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‘‘Natalia cannot take part in Games today as she has a cold and is unable to.’ Unable to what?’ Mrs Luxton read sarcastically. ‘Is that your mum’s signature?’
‘Yeah, it is. Sorry, mum worded it.’
‘So she actually wrote it for a change! Sit down on the bench.’
Watching the girls holler over each other in netball, she strained to remember what she’d written in her journal when she was off ill. About what she’d say to the Posh Man, as though he was sitting on her bed listening. And oh, fuck, she was going back to his office to talk to him for real. Can she really tell him how much she hates the sight of Lisa’s tree trunk thighs in nylon shorts, or Alana’s perfectly round bottom, Luxton’s greasy bangs flopping up and down as she jumps around their netball game like an over-excitable terrier?
Sam made a grab for the ball from Alana. Aisha swiftly intercepted, and Alana jumped and scored just as Sam fell to the floor, screaming foul play.
Luxton blew the whistle just asAlana and Aisha were in the middle of slapping a high-five.
‘Two nil!’ squawked Luxton.
‘I didn’t knock her over, Mrs Luxton. She faked it.’
‘Sam - go sit on the side.’
Sam walked away ruefully and sat beside Natalia, who frowned.
‘So did you just fake that?’
‘Anything to get those gobby fashionistas in the doghouse.’
‘Well it hardly worked. Luxton has about as much sympathy for you as she does for injuries at all. By the way have you seen the new Head?’
‘New Head? So Neary’s left then?’
‘Yeah, he’s…’ Natalia bit her lip, debating whether to say he was smoking in his office. ‘He’s an unlikely choice.’
She could go further, much further. She could say Neill was well-groomed, intelligent with gravitas and authority, and that the school had never seen anyone like him. But Sam was scowling at Alana, rapping one age-grey Hi-Tech trainer against the bench to make the torn hole at the toe even bigger, and Natalia went back into her own thoughts.
The mischief she’d witnessed from Neill was something to behold. Smoking in his office, and then setting fire to her report card. Wouldn’t he lose his job if it was seen by another teacher, or if she were to simply tell someone? Surely he couldn’t keep the habit secret for long. He was smoking when she entered the office, and she could have been anyone coming in.
When the bell went, the blood quickened in Natalia’s legs and her mind went completely blank.
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*
Approaching Neill’s door, she heard footsteps behind her - and there he was, stepping ahead of her as he caught up to the door.
‘Whoops, here I am! Coming through…!’ He breezed close to her in an air of sweet cologne that made her realise with surprise that her sinuses could smell again. He pressed down the handle, and with a flourish of his palm, beckoned her first.
‘Thanks,’ as she stepped in.
The door closed behind them. ‘Natalia, isn’t it?’
She nodded.
‘Cup of tea?’
She laughed. ‘Er, ok!’ She’d never been offered a cup of tea in school before. Then she realised they weren’t alone. Mr Neill was gesturing to the IT teacher Mr Clarke, who was rummaging around near where Natalia could see a kettle had been plugged in.
‘Jim!’ Neill clicked his fingers. ‘Fill that kettle just there, would you! With the water next to it.’
Natalia was startled by his order delivered to Mr Clarke, and was about to politely protest, but Neill continued.
‘Don’t mind old Jim. Talk as if he wasn’t here. He usually isn’t anyway, lost in the virtual world of repairing networks and debugging and defragging and god knows what else, isn’t that right old Clarkey?’
Mr Clarke just chuckled as he moved from the kettle back to the computer.
Neill pulled up his swivel chair to the side and motioned for Natalia to sit opposite. He sat, levelling his gaze at her, as her eyes fell to the floor and then raised again.
‘So, sir… what did you want to know?’
He arranged his fingers together in a temple shape. ‘I’ve been looking at huge past files of report cards and it does seem that truancy happens often enough here.’
He paused. Then he leaned forward and added, after a sly look sideways at Clarke: ‘They would make a glorious bonfire.’
She only dared mirror his crafty smile with a polite one.
He sat back. ‘And as you know, from our - let’s say, rather inflammatory meeting earlier - I’m doing away with them. They’re clearly not working, are they?’
‘Well, the thing is this,’ blinked Natalia, summoning her brain cells back one by one - ‘they coerce the pupil to have to record their attendance, what’s recorded on the register anyway, so they merely serve as a point of humiliation. You might as well stand me like Jane Eyre up on a ‘pedestal of infamy’ whilst I wish the earth would swallow me up, or like Helen Burns wearing a Slattern pasteboard, till her friend’ - she glanced at him knowingly - ‘throws it into the fire.’
His eyebrows raised and one corner of his lip curled.
She added: ‘So, far from being a deterrent or meaningful punishment, it only surely makes the pupil want to escape from the misery all over again.’
She stopped talking just as the kettle reached its loudest then began bubbling.
As it clicked off, Neill jumped up as if from a trance. With his back turned preparing the teas, he spoke:
‘Jane Eyre - that’s the set text for the exam isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but I read it years ago,’ she said, as he turned to catch her scrunching her nose.
He turned away again. ‘Do you take sugar?’
‘Yes please, two.’
