school its discipline would be his.

"You will all stand in silence until the culprit owns up."

Tiers of heads stretched before him, growing taller as they receded, on the ground of their green uniforms. Towards the middle he could see Peter's head. He'd forgotten to excuse the boy from assembly, but it was too late now. In any case, the boy looked less annoyed by the oversight than embarrassed by his father's behaviour. Did he think Clarke was treating the school thus simply because Peter was his son? Not at all; three years ago Clarke had used the same method when someone had dropped a firework in a boy's duffel hood. Though the culprit had not come forward, Clarke had had the satisfaction of knowing he had been punished among the rest.

The heads were billiard balls, arranged on baize. Here and there one swayed uneasily then hurriedly steadied as Clarke's gaze seized it. A whole row shifted restlessly, one after another. Plastic crackled softly, jarring Clarke from his thoughts.

"It seems that the culprit is not a man but a coward," he said. "Very well. Someone must have seen what he did and who he is. No man will protect a coward from his just desserts. Don't worry that your fellows may look down on you for betraying him. If they do not admire you for behaving like a man, they are not men."

The ranks of heads swayed gently, hypnotically. One of them must have seen what had happened to Peter: someone running softly behind him as he crossed the playing-field, dragging the bag over his head, twisting it tight about his neck, and stretching it into a knot at the back... Plastic rustled secretly, deep in the hall, somewhere near Peter. Was the culprit taunting Clarke? He grew cold with fury. He scrutinised the faces, searching for the unease which those closest to the sound must feel; but all the faces were defiantly bland, including Peter's. So they refused to help him even so meagrely. Very well.

"No doubt some of you think this is an easy way to avoid your lessons," he said. "I think so, too. Instead, from tomorrow you will all assemble here when school is over and stand in silence for an hour. This will continue until the culprit is found. Please be sure to tell your parents tonight. You are dismissed."

He strode to his office without a backward glance; his demeanour commanded his staff to carry on his discipline. But he had not reached his office when he began to feel dissatisfied. He was grasping the door handle when he realised what was wrong. Peter must still feel himself doubly a victim.

A class came trooping along the corridor, protesting loudly, hastily silent. "Henry Clegg," he said. "Go to IIIA and tell Peter Clarke to come to my office immediately."

He searched the faces of the passing boys for furtiveness. Then he noticed that although he'd turned the handle and was pushing, the door refused to move. Within, he heard a flurried crackling rustle. He threw his weight against the door, and it fell open. Paper rose from his desk and sank back limply. He closed the window, which he'd left ajar; mist was inching towards it, across the playing-field. He must have heard a draught fumbling with his papers.

A few minutes later Peter knocked and entered. He stood before Clarke's desk, clearly unsure how to address his father. Really, Clarke thought, the boy should call him sir at school; there was no reason why Peter should show him less respect than any other pupil.

"You understand I didn't mean that you should stay after school, Peter," he said. "I hope that won't cause embarrassment between you and your friends. But you must realise that I cannot make an exception of them, too."

For an unguarded moment he felt as though he were justifying himself to his own son. "Very well," Peter said. "Father."

Clarke nodded for him to return to his lesson, but the boy stood struggling to speak. "What is it?" Clarke said. "You can speak freely to me."

"One of the other boys ... asked Mr Elland if you were ... right to give the detention, and Mr Elland said he didn't think you were."

"Thank you, Peter. I shall speak to Mr Elland later. But for now, you had better return to his class."

He gazed at the boy, and then at the closed door. He would have liked to see Peter proud of his action, but the boy looked self-conscious and rather disturbed. Perhaps he would discuss the matter with him at home, though that broke his own rule that school affairs should be raised with Peter only in school. He had enough self-discipline not to break his own rules without excellent reason.

Self-discipline must be discussed with Elland later. Clarke sat at his desk to draft a letter to the parents. Laxity in the wearing of school uniform. A fitting sense of pride. The school as a community. Loyalty, a virtue we must foster at all costs. The present decline in standards.

But the rustle of paper distracted him. He'd righted the wrong he had done Peter, he would deal with Elland later; yet he was dissatisfied. With what? The paper prompted him, rustling. There was no use pretending. He must remember what the sound reminded him of.

It reminded him of the sound the plastic bag had made once he'd put it over Derek's head.

His mind writhed aside, distracting him with memories that were more worthy of his attention. They were difficult enough to remember—painful indeed. Sometimes it had seemed that his whole life had been contrived to force him to remember.

