The Secret Teacher

by Anon

  ‘Ah. Good point.’

  ‘I’ll do it if you want –’

  ‘No, no. He’s mine!’

  We watched him as he read from a book, and ran his fingers through his long wavy hair. Suddenly he leapt up and walked around the Department, talking to himself animatedly. He stopped before the window and pointed at an unsuspecting girl in the playground, shouting, ‘GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!’

  Oh God. Every trainer’s nightmare. A Frustrated Actor.

  Tom and I went in and introduced ourselves.

  ‘Rehearsing?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry. Yes. Just practising for tomorrow. It really is one of the most challenging scenes to perfect.’

  ‘Yes. You do realise your audience will be Year 8 Set 3?’

  ‘Ah. Marvellous. Perhaps you might offer me some direction …?’

  ‘You know that it’s a lesson? In which you have to teach?’

  He arched an eyebrow. He clearly didn’t.

  *

  I came home that evening to find Amy standing in the hallway holding a stick. We hugged and kissed and danced around the kitchen.

  *

  At last.

  A child.

  Who is not someone else’s.

  *

  I was nervous about telling people at work, but no one seemed very surprised.

  Everyone was very kind. Genuinely excited, even. It felt like telling family. They already started suggesting names: William. John. Ernest. F. Scott. Daisy. Emily. Chinua. Mercedes. Chika. Salim. Milosz.

  Mentor sent an image of Virgin and Child, with my face superimposed over the Virgin and the Child.

  I thought about telling my classes. But I didn’t want the 11s or 12s to think I was abandoning them just before their exams. And I knew the 8s and 9s would all go ‘UURGGGHHHH!’ or ‘AHHHHH!’ and generally create a massive distraction, and think that I was having the baby with Little Miss Outstanding (there were only so many adults in the world, after all, and they were all in the school; if you ate lunch with another teacher, you were going to have babies with them).

  *

  During Staff Briefing, Head showed us pictures of British officers cooking breakfast for their men in Afghanistan. ‘What does this picture say to you?’ he said. Mick shouted, ‘HUNGRY.’ Head made it clear that this was deadly serious. ‘It says three things to me,’ he said. ‘Number 1: Teamwork. Number 2: No ‘I’ in TEAM. Number 3: Morale boost.’

  That Saturday, he made all the staff come to school for a ‘British Breakfast’. I arrived just as his black BMW with the tinted windows glided through the gates, and watched him as he walked into the Canteen. He came back out a few minutes later wearing a chef’s apron and hat. I followed him up to the DT Department.

  ‘Come in! Make yourself comfortable!’ he instructed, as he beat some eggs. A Muslim SM was frying the bacon.

  After half an hour, we were sitting in a room full of smoke from burnt toast and sausages, making polite conversation, sipping orange juice, trying to suppress coughs. I was desperate to get home, do my marking, look after Amy.

  After we had eaten breakfast and cleared up, it was nearly lunchtime. I found a moment when he was eating alone to tell him my news.

  ‘How did this happen?’ he asked.

  ‘Erm …’

  I thought about inviting him to my Sex Ed class. I was a pro now.

  Lesson #182:

  Teaching Sex Ed Is Easy.

  I was really apprehensive about showing Year 9s how to put a condom on, but in the end, it was the easiest lesson of the year. I followed the Science teacher’s technique: rest it on top of the dildo ‘like a sombrero’, and then unfurl straight down in one easy motion. They were so unnerved. Even the tough boys didn’t dare try, for fear of not being able to do it.

  *

  ‘I mean: how long have you known about this?’ asked Head.

  ‘Erm … not long,’ I stuttered. ‘But don’t worry. It won’t clash with exams.’

  ‘Good.’ He grumpily finished eating his banger and handed out greasy feedback forms for us to fill in.

  How do you think the British Breakfast went?

  Which British Values did you identify before, during or after the British Breakfast?

  How can you incorporate elements of the British

  Breakfast into your own teaching practice?

  It was all going to be fine. Fine. What could go wrong? Miller was going great; we’d read the play, lifted chairs in varying levels of machismo, done the Trial of Marco with the whole class as a jury, and the most voluble kids as attorneys; now all they needed to do was loads of practice in unseen poetry and comprehensions based on newspaper articles; the 12s were all over Dickinson; the 9s, I could just show The Truman Show every lesson; Meedja, slap on YouTube; the 8s were being taken over by Trainee, so I didn’t have to do any planning or marking. Just sit there and enjoy some amateur dramatics.

  But Trainee turned out to be a lot of work. It’s all very well being able to recite a speech or direct a scene and talk about character motivation and all that, but you aptually have to teach them things these days. And he really didn’t get that.

  Just before his first lesson, I asked him if he would like to take a break from swinging back on my chair to take a look at the lesson he was about to deliver. He said he was fine and that he needed to do his breathing exercises. He was lying on the floor, saying, ‘Inhale Pink, Exhale Blue!’ when HoD entered. HoD mouthed, ‘He’s getting your job’, and walked out again.

  I had told the Year 8s that they were going to get a new teacher for a while. They were cool with that. But I don’t think they were prepared for what was coming.

