The Art Teacher

by Paul Read

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I knew it was serious when you told me you loved me. It was the first time you’d said that in a long time.’

  He turned to his wife, perplexed. ‘It was? I thought I was always telling you?’

  She shook her head, a rueful smile barely concealed. ‘Oh Patrick. What the hell did you get involved in? Why couldn’t you let me help you?’

  He sighed. It hurt. ‘Things escalated quickly.’

  ‘You can say that again. Are you safe now?’

  He looked over his wounded body, the drips and machines being reset by his nurse. ‘For now, I suppose.’ He felt impossibly tired. The Souljas would just have to take his hospitalisation, and months of physio, as downpayment for Denis’s death, until the truth came out, as it surely would, at Sarah’s trial.

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Well, I’m never going back to teaching.’

  She experimented with a modest laugh. ‘No, I meant…’ The ward hummed. The wheels of a trolley scraped somewhere. ‘…I don’t have to take this job offer, you know.’

  Patrick half-turned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You need to recuperate, and it sounds like you’re better off out of London for a time too, so… I don’t know. Maybe you could come back with us to Argentina? Danny needs you, Patrick. He’s missed you more than you could possibly imagine. And, maybe… I’m not saying it won’t be difficult, but… We could see how it goes. It could be a chance for a fresh start, for all of us…’

  Patrick gazed at his wife in mute, drugged wonder. He wouldn’t be leaving this hospital for some time but the thought of heading faraway with his son, with Ana, was morphine itself. He could only nod in quiet shock.

  They both became aware of a clicking pair of feet along the ward, growing louder before they slowed.

  When Meadows appeared, his dour face registered a brief surprise then, unthinkably, a degree of amusement. Though he couldn’t possibly have known what had occurred in the last hour, there was something in the older man’s bearing which tried desperately hard, Patrick recognised now, to foster the pretence that he was one step ahead of everyone. Meadows stopped with a sharp snap at the foot of the hospital bed, his lined head tilted to one side as he eyeballed the bedridden Art teacher and his unfamiliar visitor. The customary notebook was already in his hand.

  Patrick propped himself up onto one elbow, gritted his teeth against the violent pain in his side.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector, I’m prepared to revise my statement.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Since the title of this book was announced, several people have been in touch asking whether its contents are autobiographical. They are not. During the majority of the time I spent teaching in England, I was privileged to work at an outstanding secondary school in leafy North London, championed by a management team and hard-working colleagues far removed from the characters depicted in The Art Teacher. None of the incidents described within these pages occurred (to my knowledge) and there’s good reason why this book is fictional: bureaucracy rarely makes for a riveting read.

  I’ve been careful not to name any of my characters after real people for fear of causing offence but if I erroneously borrowed someone’s name it’s because my memory is terrible and more than two-thousand different pupils passed through my various classrooms during the years I worked part-time, desperately trying to make a go of my soppy, unlikely dream of getting published. Either that, or I just thought you had a cool name.

  Highfields too, does not exist, though it should be said that schools with similar problems do, schools where staff feel undervalued and under-supported and their pupils fail to receive the attention or edification they deserve. Like Patrick, I’d make a lousy politician but it’s clear to me that we marginalise issues relating to, and reduce the funding for, the education system at our peril.

  There are several people I need to thank.

  Early advice, which was justifiably scathing, and incredibly helpful, came from Matt Thorne. Likewise, feedback from Harriett Gilbert guided me toward newer directions. To anyone who’s ever read my work, in whatever form, and offered either honest or dishonest reviews, I thank you, principally the members of my London City MA programme and Tony Hayles and Matthew Strawson. Thanks to the APS team for laughs and spicy chicken in my carnivorous days. And to Mum, for a lifelong love of reading. Sorry about all the swearing.

  To all at Legend Press: you are. Legends. Tom, Lauren, Lucy, Lottie, Jessica: thank you so much. Special thanks must go to Rob whose editorial sagacity has transformed this book in subtly powerful ways too numerous to mention here.

  My agent, Louise Greenberg, deserves particular praise for patience and wisdom beyond measure.

  Most of all, thank you Patricia, for putting up with closed doors and wishful thinking, for being the designated driver far too often and for giving me two beautiful children under bluer skies. The people above all helped in some way along the line, but I couldn’t have done any of this without you.

  We hope you enjoyed Paul’s brilliant debut, The Art Teacher.

  Paul’s second novel, Blame, centres around a man called Lucas. He has a good job in pharmaceuticals, plenty of casual friends and the conviction that whatever ill-advised habits he may have are well under control. When the father he’s hated for most of his life dies in perplexing circumstances, Lucas impulsively accompanies a girlfriend on her visit home, instead of heading to his. A long-forgotten diary soon plunges him back into the events leading to his family’s collapse.

  Here’s a sample of Blame:

  The three of us trudge to the summit with heads bowed, the north wind twisting the long grass flat under our feet. Our midday sun is a ghost behind clouds pregnant with snow, and nothing in this beautiful, hostile place has a shadow.

  Mum holds the box. It’s made of thick purple cardboard, about the same shape and size as a child’s shoebox, and is bound by an unpretentious elastic band. Suddenly, she slows.

  ‘Here. This is the place.’

