Precocious (4 page)

He told me to read a poem: ‘Delight in Disorder’. I was flattered, I think. Was I supposed to be? Meant to be me, I suppose. He compares me to great literary heroines: Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth … it makes me laugh although I don’t really understand.

Today nothing wants to stay where it is. My skirt is wriggling around my waist, my shirt working free, one sock slipping continually down my shin. As if some invisible, inexpert hand is trying to undress me.

The bus empties. Our Lady of Compassion smiles down on us from her breezeblock throne. Sister Agnes glides among us as we file into the pupils’ entrance. She’s the head and unlike Our Lady, never smiles. She taps some girls on the shoulder and those chosen trot automatically to the toilets to wash off their recently applied mascara and lipstick.

I have a letter, in my bag. From the minute I stepped off the bus I’ve been looking for him. It is the usual formula.

The bell rings and people rush towards and around me.

I don’t know if I have friends. At school I have followers; at home I have accomplices.

It was autumn, I was fourteen going on twenty-five, according to you, and I was having a perfectly ordinary day until you gave me your phone number.

‘Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,’ is all you said when I came into your room after class. You were used to seeing me there, of course, so you barely looked up. I didn’t mean to be a nuisance, I just liked being there. I liked the rows of books, the views out of the windows and the smell, and the old-fashioned chalk board (yours was one of the few rooms that didn’t have a horrible squeaky white board), and the glimpse into your office where I could often see the back of your head and the steam from your kettle.

You drank a lot of coffee back then. Sometimes I could smell it on your breath when you leaned over me and looked at my work. You also smelled of Aramis; I knew this because I scoured department stores, unscrewing bottles, sniffing so hard I felt faint, until I found the scent that was yours.

I sat on a table, swinging my legs, looking out of the window, looking at my nails.

‘Where are your followers today?’ you asked as you meandered between the room and the office, shuffling papers, humming, running your hands through your hair. I laughed.

‘Oh, I’ve escaped them. It’s really a bind to be so popular, you know.’

‘No, I wouldn’t know!’

‘Oh yes. Sometimes even the famous and terribly gifted need their privacy. Anyway, I came to talk to you about that last story.’

Then I held my breath, as I always did. Often at this point you would say you were too busy right now to talk, or have been too busy to read it just yet, and you would say, ‘I’m sorry, kid.’ On those occasions I had to wait for the deadline, and the red pen, like everybody else. Or sometimes you gave me your unbridled critique, verbally, there and then, and were always honest, and sometimes made me flinch, embarrassed, but cleverly always finished on a compliment.

But today was all new. Today you seemed to want to
chat
.

‘Coffee?’ you called, stirring, not waiting for my answer. You brought me a mug and pulled up a chair. It occurred to me that I never saw you sitting down. I saw you striding down corridors, fast and purposeful, detached and superior but at the same time mindful of all errant behaviour, issuing sharp commands (‘Chewing gum – bin’; ‘Tie – on’; ‘Class – NOW’). I saw you standing, in front of the board, in front of your audience, high above bobbed studious heads.

But today
I
had the vantage point, looking down from my table to your chair.

‘What a day,’ you said, leaning back and resting your head into your interlaced fingers, ‘God, I hate school.’

‘You’re not supposed to say that,’ I laughed.

‘It’s after 3.30 so it’s allowed. I think I might leave and become a bus driver.’

‘I don’t think you have the people skills for that.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘If you hate it so much why do you always stay so late?’

‘Why do
you
?’

To try and talk to you
, I thought.

‘I like it when it’s quiet,’ I said.

‘Yeah, me too. Hmm, maybe it’s not school, maybe it’s the kids I hate.’

‘Thanks!’

‘Well, some are okay. All children are equal in the eyes of the Lord, as Sister Agnes would say. But clearly some are more equal than others. Speaking of which …’ You reached over to your desk. My story. ‘Your story.’

I bit my lip as you scribbled on the back page, shuffled the papers together then handed them to me.

‘Well?’

‘You’ll have no trouble getting an A with that. But you knew that already.’

‘Cool, thanks.’

‘But is that enough?’

‘Er, yeah. I need to pass to do A levels, don’t I?’

‘What I mean is, you should be aiming for more than that.’

