Free Free Fall by William Golding Page A

someone scrambled to his feet.
    “Come in then, come in! What is it?”
    We went through into a dark room over limitless carpet. There was a parson standing in the middle. He was so tall that he seemed to me to ascend into the shadows that surrounded and roofed everything. I looked at what I could with a strange lack of fear or interest. The nearest thing to me was a section of the parson’s trousers. They were sharply creased except at the knees just below my face where the cloth was rounded and shone like black glass. Once more two people argued above me and my attention, in terms which meant nothing to me and which I have forgotten. I was more concerned with and puzzled by my tendency to lurch sideways; and I thought I would like to kneel down, not because of the parson but because if I rolled into a ball there might be no need to wonder so absurdly about which way up. All I knew was that the parson was refusing to do something and that the verger was pleading with him.
    Then the parson spoke loudly and as I now think, with a kind of despair.
    “Very well, Jenner. Very well. If I must be invaded—”
    I was alone with him. He moved away, sat down in a mother-shaped chair by the dead fire.
    “Come here.”
    I moved my feet carefully over the carpet and stood by the arm of the chair. He bent his head, beyond the length of black thigh, looked searchingly into my face, examined me carefully from head to foot. He came back at last to my face.
    He spoke slowly, absently.
    “You’d be a pretty child if you kept yourself clean.”
    He gripped the arms of the chair deep and a goose walked over his grave. I saw that he was straining awayfrom me and I looked down in sudden shame for the girl’s word “pretty” and for my so obviously distasteful dirt. We fell into a long silence while I saw that his narrow shoes were turned in towards each other. And on the right-hand side the universe was still roaring and full of stars.
    “Who told you to do it?”
    That was Philip, of course.
    “A little boy like you couldn’t have an idea like that without someone suggesting it.”
    Poor man. I glanced up and then down again, I inspected the enormous explanation, saw it was beyond me and gave up.
    “Now tell me the name of the man who told you to do it and I’ll let you go.”
    But there was no man. There was only Philip Arnold and Sammy Mountjoy.
    “Why did you do it then?”
    Because. Because.
    “But you must know!”
    Of course I knew. I had a picture in my mind of the whole transaction that had led me into this position—I saw it in elaborate detail. I did it because that other parson who talked to Philip had made it seem possible that the church contained more excitement and adventure than the pictures; because I was an outcast and needed something to hurt and break just to show them; because a boy who has hit Johnny Spragg so hard that his mum complained to the head teacher has a position to keep up; because, finally, among the singing stars, I’d been, three times and couldn’t pee any more. I knew so many things. I knew I should be interrogated with terrible, adultpatience. I knew I should never grow up to be as tall and majestic, knew that he had never been a child, knew we were different creations each in our appointed and changeless place. I knew that the questions would be right and pointless and unanswerable because asked out of the wrong world. They would be righteous and kingly and impossible from behind the high wall. Intuitively I knew this, that the questions would be like trying to lift water in a sieve or catch a shadow by the hand: and this intuition is one of the utter sorrows of childhood.
    “Now then. Who told you to do it?”
    For of course, when the glamour is gone, the phantom enemies, the pirates and highwaymen, robbers, cowboys, good men and bad, we are faced by the brute thing; the adult voice and four real walls. That is where the policemen and probation officers, teachers and parents achieve the