by M. J. Trow
Maxwell smiled at her. ‘Sally Greenhow,’ he said. ‘The lady with the lamp. I know what the Breakfast Club’s all about,’ he said. He glanced across at Gary Spenser as the boy finished his tea and dragged himself across to sit by little Tommy Weatherall. ‘It’s about you,’ he said to her. ‘Leighford High? That’s just a sixties pile with peeling paint and leaking windows. Leighford High’s just the bricks and mortar where people like you make the world okay for people like them.’
Across the cafeteria area, Gary and Tommy got their heads together. ‘Break, then?’ Gary said. ‘Far hedge?’
Tommy nodded. ‘You gott’em?’
‘I gott’em,’ Gary said, with that strange sideways movement of his lips he’d perfected over his twelve devious years. ‘John Players. Pack of twenty.’
‘Seen ‘em yet?’ Tommy asked.
A slow smile crept over the boy’s face. ‘I seen ‘em,’ he said.
‘Well?’
Gary’s hand slipped inexorably into the pocket of his non-regulation hooded top and he passed something to his mate. ‘You was right,’ he said. ‘Old Greenhow’s wearing red knickers. I seen ‘em.’
Tommy accepted the chewing gum with all humility. ‘’Ow’d you know?’
‘Showed ‘em to me, didn’t she?’ Gary swaggered as much as he could while whispering inches from his coconspirator.
‘Bollocks!’ Tommy hissed.
‘All right,’ Gary conceded, unable to sustain this one. ‘I caught her gettin’ out of her car.’
‘Told you they’d be red,’ Tommy beamed. ‘Got a nose for it.’
‘What about him?’ Gary asked, focusing on the Head of Sixth Form.
‘Mad Max?’ Tommy frowned. ‘I don’t want to guess what colour his knickers are, thank you very much.’
‘Gross!’ moaned Gary. ‘No, I mean, d’you think ‘e’s givin’ her one?’
‘Mad Max?’ Tommy repeated. ‘Never. He’s way past it. Anyway,’ he clambered to his trainered feet. ‘He’s as gay as a wagon load of monkeys. Luke Jefferies told me – you know, in Year Eleven? Maxwell had it off with him in the showers, last term.’
For a moment, Gary looked up at his oppo, then he slid back his chair and followed him into the corridor. ‘Bollocks!’ Sally and Maxwell heard him shout.
Sally sighed. Maxwell chuckled. ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ he told her. ‘Young Gary has clearly just finished reading the latest Harry Potter. Nothing wrong with that at all.’
The staffroom at Leighford High was like any other mental institution the length and breadth of this great country of ours. Dodgy insurance offers sponsored by the National Union of Teachers fluttered from a notice board marked Social. On the Political board there was nothing but a solitary photo of Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education onto which someone, blessed with a higher order of satirical wit, had board-marked the inevitable glasses and second beard. Peter Maxwell could not let that stand. He it was who had added the horns. Elsewhere was the detritus you’d find in every staffroom in the land – old copies of the Times Ed., its job pages pinched, its articles unread. West Sussex In-Service glossies lay at rakish angles on filing cabinets offering courses on Crisis Management and the water-heater gurgled reassuringly in the kitchen corner.
Staff briefing had happened every Monday since Socrates had wandered through these sylvan groves spouting brilliance that his eager young students had soaked up in the cradle of civilisation. Education wasn’t quite like that today. Today was all buzz and apprehension. The Week of Weeks. The Five Days That Shook The World. You couldn’t see them of course, the Inspectors. Like plague bacilli, they were already in the building, oozing through the heating ducts, dispersing in the dusty air. You could smell them.
‘Good morning!’ A vague rumbling made one or two heads turn. Most people were still chatting, making silly jokes to keep their spirits up, laughing with a brittleness that screamed their fear.
‘Good morning!’ louder this time, but still not enough. People were sorting their mail, checking their briefcases, handbags, rummaging for the Prozac.
There was a shattering whistle, the sort the lost generation had heard in the slippery trenches of the Somme, when the donkeys led the lions up the rickety wooden ladders and out into the barbed-wired shell-shocked hell that was No Man’s Land – a bit like the boys’ bogs by Friday afternoon. Peter Maxwell took his two fingers out of his mouth and waved them gaily at his Headmaster, who was still waiting to start the day.
