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‘Did you see what he was doing with Mrs Coleman? Totally inappropriate but she insists it’s all in good humour. Good humour indeed! He’s one big joke!’
‘He’s an extroverted chap for sure, Anne,’ came back Noble, as Natalia slipped behind a door to listen, ‘but he’s brought many positive things to the school that have—’
‘He’s changing PE after Christmas which brings Mr Winterbrook’s workload up short notice! And with his poor mum being ill he’s in a pickle right now! Goodness, first time as a Head, and it shows! The man’s far too young, a liability! He simply doesn’t know what he’s doing!’
As Mr Noble muttered and parted ways from Mrs Williams, Natalia followed her wibbling bottom on to form class, curious as to what Neill had done to Coleman. Consulted her on underhand proposals? Scrutinised her coldsore? Peeled and presented a banana to her gob? Does it beat her growing list?
Stopping her just outside the door, Natalia thought she could perhaps make use of Williams’ notoriously morally-erect character.
‘Miss, can I speak with you?’
‘Yes, Natalia? It’s time for—’
‘Can I speak with you about Marcia,’ she motioned her back. ‘Marcia and Stacey. They tease me a lot. They say horrible things and make me feel… really, anxious.’
‘Oh, that’s not nice.’ She adjusted her spectacles, mouth drooping like a fish as she examined Natalia’s face.
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Marcia is the new girl, only just settling in.’
‘Ye-es…’
‘Have they, have they… threatened you at all? Done anything to you? Bully you?’
‘I don’t know if it counts as that. I just know it doesn’t make me feel very good. Maybe I should speak to that welfare officer you mentioned in Pastoral—’
‘Pupils tease each other all the time. Chin up! Best to ignore it! You’re a top pupil and you can’t let it spoil your revision. Mock Exams are only two weeks away, remember!’ Williams opened the door and ushered her in.
‘Yes, miss.’
Useless. Natalia slunk into her chair, averting her face from the rest of the class lest she have something flicked at her head again. Did she have to get beaten up before her welfare was taken an interest in? Have a leg broken before she had a leg to stand on?
Hanging her head in this way for most of the day seemed to make it go smoothly. She couldn’t meet eyes with nor catch a mutter in her direction right till hometime when she found herself having genial chat up the driveway with Shaziya Begum from Year 8. Wondering whether the wind might blow off her niqab so she could see whether Neill was telling the truth about her chipped tooth, and also whether she’d get on better with girls who hadn’t quite hit the onslaught of pubescent bodily consciousness and who may well never reach it if they wore a body covering from head to toe, her heart finally sank to see Marcia and Stacey at her bus stop.
Fingering their pockets for fags - as Natalia waved goodbye to Shaziya getting into her dad’s Peugeot - how ghastly a habit smoking seemed when not in the hands of Neill. A moment of reminiscence of poking the spongy orange tip into those parted, impertinent lips made her own lips begin to curl upwards just as Marcia was lighting up and one wild eye caught on Natalia.
‘That must be the only friend she’s got,’ giggled Stacey. ‘Letterboxes, my mam calls ‘em.’
‘What you staring at, spoff?’
‘Bit unoriginal,’ murmured Natalia as she turned away upon Stacey’s ensuing fit of giggles. Hyenas indeed.
‘You got a problem, bitch!’
‘Bit glib,’ said Natalia louder.
‘What? What did she say?’
Natalia’s mouth felt like sandpaper.
‘Is she gettin’ mouthy? You gettin’ mouthy, skinny bitch? Do you know what we’ll do?’
She kept her face trained on the spot up the hill where the bus would emerge from.
‘Leave her Stacey, aww look - she’s going all red, she’s scared!’
Condescension was ten times worse.
Frightened by her own growing volition to speak again, and louder, her tongue was straining, like never before, that her face stiffened like a brick trying to bite it quiet. As the bus appeared, the duo whispered behind her, then barged in front for the doors, knocking hard into her shoulder. Stomping up to the top deck whilst Natalia secreted herself behind an old lady in the front disabled-access seats, the shoulder knock swam from her crown to her soles.
Looking to a frail pensioner for protection, what was this! When a burly man embarked a few stops later, Natalia swapped him for her human shield, going unseen by Stacey and Marcia when they finally clattered off at Foundry Avenue.
She heaved a sigh of relief, now feeling silly for being scared.
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*
‘You can’t cook a pie you bought a week ago in the reduced section,’ Natalia groaned under her duvet. ‘It really hurts.’
‘Probably a 24-hour thing. You’ll be right as rain tomorrow. Milk and banana for a belly ache, there’s one left I think. I’m going out—’
‘Mum?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Why did dad leave?’
Natalia could see her mum’s pursed lips through her five-inch thick duvet.
‘He just… yer know. He had enough, you know.’
‘You know, you know…’ Natalia stopped. She wanted to say, no, she doesn’t fucking know. How is she supposed to ‘know’ when family go for years without talking about the most obvious big things?
