by K T Bowes
Chapter 2
“Hana, please can you answer that phone? I’m stuck. Some kid’s shoved a half-eaten apple behind this shelf and my hands are filthy!” The blonde woman knelt in front of a brochure rack, her hands buried deep in the pile of dog-eared papers. “It’s disgusting. It’s gone soft over the holidays and stuck to the shelf.”
“Yuk.” Hana dropped her bundle of papers onto the floor and ran to answer the phone. Behind her, the newspapers slid in a graceful arc into the walkway. She returned within a few seconds, chewing her lip with anxiety and her cheeks pink with embarrassment. “Sheila, it’s your husband. For you. He has an emergency.”
“I bet I know what.” Sheila hauled herself upright and Hana avoided her sticky, outstretched hands. She watched her boss saunter into the office and winced at the thought of the phone call, having already taken the full force of the caller’s discomfort. Sheila’s voice reverberated through the glass partition from the office. “You did what?”
The high beamed, vaulted roof left the partition walls hanging, stopping in mid-air as though the builders walked off the job half-finished a century earlier. Intricate wooden shapes decorated the ceiling like the inside of a church. Little angels and imps perched on the cross beams or hung from the apex, painstakingly carved into the wood of the Presbyterian school.
Hana tossed her red hair and bit her lip as Sheila’s words filtered over the partition, “What do you mean, you thought you just farted?”
Hana tried not to eavesdrop and gathered the newspapers, stacking them in the brochure rack. Sheila returned sporting a rubber glove and the hint of a smirk. “Did he tell you?”
Hana nodded and then dissolved into giggles.
“Stupid idiot,” the faithless wife remarked as she went back to the rotten apple. “I told him not to come in with a stomach upset, but he wouldn’t listen. He’s gone home to change his underwear.”
“Where’s Rory today?” Hana asked, referring to the Year 13 dean.
“I don’t bloody know,” Sheila replied with venom and Hana winced.
“How long until your house is finished?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Another few months. We should’ve rented somewhere. Moving in with our daughter and Rory was a stupid idea. He tolerated us before and now he hates us for sure.”
“I doubt that.” Hana pictured the gentle dean fighting Sheila for the bathroom and wondered if they’d manage to keep their personal differences out of the office.
The peace shattered as a loud booming voice split the air like an axe and left the molecules vibrating. “Mrs Jennings, where’s Martin? I’ve just found 9MJ without a teacher and they were trashing the place. Where’s your husband? I swear I saw him at staff briefing this morning.”
Sheila gave the angry male a disarming smile, using her Swedish charm to good effect. She used his outstretched arm to raise herself from her awkward kneeling position, then completed her manoeuvre by placing the disintegrating, fly infested apple remains into his open hand. The deputy principal stared at the rotting apple and considered its slimy vileness for a split second before dropping it into the bin. He looked at Sheila without repeating his question, his face unreadable. She smiled with enough sweetness to disarm a charging, wounded bull. “He’s sick. I can cover his class, Alan.”
Alan Dobbs grunted and breezed from the common room as quickly as he arrived. His incredible hairpiece wobbled on his head as he stalked away, in danger of blowing off as the doors slammed. It was blonde and curly, stark against his dark features and black eyebrows. Hana knitted her brow and turned to Sheila. “Is his wig on back to front?”
Sheila shrugged with disinterest, used to the incongruous appendage. She muttered something under her breath and strutted off, disappearing through the double doors which slammed behind her. Hana’s eyes widened in horror. “Sheila, the glove! Take the rubber glove off!” Receiving no reply, she poked a strand of red hair behind her ear in exasperation, “First Martin leaves the classroom with diarrhoea and then his wife turns up wearing a rubber glove.”
Sheila returned at the end of lunch, flustered and still wearing the glove. “I made those unruly Year 9 boys stay in for a lunchtime detention,” she complained. “It’s the first bloody day of term and they’re starting to play up! I coerced other staff members to cover Martin’s classes.” She sighed. “He can’t get off the toilet.”
Hurling herself into her office chair, she reached into her desk drawer and retrieved her sandwiches, staring at the gloved hand as though it belonged to someone else. With a shake of her head, she dropped it into the dustbin and bit into her sandwich. “Give them a month and that will be the worst class in the school, little buggers. What’s the world coming to?” Airborne crumbs flew across the desk and hit the computer screen as Sheila berated the class of fourteen-year-olds. “I’d prefer diarrhoea to teaching them.” Chutney oozed from the sandwich wrapper onto a significant memo which already sported a coffee cup ring over the words, ‘For your urgent attention.’
Hana smiled to herself. “Thank goodness I don’t have to teach,” she commented. “I’d be rubbish at it.”
“Ooh, talking of teaching, or teach-ers.” Sheila grinned, unaware of the blob of chutney on her chin. “Have you noticed the new English teacher? Logan something. He’s gorgeous!”
“Oh.” Hana looked embarrassed. “Tall, dark and wearing cowboy boots?”
“Yep, yep, that’s him. Did you see that body? He used the school gym this morning during his free period. I might join so I can watch. When did you see him?” Sheila peered up at Hana as the redhead hovered in the doorway.
“I dropped my handbag on the floor right in front of him. Anka and the school nurse said a car almost ran me over, but I didn’t see it. I crawled around the chapel carpark putting the crap back in my bag and only saw his shoes.”
“Yummy!” Sheila exclaimed. “He wears cowboy boots? So sexy. Did he help you?”
“No.” Hana shook her head as her embarrassment grew. “He just watched, like he’d never seen anyone grovel on the ground for a lipstick before. It was mortifying. I laddered my tights.”
Sheila poked at her squashed sandwich and then hurled it into the bin next to her. “I can’t stop looking at him. He’s got the nicest backside I’ve ever seen. Just like two little peaches in a...ahh back again Mr Dobbs?”
The afternoon whizzed by with administration jobs, keeping the budget straight and making posters advertising a visiting speaker for the next week. Hana left it until just before five o’clock to make her way back to the leafy suburb in the north of the city, to her empty house and equally hollow life.
