Joe Knight Series - Books 1-3

4. Sirgiman

4

SIRGIMAN

It wasn’t until the very last moment that I realised it was a trick. Ma Apples really was a witch.

And this was one of her spells.

I tried to stop but it was already too late. I had fallen under as surely as if a doctor had injected me with a hypnotic d**g.

The rhythm was becoming fainter, my vision blurring. The witch was putting me into a trance so that she could work out her evil plans. I would end up in a pie for sure, or else doing something unspeakably wicked as she took control of my mind. The rest of my day had been a picnic in the park compared with what was coming at the hands of this new monster in my life.

The sound from that repeated single note on my piano was now barely audible, and my vision had blurred so badly that all I could see was a dark grey fog surrounding me. Then the sound was gone completely, though the dark mists were slowly beginning to clear.

I found myself looking down into a room, as though I had been raised up. The mist or fog or whatever it was hadn’t entirely cleared, and everything was still a little blurred. It was like I was looking down through a transparent ceiling, or through a hole in a roof, the scene beneath me steadily coming into focus.

For a moment I thought I recognised a familiar face. No way - it couldn’t be! That would be ridiculous. That would be insane.

I rubbed at my eyes to get the madness out of them.

But the image was still there.

It was him. Sirgiman. Clear as day.

Except it wasn’t day. It was evening, late evening, and this wasn’t school. And neither was it my house on Hope Street. There was no piano. No front room. No parents asking me to change the record. Or telling me it was time for bed and hadn’t this been the greatest birthday ever.

I was looking down on Sirgiman, who was sitting in a room I had never seen before, arguing with a woman who didn’t look any friendlier than him. Three children were running wildly, in and out of the room. Sirgiman was aiming kicks at them as they ran past him, and missing every time.

The children all looked different. There was a girl who actually looked like Sirgiman, poor thing, a boy who appeared to have escaped the worst of his father’s looks, and a third child that could have been a boy or a girl or even a cross between the two.

Anything was possible when Sirgiman was your father.

There was chaos in that room, the kind that occasionally happened at school, though never in Sirgiman’s class, unless he was causing it.

This had to be a dream, and in truth I’d had worse. At least seeing Sirgiman unable to control his family had its funny side.

The woman was laying into him and he was taking it. He was sitting in a ripped old armchair, wearing jogging trousers with a pair of slippers that could only have been a Christmas present from someone who didn’t like him.

Aware that I was laughing out loud, I covered my mouth in case they could hear me. But nobody looked up, and the woman went on with her lecture, telling Sirgiman that he was the biggest waste of space in the entire universe.

The kids continued to run past him, in the room, out of the room, howling like demons. And he sat there, snarling, as his wife ripped lumps out of him with a voice like an iron claw scraping down a blackboard.

Then the scene changed. The woman and the kids had gone, and Sirgiman was sitting alone, tapping numbers into a phone. I could hear every word of the call, Sirgiman’s half at least. He was talking to somebody named Mick. There was a football match coming up.

“Of course I should be working, you i***t!”

That was more like the Sirgiman I knew!

“Well, what do you think I’m going to do? The same as last time, you imbecile. Yes, exactly. No, skiving is not a word I would use. More like sorting out my priorities. Yes, I could spend a day pandering to those foul children that they pay me to try and teach - waste a day, I should say. Or I could do my duty and ring in sick. My country needs me.”

I knew that children like Ida Digger sometimes skived off school, but it had never occurred to me that teachers might do the same thing. That an adult in a position of authority and responsibility could even think of acting in such a way. Maybe I still had a lot to learn.

“Wife! What’s she got to do with anything? I make the rules in this house. What I say goes around here, and you’d better believe it.”

The call ended and Sirgiman’s wife was back in the room. “What’s this I hear about ringing in sick?”

Sirgiman started to nurse his stomach with both hands. “I’m not well. I think it must be something you cooked.”

She eyed him. “Yes, that’s right. Blame me. Blame my cooking even when there’s nothing wrong with you. Are they completely stupid at that school of yours? It’s not five minutes since the last time.”

“Ah,” said Sirgiman. “Different school.”

“Same headmaster! They keep records, you know.”

“Exactly.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He favours me,” said Sirgiman. “The headmaster. We go back a long way. We have a lot in common.”

“He needs his brain looking at if you ask my opinion. England match again, is it? Well, let me tell you, if it wasn’t for this family needing your wages, I’d split on you. I’d ring up the headmaster and tell him exactly what he’s got working for him.”

“Oh, I think he knows,” said Sirgiman, grinning. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

I made a mental note to check the last time England had played, and I wondered if there was any way of checking whether Sirgiman had been off sick that day. His old school would keep records, of course, but how could I access them?

There was no way. I let it go. This was just some stupid dream, anyway. Better to enjoy it while it lasted. Any moment I would hear my parents telling me to wake up and that it was time for bed.

Sirgiman was alone again. He had a cold look of contentment that shattered as three children came screaming back in like fighter jets.

