The Sandpit Read online

  Dyer never could resist his aunt, a former prima ballerina, married to a retired Peruvian diplomat, who had devoted the last quarter of her life to improving the conditions of street kids in Lima. The upshot was that he went and met Vivien’s friend, and by and by accepted a job with Ibeji, working in a favela perched on an emerald crevasse beneath the outstretched arms of Christ.

  He continued to have inappropriate love affairs. His aunt had suggested that he needed someone ‘much rounder’ after Astrud. Dyer took his girlfriends to Lima to stay with Vivien in order that she might vet them over her home-baked gingerbread biscuits. But not, for some reason, Nissa.

  They had met at a party in the Museum of Tomorrow in Guanabara Bay. The blurry glaze of her eyes. The sheen of her voice. Nissa could begin a sentence in Brazilian and end it in French or English, and flirt in all of them. Undefended, Dyer went home with her after they ran into each other again at a photo exhibition of Peru’s Sendero years. Within weeks they were living together in his rented flat off Ipanema.

  She gave birth to Leandro fifteen months later. After what had happened to Astrud, Dyer had folded himself tight, refusing to invest in a miracle, until one eyelid quivered open, then another, and two bottomless pupils of midnight blue stared out for the first time, and, appearing to focus, saw a middle-aged man who had started to sob.

  Yet the arrival of Leandro did not fulfil Nissa.

  Nissa had a short attention span if it didn’t involve her. A baby was a competitor. Leandro was four when she left Dyer for an English lawyer, Nigel Trenchpain.

  Dyer’s despair was transparent, colourless.

  ‘I thought she was different,’ he told Vivien.

  ‘Hardly anyone is, my dear.’

  ‘Oh, Vivien,’ he said. ‘Oh, Vivien.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she held his head. ‘It’s OK.’

  Following a brief and unexpectedly straightforward tussle, he gained custody of his son.

  Leandro had his mother’s deep laugh and mameluco eyes, like antique glass, and his father’s unsettling persistence. Weaned off the quick fix of journalism, Dyer flexed his stubborn streak to safeguard his independence. The BBC and then The Economist approached him to be their stringer, but he declined. Dyer’s life concentrated on his son.

  His days freed up once Leandro began attending the nursery school opposite. While hysterical presidents battled with impeachment, Dyer spent his mornings giving English lessons to wealthy clients; his afternoons teaching glue-sniffing orphans how to read and write.

  At what point did it dawn on Dyer that God might have been Brazilian once – as Dyer had believed on arriving in Rio thirty-three years earlier – but had since changed nationality? It was a culmination of separate incidents more than any abrupt revelation, and stole up on him like the subject for his next book. Beneath the art-deco arms of Christ the Redeemer, a street kid was being killed every other week in Dyer’s favela. Drugs and flick knives were discovered in two satchels at Leandro’s new school. Even the beaches had started to stink.

  Rio. It had become true for him. A great city – a great solitude.

  Over a cold and suddenly tasteless lager in his local bar on Joaquim Nabuco, Dyer was ambushed by an occult feeling that he needed to get Leandro out of Brazil before his son got a blade in his abdomen, or Dyer did. In the five years since she had walked out, Nissa’s new life had left her no space for Leandro, and so it was up to Dyer to act.

  It was lucky that Dyer had saved for a rainy day, of which Oxford proved to be drearily full. With what remained of his severance package from the newspaper, a small inheritance from his father, and a larger, unanticipated one from Vivien, he would educate his son as he had been educated.

  In his late fifties, Dyer had no property to pass on, but he could give to his only child the indisputable kick-start of a middle-class British education – which was all that England had to offer these days, as Vivien reminded him in one of their final telephone conversations; she would die in her bed at the age of eighty-eight in her clifftop house in Barranco, a blazing torch to the morning of her last breath. ‘Why not take Leandro to Oxford?’ was her question that Dyer had repeated to himself in a moment of beer-fuelled desperation. Both Vivien and his mother, Vivien’s older sister, had been at the Phoenix, and the memories of their schooldays were unusually positive. Going to Oxford would be a good decision, Vivien said. Plus, he could research his next book there. ‘And think of the fly fishing – you’re always grousing there aren’t chalk streams in Brazil.’

