Chapter 3. THE REAL BEGINNING

The weeks passed.  It was quite a mundane job.  You opened up the school and you shut the school.  Anything that happened in-between varied, but not by much.  

There was the occasional fight between pupils, which lightened the mood, and the occasional problem that had to be dealt with but whoever was on duty during the school time hours had more work to do than the one opening and closing.  I started to feel inert. I always opted for the unlock and lock as it afforded me time during the day to do what I needed.  Occasionally I had to swap shifts one week but ideally, the early and late was mine.

I had been there for about a month when I arrived one morning at nine thirty to relieve Andy, who had opened up earlier.  I heard him talking to Jim in the Caretakers office.

“I saw it!” he said.

“Saw what?  Nothing!” Jim replied between coughs, “you saw nothing.  It’s your imagination.”

“You weren’t there!”

“It sounds like you weren’t there either, mate,” Jim replied, “you sound like you were half asleep.

“I wasn’t asleep, I know what I saw.”

“Excuse me?”

I turned around and saw one of the teachers walking towards me.

“Can I borrow a broom please? We have a bit of a problem in the art room.”

“Sure!” I said and walked into the office where we kept the brooms, dustpans and brushes and looked at Andy and Jim.

“Morning, ladies!” I said, trying to sound as jolly as I could.  I got the obligatory “Back later” response as Jim put his Parka coat on and walked off down the corridor as I picked out a soft bristle broom.

I turned to the teacher.

“I can come down and deal with it.” I said.

“I don’t want to put you out.  One of the girls has knocked over a jar of powder paint.  There’s powder paint and broken glass on the floor” She replied.

“Oh no!” I said to her, thinking “Little bastard!” to myself.

I continued. “Why don’t I go down and deal with it in the morning break?”

She was staring at Andy, who appeared to be in a world of his own, rubbing his hands together slowly as he concentrated on the floor. I didn’t let on that this was his normal ‘look’.

“Are you OK?” she asked him.  He either didn’t hear her, ignored her, hadn’t seen her or was in a semi-conscious state.  He could have been in any one or all four of those conditions but he very quickly put his coat on with a mumbled “Gotta get outta here.” and walked out quickly, then out the front doors of the school just to the right of the Office.

The teacher watched him leave and then looked back at me as if I had all the answers.

It didn’t take her long to realise I had none.  I only had questions.  No answers.

“That would be very kind.” the Teacher smiled.

“I will be down there in a minute, Miss….?”

“Johnson” she replied, “Karen to you.” but my mind started wandering, I couldn’t stop wondering what the hell Andy and Jim were talking about earlier.  

“I’m Dave” I told her.

“I know”, she laughed.  “Thanks Dave” she said and turned to walk off.   I was so engrossed in what it could be that was causing so much cloak and dagger between Andy and Jim I stood there, in a daze, watching Karen walk away.  I didn’t get the chance to hide or look away before Karen turned and looked back and saw me staring at her.  She stopped before turning the corner, laughed and waved at me. I was just lost in thought.

 

I went into the office and started work, which amounted to drinking tea and reading the paper.  I had a book with me too, Christine by Stephen King.  I had queued up the previous Saturday with a mate named Dave Ambrose to meet Stephen King in a science fiction horror shop called Forbidden Planet.  It was relatively new, situated in Denmark Street. We had always frequented a shop in St Anne’s Court off Wardour Street in Soho called Dark They Were And Golden Eyed.. A chap that worked there eventually started Forbidden Planet. Stephen King was a really nice man and took time to speak to everyone that had lined up from his desk, out the door, down the street and over the road.  

 

A caretakers life was reactionary.  Kid does something, breaks something, smashes something, injures themselves, spills something, breaks something or any other permutation we either seal off the problem or deal with it asap.  Kid gets into a fight the teachers try to separate them and if theres bloodshed we are concerned with the school property only and have no interest in the kids.  They can put each other in hospital for all we are meant to care, as long as they don’t cause us unnecessary work.  The day dragged towards 4pm when I was due to leave after Andy had arrived.  Whoever had been there during the day would detail all that had happened if it was needed and what was needed to be done if it couldn’t have been done earlier but I had done it so, there was nothing..

 

That particular afternoon I waited for Andy to come back into work.  All day the conversation he'd had with Jim that morning had played on my mind.