  The view rises to meet us as we scale the crown. Fifty unspoilt miles of the south coast unfurl with jutting piers, undulating shores and wind-lashed hawthorns. At the horizon, the sky becomes the land becomes the sea. My eyes smart with the cold.

  ‘He loved this place,’ Mum confirms for the hundredth time, this recently retired woman who used to dress for any occasion but today wears tired jeans and a shapeless brown jumper. The weather has made an unruly thatch of her hair.

  She slides the lid off and the three of us peer inside.

  My brother’s reaction is as I’d expected, but I take no pleasure from the vaguely harrowed expression he wears. He’s not a man of science and had been expecting the grey ashes of television drama. What he sees is an exercise in simple physics: the pulverised dry bone fragments from a cremulator risen, via convection, through the lighter granules after ten years of sitting in the corner of Mum’s bedroom.

  ‘It looks like…’ he begins.

  ‘I know,’ Mum says.

  A middle-aged man approaches from a worn path below, his waterproofs vacuum-sealed against his torso by the swirling wind. A black Labrador leads the way, sniffing expertly at the sparse hedgerows. I look to the others.

  ‘Shall we wait?’

  They both nod. We’ve waited a decade; another two minutes won’t hurt.

  ‘We should turn our backs,’ my brother suggests, pointing across the green-grey, ‘so he’s taken across the Downs, that way.’

  He’s.

  We turn away from the wind, though it seems to make little difference.

  The approaching man quickens, as if he knows we’re waiting for him. His eyes are apologetic. In his wake, clouds break and snow begins to spiral in small flakes, black against the white sky.

  It’s Good Friday and this must surely be one of the last truly cold weekends of the year – the ground under us is frozen and I can see the snow beginning to settle already – but it’s an important ann
iversary, and we’ve managed to all meet up, so this is the day it has to happen. I was opposed to the idea, at first, but my brother’s right: those fragile, shell-like bone particles are him. This is more than a gesture. This is a disposal. We have arrived at an ending.

  Mum begins to pour as she walks along the brow of the hill, leaving a little trail of fragments behind her. As the larger granules run out, the smaller particles are released, catch the wind and disperse in a thousand different directions. My brother reels, having caught some in the eye. We laugh. My mother hands the box to me and I empty a little more. The ash diffuses through the wind in a spectral curtain of swirls and eddies. I can taste it on my teeth. Mum stands back at some distance, lost in thought, eyeballing the view. I hand the box to my brother and he shakes out the remainder, his eyes red from the cold and the ash. Then, it is over.

  We stand there, cinders in our mouths, our hair, upon our coats, watching the snow mingle with the dust, float back down to Earth a part of it, and with every blink I see a fresh tableau within the churning sky. Candlelit lovers caught unaware through a thin gap in a door. A phone call announcing a murder. The beginning of love above the New York skyline. Blood leading to the closed doors of an ambulance. All times are here and now and one and the same, condensed, with this moment, into a single journey. And it all seems like yesterday.

  We fall into a group hug and stare out over the whitening view. I’m the first to speak.

  ‘Bye Dad.’

  Time travel. It’s an easy, forgiving process. It takes nothing to go back, to rewrite.

  It’s often said that history is scripted by the winners. Personally, I think ‘survivors’ would be a better word. I’ve been several people in my time, and my return visits to those others’ pasts are unreliable at best and complete fabrications at worst. I have survived myself, but only just.

  Don’t believe a word I tell you. Take it from me.

  We return to the car park, our shoes creaking across the compacting snow.

  I can see my wife reading a book in the back of the Cherokee. Our son is upright in his Mamas and Papas car seat beside her, in a sleep that could, and does, survive fireworks and thunderstorms but cannot cope with the imperceptible tread of a parent’s footstep. Sure enough, he stirs, then turns a slow, accusatory head towards me. This extra sensory perception, in turn, alerts his mother to my presence. She counters her smile immediately, assuming it’s inappropriate. I beam back, but this only serves to make her uneasy. She knows the full range of my smiles, and this one didn’t fool her at all.

  She stuffs her book out of sight and winds the window down. Her eyes, pink and watery, focus on the empty box Mum carries.

  We all get in without another word. My brother in the back. My mother next to me. I turn the engine and it stutters, hesitates, then starts. I know it’s just my imagination, but the snow slowing the wipers seems grittier than usual. The analogue clock mounted to the Jeep’s dashboard shows it’s much later than I realised. Once again, time ran away from us.

  ‘Will the snow cause problems for the car?’ Mum asks.

  I reassure her that it won’t.

  On the way to the restaurant, I attempt to close my mind around the memories and feelings we’ve just thrown into the air. I can’t rationalise or order those lonely fragments of time. All I can do, as the chatter around me grows in its geniality and my son – quite rightly – steals the conversation away from the darkness, is watch the narrow roads unlace in the rear-view mirror, my thoughts whirling with the bone particles, hunting for answers, for chronology, trying to get back, right back, to a beginning of sorts.

  And then I hit the ice. The Jeep bucks, jolts out of my control. I try to do as you’re told to do in the circumstances and steer into the skid but the steering locks beneath my hands and we glide, in slow motion yet at thirty miles an hour, into an oncoming van, its driver’s horrified face nothing but an open mouth screaming towards us.

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