by Paul Read
Other teachers buzzed around them, collecting sheets from cabinets. Absence forms. Health and safety slips. Detention letters. The PE department were in their usual seats, doing sod all, and an aggregation of teaching assistants huddled round a computer at the other end, each furnished with enough coffee to kill a person over seventy.
He realised Christophe was looking at him as though awaiting a response.
‘I’m fine,’ Patrick said, then, assuming he needed to justify his disposition, added, ‘I heard from Ana yesterday.’
‘Shit. How is she?’
Patrick relayed the latest. Briefly, the routine of their breaktime chat, the salted meats in Christophe’s plastic box, the watching of the clock, calmed him. Eighteen lessons to go before the holiday.
‘How do you feel about the situation?’
Patrick practiced his nonchalant shrug while looking at the carpet, possibly the only square foot in the whole school unstained by gum. The gesture came across as it was intended; he hadn’t worked out how to take the break-up yet.
Christophe crunched the lid back on his lunchbox and sighed, massaging arthritic wrists; his forefingers curled vaguely away from their neighbours as though broken. ‘Who you got next?’
‘Year Eleven. More’s the pity.’
‘Denis?’
‘Denis.’
Patrick had spent the morning dreading the latest confrontation with Denis Roberts. Hopefully the boy had forgotten about the teacher’s insult the day before. If not, Patrick knew there was only one course of action open: he would steadfastly refuse to admit yesterday had ever happened. It was a tactic he’d learned from wrongdoers at school, who, with limitless fervency and indignation, denied all manner of misconduct, even when he’d seen them do something idiotic with his own eyes. Maybe, if Patrick refuted it strenuously enough, he might even convince himself he hadn’t done anything wrong.
‘I had 11E period one. He turned up halfway through.’ Christophe chuckled to himself as he stood, confidently, unhurried. ‘He was good as gold, actually.’ Though Christophe’s English was impeccable, his Gallic accent was strong. He spoke from the front of his mouth, the last syllable of every word stressed, as though he couldn’t bear them to end.
‘Really?’ Patrick turned, almost relieved.
‘Yeah, right up to the point when he threw Stacey Cunningham’s work out the window.’
‘Excellent. So he’s excluded?’
Christophe looked at him sadly. ‘A verbal admonishment. You think I want a golf club through my head?’
Patrick took a moment to calm and steady himself before the class came in. The usual pre-match pep talk: deep breaths, face slapping.
Denis was near the back of the group as the class shuffled in and took their seats. He sat down, unshouldered his bag, folded his arms; his dead eyes, locked on Patrick, gave nothing away.
Patrick did his best to appear unfazed and, indeed, the lesson started as usual; his class completely ignored him as he attempted to show examples of previous pupils’ work on the whiteboard. They laughed at the monobrow on a copy of a Frieda Kahlo painting, even though he explained that, due in part to her inability to conceive children, Frieda always exaggerated her features to uglify herself, externalising her conflict by making herself appear more masculine.
‘Looks like your mum, Gerald,’ said Mohammad.
Patrick announced they were to continue with their self-portraits. Ten minutes in, Denis, normally one of the more vocal classroom components, still hadn’t spoken – no threats, no swearing, no phone calls to Dominos Pizza – but neither had he stopped looking at his Art teacher.
Patrick had moved Denis to the front table in an attempt to even out a pretty disastrous seating plan a while back, and the boy had soon contaminated a pupil called Matthew Keane. Formerly one of the best-behaved kids in the class, he was a perfect example of ill-at-ease teenage gangliness, chest flat and unmuscled, jaw bearded with acne. The result of this mixing of oil and water was, in hindsight, obvious; it was more likely Matthew would end up a reprobate than Denis an angel.
Denis didn’t move his head when Matthew asked him, ‘How do you make brown, dickhead?’ and neither did Patrick bother to admonish Matthew, deeming his description of Denis perfectly accurate.
‘The three primary colours,’ Patrick replied. Had this boy no rudimentary knowledge of colour theory? Of course not: Charlotte had been his teacher last year.
