by Paul Read
She wasn’t embarrassed to admit she’d been listening to his work. She wanted him to see the album, just as she’d obviously wanted him to spot her therapy notes earlier. She wanted him to see her as she was, and he felt his heart dance a little closer towards something that could, perhaps, one day, be love.
He recalled the reviews of this, their first album. ‘One of the better bands from the current crop,’ a reporter in the know had begun. ‘Undoubted talent,’ heralded another. ‘Cuts a swathe into the zeitgeist.’ But no one bought their second album of doubtful, murky compositions, avant-garde melodies forged in the inferno of his and Ana’s adultery.
‘Please don’t put it on,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘What would you say if they wanted to give it another go?’
Ana’s betrayals fermenting anew within his mind, Patrick’s reply was instant. ‘I’d tell her to get lost.’
‘I meant the band.’
‘Oh.’ Patrick slumped into the recess Sarah left in her pillow. He contemplated the brutal monotony of his teaching career, squaring it alongside the day The Forsaken played Glastonbury and Iggy Pop asked him for a cigarette backstage. ‘I think I’d rejoin, yeah.’
Sarah smiled and slipped back into bed, then curled herself up, somewhat defensively.
‘Night, Patrick.’
At that moment, he knew he’d wait until Sarah’s snoring insulted his insomnia before scribbling out his note of apology and leaving it on her bedside. He knew the night busses wouldn’t be running and a long, freezing trudge back home under a pale, cartridge paper sky awaited him. But, right then, despite his growing feelings for this woman, and the deepening mysteries surrounding her daughter, he wanted nothing more than to sleep fitfully in his son’s unmade bed with the neighbour’s violin playing a hymnal and the certainty of snow shutting Highfields.
He’d stick to the shadows on the way home, and pray Denis was sleeping too.
FIVE
There was a doll on his desk, a plastic newborn with flapping eyelids and a mouth puckered into the inverse of a feeding bottle’s teat. Like some kind of perverse voodoo offering, a cigarette had been burnt into the crotch, its stub a crude, protruding sexual organ. Across the chest, the word PEEDO had been scrawled in lipstick.
He regarded it for a while, wondering whether or not to get PC Thomas in again, but eventually decided it wasn’t obvious whether it was an insult directed at him or a sixth former’s work of art. In any case, teachers have always had to endure pupils giving them insulting nicknames, but Patrick was aware that, in the twenty-first century, nothing hits harder than insinuations of paedophilia. He was hopeful this sinister rumour – if that’s what it was – would fade into history alongside the gossip concerning Mr Jackson’s toupee (true), Mrs Edgar’s ‘love of blacks’ (a misinterpretation of a some-time proclivity) and Mr Malcolm’s wooden penis (baseless falsehood), but he knew children had little sense of quietude; information was no good battened down. Like money, gossip was designed to be spent and, as all good capitalists in a recession are urged to do, he knew children spent recklessly given the chance. The notion that he was ‘seeing’ the mother of a pupil had perhaps snowballed into a grotesquery, maybe after Jenna herself had admitted it to one of her scandalised friends.
Patrick had long prided himself on keeping his private life and work separate and, having no desire to see that change, didn’t mention the doll to anyone. If these were yet more off-stage boos, an unquiet critiquing of his skills from the stalls, then so what? Reporting it would have meant hours of form-filling and emails.
He threw the doll in the bin then, from the window, sought answers in the ambling figures of children entering the playground and surmised the identity of several gang members. Karl Simpson sported a limp, a deep scratch on his cheek and an amateur repair to cut knuckles. Quincy Ofulu was contused, battered and beaming with adrenaline. Halil Mostafa walked with his head high, showing off the bruising to his neck which hung like a necklace of hickies. No one with an injury seemed to speak to anyone else with an injury, and they moved as scarred islands among the innocent flock. The watery snow had been scraped off the playground but a few kids had gathered ammunition from goodness knows where, and a tamer version of Monday night’s brawl was taking place by the fence. Denis was playing basketball, seemingly unscathed, spinning the ball up into a basket with its netting torn. He had even developed an extra bob to his already boastful swagger and somehow there was a new purpose to him, a sense of the untouchable as he laughed and bickered with another pupil, revealing a camaraderie and playfulness Patrick seldom saw in his classroom.