  Once vocalised, the idea stuck, impossible to pour back into the frosted glass. Nigel was all for it. He had been at Summer Fields up the road, was even thinking of putting the twins down … Nissa was renovating their weekend bungalow in Búzios, and too distracted to worry about her son moving so far away. ‘As long as you write to me every term what he has been doing. I used to love getting your letters.’ She had come across a bundle of them recently, inside a large envelope with ‘João’ on it. ‘I see that spidery handwriting and immediately I know why we’re not together.’ But she had been happy to find them, she didn’t want the letters not there, she said.

  A week after Brazil lost 7–1 to Germany in the World Cup, Dyer booked two flights to London. In early September, having found a small house to rent in Jericho behind St Barnabas church, overlooking a deserted boatyard and the canal, he brought Leandro to Oxford. His main worry when he carried their four suitcases inside and thought about the quiet life that he had signed up for by making this move was that he might get bored.

  Oxford was not a place to go barefoot. The huge wide unfriendly streets, the cold wind that whipped at his ankles, the food which tasted like his aunt’s leftovers, the language. ‘Daddy, what’s a bosom?’ asked Leandro after they had been there a fortnight, hoping for a reaction. Compared with Rio, there were not many pressing invitations to Dyer’s gaze or touch.

  The tempo of the city was rushed. People walked or cycled to lectures, to dinners that began punctually with a Latin grace. To dawdle was for tourists or dropouts, or for people who were lost. Almost from the first morning, Dyer felt lost.

  The adjustment was harder for him, oddly, than for Leandro, whom he had lured to England with a prospectus woollier even than one of Viven’s tea cosies. They’d get a dog, he’d take Leandro fly fishing, they’d live in a brick house. Plus, by going to the Phoenix, Leandro was continuing a family tradition.

  Except that the school had changed, Dyer had changed. He was a different person, thicker in body, his eyes less blue, with grey streaks in his thinning brown hair, and his ideals battered; and yet in various ways he was not. It added to his sense of double vision when he walked through the new security gates, as if his boyhood Instamatic had jammed and he had continued clicking away, regardless, on the same negative. At his son’s age, Dyer had believed that he had innumerable chances, as many takes as he wanted – like Leandro’s digital camera, given by Nissa as a parting gift. In returning to Oxford, Dyer felt that he had lost his contours; he did not see the path ahead, the windscreen obscured by reflections, of dashboard clutter, the detritus of exile, of homecoming. He felt on a different road, as if his steering wheel was on the left-hand side, like the ‘continental drive’ green Beetle that he had bought second-hand from a garage in Cassington, mainly because it reminded him of Brazil.

  On this Siberian afternoon, five birds migrated overhead, slicing west through a listless grey sky. Dyer punched in the code and pushed open the gate, glancing up at the clock. Mr Tanner had asked to see Leandro and Vasily together at 4 p.m.

  Chapter Three

  THE BULLYING HAD STARTED THAT term, after Leandro was catapulted into the school football XI two years prematurely. The new coach had telephoned Dyer on the eve of the announcement to explain how he wanted ‘to shake things up’. He considered Leandro mature enough to make the leap; as well, Leandro would have company – Samir Marvar, another talented player from Leandro’s year was joining the team. (‘He’s a “ledge�
��,’ said Leandro, having to explain that this meant a legend. ‘He can kick the ball fifty-four times on his toes.’)

  ‘I shouldn’t say this,’ the coach went on, ‘but they’ve both got it in them to play for the Oxford Schools team.’ He laughed when Dyer said that he himself had never advanced beyond the second XI in cricket. ‘A dad’s greatest kick is to watch his son surpass him.’

  Afterwards, Dyer felt that he deserved a far greater kicking for not having acted against Vasily Petroshenko straight away.

  Striking to look at, with blond, almost white hair, and red-rimmed grey eyes, Vasily was a large-limbed Russian boy in his final year at the Phoenix. Tall for his age – he was thirteen – and with a disconcerting self-confidence, Vasily had put it about that he was a shoo-in for captain of the football team, having played two matches for them the previous season. To then see his name asterisked in the second XI for the match against Summer Fields was a humiliating shock for which he was ill-prepared, and it goaded Vasily to blame not himself or the coach, but whoever had usurped him. When Vasily scanned the team list, where his name should have been, his bulging glance read ‘Dyer, L.’ and ‘Marvar, S.’

