Chapter 3

5V and Fidget

As I took the last stair and rounded onto the top landing, the boy who was patently standing as lookout announced my approach by quickly flicking the classroom lights off and on. The boy was baby-faced, short and stocky, and had centre-parted jet-black wavy hair. He was slouched against the door jamb, had an unspent match in the corner of his mouth, and was affectedly attending to his fingernails with the point of a long metal nail file. He was obviously a big fan of the early Hollywood gangster movies.

When I walked toward the door, he pocketed the nail file, rolled the match from one side of his mouth to the other, and gave me a matey wink.

‘Afternoon, sir,’ he said cheerily. ‘We got you now then, ’stead of Miss Taylor?’

‘For the time being, you have, yes,’ I replied. ‘Miss Taylor’s been taken to hospital.’

‘Is it her legs again?’ the boy asked, and I confirmed that it was.

‘She really needs to get her knees sorted, you know,’ the boy continued. ‘My Gran ’ad ’ers done last Chrissmas, an’ she’s been right as rain since then.’

I said I was glad to hear it and asked if he could move to let me go past. He dutifully stepped to one side and emphasised the courtesy with a shallow bow and a courtly flourish of his right hand.

As I was about to go through the door, I recalled Brendan Leahy’s parting advice, moved my wallet to my inside jacket pocket, and held the register ready to deflect any improvised missiles which might be launched against me when I went in.

Once I was inside, I waited while the lookout followed through and cast my eyes around the room.

The upper half of the right-hand wall was occupied by a lattice of grimy windows that looked out onto the school playing fields, and the opposing and rear walls each sported cream-painted cast iron radiators and heavily pin-holed corkboards that were covered with felt tip graffiti. The remaining wall, behind the teacher’s desk, had a blackboard that was no longer truly black, and in white chalk capitals carried the news ‘Mandy Carter sucks cock’.

The room smelled strongly of sweaty adolescents and had six ranks of five desks with hinged lids and fold-down seats. Only nine of the thirty desks were occupied. There were four boys seated two-by-two at the desks in the back corner remote from the door, and another two who were seated singly and nearer the front. All six boys wore expressions that they clearly hoped would suggest innocence, but which were so exaggerated in their innocence that they made me deeply suspicious.

The only girls in the room were seated at the desks that abutted the teacher’s desk at the front. All three of them were deeply engrossed in their shared reading of the problem pages of Mirabelle magazine and paid no attention to me.

I took the board duster from the battered green metal waste-bin and expunged the blackboard reference to young Mandy’s sexual favours and then went to sit on the chair at the teacher’s desk. I discovered just in time that it was deficient in respect of a split and splintered leg and cautiously moved it over to one side. I gave myself a mental pat on the back and offered up a smug smile to the audience in the cheap seats who were visibly disappointed that I’d not gone arse over tit. I then perched myself on the corner of the teacher’s desk, opened the class register, and scanned down the list of names.

I took comfort in noting that Miss Carter didn’t feature and when the lookout had taken his seat by the boy seated near the front, I instructed the class to answer when I called out their names. The girl with the big lips and blonde curly hair sulkily folded and put away her Mirabelle magazine and answered to the first-listed name, Shirley Allyson. Her friends alongside her answered as Margaret McGillicuddy and Sandra Byrne.

Two of the boys in the back row turned out to be unrelated Greens, and the neighbouring pair were Danny Wright and Tony Billings. Two of the others I assumed were Polish because their surnames featured several runs of consecutive consonants, with most of these involving at least one z. I didn’t much rate my chances of pronouncing these correctly and I decided simply to call for the boys as Marek W and Stefan D.

Marek, as Pat Feeney later told me, had just been transferred to St. Wilfrid’s having been expelled from his previous school for assaulting members of staff. In that first registration though he came across as a quiet and inoffensive individual, polite and softly spoken. He was sprucely turned out with a pristine black blazer complete with breast pocket school badge, a bright white shirt, and a bona fide school tie knotted neatly at the throat. His seat buddy was the young gangster movie fan, Martin Riley.

After I’d taken the register – with everything done in pencil so that I could correct things as necessary later – we still had a full ten minutes to go. For want of something better to do, I introduced myself, told them I was the new science teacher and asked how many of them were doing CSE or O-level biology. They all half-heartedly raised a hand.

‘We won’t have you though,’ said Margaret McGillicuddy, ‘’’cos we were all in Baxter’s class last year. An’ he’s still ’ere … more’s the pity.’

‘You’ll get the other class,’ Shirley said. ‘With Shaz Mackenzie and that lot,’ and I said yes, I’d already had the pleasure of Shaz’s company that very morning.

