On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  Two floors up was the cavernous classroom, the desks pulled back against the walls. At one end stood a lectern with a microphone, and rows of chairs laid out in front. Martine noted, through her furred internal lens, the woman’s enthusiasm, her tense little movements as she explained her lesson idea.

  ‘I’m playing an infertility doctor.’ She took a white coat off a chair and shrugged it over a low-slung bosom, her voice deadened by the expanse of carpet. ‘She’s grown cells from defective human embryos in vitro to the 32-cell stage. Now this is the press conference. I want them to air the moral and scientific questions about cloning, to think what makes a good question.’

  She handed Martine a mocked-up press release and her lesson plan.

  Martine heard herself say, ‘Looks good.’

  She read that in pairs, the students would plan questions, interrogate their teacher in role as members of the press, probe her answers and, at the end, evaluate their efforts. Such creativity in lessons wasn’t uncommon, but Martine still found herself willing this to work. The teacher was muttering about some box of equipment that hadn’t been delivered, and Martine dragged a chair to the side of the room to watch.

  A bell pealed out on the corridor, and there was the slow tidal rush of feet. The teacher took to the lectern to enter into her part. Boys and girls of fifteen or sixteen burst or straggled into the room and stood staring at the layout and Martine.

  The teacher said, ‘Please take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. The press conference is about to begin.’

  Mumbling and giggling, the pupils scooped up the press releases from their chairs. The woman introduced Martine and the lesson started.

  There was nothing different about this student cohort from others Martine had met. There was a mixture of ethnicities; many pupils looked dirty and malnourished. Some larked about and giggled; others pretended a disinterest in the lesson.

  Once the teacher had explained the lesson and playacted her conference announcement, she got the students, in pairs, to read their press releases and write down questions they could ask. Martine noted one boy, Damion, who’d had to join a pair and make a three. His partners didn’t like it, and she heard him swearing as she threaded between the rows.

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  In the first pair she approached, a girl retorted, ‘Nosy!’

  The second she talked to sniggered and said nothing.

  ‘Why are we doing this?’ another girl challenged Martine.

  Martine said, ‘To help you learn what makes a good question.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we have tape recorders or something?’ her partner asked.

  ‘That’s up to Mrs Willshaw,’ Martine said, but now the group started heckling the teacher.

  ‘Yeah. Microphones to hold…’ ‘We should be rushing up to you, you know…’ The children became galvanised, overturning chairs and lobbying Carolyn Willshaw at her lectern. ‘This is Fatima Szarowicz…very important breaking news…’ ‘Give us a TV camera. On one of them stick things…’

  The teacher kept control. ‘You’re right everybody, and IT was supposed to bring a box of stuff, but it hasn’t come.’ She paused. ‘Would Miss Haslett by any chance be prepared to…?’

  Martine found herself agreeing to mind the class while the teacher sought the props.

  Carolyn Willshaw had stranded her between the front and second rows with thirty-one adolescents. Her surroundings crept into her cerebellum. Temporary hardboard smacked at holes in the windows, and a chill draught stammered in. The nylon carpet, spotted with fossils of chewing-gum, squelched abnormally under her feet.

  She persuaded the students to a game of Chinese whispers. Damion sneered. She took a seat on the end of the front row next to him, conscious of a fair fringe and a masculine jaw emerging out of puppy fat. She started the whispers with him, facts about cell division and clones. He passed on her messages in a reluctant growl. The lines of children sabotaged them into nonsense and obscenities, cackling. Martine calmed them down, but had to begin the game again and then again. She noticed that Damion’s neighbour was anchoring his foot down with a heavy, scuffed shoe. Damion didn’t object.

  Carolyn Willshaw returned, and the children mobbed her, and she herded them into their places and handed out her props. There were complaints about the equipment, but the teacher restored order, and Martine retired to her corner, and at last the lesson resumed. Apart from a few shouted exchanges, the students became absorbed, grilling the teacher in their roles. Note-taking and observing, Martine folded in on herself.

  The school bell shrilled. Although the lesson was a double period, Mrs Willshaw and the children broke off. In a matter of seconds they were all on their feet under the corridor wall as, beyond it, howls and cries came nearer and feet thundered. On the other side of the high windows heads appeared, pogoing up and down and jeering at the class.

