Jim was unaware of these associations. The fact remains that by sheer luck he had chosen the one corner of Thursgood’s academy which as far as Roach was concerned was endowed with supernatural properties.
Roach waited at the window but saw nothing more. Both the Alvis and the caravan were in dead ground and if it hadn’t been for the wet red tracks across the grass he might have wondered whether he had dreamed the whole thing. But the tracks were real, so when the bell went for the end of rest he put on his Wellingtons and trudged through the rain to the top of the Dip and peered down and there was Jim dressed in an army raincoat and a quite extraordinary hat, broad-brimmed like a safari hat but hairy, with one side pinned up in a rakish piratical curl and the water running off it like a gutter.
The Alvis was in the stable yard; Roach never knew how Jim spirited it out of the Dip, but the caravan was right down there, at what should have been the deep end, bedded on platforms of weathered brick, and Jim was sitting on the step drinking from a green plastic beaker, and rubbing his right shoulder as if he had banged it on something, while the rain poured off his hat. Then the hat lifted and Roach found himself staring at an extremely fierce red face, made still fiercer by the shadow of the brim and by a brown moustache washed into fangs by the rain. The rest of the face was criss-crossed with jagged cracks, so deep and crooked that Roach concluded in another of his flashes of imaginative genius that Jim had once been very hungry in a tropical place and filled up again since. The left arm still lay across his chest, the right shoulder was still drawn high against his neck. But the whole tangled shape of him had stiffened, he was like an animal frozen against its background: a stag, thought Roach on a hopeful impulse, something noble.
‘Who the hell are you?’ asked a very military voice.
‘Sir, Roach, sir. I’m a new boy.’
For a moment longer, the brick face surveyed Roach from the shadow of the hat. Then, to his intense relief, its features relaxed into a wolfish grin, the left hand, still clapped over the right shoulder, resumed its slow massage while at the same time he managed a long pull from the plastic beaker.
‘New boy, eh?’ Jim repeated into the beaker, still grinning. ‘Well that’s a turn up for the book, I will say.’
Rising now, and turning his crooked back on Roach, Jim set to work on what appeared to be a detailed study of the caravan’s four legs, a very critical study which involved much rocking of the suspension, and much tilting of the strangely garbed head, and the emplacement of several bricks at different angles and points. Meanwhile the spring rain was clattering down on everything: his coat, his hat and the roof of the old caravan. And Roach noticed that throughout these manoeuvres Jim’s right shoulder had not budged at all but stayed wedged high against his neck like a rock under the mackintosh. Therefore he wondered whether Jim was a sort of giant hunchback and whether all hunch backs hurt as Jim’s did. And he noticed as a generality, a thing to store away, that people with bad backs take long strides, it was something to do with balance.
‘New boy, eh? Well I’m not a new boy,’ Jim went on, in altogether a much more friendly tone, as he pulled at a leg of the caravan. I’m an old boy. Old as Rip Van Winkle if you want to know. Older. Got any friends?’
‘No, sir,’ said Roach simply, in the listless tone which schoolboys always use for saying ‘no’, leaving all positive response to their interrogators. Jim however made no response at all, so that Roach felt an odd stirring of kinship suddenly, and of hope.
‘My other name’s Bill,’ he said. ‘I was christened Bill but Mr Thursgood calls me William.’
‘Bill, eh. The unpaid Bill. Anyone ever call you that?’