Septembers

by Christopher Prendergast

  I was picking through an overwritten paragraph about the Black Panthers and the infamous Olympic salute when it came to me, as if it was scrunched in the black-gloved hand of the athlete. In fact the list was still folded and inside the machine. The 45-degree water was soaking through the cotton and obliterating the paper faster than the ink could run. When I pulled it out desperately, a few minutes into the spin cycle, the paper was ripped. After it had dried on the radiator the writing looked inhuman, like blobs of oil residue.

  I sat down on a chair that was propping the door open. My washing machine was crammed into a little utility room at the back of the flat. I pulled up my satchel and found my notebook and a pen. I tried to fake the list on the notepaper but I couldn’t remember all the rankings. I also couldn’t get my handwriting that bad. It seemed too obviously me. I was fucked unless I could get Alex to write it out again.

  I abandoned my form and tried to find him in the IT suite the next morning. I ran in on the wrong class and as I backed out, barely explaining myself, I walked into a printer. The teacher paused and narrowed her eyes at me. A row of children turned away from her and watched my frantic button pressing. The printer was wheezing out blank sheets of paper, and giggles spread through the class. In that sea of faces there was no Alex Blake.

  I tried to compose myself on the edge of another room full of sixth formers until eventually I was drawn to the windows and the grey playground below. Amongst the milieu of painted lines, a spread of intersections crossed by groups of kids, there was a large and dangerous-looking figure. So much action flowed towards him, lines of kids chasing, and then, as the figure came to a standstill, rippling away like they felt the force of a great stone dropped amongst them.

  In a long suede coat that whipped up their exuberance, Wolfencrantz was supervising the playground football. It was hard to tell when he had the ball as his form eclipsed it. He seemed to make it invisible at his feet and would show it in flashes now and then to maintain their commitment to the game. For a while I watched him meander around the playground and I suspected he hadn’t even nominated an end that he was shooting towards. He took one look up and produced a rugged chip, all he could do with the weathered, deflated ball they played with, to the set of goals he had just been turned away from.

  The pass bounced amongst a few kids scattered towards the backpost. It looked inventive but pointless. Either no one had read it or no one accepted him as a viable inclusion to the game. Then a boy peeled out of the shadow of a beanpole sixth former who was idly watching. The neck of this boy’s jumper was wrenched back on one side by the strap of a satchel. He quickly ducked under the strap and threw the bag to the ground. As he stepped sideways he took the ball on his chest, leant backwards and it sat up perfectly for him to hit in the air.

  Wolfencrantz’s presence again quickly asserted itself on the playground. He unloaded a barrage of firm handclaps to the goalkeeper who had pulled off an unlikely save. This was whilst Wolfencrantz still took kicks on each ankle. The kids either thought the ball was still there or wanted to take advantage of a rare chance to kick an adult. When the keeper punted the ball high a few minutes later Wolfencrantz called the boy who had hit the sweet volley to the fringes of the game. He put his ancient hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a few words.

  I did not find Alex and later Mrs Yeoman did not believe I had done anything but intentionally destroy the Hit List. Her face was flooded with indignation when she heard I’d taken and lost it. She asked me for the keys to my desk. After I declined several times, she swore and I closed the door of my classroom, telling the waiting pupils to return to the foot of the stairs.

  I watched her hand shake as she tried to get the key in the desk’s lock. Eventually I took over, unlocked it myself and we stared down into the open draw. There was a picture of Franz von Papen on top of my papers. It was taken when he served as the German Ambassador to Turkey. He was wearing a garish combination – a black striped bow tie with a pinstripe jacket. He looked like an old Hammer Horror actor from the fifties, a bit Vincent Price, with a barely noticeable moustache. The hairs were white at the ends like a fir branch under snow. It would be impossible for Mrs Yeoman to know the significance of that glossy picture. I tried to second guess her thinking and settled on the idea she thought we were looking at a picture of my grandfather.

  ‘Is that Vincent Price?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I hesitated. ‘I found it when I moved my stuff in.’

  She started going through the papers. I helped by gathering bundles and placing them on the desk. At the bottom of the draw there was nothing but Tesco receipts and a few shirt buttons. As she leafed through the papers, I restated my innocence. Soon after, she pulled out my own class list. She mouthed a name and comment with barely a whisper of sound.

  ‘Jodie Tatham – the inevitable product of an overachieving island nation . . . what is this?’

  I think, rightly, that in all her imperiousness over the school, Mrs Yeoman was quite a vulnerable soul. She had not pursued the list with Alex’s guilt in mind, but with mine. As it happened two lists had been compiled. Alex was not alone in making wild projections of thought and feeling. Mrs Yeoman was too embarrassed to look at my class list for any notable length of time and folded it in half, as she had folded the first.

  When she next spoke it was clear she had little to say.

  ‘Matthew, I’ve been thinking about the map.’ She stood looking at the wall, not aghast, but contemplating the map in a way I had wanted the kids to. Her mouth shrank to the size of a small coin. ‘It looks tatty and there are some lewd things drawn here.’ Then she moved closer to the Middle East. Her faint shadow began to climb the wall. ‘Matt, some of the things on this map are quite racist.’

