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From sheer boredom she found herself clicking on porn spam on her phone that night, and fell asleep dreaming she was riding a wave in a swimming pool.
Her bikini spun away from her like a small doll’s outfit toward a candle burning at the other side of the pool. She tried to reach it, but it grew to the size of the sun. There was a huge Bang! as her eyes jolted open to the light blaring through the window.
Her mum rapped again on her door.
‘You not up for school yet?!’
Natalia chewed slowly on her toast at the breakfast table.
‘Quarter past eight,’ hissed her mum’s liquor-scented breath. ‘You’ll have missed the bus. You got done for skiving last week and now you’re late?’
She fingered the report card in her pocket.
‘I’m going now.’
The dim October morning would have made the walk down the school driveway abysmal beyond measure, were it not for the cheer of Lady Gaga in her earphones, and the thought that she had only eight months left in Thornwood High. This was the last winter she would have to watch the grey sky outlined against the pale orange, geometric ugliness of its building like a monstrous ship looming closer as her size-five feet carried her like automatons into its rectangular mouth.
Everyone else was already in class as she headed to sign in at Reception. Deafened by ‘rah-ah-ah, Gaga-ooh-la-la!’ she crossed the driveway oblivious to the huge moving shape coming from her left.
Love, love, love! I want your—
She turned in surprise, one earphone dropping to her shoulder, frozen wide-eyed at a black Mercedes halting with a shrill screech of its brakes a metre away.
She leapt back, scrambling to the Reception doors before whoever driving the car would have chance to call:
‘You need to look out, young lady!’
Delivered in a lively shout from a face sticking out of a rolled-down window, she turned and squinted to discern which teacher it was. She didn’t recognise him: a flash of blonde-ish hair and an arm of suited grey didn’t fit the description of anyone here. Walk, walk, fashion baby… or rather shuffle, red-faced into Reception; push the late book back to the frowning receptionist, and sigh as she headed to her first lesson, French, handing the conspicuous green rectangle of shame to Mrs Williams.
‘The spoff is late!’
‘And she’s on a report card!’
‘Where’ve you been, skiver?’
She sensed the grinning faces of Luke, Bernard and Tom trained on her as though she were a bad performer who’d wronged them in a previous life show. A fourth boy Ryan would be sitting staring - he ‘fancied her’ - which apparently meant no more than blushing in her direction and slightly flinching at the insults his friends threw her way.
‘It’s what you get when you skive,’ Laura whispered next to her. ‘Just ignore ‘em.’
Natalia turned her face away. ‘You mean like Mrs Williams, and everybody else does?’
She wondered how lovely Bernard used to look at primary school, chiming along to Shine Jesus Shine! in Assembly with the unblemished face of a Cabbage Patch doll. Now he was more like a Chucky doll, hardened by four years of puberty in a council estate high school. As she reached down into her bag for her pencil case, her hand brushed past Jane Eyre she was reading for GCSE English. Herliterary heroine, she too forever ‘suffering, browbeaten, condemned,’ but soon, like the quietly ardent, ‘restless bird’ Jane, could soar high and away on her own path, away from report cards, schoolboy hecklers and Laura’s sour morning milk breath.
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*
‘Yeh-lo! Come in!’
Headteacher Mr Neary stood stout and bullish as usual by his desk, but this time there were other people in the office. Mr Clarke, the balding IT manager, was sitting at Neary’s computer, and the short and softly-spoken Deputy Head Mr Dinkey standing by the window. He was beside another man who, evidenced by the blonde hair and suit Natalia could see in full now, was most certainly the man she had nearly been run over by this morning.
She took in his regal portrait now painted before her. A stocky body in tailor-suited grey, centred with a navy blue tie and a buttoned waistcoat beneath, made him an unusual sight of quaint middle-class formality in this school. Long, light brown hair swept up from a widow’s peak on a large forehead into honey blonde coming down behind his ears. He was looking out of the window so she could only glimpse in profile, his thinking-furrowed brow of his face. Despite his detachment from the company he seemed to loom over the rest of the men.
