by Paul Read
Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2AB
[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents © Paul Read 2016
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN 978-1-7850795-7-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850795-8-0
Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.
Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
After gaining a first in Fine Art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design at Canterbury, Paul Read moved to London, finding employment at Foyles bookshop before becoming a teacher. He has worked in several inner-city schools as an Art, English and supply teacher, both in England and Italy. He received a distinction from City University London for his creative writing MA.
A few years ago, Paul was involved in a hit-and-run incident which put him in a wheelchair for several months and was where he wrote the first draft of The Art Teacher. He lives with Patricia and their two children.
Follow him on Twitter:
@paulreadauthor
For Patricia
Mi vuoi sposare?
PART ONE
ONE
Patrick Owen had managed seven years at Highfields Secondary School without punching a pupil in the face.
The week he found his patience tested beyond its usual limit started, much like any other, with Patrick swallowing a pint of sugared coffee and rising from his emails to watch the morning madness from his classroom window. Outside, pupils streamed into the playground past the teacher on gate duty – Jill McFarley from Maths was today’s tearful Cerberus – and a sea of blue jumpers and swinging bags accompanied the high-pitched recounting of the previous night’s soap plots. A cold, bright dawn. The last week before Christmas.
Billy Matthews was tagging the word ‘KILLA’ against the Science block while Sherry Dixon tugged up her top to show Hussein Sagar a new tattoo. Frankie Griffiths was being punched in the gut by Daniel Malaise, who didn’t even bother to take the cigarette out of his mouth. It looked like a comradely, playful beating. Perhaps it was Frankie’s birthday.
The registration bell tolled.
A few members of Patrick’s tutor group were already outside his classroom, picking paint off the wall by the Art storeroom and casting aspersions on one another’s sexuality, but most of them, being fourteen, were still in bed. Those present – strangely proportioned man-boys, flirting timidly with girls wearing false nails so long they couldn’t hold paintbrushes – talked about television shows he didn’t watch and bands he’d never heard. It was this cultural gap, Patrick suspected, which, more than anything, made him so invisible to youth. He didn’t know the names of many footballers, let alone their equally famous girlfriends, and would certainly never consider appearing in a pair of tracksuit trousers with the word ‘Juicy’ stitched across the arse.
His form class had learned it was easier, in the long-run, to enter the classroom quietly, to channel their natural irreverence into non-verbal art forms. Therefore, once the register had been taken, Patrick wasn’t surprised to find the still life arrangements in the table centres covered in Euro 2016 football stickers and half-inflated condoms. He couldn’t bring himself to be angry about it. It was too early, and he’d need every last kilojoule of energy for later.
Patrick powered up the humming overhead projector and an image of the Mona Lisa filled the pull-down screen covering his old whiteboard.
‘You all know this painting of course…’
A hand sliced up. That was a good sign. They normally just called out.
‘Yes, Gaia.’
‘It’s shit. She don’t have eyebrows.’
He was vaguely aware of girls passing notes between them on a back table. Sebastian was streaking something horrible from his fingertip under his desk.
‘Moving on.’ He presented to them an Expressionistic classic of inner turmoil. No teenager ever failed to associate with Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
‘It’s shit too,’ opined Matthew, the purplish trace of a black eye worn like a trophy. ‘He don’t have no eyebrows either.’
‘Why did you choose Art again?’ Patrick snapped.
‘Music had too many people, innit.’
With an exhalation too deep for his lungs, Patrick persevered. ‘These are examples of overly familiar artworks from popular media. We are entirely dislocated from their times, their initial power. You dislike them because they’ve been, perhaps, over-promoted. Try to imagine it’s the first time you’ve seen them and…’
‘It is the first time I’ve seen them,’ wailed Sonja.
‘Me too,’ said Simon.
‘The first time you’ve seen THE MONA LISA?’
The class stared at him in horror as he ordered them, with a despairing shake of the head, to finish their work from last week.
This class could be well behaved sometimes, but it was the last lesson of the day and they were full of E-numbers and holiday spirit. For half an hour he condoned the exasperating antics of young adults who should have known better, of children who acted deliberately like children in front of the adult, until he finally deigned to raise his voice. The rapping and bratting ceased for a few minutes, much to the relief of the headache he’d acquired after his Year Nine group’s endless carousel of paper aeroplanes, tie peanutting, epileptic seizures and nosebleeds.
Patrick gazed out his window, his reflection and the view morphing into a double exposure against the apocalyptic vision of the neighbouring Union City estate. It dominated the landscape with its three square miles of stark Brutalism and asymmetric blocking, the school itself built out of the same visually objectionable concrete, as though little more than a penal-looking addendum. Many of the pupils knew no other kind of architecture; though the catchment area officially included the elegant Edwardian terraces of the lower-middle class on the other side of the school, most Highfields kids were of the free school dinner demographic.
The lesson entered its last fifteen minutes and Patrick was just about to reward the class with a few minutes of unlistenable horror courtesy of a mainstream radio station when Denis Roberts appeared through the door, making teenage noises into his iPhone.