‘More than an A?’

‘An A just marks you out as better than the herd.’

‘More equal than others.’

‘Right. But again, you know that already. What you should be aiming for is to be better than
you
think you are.’

‘I think I’m pretty good.’

You laughed. ‘Of course. Anyway this all feels like more school,’ taking a gulp of coffee, ‘and we’ve already established we both hate school. Let’s talk about something else. How are things in your world?’

‘Oh, you know,’ I shrugged, ‘dramatic and fascinating, as ever.’

‘Ah, to be fourteen. Things get so much less exciting as you get older.’

‘I’m sure they do. I could use a little less excitement, to be honest.’

‘Problems?’

‘Oh, the usual rubbish at home.’ You smiled your crooked smile. ‘
I’m
fine, it’s everyone else that’s the problem.’

‘Mere mortals. Don’t let ’em get you down, kid. Remember,’ you got up and took your cup into the office, calling over your shoulder, ‘you’re extraordinary.’

For once I didn’t have an answer. That almost sounded like you meant it.

‘I should go.’

‘Do you need a lift?’ You came out of the office shrugging on your jacket.

‘No, I’ll walk, it’s fine. Ta, though.’

‘Suit yourself. See ya, sunshine,’ and with that you were whistling down the corridor.

So I walked home holding a story that, when I flipped it over, had your phone number on the back, in red pen, but no other comments, no marks, nothing. I kept trying to replay the coffee conversation in my head, but it shrank minute by minute, step by step.

Ring, ring. Click.

‘Hello?’

I said nothing.

‘Hello?’ Your bored voice.

‘Hello,’ I tried.

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s me.’
Who else could it be? Who else calls you?
I wondered. You laughed.

‘Hello, kid.’

I laughed too. Thank God, you knew.

‘Hello, older person.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, you said to call.’

‘It’s 11.30. Almost my bedtime.’

‘Everyone here is asleep.’ I was sitting on the stairs, curling into myself, hugging my knees, the receiver squeezed between my head and my shoulder, my lips almost touching the mouthpiece.

‘You sound muffled,’ you said.

‘You sound tired,’ I said.

‘That’s what happens when you get to my age, kid. You’re tired all the time.’

‘Your age!’ I scoffed. ‘You’re only …’

‘I’m twenty-eight. Nearly.’ I smiled to myself; this was new knowledge, and you’d offered it easily. What else could I find out?

‘Shall I let you go then, if you need your beauty sleep?’

‘Not just yet.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’

You laughed again. ‘You called me.’

‘You gave me your number.’

‘Fair enough. Okay.’

We talked about more or less nothing until 11.49, then we both went to bed, I in my room at the top of the house, you in your house, I wondered where.

The clatter of regulation inch-and-a-half heels down the hallway. The paralysing drill of the bell. Everyone stops where they are, what they’re doing. An instant of quiet, then…

Clamour. Books stuffed into bags, bags lurched over shoulders, move on. On to the next hour-long slice of day.

The school building was a mix of old and new. The red-brown brick, climbing ivy and crumbling high windows gave way hopelessly to a square of breeze-block and UPVC that clung like a tumour.

In the old school there were places to hide. It was once a convent, and along its dark corridors you could feel the ghosts of solemn nuns hurrying, heads bowed, to prayer. By 1992 they wore calf-length skirts and navy sweaters, small crucifixes and neat hair. They had to raise their voices like everyone else in vain attempts to be heard above the teenage cacophony. They were teachers now, touching the world in ways their predecessors wouldn’t have dreamed of; I wondered if they looked back wistfully to a time when their existence wouldn’t have been blighted by acne-covered despots and hysterical five-foot Delilahs.

The new school had no nooks or alcoves. It was resolutely straight-lined and primary-coloured.

In Physics Laura and I passed notes to each other, as usual. We would take a piece of A4 paper and fold it over, once, and once more, making a little book, and number the pages. We wrote in different coloured ink so we could see at a glance who had written what, although our handwriting wasn’t similar. I sometimes felt guilty for distracting Laura in this way, since I knew I would pass the exam without having to pay attention; she on the other hand might regret the sheets of folded-up A4 and the empty exercise books when June came. But it really was the only way to get through the tedium of protons and neutrons and blah blah blah.

