Maxwell's Inspection (2 page)

‘Is that all you could amuse your first girlfriend with?' Holton was still reading his newspaper.

‘Not at all,' Maxwell bridled, stirring his coffee briskly. ‘My party-piece – at parties, that is – was shoving sticks of celery up my nostrils. The mark of the true sophisticate. She was putty in my hands after that.'

Holton looked at him over the rims of his glasses. Peter Maxwell wasn't a bad sort. Bit mad, of course. But then, he
was
an historian and they were never the same as other people.

‘You a regular then, Ben, at Miss Greenhow's Club for Down and Outs?'

‘Certainly not,' Holton shook his paper closed as Maxwell winced at the taste of the school coffee. ‘But
seeing
as our Ofsted Inspection starts in …' he looked at his watch, ‘forty-five minutes, I thought I'd get a head start.'

Maxwell became conspiratorial, leaning forward and closing to his man. ‘So, tell me, Ben. What's the official approach in your faculty, eh? You going for the bar of soap on the floor? The wire stretched across the stair? Or what we're doing in Humanities, the subtle stash of crisp tenners?'

Holton scraped his chair back, folding his paper with a resigned flourish. ‘I'll let you know,' he said.

Maxwell smiled and leaned back. ‘Lang may your lum reek, Mr Holton,' he called as the Head of Science made for the double doors, ‘and similar Pictish exhortations.' He lolled back in the hard plastic of the chair, catching sight of the damp patches on the ceiling and the words of King Richard whispered in his brain. ‘A black day will it be for somebody.' He caught sight of a tall, pretty thing with bubbly blonde hair scurrying around the corner,
carrying
trays. ‘Ha, Norfolk,' he called to her. ‘We must have knocks, ha, must we not?'

Shakespeare was lost on Sally Greenhow, the Head of Special Needs. She'd done
The Taming of the Shrew
for GCSE and had seen
The Tempest
at Stratford. She'd rather enjoyed
Shakespeare in Love
, but Maxwell, she knew, had held horses with the Bard outside The Curtain, got pissed with him at The Mermaid and had given him most of his best lines.

‘Mr Maxwell,' Sally was the consummate professional in front of the kids, lounging around as they were, chomping toast and playing on the school's computers. ‘What are you doing here?' Maxwell raised the imaginary pistol and shot her dead, since in every television crime drama from
Murder She Wrote
to
Midsomer Murders
that line preceded slaughter. She smiled and sat down next to him.

‘So this is the Breakfast Club?' he asked her, raising his paper coffee cup in salutation.

‘This is it,' she beamed, looking round at her hapless charges. ‘You don't approve, do you?'

Maxwell looked at her. Sally was the wrong side of thirty these days. She had a loving husband, but no kids of her own. He'd never known why. There was talk of a
problem of some kind – her, not him. This was her family now. A bunch of misfits and oddballs, the exclusively included who should have been in special schools, except that the government had closed those down and dumped their charges onto the saps who were trying to run
mainstream
education.

‘Look over there,' she raised her eyebrows to her right. ‘Little Tommy Weatherall. He's got a reading age of seven, a statement that reads like a rap sheet and a lot of problems. He won't do games.'

‘Tut, tut,' Maxwell shook his head.

‘Know why he won't do games?'

‘Can't be arsed?' Maxwell suggested.

Sally shook her head. ‘Doesn't want the other kids to see the cigarette burns on his chest and back, the ones Mum's latest boyfriend put there.'

‘Ah.' Maxwell knew a slice of humble pie when he was offered it.

‘Over there. Gary Spenser.'

‘I know Gary.' Maxwell didn't have to turn in his chair.

‘Do you, Max? Know where he lives? Last Wednesday it was on the Dam, under a mattress some thoughtful soul, unable to find the Tip, had left. Thursday, it was in a doss on the Barlichway Estate, with his big sister who's on the game. He was probably there on Friday, but I
understand
the law raided it, so where he was over the
weekend
, God knows. I expect he'll tell me later today, when he feels a bit safer. You know Leighford High, Max?' She looked into his dark brown eyes. ‘That place where you and I work? Well, it's home to the Garys of this world, Max. That's what Breakfast Club's all about.'

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.