The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018

I stretched, pushing at the single millimetre of twig I could reach until I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back, the moisture attaching itself to my school shirt so that the material stuck to my skin and made me even hotter. A bead of sweat fell from my forehead onto the grey stone floor and left a dark circle there. I began to get frustrated and then panicked and then angry and I knew I was running out of time and that the other children would soon start arriving in dribs and drabs and then in a stream of maroon and blue before the first bell sounded at 8.50 a.m. I tried one final lunge, jumping as high as I could, both feet springing off the encyclopaedias, and as I leaped, I took my balancing arm away from the wall and grabbed at the nest with both hands.

I crumpled back to the ground, the books skittering to one side, my leg twisting under my weight. There was a thudding pain in my left ankle. But when I looked at the bounty in my hands, all this was forgotten. There it was: the nest and, inside, a startled, twitching Sammy.

The rest of it happened quickly. I put the encyclopaedias back under my arm, balanced the nest in my free hand, and crept back downstairs. I knew Sammy couldn’t fly because of his broken wing. No escape. The bird’s eye pulsated blackly: a squelching dot of terror. I stared at it, cupped in the nest in my hands, and although I had a vague instinct to talk to it in order to make it feel better, although I knew that’s what other, more normal children would do, I remained silent. And I remember thinking: let it suffer. Let it learn what life is like. And that in thinking this, I felt less alone. Because there was something else, some other living thing, that was enduring an experience worse than my own.

I went back to the cloakroom, put the nest on the bench, deposited the books on the floor by my peg, slipped on my shoes and, picking up Sammy again (‘Sammy’ in my mind now: a thing worthy of a name), walked swiftly outside. I made my way towards the playground, but instead of going through the gates as usual, I tacked to the right and followed the fence around the perimeter. I could see the swings. The looming, inverted ‘v’ of the slide. In the distance, a lone car, its engine puttering as the passenger door opened and disgorged a child.

The school had been built in the middle of what must once have been rather a nice patch of greenery. Behind the playground was a copse of trees. We weren’t allowed to wander here, but the naughtier children always did in order to experiment with cigarettes and kissing, so I knew it existed. By the time I reached the field in question, I was panting. I walked towards the central grouping of trees. The grass was wet from overnight rainfall and my plimsolls became stained with claggy brown mud. I would have to clean them later, I thought, before my mother got home.

At the centre of the trees was a small clearing, lined with discarded fag butts and empty crisp packets. At one edge were the ashy remnants of a fire, scraps of newsprint stuck to the underside of stones. I put Sammy in his nest on the ground. The bird was shivering now, straining to move its useless wing to no avail. Stupid thing, I thought.

I picked up a medium-sized rock from the undergrowth. I played with it in my hand, feeling the heft of it. And then, I slammed the sharp end of the rock down into the nest. The bird made no sound but when I withdrew my hand, I saw that its eye was still flickering, still sentient. Again, I punched it with the rock, throwing all my might into that single action. Again. Again. And again, this time emitting a scream for what I knew would be the final blow. I felt the crack of slender bones beneath my fist. A noise like the slow release of air from a flattening tyre. When I removed my hand, one knuckle was bleeding. The bird lay there, cracked and lifeless, the tremble of its eye finally stilled.

I told myself it had been a mercy, that only I, out of my cohort of classmates, could see the bird was suffering and needed to be put out of its misery as swiftly as possible. How frustrating it must have been for that creature, sitting on a ledge in a concrete building, gazing out of a window at the sky it could no longer fly through, beholden to these lumpen schoolchildren for scraps of birdseed. How undignified, I thought. How unfair.

As a child, I remember so very fiercely wanting to be grown up: to earn the privilege of being in control of my own existence, not by doing anything, but simply by existing for longer. I chafed against the arbitrary restrictions placed on my life. Lights out. Homework hour. Tidy your bedroom. Finish your vegetables. Stop reading. Stop fidgeting. Stop staring. Is that why I felt such a thrill when I killed the bird? We’re not meant to admit to this kind of feeling, but let me tell you honestly: I felt its death with a visceral intent – the violent pleasure of having finally done something. It was the ultimate satisfaction.

There is no need to dwell too much on what happened next. You can guess most of it. There was a predictable flurry of activity when the bird was discovered to be missing. It was Doris who raised the alarm; Doris, the cleaner, to whom I had never paid much notice, who had always seemed a bit of a dullard with her vacant expression, her yellow dusting cloths tucked into the elasticated waistband of her jeans. Well, Doris told a teacher, who then told the headmistress, who then informed the entire school at assembly that the bird had disappeared to a general commotion of disbelief. Jennifer, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the row in front of me, started crying. Alan Munro patted her arm with his podgy fingers, fat knuckles blotted with dirt. Next to me, Susan Rankin gasped and pulled the cuff of her school jumper over her hand. I was still, head lowered, eyes fixed at a point just to the right of one of my maroon socks. There was, I reasoned, no point feigning emotion. I was not known for being an expressive child. Besides, I don’t think I really cared about being found out. I think I already knew the game was up. I think I wanted it to be. I was so sick of them all, you see.