  During the Easter holiday I went into school and took the map down. With the commotion I had made over putting it up, I didn’t want the pupils to see it taken away from them.

  I had to call the caretaker to get him to open my room. He got to the top of the stairs and made a hmph sound when he saw the door.

  ‘You’re up in the satellite room, eh?’

  That is what he had christened this energy-saving construction. He put the large set of keys, brimming like a jailor’s, back in the pocket of his overalls.

  ‘You know this room is energy-saving?’ I said.

  He passed me a newer key, with a grey plastic handle – it looked like the key for a shed. Then he said. ‘You mean it’s cheaper to heat.’

  Before he left he mentioned that it was the second time he had opened up during the holiday.

  ‘This room?’ I asked.

  Apparently the sociologists had been in there again. A sixth former had left her textbook behind. I walked over to my desk and checked the drawer was still locked. The sovereignty of my desk had already been violated by Mrs Yeoman. The lists were gone but I didn’t want anyone else rooting around, looking at that picture of Papen. Nothing had been moved or changed. The desks were laid out in their neat rows. The chairs were tucked in behind them. It was left for me to make the changes.

  First I set myself up on a chair so I could reach the top of the map. I had a blunt knife that I’d brought from my flat. Starting on the eastern side and working westwards, I began plucking the staples from each side, wrenching some of the trickier ones out with the knife. Eventually the map began to fold over and collapse under its own weight. When I came face to face with Andre Miller’s ‘fuck you’ over the sea-fringed white of Antarctica, I tried not to take it personally.

  At some point I realised I was not alone. I heard gentle echoes on the stairs. I thought the caretaker might have decided to lock up early. Stepping down from the chair I turned to see Annabel, in full office attire, enter and pause nervously.

  ‘Mandy saw you come in,’ she said. ‘There are some things I wanted to tell you.’

  Annabel was moving to London. It was something s
he had been thinking about for a good few months. And along with her newfound need for independence, which she had felt so keenly at Christmas, she felt a need to open up new frontiers. I said that it was understandable. I picked the staples up off the floor whilst she spoke. My room had been so clean it felt bad to just leave them there. She asked whether I had been making it into work OK.

  ‘Yeah, fine, I’ve started getting the tram,’ I said.

  ‘All the way?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, no, I catch the bus, sometimes.’ I threw the staples into the bin. ‘But it’s nice to be able to catch up on some reading.’

  She sat down on top of one of the desks. I moved the chair to the centre of the map. Then I got back up on it, folding parts of the map back so it didn’t billow out and wrap around me. She sat there for a few minutes on the other side of the room.

  ‘This probably isn’t great timing, Matt,’ she said, her voice seeming to get louder as she spoke. ‘But, I’m really sorry. It’s over.’

  5

  TWO MOTORBIKES PULLED into the car park and dragged fumes in with them. Sunshine poured down on the cars and families. As I passed between groups, the bike engines died down. Three or four of my year 11s were pulling back the flaps of envelopes. There was glad-handing. Mandy called after me as I passed through the doors. She pressed a note to the reception glass. It was 11am, results were in and I was running late. The note said that Wolfencrantz wanted to see me after I had talked to some of the parents.

  I walked back out into the car park. There we were, all together, finally, with nothing to lose. I tried to relax my guard but I felt like a lot more needed to be said. I found it around the back of the workshops, on the far side of the building, where a group of young men were having their last illicit cigarettes. A few of them tried to hide the fag-ends in a cursory gesture – one put a Marlboro out on the redbrick so I set them at ease. It was summer after all and they weren’t coming back. In fact, neither was I.

  ‘What, sir?’ one asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m leaving too. I wanted to wish you guys luck,’ I said.

  ‘Wish me luck, sir? You should have given me a C. You can keep your luck.’

  A debate opened up about the merits of my classes. A few voices rose up in my defence.

  ‘Forget him, sir. He is just having a fit because he didn’t revise and he told his dad he was gonna go to College. Hehehehe.’

  They then told me how this pupil had devised a decent system of adapting the school reports, firstly by scratching out different parts of the grades with a scalpel he’d taken from a stockroom, then by excruciatingly matching up the right colours of ink, the right thickness of the nib, and shifting lines around or adding them on. If his dad bothered to read the criticisms of the text rather than the grades, if either of his parents penetrated the troubled handwriting, the boy just explained that the teachers were hard on him because they wanted to push him to fulfil his amazing potential.

  It was quite funny – knowing that his father was going to take a hand to him for maintaining a consistent and high level of bullshit throughout the year. They told me how at home he was the captain and joint top scorer for the basketball and football teams respectively. Apparently I had told him he should look forward to getting a scholarship after college. Even Wolfencrantz had considered adapting his schedule to give him the private maths lessons that would bring his arithmetic up to scratch with the other subjects. The lies appeared to have mounted up.

  I remembered the note Mandy had showed me and excused myself from the smokers.

