- then I'd hate to be the one to deprive him of a chance to get somewhere in life.' He sat back. 'Very well, it's decided. Keogh missed the exams through no fault of his own, so ... I'll speak to Jack Harmon at the Tech., see if we can fix up some
sort of private examination for him. Of course I can't promise anything, but - ' 'It's better than nothing,' Hannant finished it for him.
'Thanks, Howard.'
Tine, fine. I'll let you know how I get on.' Nodding, Hannant went out into the corridor where
Keogh was waiting.
Over the next two days Hannant tried to put Keogh to the back of his mind but it didn't work. In the middle of lessons, or at home during the long autumn evenings, even occasionally in the dead of night, the boy's young-old face would be there, hovering on the periphery of Hannant's awareness. Friday night saw the teacher awake at 3:00 a.m., all his windows open to let in what little breeze there was, prowling the house in his pyjamas. He had come awake with that picture in his mind of Harry Keogh, clutching Jamieson's folded sheet of A4, heading off across the schoolyard of milling boys in the direction of the back gate under the stone archway; then of the boy crossing the dusty summer lane and passing in through the iron gates of the cemetery. And Hannant had believed that he knew where Harry was going. And suddenly, though the night had not grown noticeably cooler, Hannant had felt chilly in a way he was now becoming used to. It could only be a psychic chill, he suspected, warning him that something was dreadfully wrong. There was something uncanny about Keogh, certainly, but what it was defied conjecture - or rather, challenged it. One thing was certain: George Hannant hoped to God the kid could pass whatever exams Howard Jamieson and Jack Harmon of Hartlepool Tech. cooked up for him. And it was no longer simply that he wanted the boy to realise his full potential. No, it was more basic than that. Frankly, he wanted Keogh out of here, out of the school, away from the other kids. Those perfectly ordinary, normal boys at Harden Secondary Modern.
A bad influence? Hardly that! Who could he possibly influence - in what way? - when the rest of the kids generally considered him a weed? A corruption, then, a taint which might somehow spread - like the proverbial rotten apple at the bottom of the barrel? Perhaps. And yet that simile didn't exactly fit either. Or maybe, in a way, it did. For after all, it makes little difference that an apple can't appreciate its own rottenness: the corruption spreads anyway. Or was that too strong? How could it even be possible that there was something, well, wrong with Harry Keogh, something of which even he was unaware or lacked understanding? Actually the whole thing was becoming distinctly ridiculous! And yet ... what was it about Keogh which so worried Hannant?, What was in him, seeking a way out? And why didHannant feel that when it finally emerged it would be terrible?
It was then that Hannant decided to investigate Keogh's background, discover what he could of the boy's past. Perhaps that was where the trouble lay. And then again, i f maybe there was nothing at all and the whole affair was pi simply something spawned of Hannant's own overactive imagination. It could be the heat, the fact that he was If sleeping badly, the unending, unrewarding, repetitious routine of the school - any or all of these things. It could ! 1 be - but why then did that inner voice keep insisting that Keogh was different? And why on occasion would he find Keogh staring at him with eyes which might well be those of his own dead and buried father...?
Ten days and two Tuesdays later, tragedy struck. It happened when the boys, PTI Graham Lane, and the Misses Dorothy Hartley and Gertrude Gower went off on their end-of-day stone-gathering trek to the beach. 'Sergeant', ostensibly to collect specimens of some rare wild flower, but more likely to impress his lady love, had climbed the beetling cliffs. When he had been more than half-way up the treacherous face of the cliff, projecting stones had given way under his feet, pitching him down to the boulder- and scree-clad beach below. He had tried to cling to the crumbling surface even as he fell,