A silence. ‘Thank you.’ James Diamond, B.A., B.Sc., M.Ed., God knew what initials he had amassed by now, was standing alone before his staff, the wrong side of forty, veteran of a hundred bad decisions. Was that a new suit, Maxwell wondered? Could be. Diamond’s salary was vaguely commensurate with the national debt of Ethiopia.
‘The Inspection team is in the building,’ he told them, clutching a sheaf of papers to give his hands something to do. Maxwell held up his fingers in the sign of the cross. James ‘Legs’ Diamond looked like shit, Maxwell thought. He’d watched him over the last days descend, as Maxwell had always presumed Hitler had in the Bunker, into an exhausted madness. Any minute now, Diamond would start to rebuild Linz. ‘Mr Whiting will be with me for most of this morning. Make sure your lesson plans are on chairs outside your rooms, everyone. Any notices?’
‘Er …’
Diamond caught the movement from the corner. ‘Yes, Sylvia.’
‘Heaf tests, I’m afraid. Thursday. I tried to change it, what with Ofsted and all. In the Hall. I’ll put timings in the registers.’
‘Thank you, Sylvia.’
Maxwell winked at her. Sylvia Matthews, School Nurse, the Florence Nightingale of Leighford High, wandering the lonely wards of S Block, ice-packing sprains here, dobbing out morning after pills without the Headmaster’s or the parents’ knowledge, wiping eyes and wiping bottoms. She wouldn’t have it any other way. They went back a long way, Sylvia Matthews and Peter Maxwell. At one time they’d been … an item? No, never that. Oh, she’d loved him all right, that was plain to see. Unless, of course, you were Peter Maxwell, who could be all three wise monkeys at times. But that was before she’d found her Guy and he’d found his Jacquie. Now, Sylv and Mad Max were just comfortable together, like a pipe and slippers, cocoa and a hottie.
‘Well, then, everybody,’ Diamond did his best to smile. ‘Have a good day.’
And the hubbub rose again as the Arch Curriculum Manager exited the room.
‘Legs Diamond has left the building,’ muttered Maxwell, lifting a weekend’s worth of crap out of his pigeonhole.
‘Max,’ Paul Moss, the Head of History, was at his elbow. ‘All set?’
The Head of Sixth Form turned to face him. Disappointingly, young Paul had changed his Daffy Duck tie for a plain blue one and his natty George at Asda shirt had been replaced by something altogether more po from Burtons. Oh dear, he’d caved in. And Mad Max had such hopes for the lad who was Head of History. ‘As set as I’ll ever be,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘And … um … your lesson plans?’
Maxwell waved the equivalent of a rainforest in front of the man’s nose. The relief on Moss’s face was visible. It was all there, he could tell even at a glance – course units, aims, objectives, resources, seating plans. There was a God. ‘Thanks, Max,’ Moss beamed. He knew perfectly well that Peter Maxwell had not written a lesson plan in thirty years. William Gladstone had been at Number Ten and beer was 1d a pint.
‘Of course,’ Maxwell waited until his nominal boss had nearly reached the door, ‘there’s absolutely no guarantee I’ll use them.’ And he grinned maniacally before blowing the young man a kiss. Poor Paul. He too had had a fear-struck few weeks, finding this evidence, collating that. Mrs Moss and all the little Mosses had got used to his uncontrollable outbursts, his panic attacks, his collapses into sheer, unadulterated terror. Could Ofsted do that to a man? Yes, if Mad Max was on your team.
Peter Maxwell had been teaching for thirty-four years. He told
Year Twelve it was forty-eight. He told Year Seven it was ninety-three. Both Year Groups believed him. And in all that time, he had never, until now, had a free period to start the week. This year he had, for the first time in eternity and it gave him a breathing space, a chance to sharpen his pencils, brew his coffee, focus his mind for the coming hour, the coming day, the coming week. And a chance to sort out the problems of his own, his very own, Sixth Form. The anomaly still existed – they were actually, in Tony Blair’s New Cool Britannia, Years Twelve and Thirteen, but the phrase ‘Sixth Form’ had a veneration of its own and it refused to lie down. There would be those who’d been thrown out of home over the weekend, who’d got into a fight in any one of a number of hostelries between the Vine and the Arms. There’d be those whose boyfriend/girlfriend had dumped them, those who were convinced they’d loused up their A2s, their ASs, their GNVQs. And all of them, all of them, would be queuing up on the Mezzanine floor where Mad Max lived. His Number Two, alias Helen Maitland, the Fridge, would be there already, battling well, but not, in the end, coping. She would lay her burden on the Lord. And the Lord – he’d lay it all on Peter Maxwell.
