‘Listen to me, snotnose,’ Dussander said quietly.
Todd’s head jerked angrily around at that.
‘Before today,’ Dussander said carefully, ‘it was possible, just barely possible, that you could have denounced me and come out clean yourself. I don’t believe you would have been up to the job with your nerves in their present state, but never mind that. It would have been technically possible. But now things have changed. Today I impersonated your grandfather, one Victor Bowden. No one can have the slightest doubt that I did it with… how is the word?… your connivance. If it comes out now, boy, you will look blacker than ever. And you will have no defence. I took care of that today.’
‘I wish—’
‘You wish! You wish!’ Dussander roared. ‘Never mind your wishes, your wishes make me sick, your wishes are no more than little piles of dogshit in the gutter! All I want from you is to know if you understand the situation we are in?
‘I understand it,’ Todd muttered. His fists had been tightly clenched while Dussander shouted at him — he was not used to being shouted at. Now he opened his hands and dully observed that he had dug bleeding half-moons into his palms. The cuts would have been worse, he supposed, but in the last four months or so he had taken up biting his nails.
‘Good. Then you will make your sweet apologies, and you will study. In your free time at school you will study. During your lunch hours you will study. After school you will come here and study, and on your weekends you will come here and do more of the same.’
‘Not here,’ Todd said quickly. ‘At home.’
‘No. At home you will dawdle and daydream as you have all along. If you are here I can stand over you if I have to and watch you. I can protect my own interests in this matter. I can quiz you. I can listen to your lessons.’
‘If I don’t want to come here, you can’t make me.’
Dussander drank. ‘That is true. Things will then go on as they have. You will fail. This guidance person, French, will expect me to make good on my promise. When I don’t, he will call your parents. They will find out that kindly Mr Denker impersonated your grandfather at your request. They will find out about the altered grades. They—’
‘Oh, shut up. I’ll come.’
‘You’re already here. Begin with algebra.’
‘No way! It’s Friday afternoon!’
‘You study every afternoon now,’ Dussander said softly. ‘Begin with algebra.’
Todd stared at him — only for a moment before dropping his eyes and fumbling his algebra text out of his bookbag -and Dussander saw murder in the boy’s eyes. Not figurative murder; literal murder. It had been years since he had seen that dark, burning, speculative glance, but one never forgot it. He supposed he would have seen it in his own eyes if there had been a mirror at hand on the day he had looked at the white and defenceless nape of the boy’s neck.
I must protect myself, he thought with some amazement. One underestimates at one’s own risk.
He drank his bourbon and rocked and watched the boy study.
It was nearly five o’clock when Todd biked home. He felt washed out, hot-eyed, drained, impotently angry. Every time his eyes had wandered from the printed page — from the maddening, incomprehensible, fucking stupid world of sets, subsets, ordered pairs, and Cartesian coordinates -Dussander’s sharp old man’s voice had spoken. Otherwise he had remained completely silent… except for the maddening bump of his slippers on the floor and the squeak of the rocker. He sat there like a vulture waiting for its prey to expire. Why had he ever gotten into this? How had he gotten into it? This was a mess, a terrible mess. He had picked up some ground this afternoon — some of the set theory that had stumped him so badly just before the Christmas break had fallen into place with an almost audible click — but it was impossible to think he could pick up enough to scrape through next week’s algebra test with even a D.