  Trainee entered the classroom with his trousers tucked into his socks, wearing a beret and carrying a small plastic sword. They pissed themselves. When he finally regained control, he made Mercedes read Ophelia (we hadn’t got very far in six weeks) –

  Lesson #199:

  You Never Get Through The Text.

  You Rarely Get Halfway.

  Mercedes stumbled her way through as best she could, stifling giggles.

  My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,

  Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;

  No hat upon his head; his stockings fouled,

  Ungartered –

  ‘HAHAHAPLEASESIRSOZZLESQUAZZLESCAN’T DOIT!!!!’

  *

  Trainee was acting it all out. He undid his blazer, tossed his beret aside, pushed his socks down, and dropped to his knee before her. I had a flashback to the pomegranate. No way back.

  As I watched him, I realised that training to be a teacher was like being a terrible actor stuck in a matinee performance, and never feeling comfortable in your role. The audience titter and smirk at you and then walk out. And then you have to go see the theatre director for notes. What was I supposed to say? ‘Darling, you were MAHvellous. The way you dealt with that heckler. Well, all of them. Don’t worry about hoi polloi. I was rapt, utterly rapt …’

  At the end of the lesson, I patted him on the back and said, ‘Great, let’s catch up later.’ I ran out of the lesson to get away from the throng who wanted their practice papers back – which I still had not marked – out into the playground, waved at Salim, gave Donnie a friendly tap on the shoulder, and came to a standstill at precisely 10 a.m., where I acknowledged the Duty Manager with a salute, put my hands behind my back, and adopted my stern duty face.

  Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip.

  I looked up at the clock. I had five minutes. Enough time to check my phone. I reached into my pocket.

  Text message.

  From my mother.

  Please ring asap.

  I knew exactly what that meant.

  The outside was about to come crashing in.

  Dad had died.

  *

  I don’t remember much after that. I found Mentor, who organised for my lessons to be covered that afternoon. I left in a daze and found my way home to the car and then I drove, I don
’t know how, guided by some reptilian GPS. My mother was sitting at the table, head in hands. We hugged and cried. I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And immediately felt like an idiot. She said, ‘It’s only been a few hours.’

  I had to do something, so after lots of tea and staring, I went to the Funeral Director’s, which was at the corner of a busy crossroads, nestled between the police station, a mosque, a bank, Mothercare and a Poundshop.

  One of that lot has to protect him.

  The woman behind the counter of the Funeral Director’s was jolly and welcoming. I said my father was in there. She looked at me, smiled, and then said, ‘Oh, yeah! Dead ringer!’

  I stared at her.

  Surely your only job is not to say something like that.

  ‘Oh, sorry! I didn’t mean …’

  Standing outside in the cold wind as people bustled by with bags overflowing with Poundshop bargains, I felt the loneliness of this first night dead. For after tonight, nothing would ever be different.

  I walked home breathing deep, gusty air. I looked up at the moon’s broken glare through the branches of the trees.

  I am alive.

  But when I woke the next day, I could not get up. I tried to deny reality. I kept trying to go back to sleep and wake up different. But I only got more tired, more blotchy, more dazed. For a week, it was just dark, dark, dark.

  I spent the whole week in my dressing-gown trying to find a poem to read at the funeral. I must have gone through every single poem in the canon. Most poems I had to read three or four times, partly because they were incomprehensible, but partly because all I had been conditioned to do was spot shit like alliteration and sibilance. I suddenly realised I couldn’t read poetry. What does any of this stuff aptually mean? A lifetime of literature, and all you care about is the literature, not the life. Like that guy in The English Patient who says, ‘It comes from having read too much into too little.’

  Dad would want The Four Quartets.

  Of course he would.

  That was how he communicated with me, so that is how I would make my final communication with him.

  *

  The day burned bright, the sun flaming the dew on the tombstones of the secluded chapel, as I read words from The Four Quartets that sounded like they had been written especially for this day.

  History was now and England.

  At home, we played Leonard Cohen loud. I stood by the mantelpiece and looked at pictures of myself as a baby being held by my father, and I felt a profound sense of time collapsing.

  Time present was time past was time future.

  Tick. Excellent. Check tense.

  *

  Gradually, staff found out and offered condolences.

  Thanks, yeah, terrible, thanks.

  I really didn’t want the kids to find out. I had spent the last year erecting this carapace of strength, this impregnable persona, and now it was going to be totally undermined. But they smell you out.

  A day or two later, while waiting for Trainee to appear from behind the Dry Erase Retractable Whiteboard/arras, Mercedes said, ‘Are you sad, Sir?’ I paused. ‘Yes. Yes, Mercedes, I am.’ And she said, ‘Sorry.’ I thanked her, like a dear friend. ‘We miss you,’ she whispered. ‘I miss you too,’ I said.

  Head didn’t say a word. Nothing. Not one word. Every time he walked past me, he just blanked me.

  Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

  One day an SM came up to me by the photocopier, put an arm around me and said, ‘I am very sorry.’ It turned out that she had lost her father the year before. They weren’t all autobots after all.

  She said, ‘You’re just numb, aren’t you?’

  *

  Numb.

  Yes, numb.

