Owen Marshall Selected Stories (40 page)

Prof Glower at the front refused to be hurried. ‘Shut your trap,' he said sternly. Eileen was an indispensable secretary, but still a secretary after all. ‘You're a bunch of sodding sooks. Wankers, the lot of you.' He strode on, refusing to hunch into the gale, professorial to the last, yet in his heart he felt an irrefutable regret that he had ever abandoned his love of Proust, and taken on the New Zealand vernacular.

E
ven before the final bell kids were drifting away from the classrooms, some with special dispensation because they had buses to catch, others just up and off from teachers whose discipline was weak. Paul Broussard could have named those teachers without bothering to check the rooms, but who wanted to make an issue of it on the last day of term. All through the school there was an unclenching, a slackening, a sense that, ah, things were near enough to over. Among the teachers only the zealots took a grim pride in grinding out a last exercise before the chairs went up. And when the bell rang the students burst from the buildings, swirled briefly at the locker rooms and bikesheds, then as a human tide ebbed away, leaving debris, and within the buildings a scent of packed, reluctant congregation.

Pressure lifted away from the whole institution in a way almost palpable even within Paul's office. Sure, there would be a final flush of administrative tasks for him as teachers completed end-of-term procedures, but he would come back to the school over several quiet days and deal with those without the constant interruptions of school time. Crisis management was his habitual occupation during term, but frequency made it no easier. The stunted glue sniffer brought to his door for the third time in a fortnight, the fifth form Chinese boy lying behind the fives courts with teeth knocked down his throat, the choral singer who had an epileptic seizure, the skinheads from the street refusing to leave the senior girls' common room, the
male teacher reduced to tears by the brutal insolence of a fourth form class, the boy who had created a large audience by shitting on the bonnet of the counsellor's car, the shoplifting calls from the supermarket manager, the torching of the twelve, blue outdoor cafeteria tables purchased from school gala funds, the balaclava woman on drugs screaming to see her daughter even though Child, Youth and Family had said it wasn't allowed, the quiet girl found at the back of keyboard skills cutting her legs with broken glass. Such things took precedence over the routine administration of exam timetables, maintenance returns and sports day, which then had to be done late at night, or over his weekends.

Paul intended to go through to the staffroom for a while, have a coffee and wish colleagues a good break. Most would be as eager as the kids to get away, but cheerful as they tidied up final paperwork and told each other of their plans.

It was his custom to have a last walk around the buildings and grounds before leaving the school. Often he found something that needed action before the weekend. He walked down the corridor lined with photographs of laudatory achievement, and the glassed cases of trophies. He passed the open door of Gareth's office and saw the principal stretched back on his chair with the phone to his ear. Gareth lifted the palm of his free hand towards Paul in acknowledgement, and rolled his eyes up to show his exasperation at a call he wished would end. That was another reason Paul liked to take his tour of duty — it took him beyond his office, even if the cellphone accompanied him.

Mary-ann Beale had similar intentions perhaps, because she joined him at the large swing doors to the main entrance. Mary-ann was senior mistress and would have had the deputy principal's job if merit always received its just reward, but she bore Paul no grudge for the male prejudice the majority of the board had exercised in his favour three years before.

‘Thank God for the bell,' Mary-ann said.

‘Why is it that with four terms now, they still don't seem any shorter?'

‘We're getting older,' she said, as they moved out into the main quad which had a showpiece rose garden at its centre. As always she carried her big-format, blue diary with her to record her tasks as they arose. She was a stickler for efficiency, and famous for it. Kids knew that whatever went into Beale's book would in due time have consequence. Her dark hair was always in a page-boy cut, and her lipstick smudged on her soft, shifting face. It was the face of a fat woman, but by discipline she had kept her body from achieving its predilection. ‘I've had a cow of a day,' she said. ‘One thing after another.'

Paul admired Mary-ann although he never thought to tell her so directly. She fronted up to tough decisions day after day and was slagged off a good deal because of it, but more ex-pupils came back to see her than returned for any other teacher. ‘Oh, everybody's twitchy by end of term,' he told her. ‘Docky came to me again this morning and said he's resigning. He does it once or twice a year.'

‘Accept it, for God's sake. Wouldn't it be a mercy for the kids as well as us.'

