Septembers

by Christopher Prendergast

  Although they had gone to the same school, Corinne was not one of Annabel’s old school friends. They didn’t talk at all for a number of years. Their friendship only got off the ground once they started weekend shifts at the same newsagents. Both warranted attention from an early age. It seemed to me, Corinne must have got addicted to this attention and had to move to the capital. Not to say she would get it there, but in some way London offered to compensate.

  Corinne wore a grey jumpsuit with black tights and had a streak of peroxide in her hair. She was cosmopolitan. She turned heads with an overpowering laugh. Being northern in London was perhaps her most appealing trait. It struck me as exotic. That more than the Bermudan blood that ran down her Dad’s side of the family.

  Some way into her time in the capital, following several volatile and short-lived friendships, Corinne had acquired Seb and he made space to move her in. Seb was well paid, gay and lonely. As friends, they kept each other’s backs. Seb was tied up in hedge funds. What I liked about Seb was his general awareness of the circus he was involved in. In fact, I liked them both; they were the only double date I could agree to. They never asked about my salary or tried to suggest alternative careers.

  Only once, the first time I met him, and very half-heartedly had Seb ever said, ‘You should move down here’. He meant London.

  ‘You look nervous.’ I said.

  ‘Can you not see her?’

  I looked over at the bar. ‘She’s ordering a drink.’

  Annabel shook her head. They walked over to us and Corinne was holding a Diet Coke.

  ‘Hey, Matt! How are those kids treating you?’ Seb asked.

  It had only been a few weeks. I told him I was still getting bogged down in the paperwork.

  Seb patted my arm reassuringly. He grabbed the peak of his flat-cap and tilted it a little. ‘You know I’ve got a manager now who’s twenty-two. This guy got fired out of a cannon through the education system. He’s phenomenal.’

  I asked whether his boss was Etonian.

  ‘Not even. We don’t take wannabe MPs. We take the really smart people, handpicked.’

  ‘Do I get a hello, Matthew?’ Corinne asked, smiling.

  We hugged and I felt the bump of her stomach press up against me.

  ‘It’s been six months. There’s too much to talk about. Seb’s had too many boyfriends to mention.’

  Seb went red at this and, just as I was about to offer my congratulations to her, Corinne got her second wind. She explained she couldn’t drink that night and did an Adam West-style darn it gesture with her fist. Then she reassured us we were all there to get drunk in her stead. She wanted to have fun vicariously. I didn’t think there was enough to go around.

  Following Corinne’s speech Annabel went at it hard, draining her bottles when I had barely touched my pint. We went to a few different bars. At one point we found ourselves wandering around the Eden shopping centre looking for a bowling alley that was closed. Later I found myself talking to Seb about wrestling in our hotel room. For twenty minutes Annabel had been suggesting baby names. When she came up with ‘Kurt’ I immediately thought of Kurt Angle, the wrestler.

  ‘You know, I had to break up a fight the other day over Kurt Angle,’ I said.

  Seb didn’t know who Kurt Angle was. He’d never watched wrestling.

  ‘You’d call this a sport?’ he said after listening.

  ‘It’s an art. It’s performance,’ I said.

  He told me some personal horror stories. His classmates used to bully him. They would ask him trick questions, invite the right sort of response and launch themselves at him. He showed me how they compared wrestling slams and holds, shaking their heads at each other in disagreement, snatching at his raised arms and lifting him up. Day after day he went through this at school.

  ‘Crippler Crossface,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Seb asked, looking confused.

  ‘I think that first move was the Crippler Crossface.’

  ‘OK. Maybe it was.’ He looked past my shoulder. ‘So what were the kids fighting about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘None of them wanted to be Kurt Angle in the Royal Rumble.’

  He shrugged.

