incongruous somehow.
Jacquie and Maxwell nodded as the couple turned, both a little annoyed to have their tranquillity shattered. Not a courting couple, surely, the tourists thought – he was old enough to be her father. Under the canopy, the ground was uneven, pock-marked with the print of a thousand rubber boots. Dead Man’s Point was on the ‘Walk the South’ route every autumn when the rain turned the path to torrents in places. Out on the headland, the air was chill now that the sun was dying. They had ducked under the tape and stood on the edge of the pit as the SOCO team had excavated it.
Maxwell squatted on his heels, picking up handfuls of soiland watching it fall. Out to sea, beyond the curve of the Bay, a solitary liner, like a ghost ship in full sail, slid noiselessly, lit like a magic lantern against the purple bars of the clouds. He straightened, looking back to the car park, then to his left to where the sandstone fell away to the cliffs. The edge was near, beckoning. He’d only once felt that before, when he’d gone to visit a friend in Bristol and found himself on the suspension bridge at Clifton. He felt it then, drawing him down. How wonderful it would feel to sense the air rush through your veins, how free. He sensed it again now, with his feet on the shifting sand of Dead Man’s Point and the sea unreal and silver in the twilight fifty feet below.
‘Max,’ Jacquie held his arm. Suddenly, she was afraid. And she didn’t know why. ‘Max, let’s go home.’
CHAPTER SIX
Tuesday. Tuesday. Hate that day. At the dog-end of an academic year, with three weeks to go to ‘School’s Out for Summer’, it had to be said that Leighford High was a strange place. Year 13 had gone into that vast abyss of deck-chair attendancy, ice-cream salery and other part-time jobbery that was the lot of teenagers around the coast of this great country of ours. After that was the Gap Year and the great Tony Blair university scam – walker? gum-chewer? You’re in. Year 11 had gone too, albeit temporarily. Most of them would be back come September when the grapes were purple and the season misty and mellow. They would have achieved what they set out to achieve, not a clutch of five A grade GCSEs, but the James Diamond–given right to wear non-uniform clothes. And they would automatically become Maxwell’s Own. There was a certain irony in the fact that the member of staff at Leighford most conversant with uniform should be in charge of a bunch of misfits that didn’t wear any. The new Year 7 of course had yet to join, wandering goggle-eyed around the scruffy corridors, meeting up again with the very people who had bullied them in junior school. There was a God.
And God, that particular Tuesday, was Peter Maxwell. He sat in his film-postered office with the Fridge beside him. Allright, it was very unkind of someone to have called Helen Maitland the Fridge, but even Maxwell, in a darker mood, could see the relevance of it. Helen was positively rectangular, but with smoothly rounded corners and she habitually wore white. That said, Helen was the salt of the earth, Maxwell’s Number Two. When the Great Man wasn’t there, she was, sorting EMA contracts, teaching GNVQ courses, handling PMT problems; that woman could acronym for England.
‘You do realise, Anthony,’ Maxwell was saying, ‘that we allow you to bring your car onto the school premises on the assumption you know how to drive it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Anthony Cross knew when he was on the carpet. He’d learned his body language subconsciously from Maxwell and stood there, hang-dog and not making eye contact. He’d screeched out of Leighford High’s car park yesterday, doing a wheelie in his clapped out Peugeot,
and
he’d abandoned half the carton content of the town’s KFC on the tarmac. A flogging offence at the very least. Maxwell thought that too.
‘If this was a real school,’ he growled, ‘I’d have you paraded in hollow square, with the
Jacquie and Maxwell nodded as the couple turned, both a little annoyed to have their tranquillity shattered. Not a courting couple, surely, the tourists thought – he was old enough to be her father. Under the canopy, the ground was uneven, pock-marked with the print of a thousand rubber boots. Dead Man’s Point was on the ‘Walk the South’ route every autumn when the rain turned the path to torrents in places. Out on the headland, the air was chill now that the sun was dying. They had ducked under the tape and stood on the edge of the pit as the SOCO team had excavated it.
Maxwell squatted on his heels, picking up handfuls of soiland watching it fall. Out to sea, beyond the curve of the Bay, a solitary liner, like a ghost ship in full sail, slid noiselessly, lit like a magic lantern against the purple bars of the clouds. He straightened, looking back to the car park, then to his left to where the sandstone fell away to the cliffs. The edge was near, beckoning. He’d only once felt that before, when he’d gone to visit a friend in Bristol and found himself on the suspension bridge at Clifton. He felt it then, drawing him down. How wonderful it would feel to sense the air rush through your veins, how free. He sensed it again now, with his feet on the shifting sand of Dead Man’s Point and the sea unreal and silver in the twilight fifty feet below.
‘Max,’ Jacquie held his arm. Suddenly, she was afraid. And she didn’t know why. ‘Max, let’s go home.’
CHAPTER SIX
Tuesday. Tuesday. Hate that day. At the dog-end of an academic year, with three weeks to go to ‘School’s Out for Summer’, it had to be said that Leighford High was a strange place. Year 13 had gone into that vast abyss of deck-chair attendancy, ice-cream salery and other part-time jobbery that was the lot of teenagers around the coast of this great country of ours. After that was the Gap Year and the great Tony Blair university scam – walker? gum-chewer? You’re in. Year 11 had gone too, albeit temporarily. Most of them would be back come September when the grapes were purple and the season misty and mellow. They would have achieved what they set out to achieve, not a clutch of five A grade GCSEs, but the James Diamond–given right to wear non-uniform clothes. And they would automatically become Maxwell’s Own. There was a certain irony in the fact that the member of staff at Leighford most conversant with uniform should be in charge of a bunch of misfits that didn’t wear any. The new Year 7 of course had yet to join, wandering goggle-eyed around the scruffy corridors, meeting up again with the very people who had bullied them in junior school. There was a God.
And God, that particular Tuesday, was Peter Maxwell. He sat in his film-postered office with the Fridge beside him. Allright, it was very unkind of someone to have called Helen Maitland the Fridge, but even Maxwell, in a darker mood, could see the relevance of it. Helen was positively rectangular, but with smoothly rounded corners and she habitually wore white. That said, Helen was the salt of the earth, Maxwell’s Number Two. When the Great Man wasn’t there, she was, sorting EMA contracts, teaching GNVQ courses, handling PMT problems; that woman could acronym for England.
‘You do realise, Anthony,’ Maxwell was saying, ‘that we allow you to bring your car onto the school premises on the assumption you know how to drive it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Anthony Cross knew when he was on the carpet. He’d learned his body language subconsciously from Maxwell and stood there, hang-dog and not making eye contact. He’d screeched out of Leighford High’s car park yesterday, doing a wheelie in his clapped out Peugeot,
and
he’d abandoned half the carton content of the town’s KFC on the tarmac. A flogging offence at the very least. Maxwell thought that too.
‘If this was a real school,’ he growled, ‘I’d have you paraded in hollow square, with the
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