  On their own, the incidents were small. Dealt with one by one, Vasily’s tantrums would have been manageable. By not addressing them, a damaging relationship became normalised; and Dyer, to his shame, in not helping his son to navigate the waters with Vasily, had assisted.

  Vasily’s reaction on discovering that he had been replaced by an eleven-year-old boy was to take Leandro into the playground and demand that he climb the flagpole in front of the others. No, refused Leandro, flushing, it was out of bounds, he would get in trouble with the teachers. But Vasily insisted in a menacing voice. It was a Phoenix tradition, anyone who got into the first XI two years early had to climb the pole. If Leandro didn’t climb it, he would be locked in the loo by the rest of the team and stripped.

  When the inevitable happened, and Leandro crumpled to the tarmac, scraping his knee, a teacher ran up and demanded to know what he thought he was doing.

  Vasily stood there, grey eyes blinking. Leandro, blood trickling, said nothing.

  The attempted scaling of the flagpole had resulted in a visit to the school nurse, and in Leandro receiving his first Minus.

  Dyer held back from making it a national incident. This was a stand-alone episode. Impatient of all kinds of bullying, he was indignant on Leandro’s behalf, but he made provision for Vasily’s resentment. Boys will be boys. Leandro had to learn to tough it out. No one had been tougher than the kids on the beach where Leandro had sharpened his football skills. It would make his son stronger. It had nothing to do with Vasily’s mother.

  Leandro kept to himself what really was going on: that what Dyer hoped was merely an ad-hoc moment was the beginning of a concerted campaign to destroy his self-worth with a peer group of which Vasily was overlord.

  It was Leandro’s history teacher who alerted Dyer. She suddenly turned to him and said: ‘Is Leandro OK?’

  ‘He’s had an earache.’

  ‘No, no, not that.’

  Dyer gave her a quick look. ‘Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t seem very happy right now. I’ve noticed he’s withdrawn a lot. He was far friendlier to begin with, and he’s not a shy boy.’

  Leandro had been flailing a bit in his work, it was true. The peeling away of academic kids at the start of the second year had left him in a lower class. Supremely fluent on his feet, uninhibited, with a quick intelligence, he fumbled, however, with Wordsworth and the Napoleonic Wars. Dyer wondered if the malaise was due to that.

  ‘Leandro, is there anything you’d like me to help you with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Silence.

  His son, although diligent, had always been temperamental. He shared Dyer’s tendency to be moody, which expressed itself when he was hungry or tired, or was asked a question that he didn’t want to answer.

  ‘Leandro?’

  ‘Dad …’ he said, on a warning note.

  If it unsettled Dyer to see Leandro exhibiting characteristics he shared, then it also blinded him. He attributed his son’s subdued behaviour to longer days at school, to Leandro’s flu which had given him a painful ear infection, and to his own malaise at the sound of winter slamming against the panes, the chill dark afternoons – weather for reading and taking notes, and not much else.

  Dyer did not uncover what was going on until, arriving to collect his son one afternoon, and unable to prevent his glance sweeping the playground for Katya, he came upon a stricken-looking boy who reeled towards him. At first, he failed to recognise the disconsolate figure, then the faded uniform began to register. Exactly as his parents had done, Dyer had purchased this second-hand, from a room behind School House which opened at odd hours and was staffed by vultures who volunteered in order to pick through the best stuff. The stacks had shrunk to a few items by the time Dyer turned up. Almost all new boys wore pristine dark blue corduroys; Leandro’s were weathered, greyish, the colour of the February sky.

  ‘Leandro!’

  He was biting down on his lip and his eyes were shining. Behind him, a group continued to kick a football around with exaggerated concentration. A tall, fair-haired boy, who seemed to be their leader, turned and smiled at Dyer. A knowing, mocking smile, emanating a malicious energy that escorted Dyer back to the favelas.