‘When you said the other day about dad running away,’ the talking duvet continued. ‘Did he leave when I was crying all the time? All the tantrums you said I used to have—’
‘No, no no…’
‘So, where is he now?’
Another pause. ‘I don’t know love. I don’t keep track. I don’t care. Best not to.’
On the closing bang of the front door, Natalia’s left eye, then right eye flicked opened. Fruit… bowl. She slipped out and down into the kitchen and saw that indeed, there was one banana left in it.
One was all she needed. One banana, to feed not her stomach but her soul right now. Take it, Natalia… as she took it into her hand. Do it in love for me. Oh she’d eat this, for him, right now! She would stand and peel it as meticulously as Neill had done, just as lovingly, for herself. Slowly, smiling, laughing; far more sensually than she possibly was able to do in his office.
The top didn’t break on this one, so she had to bore a hole with her nail. The banana in the office had been slightly under-ripe, plucked from a fresh bunch her mum had just bought from Aldi - bearing a stripe of green that Neill had snapped like a seal - that had made a scouring noise as the first peel came down, when she’d watched with innocent bemusement thinking he was going to eat it.
Unlike this banana with flecks of ageing brown upon its softer, quieter skin as she stripped it down, the strands on the office banana had come away easily, none of those horrible dangly bits, and the whole shaft had popped neatly from its skin as she ate it piece by piece, reducing time for awkward pickings of strings from sides of the banana and, God forbid, from her mouth.
It wasn’t every day she was called to observe the minutiae of banana ripening, she mused. The main thing was getting that fragrant mush moving in her mouth, into that awkwardness and delight all at once, and how it ended with a curious confidence, as if she’d just swallowed a dare, and washed out the final taste and looked up unnerved, a notch up of nonchalance. Notchalance. Incremental incredulousness. Every time she went into Neill’s office and tasted something. Eat me! Drink me! Grow bigger, twenty years bigger you difficult bugger, and ask mum where the fuck’s dad!
She chucked the skin with a Neillian exhale, went upstairs and slipped back into bed, closed her eyes, the lyrics from This is My Body on loop in her mind. Filled with his spirit, how you will grow! You are the banana, I am the tree! Over the face of Marcia and Stacey in her head, she plastered over the image of Neill, blowing a bigger cloud of smoke than they ever could over that greasy-fringed pimp.
She dared her memory to wander through everything they’d spoken in their last meeting, smiles hitting like popcorn in a pan on her face as she recalled his corkers. ‘Bollocks bigger than mine,’ he’d said of Miss Bailey. ‘Drawing the most amusingly detailed cock graffiti.’ Enid Blyton’s dick and fanny. He’d even said cunt. He joked he’d need her to hold his hand, the most outrageous bit of all to imagine him needing her emotional support.
She closed her eyes and saw crude graffiti of bollocks and bananas rising from lunchboxes and pissing over toilet seats as she lay smiling, singing: ‘Do it in love for meee!’ which turned into: ‘Don’t give up now, little Donnn-key!’ louder and louder, till she heard her mum clatter through the front door, and she fell into thoughtful silence, then into mouth-hanging sleep, waking happily to a sheen of banana dried like glue on her tongue.
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*
There was something deeply comforting about seeing that long black bonnet outside the school. It was a signal, a flag of reassurance that he is here. He is here. He is already here. He is able to be here, and he has chosen to be here. He is parked, he is inside, he is with us.
Arriving purposefully late that morning to avoid form, she passed by the Merc, noticing it left scant room for Mr Allsebrook’s yucky Yaris - more alliteration, a girl after my own heart!… as a dim ray of sun squeezed through the clouds glinting off the contours of the waxed bodywork like no other car in the car park.
Joining the tail of her class filing into Assembly, her attention was sucked like sand through an hourglass in such intent anticipation for the sight of beige-suited Neill striding to the front, that as she fumbled to sit down, she failed to notice the two girls who had slipped in either side of her.
As the rest of the school settled and awaited Neill’s bellow that would signal the hall to silence, sniggers came from the pointy elbows now bookending her, mouth-breathing a low vitriolic conversation right into her space, thoroughly intended for the now crestfallen Natalia to hear, as she realised in a mortifying moment who was either side of her, and her excitement from a moment ago flailed like a burst pimple.
‘Tonight,’ whispered Marcia, ‘we’ll batter her.’
A sinister giggle came from Stacey that reminded Natalia of some disturbing film she’d one night found her mum watching on Channel 5 about a serial killer called Henry.
‘Why are you gonna beat her up?’
‘I can’t stand her.’
Natalia’s blood slowed like lead. Her normal reaction of indignation was weighted by what felt like an iceberg that could crack and melt on the very spot.
‘Quiet, everyone! QUIET!’
