A Pure and Honest Heart
by Zambezi
Chapter One
The little click the alarm clock made before it started beeping in earnest was enough to wake Brad up from his slumber. It had been a good dream - he had been recalling the more sensuous parts of his two weeks in southern France alone with his girlfriend Sarah. The memories came flooding back to him again as he struggled to open his eyes. It prompted him to pick up the photo-frame from his shelf and stare into it intensely. They had meet, aged twelve, at a country fair and upon discovering that they lived only a mile apart had gradually grown close to each other by circumstance rather than by design. Brad could no longer imagine his life without her, and although they could hardly describe themselves as childhood sweethearts they had each found having the other so close by pretty handy as they progressed through adolescence. His pyjama trousers twitched as he remembered how they celebrated their arrival, alone, at the villa just outside Narbonne. The apparent mismatch between their backgrounds - rich townies trying to buy into some idyllic vision of country life against struggling farmers - only served to bring them closer together until Sarah's parents had finally realised that Brad was much like them anyway, largely courtesy of his scholarship to Trinity. He thought he loved her, but as he had never really been in love before he wasn't entirely sure. The sex they had been having for the last year, since she turned 16, was good though, and for the time being that would do nicely.
Slowly, he opened his eyes and had to think for a second before he remembered exactly where he was: room number one of Wordsworth House, Trinity School.
Boarding school hadn't really appealed to him at the beginning, but it had kind of grown on him nevertheless. After eight years of it, he had even begun to form a grudging admiration for the routines, the efficiency, and the predictability of it all. Now entering his Upper Sixth year Bradley Johnson knew that he was in the best possible position to launch himself onto the big wide world that would await him twelve months further on. His full-fee scholarship to one of the most highly-regarded private schools in England had seen to that.
He quickly heaved his seventeen year old frame out of the bed and removed his pyjamas before sneaking a quick glance at himself in the mirror. At five-ten tall in his socks and just touching 130 pounds he wasn't exactly a giant, but he was the right shape: solid, broad of shoulder, and classically triangular from the years of helping out on the family farm. He waited for his morning hardon to die away before slipping on a dressing gown and heading for the showers.
As always, he was the first there. The first wake-up round wasn't made until twenty minutes later at 7 am, but that produced a big run on the eight showers. There were fifty seven boys in the House - his House, Brad had to keep reminding himself - so many of the boys would rise early to beat the rush. Brad stepped in and pushed the single button to activate the water stream and waited for the warmth to cascade over him. At 6.42, exactly on time, Nathan Gregory, a nice enough chap in the Lower Sixth whom Brad had known and respected for years, came in and they started chatting in the gathering steam.
"We missed you last night," Nathan began, referring to Brad's absence from the beginning of term events of the day before.
"One of the great miracles of British public transport. My train got cancelled: I missed the connection. I didn't get in until nearly ten, so I haven't even met the new boys," came the explanation. "At least I managed to avoid small talk with their parents, so I won't be saddled with their expectations as well." Brad grinned, remembering how awkward his predecessors had felt in previous years. He looked around the familiar shower room just to make sure all its faults were still there, present and correct: the cracked tile behind the second outlet, the small bush growing from the long-dead extractor fan, and the musty smell of a couple of hundred sweaty adolescent socks. Astonishing, Brad thought, given that every single locker had been empty since the start of the summer holidays eight short weeks before.
"Ah, still thoroughly aloof about everything outside your own little world. Glad to see you're on top form already. Do anything interesting over the summer?" Nathan enquired. "I heard a rumour you went to Camargue with that bird of yours. Get your leg over?"
"Yup, sure did, and yup." Brad put on his best quizzical smile. "Actually, I spent most of the time on the farm. Unpaid, naturally - with all the rain in July we'll be lucky to break even this year. I don't know how I'll get through university."
Nathan changed subject. "You ready to look after us this year?"
Brad grinned back at him. The Housemaster, Tom Stephens, had asked Brad to be the House Captain of Wordsworth for that school year. Mr Stephens himself was a slightly eccentric man and not particularly well-liked by the boys in his charge. He had hoped that appointing Brad would allow him to use both his star student's popularity amongst the boys and his natural leadership skills to keep things running where he feared he would upset the delicate balance between pupils and staff. Most of the boys at Trinity came from very affluent backgrounds and took great exception to being told what to do, even when they knew they had crossed boundaries. Brad actually had a tremendous amount of respect for his Housemaster, if not all of his fellow pupils, and had agreed in an instant to work for him.
"Ready as I'll ever be. I just hope with all this responsibility stuff - not to mention all the crap going on back home - I'll still have time to concentrate on my studies. I need to get into university if I ever want to get off that bloody hop farm."
