Cheers, Charlie

Chapter 1

The bell trilled shrilly, rather than tolled, but that was enough for the students to call the rest of the school-day dead. The children poured out of the classrooms like water storming down a causeway, struggling to put on jackets, backpacks, shoving one another with a collective flailing of limbs that was only a trained eye could tell wasn't made up of a deliberate violence. In less than a few minutes, the torpor and pandemonium of the hallways had subsided into the clapping and clattering from the feet of a few stragglers, and within ten, the halls between the classrooms were still, and empty of any life.

Ted stayed perched at his desk, hunching on the stool provided to him, that he tried desperately to avoid by giving lectures standing up. He flicked through a stack of papers, glancing at the basic shape of cursive, the accuracy of spelling, and the use of spacing underneath each question, placing A's underneath the prettiest ones, and the occasional F's underneath the one's with the more haggard, undecipherable writing. Whether the answers were correct had had little bearing in his grading since after his first year of teaching.

He stepped up from his desk as he finished initialling the final paper, and he indulged in an enormous windmill-like liberation of his limbs from his cramped seating position. He walked over to the window to see what the last couple of hours of the day would look like: Blanched, cloudy, bordering on the sort of grim weather that would likely transform itself into an awful night. The plan for a late meal and a pint would have to be changed to canned ham-and pea soup and a bottle of something brown from the corner plonk-shop.

The light from the classroom, and the dimness from the outside gave him a chance to gaze at his own reflection. He didn't do that much nowadays, and even occasions where he stood in from of the grimy, square mirror of his bathroom, he was focused on the imperfections, the spindly hairs he had to shave, the bags under the eyes, the hair that he plastered down with Pomade every morning. Today he felt he could sense his age. The pointy, waxy face he had had for his entire adult life seemed a touch paunchier and ruddier. The look of being an overgrown boy of adulthood had been mildly offset by a worn pallor, as well as the faint traces of lines on the edges of his face and mild greying of the hair which thankfully hadn't thinned further than when he'd been twenty. The only feature he still despised, the slight snaggle of his teeth from a flaw in his palate that no dentist in his youth had deemed it necessary to fix, even seemed to fit his jaw a little better. Middle age had blessed him, or else, he supposed, he had ceased to care about the imperfections now that he had passed the half-way mark.

Down below from the fourth storey window, he saw two men pass by the dwindling crowd of children down below. They were dressed smartly, with thick woollen coats that looked expensive and well-fitted. Inspectors from the Education Department? Ted thought. They usually called in the middle of the day, but then again, the Department had also like to spring some surprise visits, as of late. Normally teachers were supposed to stay in for an extra half-hour, so leaving (like he normally did after he hurriedly marked students' papers), wouldn't be looked in kindly. Ted grumbled to himself and glanced back over to the pile of papers he had finished marking, and, with a jerk of petulant movement, picked them back up, along with his pen, to do some more in-depth marking, just in case the two men came nosing about.

Five minutes later, he heard the curt, lilting tones of the two men in conversation before they eventually knocked at the door. He furiously scribbled the last notes on the top papers before he hurriedly coughed so that they could hear he was still in the office.

"Come on in!" he shouted in a wheedling tone. He sat up straight at his desk as much as his horrid little stool would allow, and tried, pre-emptively, to give a thin smile that looked mellow and approachable, but didn't show off the jagged peaks of his front teeth.

The two men stepped in. One was as tall as the door, and stooped in with a bow as he took off his hat. The other was less tall, but far older, with a shock of white hair, where the other had a dark, McCartney-esque bob, and proceeded to gently amble in after the tall man, as if he were taking a leisurely stroll in the sunshine.

"Ah, delightful to see you here. We thought we'd missed you," The older man said as he placed a hand out to shake Ted's. "Dr. Henry Hare. A true pleasure to make your acquaintance. And with me is my junior colleague, Dr. Benedict Burke." The taller man nodded shyly, and simply waved instead of taking Ted's hand.