‘I did, but he never puts it in writing, and withdraws it later anyway. He just wants the satisfaction of telling Gareth and me where we can stick the job. It's a therapy for him, but it winds us up, of course.'

‘Docky knows he's not up to it any more, but won't admit it,' said Mary-ann. She felt better for hearing that Paul had been put through Docky's rant. There's more humour to be had in the predicament of others than in your own. She and Paul knew that within the next year they'd have to find some way of easing Docky out.

As Paul and Mary-ann walked past the manual block he thought that she was right, that getting older was as much a reason for their disillusion as anything else. What had amused him about the kids when he was in his twenties and thirties brought only impatience
now he was fifty. Year after year they came on with unbounded energy and a sense of their own novelty, constantly renewed, while his finite resources were sapped just that much more by each intake. He could still remember most of the individuals of his first classes, but of later ones just the very best and worst, the majority scarcely registering at all. And from that grey majority a pleasant adult might return and expect to be remembered. Someone for whom there had ever been only one 6B Geography, and who never considered it as one of a long series for Paul.

‘I think I'll check the girls' common rooms,' said Mary-ann. ‘I had some classes detailed for clean up, but who knows.'

‘I'll look in on the boys' ones,' said Paul.

‘If you find a mess you might be able to get some of the kids from the final detention. There's a few hardcore still with an hour today, I think.' And that wouldn't be the easiest of jobs — detention supervision on the last day of term. All sorts of possibilities for things to go wrong. Paul tried to remember which staff member had drawn that short straw. And there'd be those kids who didn't show up, obeying that juvenile consciousness of time which considered two weeks an eternity between them and retribution. And when eternity ended, Mary-ann, or Paul, would be waiting.

The senior common room wasn't too bad: attempts had been made, although there were still plenty of textbooks that should have been away in lockers. At least the litter had been taken to the rubbish drums by the cafeteria, leaving just the heavy smell of socks and pastry and hooliganism. The ceiling bore a dark, hachured pattern from the impact of a thousand muddy rugby balls, and the old furniture had been gutted as if in a desperate search for treasure. Everything had been worn back to a fundamental communal minimalism.

Paul walked on through the corridors until he reached the fifth form boys' common room, but even as he went in he heard someone running behind him, and a junior girl with frizzy, pale hair and the tartan school skirt almost to her ankles skidded in the doorway. ‘Mrs
Beale wants you to come to the main gym, Mr Broussard.' As she spoke she looked not at him, but at the common room, which was foreign ground to her.

‘Okay,' said Paul. He went out into the north quad and cut across the grass, under the wet-weather walkway to the school office and on towards D block. The frizzy girl half walked, half ran beside him. ‘Thanks for telling me, ahh —. Thanks for telling me. What's your name?'

‘Nadine Troy,' she said, giving a little skip at the disclosure.

‘Anyway, thanks, Nadine. You can get away home now.'

‘Mrs Beale told me to come back.'

‘Okay then.'

Maybe Mary-ann had found a stash of shoplifted stuff, or copped some kids for vandalism. Last year there'd been the discovery of marijuana plants in the ceiling of one of the computer labs, with bulbs rigged up for light and all. How few people outside the system realised the truth of schools — that they weren't cosy and manageable but, like society at large, were places of ambivalence, jostling contradictions, and with a small but powerful criminal fraternity. Many of the druggies, car thieves, intruders and vandals who contested with the police in the weekends, donned uniform themselves on Monday and went off to their classes with their intentions quite unchanged.

‘So what's Mrs Beale on about then, Nadine?'

‘I dunno.' Nadine trotted up beside him, encouraged by being spoken to. ‘I was just going past the gym and she came out and told me to get you from the common rooms.' Nadine's frizzy hair shook like metal filings and he half expected her to jangle. He guessed she was a fourth former, but had no recollection of ever having seen her before, though that was common enough in a large school. He liked her openness and willingness to help. Some kids would be already whining that they had to go, and couldn't someone else do whatever it was that was asked of them.

Paul and Nadine went in the main door of the gym, the shadow there a sudden reduction of light and temperature. The gym was a cool, clean space: the high ceiling, polished wooden floor with court markings in white and blue. No equipment visible at all except the heavy ropes drawn from the centre and secured to the wall bars.

‘Mary-ann,' called Paul.