  Leandro’s nose was still running by the time they returned to Jericho. It was alien to his nature to snitch, but in trickles and half-sentences he choked out what had happened in the instant before Dyer appeared. How the other boys had looked to Vasily, saying, ‘Can Leandro join us?’ How Vasily, shining with self-satisfaction, replied sneeringly, ‘Not today, sorry. You’re rubbish at football. Come back when you’re better.’

  That night they sat up late. Dyer yielded to no one in his ability to extract information. Leandro’s story was followed by another. And another. Until Dyer had a vision of his son like a prisoner of the Tupi Indians, suffering in silence the punishment that they reserved for their bitterest enemies, wrapped in a writhing coil of poisonous toads which had started to shrink around his neck.

  Dyer learned how Vasily had tried to drown Leandro in the swimming pool. ‘He pushed my head under and didn’t let me out. His mother was sitting right in front and thought it was just a joke.’ How, arriving for training practice, Leandro had stepped over the rope barrier beside the pitch, ‘and he whipped it up and hit me between the legs.’ How, incited to new heights of malice, Vasily had shut Leandro in a locker ten minutes before his training session with the first team, and started banging on the lockers on either side, not stopping until it was time to go. ‘You’d taken me to the doctor for my earache and it really hurt my ears.’

  Leandro wasn’t Vasily’s only victim. ‘He does it to Samir too.’ In his jealous turmoil, Vasily had only to see Samir bouncing a football on his toes for him to march over and kick the ball away as far as he could. He had also posted insinuating comments on a group chat, speculating whether Leandro and Samir might be gay.

  Dyer felt sick that he had downplayed Vasily’s behaviour. A surge of guilt overwhelmed him that he had failed to protect his son. Since Leandro’s mother lived 5,700 miles away, and had never displayed much maternal interest, it fell once again to Dyer to do something, even if Leandro himself didn’t want his father to do anything. ‘Please, please, no.’ But this also was part of bullying, Dyer recalled.

  Between discovery and action, Dyer lay awake, eyes closed. The smell that she had left in the air. Like wheat. ‘But you don’t have a choice, dear,’ came his aunt’s voice, as if on a crackling old radio. In the favelas, the bullies were the ones you had to neutralise.

  Dyer telephoned the school in the morning and was put through to Mr Tanner, head of day children, and a blackbelt stickler for rules. He responded with super-efficiency. ‘I want you to write it all down.’

  ‘It’s reached a point,’ Dyer add
ed, ‘where I feel it has to be dealt with.’

  ‘And so it shall,’ said Mr Tanner, a boyish-looking man known as a good rugby player. ‘And so it shall.’

  Bullying, he hardly needed to remind Dyer, had absolutely zero place at the Phoenix. He knew ‘young Vasily’, considered him ‘quite free range’ in a tone that suggested ‘cocky little shit’. The rapidity of Mr Tanner’s reaction on receiving Dyer’s email hinted that this was not an isolated incident, something that he felt at liberty to vouchsafe during a follow-up telephone conversation in respect of another boy whose father had also registered a complaint. Dyer deduced that he was referring to Samir Marvar.

  ‘What I’d like to suggest is the following,’ Mr Tanner said. ‘I’m going to get the boys together to talk about it, but first I will meet with Vasily and his parents.’

  The street lights switched on. Dyer closed the gate behind him, and stood for a moment looking back down Bardwell Road. This was the start, this was the gate from where he had set out, the portal to the world beyond. He had hoped that he would find there the excitement and fulfilment he pictured for himself when he read the passing of Arthur or Treasure Island or Greenmantle. He would meet his Guinevere. In real life, she would touch his shoulder. You. At last.

  He turned – and that was when he saw Vasily’s parents waiting by the Rink.

  Chapter Four

  A LARGE PART OF Dyer’s guilt had to do with his eye being not on Vasily, but on Vasily’s mother. Most of the Russian mothers were boarding mums who lived in Moscow or St Petersburg and visited Oxford once a term; Katya Petroshenko, by contrast, based herself during term-time in a gated community off Jamaica Road. Little was known about her. A former Murmansk beauty queen with an idiosyncratic command of English was the story going round. ‘Vut zer fuck iss bum-break?’ was one phrase that had been attributed to her, but this may have been the registrar’s touch.