A hush fell over the hall as Neill’s smooth tones began only a few metres yet a mile away. Her gaze fell into her lap where her hands were clasped; blinking to the sides to curse the knees of the two fiends that had it in for her. What had been the use of keeping her head down all day yesterday! Between them, right here, she was a weak, sallow, pathetic undergrown thing. ‘Poor, obscure, plain and little,’ like Jane herself! Twenty years ahead - what a fucking joke! Just like Williams said, everything Neill said was surely a joke!
Now he was doling out certificates to Year 8s on behalf of their absent Head of Year, Noble. Then with a sudden shift in timbre which piqued Natalia’s interest to look up, he was announcing the new canteen meals, and the hall whooped into a pronounced round of applause.
He stood smiling and soaking it in, as his eyes roamed to her - either because they sought her out, or because she stood out - as tellingly, neither she nor the two girls either side of her were clapping.
His face bore a quizzical ‘why aren’t you clapping?’ look, with a growing shade of ‘why on earth are you sitting with those two?’ The latter grew evident to be the emphasis, as his eyes, still fixed on her whilst the clapping waned, moved from one girl to the other, and in a flash she knew, right in this moment, she’d been busted.
He said he’d find it out, and he did.
As soon as Assembly was done, she was out of here. She would walk straight out of the school, and walk all the way home if she had to. She couldn’t face anyone right now, least alone herself.
As the hall full of pupils began to rise and bottleneck through the doors, the curse of her companions only remained pinioned to her sides; the brush of their arms made her feel like she would vomit or wheeze or implode... she turned and suddenly spluttered, as though her throat had suddenly opened, unlocked, activated:
‘Just leave me ALONE! You are nasty, awful twats! Go fuck yourselves, just fuck off, fuck right fucking off!’
Before Stacey and Marcia had blinked, Natalia had burst away like a thunderbolt several bodies ahead whilst the staff, including Neill, were all moving ahead of the pupils through the same doors.
She was thrown more than one indignant ‘watch it!’ as she wormed her way through the doors with a shove here and a shove there, making headway in the widest part of the corridor, until the narrow part began, which siphoned the pupils into three a head. And from over the tops of all the heads, she groaned to see a few feet away, Neill stationed with Mrs Coleman to the right side of the moving traffic. Why were they standing right there in the way? A pulse of adrenalin deep in her pelvis both adored and abhorred that she would have to pass Neill within a metre proximity.
The volume of Neill’s merry chit-chat grew nearer, and now over bobbing heads, his eyes met hers - as she lowered her face, and crossed her arms - lest he might grab her wrist again. But the closer the traffic moved along, she knew something would happen, she just knew…
She looked up again, and found herself suddenly transfixed, veering toward him, reeled in like a tiny fish in a strong current passing a hair away from the underbelly of a Great White. And before she could look for a gap to swim away, in a flash she felt across her waist, his stout suited arm barricading her from going further - all while he was still facing ahead, continuing to talk casually with Mrs Coleman.
With the flow direction of the crowd moving forward, no-one else could see Neill’s tactful interception, nor even could Coleman, occupied in conversation on his other side; Natalia barred from her view by Neill’s body itself. And lest she try to slip round it, his hand was inside her coat, pulling the fabric of her jumper tight in a decisive fist,
She was pulled into him like a curtain caught in a hoover. Her face was almost against his upper jacket sleeve where she now took refuge in the stiff cotton that tickled her cheek. Blinking slowly, she inched her right nostril over an increment to inhale it, and for one infinitesimal, peculiar glimmering moment she drops her heavy bags of emotion - or rather, is suspended lightly just above them - and basks in the warmth that had once encircled her wrist, now encircling her body.
It was barely a minute he could hold her there, but in that short time something seemed to happen within her torso: his arm, his hand, the pressure on her stomach and her hip, pressed right where she felt her deepest sadness, fear and loneliness, and the touch seemed to do something amazing but terrifying to it - it seemed to stir it up like powder from the bottom of a glass of water, and at the same time she embraced it, she wanted to run a million bashful miles from it. As the moving crowd quickly thinned out to an end, it ended the surreal moment that could only be couched within it, and as the last people drifted out, Neill had no choice but to let go of her from his side, well before anyone including Coleman could see.
Natalia stumbled away on legs that were weakened by two things: her misery, and the tender, unexpected encounter with Neill. Was that just a mistake, did she get caught upon his body accidentally? Confused, ashamed, she furled her brow and flung herself through the nearest outdoor exit, finding herself at the side of the school leading to the old bike and gardening sheds, which she would pass by and make a swift getaway through the back gate.
Rapid footsteps came on the gravel behind her as she turned in surprise. There he was again, she both lamented and rejoiced; Neill, yet again! Coming for her? Was he that determined? Fast walking toward her with his face trained on her, restarted swirls of adrenalin in her thighs as her mortification gave way to amazement, slowed her pace with this new shock, and he advanced upon her. Broad fingers slipped through the back of her hair and a warm palm clamped her neck, gently but firmly, and after he looked round to check no-one was watching, yanked open a brittle wooden door and pushed her straight into the bike shed.
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