  The car park and playground were draining clean as I went back into the school. I admired the solemn passage of steel columns in the main corridor. I went right through the school to the very back where a staircase looked out, through perspex smudged with dust and fingerprints, onto a range of fauna that ran around the back of the buildings and sectioned it off from the surrounding housing.

  This was where the old hub of the school had been run from. They moved most of the offices because it wasn’t cost effective to be installing broadband wires and knocking through walls in an old redbrick building. Whilst most of the former offices were filled with stuff no-one had the authority to throw away – I passed an open door with a chipped white exercise bike poking out – the old Head’s office had been declared a no-go area. Thus it preserved a thick oak desk towards the tall windows at the back of the room and also a chalkboard mounted on the left-hand wall. That would have been where the smoking boy had his imaginary arithmetic lessons.

  This was Wolfencrantz’s office. I approached the door on the third floor and gave it a gentle knock. The greeting was immediate, as always, and allayed my fears of a volatile opening. As I pushed the door, I first saw planet earth. It was the centre of a small orrery that rose to waist height. Wolfencrantz was sat behind his desk at the far end. At first I thought he was standing over it. In fact he sat there, with a black pen. He looked about to write something and hesitated.

  ‘Hello, Matthew.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Is that the time? The afternoon has disappeared. I’ll just finish up. Are you OK to sit down?’

  He pointed the pen to the chair. I sat down with my hands quite still and breathed out. Wolfencrantz had done well to maintain the spaciousness of this old haven. I found myself staring sideways at the orrery with my hands between my legs. With its little golden renderings of the planets, it was both a magnificent and understated thing. Each planet reflected the dull colours of oak as well as the giant frames of his bookshelves. He saw that I was taken with it.

  ‘That was a present from my uncle,’ he said. ‘I think he was horse trading for a more sizeable one with a friend of his in London when he spotted that on a market stall in Marrakech.’

  I told him I had only seen one up close once before. They kept it in the science museum back home. Whilst it was much bigger it didn’t seem half as impressive as the one Wolfencrantz had acquired from his uncle. Maybe some of his family were pretty flush after all. I told him I really liked it anyway, and that I’d get one, if I could afford it.

  ‘Well, you can’t beat the real thing, can you?’ He stamped the floor here, twice and firmly, beneath the table. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘why not embellish it, put it in gold and keep it polished?’ Then, as if remembering that I had spoken, too, he placed the pen down on his wad of paper and said the word home. ‘When was the last time you went back to Birmingham, Matthew?’

  ‘It surprises me that you haven’t achieved everything you wanted to. The things we envisaged when you started. Looking at how everything has panned out for the year, it seems you’ve struggled to settle in. You haven’t really asserted yourself in the classroom as we thought you might. Has this been the right post for you? I know you’re as disappointed as we all are with the results today. Sometimes you’re dealt a bad year but you can’t let that impact on you as a teacher.’

  His assessment didn’t seem fair. For one, my year 7s and 8s were doing quite well. No-one was worried about their performance. Secondly, I felt my relationship with the students was for the most part good, give or take a few disciplinary issues. I told Wolfencrantz I had no problem with the syllabus, even if it was dry at times. I explained that it was the stuff around teaching that was bothering me. When it came to the material and the kids I was fine. The exam results had not been great but I was still finding my feet. He didn’t seem to listen.

  ‘I know you and Mrs Yeoman have had some working issues this year. It’s a problem for all of us if you subvert the chain of command. I think you can acknowledge that.’ He drew breath. ‘She has her own methods for running the school, but she is under a lot of pressure to perform – we all are.’ He sat up a little. ‘You say your relationship with the pupils has been healthy?’

  I nodded. He bent down and opened a drawer. He pulled out a few sheets and placed them at the edge of the desk so I could read them. He pointed to my handwriting, sc
rawled around the lists of my classes.

  ‘This does not demonstrate a rapport,’ he said. ‘There is something I am inherently worried about here.’

  He pointed to different comments. Some sentences ran into crammed paragraphs on individual students. Wolfencrantz or Mrs Yeoman had circled the comments they found to be most offensive.

  I had stepped into that office ready to accept a parting of ways. The least I wanted was to part with Wolfencrantz on good terms. He had always said things which suggested he saw something in me. Now he made it clear we were beyond the stage of nurturing potential. And he wasn’t talking about the kids, he was talking about me. He relayed the stories of the lists but somehow the two had been confused. He believed I was not only responsible for the comments of my class list, but also for the defamation and underlying threat of Alex Blake’s Hit List. I tried to straighten this out.

  ‘I was on Alex’s list! I was number 19!’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Regardless of authorship, you destroyed potential evidence.’

  Things did not look good at this point. The more I spoke the more I seemed to incriminate myself to Wolfencrantz. Eventually he brought the conversation around to the content which he had found offensive. He wanted to confront statements I had made about individual children. There was a strong argument that those thoughts had compromised my ability to teach the students. He could brush aside the caricatures I had made. Those were the observations about their looks or behaviour which told them apart at the beginning of the year. Superficial judgements were partly natural.

  Beyond this there was an abuse of position. He argued that I had segregated them. My judgement had been fundamentally impaired. He asked me to say something in my defence. He asked if there was anything going on in my personal life.