By now Ted realised that the two weren't with the Education Department, for one, they looked too educated, but also, he had never had such a warm welcome by anyone who had ever come in for an inspection. "Nice to meet you too." Ted offered, not knowing if he should say anything else without a lawyer present.

The older man could clearly see his confusion, and hurriedly explained himself.

"Ah, me and my colleague are from the The Dover Academy of Science, with myself being the head of the Department of Social Sciences. Dr. Burke is undergoing an intensive study on the social behaviours over a period of time for pre-adolescent schoolchildren, and we were very interested in your class for this study."

Ted looked at them, disarmed by the situation. "Have you talked to the principal about this at all? I don't really know if I have the authority to enlist minors without the parent's permission…"

"That, I'm thankful to say, is not an issue." Dr. Hare said with confidence.

"So you have spoken to the Principal, then-" Ted began.

"We were talking about a past class of yours." Dr. Burke said meekly, as he took up almost the entire doorway.

"Ah." Ted said, finally understanding why they were speaking to him. "I'm afraid I can't really help you."

The two doctors glanced at one another wordlessly, before both staring back at him intensely.

"You are Mr. Theodore Turkentine, who taught the 6th grade here, seven years ago?" The old man inquired, adding a more forceful inflection at the end of the question.

"Yes." Ted answered.

"You taught Charlie Bucket." Dr. Burke said. His voice was gentle, firm but engaged. Ted noticed that hadn't been a question.

"I had that pleasure, yes." Ted said in response. "I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to talk about it. He's still technically a minor. It's rather bad taste to divulge his schoolyard misadventures, or lack thereof."

"Yes, you were quite coy when you were asked about your personal relationship with Charlie Bucket," Dr Hare spoke, as Burke stared on at Ted with what he was beginning to feel was hungrily. "We've done some reading on your reactions at the time, but that has only a little bearing on what our research project is."

Burke began to speak excitedly as soon as Hare finished his sentence. "We're following up on the social lives of the children who interacted with Charlie, and analysing whether his success and celebrity have affected their own lives. Whether they have used his story as an aspirational framework to apply towards their own lives as a way towards success."

Ted looked at the young man sourly. "Isn't eighteen a little young to tell if someone is a success? Most of them wouldn't even be that old yet."

The white-haired doctor nodded sagely at him. "Of course. But there are indicators, precursors if you will, of whether they are vying for success within society. College applications, applying for internships, forming affiliations with certain social circles… And, of course, there are early indicators of social maladjustment as well…"

"And, pray tell, what are those?" Asked Ted, increasingly losing patience.

"Juvenile delinquency, development of extensive mental health defects, poor socio-economic markers…" Dr. Hare continue dispassionately.

"Tell us, Mr. Turkentine, have you had any contact with any of your former students from that period at all?" Burke chimed in hurriedly.

"Have you ever had any interactions with your teacher from when you were ten?" Ted said back. "I haven't talked to any of my former pupils after they left this school. I can't even recall if I spoke a word to them outside of the schoolgrounds. I'm a professional, gentlemen."

Burke looked down on him with a look of annoyance, but kept his mouth shut firmly, as if he were biting his tongue to stop himself from telling Ted off for not giving him the answer that he'd wanted. Hare, evidently, took the silence to interject.

"Perhaps you could tell us a little of the more immediate emotional reactions of your pupils during the period surrounding Charlie Bucket's winning of the competition, and that could assist us, Mr. Turkentine."

Ted said nothing, but was aware that the enormous, gawky man was still lumbering front of the door, and didn't feel that barging past would be more sensible than sitting back and hurrying through the questions.

Hare clearly took his silence as a cue to continue. He leafed through a slim notebook and pen that had been drawn from his front shirt pocket.

"Would you say that there was a furore within a majority of the classroom at the announcement of the competition?"

Ted snorted. "Yes, in this class, along with every other class in this school, and every other class in the world."