“Kids!” he shouted. “I hate the lot of them!”

The man was a born teacher alright.

I could faintly hear music, but I couldn’t work out where it was coming from. I wondered if one of Sirgiman’s children was having piano lessons. If so it was some coincidence, because the music was exactly the same as the rhythm Ma Apples had taught me.

The scene below me started to fade and in a moment I was back in my front room on Hope Street, my finger pressing down on Middle C.

“Come on, Mozart, time for bed,” said Mum.

“How long have I been in here?”

“About three weeks,” said Dad. “Or did it just seem that long. You need to learn a new tune. Fast. And try and find something with more than one note.”

Dad was looking at me in a curious way. “Joe,” he said. “What did you say just now? How long did you think you’d been in here? Daydreaming again, eh?”

“Dreaming or not,” said Mum, “it’s school tomorrow in case you’d all forgotten.”

Like I needed reminding.

I had no dreams that night, or at least none that I could remember. Yet the strange daydream with Sirgiman remained clear, every detail of it, and particularly the part about him planning to skip school to watch England play.

I climbed out of bed that morning with the prospect of another day at Bullies’ Delight bearing down on me like a sack of leg chains. Yet beneath the weight of the day, something lighter flickered.

What if Sirgiman didn’t turn up for school? What could I do with that knowledge? Knowledge is power, wasn’t that what Dad was always saying, trying to get me to read more books?

My brief surge of enthusiasm for the day quickly soured. Who was I kidding? There was no way I’d learned anything about Sirgiman. How could I have? How could I be playing a note on that wretched piano one minute and looking into his house the next? I was daydreaming and it would do me no good because it never did. Daydreaming only ever brought me trouble, lots of it. That was the way the world was, even Dad had said it. But it was okay for Dad to be a dreamer because he wrote books and wasn’t a child any more, much as he wanted to be. But when a child spent his time daydreaming, everybody said they would never amount to anything until they woke up and got on with the real world.

I got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. Dad was busy in the study, reading a chapter to Doozy while Mum made a dozen phone calls. I played with an egg and thought again about the weird stuff with Sirgiman, deciding that it was best to forget about it.

Leaving the egg uneaten, I went back upstairs to get my things. And that’s when I heard a man on the radio say something about a football match that evening.

I set off to school. It was pointless asking my parents anything about football. They knew as much about sport as I knew about playing the piano.

Walking through the gates of Bullies’ Delight I prepared myself for another day of madness and cruelty.

I was surprised to see the temporary maths teacher, Mr. Jenks, sitting at the front of our classroom for registration. Mr. Sirgiman was unwell, apparently.

He would be taking the day off.

At first break I looked around the playground for someone to ask about the football match. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, and so carefully selected a quiet, friendless boy from the year below. He was kicking a stone around, no doubt imagining himself about to score the winner in some imaginary cup final. I tapped his shoulder.

“Don’t suppose you know who’s playing later?”

He began laughing. Then he turned around, and in a voice louder than a fully qualified games teacher, he shouted, “Hey, listen to this, everyone.” He took off around the playground like a wild thing, telling anyone who would listen.

The entire playground wanted to listen. Everyone wanted to know about the boy who didn’t know that England were playing.

The rest of break was miserable, though at least Todd Toshack hadn’t joined in. Todd wasn’t the least bit interested in football. According to Todd, it wasn’t a sport for real men. That’s why the Welsh weren’t any good at it. Rugby was the sport for men and he defied any child to argue. None did, and I felt the heat shift from me as we lined up to go back into school.

All through chemistry, I was thinking about Sirgiman. Could it be coincidence? Coincidences happened all the time. He was probably at home with the flu, his wife making him hot drinks and wringing out his tissues.

I thought about the daydream: Sirgiman’s wife suggesting that the school could check previous absences against England matches. Had Sirgiman really done this before? How could I find out when he’d last been ‘off sick’, and if it had coincided with a football match?

“Joe Knight!”

Mr. Macbeth was looking daggers.

“Sir?”

“Daydreaming again? Stand up.”

A few minutes of sarcasm and laughter followed before I found myself standing in the corner for the rest of the lesson. Mr. Macbeth said that it would give me time to reflect on my behaviour. But all I was reflecting on was the utter stupidity of the punishment.

What was he hoping to achieve by it? Humiliation, I imagined, though the sarcasm and laughter had achieved that much already, surely. Standing in the corner, nose pressed up against the peeling wallpaper had to be just about the worst thing that a teacher could do to a dreamer. It made daydreaming so much easier when the teacher couldn’t look at your face and see if you were paying attention.

Couldn’t he see that? Did they teach them nothing before they let them loose in a classroom? And what kind of a name was Macbeth for a chemistry teacher anyway?

It clearly hadn’t been thought through, but then Mr. Macbeth was old-school and a chemist at that. Not as raving as Sirgiman, but not the brightest spark either. He wore suits that were already out of fashion during the Second World War, and loved shouting at children for a living. He could handle a test tube and a Bunsen burner, no doubt about it, but reality was a foreign country that Macbeth rarely visited.