  I sank back into the headboard and motioned for him to pass me another beer. The night hadn’t fully materialised. We knew a baby was on the way but I was none the wiser about how it had come to exist. I was beginning to suspect that Corinne and Seb conceived between them, out of a drunken fumble. It couldn’t be true though. If they had consummated the friendship it would have been carefully planned. They would have met every day for two weeks in Starbucks about it. Normal and willing sperm wasn’t good enough for her. It had to be coveted.

  I watched the two girls as they did impressions of their old manager. After a while, Corinne and Seb decided to go back to their hotel. I watched Anna breathe heavily at the end of the bed. She brushed one of her dress straps off her shoulder indignantly.

  ‘Who’s Kurt Angle?’ she said. Before I could answer she continued. ‘He’s not one of your kids, is he?’

  ‘He’s an American wrestler.’

  ‘A wrestler?’ she huffed, and slunk into the bed. ‘Wrestle me . . . for once.’

  I stood over her, pulling back her hair, and I went to kiss her just as she pulled away. She had motioned to the bathroom and stretched out two fingers; it was either a peace gesture or she meant ‘two seconds’. The room was a bombsite of drink. Seb had left half a bottle of red. Small items of clothing were on the bed. I hadn’t noticed her take off some of the bracelets. These things didn’t look like ours but I doubted either of our guests would have felt the need to deposit them. I stood by the toilet door. Anna was quiet.

  Her shadow moved in the light at the bottom. It moved slowly. Then I realised she was being sick. I tried the door but it was locked.

  ‘I’m fine. I just need some water,’ she said, her voice muffled slightly.

  I sat on the bed and watched the news. After about ten minutes Anna came out quietly coughing and put her head in my lap. Her face disappeared behind hair. I felt her cold lips brush against my hand. Her breathing told me she was drifting off so I watched the headlines roll in and out. I watched graphics of regions without any audio. I tried to relate them to the wider picture in my head. Tried to guess the neighbours, the old empires, the old names for places and that was how I drifted off myself.

  2

  I ORDERED A wall map from Amazon for £25.50. It was a physical map with clear variations of shading. These were mainly greens or browns on land showing the contours and terrain of different parts of the world. The mountain ranges were the darkest. The Himalayas and Karakoram mountains loomed like a birth mark over China and India. I also bought a 17th-century map, as a counterpoint, to stick on the adjacent wall. It had come up in recommendations. This map had two circles, one showing Europe, Asia and Africa, the other the Americas. I liked it because the earth had been cracked in two like a nutshell.

  If you stood close to the wall looking at them they completely swallowed you up.

  Annabel drove us both into work on Monday. She waited for me in the car whilst I carefully rolled up the map and placed it back in its cardboard tubing. I got in and brushed some beer packaging off the front seat. She smirked. The drive was our usual exchange of passive-aggressive comments about the radio. Except for when I put the map, in its tube, on the backseat. She turned the radio down and asked me what it was for. I told her it was a map for my classroom and she stopped short of saying You’re not a geography teacher. She narrowed her eyes though.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘I want the kids to be able to put things in context. To think about things on a bigger scale than they do,’ I said.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ she said. ‘I hope they don’t ruin it for you.’

  We turned into Eastfield Drive, a genteel
cul-de-sac. She pulled into an empty gravel drive and turned the car back around. I leant over to kiss her. She giggled and kissed me back, squeezing the inside of my leg. I undid my seatbelt and looked at the netted windows of the houses around us before opening the car door.

  ‘Don’t forget this’ she said, pulling the tube from the back.

  Her Peugeot drove off and smoothly exited. I reached the roadside on foot just in time to see her pull into the next turn-in, through the school gates. Sometimes if I walked too fast I caught her up in the car park and blew our act. Once I said hello to her, walking past, as she was locking the driver’s door. She wasn’t impressed. She rolled her eyes when we were undressing that night and said What’s the point, Matt? You might as well shag me on the bonnet.

  Both of us, early on in the relationship, thought we needed to keep it secret. Perhaps I thought I was going to mess her around. I slowed my walking pace, paying attention to the paving stones and the litter fringe to my right. Groups of school kids were starting to appear in sidestreets and at bus stops. When I did eventually come to the school fence I could see clearly across the car park. Annabel was a black and white figure in the distance, going in through the front doors. She worked behind the reception. I was a history teacher.

