The Grave Tattoo

2

Matthew Gresham gulped his last mouthful of coffee and dumped the mug in the sink. Members of staff were supposed to do their own washing up, but Matthew reckoned there had to be some advantages to rank so ever since his promotion to head teacher he’d left his dirty crockery for someone else to deal with. Besides, he had more important things to occupy him. So far nobody had commented on his presumptuousness, though he’d noticed disapproving glares from Marcia Porter more than once. But Marcia was a busted flush. When he’d leapfrogged her into the top job, she’d stopped trying to get the world to bend to her will. It was as if she’d thrown in the towel. She might not like what Matthew did, but she didn’t attempt to challenge him. Not like before, when they were theoretically equal except for her constant assertion of her seniority. These days, she gave him as wide a berth as was possible in a village school with a staff of five teachers and four teaching assistants.

Teaching assistants. That was a joke. Mothers with time on their hands and the misplaced notion that somehow, merely by giving birth, they had the inside track on how to educate kids. But they’d gone through the school system before SATs and the National Curriculum. They didn’t have a bloody clue about the pressures that real teachers like him had to live with on a daily basis. Matthew missed no opportunity to remind them of how much the world had changed. The main result was that, as with the rest of his staff, they spent as little time as possible slacking in the staffroom. That suited Matthew fine; his office was, to his way of thinking, barely adequate for his needs. He much preferred working in the staffroom, where he could brew himself a coffee whenever he felt like it.

He had to stoop to glance in the mirror above the sink which had been placed to suit the stature of female teachers rather than six-foot headmasters. Dark blue eyes stared back at him from olive skin a couple of shades darker than the local norm. The legacy of his Cornish grandfather, passed on to Matthew and Jane from their mother. He ran a hand through the dark mop of mutinous curls, inherited from the other side of the family. They looked glorious on his sister but simply made him feel like a poor man’s Harpo Marx. He smiled wryly, thinking of the lesson he was about to teach the top two classes. Genealogy and genetics, those twisted strands that wrapped around each other like the double helix of DNA, complete with the kinks that could have all kinds of unforeseen consequences. There was no doubting his relationship to his sister nor his parentage. Their father had the same corkscrew curls, as had his father before him.

The bell rang for afternoon classes and Matthew hurried out of the staffroom. As he approached the classroom, he heard a low murmur of conversation which stilled when the fifteen children saw him appear in the doorway. One of the benefits of small rural schools, Matthew thought. They still learned manners along with the National Curriculum. He didn’t envy the poor sods who had to teach the kids on the estate where Jane lived. ‘Good afternoon, children,’ he said, his long legs quickly covering the short distance to his desk.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Gresham,’ the class chorused raggedly.

He opened up his laptop and hit the key to take it out of slumber mode. Immediately the interactive whiteboard behind him showed a screen which read Family Trees. Matthew perched on the edge of his desk, from where he could easily reach the keyboard. ‘Today we’re beginning an important new project which will form part of the village Christmas celebrations. Now, one thing every one of us has is ancestors. Who can tell me what an ancestor is?’

A small boy with a thick mop of black hair and a face like a baby spider monkey shot a hand into the air. He bounced on his chair with eagerness.

‘Sam?’ Matthew said, trying not to sound weary. It was always Sam Clewlow.

‘It’s your family, sir. Not your family that’s alive now, but all the ones that came before. Like, your grandparents and their grandparents.’

‘That’s right. Our ancestors are the people who came before us. Who made us what we are. Every one of us is who we are and what we are because of the way our genes were combined down the ages. Now, does anyone know what a family tree is?’

Sam Clewlow’s hand rose again. The others looked on in indifference or satisfaction that Sam was doing all the work and saving them the bother. This time, he didn’t wait to be asked. ‘Sir, it’s like a map of your family history. It’s got everybody’s birthdays, and when they got married and who to, and when they had children and when they died and everything.’