  The teacher explained, ‘The sixth-formers. They know the lesson’s something different and you’re here.’ She rallied the pupils. ‘Cupboards to doors!’ She grinned at Martine. ‘A precaution.’

  While a brigade of adolescents hauled two tall metal cabinets in front of both classroom exits as if they’d done it before, and with fists and feet already pounding on them from the other side, Martine said, ‘Tell me about Damion.’

  The teacher sighed. ‘Middle-class Anglo-Saxon parents in the media, sent him here on principle. Not very literate but bright. A bully in his time, now probably being bullied. What else do you want to know?’

  Martine looked at Damion swaggering among the children drifting back to their seats as the lesson stuttered into life a second time.

  Eventually, it was all over. Carolyn Willshaw still needed to work on probing and open questions, and must include quantitative as well as qualitative data in her findings, Martine had decided, now ready for feedback in the staffroom. The cupboards were pulled aside, and Martine left beside her. The students ebbed along the corridor, but Damion wasn’t with them. She had an impulse to go back, and mumbled to Mrs Willshaw that she’d left something behind.

  The boy was on the far side of the room. He was crouching by a radiator, his backpack flung away from him, arms flopped on his knees. Martine crossed and stood nearby, resting against the sill of a blocked-up window. She was wary of being too close to him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She wasn’t surprised when he said nothing. ‘If you’d like to talk…’

  Her elbow was painful on the window ledge, picking up a smattering of grit. She realised that the radiator was dribbling water onto the floor, which explained the sodden carpet. There were skidmarks on the green walls; in one corner, an empty Sprite bottle and a Coke tin; along the skirting, a jetsam of sweet wrappers and paper clips. The place flared in her consciousness.

  The boy hoisted himself to his feet, shooting her a knowing smile. ‘You’re weird.’

  Martine beamed. ‘So people sometimes say.’

  For a moment, she was still sure of it later, his eyes melted into that look that a male lover can have, a gaze without concealment.

  Then his lids dropped, and the jaw set. ‘I don’t like being here.’

  ‘It must be hard for you.’

  ‘I don’t mean here. I mean here.’ Turning his head away, he stabbed a finger at the carpet.

  Something in Martine lurched. She registered, He thinks I’m being inappropriate.

  Damion twisted his head convulsively and flicked his eyes round for an escape route.

  ‘I just thought it might help to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Teachers can be your friends, too, if you need one.’

  She waited, but he said nothing.

  ‘Can I go?’ he said abruptly.

  She let him, her inner voice berating her because he’d had to ask.

  When she left the teacher later, Martine wished she could give back the building, the classroom and the boy, but she still felt in the thick of it, and suddenly knew that this ugly-beautiful landscape was a useful sort of poison, would
do as well as anything else to propel her forward, alone as she must go.

  She began to look for a job teaching biology and general science. She’d taught before, and she could do it again. In the end she found a Lambeth school, similar to the one in Tower Hamlets, that couldn’t deny her credentials. She hoped to make a difference, but maybe almost more, that her new setting would make a difference to her. Just to be safe though, the place taught only girls.

  The phases of the moon, its eclipse cycle, earth’s tides, the colour coding of land and sea and swirling cloud around the globe, everywhere there are patterns, but for years, Martine avoided philosophising about hers, blanking out any overview of what had happened to her. She couldn’t afford to be a satellite, looking down on all her failures.

  In 1994, the newly appointed President Kumaratunga pledged to end his island’s war. In London, Ron Dearing published his aims to revise the National Curriculum. Martine got on with the routines of daughterly care and singledom and working life and adulthood.

  By 1995, she was busy re-learning her job. She skated over red dwarfs and black holes in the curriculum, a thin chapter at the end of the GCSE textbook. At home she read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus with its claim that now and then, men like to back away from intimacy. She wondered, was male distance, not difference, what had attracted her all those years?

  In Sri Lanka, rebels sank two gunboats, sparking the Third Eelam War. A bomb wounded President Kumaratunga, and a suicide attack at Colombo airport maimed a large portion of the Sri Lankan Airlines fleet.