As the assembly continued, and we shuffled to our feet to sing ‘Morning Has Broken’, I could feel someone looking at me. When I glanced round, my eyes met the heated gaze of Mrs Love, her small features contracting.

She waited until the end of assembly to take me aside, grabbing hold of my arm with surprising force, her thin fingers pressing through my jumper.

‘So, Martin,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Do you want to tell me what you did with Sammy?’

‘All right,’ I said. She looked surprised, then led me off to the staffroom which smelled of instant coffee and fig rolls and had old copies of the Guardian and a single dog-eared issue of Horse and Hound stacked up on one of the bookshelves. I confessed without much trouble. I glossed over the finer details of how I’d dispatched the creature, saying simply that I felt it should be put out of its misery. Mrs Love’s face turned from red to white to shiny as a sweat broke out across her upper lip. I could see that she didn’t know what to make of me. She actually tried, at one point, to reach out and take my hand.

The headmistress summoned my mother and said that I was suspended with immediate effect.

My mother was not as furious as I had expected her to be. She refused to talk to me for the rest of the day and sent me to bed without any food, but that was pretty much par for the course. The next day, she didn’t go to work but sat waiting for me in glacial silence at the breakfast table. I came down in my pyjamas and dressing gown, having not known what clothes to get dressed in. My school jumper lay wrinkled and empty: a shed skin over the back of my desk chair. I wondered if I would ever wear it again. I was intrigued, more than anything, to know what would happen next.

‘Well, Martin,’ my mother said as I took a seat and poured milk over a bowl of cereal I did not want to eat. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’

She looked at me over the rim of her coffee mug. There was a chip on the upper edge of the handle: a white arrowhead against the red.

‘You’ve always been a wrong ’un.’

Her lips pressed together in a tight, crooked line.

‘I’ve tried my best for you, I have, and it hasn’t been easy, all on my own, but I’ve tried to raise you like a normal boy. I’ve given you a roof over your head and everything you could ever want. But you’re not, are you? Normal, I mean.’ She broke off and then added, more to herself than to me: ‘There’s something missing.’

I willed myself not to cry. Until this point, I’d felt powerfully immune from any kind of emotion. But my mother had always possessed the ability to wound me at the most tender point.

I nodded.

‘Yes.’

She drained the last of her coffee.

‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘There we are.’

We lapsed into silence. My cereal became lumpy. I sipped at my orange juice. Outside, it started to rain, droplets of it trailing down the window in a race of their own making. After a while, my mother pushed back her chair and came round to my side of the table and then she did something I could not remember her ever having done before: she reached out and squeezed my shoulder.

They let me back into their drab little school. My mother spoke to the headmistress and, I suppose, gave her some guff about my dead father and how hard it had been for me. I returned after a fortnight’s purdah. Jennifer never spoke to me again and the others kept their distance. But, I confess, I found relief in my exile rather than torment. The time passed peaceably enough. Events merged into each other; a soupy fog. Nothing interesting happened.

And then, one springtime morning, I found myself sitting the entrance exam for Burtonbury School. I think, from what I can recall, that my mother had been speaking to someone in the cafe about my predicament and they had told her I should try for Burtonbury. The customer in question had a troubled relative who had gone there and prospered. It seemed as good an idea as any. In any case, I liked exams and was good at them, and I knew about boarding school from Enid Blyton books so I was in favour of the idea. I wanted so very much to get out of Epsom. The only exciting memory I have of that place is of once having seen Lester Piggott fall off his horse while competing in the Epsom Derby.

I passed the Burtonbury exam, as we had both known I would, and was offered a full scholarship. My mother sewed name tapes into socks for what seemed like weeks. In the welcome pack sent to me before the start of the autumn term, there was a shopping list of necessary items for boarders. I was required to come with one full-size umbrella, one complete rugby kit in the school colours of brown and green (with three changes of Aertex shirts), a shoe-polishing set, a supply of stamps and – most bizarrely – a stiff straw boater with a ribbon which I would be expected to wear for formal occasions.

My mother ignored the approved outfitters and uniform suppliers, seeking out instead the cheaper bargains in charity shops. As a result, my school jumpers were always faded and my P.E. shorts were never white enough and the Aertex shirts had immoveable off-yellow stains under each armpit. The smell of other people’s sadness lingered in the threads.