‘That’s what I’ve done, but it looks well dirty.’ Matthew’s voice was so shrill it was almost a whimper.
‘Just use the brown then,’ Patrick snapped, indicating the poster paints racked together at the rear of the classroom. Matthew slouched over and squeezed out half the tube into his palette. ‘Only take what you’re going to use,’ Patrick added mechanically. Almost every sentence that left his mouth these days had been uttered before.
Still Denis sat there. Had someone been training a camera on the boy, and were to play it back at high speed, they would find him perfectly still against a tornado of movement, like a time-lapsed predator in a nature documentary. Patrick had been avoiding speaking to him in case it was the provocation Denis had been looking for, but other members of the class were cottoning on to Denis’ singularly sinister focus.
‘Um, Denis,’ he mumbled. ‘You going to paint anything today?’
Patrick jumped as Denis shot out of his seat, then watched him with a mixture of relief and concern as the boy marched to his folder and pulled out his latest masterpiece. He took the paper back to the table and began painting over his handiwork in thick black paint. To his credit, he was careful to use the right amount of water and avoided streaks. When finished, he went to the drying rack and laid it down, then took another piece from his folder and began the process afresh.
Reluctantly, Patrick went over. ‘Denis, this is your GCSE. You can’t systematically ruin every single piece of work in this manner.’
The boy turned to him, looked him directly in the eyes.
‘What level was this, sir?’ he asked.
‘You’re currently working at an E.’
‘That’s racist.’ Denis carried on.
Patrick allowed himself dangerous thoughts. Maybe standing up to Denis yesterday had taught him, a boy excluded seven times for fighting, some respect. Maybe he, a male Art teacher, that most lowly and mocked of specialists, had managed to sort matters out through the boy’s own tribal idioms of the raised voice and offensive language. Maybe the incident was already forgotten. Maybe he’d got away with it.
Outside the window, on the patchy grass in front of the school fence where TATIANA IS A FAT SLAG was burned in weed killer, Denis’ gang waited.
Denis stood to place his latest newly destroyed exhibit in the drying rack and, on his return to his seat, brushed his hand across the bare leg of the girl sitting immediately beside him. Far from act offended, Jenna Moris smiled at him.
Patrick had often overheard girls commenting upon Denis’ ‘buffness’, despite signs of acne and a general air of contempt for humankind. The cleft lip wasn’t something that spoiled his looks; it barely registered as an imperfection. In any case, he doubted many pupils knew its true origins, and he probably touted it as a fight scar. But it was odd that Denis was touchy-feely with Jenna Moris, of all pupils, a pretty and sensible brunette who remained on the borderland of Patrick’s senses, never excelling, never causing trouble, getting on with her work. Admittedly, Jenna had lately taken to wearing a skirt shorter than the regulation length, canvassing the attention of testosterone-surged boys, but to even consider romantic attachment to Denis Roberts? Surely not.
And then he translated the look on her face. It wasn’t a smile that existed behind the eyes. It was fear.
The hand was still on her leg. Jenna sat, staring ahead. Tiny muscles bunched under her jawline, beneath the smile, as she began to twist subtly away. His fingertips rose up the thigh, then slipped into forbidden territory. As she made desperate eye contact with the t
eacher, Denis released her.
Patrick could only ask, ‘You two okay?’
‘Sure, sir,’ Denis said
Patrick knew no teacher could let something like that go, so swiftly moved her to another table – it was easier than getting the boy to move. She went willingly.
Denis scowled at Patrick, then banged a fist down, hard, on the table, silencing the class. The anger was terrifying, but Patrick couldn’t help but be envious of Denis’ classroom management skills. He was only fifteen, yet built entirely of a brute anger which demanded authority. He crossed his arms and resumed the silent eyeballing of his teacher.
Patrick attempted to act naturally as he paced the room, putting as much distance between himself and Denis as possible. ‘Sophia… Lovely work. Lauren… Excellent. Josh… Fewer naked ladies, perhaps?’