Miss Danson was as dull as her subject. She had receding hair and a monotone voice a bit like a man’s.

‘Next week we are going to dissect a bull’s eye.’

She didn’t blink when she told us this. She breathed heavily, patrolling the desks in her leaden shoes. Most days she was preoccupied on these rounds with preventing Sean Brady from turning on the gas taps, or telling Martin McLoughlin to get his jumper sleeves OUT OF HIS MOUTH. Debbie Smith was painting something intricate in Tippex on the desk across the room from us, so I thought we were safe.

‘Miss Palmer.’ I wasn’t expecting the dry voice so close to my ear, or the talon swoop that snatched up our carefully folded note. She unpeeled it as though unwrapping a gift.

‘What do we have here, ladies? Hmm?’

I shrugged. Laura stared at her feet as though she had never noticed them before.

‘“Andrew Partington is FIT,”’ Miss Danson read aloud. The muffled giggles presumably encouraged her that she was being funny at our expense because she continued.

‘“Beautiful eyes,”’ she huffed, ‘– very insightful, I’m sure – “and what a sexy bod.”’

‘Miss, isn’t he a bit young for you?’ A voice across the room, then a nervous laugh, then the full bleating eruption of twenty-nine teenagers. As she realised what she had said, the colour rose up Danson’s throat.

‘Right. Outside, both of you.’ En route to the door I caught sight of Andrew Partington’s beautiful, mortified eyes. ‘And this …’ she held up the closely written paper by its corner as though it might contaminate her, ‘will be going straight to the Head of Year.’

Oh, fantastic.

‘What are these notes about anyway?’

‘She didn’t show you?’

‘I didn’t think it polite to look.’

‘Oh, you know, the usual. Who’s in love with who.’

‘With
whom.
’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Love is over-used and over-rated.’

‘The word, or the emotion?’

‘Ha ha. Both.’

‘Such cynicism. Such a shame. She must have really messed you up.’ The words were out before I could stop them. I looked at your face, trying to read you.

‘Who, exactly?’ You smiled, thank God. When you smile your eyes crease.

‘You know.’

‘Ah, you mean the W – I – F – E?’ You spelt the word out in a whisper as though disguising it from a small child.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Technically it’s E – X – W – I – F – E of course. And I’m sure you’re right.’ This much was a revelation: I wasn’t sure if you were divorced yet, or even separated, but you hadn’t worn your wedding ring for some weeks now, which of course I’d noticed. ‘Need a lift home, kid? You can psychoanalyse me some more if you like.’

‘Nah, I’ll get the bus. But thanks.’

‘One of these days I won’t offer. A man can only take rejection so many times, you know.’

‘Whatever!’

The journey home was when the change would take place, from one version of me to the other.

I don’t mean the physical things that everyone did, like rolling down the skirt, rolling up the socks and wiping off the lipstick. I didn’t worry about those anymore. You would think my mum and dad would be too busy ignoring each other to ignore me too, but somehow they managed it.

Whereas at school I was Top Group, everyone’s friend and good at everything (well, except PE, but my creative skills came in very useful for writing weekly excuse notes), at home it was a tougher job to be noticed. By ‘home’ I don’t just mean my house, I mean the estate. On the estate there were no points for being clever, in fact it meant you were viewed with suspicion. There weren’t even many to be had for being popular. You could be too popular, especially with the boys.

The bus route told a story. Looking out of the window was like watching a reverse film reel of social evolution. Double-fronted semis with their bulging bay windows and effusive gardens rolled by. The streets narrowed as the houses shrank and moved closer together and some cleaved into flats. Oak trees mutated into lamp-posts and vandalised phone boxes. The driver took the sharp turn by the pub and I pressed the bell for him to stop.

‘Look – it’s raining – you can’t walk home in that.’

I was in your room again, drinking coffee. It was becoming a habit, at least once a week. It was a Friday, so there was hardly anyone left in school. Most people were out of the door at half past three with astonishing alacrity.

Out of the window, the rain was coming down in sheets, blurring the trees, the cars in the car park, the newsagent’s across the road. It was late October rain: half-term rain. I looked at my bare knees and flimsy shoes and shrugged.