That Monday however, there was just one standing by his office door. And it wasn’t one of Maxwell’s Own. It was a woman, brunette, attractive, pencil-pleat skirted, with a silk scarf and an elegant Celtic brooch to hold it in place. She was … what… forty, perhaps? Perhaps less. She spun on her heel to face him.
‘Mr Maxwell?’ Her hand was thrust out. He glanced at it. No dagger. That was a start.
‘That’s right.’ He took her hand. It was slim, but the grip was firm for a woman. Perhaps she worked out, pumping iron in her spare time for WWF.
‘I’m Sally Meninger. This week I’ll be taking a look at the pastoral provision in the school. I understand you’re a history teacher.’
‘Right again,’ he said. ‘Won’t you go in?’
He followed her into his office, that Inner Sanctum where he sometimes had the luxury of closing the door.
‘Then we’ll be seeing rather a lot of each other. I’m Humanities too.’
‘Joy,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Coffee?’ He ushered her to a soft chair.
‘Good Lord,’ Sally Meninger was taking in Maxwell’s walls. His décor, it was true, took some handling. Ahead of her, Rita Hayworth smouldered seductively, assuring the cinematic world that there never was a woman like Gilda. An ex-president of the United States to her right appeared to be in bed with a chimp called Bonzo and to her left a black-trimmed parasol tossed on the air currents somewhere on the Irish coast over the head of Ryan’s Daughter. Above Maxwell’s already bubbling kettle, Butch and the Kid were making a determined run for it, thumb-breakers blazing against half the Bolivian army.
‘Did they make it, do you think?’ he asked her, nodding in the poster’s direction. ‘Butch and the Kid. Did they get out?’
‘You’re the historian,’ she smiled, crossing her legs and declining his coffee with a shake of the head.
‘And you?’ he was stirring after her shake.
‘Sociology, originally,’ she told him. ‘All rather a long time ago, I’m afraid.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
‘So, did they?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Butch and the Kid. Did they escape?’
Maxwell sat down opposite her, dropping the scarf and hat to one side. ‘Butch’s sister said they did. They came home from Bolivia one day and lived to a ripe old age. ‘Course, she was a few bullets short of a six-gun. Is this your first visit to Leighford, Miss Meninger?’
‘Wearing my Ofsted hat, yes. I came here as a child, of course. You still had donkey rides then, I seem to remember.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘That was before Women Against Donkey Abuse took over. WADA. How they’ve enriched our lives.’
He saw her write something on her sheet. He didn’t have to see what it was. He knew. It would read something like ‘Chauvinist Pig’. Good start.
‘How long have you been wearing your Ofsted hat?’ he asked her.
‘Six years,’ she told him.
‘Ah, so you were one of Chris Woodhead’s Finest, then?’
She smiled. It was like the silver plate on a coffin.
‘Good job?’ he asked her.
‘Depends on the school,’ she shrugged. ‘Sometimes it’s a positive pleasure.’
‘And other times?’
She looked into his eyes. ‘Sometimes it can be pure bloody murder.’
Chapter Two
‘Oy! Sultans of Swing!’ Gerry Cosgrove was in no mood to muck about. His missus had kept him up half the night with her snoring and the brewery delivery had been late. He’d caught his thumb between a couple of barrels and his back was playing up. To cap it all, it was Monday night, the place was empty and his Live Music was guilty of offences under the Trades Descriptions Act; he wasn’t sure they were actually alive and he was bloody certain they weren’t playing music. ‘Come on, it’s ten past nine. How much of a break do you blokes want?’
‘Sorry, squire,’ Duggsy was Lead Guitar and Vocals, the spokesman of the group. His top was grunge, his hair retro punk, his jeans Milletts. ‘Monday night, ain’t it?’
‘Yeah, well, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that,’ the landlord told him. ‘Where’s your drummer?’