There were some pupils, from time to time, who gave a damn. Like Serene, the quiet Palestinian whose work was awful last year, her English worse, but who appeared to learn at a superhuman rate and possessed a work ethic that put the rest of the class to shame. Or Cosmo, who when asked how he thought Degas had created his unique brushstrokes, had simply replied, ‘It is pain, only pain.’ He knew it was probably a mangled translation but, by comparison, Denis was nothing but a Vandal. Or maybe he’d simply been trying to say ‘paint’.
The end of the lesson arrived and Patrick asked for a volunteer to help pack away. The usual swots extended their arms amid the squabbling and swearing. As did Denis.
It was an obvious challenge. Dare he refuse him? Denis had never offered help before.
‘Okay. Denis, thank you.’
Patrick watched the boy as he went around the room collecting mirrors and paper. At his own table, Denis almost knocked a pot of water across Matthew Keane’s work. It wobbled, then righted itself. Nothing was ruined, no one got wet, but Matthew saw fit to shout, ‘Watch it, Harey.’
Maybe Matthew had decided to place a public challenge for his crown, or maybe it was a joke gone disastrously wrong, but this insult was far from sophisticated, even by schoolboy standards. The classroom fell silent.
Denis carried on collecting the work as if nothing had happened. Was it possible Denis really hadn’t heard him? Patrick didn’t think so: in those eyes, just for a second, he saw cold, smug malice. The grin of a Napoleon. A bad seed. The boy scratched lightly, perhaps involuntarily, at his cleft lip scar.
‘Um, Jenna,’ Patrick said. ‘Can I see you after class please?’
When Patrick dismissed the group he watched Denis as he retrieved his bag from under his stool then straightened to face his teacher. Patrick braced himself, his deltoids as tense as masonry. One by one, the class left behind him.
Just Patrick, Denis and Jenna remained.
‘Denis, I said you could leave.’
‘I know.’
Patrick walked out of his room, into the corridor, then beckoned for them to follow. He felt safer there, with the CCTV.
‘So what was that? You were touching her leg.’
‘It’s fine, sir,’ she said.
‘See?’ Denis declared. ‘It’s cool.’
Jenna’s eyes never left the ground, but Patrick could tell she was tearful.
‘It’s inappropriate…’ Patrick began.
Denis took a step towards the teacher. ‘You wanna know what’s inappropriate? You’ll see inappropriate. But not in front of a woman, innit. You and me. You’ll see how inappropriate I can be.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’ Patrick asked, but it was to the back of Denis’ head as the boy strode into the corridor and was lost amongst the sea of blue jumpers. Jenna followed.
Thirty seconds later, there came an enormous, prehistoric roar from the stairwell. His recently evicted Elevens were no doubt ‘rushing’ the younger years en route to their tutor rooms and the echoed screams of delight and panic sang like Saturday terraces across the whole floor. He edged towards the stairs to investigate but saw only a mass of heads.
Patrick was just about to retreat into his classroom when a different noise assaulted him above all the others. An animal in pain.
He ran down one set of stairs. Two. The sound seemed to remain the same volume the nearer he got to the source; the animal’s whimpers were dying down.
There was a huddle of bodies around a boy lying in the turn of the stairs, cradling his arm. The boy was Matthew Keane.
‘What’s the matter?’ Patrick asked. ‘Who did this?’ And as soon as he spoke, he knew.
Matthew was cradling his arm, Patrick suspected, not to ease the pain, but to keep it in place. The boy was as white as paper, and it was this, and the sweat, and the tears, rather than any other physical evidence, which told Patrick the arm was horribly dislocated at the shoulder.
‘Was it…?’
‘It was no one. I fell.’
‘I saw,’ said some spotty kid without a single inch of his uniform tucked in the right place. ‘He stacked it.’
‘Yeah, he stacked it,’ said another.
The gathered crowd all nodded. They were all lying. Patrick looked around. No CCTV here, of course.
Patrick asked to have a look but Matthew shuffled away, shaking his head from side to side. The teacher took out his phone to call an ambulance.
‘Already done it,’ several children announced in unison.
‘I reckon we should get him in the recovery position,’ said a lone voice. Another boy hunkered down next to Matthew and whispered, ‘Stay with us, bruv. Hang in there.’
