Love in Every Season
By Charlie Cochrane
Horns and Halos © Charlie Cochrane, 2014 and 2019
Tumble Turn © Charlie Cochrane, 2012 and 2019
Sand © Charlie Cochrane, 2014 and 2019
What you Will © Charlie Cochrane, 2014 and 2019
These are works of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or establishments, events or locales is coincidental. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Spring
Horns and Halos
Hampshire, February 14th, 2011
“Direct or indirect discrimination related to protected characteristics is illegal at any stage of the recruitment process.”
Protected characteristics. Score one for the buzzword list. Jamie tried to keep a straight face while the tutor spoke, but it wasn’t easy.
“A candidate’s gender or sexual orientation is less important than the impact they’ll have on standards in your school.”
Sexual orientation and impact on standards. Two more phrases for Jamie to mark off his hypothetical card. If he got a full house, would he be allowed to shout “Bingo!”?
He took what he hoped was a casual glance around the room, to see if anyone else looked like they were feeling a bit cynical, but most of the other course delegates appeared solemnly interested, as though showing any degree of ennui was itself discriminatory. There were the odd one or two who clearly disapproved of anything smacking of political correctness—you could spot them a mile off—but Jamie wasn’t in the mood for fighting them, even if he’d needed to. The woman leading the selection and interviewing training had already administered more than one metaphorical slap to the wrist, so with any luck the dinosaurs would soon learn to keep their heads down.
Jamie decided he’d cut the other non-dinosaur delegates a bit of slack, given that they’d probably not come across any of this stuff before, and people were getting twitchy about possible court cases. His governing body had gone over some of the work when the Equalities Act first came out, a year previously but it was likely to be a bit frightening to the other people on the course, especially when the terrible realisation struck that if they didn’t play everything absolutely straight, their school would be up in front of some sort of tribunal—worse still, all over the local papers—accused of prejudice.
Who’d want to be a school governor? No pay, little thanks, plenty of red tape. And yet they’d all volunteered to be on governing bodies and then to attend this course. Altruistic. Or gluttons for punishment. And on Valentine’s day, just to rub things in.
“So just work with the person next to you.”
The tutor’s words brought Jamie back to the present with a bump. Work with the person next to you to do what?
“I hope you know the answers because I’m stuck.” The bloke next to Jamie—Alex, according to the hand-written sticker on his shirt—grinned and brandished a worksheet.
“I do, but only because I’ve done this bit before, on another course.” Jamie returned the smile.
“You write the answers in, then I’ll read them and try to look intelligent.” Alex’s eyes twinkled.
Why weren’t there any blokes like this on the Cattlebridge Primary Governing Body, with brown eyes lively enough to make the interminable meetings worth sitting through?
“Deal. They’ll give us an answer sheet later, anyway.” Jamie scribbled down some key words, just so it wasn’t obvious that his mind wasn’t on the questions.
“I don’t think they’ll let me have an answer sheet. Punishment for sneaking in late.” Alex smiled again.
Jamie filled in some more answers, trying hard not to write “Do not flirt” on the page.
What point would there be in flirting, anyway? Alex was bound to be married, with two kids in school and one more to come. Typical parent governor. The handsome ones always were.
“Which school are you at?” Alex asked.
“Cattlebridge Primary. Community Governor.” Drafted in because his mother was pals with the Chair of Governors, a woman who was desperate to get some young blood on a board dominated by people who either wanted to bring back the cane or spend every meeting picking apart the three pounds seventy five overspend on glue sticks. “You?”
“St. Paul’s, Heathfield. Foundation governor. The vicar put me in a half Nelson until I volunteered.” Alex reached across and picked up the worksheet. “Looks like you’ll get ten out of ten. Glad I sat here—I’ll copy off you.”
“Feel free.” Don’t flirt, Jamie reminded himself. Even if by some miracle he isn’t straight, he won’t fancy you. The nice ones never do.
Old Boosyboots at the front of the room clapped her hands, as if she was addressing seven-year-olds.
“Sit up straight and behave,” Alex hissed out of the side of his mouth, “or else we’ll get detention.”
“We’ll just go through the answers,” Boosyboots said, brightly. “Sorry to be making you work so hard when you’d probably rather be out buying boxes of chocolates or receiving them,” she added, with a simpering grin.
“And if she mentions bloody Valentine’s Day once more,” Alex hissed again, “I’ll...”
Boosyboots giving him the sort of look which could have curdled milk at ten yards stopped Alex in his tracks.
“Detention for certain,” Jamie whispered, with a snicker.
***
Jamie didn’t think he had a guardian angel. If he did, the so-and-so had been noticeably slacking on the job over the last few years, especially regarding hitching him up with a decent bloke. So, the fact that he’d been put on the same practice interview panel as Alex—therefore could legitimately spend the next day and a half of the course working alongside him—must just have been good luck.
Or maybe bad. Two days of trying not to make it obvious that he fancied the pants off the bloke. Why did nice things always seem to come on the horns of a dilemma?