As Natalia put out the folded green card to Neary, her eyes flitted back to the visitor, waiting for him to turn round. Was he a visitor? An inspector? A prospective parent?
Neary squinted at the card. ‘Late today?’
‘Yep, sir, sorry.’
Dinkey had moved over to Clarke at the computer to sit and mutter about something, whilst the regal man by the window turned, only just realising someone else had come into the room. His eyes were on the card in Neary’s hand, and Natalia sensed that his scrunched, majestic eyebrows held something he wanted to know.
‘These are report cards, Neill,’ said Neary, as if in answer. ‘The kids get them when they bunk off school. They get them signed by every teacher and then by me at the end of the day.’
The stranger, ‘Neill,’ was again gazing out of the window in contemplation.
‘Another one of your ideas, John?’ he now glanced towards Natalia, not quite looking at her, adding: ‘And do you ever ask the pupils why they truant?’
To Natalia his voice was almost melodious. The drawn out vowel of ‘ask,’ and the bass tone dip of ‘why,’ she noted, was a Queen’s English seldom heard in an inner-city Northern school.
Neary replied benignly:
‘Well, no, the report card monitors their attendance, deters it from happening again, you see Neill.’
Natalia’s eyes ping-ponged back to the mysterious challenger.
‘Really.’
Neill cocked his head unimpressed, and blinked two piercing blue interrogators squarely at Natalia:
‘And how many times, young lady, have you truanted from school?’
She was just pocketing her card as her mouth dropped open, and Neary interjected without looking at either of them:
‘This would be the third time I know of.’
’Deterrent indeed,’ Neill scoffed. His eyes roved back to Natalia:
’May I ask you, young lady, why you truant?’
Neary drew a breath, whilst Natalia’s face grew warm. Speak, she told herself! What could she say? How honest could she be?
‘Um—’ she began, looking right back at Neill, whose expressive eyebrows, dancing above kind twinkling eyes, despite his overall slightly intimidating demeanour, seemed to assure her of his sincerity.
‘Well, I truant because this place feels like a prison to me’ - Neary blinked up in surprise - but her words now came in a train of passion:
‘It feels like a prison physically, intellectually, and emotionally. I truant because for one day I can pull myself out of the prison even for a humiliating and pointless punishment of a report card, to feel part of a world that looks at me like someone worthy - even if that’s standing around in B&Q for seven hours pretending to be interested in drill bits and raw plugs, because even then, even then—’
‘Ok Natalia, I think we’re done, eh.’
Upon being cut short by Neary, she glanced back at Neill, whose quizzical look had softened into surprise, not pity, but somehow a tenderness, as his eyes wandered off slowly round the room as hers had done. The other two men at the desk were still murmuring between themselves, not paying any attention to the exchange. Neill nodded at Neary who was shifting papers on his desk, then back to Natalia, smiling politely:
‘Thank you.’
Slinging her bag to her shoulder, she left the room as a low conversation continued between Neary and Neill. Down the corridor she met with Mrs Coleman, slightly breathless on her way to the office.
‘Is Mr Neary in?’
‘Yes Miss, he’s in with an inspector or something.’
‘Inspector?’ she breezed past Natalia, looking bemused.
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Just as Natalia climbed onto her bus, she caught sight of the black Mercedes speeding off down the other side of the school. She rolled her eyes cringing that maybe she’d gone too far, telling him that she wandered pitifully around a DIY shop. Was the look he gave afterwards in interest or awkwardness?
But as she reached to slice her bus pass into Jane Eyre, she thought with a smile, that she’d never talked boldly like that in Neary’s office before. It was as if ‘a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave,’ and imparted strength, an ‘extraordinary ray that bore her up… her soul expanded, exulted with a strange sense of freedom, as if an invisible bond had burst’! She thought back to her dream this morning, that bright light! Shining as Bernard’s sweet child face once did!
As for Jane Eyre, so too for Natalia, ‘life had its gleams of sunshine’! Even just a gleam. For a proud man like that wouldn’t hang around a school like hers for longer than an afternoon, and one day she could drive off as unimpressed as he was… to ‘the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen!’
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