Boarding School Buddha

“If he’s not out in ten minutes, I’ll call maintenance and we’ll drill the damn door out. Speak some sense into him will you Woodbury?” Housemaster Gatting’s eyes slid around like pink-tinged eggs in a pan as he delivered this ultimatum. Alcohol and the brutal fact of fifty boys under his care in this prestigious school had taken their toll. A cup and saucer in his hands were turned into a percussion instrument of tiny chinking china noises. He wasn’t a bad man. Woodbury, as the unofficial best friend of Haller, was expected to buck his friend up and put an end to the silliness which had begun two days previously in the Dining Hall. To put it another way, he had to help his friend sort his shit out or it would be discipline –and- seriousness time which meant parents would arrive at school like worried foreign diplomats; they always looked surprised at what their sons and daughters became in this place. Gatting departed, swatting curious pupils away, and Woodbury was left with Haller, or rather the grained surface of Haller’s illicitly locked door with its unmoving brass knob.

Two days before, at dinnertime, the great Dining Hall had filled up as usual with the barbarous swarms of girls and boys low on blood sugar. Haller had arrived amidst the ear-splitting din after a history lesson. He dumped his books on the table around which the rest of his year-group, the Upper Fourth, slunk like watchful water buffalo. Joining the Soviet-length queue, he had obtained for himself a plate of teatime slop, in the guise of a lasagne swimming in an inch of orange fat, when a Grecian approached and things started to go wrong.

The Grecians were the highest year in school, top of the food chain and endowed with plenty of free periods in which they could concoct new and fascinating ways of tormenting the younger years, namely the Upper Fourth. “Hey dickwipe” the Grecian known as Julian Seamer had addressed Haller, a customary greeting in this place. As was also customary, Haller’s UF colleagues evaporated, finding that they suddenly had very pressing things to do.

“I want you to go over to Boomer and call him a pompous old bastard. If you don’t do it, then it’s beatings for you for the rest of term.” This was known as “the double-bind”, a classic ploy. Either the miserable sufferer is dealt multiple detentions and a massive verbal roasting from the teacher in question, or he could expect lengthy and detailed violence visited upon him daily by the Grecian and his colleagues, all of whom had the benefit of growth spurts and a knack for sadism.

They had been targeting Haller for a whole term already. He’d made enough tea and toast to feed the five thousand twice over; he’d received so many punchings that his upper arm was a permanent blue-brown colour. He was reaching the limit of what a young man might endure. The Grecian motioned to Mr “Boomer” Carrington, “Sir, sir, Haller here has something to say to you….”

As Woodbury hadn’t himself been present at the incident, he’d had to rely on other people’s reports of what happened next, which were varied and colourful.

He pressed his ear to the door and listened; then he spoke: “Haller old mate, old pal…it’s Woodbury. Listen, everyone’s a bit worried about you, and me being your….you know, they thought I could have a word.” Woodbury couldn’t quite bring himself to say best friend because in this place, friendship was a matter of survival and was therefore also a matter of politics. So it paid to keep things vague and unsaid. Woodbury continued, “They want to know…what’s wrong. I know things have been getting you down.” The door, and the room beyond it, was silent. He didn’t know how to say the next bit. “Is it…is it a gay thing? Only I’d heard that you kissed that neanderthal Julian and anyway, you know the lads wouldn’t care one jot, well apart from Jenkins and he’s always been a sandwich or two short of a whole damned picnic.”

“It’s not a gay thing, I’m not gay.” Haller’s voice came muffled through the door. “Ha! I did plant one on him though. And old Boomer too.”

Woodbury sat himself down on the floor. “So what’s up? You’ve been holed up in there for two days. Ratnasuriya said he saw you racing from the library with piles of books under each arm.”

“I think that I have…no, no that I am a certain condition.”

“A medical thing? I mean I could fetch Matron, she’ll know…” Matron was good for all things medical and emotional, both of which were foreign fields to Woodbury.

There was stirring within, then came a book slid narrowly under the door: “An Experience of Zen by Rev. Okuhara Korogi”.

“Page seventy eight” said Haller from within.