‘Don’t touch him.’ The booming voice came from behind them. One of the new deputy heads (they changed quicker than Charlotte’s boyfriends, and a few of them even had been) was barrelling through the crowds.
The stairwell was soon closed off and Patrick was moved on to deal with the hysterical crowds, Chinese-whispering the incident into delectable untruths.
‘He got shanked.’
‘His neck’s broken.’
‘He shat himself.’
Finally, the mournful wail of an ambulance cut through the madness and the ghoulish crowds headed outside. Patrick headed up to the comparative peace of his classroom to watch through the window.
The ambulance was swarmed, rock star-style, as the paramedics struggled to convey the stretcher towards it. All pairs of eyes were on the boy. All but one.
Denis Roberts, hands in his pockets, was standing under the walkway connecting the library to the English department. His eyes weren’t on the ambulance, or Matthew.
Neck craned, he watched only Patrick. His parting words seemed to play across his features like some kind of television drama voiceover: ‘You and me. I’ll show you how inappropriate I can be.’
Slowly, to make sure his teacher couldn’t possibly mistake the gesture, the boy sliced a calm and steady forefinger across his own throat.
FOUR
The phone in the Art office rang at the end of the day.
‘Shall I get that?’ Patrick asked after three trills, once it’d become obvious Charlotte, the nearest to the phone, wasn’t going to.
Generally, Patrick could hear the excuses forming in her throat before she fashioned them into words, preliminary sighs and clicks, the gobbledegook of academic dissatisfaction. ‘Is that the external line, or the other one?’ she eventually asked.
They both sat there looking at the phone until it rang off. In the playground outside, Luke Dylan in 8H was trying to make Mr Daniels jump by rapping, in the old sense of the word, against the Science lab window. Terry Valentine in 10G peddled poppers behind the tuckshop. The phone rang again.
Patrick leaned over and plucked it from the cradle.
‘There’s a Ms Sarah Ellis here to see you,’ a nameless office entity stated. ‘Shall I send her up?’
‘Who?’ The surname was unfamiliar to Patrick, and he had no appointment scheduled. Reception was strict about people just showing up, ever since Martin Bingham’s father strolled into one of the ICT suites and struck Mr Baker across the chin with
a keyboard.
There was muffled chatter on the end of the line. The voice returned: ‘Jenna Moris’s mother.’
Patrick groaned inwardly. ‘Yeah, go on.’ He replaced the phone.
‘Problem?’ Charlotte asked.
‘No. Nothing.’ Patrick had yet to report the incident he’d witnessed earlier. He’d told himself he hadn’t found the time to do so, that maybe Denis and Jenna were an item after all, that maybe it wasn’t his business. But, when it came down to it, Patrick was ashamed to admit he simply didn’t want any kind of confrontation with the boy.
He wandered over to the pile of still life artefacts in the corner of the office. A plastic skull. The top half of a department store mannequin. A coil of blue rope. Their Australian technician had been in the middle of sorting it all out before he was given the heave-ho for ‘inappropriate use of the darkroom’; the blonde sixth former concerned was already hiding the first bulgings of her pregnancy with looser clothing.
Absentmindedly, Patrick ran his hand over the Les Paul guitar half-buried under the collection. There was a thick layer of dust upon it.
He caught Charlotte’s eye and she looked away, embarrassed.
Jenna’s mother was brought to the Art office by the kind of dumpy, fashion-deficient human being who gave women working in school administration a bad image. Sarah Ellis was far more striking. She was dressed in dark blue jeans, a well-fitting light blue jumper and her trainers were incongruous enough to be fashionable. Her hair was mid-length, dark, with a solitary streak of blonde through the front. She wore no earrings, only a light sugaring of make-up and was probably in her mid-thirties. There was a simmering anger behind multicoloured irises which grew darker nearer the pupils.
‘Hello,’ Patrick said, hoisting over his face the same bogus smile he’d worn for his interview seven long years ago. ‘Let’s go to my classroom. I think I know why you’ve…’