‘Tea, Clarkey?’
‘No thanks Neill. I’ll be off in a minute, your connection’s all fixed.’
‘You are a gentleman.’
He stirred the clinking teaspoon as Natalia continued - undeterred or rather even motivated by the presence of Clarke - in a torrent of words that even surprised herself:
‘If you want my opinion, report cards are downright useless, a pointless indignity, that does nothing to address the conclusion of the truancy, let alone the root cause.’
Neill turned with the teas, putting one solemnly down in front of her as she thanked him, feeling like a smooth-talking paralegal he was consulting in great confidence.
‘Tell me Natalia, do all pupils here talk like you?’
‘I… don’t know,’ she said, just as Neill looked up to say goodbye to Clarke, and as the door closed again, Neill slid his chair back to his computer. ‘How do you mean?’ as she shuffled her chair along with his.
‘The way you talk,’ he leaned forward on his elbows over the desk as his chair levers clunked beneath, ‘is like no pupil I’ve heard in the three high schools I’ve worked in over ten fucking years.’
Natalia looked down, her cheeks pinkening.
‘I, I’ve barely said anything.’ Then she raised her head and added slyly: ‘The way you talk sir, or rather swear, is like no teacher I’ve ever heard, let alone Headmaster.’
He chuckled and sat back. ‘Sorry,’ he began, ‘I don’t usually… well anyway, back to the topic we started on. I recall you saying you truant because you feel as though this wondrous Thornwood High School feels like jail to you in every sense, and that browsing the paraphernalia of Homebase DIY fares superior.’
‘It was B&Q, sir.’
He guffawed with a bolt of laughter that seemed to bounce off the ceiling and down onto her, triggering another lift of her smile.
‘Cheeky!’ Then he frowned. ’Did you really go to B&Q?’
‘Yeah - well no - not for seven hours.’
‘Well, anyway, what makes this place a prison? You’re clearly studious, so doesn’t it satisfy you in that way?’
‘Somewhat.’
‘Somewhat,’ he imitated girlishly, and laughed. ‘But you say you have no friends, which can’t be pleasant. Why is that?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I find it hard to fit in with people. Since primary school, although at least that was nicer because it was Roman Catholic—’
‘So you’re religious?’
‘Well, no. We went to Sunday mass when I was little, before my mum went all… anyway. High school is different, brutish almost and I guess my protection is to be alone, deep in my own thoughts. Any friends I do make are similarly odd loners.’
‘You don’t seem odd. You seem to me to be an engaged and intellectual girl.’
‘Well, if that’s true, it’s not the kind of engaged intellectualism that interests other 15-year olds.’
He sat back again, arms folded, pursing his lips and screwing his eyes as though scanning a most peculiar specimen with growing intrigue.
‘So that must make school generally disagreeable on a daily basis, just by your own personality, the way you perceive it and the way others perceive it. I can’t so much help there. But I want to know, as the new Headmaster, how I can begin to make improvements to the school.’
‘Oh? That’s… pretty good, wanting to know our opinions. Are you talking to other pupils too?’
‘Oh yes. But starting with you, well, makes sense. You talk on my level. In fact, you talk like someone twenty years older.’
He sipped his tea and smiled a wide smile. She smiled back, looking at his mouth. She liked his mouth. He had a wide palette, with well-formed straight teeth, that were not a fake brilliant white, but a more naturally off-white, as if they’d happily taken a more human, tainted tinge from years of smoking.
‘Oh, thanks, Mr Neill’ - she looked hurriedly back up to his forehead, where there was plenty room for her eyes to roam.
‘By the way, all the pupils can just call me Neill.’
‘Oh, sorry. Neill. Well, of course,’ she chimed in now with a mock air, as though to set some humour against her growing self-consciousness: ‘I’m the main pupil you should talk to, the only one in probably the entire school who pays attention to anything around her, the nuances of the shitty teachers, the general moribund feeling that’s present in most every lesson, a feeling that, well, life is all happening out there, and not in here, with these miserable failings we call teachers, most of whom don’t even seem to like working with young people.’
Neill was still smiling. ‘See? Twenty years ahead.’
He got up and walked to the window, fidgeting around his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter, before he spoke again:
‘Where you are from? Your accent is clearly Yorkshire but not that Yorkshire when you rattle off like some bookish nerd. Your surname is what, Russian?’
‘Yes—’ she blinked in mild surprise. ‘But I’ve always been from here.’
‘Where in Leeds do you live?’
‘Gipton.’
‘That posh?’
‘Nurh, it definitely in’t posh.’
He chortled. ‘Well anyway. If there’s pupils here like you then heading this school will certainly be interesting. But the teachers are what I’d like to look at.’
The bell went for the end of break.
‘Tell me about the teachers from your perspective.’
‘Sir, the bell just went…’
‘Did it?’
‘It’s lesson time. I need to go.’
‘Oh, shit,’ he glanced at the clock. ‘What lesson is it?’
‘Maths.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘No.’
‘Good, then you won’t miss it.’
She stared. ‘You’re having me - miss a lesson?’
He leant toward her. ‘No, this is an important meeting.’
Just how unbelievable was this man?
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