  The voice of Mohan’s letters, which she’d not touched for years, hallooed from far away, ‘Sometimes I am quite worrying.’

  Her Sri Lankan fantasies spread in sleep, now always including the permanent move to Sri Lanka, and sometimes some sign of detente between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, like Lakshman’s with the Tamil in his office.

  The suck and drag of globalisation and capitalism, of oppression and resistance, violence and change, continued in the world.

  25 Road

  (Road: A hard, flat pitch for a run-up)

  1997– July 2010

  On Thursday 1 May 1997, Pearl suggested drinks to Martine at her Bohemian flat in Seven Sisters with ‘whoever you fancy bringin”, cautioning that ‘You know I don’t do eats.’ Eyes only half on the TV, an ill-assorted gaggle would drink to the results of the general election as they came in. His depression permitting, Jonas might even join them.

  Abigail Gilmore, who lived downstairs from Martine at Aldebert Terrace, was a feisty sixty-seven-year-old with a spinal problem she didn’t want to admit to; Geraldine was the Head of IT at school, a flamboyant fashionplate with an air of need Martine couldn’t quite pin down. She decided to take them along. Back turned on the last shaving of moon in the city sky, she prepared seafood stew with coriander pesto, but it turned out that Mrs Gilmore didn’t like fish, so she rustled up fried potatoes and beans instead.

  On the tube, Mrs Gilmore was describing her attempts to dig her own grave in the garden when Geraldine said, ‘Fun fun fun!’

  The train was wailing to a standstill at Finsbury Park. As the doors hissed back, Martine’s gaze followed Geraldine’s. Across the island platform, on the eastbound Piccadilly, a shimmering troupe was arriving for a train. A stentorian voice sang The Galloping Major. The gang wore costumes in Tory blue or Labour red. There were bangs and raucous laughter as someone killed a drift of balloons with a stilettoed shoe. They had a banner, ‘Bugger Blair’, and bottles, clinking hazardously in rustling plastic bags. Before her train doors rumbled shut, Martine caught the echoes of a Welsh accent, and realised it was Fleur’s, and that Evie, Nev, Graham and Bernard were also in the group.

  Her train drew out, and her default of flat contentment drained away. She didn’t crane for the vanishing point on the platform where the coiffeured Bernard in a red catsuit was mounting his carriage gracefully. She thought, The Soho Sisters are my friends; why didn’t I say so? In her mind, the group branched away on another track.

  Many years before, in a cabbies’ caff, Tiny Tot, who was, with Litolita, one of Madame Dada’s double acts, had overheard the bourgeois prattlings of an intoxicated Ali and Martine, guffawed and flourished her little sequined arms, and dared them to enter the Soho world of Madame Dada’s club, Grand Dame Tattlemouse, Old Sal and all the rest. That foggy two o’clock morning led to friendships, firm and true. Now though, many were speeding into the distance.

  By just gone ten o’clock at Pearl’s, BBC News was predicting a landslide Labour victory, and Pearl was wound around Jonas – odd, although it seemed to mean nothing to them. The evening was strangely hollow for Martine.

  By 1998, Martine’s designer maisonette no longer seemed to suit her Puritan work regime and lifestyle, so she bought a flat on the seventh floor of one of the Brandon Towers in Kennington, skyscrapers on an ex-council estate. Two small bedrooms and a private balcony, netted to keep out pigeon onslaughts. She left all her ferns, although, if she’d looked inward, they grew on in her imagination. At night she stared out through the wires, across the estate with its squares of grass and high-rise flats, over a jetsam of lower buildings towards the Thames and, beyond its unseen water, the City to the left and Docklands to the right, not acknowledging that she shared this view with the moon. Slowly she replaced her furniture with junk-shop pieces, French country and shabby chic. She made her changes without fuss, as if slipping a ball between a succession of cups.

  Meanwhile, the Blair government introduced the National Literacy Strategy in schools. In Martine’s job there was plenty new to do.