Chatting over coffee break was fine, the whole of his table having congregated together, the six of them looking a bit nervous at what they’d let themselves in for. Inevitably the conversation had drifted off into matters February the fourteenth-related, at which point Jamie had tried to look interested, although he’d dreaded the seemingly inevitable, “What surprise have you got lined up for your girlfriend?”
“I can’t stand all this Valentine’s nonsense,” one of the blokes in the group said He was the one Jamie had nicknamed Mr. Daft Ideas—although not to his face—because of the answers he’d come up with for the quiz.
“What does your wife think of that?” Sandra, the panel leader—elected because she’d smiled and nodded at the wrong time—asked.
“The same as me,” the bloke replied, as if there couldn’t be any other answer. “It’s just another way of conning people out of their money.”
“I’d agree with you on that.” Alex broke his biscuit—a custard cream, Jamie noted, with approval—made as if to dunk it then clearly thought better of the manoeuvre. As though he was weighing up every word and every movement. “And it always seems so cruel.”
Jamie sipped his coffee, intrigued. Something about the day clearly made Alex feel uncomfortable, maybe at a deeper level than the obvious, I never got any cards when I was a spotty teenager.
“Oh, Jamie, you’ll have to be the one to stand up for your gender,” Sandra said, tapping the table with an elegant, pink painted nail. “Surely you’ve got a romantic streak in you.”
“I have,” Jamie said, looking anywhere except at Alex, “although I’m not sure Valentine’s Day really has much to do with romanc
e. Sorry to be a disappointment, but...” He shrugged.
“You’ll be in trouble with your—”
Sandra was interrupted by Boosyboots insisting they reconvene. Never had Jamie so welcomed being called back into class and so avoid having to explain why he couldn’t be in trouble with his wife or girlfriend, as he didn’t have one and never would. Out of the frying pan into the fire, though, because his group had to get their heads down over some hot school improvement plans and person specs, and maybe his and Alex’s heads would be a bit too close for comfort.
***
When lunch came, it had been natural to drift into the dining room in their groups and so for Jamie to find himself sitting next to Alex over their plates of finger food.
“I have to say I’m almost enjoying this training.” Alex picked up a sandwich and eyed it with suspicion.
“I think that’s supposed to be tuna. I’ll run you to casualty if it tastes as bad as it looks.” Jamie attacked a sausage roll. “These are quite good, though.” He washed it down with orange juice. “This has got better since we finished the legal stuff. The training course, not the food.”
Alex grinned. His face seemed like it was always ready to break into a smile at the slightest excuse. “Better doing this than being at work today. Too many chocolates and cards from mystery admirers.”
“You’re that popular?” Jamie could imagine Alex as the office pin-up. Who wouldn’t want to lavish cards and presents on him?
Alex snorted. “Not for me. Flying around for everyone else, though. I feel like locking myself in my office and not coming out until the hormones have calmed down. Right,” he added, wagging the tuna sandwich like a baton, “no more mushy talk. I need to get up to speed on all this selection stuff. We’re recruiting a new deputy next week, and muggins here got talked into being on the interview panel.”
“Arm twisted up your back again?”
“Something like that. Isn’t that why we’re all here? Because we volunteer at the drop of a hat?”
“Do you do any interviewing with your work?” Jamie asked, although experience of asking questions wasn’t necessarily the sort of skill required of governors who found themselves on recruitment panels, availability and being alive tending to rate higher.
“I’ve done a bit, but this feels much more important. I can tell if a graduate’s bullshitting me. Not so easy when it’s somebody spouting education gobbledegook.” Alex tried another tuna sandwich. “These are better than they look. Appearances are clearly deceptive.”
Jamie swallowed hard, and not just because he’d just bitten into an underripe tomato. How many people in the room would take a look at the pair of them and suspect what was going on under the surface? Going on in one direction, anyway—he wouldn’t let himself even pretend there was a chance Alex was gay. Or interested.
“We had a new deputy last year,” Jamie said, aware that the conversational gap had gone on a few seconds too long. “I sat in on their data presentation. Every time they started talking in jargon, I asked them to explain it in words that a dimbo like me could understand.”
“I’ll remember that. Did it work?”
“It did. Too well. The woman we recruited was the only one who could explain the data and make sense of it, which was good, but I ended up being dragged onto the panel for choosing a new headteacher when our one retires next year.” Jamie made a face.
“You should try being a bit more useless,” Alex said, with another one of those devastating smiles. “It isn’t always the best strategy, being too competent. Gets you conned into things.”
“Puts people’s backs up, too.” Jamie brought to mind a woman he used to work with, who’d been über competent, getting things done efficiently and without fuss. He’d like her a lot—as a colleague, naturally—but she’d generated a lot of resentment among those who were lazier and less capable.
Alex nodded. “Too right. People find perfection frightening.” He caught Jamie’s eye as he used the word “perfection” which made the bloke’s heart jump and his thoughts go racing to all sorts of places they shouldn’t.
“I suppose...” Jamie said, trying to choose his words carefully, but then someone else on the table started to get a bit heated about Ofsted, and the moment—if it was a moment—passed. Maybe it was just as well. Why raise your hopes just to have them dashed on the rocks? Or, in this case, on the chocolate cookies, which were just as rock-like.