Denis was one of the more problematic members of his Year Eleven Art group. He was a well-built boy, had grown twenty centimetres outwards and upwards over the year, and now sported a thickening moustache and passable sideburns. As a child, he’d had an operation to repair a cleft lip and the scar remained, running angrily up the left side of a flat philtrum to his nostrils.
‘…You shoulda seen him… I banged him up, bruv. Listen, give us a call laters, yeah,’ he said, ‘I gotta be doing Art or someshit now.’ He walked slowly, with exaggerated torso bobbing and a smoothing of his eyebrow, to his seat.
‘Stay where you are,’ Patrick demanded, walking briskly towards him. Such was Denis’ over-confidence, he allowed the teacher to scythe his phone from his grasp. ‘I’ll take that, thank you. Wait outside.’
The boy threw
his shoulders back, bunched his mouth into a kiss and balled his fists.
Denis was not going to wait outside.
A few kids snickered in anxious response, thrilled that one of them dared to stand up to the grown-up, his rules, his routines.
‘Sophia,’ the Art teacher ordered, still calm, still measured in his tones. ‘Could you call for rapid response please?’
Sophia sheepishly left her seat at the front of the class and brushed past Denis, who continued to puff out his chest. Sophia was the best kid in the class, honest, quiet, dependable, and far from brainless. She knew to whom she should remain loyal. Two minutes later, following Denis’ numerous variations on ‘Why’d you do it?’ and ‘You’re so bait, man,’ Sophia returned with news that the day’s designated senior teacher was ‘on their way’. Rapid response wasn’t coming.
‘Stop disturbing the class, Denis. I’ll speak to you at the end of the day.’
‘It is the end of the day. You’re jacking my phone. That’s racist, man.’
‘Denis, we’re the same colour.’
‘That’s racist, man.’
‘Denis, really… What’s the point of bursting in here and disturbing everyone’s learning?’
‘What’s the point of you, you old fart?’
The class laughed. It was true. Right now, he felt unfathomably ancient.
He heard someone at the back mutter, ‘Owen got owned.’
Kids today communicated with words he simply didn’t understand. It was the same mangling, freeform approach they took to walking, of all things. Denis was doing it now: a lounging gangsta gait. Why was walking in the upright manner which homo sapiens had historically preferred now deemed so embarrassing? Patrick felt it was surely something to do with the unnecessary exposure of boxer shorts. ‘Underwear,’ he kept telling them. ‘It’s called UNDERWEAR. You wear them UNDER.’
Patrick thought the class had been hard to control before, but after the projector screen chose this moment to fly up into its housing with a drum-rolled whipcrack and reveal a crudely-drawn, ejaculating penis and two curly-pubed bollocks, he had no chance.
He looked at the clock. Only five minutes left of this torture for today.
As the rest of the class cried with laughter, Denis perched himself on the teacher’s desk and announced, ‘I’m gonna wait here until the end of the lesson, and then you’re gonna gimme back my phone.’ Patrick was sorely tempted to cast his phone to the floor and stamp on the fucking device, but in the grand scheme of things none of this mattered; he knew how petty he looked. The fact that Denis was never without his phone, yet managed to leave his pencil at home every single day shouldn’t really have got to him as much as it did. He began wiping the cock and balls off his board. Four minutes to go.
Down the corridor, he spied Charlotte, his head of department. He called out for her, then watched her try to pretend she hadn’t heard before eventually, slowly, walking in the direction of his classroom. She hovered with impatience at his door.
‘Ms Purchase, I caught this boy using his mobile and confiscated it. Now he’s causing all sorts of trouble,’ Patrick explained.
His head of department was able to transmit, through a facial expression which remained both remote and indifferent, that she was far, far too busy to deal with this.
At twenty-nine, Charlotte was six years younger than Patrick but it was her innate, as opposed to financial, superiority which irked him most. She was the sort of woman who wouldn’t walk through a door unless it was already held open. Fortunately for her, being heir to two Highgate houses and symmetrically pleasing Italianate looks, she was also the sort of woman most men held doors open for, so was used to getting her way.
Patrick, wishing he hadn’t bothered in the first place, once more repeated the school’s code of conduct to Denis.
‘You’re joking me, man,’ the boy scoffed. ‘Don’t be dry.’
Patrick noticed the plastic compass in Denis’ left hand, with which he’d idly carved what looked like an AK47 into the Art teacher’s desk. Sadly, this was the first decent drawing the boy had managed all year.
‘May I have his phone?’ Charlotte asked.
Relived and grateful, Patrick handed it over. Then watched in astonishment as Charlotte gave it back to the boy.
‘Look, young man, just don’t get it out again, okay?’ she cooed, undermining her colleague in fangless fashion.
Patrick watched her face, the vacant excuse for nervous happiness it presented, and wondered who the bigger idiot really was. Once upon a time, they’d both taken Fine Art degrees.