  That’s it.

  Exactly.

  Numb.

  *

  And numb was the way forward. I had to numb myself with beeps and grind, with exam prep and data input. The only response to fathomless pain.

  And it worked. I learned to love the numb quotidian grind.

  Just keep numbing it out.

  Everything was structured. Routine. Steady. Settled. I planned. Delivered. Marked. Fedback. Planned. Delivered. Marked. Fedback. I didn’t have to think. I clocked in and clocked out.

  *

  Bell goes.

  Ding!

  Slobber.

  Answers.

  Ariel. 18 point.

  Practice Papers for the 11s, 12s and 13s.

  Wag wag wag.

  Hineni. Here I am. God. Here I am.

  Just keeping it numb.

  *

  I had to make revision booklets for the mocks. The Emily Dickinson booklets were particularly numbing, because I mindlessly went on the internet and copied and pasted the poetry from any old website, but it turned out that it was the wrong version, so I had to go through and change every hyphen into an en-dash. And that’s a lot of hyphens.

  *

  After great pain -

  No, like that –

  Exactly.

  Numb –

  *

  Amy and I had booked to go to Iceland over Christmas. I said I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea now, but Amy insisted. What had been intended as a purifying escape now looked like it was going to be a pure reflection of my emotional state. I had spent over a year listening to Little Miss Outstanding bang on about Pathetic Fallacy; now I was aptually going to experience it. On the plane, I listened to The Letting Go by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, which he recorded in Iceland, and thought about Brave New World. Here I am, God. An Epsilon in exile. Obi-Wan banished to the mountains of Tatooine.

  The hotel was wedged between a sheer glacier and a green, broiling sea. A solitary black church stood on the headland. We walked along the black volcanic beach, as a hurricane whipped up around us. Amy tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear her over the wind. That afternoon, we went to a water park and I got stuck at the top of a waterslide in the howling gale. We drove back, through the eye of the storm, with the car lifting off the road. All I could see was tumult and chaos.

  When we got back to the hotel, we sat quietly and stared at the crashing waves. A Physics teacher from my school walked in with his girlfriend. I greeted him like a long-lost brother. We discussed all the people who were leaving the school; how sad it was; how it wasn’t going to be the same. I said at least we were still holding out, but then he admitted that he too was leaving. I expressed all the sadness and shock I was capable of, which wasn’t much given the circumstances, and asked why. He gave the boilerplate reasons – done my time, too much red tape, got stale, just want to be allowed to teach, love the kids but had enough of SM, don’t want to be an SM, time to shit or get off the pot – before sheepishly admitting he was going to a private school.

  We stared at the sea some more, weighed down by immensity. Finally, I was feeling something. Finally, I was thinking about something. I realised that this was the first time I had thought about anything for years. I was paid to think, and to help children think, and yet I spent most of my time chasing my tail in a frantic muddle. I felt time collapse into an eternal present. I could finally approach my grief, and became very upset thinking about how my father would not get to meet his grandson. Amy comforted me by telling me that I could honour his memory by being such a father to my son. To become a real father is to become a real son. There was a torch that was being passed on, like that from teacher to pupil. I pledged to her that, whatever else happened, all I wanted to be was a proper father to my child.

  *

  I lay awake in the endless dusk reading Emily.

  *

  This is the Hour of Lead –

  Remembered, if outlived,

  As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

  First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

  14

  Personality Recalled

  Tuesday, Period 6. The Hour of Lead. The weekend has yet to heave into view. Lunch rush is o
ver. Blood sugar is dangerously low. Heads are heavy and mushy. Brain cells inert.

  I hadn’t bothered to plan this lesson. After all, they were really motoring on Dickinson now, so I thought this was going to be a no-brainer. All I had to do was give them a stimulating Starter and then they could get into groups and brainstorm around each section, and then feedback at the end. Teaching the teacher. The best kind of lesson.

  We stared at images of the nervous system, a heart, feet, tombstones, watches, quartz, lead, a frozen landscape.

  ‘Come on. Someone … Anyone,’ I sighed.

  The clock seems to have stopped.

  ‘Ella?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Liam?’

  ‘Er … sorry. What was the question?’

  ‘Which. Poem. Is. This?’

  ‘Cemetery?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Rolex.’

  ‘OK. What else?’

  ‘Stones. Heart. Feet.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm. Anything else?’

  ‘Winter.’

  ‘Good. So what do we think the poem is about? Ella?’

  ‘She’s in love with this guy, yeah, but he dies, yeah, and den she goes to the cemetery in winter and den loses her watch. And den she gets bare cold and her feet get frozen and fall off?’

  ‘Great, Ella! It’s a start. OK. Couple of minutes to discuss it and then feedback.’

  I checked my email. The Data Manager had sent round a reminder that the Year 7, 8 and 9 data was due, with a link to the spreadsheet and a SMART Notebook guide of how to fill in the columns.

  The Year 11 Football Team had won another competition.

  A reminder to get all reply slips in for the Oxford trip.

  Tick, tick, tick. Delete all. Delete all the emails! LA LA LA!

  *

  They are still just sat there.

  *

  I turned the lights off.