"Was it bad?" Nathan ventured.
"This year was even wetter than last. We'll really be lucky to break even with this crop." Brad said, seriously this time. He looked up and noticed that the shower room was beginning to fill up. Most said "hi" to him as they entered, and they were all exchanging pleasantries about their summer breaks.
It was at exactly this point, 6.51am on Monday September 7, 1998, a sunny Oxfordshire morning, that Brad first set eyes on him. Since he had never seen the boy before Brad figured, correctly, that he must be a new pupil. There was nothing remarkable about that: twelve new boys had arrived to join the Third Form the day before. Although it was unusual there was nothing particularly remarkable about the way this boy had come into the showers before the first wake-up round. There was certainly nothing to note about the boy's physical appearance apart from that he had the body of a fairly unremarkable thirteen year old boy who had not, as yet, shown any visible signs of impending puberty. Nothing unusual about that, either.
In fact, the only thing that made Brad pay any attention at all was the boy's ice-blue eyes. They were full of something, only Brad didn't know what. A long story? Perhaps. A hint of evil? Certainly not. There was torment of some kind in there, Brad realised. And there was also a strong overtone of vulnerability. Brad just stared, struck dumb, until Nathan clicked him back into reality.
"Earth to Bradley! Anybody in there?"
"Sorry, miles away just then. What was it you wanted?"
"Just wondering why you are staring at some junior. It's not as if you've never seen one before."
Brad glanced back at the boy and saw him smile, having obviously overheard. He smiled back and then, for reasons he couldn't even begin to explain, he winked. The boy blushed and scooted out of the showers, grabbing a towel and wrapped it around his waist quickly. Brad turned back to Nathan.
"Just wondering about what's coming up this year, that's all. And I wasn't staring either. You know full well I prefer girls," Brad continued, forcing a grin and acknowledging the innuendo.
Nathan nodded. He had met Sarah when she had come to watch Brad on stage the year before. He reckoned Brad was lucky to have found her. The two teens stepped out of the shower and towelled off before heading their separate ways back to their rooms.
When Brad arrived back he looked closely in the mirror at his face, which had so far been untouched by any serious signs of a beard beyond some adolescent whiskers. Despite that, he was still somewhat taken aback to see before him not a teenaged kid, but a young adult with real responsibilities and a life stretching out ahead of him, strewn with tough decisions and big rewards - or otherwise. He shuddered at the thought, as his mind drifted back to the as-yet unnamed boy in the shower. Those eyes had told him something, something tortured, and he just knew that it was his duty to get to the bottom of it and make whatever it was better. All he had to do, in fact, was work out what he had to do.
Brad slowly put on his uniform and trotted down the stairs towards the dining hall for breakfast. Trinity School cooked breakfasts had not changed in the eight years he had been eating them: dripping in fat and doubtless the culinary interpretation of an express ticket to the great cardiac armchair in the sky. He had already settled for cereal and toast in his mind when, in the line in front, he spotted the shower boy again. Well, the boy had made it to the dining hall under his own steam. Most newbies hung together in a big group and followed each other around like pack animals; this one hadn't. Sooner or later, Brad mused, the boy would start to do really outrageous things like think for himself. He smiled, knowing that this boy would turn out to be a good kid come what may. He just knew it.
After collecting his food he looked out across the room and saw his best friend Tony seated at the far side on 'their' table, waving frantically. He had been so late arriving the previous night they hadn't had a chance to catch up. Brad stopped to pick up two cups of coffee on the way to the table.
Tony Fleming had only joined Trinity for the Sixth Form, but had very quickly become great friends with Brad. They both enjoyed a fairly similar outlook on life as fairly like-minded liberals. Since Tony was also from a farming family they had much in common anyway; and shared a mutual distrust from some of the Trinity boys from more traditional public school backgrounds - the stockbrokers' or barristers' sons. The fact that Tony hailed from Zimbabwe also alienated him to a certain extent from the majority of the closed-minded students.
"You missed the fight of the year last night," the excited and heavily-accented boy exclaimed to his House Captain. "Davis nearly had a fist fight with Stephens - it turned out he'd been trying to get some new boy to fag for him."
Brad shuddered. He had never much liked the concept of fagging - where junior boys were 'adopted' into servitude by older ones to perform such menial tasks as cleaning rooms, making cups of tea, polishing shoes and so on. Come to think of it, Brad had never much liked Bob Davis either. Bob Davis was the public schoolboy's worst nightmare personified. He was an arrogant, spoilt bully, who always got what he wanted. If he didn't, he threw a tantrum or sulked until he got it anyway. His family had made some enormous donations to the school every time he had been threatened with expulsion - and that had been frequently. In short, he was a nasty piece of work.