Whenever he had sat an examination someone had constantly rustled paper behind him. Nobody else had heard it; after one examination, when he'd tackled the boy who had been sitting behind him, the others had defended the accused. Realising that the sound was in himself, in the effect of stress on his senses, Clarke had gone to examinations prepared to hear it; he'd battled to ignore it, and had passed. He'd known he must; that was only justice.

Then there had been the school play; that had been the worst incident, the most embarrassing. He had produced the play from his own pared-down script, determined to make an impression in his first teaching post. But Macbeth had stalked onto the heath to a sound from the wings as of someone's straining to blow up a balloon, wheezing and panting faintly. Clarke had pursued the sound through the wings, finding only a timidly bewildered boy with a thunder-sheet. Nevertheless, the headmaster had applauded rapidly and lengthily at the curtain. Eventually, since he himself hadn't been blamed, Clarke ceased cross-examining his pupils.

Since then his career had done him more than justice. Sitting at his desk now, he relaxed; he couldn't remember when he'd felt so much at ease with his memories. Of course there had been later disturbing incidents. One spring evening he had been sitting on a park bench with Edna, courting her, and had glanced away from the calm green sunset to see an inflated plastic bag caught among branches. The bag had seemed to pant violently in its struggles with the breeze; then it had begun to nod sluggishly. He'd run across the lawn in panic, but before he reached the bag, it had been snatched away, to retreat nodding into the darkness between the trees. For a moment, vaguely amid his panic, it had made him think of the unidentified boy who had appeared beside him in a class photograph, face blurred into a grey blob. Edna had asked him no questions, and he'd been grateful to forget the incident. But the panic still lay in his memory, now he looked.

It was like the panic he'd felt while awaiting Peter's birth. That had been late in the marriage; there might have been complications. Clarke had waited, trying to slow his breath, holding himself back; panic had been waiting just ahead. If there were any justice, Edna at least would survive. He'd heard someone approaching swiftly beyond the bend in the hospital corridor: a purposeful crackling rustle—a nurse. He had felt pinned down by panic; he'd known that the sound was bearing death towards him. But the nurse must have turned aside beyond the bend. Instead, a doctor had appeared to call him in to see his wife and son. For the only time in his life, Clarke had rushed away to be sick with relief.

As if he had vomited out what haunted him, the panic had never seized him again. But Derek remained deep in his mind, waiting. Each time his thoughts brushed the memory they shrank away; each time it seemed more shameful and horrible. He had never been able to look at it directly.

But why not? He had looked at all these memories without flinching. He had dealt with Peter, later he would deal with Elland. He felt unassailably right, incapable of wrong. He would not be doing himself justice if he did not take his chance.

He sat forward, as if to interview his memory. He coaxed his mind towards it, trying to relax, reassuring himself. There was nothing to fear, he was wholly secure. He must trust his sense of innate Tightness; not to remember would be to betray it. He braced himself, closing his eyes. At the age of ten, he had killed another boy.

He and Derek had been playing at the end of the street, near the disused railway line. They weren't supposed to be there, but their parents rarely checked. The summer sun had been trying to shake off trails of soot that rose from the factory chimneys. The boys had been playing at spacemen, inspired by the cover of a magazine crumpled among the rubble. They'd found a plastic bag.

Clarke had worn it first. It had hung against his ears like blankets when he breathed; his ears had been full of his breathing, the bag had grown stuffily hot and misty at once, clinging to his face. Then Derek had snatched it for himself.

Clarke hadn't liked him really, hadn't counted him as much of a friend. Derek was sly, he grabbed other people's toys, he played vindictive tricks on others then whined if they turned on him. When he did wrong he tried to pass the blame to someone else—but that day Clarke had had nobody else to play with. They'd wanted to play spacemen chasing Martians over the waste ground of the moon, but Derek's helmet had kept flying off. Clarke had pulled it tight at the back of Derek's neck, to tie a careful knot.

They ran until Derek fell down. He'd lain kicking on the rubble, pulling at the bag, at his neck. The bag had ballooned, then had fastened on his face like grey skin, again and again. His fingernails had squeaked faintly on the plastic; he'd sounded as though he were trying to cough. When Clarke had stooped to help him he'd kicked out blindly and viciously. Dismayed by the sight, infuriated by the rebuff, Clarke had run away. Realising that he didn't know where he was running to he'd panicked and had hidden in the outside toilet for hours, long after the woman's screams had gone by, and the ambulance.

Though nobody had known he and Derek had been together—since Derek's sister and her boyfriend were supposed to have kept the boy with them in the park—Clarke had waited, on the edge of panic, for Derek's father to knock at the front door. But the next day his mother had told him Derek had had an accident; he'd been warned never to play with plastic bags, and that was all. It wasn't enough, he'd decided years later, while watching a fight; too many of his classmates' parents weren't enough for their children; he'd known then what his career was to be. By then he had been able to relax, except for the depths of his mind.

