Free Black Chalk by Albert Alla Page B

lawn, and a hastily erected police line, half enforced by officers, half by reticent onlookers unwilling to get closer. Past the line, there were ambulances and working uniforms. The camera zoomed in on the entrance to the annexe: the back of a paramedic was coming out, his hands holding a stretcher carrying a covered lump. The camera zoomed out, seeking civilians, and found three teachers looking at the bodies coming out of the annexe, their faces limp with shock. And a crying man, his bald head red and bent.
    Over it all, a man spoke:
    â€˜â€¦since Dunblane…’
    The reference to other massacres stood out but I wasn’t really listening. His even and correct voice was punctuating the remoteness of the coverage. I’d come out on one of those stretchers and I didn’t remember seeing any cameras. The crowd had been smaller. The images had to have been taken when I was already on my way to the JR. I was witnessing events I hadn’t been a part of, I told myself. Events that didn’t concern me.
    The feeling was reassuring. The film cut indoors, to a classroom I’d never been taught in, one of the large rooms on the ground floor of the main building. A man gave a news conference. He wore a dark suit and a sober tie. His large square glasses climbed up towards his forehead, which creased up and down as he answered a swarm of journalists. Someone asked a tough question. He turned towards him, twitched his thick eyebrows, and reached for his glasses with his right hand. For a second, he stood in front of the cameras, in front of the flashes, silent and tweaking the frame of his glasses. Then he took them off, and twirled them between thumb and forefinger in time with his answer. Det Ch Insp Andrew Hill, the caption read alongside a time stamp: 18/02/2000.
    The film cut his answer short and moved back outside, to the frosty grass and bare trees of our sports ground. The camera shot was still: in the distance, the Kemp Annexe loomed over the ground, framed by grey branches and dark bushes, two levels tall from this angle. The groundsman’s workshop occupied the ground floor, its metal shutters drawn down, red and blue patterns painted by a long-gone class. The top floor still counted three windows, one for each classroom, and another for a mysterious cupboard I’d never seen anyone use. There was no one on the field – I could imagine the groundsman barking at anyone daring to set foot on his turf.
    The picture looked right. When every shot before had been glaringly foreign, this one looked just as it should. On the right of the shot, I could glimpse freshly painted football posts. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the camera had turned around to show two football teams passing balls around in their warm-ups.
    I felt a surge of memories coming up, my eyes drawn to one of the windows, images flashing through my mind. Bangs, wafts. Tom’s soothing gestures. The taste of metal in my mouth. The sound of a chair falling behind me. Eric’s puzzled look. The memories rushed in; I tried to cut them short, remembering the shape of the command I’d burned into my mind: ‘Don’t’. The grass, the trees, the workshop, I’d played many a football game out there. Better, I imagined the sun shining on the field, Jeffrey running in, and me standing at gully, the very same scene behind the wary batsman, an edge flying my way, a successful dive, teammates surrounding me.
    I could breathe again. My thoughts temporarily tamed, I diverted them to the journalist’s concluding statement, to his open-ended remarks.
    â€˜Let’s talk about some of these questions,’ the newsreader said from her studio, half the screen devoted to her correspondent, the man in the suit in front of bricks, doors and steps. ‘It’s been nine days. Why don’t we have a better understanding of what happened inside the Kemp Annexe?’
    â€˜Sarah, we simply don’t have