  She suffered plague and pestilence in 1999, as if, as Mohan was to her, she was a landscape. Her precious MGB Roadster was blighted by vandals, and she decided it had to go. There was a flood in her flat from burst plumbing on the floor above that filled her dreams of finding Mohan with the topic of water. Bill Kidmay restored a chest of drawers, her bedside table and a bookcase. While everything was sorted, she camped with Claire and Rollo and their dogs and bought more functional, waterproof furniture, some tubular, some glass. By then Jonas, listless and morose, was back living with Martine’s mother and McLairy, the latest dog.

  Dead flies poured out of her lobby’s ceiling trapdoor, swarming into her dreams as the tropics’ pestilential yellow rice stem borer, the brown plant hopper, the rice thrip and the gall midge, authentic details for her Sri Lankan job in aid. Her menorrhagia was modulating into the milder, erratic bleeding of the perimenopause, but that meant heat waves at night and seesawing moods by day. She had bouts of laryngitis from colds caught at school, made worse by raising her voice in hectic classrooms. She still revolved through school, friends and family; she found it hard to focus on much else.

  At the Millennium, a quarter moon oversaw a fraction of Martine join Pippi and Gretel, her mother, Jonas, Bill Kidmay and McLairy round an undersized bonfire on Harrow Weald Common sipping acid punch with sparklers in their hands.

  There was drought in Sri Lanka in 2001-2, to the island a blow more crushing than the attack of 9/11. Jamie Bulger’s killers were released from custody on life licence, their identities kept secret. With the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies rolled out in secondary schools, Martine began to feel new pressures: before long, the NLS would apply to science. Change, change, change.

  In 2002 Martine was promoted to Head of Science, despite initial resistance. The Sri Lankan government signed a ceasefire agreement with the Tamil Tigers, who’d dropped demands for a separate state. The road from the Jaffna peninsula reopened. In 2002-3, rains in Sri Lanka brought a record rice harvest. Martine heard that her school might soon take boys.

  In all the years after Mohan, Martine was trying to be pragmatic, down to earth, but her poetic side remained, albeit in the dark. She surfed the net at night, moving unblushingly from online male titillation to researching Farmer Field Schools, the Temple of the Relic, the Mahaweli Project, the Esala Perahera, and breadfruit, and dragonflies. Her
researches fed her dreams, and without knowing it, she began to shift through the spheres of her resistance, from a kind of troposphere to a kind of exosphere, up and out of her own earthbound grip.

  2003-4 you might call her troposphere. Her internet wanderings told of floods in Sri Lanka. Then, newsfeeds brought her tales of Sri Lankan drought, the Indian Ocean tsunami and the end of the ceasefire. At home, the Children Act and the Tomlinson report promised yet more change in school.

  She travelled through 2005, as it were her stratosphere, the assassination of the Sri Lankan foreign minister and the tsunami clean-up, and the island’s feuding over a rebel deal on aid.

  In London, bombs went off on buses and trains; the Tomlinson reforms were stopped before they’d started; Martine’s school became a Beacon School for Technology and Science, which meant extra work again; and it began admitting boys. She had to confront what she knew: that she, if not her lessons, favoured male students over girls. Garey, who used every piece of her advice; Kumar, almost her stalker for a term or two; and the Ravi she found ravishing, whom she was careful not to see alone. Amal, the leader of a group of girls, accused her outright of being sexist.

  One weekend, Jonas visited. ‘Um, Samantha.’

  A large presence with piled-up, slipping hair and a surprised expression thrust Martine a bottle of goji berry juice and forged her way into the small living room, bearing Jonas in her wake. At fifty-six, Samantha was older than Jonas by some twelve years.

  ‘Living here must be some middle-class guilt fest, yeah?’

  Martine stammered, ‘Not exactly,’ forcing a grin for Jonas’s sake.

  Samantha refused coffee in favour of her juice, and made more laughing, terse pronouncements, taking in the flat with a piercing eye. She had a successful shoe shop chain, and Jonas was moving in with her in Weybridge. He was being saved, apparently from something that might include Martine.

  Martine pushed through 2006. She’d always resisted Googling for any trace of Mohan, but absorbed that a suicide bomber had attacked Colombo’s main military compound; that the government was still striking enemy targets; that the rebels had attacked a naval convoy close to Jaffna; and that fighting had worsened in the north-east.