I was reading my book when he arrived at ten past four..  I had no reason to be there past 4pm but I needed an excuse to find out what was going on and thankfully it was raining heavily and I could blame it on that.  I heard the big front door of the School open and an umbrella being shaken and opened and closed very quickly.  The footsteps got louder and nearer.

“Still here?” he asked as he stepped into the office.

“No!” I replied.  “This is a recording!”

He put his umbrella in the stand and tried to take off his soaked anorak but couldn’t.  The hood was still up and not allowing him to remove the coat.  I watched as he jumped up and down in the corridor, bending over and shaking.  Eventually. something triggered in his head and he pulled the hood back  I almost clapped.

I looked at Andy, and pointed at the window.

“I’m in no rush to get soaked to the skin.” I told him.

He took his parka coat off and hung it up.

“The kettle has just boiled.”  I said.

“Oh great!” He replied cheerfully, “Lifesaver!”

He started to make a cup of tea.  I folded The Times up and slipped it into my bag.

“I had a weird experience today.” I told him.  He had been spooning sugar into his mug and stopped suddenly at the fifth spoonful..

“What do you mean?”  He asked, in a voice that sounded like it dreaded the answer to come.

“I thought someone was in the corridor outside here but there was no one there.” I said.

Andy turned and looked at me.  “Really?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I would have put money on there being someone in the corridor out there.  Three times I heard it.  Three times I looked.  Nothing!”  I told him.

He went back to making the tea as the kettle clicked off.

“I saw something this morning.” He said quietly, “when I opened up the hall over in the old school.”

“It was a Pigeon!” I told him.

“What?”

“A pigeon.” I lied, “It came in the front door I suppose when the teachers took three classes to the Big Library over the road.  God knows why they bother? There’s a perfectly good library there!” I said  pointing at the door of the school library to the left of our door, which even for those days was quite extensive.  “Bloody thing started walking around on the mat out there but it flapped its wings a couple of times.  Freaked me out, mate.  All the other kids and the teachers are over the old school so I knew there was no one else over here.”

Andy stirred his tea slowly and I waited.  After a minute I asked him, “What do you mean you saw something this morning?”

Andy stared at his tea.

I watched him as he looked at the mug,

“Saw…what?” I asked again.

He told me what happened.

That morning he had started to open the school up.  He had entered the old school from the exterior door at the base of the staircase.  He opened up the cupboard in the far corner and turned on the staircase lights.  This cupboard is in the exact mirror position of the cupboard in the opposite corner at the other end of the hall except it doesn’t have a staircase to a boiler room like that one.  He opened the hall door, turned the lights on and stepped into the hall.  He crossed the hall and opened the hall door to get to the Boiler room at the top of the link corridor and under the staircase to turn on the stair lights.  After they came on he closed and locked the boiler room.  As he turned he saw the face of a girl looking at him through the glass of the hall door. 

He was startled but wondered why the girl was there.

“I thought she had been dropped off early by her parents but now I realise that was stupid, it was 6am and I had to open the outer door to get in.”

She had stepped back from the door and her face faded from view.  Andy walked over to the hall door and opened it, saying something like, “You’re early!” but there was no one there.

“She was there mate!” he said, “I wasn’t seeing things, it was her.  She was there.”

“It must have been the light or just your imagination.”

Andy shook his head.  “It wasn’t my imagination.”

“Well the light plays tricks,” I told him, like I knew what I was talking about, “and we can see things that are not there.  These places are creepy when you are alone in them.  Every noise can scare the life out of you and the early mornings and late nights are the worse.”

“I know, but I know what I saw. No one can tell me otherwise, or make me think otherwise.”

“OK,” I said, as I drank my tea.  We sat in silence for a few moments.  He was a little shaken by it I could tell.  Even telling me about it had made him nervous.

It all sounded strange to me.  Andy was sitting there silently thinking about what happened as he drank his tea and I was thinking about what he had described.  I listened to the rain as it hit the window and heard the distant rumble of thunder.  I looked at him and he suddenly looked up, staring back at me.

“What?” he asked me. “I didn’t hear you.”

“’It was her?’” I repeated.

Andy looked at me surprised.

“You said ‘it was her’.  I explained, “You told me, ’It was her’. Who her?”

Andy bit his bottom lip for a second before telling me.

“The dead girl.  I’ve seen her before.”