  Mrs Yeoman was the deputy head. That Monday she watched me staple the top of the map to the classroom’s back wall. I was standing on one of my tables. It was a rare period of my weekly timetable when you wouldn’t stumble on the stuffy huddle of a sixth-form sociology class. They had my room sometimes and usually pushed my tables together. They appeared to dedicate most of their lessons to micromanaging furniture.

  ‘Have you got a minute, Matt?’ Mrs Yeoman said.

  I got off the table and put the staple gun down.

  ‘We’re in a bit of bother at the moment with Helen off on long-term sick . . .’

  She wanted me to reconsider playground duty. To steer the kids away from each other. Adjust their little sails and set them off again in opposite directions. That was not how it would be, so the answer was always, kindly, no. She was a tough nut though. She kept telling me I wasn’t the new guy any more.

  ‘You know the routine, the syllabus and a lot of the kids now. I’ve looked at the rota alongside your timetable. I’ve earmarked Mondays and Thursdays for lunchtime duties. It shouldn’t disrupt any lessons,’ she said.

  I hesitated. I was running a lunchtime club every Thursday. Those long, sodden winter months wore the kids down and they welcomed the chance to stay inside and sit in front of a television. Some of the other teachers ran clubs at break time but I found twenty minutes wasn’t long enough to show them anything of value. I experimented with a few names but settled on the relatively straightforward ‘History Club’. Names with Soviet overtones came and went. I thought of taking the crucifix off the classroom wall and fixing a picture of Franz von Papen there, even if it only stayed up for half an hour.

  There was no point trying to get the kids to read the textbooks or make period costumes. There was a simple concept to stick to. We met and we watched films. I thought that if I volunteered enough Hollywood films to catch their attention I could sneak in one or two they wouldn’t watch otherwise. In truth, for that first month or so, all the historic material we looked at was groomed for the big screen.

  I explained the activities I had organised to Mrs Yeoman. She went over to the TV set and brought down the pile of DVDs that were stacked alongside it. I tried to explain the success of History Club whilst she scanned the front of a DVD case.

  ‘They’ve responded well and six of them came along last week.’

  ‘During the lunch hour?’ she interrupted. ‘Matt, you haven’t cleared this with me. Break times and after-school clubs are OK but legally we can’t disrupt the kids’ lunch hour. Plus, we are supposed to know, for obvious reasons.’

  I told her that I wouldn’t be able to get these kids to stay behind after school. Most of them brought their lunch up with them. What was wrong with them sitting in the room and watching the films whilst they ate? As far as censorship was concerned, I thought that it couldn’t be any worse than whatever they saw at home. And if they lacked parental guidance there, in our classroom they could rely on my sarcastic running commentary, one that reminded them of the wisdom of the cutting-room floor.

  Just as our discussion began to get heated I turned to see two of the kids standing in the doorway. If they were attentive to the nature of our argument they didn’t show it. They stood inexpressively. There was a good chance they heard Mrs Yeoman’s first name – Sarah. She hated the kids knowing that. As if to right this wrong she turned sideways on and nodded towards them, clearly flustered.

  ‘I guess this must be another instalment of History Club,’ she said.

  It was actually detention. They had arrived to help me put up the map. As I countered, Mrs Yeoman decided to take her leave, letting her hand float towards the map and issuing a rebuke to the girls, getting their names wrong then correcting herself. ‘Get on with it then, girls. Don’t let me see you here again after school.’

  One of the girls was vexed at this and started moaning, insisting I’d held her back instead of others. Sometimes, admittedly, I reined her in because I knew I wouldn’t have to chase after her friend if I kept both of them back. She suffered for her conscience. In another time she might have thrown herself under a horse.

