Echoboy’s arrest. October 1981. DESK 128 updated location code CIVIC IDEAL YOUNG
The car by the gate was not unseen. The new security camera above the alleyway stood still but at any given moment it could pivot its neck like the heron soaring overhead to see the plume of smoke above the Secondary Modern. Grey frosted footsteps etched the edge of the pond beneath the pylons, the fabled phantom cloak unveiled the words still hanging wet across the footbridge which linked the far end of town to somewhere else.
Fill me up with holes, I’m drowning, going down again. Let me wear my soul around town unchained, wrapped in sheets of rain. When you reached out for me did you touch my ghost, was I empty when you needed me the most?
How had that Sistine arc of words been painted, suspended in the air above the link road from the Great North Road to the A1? The heron circled the roundabout skimming the footbridge on the way up the small hill to investigate the two circular feeding zones between the railway and the A1. Below, figures left the large white cube. Those left inside placed bets, would he run? You’d have to give him decent odds based on current form, he had come third in the fifteen hundred and that was after the triple jump and the discus. The adult uniforms marched Echoboy to the car in front of the entire school as a jackdaw raised the alarm across the fields. They came for him during assembly to make a statement and to frighten up other statements. Someone shrieked that he was being treated like a criminal as another started singing Bank Robber until silenced by a swift two finger Phantom claw to the third rear rib, designed to disable the vocal chords. Symbols replaced words. Codes replaced… communication.
As Echoboy felt the fresh drizzle touch his face, he glanced from the beat of his feet on the concrete path to the bottomless pond on the far side of the school fence, embowered by the curve of mirror play trees shielding it from the thousand-eyed monster tracking the departure from behind the already crumbling facade of the comprehensive cage housing what might be left of his education. The school was assembled at speed in 1970 by Crittal Hope, Crittal Windows adorned Tower Bridge and the Great West Wall window of Coventry Cathedral, which explained why the school was mostly glass, offering reflective views across the fields to the pylons.
He looked at the graffiti adorning the incinerator tower, a martyr to none is the traitor to some, burn baby burn. A trail of smoke crawled into the fog, taking with it the last traces of future exhibits including the decoded note from the pond. Echoboy’s martyrdom march was filtered through circular cuffs clearing Crittal glass with a musical squeak, pupil’s pupils zoomed through condensation, ignoring appeals to stay seated, once one in ten had risen, resistance was useless, the breathless betrayal was complete, the serpent assembled. The assembly dismissed, a maroon and grey snake spilled onto the wet concrete, wriggling around the incinerator towards the car park.
Echoboy glanced at the school gate, would the Phantom rise once more, wrapped in sheets of rain? They said he had drowned like the test pilot from the burnt out car in 1973. The fire brigade tried to pump out the water to retrieve the body. Fed by a spring and linked to the legendary swallow holes haunted by the headless ghost of Thomas More, the water level did not drop, the pumps got too hot and the rescue was abandoned. Was the Phantom down there somewhere? That was the rumour flooding the fist-dented corridors down which he had bundled for five years since September 1976, the first year of the Phantom. The mist sat heavy over the pond, he knew it would still be nestled along the crest of the hill, where the narrow strip of Green Belt walked a wilderness beneath the pylons, running from the A1 in the west to the Great North Road in the east. If he attempted to run, they would use the cuffs. He had seen the westward footprints before school that morning, the first grass frost marking his creeper shoes. Following the prints from the pond to the arrow on the fence, where the hedgerow was overgrown, the trail went cold, the footprints stopped dead.
Another Phantom puzzle? Scratched into the fencepost, he could just about make out the words – traitorous gait, manoeuvre, signal, mirror, housing Erif Elap. Where the post joined the grass, he saw – fill me up with holes. Fix C1. A5. A fork in time, press rewind to silence eyes. The chalk outline of a crime scene dead body on the body of a cassette, symbol replacement for words, the subway song by The Cure, code cracked, message received. He’d left the package, the sketch of PylonStarlings and the rolled up oil painting, they were going to turn it into a stage backdrop for Echoboy and The Minotaurs. They’d already used in the video, the school camera stolen at lunch hour, finding the shadows in the woods by the school and overlaying the painting on the editing machine. (VIDEO LOCATION)
The starlings had patterned the sky the previous evening, forming dark musical notes as they littered the pylons extending west over the newly constructed A1178 at South Mymms, (soon to become a high-speed freeway where traffic need never stand still, the space age dream was to be called the M25). The silver giants were a key motif for the Phantom, he used them to express the seven pitches of Pythagoras, creating his Pylonthagoras diorama in the subway descending beneath the A1 from Lane End by Pete’s Transport Cafe. Was that the cry of a jackdaw or a signal echoing through the fog?
Assessing the spectacle through rain littered glasses, Echoboy remembered the training, walk amongst the enemy as if you are one of their number. He noted the ruthless rhythm of his captors and decided to concentrate on the rise and fall of their polished footsteps, the stress and emphasis moving forward to ballad meter. They were all in time and he was slightly out of step, with a hop and a skip he joined the beat and rehearsed the form his ballad would take once they requested the recital. Was the Phantom one of their number? He could hide in plain sight. Perhaps this was all his doing and Echoboy would join him in the underworld.
Bundled into the car, he could hear faint chants from the crowd but they died on the wind before reaching him, disappearing onto the roof of the music room next to the swimming pool where he had taken his first flight, but now was not the time to think of that, whatever happens don’t let that resurface today of all days, take a deep breath, keep it submerged lest they drop any depth charges. He twisted to look as pupils rushed the car and the arm around his neck dislodged the Anti-Nazi League badge.
As the engine roared, exhaust fumes curled upwards and the hand attached to the numbered shoulder released the choke. At speed the fleet of cars took off, sucking into their slipstream a years worth of memories. The folded edges of the town catching all those scents in an imaginary Japanese handkerchief tied to a stick, from winter rose to cherry blossom snow, from a meadow of sweet grass cuttings to this dank autumn confetti of sycamore helicopters which he imagined would all follow the convoy as far as the school gates where they teamed up with two tin cans rattling down the drive. A marriage made in the well of scented tears. For many of those looking on, eyes filled with rain, the abiding memory of Echoboy would indeed be married to that moment.
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