She walked off, indomitable, victory-flushed. Denis looked pretty triumphant too, his lips curled in a combination of apathetic impudence and a superiority Patrick couldn’t understand how a mere fifteen-year-old could possess. He had a cluster of small whiteheads around his mouth, a new, fourth, slice in his right eyebrow.
Patrick shot a glance out the window, where a few of Denis’ little gang waited in a shattered bus stop. How he’d got mixed up in that group – older boys, mostly expelled or past-pupils who’d made a habit of truanting and intimidation during their own tenures – Patrick didn’t know. They were always there at the end of the day, smoking and shouting obscenities at the sixth form girls. One of them was supporting a gimpy leg with an inverted golf club.
Thirty seconds to go.
Patrick tried to smooth matters over with a lie: ‘You know, you’ve got talent in this subject. If you could just…’ But praise only works on children who aren’t already as egocentric as their Premier League idols. ‘Listen, Denis,’ Patrick said in response to another giant huff, ‘I know you’re not keen on the subject but others are, they don’t want to be constantly distracted. You’ve all got a GCSE to take.’
‘Man, I ain’t got no talent, you know that.’
Ah, the fabled double negative. ‘You mean, you haven’t got…’
The bell went.
Denis jabbed a sovereign-ringed finger into Patrick’s chest. ‘Apologise for jacking my phone,’ he demanded.
The class were still in their seats, despite the bell, watching the drama unfold.
‘What’s the magic word?’ Patrick asked, attempting to inject a kind of levity into the lesson finale.
‘Bender. Apologise for jacking my phone.’
How Patrick even found the strength to sigh these days was beyond him.
‘Denis, I don’t have to…’
‘It ain’t nice to snatch. You gonna apologise?’ Menace reddened his eyes.
‘You can go now.’ Desperately, he addressed the class. Still, no one moved. They knew there was more to come.
‘Everyone thinks you’re gay, sir. D’you know that?’
Patrick turned to face the boy again. ‘I couldn’t care less. Goodbye.’
‘You got a wifey?’
A slow smirk crept across Denis’ face as Patrick prickled. Denis had sensed something, a nerve grazed, a mask slipped. ‘Did she dump you because you’re such a loser, sir?’ This was followed by an enquiring look, serious, deadpan.
Despite himself, the teacher let fury win. ‘Get out!’
‘I’m just asking, innit. Keep your hair on.’ Denis raised his eyes towards Patrick’s hair, as if denigrating the style Patrick sported, though it was of a style little different to Denis’ own. Patrick wore his hair short because he was thinning, Denis did so to separate himself from the fingerless-gloved Emos who played a card game known as Arsehole in the Design Technology rooms at breaktime. ‘I mean, you went to university and everything to get this job, did you? And you think you’re not a loser?’
‘And what about you, Denis? What do you expect to amount to?’
He hadn’t meant to say that, and certainly not with such venom. It had come from within him, unauthorised. Denis took half a step away from his teacher, his bruised look of disbelief echoing the gasps from the room. Teachers weren’t meant to say things like that. You could wind them up, and up, and up, but they were never s
upposed to come back at you. Still, what would Denis become? Patrick dreaded to think.
The atmosphere in the room was leaden. Still, no one moved.
‘I won’t ask again. Get out.’
‘And I won’t either. Apologise.’
Denis spat on the classroom linoleum – it glistened in the muddied sunlight cast from the estate-shadowed panorama – then walked right up to his teacher. The boy was employing a primal trick, moving into another’s personal space, making himself bigger in the presence of a rival. There were more gasps from the assembled students, but muted now.
Patrick put a hand out to repel the boy, the flat of his hand on Denis’ breastbone. The two of them glared at each other.
‘Get out.’ Patrick put defiance, a trained authority, into the words, but Denis continued to stare, his eyes screwed into black holes. Fingers curled by the boy’s sides, gunslinger style.
‘You can’t touch me,’ Denis hissed, shrugging Patrick’s hand off. ‘You ain’t allowed.’
Patrick felt his desk meet the back of his legs. He’d been backing away without realising. His fists were so clenched they hurt. If the boy dared take another step towards him, made to move, speak, breathe, Patrick doubted he’d find the strength not to knock his block off.
They both stood in silence.
Fear, or the embers of professionalism, kept Patrick’s arms pinned to his side.
‘Sorry,’ he whispered.
‘What?’ The boy theatrically cupped his hand to an ear. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
Marginally louder, though the class had all heard the first time, Patrick repeated himself. ‘Sorry.’
With eerie and surreal calm, Denis took a step back and swaggered towards the door.
One by one, and visibly disappointed, the class stood and followed the boy out into the growling corridor.
TWO
The sound of his own footsteps echoed around him as he sped through pages of tabloid and the crabgrass sprouting in fractured concrete. Any other time, he would have feared what his frantic scurrying must have looked like to the estate’s residents. But no one was out. No one ever was after dark, except the gangs.