Hare smiled at him kindly. "Yes, of course… But did some students take this competition to heart with a particular zeal? Perhaps purchasing a notably large amount of Wonka Bars, for instance. Or perhaps getting a part-time job in order to fund their extra spending. Something of that nature."

Ted rolled his eyes, and weakly reached into his mind to recall anything from the other children in the class. "Warren Bilkins bought the most Wonka Bars in the class, at about six hundred. But he had two older siblings, and his parents bought them at a premium too. But most of the children bought around a hundred or so on average during the period."

"And yourself?" Hare asked, not raising his eyes from his notebook.

"Hmm?"

"How many Wonka Bars did you end up purchasing for yourself?" Hare asked obstinately.

Ted paused. "Maybe three hundred. I dipped into my savings and bought a few boxes direct from suppliers."

Burke gave a shrill whistle in appreciation. "That's a lot of chocolate for one man."

"Oh, I gave it to neighbours. And a box to my mother, and she donated it to the church. They did a chocolate themed bakesale."

Hare scribbled a short note down with his answer, before he began to speak again.

"And Charlie himself, did he ever reveal how many he had bought? Before he won, of course."

Ted squinted at Hare. The questions had slowly begun to separate from what they had initially begun to tell him, and had turned toward the inevitable subject. He saw no need to lie though. The specifics of every conceivable anecdote in his life, no matter how marginal, had been pried from students, their parents, and every acquaintance that Charlie Bucket had ever met. He had been approached last, as a formality that, though a significant authority in his own way, was unnecessary to create the narrative that they wanted.

"I believe he had said he had bought two. Before he found the ticket, of course."

Burke glared at him, wide-eyed, as if greedy for more minutia. "And how did the other children feel about that once they knew he had won? Did they think he deserved it?"

Ted could feel his face begin to burn from a mounting anger. His next words came out with a burst of spittle and wasted breath.

"How do you think they felt? They each hated that it wasn't them. If Charlie had come back after he'd won the ticket, I'm confident they would have torn him to pieces."

The next question by Hare took him by surprise.

"Would you have joined them?" The man asked with a sudden, striking dimension to his voice.

Ted's lips moved as if to make out some retort, that he was insulted with the very pretense of the question, but his lungs refused to breath out a word, and he realised he had breathed out the air, as if he had leapt into an icy river.

"Did you try and dissuade them from this at all? Or discuss the fairness or unfairness that was felt with the children?" Hare asked, as if mentally erasing the last question he had asked, as well as Ted's reaction to it.

Ted found his breath, but this time paused before he spoke, deliberating more than reacting.

"Oh, there was an assembly that the principal called, before the flood of reporters came in, where he harped on about how fortunate Charlie was and how we collectively should have wished him well. It was like something from the other side of the Iron Curtain. And I remember speaking with some of of to children who had gotten into fights or flagged on their homework that they should try and forget it. There's not much more than that."

"Yes, I think we have one of those on file… Elliot Eggers, wasn't it?" Burke said, frantically leafing through loose sheets of paper in the manilla files he was holding in one arm.

Ted nodded, waiting from the more piercing question from the man's partner.

"And did you notice if there was any disparity in how each child took the news that Mr. Bucket had won, depending on their own circumstances? Were children who had invested more financially in the competition more resentful in any way that you noticed, compared to poorer children who hadn't?"

Ted sighed.

"I don't know if I can answer that. The atmosphere was largely pretty universally miserable in the classroom. I suppose the children saddest about it were friends of Charlie who thought he was going to come back, first. They were crushed when he didn't."

This produced a reaction in both the men, with Hare furiously scrawling some thought out, while Burke looked at Ted dumbly.

"I'm sorry, are you telling us that Charlie had friends?" Burke said with a tone of shock.

"…Yes?"

"It's just that… In the literature… In the interviews that he did… And the interviews that we did with others…" There was an unmistakable tremor in the younger man's voice. Doubt had entered where none had been before.

"What my colleague means to say is that Mr. Bucket has described his own social life before his winning of the Wonka competition as rather alienating. That he felt apart from others due to his own extensive poverty. And the interviews we conducted with others from his class, none of them described themselves as friends of his." Hare peered at Ted intently, as if daring him to contradict them.