As I stood admiring the patterns in the wallpaper, I imagined Sirgiman rubbing his hands together with glee after ringing in sick. Then putting on dark glasses and perhaps even a false beard, before driving out of the city.

Occasionally the distant whine of Macbeth’s chemistry-class voice intruded into my daydreaming, though to little effect. I turned my thoughts to Ma Apples.

Was she really a witch? Witches only existed in fairy tales, or in the stupid stories that Dad wrote. Maybe Dad believed in witches. Anybody who talked regularly, and at length, to the family cat was capable of believing anything. But that didn’t mean I had to believe such nonsense.

Yet there was something odd about her. The thought brought a fluttery feeling to my stomach. I imagined her placing a spell on Macbeth, reducing him to the size of a walking thumb that fitted nicely into a test tube, under which was placed a Bunsen burner. The chemist was begging, in a tiny voice, to be released when Todd Toshack turned up the flame and the teacher started screaming.

The lunch bell brought an end to his screams, and he showed his gratitude by ordering me to write out a hundred times that I must not daydream in Chemistry.

After pushing a tasteless sausage around a plate filled with powdery mash and bullet peas, I went to the playground to see what wars were raging out there.

An interesting whisper was doing the rounds, about Sirgiman skiving off to watch England play. After listening in on a small, select group of older kids tucked away at the intellectual west side of the playground, I took a deep breath and went in, firing questions like an ace news reporter.

Did they think Sirgiman had done this kind of thing before? When? At his old school, perhaps? Were there rumours from his time there? Had England been playing on that day too?

It was desperate stuff. But then I was desperate to know. One of them, a boy known to own a leather brief case that had been handed down through three generations of his family, turned on me. “Are you a member of the Spanish Inquisition?” The others in the group laughed. “Maybe he thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes,” said a carrot-topped boy, who kept his nose pointed into the air at all times, and whose high-pitched laughter suggested he had made the joke of the year. “Sirgiman wouldn’t like it if he knew he was being checked on by a brat from the lower ranks,” said another boy through what sounded like a mouth full of plums. “Maybe we should inform Mr. Sirgiman that he is under enquiry from the lower years,” said carrot top, causing his circle of puffed-up friends to laugh once again.

I walked away from the g**g of halfwits, wondering what abuses might be awaiting me from amongst the ranks of my own sad year, when I felt a tap on the shoulder.

It was one of the older g**g, a dark haired, skinny boy who hadn’t seemed amused by my questions. “I was in Sirgiman’s class last year,” he said. “He did the same thing.”

“You were at Sirgiman’s last school?”

“Afraid so. Luck hasn’t featured much in my life.” He didn’t even laugh when he said it. “The same headmaster, too,” he went on. “I reckon Sirgiman only got away with his skiving because of the head. They seem to have a connection.”

“What kind of connection?”

“I’m not sure, but I know that they both hate dreamers. That’s why I left. And now they both show up here. It feels like they’re following me.”

Again he didn’t laugh. But then with luck like that perhaps he didn’t feel that he had much to laugh about.

“He’s bad news. I hated him then, and I hate him now. And I tell you, he’s getting worse.”

I held out a hand. “I’m Joe Knight, by the way.”

“I’m Robert Earle.” We shook hands. “You’re a dreamer, aren’t you?” he said.

“Why do you ask?”

At last he smiled. “It takes one to know one.”

“So this ringing in sick,” I said. “Do you reckon it’s to watch football?”

“No doubt about it. He likes to make a day of it. He goes down early on the train.”

“It couldn’t have been a coincidence?”

“No chance. We live on the same road. I saw him returning home that night after the last game. He was dead drunk, singing football songs, and wearing an England scarf.”

“He could have watched the game on television, or in the pub.”

“He travelled down to London, I tell you. He always does.”

I thought for a moment. “You wouldn’t happen to know how many children he’s got, by any chance.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering, that’s all.”

“A son and two daughters, since you ask,” he said. “Mind you, one of his daughters is such a tomboy it’s difficult to tell.”

I swallowed so hard it made my throat ache.

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

“You asked.”

“You still didn’t have to tell me.”

Robert Earle frowned. “Do you want to know or don’t you?”

I nodded. “I want to know everything about him.”

He looked around, as though checking that the coast was clear, and then he lowered his voice. “You have to be careful, Joe,” he said. “Sirgiman hates all kids. I think he hates more or less everyone, but he hates kids particularly and dreamers most of all.”

“Why is that?”

Robert shrugged, and I recalled something that Mr. Handel had said. About the evil one knowing its nemesis would come as a dreamer.

“So how are we going to bring him down?”

Robert Earle’s question was a good one. As good as any that I’d heard in a long time. But at that moment, the bell sounded, calling us into lines.

Thoughts of revenge took flight inside my head, while above them flew an urgent desire to lift up that piano lid and find what other secrets Middle C had to reveal about the dark and secret life of Sir Alf Ramsey Sirgiman.