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Sunday was spent cradling the gems Natalia had dug from the last meeting with Neill. Gems of information about him, as though she’d dug for and earned them, paid for them with a few blushes and stammers, and now as she ran a bath, laying and poring over these gems would be good as reading a book; better even, with her hands kept down warm in the water.
So Neill lives near the well-to-do Scarcroft village. She recalled her mum once gossiping with her friend who cleaned a lady’s house there. ‘Stuck up bitches all of them up that way,’ was their eloquent conclusion over cheap white wine. She remembered a bus ride she once took up to Wetherby; a hazy memory of August sunshine glinting off the bus window as they chugged past preened hedgerows and shiny street names unblemished by vandals. A place that would look down its powdered nose at her dank streets of Gipton, but where even a stuck-up, leggy lawyer bitch missed the mark of Neill approval?
Rolling over in the bath, she submerged her face in the water wondering whether there was more to Neill’s story. Did he keep kissing the woman, did he take her home? She always grimaced at kissing on TV. Gross, she would utter whilst her mum would cackle, so why did she keep musing on the image of Neill coming onto a woman in the pub? Was it ok to just be interested in him, like she would an engrossing character in a book? Interested to know who he spends his weekends with; who’s lucky enough to cross paths with him in non-school hours… what it would be like to meet him not as a schoolgirl, to imagine him roaming beyond the Thornwood pen like a wild tiger in casual clothes?
Dark wet hair fell down her shoulder blades, imagining her glistening bottom crack as one of the mermaids on her phone, that he liked looking at, she could tell in his eye… all those cheeky references they ping-ponged off each other, good Lord! That kind of thing would be gross with the likes of Neary, whose bottom was the last thing she’d want to think about.
But Neill? Neill’s bottom? Neill making references to her bottom? And her mouth? And what she does in bed in the morning? Natalia, I thought you’d been stung on your bottom! Natalia, you have chocolate around your mouth! Natalia, stand up! So his eyes could roam all over to look for her crack… I meant the phone! And how her wrist bone still creaked with an impertinent yet reassuring imprint of pressure that went on promising: ‘I can tell something’s preying on your mind… I will find out what it is!’
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*
Monday morning, Natalia stuffed away the new uniform tops into her drawer. She’d wait to see everyone else lose their ties and don the polo tops, not wanting to appear like an even bigger advertisement of fanaticism for the new Head as her frequent smirks around him probably already gave away.
She arrived just as Sam was walking into form, noticing she too, was still wearing the normal uniform and tie.
‘You didn’t burn yours then?’
‘Don’t be daft. It was only a bunch of the dickhead lads down on the green.’
‘Did you see it in the paper?’
‘Only cos that spoff Mike Peterson in Year 10 knows someone whose dad’s a reporter,’ she said as they sat down. ‘He must get book tokens or blowjobs or something whenever he dobs someone in for a story.’
Natalia laughed. Then her face fell as Marcia entered the room.
She had her tie in her hand, and went straight for Stacey to wrap it round her waist and proceed a frantic, giggling wrangle around the room, riding each other like horses through the tables whilst the rest of the class fell into some sort of fit of heckling.
Mrs Williams opened the door just as a tie was hurled across her path like a lasso into the bin.
‘Oh my word!’ she blinked, adjusting her spectacles.
‘Sorry miss!’
‘Sorry you missed,’ someone chortled.
Williams shook her head, gripped her files tighter under her arm as she waddled to her desk.
‘Mayhem. He’s caused mayhem.’
Natalia smirked.
‘What are you laughing at?’ hissed Marcia from her desk as Natalia inwardly groaned.
The first lesson was French in the same room, and within five minutes, she was feeling small bits of paper being flicked at the back of her neck. As each one hit, her eye ducts prickled. It was like a curse had been restored. Heart sinking into her stomach through the day, she shirked lunch and holed up in the IT suite.
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*
After a glad afternoon Art lesson of escaping into nautical sketchbook worlds of Waterhouse sirens and sailors, Natalia shuddered as she buttoned up her coat to file out toward the bleak, drizzly November sky. She could hear Marcia’s drawl behind her, mingled with Stacey’s inane giggle, and as it channelled closer to her ear she suddenly feared they were following her to her bus stop.
She spotted Neill ahead, fag in mouth, packing the boot of his car - and she gazed longingly, as though she were gagged, mute, only able to call out to him in her head.