"Oh, I only know that during class, he talked with other children, maybe a little less than a few of the others, but he was hardly a loner. I suppose the years of telling the whole world that he didn't have any friends might have killed any fond feelings that they had for him." Ted began to pack up his own briefcase as he spoke, hoping that his actions might speed along what had now become an interrogation, along.

"Alright," Hare jotted as he spoke, while Burke licked his finger and searched amongst the papers, apparently inspired by the new revelation to re-examine their gathered material. "And were these friends you claim he had of the same socio-economic background as Mr. Bucket? Approximately of course."

"Look. I don't know the specifics of any of my students, former or present lives to comment in absolute confidence, but he was liked by many children before the Wonka bar contest. Some of which were better off, and many who lived in similar circumstances. It was around fifty-fifty."

"Could you give us more accurate numbers if you had some more time?" Burke said.

"No. As a teacher of both science and mathematics, those are professionally the most precise figures I can give you. I'm not sure I can help you more than that anyway. Now, if you'll please, I've got to get home before it gets too dark." Ted picked his coat off the rack by the door and began to button himself up with his free hand, swinging the briefcase around him in a lazy arc that caused Burke to stumble back over his lengthy feet away from the door.

"Will you allow us to call on you again? In case we have any follow-up questions?" Hare said, flipping the cover to his notes closed in a swift, single-handed movement, and tucked his pen primly in his jacket pocket. His tone was dry, without the pretence of compassion that he had had at the start of the questioning.

"I'm sure I couldn't help you beyond what I've said already." Ted half-sneered as he spoke. The few minutes the men had spent in his classroom had taxed him more than the eight hours he had already spent in there with thirty children. He lurched out of the door and made straight for the stairwell.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Turkentine!" He heard Burke call out after him as he stepped down towards the outside doors.

That same afternoon, Ted saw an ex-student of his packing away his groceries as he bought himself his dinner for the week. At first, he thought he must've been feverish, and that the weather and his rapid switching between warm and frigid air had done something to his blood pressure. When he had seen the young man, his mind had shown him two contradicting images of the boy that he remembered, and of an aged stranger in their thirties that he had never seen before, and his mind tried to overlay both things on top of one another. For some bemused moments, he thought of a small child in a drawstring apron and clerk uniform packing bags and was impressed by a false memory of a stocky, unshaven man giggling at the back of the classroom surrounded by children. His face felt frozen as he was overwhelmed with the images, and it took every fibre in him to give his old pupil what he thought was a kindly grin.

The young man only looked at him worriedly, as if he was going to pull a pistol out instead of a cheque-book. Ted fumbled with the booklet and the cheap pen that they had behind the counter. His signature looked so shaky that he was sure that the teen would scrutinize it and ask him to sign another one. But he was simply asked whether he needed his bags taken to his car or not, which he nervously declined.

Carrying the bulging paper bags the two blocks back to his place, his lips stumbled over the likely sounds of the boy's name, but nothing in his mouth seemed to fit the shadow of memory that he still had correctly. Sammy Bretton? Larry Button? Lammy Buxom? The names of a thousand different children who had passed through his life.

He stomped up the stairs of his low-rise tenement, and chanted syllables. Danny Pinion. Jenny Benton. Fanny de Botton. Charlize Bullet. Charlie-

Charlie Bucket.

Ted found himself staring at the outside of his apartment's door as his mind had banished all other surrounding thoughts beyond his ex-student's name. He numbly did a dumb dance of placing down the groceries, getting his keys out to open the door, and stooping over to pick them back up, before he clumsily kicked the door closed behind him.