Duggsy checked behind him. ‘Having a slash, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Still?’ Cosgrove seized the moment to collect a few empties on the beer-wet table nearby.
‘Well, he’s old, inne?’ Duggsy explained. ‘You gotta be a bit, y’know, understandin’ ain’tcha?’
‘No,’ Cosgrove bore down on the lad. ‘No, that’s precisely where you’re wrong. Ah,’ he glanced up as six people bustled into the bar, ‘Don’t look now, but rent-a-crowd’s arrived. Your audience just doubled.’
‘Bit of acoustic then, Wal?’ Duggsy turned to Mr Bassman as the landlord hurried off to look genial. Wal was a beige replica of Duggsy, but terminal acne had hit him at sixteen and had never quite gone away.
‘Nah, can’t be arsed,’ Wal muttered. ‘Where the fuck’s the Iron Man?’
‘Probably can’t find his way back.’ Duggsy finished his drink. ‘Lord Muck over there’s getting a bit pissed off. I may have to hack into Postman Pat in a minute. Fuckin’ hell!’
‘What?’ Wal looked up from checking his leads.
‘That’s only Mad Fucking Max!’
‘Never!’
‘As I live and breathe. Look, over there. With that lot just come in.’
‘’Ere, that’s that tit Mr Holton. I always hated him.’
‘I seem to remember he wasn’t overly fond of you, Wal, me ol’ mucker. Must be Teachers’ Nite Out.’
A wiry man with spiked black hair and a pony tail swaggered his way from the furthest corner, the flickering lights from the pinball machines catching the studs on his leathers and the collection of piercings that adorned his otherwise unremarkable face.
‘Well, about fuckin’ time, Iron,’ Duggsy batted him with his guitar-case, mercifully the soft one. ‘We were about to begin our overture.’
‘Sorry, man,’ the drummer muttered. ‘Bit of me old trouble.’ He took a serious drag on whatever he was smoking and bared his teeth to the flashing lights that suddenly rotated. The barman switched off Chris Tarrant, much to everyone’s relief and the band struck up.
‘Mother of God, what’s that?’ It was Ben Holton who reacted to the sound first. He still remembered the Vine in the old days, when it reinvented itself from a spit and sawdust dive to a mock-Tudor eaterie. Herring-bone covered the walls and a rather plastic-looking breastplate and halberds gleamed over the huge grate.
‘That,’ shouted Sally Greenhow over the noise, ‘is the Yawning Hippos. Two of them are old Leighford Hyenas.’ She had long ago adopted Maxwell’s terminology for the alumni of the old place.
‘Really?’ Maxwell screwed up his eyes to make them out. For all the Vine was virtual
ly empty tonight, a thick haze with a sweet smell which hung like a pall over the place, soaking into the rich swirls of the carpet and coating the leaded panes. ‘Which ones?’
‘Lead and bass guitars,’ Sally said, fumbling for her change. It was, she insisted, after the day they’d all had, her shout.
‘That’d be those things with leads dangling from them,’ Maxwell was reassuring himself. ‘Good God, yes. You remember William Thing, Ben.’
‘Thing?’ Holton repeated, letting his lips dip into the froth.
‘Well, that’s only an approximation of course. Everybody called him Wallie when those books came out because he was so nondescript. Couldn’t find him in a crowd and so on.’
‘Still is,’ Paul Moss chipped in, gathering up two drinks and heading for a table as far from the band as possible. ‘That’s why he’s playing bass.’
‘The crooner,’ Maxwell was waving a finger at him trying to find the name in the vast vaults of his memory, ‘is Matthew Douglas, who once vied with fourteen others for the coveted title of the stupidest boy in Ten Eff Three; Class, if I remember, of ‘99.’
‘Well, haven’t they come on?’ Holton muttered, stumbling after Moss to the corner and squeezing himself into one of the snuggeries, the alcoves that lined the far wall.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Sally sauntered with him. ‘The Hippos have quite a following.’
‘So I see,’ said Holton, looking round at the deserted pub.
‘Well, people,’ Maxwell raised his Southern Comfort. ‘Here’s to a bloody war and a sickly season.’ Maxwell’s toasts were usually incomprehensible, but as The Yawning Hippos ritually murdered the Nine Inch Nails, the others intoned ‘Here! Here!’