The boy’s vengeance was to be a slow one, was it? What would come next? Razor blades hidden inside his pigeon hole? A nail up through his chair? The thought of his parents’ evening appointment later on was a dark twist in Patrick’s heart.
Never far from Denis’ side, a brunette in a skirt far too short for the season exposed an approximation of her mother’s legs, clung and whinnied over his very presence.
Was this evidence of a personality trait Patrick needed to let Sarah know about? Might the loss of a father figure have forced Jenna to pine over boys who mistreated her? Did Denis actually like Jenna, or was he, for reasons unknown, merely convincing her he did?
When the bell sounded, Denis stood, ran his hand through Jenna’s hair and ambled away from the school building. Jenna looked without expression in the boy’s wake before turning and glancing up at Patrick’s window.
He wouldn’t report the doll. In seeing Jenna’s mother, he was already kicking the hornet’s nest. He probably didn’t need to stick his dick in there as well.
She appeared at his door later that day, refusing to look him in the eye. He couldn’t blame her, and tried to imagine how he’d have felt if he’d believed his mother had been carrying on with one of his secondary school teachers. He’d probably have killed himself.
She wasn’t the only one who had trouble looking at him either. Matthew was back, an external fixator on his arm, pins bolted deep into iodine-stained flesh.
‘Good to have you back,’ Patrick said. ‘How’s the arm?’
‘It’s better,’ was the sheepish reply. No doubt the pride with which he’d been previously showing off his injury was acutely tempered whenever he faced someone who was actually there, who’d heard his screams. The boy was on a cocktail of anti-coagulants and painkillers; his eyes were two full stops in his face and his hair was an electric shock of toilet-brush. It seemed Matthew had sustained far more damage than simply popping his shoulder out of its socket. He’d snapped his radius just below the elbow.
‘Surely you’re not fit to be back yet?’
‘Ride or die, sir.’ Matthew was a different specimen to Denis. His rage might have been natural but his overconfidence wasn’t. This was the kind of boy who laughed over teachers’ altered entries on Wikipedia using his mobile phone then allowed that exact same phone to be confiscated.
Matthew had recently been added to the unofficial SEN register, due to ‘behavioural issues’, but that seemed to Patrick no more than a cover for his real problem: he no longer gave a shit. Academically, Matthew Keane had lapsed into one of those marginal students, a D grader, borderline C, who could potentially scupper an entire year’s exam results. Come GCSE time, it was kids like Matthew who received more attention than they deserved, like swing states in American elections. Without help, Matthew, and others akin to him, would be listlessly plodding from room to room, truanting the odd class and generally underachieving to their hearts’ content.
‘So how exactly did you do that then?’ Patrick asked, as flippantly as he felt he could get away with.
Matthew shrugged, followed it with a vague wince of remembrance. ‘Careless, wasn’t I?’ He began to walk to his seat, as fast as his analgesics permitted.
‘No. Really. How did it happen?’
Matthew, realising escape was impossible, stopped and turned. ‘I told this story, like, five hundred fuck
ing times already. I might’ve got a knock. There were too many people pushing.’
‘You sure?’
The boy looked at his teacher as though he were the biggest dunce in the school. He held up his forearm and the metal sparkled. ‘Yes sir. I think so.’
He took his seat.
Patrick outlined the day’s task. Each student was to create a half-decent replica of their own head from clay and he took the class through the basics, then patrolled the room, waiting for the carnage. Denis hadn’t entered the room with the rest of them, and he kept looking towards the door, waiting for the latecomer to gatecrash with an explosive act of violence. His tile-armoured body warmer was giving him terrible neck ache.