‘You’ve got it, Sam. And what we’re going to do over the next few weeks is to try to map our own families. That’ll be easier for some of you than others–those of you whose families have lived locally for generations will be able to track them from parish records. It will be harder for those of you whose families are relative newcomers to the area. But one of the things we’ll be doing during this project is exploring the many different ways we can go about mapping our past. The thing about this project is that it’s one where you’ll have to work with the other members of your family, especially the older ones such as grandparents and great-aunts and–uncles.’ Again, Matthew felt grateful that he wasn’t stuck in some inner-city sink school. A project like this would be impossible to contemplate there, with its fragmented lives and alternative views of what constituted a family. But in Fellhead, either they’d lived in extended families for generations or else they were incomers from the sort of nice middle-class family where, even when they pretended to be New Age, marriage certificates were still the order of the day more often than not.

‘To show you the kind of thing we’ll be doing, I’m going to show you my own family tree.’ He clicked the mouse button and his name came up on the screen. Underneath it was his date of birth. He clicked again and this time his name was linked to Diane Brotherton with an ‘equals’ sign. ‘Can you guess what that sign means? Jonathan?’ he asked a chunky red-haired boy, ignoring Sam’s eager hand.

Jonathan Bramley looked faintly startled. He frowned in concentration. ‘Dunno,’ he finally conceded.

Trying not to show his exasperation, Matthew said patiently, ‘It means “married to”. Mrs Gresham was Diane Brotherton until she married me.’ He clicked again and a vertical line appeared, connecting them to Gabriel Stephen Gresham.

‘That’s your baby,’ one of the girls piped up unprompted.

‘That’s right, Kylie.’ Matthew clicked again. Now little thumbnail pictures appeared beside each of the names. ‘We can even add photos. That way, we can see how family resemblances move between generations. Now, we can all start our family trees with what we know already.’ He tapped the keyboard and brought up another screen. This showed his parents and his sister, complete with photos, places of birth and occupations.

‘But we’re going to do more than that. We’re going to delve into the past and trace our family trees as far as we can.’ This time, the family tree he displayed included his grandparents–one grandfather an incomer, a refugee from the Cornish tin mines who had come to the Lakes to mine slate, the other a Cumberland shepherd–and his aunts, uncles and cousins.

‘And one of the things we are going to learn about is the way a community like ours has grown through the years. We’ll find all sorts of connections between families that you might not even have known about yourselves. You may even discover common ancestors, and you’ll start to get a sense of how people’s lives have changed over the centuries.’ Matthew’s gift for sharing his enthusiasm was working on the children now. They were hanging on his words.

‘We’re going to begin with your immediate family. Look at my family tree on the board so you know how to lay it out on the page. And tonight, when you go home, you can ask the rest of the family to help you fill in the gaps. As we continue, we’ll explore different ways of discovering more information about your history and your ancestors. Now, find a fresh page in your workbooks and make a start.’

Matthew waited till they had all got going, then he sat down behind the desk. He pulled a pile of maths workbooks towards him and started marking the children’s work. His absorption was disturbed by a muttering and sniggering that ran round the room. When he looked up, Sam Clewlow was flushed, his eyes bright with unshed tears. Jonathan Bramley looked gleeful.

‘What’s going on?’ Matthew demanded, getting to his feet. Nobody met his eye. ‘Jonathan? What’s going on?’

Jonathan’s mouth compressed in a tight line. He didn’t know it yet, but he would spend the rest of his life being caught out by his own stupidity and the concomitant inability to dissemble. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered eventually.

‘You can tell me now or you can stay after school and tell me then,’ Matthew said, his voice hard. He’d never understood the complaints of teachers who claimed they couldn’t control the kids. You just had to show them who was boss, and keep on showing them.

‘I just said…’ Jonathan’s voice trailed off as he looked around desperately for support that was not forthcoming.

‘You just said what?’

‘I said we all knew who Sam’s ancestor was,’ he mumbled.

‘I’m fascinated to hear it,’ Matthew said. ‘And who exactly did you have in mind?’

Jonathan’s ears were scarlet and his eyes were fixed on the floor. ‘The Monkey Man up on the moor,’ he said in a voice barely above a whisper.

