The Heat of the Sun

Boyd, awed.
    ‘Not much of a secret,’ said Le Vol, ‘if all of us know it. Who found this out, anyway?’
    ‘Someone,’ said Elmsley, ‘who’s not fond of Trouble.’
    Trouble’s glory departed as swiftly as it had arrived. He had no peace. In corridors, fellows shouldered roughly past him. Towels flicked at him in the bathroom. One
day, several fellows held his head down a toilet bowl and pulled the chain. His smallness became a curse to him. He was tripped up, pushed into walls; the stairs, which he had taken so confidently
before, became places of danger where a mischievous hand, a malevolent foot, might seek him out. More than once he stumbled and fell. ‘Watch it, little boy!’ and ‘Get away from
me!’ came the wails of outrage as he cannoned into fellows further down.
    Cubicle number thirty was desecrated. First the silken quilt was hacked with knives, set alight, pissed on, then flung from a window. Obscene additions covered the colourful pictures.
Jubilantly, fellows flung Trouble’s phonograph records like discuses up and down the corridors, inundating the brown linoleum with a jagged sea of black.
    They smashed the phonograph too.
    In study hall and at dinner, Trouble sat alone. Of the acolytes, none remained. True, some had lingered – the Townsend twins had been the last to hold out – but the burden of
conformity was too much. To take Trouble’s part was to invite assault, derision, the vilest accusations. For a few days fellows shook their heads, wondering how Trouble had taken us all in;
then none spoke of the past any more. Trouble might never have enchanted any of us.
    The masters did not know what was going on. The world of the boys, like the secret lives of animals, unfolded beneath their awareness. If Mr Gregg thought again of the incident with the
blackboard, he must have seen it as an isolated outrage, not the first in an evil chain. In class, Trouble betrayed little, sitting in silent dignity. The stares, the whispered jokes, the compasses
stabbing his buttocks, came only when the master’s back was turned.
    One afternoon, as snow fell thickly, Mr Gregg made us read aloud from Cymbeline . The scene was a long one and the class soon grew restless; besides, Mr Gregg had
assigned a part to Trouble. Guffaws, barely suppressed, accompanied every speech that Guiderius delivered.
    In the scene, Guiderius and Arviragus, the king’s disguised sons, conduct a burial service in the woods for Imogen, whom they falsely believe to be dead as well as a boy; that she is their
sister is also unknown to them. Neither the pathos nor the absurdity of the situation infused our reading. Trouble was dutiful, his voice clipped and passionless; Elmsley, as Arviragus, sounded
uncommonly nervous, stumbling often, as if in the mere act of playing a scene with Trouble he had compromised himself.
    Trouble intoned:
    Why, he but sleeps:
    If he be gone, he’ll make his grave a bed;
    With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
    And worms will not come to thee.
    The snorts were loud. Mr Gregg looked up from his book.
    Elmsley replied, stumblingly:
    With fairest flowers,
    Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
    I’ll sweeten thy sad grave.
    Eight fellows had speaking parts. I was one of them, and we all had to stand. I resented this; I was the Soothsayer, who speaks only when the scene is almost over. Outside, glaring whitely under
the pale sun, snow covered the playing fields like an intimation of death.
    We had reached the part where Guiderius and Arviragus sing their famous funeral song. Trouble had the first verse. At the direction Song he paused. Someone stifled a shriek.
    ‘Just read it, Mr Pinkerton,’ said Mr Gregg.
    Suddenly I was alarmed. Trouble faced the class. In fascinated, confused longing, we all gazed back at him. From the first I had sensed his magic; now, as if all along he had been biding his
time, waiting for his moment, the magic reached out to touch us all.
    Mr Gregg looked puzzled. Then Trouble began to sing:
    Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,
    Nor the furious winter’s rages;
    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
    Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
    Golden lads and girls all must,
    As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
    On the first lines, Trouble’s voice wavered; after that, the tone became assured. I slumped into my seat, pinned down as if by oppressive gravity, yet something in me struggled to escape,
like a bird that flurries at the bars of its cage.