It was Jenna who fashioned the first grenade, tamely lobbing it over to Marie, a pretty, gothic-looking girl whose dark hair was betrayed by ginger eyebrows. She caught the clay easily and asked Jenna something Patrick couldn’t quite discern, though he heard Denis’ name mentioned. Jenna dismissed the enquiry in a guilty, complicit manner, betraying the fact she had information to hide. Indeed, her friend sang back a childish ‘Oooh’ at which Jenna visibly blushed.
Were Jenna and Denis, unthinkably, friends? More than friends? He’d seen her in the group just before the brawl but didn’t really believe she would be so stupid as to become mixed up romantically with the boy. And yet, here she was, coyly skirting the issue with a teenage lack of dexterity at odds with her appearance (it was impossible to ignore the similarities between her and her mother: the same small, precise features; the eyes a comparable multiplicity of colours; the same slightly nervous mannerisms hidden by the brash voice of the metropolis). Jenna even managed to draw in an angry, juvenile way these days, which didn’t do her already scratchy and disjointed style any favours whatsoever. She chewed gum, masticating exaggeratedly, and when he told her to spit it out she plucked it from her mouth and contemptuously fastened it beneath her table. Almost overnight, he’d created a delinquent.
Miraculously, the carnage of clay never interfered with the lesson’s usual undercurrent of disruptive childishness, and it wasn’t until the hour’s end that Denis appeared.
Patrick sensed him, even before he knew he was there. His presence was heralded by a poltergeist-flicker of lights, which seemed to suddenly deposit the boy in the blink of an eye at his classroom door. Matthew was certainly spooked out, and didn’t leave his stool with the others, visibly shrinking from his former friend. But Denis, hands in his pockets, eyes unseeing, seemed to be waiting only for Jenna.
‘Tonight,’ Denis growled at her, and then was gone.
Patrick saw Christophe glance over, then unsubtly swivel his eyes towards an uneven stack of papers on his desk before rechecking the spelling of DuPont on his name card with dark and knitted brows.
The Arts and Humanities subjects, a loose umbrella title which also incorporated Modern Foreign Languages and PE (the dads would be all over Miss Bates, Patrick knew, who wore a pair of yoga trousers which left no mystery whatsoever as to her figure’s exact geometry), were gathered in the hall, while Science, Maths and English – the important, ‘Core’ subjects – hid in the gym. Charlotte sat filing her nails to Patrick’s left, a bored Harriet to his right.
Patrick normally objected to this way of meeting the parents, and knew of nearby schools where teachers remained in their teaching rooms while the pupils’ progenitors toured the lost corridors, but was grateful that, tonight, a degree of impersonal protection was assumed as a result of the all-in-one arrangement.
At first everyone had been able to hear Mr Pfister refer to Cindy Granger as ‘keen and disciplined’ and stress how, if he’d been her father, he would have sent her to an entirely different school but, as more parents began streaming in, the hall bloomed with noise and only the conversations from the immediate other side of the desks could be heard. Patrick sat alone for some time. 6:15 stood out on his appointment sheet as though inked in blood, but he didn’t unduly concern himself with the fact. Neither Denis nor his mother had been particularly frequent attendees of parents’ evenings over the last four years.
Patrick rang Ana’s mother.
‘¿Quién llama?’
‘Can I speak to Ana? I tried Skype yesterday. Is everything okay? Did they make it back alright?’
‘I tell you she no here.’
‘They flew back days ago.’
‘No here. She and Danny in England.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘No, you mistaken. Ring hotel.’
‘Listen, there is no way my son would be in London without me knowing. They were due to catch a flight Monday. Just ask her to call me, will you?’
Derek Pertwee’s mother bowled over and Patrick hung up.
Just as the teaching of drawing is all about redrawing, modifying and refining mistakes, so Patrick knew he also had to mould his parents’ evening performance around the personalities and expectations of his carousel of visitors, some of whom would be supportive, others hostile. At one point, when faced with a huge bouncer of a parent he suspected would pounce upon any criticism of his lackadaisical daughter with very real violence, he even affected a South London accent. The truth of the matter was that parents’ evenings at Highfields were just as frightening as being in the classroom.