“Seventy eight, seventy eight, ah” and Woodbury read to himself:

”When I heard the Master speak in this way, I felt a great bursting within, like a bucket shedding water through a broken bottom. It came to me all of a sudden that each thing in its place was perfect and had ever been, and that nothing really ever changed but that everything was only coming and going. The normal drab colours of day were painted anew except that nothing had changed. Everything was just what it was, and yet that fact, and it had all the vital force of one, was cause for rejoicing and wonder which caused tears to stream openly down my cheeks. The Master laughed and laughed, and we sat crying and laughing, for an interminable time. There simply was no problem anymore.”

These lines were messily highlighted with “YES YES YES!” written underneath in Haller’s crabby handwriting. Woodbury spoke: “So that’s what’s wrong: you think you’re enlightened?”

“Ah, not me, no well…it’s difficult to explain. If “I” had any meaning, then…I was up against a wall, Wooders old man.  I had the horror of that Grecian and his cohorts on the one side, then Boomer and the faculty on the other. There was nowhere to go, and something just…gave way.”

“Wonderful! So you dealt with a nasty jam. Why then lock yourself away and get yourself and probably me into trouble?”

“Because…because everything just seemed…too…too beautiful.”

Despite the fact that there was a wall between them, embarrassment could still burn a hole in the conversation, which in this place did not often feature “beauty” or warm feelings of any kind apart form in that joking, schoolboy way.

Haller continued: “It was too much to think of, jogging about the place seeing everyone and everything as cosmic, wonderful and imbued with the vitality of the universe whilst retaining its own particular qualities and imperfections. So I thought I’d hide away awhile.”

“Even old Gatting? I mean, you can see him as cosmic?”

“Yes. I know. It’s freaking me out. The book doesn’t really elaborate on what happens next. I think I may need…to go to a monastery. Or something.”

Woodbury crinkled his brow in thought. “Is this like what happened to the Buddha?” he asked.

“I think it’s a pretty big deal to claim that sort of thing, but…yes. At least, it’s of a similar ilk. Not dissimilar at all.”

“And what did he do?”

“He hid, you know, for a few days.”

“And then?”

“Then he came out, and his peers were so dazzled by him they just sat around and swallowed down every last word he had to say on anything.”

“Hal old bucko, if you think you’re going to come out of there, and I’m going to become your disciple, you have another thing coming.  Anyway, what use is it to have a Zen experience? It doesn’t seem to have done you much good.”

“How can I explain…things don’t need to be as difficult, somehow. We just take it all so personally, life I mean.”

“How else should we take it? Look you’d best get over yourself, and quickly, because Gatting is coming back here shortly, and if he has to batter down the door…”

“There’ll be trouble?”

“There’ll be trouble anyway. It’s simply a question of quantity. I think we’re already talking a truckload.”

“Woodbury, I don’t know if I can do it. Lessons, homework, exams and sports and all that.”

“I thought you said everything was imbued with the essence of the cosmos? Just not double maths with Stinky O’Meara on a wet Wednesday afternoon?”

There was a pause.

“You’ve got me there, Wooders. You’ve really got me there.”

“So you snogged a Grecian and a teacher, apparently bowed at the feet of a terrified second year, kicked over a dinner table and ran across the main quad shouting “Perfect!Perfect!” before pillaging the library, without using a library card I might add, and locking yourself in your study for two whole days missing any amount of lessons, meals, role-calls and extra-curricular activities. I hope it was worth it, old bean, I really do.”

“I think it was. I can see…how things might be different. How to get though all this.”

“If you have a plan for that, I’m all ears. But you have to rein it in. We’re being reared to be respectable pillars of society, and I’m not sure that you going all Jesus Christ Superstar is going to wash well with the powers-that-be.”

“It’s all a nonsense though. Why don’t they teach us this stuff? The stuff that matters?”

From the stairwell came the noise of insistent and hurrying feet: “Look, even old Buddha had to eat, he had clothes and places to live. He had to beg money from someone didn’t he? That stuff’s all part of it, I’m sure. Look, Gatting’s on his way, Hal, open the bloody door!”

There was fumbling with a padlock, and Hal’s door flew open just as Gatting rounded the corner with a rising roar in his voice: “Haller I’ll have your bloody guts for garters WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO BOY!”

“If you manage to get through this unscathed, I’ll eat my own shoes.”

Haller stepped into the corridor: “Mr Gatting sir, I can see that you suffer, but let me tell you something: it doesn’t have to be this way…”