He knew the teen working at the store wasn't Charlie Bucket. He had been a boy Ted had taught in a class a year afterwards, who had nevertheless squeaked excitedly, like all the other children that year, that the boy who had won the prize that every child on Earth dreamed of, had passed right through the same classroom that they were sitting in. And Ted would have to shush or admonish them for being too excitable, and not focusing on their work, even though before that year he hadn't cared an iota about children talking in class. He felt bad about how strict he felt he had to be, but he thought of the alternative of the year before, where children had fought one another, cried at their desks until their parents came to pick them up, or else sink deep in to imaginary scenarios that left them as unresponsive and dazed as dementia patients. And it wasn't even close to the worst things that some of the children had done outside the classroom.

The interview that the two researchers had asked him had unsettled him. Had dredged up submerged years of shame an inadequacy that still affected him. In truth, they weren't behind him, he was still living through them, and while all the awful things that had happened in that time, his mother's death, his breakup with Wilhelmina, and losing his parent's old house, weren't necessarily related to his old student, Charlie Bucket had become a figure that evoked dread whenever he was conjured back into the forefront of his consciousness.

He packed away most of his groceries, leaving only a small bundle of paper that held some squat sausages, and a tin of beans. He put on a blackened saucepan and cast-iron skillet onto his stovetop, and dumped them each in one of them. While they cooked, he reached to the cupboard besides his mother's old china hutch and brought down a half-bottle of sherry. He took a small swig from it before picking out a tapered schooner from the hutch, and poured himself a liberal amount.

He raised his glass towards the bulb in the middle of the ceiling, before giving a sardonic toast.

"To Charlie!"

By half past six, he had served a dinner of scorched sausages and lukewarm beans, and was decently drunk enough to not feel the need to criticise them. He was too fuzzy headed to concentrate on the television and too sober to fall asleep early, so he turned on the radio and half-dozed to easy swing.

He dreamed that he and Wilhelmina were walking down a long laneway in a soot-streaked, industrial town. This was a version of her from when they had each met one another. The few solitary white hairs she may have had were indistinguishable amongst the fluffy mess of mousey-brown hair she had. Her face was full from before she had to have her wisdom teeth removed. She wore a black vest over a collared white shirt and leggy trousers that matched the vest, something he vaguely remembered her wearing on one of their ill-conceived attempts at clubbing when they were both still teaching together. But she held a strange jacket in one arm, it was a bright, fresh green, and looked like it was made of freshly plucked oak leaves.

Suddenly, after walking without talking for a long while, the two of them reached the end of the lane, the brown brick wall which ended it suddenly jarred and blurred, before simply being the gates of a factory. The two walked in through, both blushing, but serene.

Once they had entered, they saw scores of people in mismatched safety apparel. Some had only masks and gloves, others had gumboots and hardhats. They milled around a perpetually looping conveyor belt which only seemed to hold the shadow of solid items. Nothing of any particular shape or distinction was identifiable, and nothing was done by anyone who appeared to work there. Each shade just passed on along the belts. Sometimes fading or being blocked from view, while others suddenly appeared in the peripheries of Ted's vision.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, a figure whose face was concealed by a gas-mask handed him an item. It was a round metal tin of toffees.

"Would you like to see how the toffee is made, child?" Ted raised his attention from the tin to see his own grandfather standing before him, replete in a white coat, horn-rimmed spectacles that were themselves covered in safety goggles, and with scaly green rubber gloves on his hands which gestured for Ted and Wilhelmina to follow him. Ted pulled her along, and she seemed to resist being pulled, despite the passive expression on her face.

They made their way to a room that contained an enormous vat, which seemed to hold a darkened, churning lake of something which had no shape and no form beyond its container. It was a putrescent brown that seemed to suggest deeper, blacker depths beneath it, and it seemed to exude a primordial sense of stickiness and contamination, like a tarpit that held the carcasses of numerous extinct species. As Ted stared deep into it, he felt a sudden fear, as if he gazed long enough into it, his gaze, and all of his thoughts would stick to its surface, and then be pulled down into its depths.

"Here!" His grandfather called from down below.

Down a flight of stairs, his grandfather sat in front of one of the gigantic walls of the vat, and beside him was a small tap which seemed fragile against the sublime, monolithic surface of curved metal that it sat in front of. Ted walked downwards to join him there, and Wilhelmina's footsteps padded softly behind him.