To this day, I have a profound aversion to second-hand clothes. I can’t abide the new trend for ‘vintage’ outfits, the nipped-in 50s dresses sported by overweight ladies who live in east London running Scandinavian coffee shops and the rolled-up chinos favoured by bearded hipsters who work in digital marketing. I have a minimal wardrobe but I invest in key, tailored pieces that last. Although I can’t really afford it, I have my suits made to measure by Ben’s tailor, purely for the pleasure of knowing no one else has ever shrugged their shoulders into my jacket.

Despite my mother’s obsession with cutting costs, the requisite Burtonbury boater defeated her. There simply wasn’t an available supply of them in Oxfam, which must have been terribly frustrating. In the end, she was forced to go to Ede & Ravenscroft and spend an inordinate sum on a hat I would only wear three times a term, before consigning it forever to a cardboard box shoved in the back of my wardrobe.

The evening before the first day of my new school, my mother and I took the bus and then the tube to Paddington, armed with my boater and a suitcase full of clothes. My luggage was so heavy that the only way I could board the train was by mounting the stairs, grabbing hold of the suitcase handle and leaning back as far as I could without falling over. In this way, I managed to leverage my body-weight against its bulk before sliding it up into the carriage.

My mother did not wait to see me off. She stood on the platform and watched me take my seat. I glanced at her through the window: a broad woman in a shapeless beige coat buttoned all the way up to her neck. Her face was set. I raised a hand halfway to the window. I was going to wave but then didn’t. I thought it might, for some reason, make her cross. She gave a little nod of acknowledgement, then turned and walked away, the low heel of her shoes sounding dully against the concrete.

As she left, I felt a wave of relief, as if a curtain had been lifted from my field of vision. The light flooded in. I blinked and allowed this new sensation to settle. I was on my own, for the first time in my thirteen years on this planet. Entirely, blissfully, permissibly alone.

The train pulled out of the station. The carriage filled with the sound of schoolboy voices and the pop of fizzy-drink cans and crisp packets being opened. I kept staring out of the window, unwilling to speak to anyone. The graffiti and bricks and metal of London slid past and gave way to suburban hedges and children’s swings and washing lines which in turn transformed into an unspooling ticker tape of green fields and church spires.

As the train pressed on, I was aware of the importance of the moment. I watched myself, squashed in that train seat, with my untouched sandwiches still wrapped in tinfoil on the table in front of me, and I realised that my life was in the process of taking a different direction, plotted according to a new constellation. At the age of thirteen, my boat was setting sail across the beating tides of a different ocean. I would be starting a new school, one more befitting my character. But perhaps I also had some intimation that a more profound shift of fate awaited me.

Because, although I didn’t know it yet, I was about to meet Ben and nothing would ever be the same again.

II. (#udb1ee16b-168a-5c80-b4d2-4d8a6dd58263)

Tipworth Police Station, 2.40 p.m.

I REACH ACROSS THE TABLE FOR MY COOLING TEA. My throat is dry from all the talking. My eyes, too, feel scratchy. I wonder if I could ask for some Optrex drops but one look at Grey Suit’s downturned mouth suggests the request wouldn’t be met in a generous spirit.

He still hasn’t spoken. While Beige Hair has been looking at me in a frank, friendly fashion and interjecting with the odd murmur as I recount the evening’s events, Grey Suit has been sitting impassively in his chair, arms folded across his stomach. No paunch. A hint of hard muscle beneath the gentle stretching of the shirt buttons.

I’m guessing you have to keep fit if you’re in the police. There are probably regular tests where they have to run measured distances as a beeper goes off at shorter and shorter intervals. I can imagine Grey Suit in shorts and a loose T-shirt, perhaps bearing the faded crest of an American university he never attended, sprinting with all his might, his face as void of thought as it is now.

I knew people like him at school: boys who excelled at physicality and who never needed to try with anything else. Big, slab-faced boys with no personalities and an understanding of the world wholly predicated on who would win in any given contest. The kind of boy who would always initiate an arm wrestle in a pub. They were popular, these boys. I wonder if it’s because we all have an innate need to be protected. So we seek out the bigger, brawnier specimens and we want to be around them because they will shield us one day when we most need shielding. They will man the lifeboats when we hit the iceberg. And for this, we are willing to overlook their complete lack of conversational guile or intellect.

‘So,’ Beige Hair is saying, ‘you weren’t staying at the big house. At Tipworth Priory, I mean?’

I can’t work out whether this is a tactic or whether she really hasn’t been paying attention.

‘No. As I think I already said.’

Beige Hair nods. ‘Of course you did, Martin. Of course you did.’

Grey Suit shifts in his chair.