Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

The next seven days of each boy’s diary hold the dutifully scrawled lines: “Nothing today,” the bare minimum required to meet Madame de Silentio’s demand that we record something every day. Matron Seacole, who has since retired, very kindly responded to my written enquiry with the recollection that Charlie Wulf kept the dormitory up three nights in a row with the shouting and kicking he did in his sleep, and had to be dosed a total of ten times. Charles Wolfe was wakeful but didn’t fuss and said he was fine. The boys wrote notes to each other, in a code that I have been unsuccessful in cracking. I can draw no firm conclusions as to what was happening inside the heads of these boys during the seven days of what they described as “nothing.” Charlie’s schoolwork slipped badly. Charles’s schoolwork remained at an excellent standard.

On the eighth day, both boys meticulously recorded a “conversation with a prisoner” in their diaries. They had learnt the prisoner’s name, and they had learnt that he had been a prisoner a long time, longer than he could remember. They had learnt that Madame de Silentio had imprisoned this man, and that the man wished to be freed. And they wished to free him.

Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote in red ink, beneath that day’s diary entry. Why did you do this to Reynardine?

Madame de Silentio stuck to her policy of not responding to diary entries.

The teachers suggested keeping a close watch on the boys, but Madame de Silentio insisted that they were intelligent boys undergoing a thought experiment, that they were not seriously planning to do anything.

The teachers kept the boys under close observation anyway.

Charles and Charlie didn’t return to the lake for quite some time. If it were not for the fact that they knew the man’s name was Reynardine, I would say the “conversation with a prisoner” recorded in their diaries is a fabrication, and an artless one at that. It looks fake to me; the tone of the exchange is almost unbearably stilted. But then the entire situation is unusual. And if the conversation was indeed a fabrication, it’s difficult to establish where else they could have got the name Reynardine from.

The boys must have developed some system of passing notes that made them feel safe — perhaps they found a hiding place — either way, they stopped corresponding in code. Flurries of extant notes are filled with guesses at the relationship between Reynardine and Madame de Silentio and, oddly, a semi-serious argument about Reynardine’s face beneath his mask. He must be like a freak — a fish, Charles wrote to Charlie. He can breathe down there. He can speak. Charles writes to Charlie of having swum down with a diving light between his teeth and spoken face-to-face with the prisoner, of having held the padlock that bound him in both hands, of testing the mechanism inside with a fingernail while Reynardine breathed bubbles in his ear. This in the darkness of three a.m., while the rest of the school — including the heavily dosed Charlie Wulf — snored. . I can’t imagine.

I reckon he looks like you or me, Charlie responded. The question is, which?

What do you mean by that? Charles wrote back to him, in very precise, very black lettering, the handwriting of hostility.

Thinking that the boys had been reduced to mere squabbling over aesthetics, the teachers relaxed. That was their mistake, because when the staff relaxed, the boys struck, bribing three first-years to report a sighting of rats in a first-floor broom cupboard and locking Madame de Silentio and Miss Fortescue, the deputy head teacher, into the broom cupboard when those two worthy ladies went marching in to investigate. After that Charlie stood guard outside Madame de Silentio’s office. Within, it was the work of a few minutes for Charles, the experienced thief of small items, to unobtrusively comb Madame de Silentio’s belongings and pocket two keys. He knew his padlocks but was too pressed for time to exercise proper Decisive Thinking — all he could be sure of was that one or the other of these keys would free Reynardine.

When imagining such relationships — prisoner and gaoler — you’d imagine that the gaoler is always aware of the whereabouts of the key that gives her her power. You — or I; let’s say I — imagine her stroking the key and gloating over it, taking it out nightly and admiring it. Not so. Madame de Silentio says she’d just tossed the key into a drawer somewhere and hadn’t looked for it for years. She didn’t miss it. Her office was in the order she’d left it in, and the baffling time spent in the broom cupboard was brief enough to be passed off as minor mischief on the part of the first-years, all of whom she punished with a severity disproportionate to the crime. “Can’t be slapdash with these things. Got to let them know it’s not on.”

And so Reynardine was freed. That simply, that easily, because Madame de Silentio was unable to believe that she could be disobeyed, Reynardine was freed by a boy who conspicuously asked for a dose and let the milk run out of his mouth and soak his pillow once the matron had walked down to the other end of the dormitory.

Reynardine rose up amongst the loose chains, his legs twitching, as he had forgotten how to walk. Neither of the boys record this; that’s just how I think those first few seconds of freedom were. He told Charles he would be gone by morning. He flexed his hands in a way that worried Charles but gave a gurgling laugh and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, boy.”

He told me he won’t forget what we did for him, Wolfe wrote to Wulf.

By the middle of the next day, Madame de Silentio knew that Reynardine had been released. This wasn’t due to any psychic connection; it was due to the local news. “The thing about Reynardine,” Madame de Silentio explains, “is that he is a woman-killer. He doesn’t do it joyously — oh, no, he does it with dolour and scowling. Women upset him. He said to me once that he hates their Ways, that from the moment he encounters one of them he’s forced to play a Role, and he won’t stand for it. Paranoid nonsense.” The night he was released he passed through Greenwich, killing and killing. Forty women gone between two-thirty and four a.m., and he went quickly on throughout the country, doing more. Worse, in the days that followed, other killers, killers of children and aged parents and love rivals and husbands, they, too, swelled the murder rate, as if inspired. A bad week in time, an awful week of red shivers, the streets empty of civilians and full of police.

Madame de Silentio called the boys into her office and took the key back from Charles. Useless now, but still, it was hers. The boys didn’t know what they’d done, they didn’t connect this red week with Reynardine, until Madame de Silentio explained it to them.

For the rest of their time at the Academy they were in hell, without her even laying a finger on them or saying another reproving word to them. The two boys went around together, always together, without speaking to each other, their hair limp, their eyes bulging, their faces the faces of drowned men. Each day brought news of Reynardine’s work in the world. He didn’t look like what he was, Charlie Wulf wrote in his diary. That was his last entry before all the leavers’ diaries were handed in. Charles Wolfe didn’t mention the lake incident again.

Upon their graduation Madame de Silentio sold Charles to a beautiful woman named Helene. She had blue eyes, which it thrilled him to look into. He believed that the petty thievery of his childhood had simply been impatience for the day when he would have two blue eyes like these to adore. But Helene was haunted by her past self. She’d been a fat child; even her ankles had been fat. In a letter to Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote that Helene had a serious fit of the hysterics when she saw him making supper for her — he was frying fish fingers in oil. She was unable to accept a hot meal as a gesture of love; she was convinced Charles was trying to make her fat again. He was able to soothe her — our training covers all emergencies, but he wished he hadn’t had to draw upon it. Helene didn’t like introducing Charles to her friends, either, because she found him ugly. She left him at home, or if she entertained at home she left him skulking around in the kitchen. As a test, Charles went missing for two weeks, roaming London, sleeping under newspapers on park benches. When he came home, Helene spoke of a party she’d recently been to, running rapidly through a list of anecdotes connected to names he didn’t know, and she looked irritated when he asked her to slow down and explain who was who. “I already told you,” she said. She hadn’t noticed that he’d been gone. She’d probably come home from her parties and chattered away to thin air, believing that he was hidden in it somewhere, listening attentively. She hadn’t been worried at all during his fourteen-day absence, hadn’t looked for him.