Once they had joined his grandfather, the old man put his hand to the nozzle of the tap, and turned the handle for just a second. Out came a small globe which for a moment seemed to retain its liquidity, and reverberated in his gloved hand like the surface of a pond rippling in the rain. Then, it suddenly seemed to freeze, inert. His grandfather raised the small globe up to the light before handing it over to Ted.

It was a toffee.

He looked at his grandfather's face, who looked at him expectantly, and he was suddenly compelled, with a sudden stroke of epiphany, that his grandfather had given it to him as a gift to eat. He turned for some sign of comfort of contest from Wilhelmina, but her gaze was blank and unfixed. The cardigan in her hand had turned a sickly yellow.

He placed the toffee on his outstretched tongue, prepared to roll it over around his mouth in order to taste it, but something felt enormously wrong. It was though he felt there was something undulating and coppery tasting in his mouth, like a maggot smothered in fresh gore. He attempted to spit it out onto the ground, but he found his lips had become stuck shut. In a moment of panic, he bit down hard, and he felt a sudden jolt of pain in his jaw.

Finally, his lips parted, and he saw fragments of his teeth begin to litter onto the ground like a fine dusting of ruined porcelain. There was no trace of whatever he had put in his own mouth moments before.

"Not to worry, chap. We can fix that!" His grandfather screamed at him enthusiastically. The scaly green gloves pulled Ted at his shoulders, and he was forced until body was directly underneath the tap. One hand held him in place, while another spun the handle of the tap, allowing a torrent of formless goop to rain down onto him.

At first he felt the stuff begin to dribble and writhe throughout his clothes and dance along the surface of his skin, then, he felt a sudden feeling, not coldness, but a kind of silencing of the stuff's unquiet movement, and what had poured out of the tap immediately solidified on his skin.

With an enormous effort, he forced himself to stand up, though his body didn't give him any sense of feeling at all. He looked down at his arm, and instead of pink, raw flesh covered by something brown on the surface, the entire limb was frozen and transparent, like looking through a bottle of brown glass.

As Ted looked around at the rest of his body, he began to feel fractures lacing along the limbs, as though the pulse of blood that should have stopped as he had turned rigid, had continued and begun to cause the crystalline matter of his body to rattle and shatter from the inside out. He looked to see his grandfather take his gloves and coat off, as if he had finished his work for the day. And with a final feeling of terror he glanced over at Wilhelmina, whose own face had turned into a pallid death mask, and as he looked pleadingly at her one final time, her own face dropped from her body and shattered to the floor, and her jacket came apart in a flutter of brown leaves, smothering everything.

A burst of noise awoke him, and he found himself sticky and cold from sweat, and used the shock of his own awakening to spur himself out of his armchair and towards the source.

It wasn't the radio, as he initially suspected, but he turned it off anyway before he proceeded towards the telephone, which was still ringing out deafeningly through the apartment.

"Ted Turkentine speaking. Who is this please?" He spat out breathlessly into the receiver.

There was a soft exhalation, which confused Ted for a moment, before he realised the person on the other side of the line must've been smoking. A high, lilting voice that flowed like honey even through the receiver, answered him.

"Mr. Turkentine. My name is Miss Verruca Salt. My deepest apologies for the lateness of my call. Things are… currently in motion, and it's rather important that I contacted you quickly."

Ted didn't answer, hoping the next words that were spoken would determine whether it was a prank phone call, or whether he would listen on, no matter the length of the conversation.

"I'm afraid that while I have rather a great deal that I'd like to talk to you about, however, the phone isn't the best place to do it. I'd like you to meet with me. Tomorrow night. I can have a car pick you up from outside your apartment at Seven."

The line became silent, and Ted allowed the words churn through his mind, taking into account the ridiculousness and the probable danger of treating it seriously. With a small exhalation of his own which shuddered along the line, he finally answered.

"I'll see you then."