He'd allowed himself to forget; yet today he was hounding a boy for a lesser crime.

No. It wasn't the same. Whoever had played that trick on Peter must have known what he was doing. But Clarke, at ten years old, hadn't known what he was doing to Derek. He had never needed to feel guilt at all.

Secure in that knowledge, he remembered at last why he had. He'd sat on the outside toilet, hearing the screams. Very gradually, a sly grin had spread across his mouth. It served Derek right. Someone had played a trick on him, for a change. He wouldn't be able to pass it back. Clarke had hugged himself, rocking on the seat, giggling silently, starting guiltily when a soft unidentified thumping at the door had threatened him.

He gazed at the memory. It no longer made him writhe; after all, he had been only a child. He would be able to tell Edna at last. That was what had disturbed him most that evening in the park; it hadn't seemed right that he couldn't tell her. That injustice had lurked deep within their marriage. He smiled broadly. "I didn't know what I was doing," he told himself again, aloud.

"But you know now," said a muffled voice behind him.

He sprang to his feet. He had been dozing. Behind him, of course, there was only the window and the unhurried mist. He glanced at his watch. He was to talk to his sixth-form class about ethics: he felt he would enjoy the subject even more than usual. As he closed his door he glimpsed something moving in the indistinct depths of the trees beyond the playing-field, like a fading trace of a memory: a tree, no doubt.

When the class had sat down again he waited for a moment, hoping they might question the ethics of the detention he'd ordered. They should be men enough to ask him. But they only gazed, and he began to discuss the relationship between laws and morality. A Christian country. The individual's debt to society. Our common duty to help the law. The administration of justice. Justice.

He'd waxed passionate, striding the aisles, when he happened to look out of the window. A man dressed in drab shapeless clothes was standing at the edge of the trees. In the almost burnt-out sunlight his face shone dully, featurelessly. Shadows or mist made the grey mass of his face seem to flutter.

The janitor was skulking distantly in the bottom corner of the pane, like a detail squeezed in by a painter. He was pretending to weed the flower-beds. "Who is that man?" Clarke called angrily. "He has no right to be here." But there was nobody except the janitor in sight.

Clarke groped for his interrupted theme. The age of culpability: one of the class must have asked about that—he remembered having heard a voice. The age of legal responsibility. Must not be used as an excuse. Conscience cannot be silenced forever. The law cannot absolve. One does not feel guilt without being guilty. Someone was standing outside the window.

As Clarke whirled to look, something, perhaps the tic that was plucking at his eye, made the man's face seem the colour of mist, and quaking. But when he looked there was nothing but the field and the mist and the twilight, running together darkly like a drowned painting.

"Who was that?" Clarke demanded. "Did anyone see?"

"A man," said Paul Hammond, a sensitive boy. "He looked as if he was going to have a fit." Nobody else had seen anything.

"Do your job properly," Clarke shouted at the janitor. "Keep your eyes open. He's gone round there, round the corner." The afternoon had crept surreptitiously by; he had almost reached the end of school. He searched for a phrase to sum up the lesson. "Remember, you cannot call yourself a man unless you face your conscience." On the last words he had to outshout the bell.

He strode to Elland's classroom, his gown rising and sailing behind him. The man was chatting to a group of boys. "Will you come to my office when you've finished, please," Clarke said, leaning in.

Waiting in his office, he felt calm as the plane of mist before him. It reminded him of a still pool; a pool whose opaque stillness hid its depths; an unnaturally still and opaque pool; a pool from whose depths a figure was rising, about to shatter the surface. It must be the janitor, searching behind the mist. Clarke shook himself angrily and turned as Elland came in.

"Have you been questioning my authority in front of your class?"

"Not exactly, no. I answered a question."

"Don't quibble. You are perfectly aware of what I mean. I will not have the discipline of my school undermined in this way."

"Boys of that age can see straight through hypocrisy, you know," the teacher said, interrupting the opening remarks of Clarke's lecture. "I was asked what I thought. I'm not a convincing liar, and I shouldn't have thought you'd want me to be. I'm sure they would have found my lying more disturbing than the truth. And that wouldn't have helped the discipline, now would it?"

"Don't interrogate me. Don't you realise what you said in front of my son? Does that mean nothing to you?"

"It was your son who asked me what I thought."

Clarke stared at him, hoping for signs of a lie. But at last he had to dismiss him. "I'll speak to you more tomorrow," he said vaguely. The man had been telling the truth; he had clearly been surprised even to have to tell it. But that meant that Peter had lied to his father.

