Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [62]
“How are you this morning, my lad?”
“Car,” said Timmy.
Timmy was alone in the six-bed ward. A TV set roosted high up on the opposite wall: it showed the planet Mars, filling half the screen now, and getting ever closer.
“Timmy, try to remember. Who did this to you, Timmy?”
“House,” said Timmy.
The boy was not in San for one of his workaday injuries, something like a burn or a twisted ankle. Timmy was in San because he had been raped: three days ago. Mr. Caroline had found him in the potting shed, lying on the duckboards, weeping. And from then on Timmy had lapsed into the semi-autistic bemusement that had marked his first two years at Shepherds Lodge: the state that Pop Jones, and others, liked to think they had coaxed him out of. The flower had partly opened. It had now closed again.
“Timmy, try to remember.”
“Floor,” said Timmy.
Rape—nonstatutory rape—was vanishingly rare at Shepherds Lodge: rape flew in the face of everything its staff cherished and honored. Intergenerational sex, in that gothic mass on the steep green of the Welsh border, was of course ubiquitous, but they had a belief system which accounted for that. Its signal precept was that the children liked it.
“Who did this, Timmy?” persisted Pop, because Timmy was perfectly capable of identifying and, after a fashion, naming every carer on the payroll. The Principal, Mr. Davidge, he called “Day.” Mr. Caroline he called “Ro.” Pop Jones himself he called “Jo.” Who did this? Everyone, including Pop, was edging toward a wholly unmanageable suspicion: Davidge had done it. It seemed inescapable. The last time something like this happened (in fact a much milder case, involving the “inappropriate fondling” of a temporary referral from Birmingham), Davidge had pursued the matter with Corsican rigor. But the investigation into the attack on Timmy seemed oddly stalled: three days had passed without so much as an analdilation test. Davidge’s shrugs and prevarications, by a process of political trickledown, now threatened a general dissolution, Pop sensed. The janitor was on his own here. Already he felt at the limit of his moral courage. The only whispers of support were coming from a confused and indignant eleven-year-old called Ryan, Davidge’s current regular (and, therefore, the cynosure of B Wing).
“Was it … ‘Day’?” he asked, leaning nearer.
“Dog,” said Timmy.
The two male nurses—the two reeking sadists in their sleeveless T-shirts—were snorting rhythmically under their weights. Pop called out to them:
“Excuse me? Excuse me? Mr. Fitzmaurice, if you please. You will be turning this television off, I hope. The boys are not permitted to watch the news today. It’s an OO. An official order. From the Department Head.”
The male nurses leered perfunctorily at each other and made no response.
“This television will have to be disconnected.”
Fitzmaurice sat up on his bench and shouted, “If I do that the whole fucking system goes down. Every TV in the fucking gaff.”
Pop Jones, as a janitor, had to bow to the logic of that. He said, “Then he’ll have to be moved. It may be quite unsuitable for children. There may be some bad language.”
With a cheerful squint Fitzmaurice said, “Bad language?”
“You can turn the sound down at least. Nobody knows what’s going to happen up there. Anything could happen up there.”
Fitzmaurice shrugged.
“Car,” said Timmy.
Pop looked at the TV. Mars now filled the screen.
This day many questions would be answered. Not the least pressing (many felt) was: why now? What was the “tripwire”? How did you explain the timing of the Contact from the janitor on Mars?
It seemed significant, or perverse, for two reasons. As recently as 2047, after many a probe and flyby, NASA had successfully completed the first manned mission to Mars. The Earthling cosmonauts spent three months on the Red Planet and