Sarah and Jenna breezed into the hall.
The pupils were required to wear uniform at these events and it was interesting to note that Jenna had rolled her skirt back down at the back to repair its length. In contrast, Sarah had dressed as though attending a gala premiere, dressed in a tiny black number which courted considerable attention. She waved at Patrick across the hall and he waved back, then looked around to see who’d noticed. Nobody except Christophe had.
Jenna hadn’t made an appointment of course, and to have done so would have been suicidal, but that didn’t stop Sarah from tottering over while her daughter spoke to Mary in 11C.
She stood in front of him, hand on hip, chest thrust forward. ‘I got your Dear John,’ she said before bending forward at the waist and putting her mouth to his ear. ‘Just imagine,’ she breathed. ‘Me. You. This desk. All these people watching.’ And then she was gone.
Charlotte’s face remained blank, and he had to respect that. Harriet began a coughing fit. It wouldn’t be long before she took another week off.
Parents and pupils came and went as Patrick’s eyes calloused themselves harder with tiredness. He could tell more-or-less off the bat how the encounters were going to go. Praise worked best of course, even if it wasn’t deserved, and generally sent both parent and pupil off happily nonplussed. Occasionally, the room erupted with laughter and everyone looked with suspicion, more often than not, towards the dads at Miss Bates’ table.
At about six, it seemed to get darker, the oxygen retreated and something approaching quiet fell over the hall like a fire blanket. Denis Roberts and his mother had arrived.
Patrick watched them amble near Mr Stewart and hunker on the chairs aligned around the perimeter of the hall. Mrs Roberts was a large woman, especially weighty around the neck, wrists and ankles, as though out of some hideous deference to gravity, and her complexion was as rugged and blotched as someone who’d spent years working on a farm while eating nothing but chips. Despite all this, there was a trace of something once-beautiful in the shape of the face and the sideways olivedrops of her eyes, but anger and Western sedentism had set in and ruined her.
Mr Stewart was finishing his conversation with Amy Stoppard’s mum and smiled over at the Roberts duo to let them know they were next. Mrs Roberts looked back at him with a cold, unmoved gaze then heaved herself from her chair.
While Denis moved very little, his mother occasionally looked towards her boy but it was hard to tell their emotions, not least because Miriam Dylan’s father sat before Patrick trying to ascertain, in irate fashion, exactly why his daughter had earned an E and not an A* on her latest report.
Patrick clichéd his way through the rest of the meeting with Miria
m’s father and the moment he left, muttering something about modern professionalism, Denis and his mother edged forward to take their places. Instinctively, Patrick’s eyes flicked round the hall for nearby fire exits. Sarah and Jenna still worked their way round the room.
‘Hello, Denis,’ Patrick offered, his voice a convincing falsetto for the first time in his life.
‘Alright,’ the boy replied, slumping almost horizontally in a chair opposite.
Denis looked defeated already and Patrick wondered what monstrous bribe had been dangled to drag Denis here. His mother’s face was fierce with the expectation of criticism. She neither offered recognition nor her hand.
Patrick turned matters over, straight away, to Denis. ‘So, Denis. Tell me. How do you think it’s going?’
Denis looked up. There was more than a trace of confusion in the shaved eyebrows.
‘Alright,’ he shrugged again.
Patrick attempted to turn on the charm, looked to the mother and half-rolled his eyes. ‘They all say that,’ he demurred. ‘I would say that Denis is a very capable student. Very talented.’
‘Is he applying himself?’ she asked, clearly suspecting the answer.
‘No.’
There was a silence amid the din of the hall. Mother and son both sighed in dismal acceptance and Patrick wondered, if this was what they’d been expecting, why they’d bothered turning up.
‘What does he need to do?’ she enquired.
‘He needs to produce a year and a half’s worth of artwork in the next four months.’
She turned to face her son. ‘Am I going to get this from everybody tonight?’