It seemed to make him look up, or maybe that was the squawk from the girls behind her just as the bottleneck of pupils broke through the doorway.
‘Natalia! Come here please.’
She stepped over. ‘Hi Neill.’
‘Listen,’ as he puffed a vivid cloud of fag smoke into the crisp air. ‘I can’t keep calling you out of lessons. Your RE teacher nearly bust me marking you in last time.’
‘Oh, er. Of course.’ She bit her lip.
‘So can you come up tomorrow at lunchtime instead? I need you for something.’
‘Oh er of course!’ she beamed.
‘1pm,’ he said intently. ‘For the whole hour.’
She suddenly felt like her body was being lifted by sylphs.
‘So bring a packed lunch,’ he continued. ‘Or I could get you—’
‘No it’s ok, I’ll bring something. Just make me tea,’ she smiled.
‘Certainly. Thank you.’
As she moved away, his eyes shifted to the loitering girls.
‘You two! Stacey, Marcia. Here please.’
‘Awww, what! Sir, I’ve got a bus to catch!’
‘You gonna offer me a fag, sir?’
‘I beg your pardon!’
As Natalia hurried on, she could hear his voice continuing, ‘I have a question for you…’ and some garbling to do with the new uniform and dress code, whatever it was, it enabled Natalia to get ahead away from them. Her heart lightened for the first time that day.
I need you for the whole hour! The grey rain blowing into her eyes up the driveway could have been a tropical breeze. Those words replayed in her head all the way through to closing her eyes in bed, when the next morning, imagining her toothbrush was a fag in her mouth, she almost forgot to pack her lunch.
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*
The next day Natalia noticed at least a third of her form class no longer had ties, and were wearing the new soft polo shirts and cardigans. She thought she’d start wearing hers tomorrow.
Roll on lunch with Neill! She’d happily starve for an hour of pure therapy; impudent license to slag off Williams’ blackheads and Allsebrook’s senility and whatever else she fancied behind closed doors with her New-Age, Neill Fawkes genie-lamp lighting up the darkness of miserable Thornwood!
At the end of Chemistry, Natalia’s stomach felt like it was being squeezed by the sound of the lunch bell itself. Neill time!
She jogged up to his office and knocked.
‘Come in!’
She opened to see him bundling sandwich packaging into his bin.
‘Ah!’
‘Hi Neill, you asked me to come—’
‘Yes,’ he said as if it were obvious. ‘How are you?’
‘Ok,’ she nodded back as she approached his desk, knowing full well that her facial set was still imprinted, tainted, with a troubled energy.
‘Hmm. Still don’t believe that,’ he sniffed, ‘especially when you must have finished the blob by now. Ah good, you brought your lunch. You get started on yours. Sorry—’ He stifled a soft belch, ‘I couldn’t wait for mine.’
‘Oh that’s ok, New-Age Head,’ she smiled politely as she sat down.
‘Ah! They told me about that.’
‘My mum was reading the paper. I told her it was a storm in a teacup.’
‘Did you tell her it was all your fault?’
‘No, it was the Yorkshire rip-off’s.’
He chuckled, as his eyes fell to her tie. ‘So how come you’re still wearing that, Jack the businessman?’
‘I was waiting for the tide to start turning.’
‘Nonsense. You are the tide. And your tie has died. Take it off.’
She laughed and hesitated.
‘Besides, a local inferno of pupils burning their ties en-masse was a tsunami, surely?’ he frowned.
‘Just don’t want to look conspicuous.’
‘Come on. Give it to me.’
He held out his hand.
She rolled her eyes, slid it off from around her neck and passed it over, adding:
‘What if I want to keep it, as a souvenir of oppression? Or these might go for a big buck on eBay once our ASBO school becomes notoriously known… ’
‘Exactly. I’ll have it,’ as he pushed it into his drawer.
‘Something to satiate your pyromania with later?’ as she adjusted her hair.
He smiled. Then his face quickly composed again.
‘Onto why I called up. Number one. That pair of hyenas I saw behind you at hometime yesterday. They been giving you any bother?’
‘Who?’
‘You know who. The new girl and her greasy-fringed pimp.’
‘No, they’re alright,’ she said quietly.
‘Hmm. Alright. I guess that absolutely unfitting word for them is the obligatory dialectical response. In the same way that the bottom of my toilet bowl, after several squirts of Harpic and a good stiff brush after a Sunday load-up down the Scarcroft Inn, is alriiight.’