‘In here.' Her voice came from one of the storage rooms by the Phys. ed. office. Paul went to the open door and looked in to see the shelves of balls with checker-board markings, the clumped skipping ropes, and Mary-ann kneeling on the floor beside a girl whose head rested on a grey gym mat and whose legs were dark with blood.

‘Oh, Jesus,' he said.

Mary-ann looked up at him, the straight hair at the sides of her face finishing at her jaw line. ‘I wanted to ring from the office here, but it's locked. Could you use your cellphone for the ambulance?' Paul turned away to dial so that he wouldn't be looking at the girl as he spoke: her heavy, pale legs with the knickers half down, her heavy, pale face with an expression both questioning and oddly resigned.

He had forgotten Nadine, but facing back into the gym he found her close beside him, and as he spoke to the emergency service he tried to position himself between her and the tableau in the equipment room. He held up his hand though she wasn't making any attempt to push through. He felt more immediate pity for Nadine than for the girl on the floor, an irrational feeling, but powerful nevertheless. When he'd finished on the phone he moved out, ushering Nadine back a bit. ‘Look, Nadine,' he said, ‘Mr Quintock needs to know about this. Would you go to the office and ask him to come over, and then could you please go up to the top gate and guide the ambulance down here? Don't take any notice of the No Vehicle signs — come over the lawns by the swimming pool as a short cut.' Nadine whirled about without speaking, with a final jangle of hair ran noisily through the shadowed body of the gym, was outlined for
a moment in the bright rectangle of the door, then was gone.

Paul crouched beside Mary-ann, and his knee popped loudly in protest. ‘Have you got a clean handkerchief?' she asked him, and when he gave her the handkerchief, compactly folded, she shook it out with a flourish almost as a conjurer might. Paul took the girl's listless hand in his and could feel the slight sweat on it. Her face was forlorn, as if floating a long way below him.

‘It'll be okay,' he said. ‘The ambulance will be here in a jiffy. Don't you worry. Everything's fine.'

He thought that he recognised her: not by name, but as the unexceptional sixth former who always had a small, clumsily acted part in the school plays. ‘She hasn't been attacked, has she?' he asked Mary-ann, though knowing he shouldn't talk in front of the girl as if she wasn't there.

‘She's been pregnant,' said Mary-ann. How well she managed a minimum of specific information.

With relief Paul heard Gareth's loud, enquiring voice in the gym, with relief he went out and motioned him towards the equipment room, where the two of them stood talking in the doorway, Gareth's voice becoming more subdued as he looked past Paul to see Mary-ann and the girl on the floor. ‘Right, right,' Gareth said. ‘Poor kid.' He hesitated to go closer for it seemed very much the sort of thing women coped with. ‘Ambulance?' he said, taking responsibility for lesser matters.

‘On its way. I must go out and help Nadine guide them in.'

‘Parents?' said Gareth.

‘We haven't done anything about that yet,' said Paul.

‘I'll see to that now.' Gareth's upper body swayed away, but before his feet moved he remembered he didn't know the girl's name. He swayed back and stepped in to be beside Mary-ann. He leant low and put a hand on her shoulder, gently, as if she were the injured party. ‘And this is?' he said softly.

‘This is Susan Bates,' said Mary-ann. Susan's face still floated
against the grey shadows of the thick mat. Mary-ann was stroking a cheek with the back of her forefinger.

Paul and Gareth walked quickly together across the gym and into the bright sunlight. They saw the ambulance coming across the lawn. ‘Jesus, what next, eh?' said Gareth. He lifted his eyebrows very high and puffed out some air through puckered lips. ‘I'd better find which hospital they'll go to,' he said. Paul watched him stride off, halt the ambulance briefly with a gesture, send a trio of gawping boys packing, then hurry on to his office.

It was bread and butter stuff for the two ambulance guys. They had Susan Bates in the back, Mary-ann Beale as well at her insistence, and were on their way in just a few minutes. Paul was left in the full, quiet sun outside the gym almost as if nothing had happened at all. But he wasn't alone. There was a seat along the outside wall of the gym, and Nadine had been sitting there since guiding the ambulance in. Her hands were spread each side of her on the warm wood of the bench. She was lifting the heels of her shoes up till her feet rested on the toes and then dropping them again. She did it quickly over and over again.