  On Thursday I caught Alex Blake defacing the map. That day the school’s headmaster, Wolfencrantz, had asked me personally to cover playground duty. Mrs Yeoman had gone over my head. During my first lesson a group of year 7s had been outside the door passing signals in some strange whispered language, accompanied by gestures, to my pupils through the window. I kept going out there to threaten them. So by the time I caught Alex Blake writing on the map I was at the end of my tether.

  His partner in crime, the foil to his wit, was busy distracting me with endless questions. They were questions about a set of questions I had given out. It was a basic summary of a month of work on the Treaty of Versailles. I don’t know what Papal infallibility had to do with the post-war conference but he was obsessed with uniting the two issues. Was the Pope at the Palace of Versailles? Why wasn’t the Pope at the Palace of Versailles? Had he been invited? Rusty as I was on the Vatican City and the role of the Pope during the wars, I didn’t think he warranted a place at the table.

  I saw Alex writing on the back wall. He was leant against Egypt whilst trying to craft something onto the map. Even when a general murmur circulated and he knew I was looking, he didn’t stop. Instead he muttered shit and finished off the contribution. I was so angry I threw a textbook down on my desk and sent papers flying. I immediately gave Alex an hour-long detention and only checked the damage as everyone left.

  After scanning the map for a while I realised he had sketched a penis on Israel. When I confronted him later he denied the whole thing at first. In detention he confessed. ‘I didn’t draw it. I just circumcised it.’

  I looked closely at Israel. Its borders with Jordan and Egypt tapered to a point and someone had drawn over these lines to make a penis shape. Then they had gone back and added the balls, which were much less angular. A scissor line of semen flew into the Red Sea. All of these lines were drawn with a black ballpoint pen but the penis head had been drawn over with red pen, showing the coronal ridge. I turned around and Alex was flicking aimlessly through his textbook. I gave him ten minutes of detention then let him out early. I didn’t mention the incident again but I wrote a note about it on my class list, next to Alex’s name.

  When I started at St Edwards they gave me a print-out of my classes, a list of the pupils’ names with a photo next to each one. I have a terrible memory so it served its purpose. But after a girl was taken by a school janitor and killed, her mom fought for some new laws to reduce risk to kids. Within a few days of the new academic year they came and took my class list off me an
d gave me one without photos. I found I could remember them by drawing my own impressions of the kids in the gaps between their names, as well as listing certain attributes or features.

  I tried to keep this sheet safe. Certainly, I did not want Andre Miller to know that he was ‘clubfooted’ and, as Leon Monk asserted, ‘too quiet to be trusted’. Leon himself ‘answered in equivocation’ and had a slight ‘bung eye’. Still, I don’t doubt Leon was as taken aback as me when we learnt that Andre had been found with a knife on him, on the school grounds, during half-term. The caretaker saw him sharpening it on the perimeter fence. He had the other arm through the fence, hanging it there like a pendulum. I asked Leon once, candidly, when I held him back for detention, if he knew whether Andre had it in for one of the teachers, any in particular.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Leon said, ruling a margin on a new page. ‘He hated all of you.’

  I went in to discuss this with the headmaster. Wolfencrantz rapped his fingers on the desk when I told him about Leon’s comment. He said, ‘The young man could do with going a few rounds every other night – southpaw, I was. Boxing would give him the physique he needs for his self-esteem. He wouldn’t have the energy to walk three miles and cross the playing fields during half-term either. He wouldn’t want to. Why would a youngster do something like that? It baffles me, Matthew, it really does.’

  The police were called and went over to a concrete walkway behind some nearby shops where Andre had last been sighted. Wolfencrantz waited calmly for them to arrive in the school’s reception. He shook three officers’ hands and told them, ‘I used to box.’ A circle of deputies gathered around him. He led the police to the meeting room behind the desk. When he tried to open the security door, he forgot to run his staff card across the sensor. He kept yanking the handle regardless. This went on until one of the receptionists craned over their desk, saw the blood rushing to his temples and buzzed him through.