The boys were clearly not interested in entering the conversation and variously occupied themselves by returning attention to their fingernails, rocking their chairs on the back two legs, twanging rulers on the desk, and flicking their neighbour’s nearest ear lobe.

I endeavoured, therefore, to chat as best I could just with Shirley, Margaret, and Sandra. I asked what they’d been reading in their Mirabelle magazine. They ignored the question completely and instead asked what I thought of David Essex’s new single, immediately following up with an enquiry as to whether I thought the man was ‘a pufter’. I explained that I wasn’t really a fan of Mr. Essex or his pop songs, and I declined to express an opinion as to his sexuality.

‘What about Marc Bolan?’ Sandra asked.

‘What about him?’ I asked.

‘Do you think he’s a homo?’ Sandra replied.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I said. ‘And why does it matter to you if he is or isn’t anyway?’

All three girls pulled faces that made clear their opinion that I was a total idiot, and I was thankful then that Pat Feeney gave a knock on the door and straightway came in smiling. ‘Good afternoon 5V,’ he said, addressing the class, and they for their part returned with an ill-synchronised and insincere ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Feeney.’

Pat took me aside and explained that he had another favour to ask.

‘The Deputy Head’s reported that Miss Taylor’s going to be off for quite a while, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I’ll need you to stand in as form tutor for 5V until she’s back. I hope that’s okay?’

‘That’s fine’, I said.

‘And I’ll also need you to cover for her on bus duty tonight,’ Pat added.

My stomach sank but I smiled and said, yes, okay. Pat briefly then gave some background and explained what I had to do.

St. Wilfrid’s, he said, was a little out of town and off the main bus routes. Most of the pupils also didn’t live quite far enough away to qualify for a local authority bus pass. This meant that the Catholic parishes had to provide funding for private buses that picked up outside the main gates and the teaching staff were required to take turns to ensure safe and speedy boarding when the transport arrived. It seemed like a fairly simple and undemanding task, and I was none too bothered when Pat asked me to do the honours that afternoon.

At 1.40, I dismissed 5V from registration and returned to my lab to spend the first two periods of the afternoon with another class of third-years. Of the expected class of thirty-one, there were eleven that attended. I bravely decided that that was too many for me to allow them to sit and simply chatter, but too few to warrant a proper lesson, so I split the difference, gave them an A3 sheet of plain paper each, and got them to draw posters showing herbivores and carnivores in food chains.

Moira Middleton took the opportunity as an excuse to draw her pet moggy, Fidget. We fell into dispute when I informed her that all cats were carnivores. Moira protested vehemently that Fidget was not, and that he only ever had Whiskas and sometimes milk and Frosties as a treat. ‘And he eats grass!’ she added with emphasis.

‘Yeh, but only when he wants to be sick,’ Patrick Simms informed her.

‘Fidget doesn’t get sick,’ Moira defended. ‘He’s well looked after and perfectly healthy, thank you’.

I could see that she was beginning to get a trifle upset and I tapped a finger on Patrick’s poster to indicate that he should focus on his own work. I suggested to Moira that she might like to draw a little mouse below her picture of Fidget.

‘You should do it lying on its back all covered in blood,’ Patrick interjected.

‘Moira can draw it how she wants, Patrick,’ I said. ‘You just concentrate on your own poster.’

In the single-period that followed, I had a free lesson, so I tidied up the lab and then went down to the staff room to get a cup of coffee. The room was empty save for a little chap with grey hair and Marjorie Proops glasses who was sat in the far corner doing the Guardian crossword. He was dressed in chalk-dusted jacket and ill-fitting trousers just like Neville Roberts, so I mentally marked him down as a member of the maths department. We exchanged smiles and nodded remote greetings to one another, and I took my mug of Nescafe and sat in the corner diametrically opposite.

Someone had left a battered paperback copy of ‘Where angels fear to tread’ lying on the armchair beside mine. In between sips of coffee, I leafed through to find the passages that we’d been tasked to dissect and analyse when studying for O-level English. There were annotations in the margins just like those in the copy that I had used back in 1968. The sight of these slanted scribbles brought forth a flood of memories, some of which were pleasant and others decidedly not so.

At 3.30, when the final bell went, I donned my electric blue sports jacket and left the building via the back door that led to the staff car park. I walked through the school gates and out into the adjoining street. There was already a heaving mass of bodies awaiting their transport home. Some were closely paired and seeking to satisfy their amorous ambitions against front garden walls, others were pushing and shoving on the pavement, and some were knocking seven shades of shit out of each other in the roadway. I swallowed hard, forged my way apprehensively toward the nearest melee, and sought to restore some semblance of order.