Brad knew that the battle lines had been drawn. They had reached something of a detente before the summer break and had hoped that they would keep themselves to themselves. That plan went out of the window. He knew that Davis would be trouble and that meant work for him: chasing after him and protecting those who stood to get hurt. He forced a grin to himself and ate his breakfast quietly.
Brad knocked on his Housemaster's office door some twenty minutes later and walked in. Tom Stephens was seated behind his desk and beckoned his right hand man to close the door. As Brad sat down, the older man began to outline the various histories of the twelve new boys who had started in Wordsworth House the day before.
Stephens very quickly went through the list of the new intake, explaining as much as he knew about the background of each, why they had chosen Trinity, and how they had each reacted to the events of the evening before. Nothing particularly distinguished about any of them: no obvious victims to worry about, but equally no potential Hitlers and weirdoes to be concerned with just yet. There was one boy who had just emerged from a divorce battle, washing out in boarding school as a part of the deal. Nothing unusual about that, Stephens had observed, and the boy seemed fairly normal anyway. Brad had already mentally switched off - anything important here and he'd hear it from the boys concerned and from their viewpoint too, which was all that really mattered to him.
After Stephens finished rabbitting, Brad looked up and clicked his mind back on. "That just leaves Bob Davis to discuss then."
"So you heard?"
"Good news travels fast, didn't you know?"
The teacher forced a grin. "There's not much we can do at this stage. But keep an eye on him, ok? And ask all your Prefects to as well."
"Of course. We were going to anyway, but I guess he must have figured we're on to him after what happened last night. Do you want to talk about it?" Brad offered.
"Thanks for the offer, but I can handle one arsehole."
Brad smiled at his teacher's profanity, and headed out of the door before making his way to the school chapel.
Religion had never been a large part of Brad's life, but he figured it was the flip side of the brilliant education that such a religious school provided. He would have preferred if he had been given a choice about his religious affiliation - but then beggars can't be choosers, as his father frequently observed. Wordsworth House all had to sit in an assigned area of the chapel. Brad stood around making sure his boys were all seated properly and then tried to complete a silent roll-call. He stood over the pews and looked at the sea of boys in front of him, before he realised that he had no idea who the twelve youngest people on the Wordsworth benches were. Instead, he tried to imagine which name went with which face. He began with the first face on the bench, a short dumpy lad with dark spiky hair. This guy looked like a Jeremy, thought Brad, his eyes searching the list for such a name. There wasn't one. Great start, Brad, he muttered to himself. He looked back up, letting his eyes fall on the next young teenager, a hulking grizzled giant who looked like he had just served time in prison - nothing like a young teenager at all. He looked like a Chas. The giant, obviously uncomfortable in his new leather shoes, leaned forward to adjust them, revealing that his collar was a couple of sizes too big. His name tape flashed into view: Charles Danton. Clearly a Chas. Brad allowed his face to be slowly overtaken by a large smile which was itself overtaken by nothingness as he moved onto the next figure on the pew.
The shower boy was staring directly ahead, apparently terrified of something. Those eyes still held some terrible story, something that the boy was dying to tell to anyone who would listen but at the same time ashamed to admit. The boy became aware of someone looking at him and shifted slightly in his seat until his eyes rested on Brad. Noticing his House Captain reading through a list of names - and obviously lost - the conscientious thirteen year old volunteered his name.
"Richard Young."
Deep, powerful, and searching, those troubled eyes told a long and anguished story. They seemed terribly out of place on the still-expressionless cherub face. This could only be the divorce child, the child who didn't want to be at Trinity, who had been used as a pawn by his warring family for the previous three years, who had turned around and walked out of Stephens' reception the afternoon previously after his parents failed to control themselves in each other's company yet again. It all showed in the eyes, eyes which may have had a story to tell but also had a desperate statement to make. He had seen similar things in the eyes of his cows suffering in the final, agonising throes of BSE. Funnily enough, the boy looked just like a Richard, if not a cow.
Brad looked back at him and smiled again as Richard's own face lit up in recognition from the shower that morning. Brad winked, again without realising he had done it. Relieved he had been noticed, Richard relaxed visibly.
Brad suddenly felt light-headed as he became aware of the wordless conversation he was having with the boy. He mentally damned the rest of his headcount and went and sat down in his seat, next to Tony Fleming.
"You look like you just saw a ghost," Tony whispered.
"I feel like I did." Brad's tone was enough to tell Tony he didn't want to talk about it any more.
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