Clarke threw the draft of the letter into his briefcase. There was no time to be lost. He must follow Peter home immediately and set the boy back on the right path. A boy who was capable of one lie was capable of many.

Far down the corridor the boys shouted, the wooden echoes of their footsteps fading. At the door to the mist Clarke hesitated. Perhaps Peter found it difficult to talk to him at school. He would ask him about the incident again at home, to give him a last chance. Perhaps it was partly Clarke's fault, for not making it clear how the boy should address him at school. He must make sure Edna didn't intervene, gently, anxiously. He would insist that she leave them alone.

The fog pretended to defer to him as he strode. It was fog now: trees developed from it, black and glistening, then dissolved again. One tree rustled as he passed. But surely it had no leaves? He hadn't time to go back and look. The sound must have been the rattling of the tree's wire cage, muffled and distorted by the fog.

Home was half a mile away, along three main roads. Peter would already have arrived there, with a group of friends; Clarke hoped he hadn't invited them in. No matter; they would certainly leave when they saw their headmaster.

Buses groped along the dual carriageway, their engines subdued and hoarse. The sketch of a lamppost bobbed up from the fog, filling out and darkening; another, another. On the central reservation beyond the fog, a faint persistent rustling seemed to be pacing Clarke. This was always an untidy street. But there was no wind to stir the litter, no wind to cause the sound that was creeping patiently and purposefully along just behind him, coming abreast of him as he halted, growing louder. He flinched from the dark shape that swam up beside him, but it was a car. And of course it must have been disturbing the litter on the road. He let the car pass, and the rustling faded ahead.

As he neared the second road the white flare of mercury-vapour lamps was gradually mixed with the warmer orange of sodium, contradicted by the chill of the fog. Cars passed like stealthy hearses. The fog sopped up the sodium glow; the orange fog hung thickly around him, like a billowing sack. He felt suffocated. Of course he did, for heaven's sake. The fog was clogging his lungs. He would soon be home.

He strode into the third road, where home was. The orange sack glided with him, over the whitening pavement. The fog seemed too thick, almost a liquid from which lampposts sailed up slowly, trailing orange streaks. Striding through the suppressed quiet, he realised he had encountered nobody on the roads. All at once he was glad: he could see a figure surfacing darkly before him, fog streaming from it, its blank face looming forward to meet him. He could see nothing of the kind. He was home.

As he fumbled for his keys, the nearby streetlamp blazed through a passing rift in the fog. The lamp was dazzling; its light penetrated the thickset curtains Edna had hung in the front rooms; and it showed a man standing at its foot. He was dressed like a tramp, in ancient clothes, and his face gleamed dully in the orange light, like bronze. As Clarke glanced away to help his hands find his elusive keys he realised that the man seemed to have no face, only the gleaming almost immobile surface. He glared back at the pavement, but there was nobody. The fog, which must have obscured the man's face, closed again.

One room was lighted: the kitchen, at the far end of the hall. Edna and Peter must be in there. Since the house was silent, the boy could not have invited in his friends. Clarke closed the front door, glad to see the last of the fog, and hurried down the hall. He had taken three steps when something slithered beneath his feet. He peered at it, on the faint edge of light from the kitchen. It was a plastic bag.

In a moment, during which his head seemed to clench and grow lightless as he hastily straightened up, he realised that it was one of the bags Edna used to protect food. Several were scattered along the hall. She must have dropped them out of the packet, she mustn't have noticed. He ran along the hall, towards the light, towards the silent kitchen. The kitchen was empty.

He began to call to Edna and to Peter as he ran back through the house, slipping on the scattered bags, bruising his shoulder against the wall. He pulled open the dining-room door, but although the china was chiming from his footsteps, there was nobody within. He ran on, skidding, and wrenched open the door of the living-room. The faintest of orange glows had managed to gather in the room. He was groping distractedly for the light-switch when he made out Edna and Peter, sitting waiting for him in the dark. Their heads gleamed faintly. After a very long time he switched on the light.

He switched it off at once. He had seen enough; he had seen their gaping mouths stuffed full of sucked-in plastic. His mind had refused to let him see their eyes. He stood in the orange dark, gazing at the still figures. When he made a sound, it resounded through the house.

At last he stumbled into the hall. He had nowhere else to go. He knew the moment was right. The blur in the lighted kitchen doorway was a figure: a man, vague as fog and very thin. Its stiff arms rose jerkily, perhaps hampered by pain, perhaps savouring the moment. Grey blotches peered from its face. He heard the rustling as it uncovered its head.