“You said something about Valentine’s Day being cruel. What did you mean by that?” Jamie asked, when the conversation around the table fractured into smaller pieces again.
“Did I really say that?” Alex fiddled with his biscuit, as though unsure about whether it might poison him. “I must be carrying around more of a burden from my teenage years than I imagined. I was always the one who never got sent a card. Never got kissed behind the bicycle shed.”
Jamie didn’t trust himself to make any more of a response than, “Yeah, been there, get that.” Too much risk of flirting, if he’d said what he really felt. How could a bloke as gorgeous as Alex not have had a swarm of girls round him? Unless he was the classic ugly duckling turned into a glorious swan?
“Do you really get that?” Alex looked up.
“Yes,” Jamie replied, aware of how much he wanted to blurt out something totally stupid like, I’d make up for all those missing cards. You’d get a lot more than just kisses behind that bicycle shed. He swallowed hard and tried to look like none of this was important. “Romance is for three hundred and sixty five days, not just one, or it isn’t worth the effort.”
“Three hundred and sixty six, if it’s a leap year,” Mr. Daft Ideas, aka Bruce, cut in, making Jamie jump. He’d forgotten there was anybody else in the room except for him and his fellow anti-Valentine’s crusader. The fit anti-Valentine’s crusader.
“Quite right, Bruce,” Alex said. “You keep this bloke under control. Right, excuse me, got to powder my nose.”
He grinned at Jamie, pushed back his chair and—with what might have been a wink or might just have been Jamie’s wishful thinking—headed in the direction of the loo.
***
The afternoon was almost done. They’d done the bit about making sure, if this was the real thing, that they didn’t just rely on interviewing candidates, but saw them involved in hands-on activities. They’d covered all the good interview practice stuff, and Boosyboots the trainer was allowing them to create their own questions.
“We should ask them what sort of books they read,” Bruce the Daft Ideas suggested, proving the rule that there was always somebody at governor training who not only had silly inspirations but was convinced they were the work of genius.
Jamie stifled a groan. Didn’t he have enough weirdoes to contend with on his own governing body? All those old geezers who probably got more of a kick sitting on a committee than rolling around in a bed? Why couldn’t he have been allowed to get away from them here?
“You can learn a lot about somebody by the books they read,” Bruce continued, clearly in deadly earnest.
“Oh, for goodness sake.” Alex threw up his hands. The tolerance he’d shown towards Bruce at lunchtime had worn thinner and thinner as the afternoon had progressed. “So, are we supposed to be looking for a candidate who reads Agatha Christie or Marcel Proust? Where does it say what’s the required reading for deputy heads?”
Bruce blinked nervously. “I didn’t mean…”
“I’m sure you didn’t.” Alex cut the sentence off, an unexpected note of authority in his voice. “Can we keep to the job spec, please? What people read or watch on TV or…or whatever, isn’t relevant to their ability to do the job.”
“Sorry.” Bruce studied his papers, clearly avoiding Alex’s eye.
“No, I should apologise,” Alex said. “Shouldn’t have lost my rag. Blame it on not getting enough cards in the post today or something.”
“Thank you.” The woman leading the panel smiled at the truce between combatants. “Back t
o the matter in hand.”
Jamie leaned on his elbow, ostensibly looking at his own paperwork but keeping half an eye on the people round the table. Sandra was deftly guiding the group through identifying the key areas they wanted to ask about, Bruce seemed completely mollified, probably hatching another ridiculous question, but Alex still appeared uncomfortable.
He’d been about to say something, Jamie was sure, hot on the heels of the watching TV remark, and he’d changed it at the last moment. So, what had forced the sudden change of tack? The realisation that he was about to let out something too close to home? Maybe it had been something like, almost quoting Avenue Q, “What people read or watch on TV or what they do in bed with guys”?
“Sorry, Jamie?” Sandra smiled. “Did you say something?”
Oh hell. Had he spoken that last bit out loud rather than just in his head?
“I was talking to myself about these questions. Bad habit. Sorry.” He flicked through his papers, again, trying to ignore the heat rushing up his face.
And, while he didn’t dare look, he’d have put ten quid on Alex grinning at his ever-reddening neck.
***
“It’s been a good day, all in all.” Alex started to get his stuff together and put it in his briefcase. They’d survived the day, at least without killing Bruce.
“Not bad. I think I’m almost looking forward to the next bit.” Jamie went as slowly as he could, ordering and reordering his papers.
“What next bit? Getting home and finding a profound lack of rose-covered cards on your doormat?”
“I like Valentine’s Day as little as you do, remember? I’d have forgotten all about it if everyone hadn’t been talking about it all day.”
“Hey, sorry.” Alex winced, as though he’d been kicked.
“No, my fault. Shouldn’t be so tetchy.” Jamie managed a smile. He wanted to say, No wonder I don’t get rose-covered cards, but that would be too much like fishing for compliments. “Been a long day.”
Love in Every Season Page 1
