I might have suspected that I had more to do with his death than the other boys in 4b, but I didn’t know. When I heard how he died I knew that I had killed him.
Soon after that the dreams came. The dreams where I’m looking at the blade of the spade, or fastening the elasticated belt around his thick, red neck. It’s astonishing how many different ways I’ve murdered Mr Vello in my dreams. Murdered him and murdered him and murdered him again. I’d say that while I’ve slept I’ve probably killed Mr Vello at least two thousand times. And you wanna know the really queer thing about it? Every time I do him, I do him in a fresh way – an original way.
Some of the ways that I’ve dreamt I killed Mr Vello are positively baroque. Like shredding his buttocks to a pulpy mass, my weapon a common cheese grater. Or like pulling his head off. Just pulling it right off and sort of de-coring his body. Really icky stuff. I’m glad I can’t express this too well in words because it’s worse than any special effect you’ve ever seen. I don’t know where the dreams come from because I don’t see the world that way. I’ve never watched an operation, or been in an abattoir. I don’t go to horror movies. I’ve never even seen a dead person. So I just don’t know where I get all these vivid anatomical details.
Of course it’s the guilt. I know that. I’m not stupid – far from it. I’ve got the real gift of the gab. I can talk and talk. That’s what I do for a living: talk and talk. That’s what the kids at school said about me, ‘You can talk like a chat show host, Wayne,’ that’s what they said. And it was prophetic, because now I am a chat show host. I went straight from being a lairy kid to being a lairy adult. That’s how I really killed Mr Vello, of course, I killed him with my big mouth. I killed him by winding him up. Winding him up so tight that he shattered. He just shattered.
Yeah, I did him all right. But I can tell you I didn’t do it all by myself. I couldn’t have managed it without the Indian Army. Mr Vello came to us as a supply teacher. He wasn’t like the other teachers at the school. He didn’t wear PVC car coats, or ratty corduroy jackets. He didn’t speak with a cockney accent, or try and speak with one. He didn’t read the Guardian, or the novels of D.H. Lawrence. Mr Vello dressed like a retired Indian Army officer. I think that’s how he saw himself.
He was a solidly plump Yorkshireman in his mid-fifties. He always wore a blue blazer with brass buttons – the Yorkshire County Cricket Club badge was on the breast pocket. Mr Vello combed his hair back tight over his scalp. He had been using Brylcreem for so many years that the thin slick of his hair had become Brylcreem-coloured. Mr Vello’s face was moley rather than vulpine, but when he got angry, which he did with increasing frequency, his apparently friendly, diffident wrinkles seemed to get smarmed back with his greasy hair.
With the benefit of culpable hindsight I can place myself behind Mr Vello’s metal-framed spectacles and picture class 4b as it must have appeared to him when he first swung back the big wooden door and walked in on us.
Simmo was doing his drawing-pin trick. This was a bogus bit of fakirism whereby he placed three drawing pins on top of a desk and put his fat white hand over them. He then asked another boy to stamp on the back of his hand. On this occasion Simmo got it wrong – just as Mr Vello walked into the room he screamed and held up his hand. The three drawing pins were deeply embedded.
‘What’s all this?’ said Mr Vello, setting a pile of text-books down on the teacher’s desk.
‘Please, sir,’ gurgled Simmo (blood was beginning to flow), ‘please, sir, I’ve hurt my hand.’
‘Nonsense, boy,’ said Mr Vello, ‘now sit down and shut up . . . all of you: sit down, shut up and pay attention.’
But we didn’t. We never did. We just went on: flicking rubber bands; chasing one another around the desks; bashing and shouting. The majority, that is. But really there were three distinct minorities in class 4b: the Jews, the Gentiles and the Asians. 4b was a bipartisan culture, however, and power derived solely from the antagonism between the Jews and the Gentiles. We formed two gangs and called ourselves respectively The Yids and The Yocks.
The Asian boys were different. They were all first-generation immigrants, mostly East African Asians, expelled from Uganda and Kenya, but some Punjabis and Pakistanis as well. It could have been this factor alone, or perhaps it was because Asian families have a more pronounced tradition of respect for pedagogues, but none of the Asian boys was indisciplined or cheeky. On the other hand they didn’t exactly stick together. They certainly didn’t all sit together in the classroom. It was as if they had conspired to be unobtrusively unobtrusive. I reckon Mr Vello picked up on this immediately. Because it was the Asian boys who stopped buggering about first. They all sat down at their desks and got their books out.
Mr Vello saw the rest of us, immediately, for what we were: time-servers; time-wankers; ignorantly urbane boys – full of nasty decadences. The doomed scurf on the last polluted wave of our culture. He said as much, or rather shouted it.
‘You boys are ignorant,’ he shouted, ‘ignorant of discipline.’ He walked up and down the classroom batting the backs of heads with practised swipes of his wooden ruler. We yowled and yammered like the Yahoos we were. ‘But it isn’t your fault, you live in an undisciplined society and you are subjected to a banal cultural babble. You would do well to observe these Indian boys. They at least have been subjected in the more recent past to the rigours and responsibilities of imperial rule. Isn’t that right, boy?’ Mr Vello stopped by Jayesh Rabindirath, a thick oaf who was heavily moustachioed at fourteen.
‘Err . . . yes, sir. I suppose so.’
Mr Vello tried to teach us. He tried for weeks. But he just couldn’t hack it. Adolescent boys sense weakness in a teacher and go for it like piranhas sporting in offal. I think that in a quieter school, some nice prep where the kids were better behaved, Mr Vello would have been OK. But at Creighton Comprehensive he didn’t have a chance.
I think he was overwhelmed by the militancy of our philistinism, the utter failure of our didactic urge. Naturally we played up to this – me in particular. It took only four maladministered lessons for the situation to deteriorate to such an extent that the poor man couldn’t even talk for sixty seconds without being importuned by a battery of grubby paws, stuck out straining from the shoulder, at angles of forty-five degrees. ‘Please, sir! Please, sir! Ple-ease, sir!’ we all chorused, but as soon as he paid us any mind we would come up with some absurd request (‘Please, sir, may I breathe ?’), our subservience a grotesque parody of his assumed authority. Or if, in the course of attempting to instruct us, he managed to shout out a question, we would vie with one another to produce the most facile, the most patently weak, the most irrelevant answer.
I think I managed the worst example of this fairly early on. Mr Vello was attempting to discourse on the Crimean War; back to the class, he mapped out the battlefield at Balaclava with a series of mauve chalk strokes. We had all fallen silent, the better to stand on our desks and wigglingly shimmy our contempt for him. Without bothering to turn he flung over his shoulder, ‘Why were the Russian batteries positioned here?’
I came back triumphantly (God, have I ever been funnier?), ‘Because that’s where the little diagram said they should be positioned.’
We all fell about. I got eighteen consecutive detentions. God, how we (and me in particular) loved it when he got worked up. It was so comic, there was something cartoony about the colour contrast between his blue, blue blazer and his red, bursting, humiliated face. Rebellion was in the air.
It was during the lesson after that that Mr Vello first announced the establishment of the Indian Army. ‘Now then, boy-yz!’ He thwacked his desk with his ever-handy ruler to give his words emphasis.
‘Now then,