‘You mean the body in the bog?’ Matthew guessed. The grisly discovery had been the talk of the village for the past few days.

Jonathan nodded and gulped. ‘It was just a joke, like.’

‘Jokes are meant to be funny,’ Matthew said repressively. ‘Insults aren’t a joke. And it’s not appropriate to make jokes about the dead. When that man was alive, he had friends and family who loved him, just like you. Imagine how you’d feel if someone you loved died and some thoughtless person made a joke about it.’

‘But, sir, there’s nobody alive to care about the Monkey Man,’ the irrepressible Kylie said.

Matthew groaned inwardly. It was going to be one of those conversations, he knew it. He believed in his job, but sometimes he wished he hadn’t done quite such a good job of helping them develop enquiring minds. ‘Why do you call him the Monkey Man?’ he asked.

‘Coz that’s what they look like,’ a boy piped up. ‘There was a programme on the telly about that one they found down in Cheshire. He looked like an ape.’

‘So that’s why we call him the Monkey Man,’ another chipped in.

Sam Clewlow snorted. ‘That’s stupid,’ he said.

‘Why is it stupid, Sam?’ Matthew asked.

‘Because the man they found in the peat in Cheshire died back in the Stone Age. That’s why he looks the way he does. But the one on the fell isn’t that old. So he doesn’t look like a monkey, he looks like us,’ Sam said firmly.

Snorts of derision met his words. ‘He don’t look like me,’ Jonathan blurted out. ‘Our Jason said he looked like an old leather bag with a face. And he should know, he plays darts with Paul Lister that found the body.’ Jonathan leaned back in his seat, his earlier humiliation forgotten as he basked in their attention.

‘So maybe he is one of our ancestors,’ Sam chipped in.

‘Yeah,’ Kylie said enthusiastically. ‘Maybe he got murdered and buried on the fell.’

‘That’s right. Coz how else would he have ended up in the peat?’ another said.

‘He might simply have had an accident when he was out on the hill,’ Matthew said, trying to dampen down their ghoulish enthusiasm. ‘He might have gone out to tend his sheep, taken a tumble and died out on the fell.’

‘But then somebody would have gone looking for him and they’d have found his body,’ Sam pointed out reasonably. ‘The only way he could have ended up under the peat is if somebody buried him there because they didn’t want anybody to know what had happened to him. I think Kylie’s right. I think somebody murdered him.’

‘Well, until the scientists have done their tests, we won’t know anything for sure,’ Matthew said firmly.

‘It’ll be like Silent Witness,’ Kylie said. ‘The doctor will figure out how he died and then the police will have to find out what happened.’

Matthew couldn’t help grinning. ‘I don’t think it’ll be quite like that, Kylie. From what I hear, if the body in the bog was murdered, his killer will be long dead too. But until we have some facts, I suggest we all get back to what we do know about.’ He held up a hand to silence their chatter. ‘And who knows? Maybe one of you will discover an ancestor who went missing at the right time.’

Sam Clewlow gazed at him, open-mouthed. ‘That would be fantastic,’ he breathed.

I was engaged in my poetical labours upon the long Poem on my own life, pondering how best I might find apt illustration of those matters I hold dear when I saw a figure at the gate. At first glance, I took him to be one of those travelling or wandering men who from time to time arrive at our door in search of sustenance. My sister is accustomed to provide them with food & drink, before setting them on their way. On occasion, she has gleaned tales from them which have provided me with matter fit to be translated into poems & so I do not discourage her in this small charity. The man at the gate seemed to be one such, with travel-stained, clothes & a large-brimmed hat to shelter him from sun & rain alike. I was about to direct him to the kitchen door when he spoke. To my astonishment, he greeted me by my Christian name, addressing me with some warmth & familiarity. ‘William, I see you are hard at it. I was told, you had become the Poet of the, Age & now I see it for myself.’ I still had no notion of who the man was, but he opened the gate without further ado & walked across the garden towards me. His bow-legged gait had a nautical flavour to it, & as he drew closer an impossible suspicion grew large in my mind.