The corner of her lip raised. ‘You really love taking the piss out of Yorkshire people?’
‘No darling, your toilet does that for you. Now sit, for number two. Of course, not like that…’
She lowered into her chair. ‘What is it this time?’ She craned her chin down to the empty space at her collar. ‘Firing or hiring?’
‘Conspiring!’
He stabbed his keyboard space bar and she looked up with a start.
‘I’m applying Thornwood for a government top-up funding thingamajiggy—’
Now he looked up with a start, as Natalia prised off the lid of her lunch box with a loud, stiff crack.
For a moment all four eyes fell upon the block of foil-wrapped sandwiches nestled into the curve of a banana that she’d packed herself that morning. She withdrew the sandwiches, hastily placing the lid loosely over and pushing it to the side. There was no way, she suddenly realised, she was going to eat a banana in front of Mr Neill. What on earth was she thinking when she put that in?
Her eyes came back up at him, just as his shot back to his screen.
‘So I have to give various reasons why I want a wad of money for the school, some of which will be real and some, well, in place of the real reasons that may win me the funding,’ he continued with a glint in his eye, as Natalia brought a coy hand to her slowing, munching mouth and grunted:
‘An application written with half-porkies?’
‘More than half.’
‘Oh. So I’m aiding you in subterfuge.’
‘Not quite. Technically, you aren’t supposed to know it’s bullshit, so you don’t know it’s bullshit. You just need to help me engineer the wording of the bullshit to not sound like bullshit. So it’s all legitimate. Got it?’
‘Rr-right. So why,’ half-shielding a mouthful of cheese sandwich with a pen-stained hand as she chewed as modestly as she could, ‘are your real reasons for wanting the funding unacceptable?’
‘They just may not consider them essential. I want to, for example, have regular overnight school trips, and also week-long foreign exchanges with France, Spain, Italy. Even transatlantic, why not? I want swimming lessons in the brand-spanking-new centre in town, not the verruca-ville Fearnville, piss-shit-and-sweat cesspit—’
‘You’ve seen it then.’
‘I want a gourmet canteen menu and I want the stage rebuilt with decent acoustics for concerts. And more besides.’
‘Mmm, nice,’ as Natalia bit the last of her sandwiches. ‘What about updating the prehistoric IT suite?’
‘Already doing that.’
‘Oh, good,’ as she finally screwed up her foil containing the crusts, flapped open the lunchbox to stick them back in, and pushed it away.
His eyes followed it.
‘Thought you said you were going to eat your lunch here Natalia.’
‘I am. I did.’
‘You didn’t finish it.’
‘Huh?’
She opened it. ‘There’s just that left,’ she said with a little laugh.
‘So finish your lunch.’
She glanced at the banana, then back up to him.
He was staring and waiting.
Her mouth moved to form words, then closed again.
‘You want me to…’ her words tapered into another laugh, ‘eat this banana?’
He looked right at her with a deadpan expression, still wordless.
‘Nah, I’ll have it later.’ She pushed it away again.
‘Ok. Pass it here then,’ he motioned.
‘You want it?’ She slid over the lunchbox and watched him take out the banana and begin to peel it. ‘Hungry still, sir?’ she smiled.
‘No.’
Now holding the undressed banana, ensuring all the petal-skins were pulled down evenly, delicately whisking away a thin yellow strand like excess thread off a finished stitching - and then another, as if preening it, lovingly almost - all with a perfectly thoughtful and serious face, he raised and presented it toward her like he was gifting her with the most precious, exotic yellow flower.
‘You are. Here you go.’
She shook her head with a stumbling ejection of breath from her throat.
‘Wha… I…’
He extended it further toward her, as the corners of her mouth wavered.
‘Take it, Natalia.’
As gentlemanly as if proposing marriage, his voice was so soft and earnest, his big clear eyes so unblinking, all the tentacles of his attention, silently, yet deafeningly trained on her, as if he were imploring her to join him in some magical world where banana flowers were the elixir and he didn’t want her to expire without hers.
She cleared her throat. It felt as though a sadistic seamstress had a needle to her urethra, repeatedly chasing and pinning it to the floor.
But it’s just Mr Neill! Rambunctious, delightful, as-merry-as-a-musical-on-the-telly Neill, and of course, he’s just waiting for her to finish her lunch.
‘Oh, my god.’
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