The Last Weekend (12 page)

‘Besides, I’m winning. You’re the one taking the risk.’

‘Fine. Agreed. Five grand, then,’ he said.

Of course I could have said I hadn’t intended … that the use of the word … that he’d twisted my meaning … But he had me in a corner.

‘If you’re sure it won’t kill you,’ he said.

It wouldn’t kill me. But Em would.
Five grand?
It was more than two months’ salary, after tax. More than we’d spent buying the car. More than our wedding and honeymoon had cost. More, in effect, than the house, which we’d paid for with a 95 per cent mortgage.

‘Five thousand pounds,’ I said. ‘Wow.’

This was madness — the late hour, the strange house, the heavy drinking, the dateless night. But I knew my reputation was at stake. The bet was less a sporting contest than a test of courage: was I willing to take a risk? Say no and I’d lose anyway — would sink in Ollie’s estimation. He was my friend, my dying friend, and this bet his last request. Reject it and I’d be rejecting him.

‘We don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he said, knowing he’d trapped me.

‘We’ve agreed now. Let’s shake on it.’

‘Five thousand pounds I beat you.’

‘Five thousand pounds
I
beat
you,’
I said, giving him my hand.

Saturday

The night sizzled and fried, even with the window wide, the low eaves trapping the heat. I slept fitfully and woke early, detaching myself from Em to lie apart, clammy but cooling, on the sheet. Dust hung in the light beam from the curtain crack. From the height of the sun — a yellow circle behind the gingham squares — I put the time at six. Unknown birds called across the fields and I imagined them as species redeemed from extinction: the corncrake, little bustard or red-backed shrike.

Till recently, I had a gift for putting my problems to sleep when I went to bed. Then something changed and I began to wake at unknown hours and to worry away in the dark; even alcohol, my usual prologue to sleep, was no help. When I saw ‘my’ GP — the possessive seems misplaced, since I’d never previously seen her — she tried the word depression on me, which was something else to fret about. We agreed that I try some over-the-counter herbal sedative called Somaduce (Comatose as Em christened it), which carried no risk of addiction. Its only effect was to make me listless by day, and, after a month of insomnia (the nights made worse by my indignation at wasting good money), I abandoned it. If I couldn’t sleep for worry, that was natural. Why worry about being worried? I was right to be worried. The worrying thing was that I’d taken so long to see it.

That’s how I sold my insomnia to myself, jokily, which was a step forward, or rather back to the ironist I used to be. But what had been waking me early for several weeks before Badingley wasn’t a generalised midlife crisis but something quite specific. I lay brooding about it that morning, after dreaming of it half the night. Ollie’s tumour and the reckless bet I’d made were bad enough. But it was school, and an episode just before the summer holidays, that had me sweating under the eaves.

Few teachers enjoy playground duty. And my mood was not the best that Tuesday lunchtime because Mrs Wilkinson, our dyslexia specialist, had spent so long discussing one of my pupils with me it left no time even for a sandwich. Outside the kids divided in the usual gendered fashion, the girls colluding in quiet clumps close to the building, the boys running wildly at the fringes. As I stood unnoticed by the boiler room, I heard some girls from Year Three singing and clapping hands. I recognised the tune from childhood. But the words and gestures were new.

We are the Derby girls
(clap hands)
We wear our hair in curls (
pat hair)
We don’t wear dungarees
(rub thighs)
We show our sexy knees
(touch knees)
The cocky boy next door
(pat crotch)
He got me on the floor
(touch ground)
I gave him 50p
(slap hands)
To give it all to me
(thrust crotch)
And now I’ve got this brat
(rock arms)
In a high-rise council flat
(reach up)
We drink and smoke and shag
(wiggle hips)
We are the Derby slags
(clap hands)

My first impulse was to intervene and discipline them. But did the girls — seven- and eight-year-olds — understand what they were singing? I’m not used to younger kids; it’s the tough nuts, the ten- and eleven-year-olds, I specialise in. And these girls could have learned the song by rote, just as I used to learn carols ('Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb'), uncomprehendingly. Best let it go. If I raised it with our head teacher, Mrs Baynes, she would take no action. I left them to it and walked away.

Even if I’d not been bad-tempered, I would have dealt with Campbell Foster in the same way. I’ve never taught Campbell

– normally I would have had him in Year Five but that year I’d been switched to Year Six as an experiment before switching back again. I’d been aware of him, though. You couldn’t not be. You only had to attend Assembly, for which he’d be late or in which he’d be noisy or from which he’d be escorted and made to stand in the corridor. Some kids are trouble for just a term or two. Campbell had been trouble since nursery school

– trouble enough for any normal head to have excluded him by now. But Mrs Baynes believed in sticking with kids and ‘building their self-esteem'. From what I knew of Campbell, his self-esteem didn’t need building up but stamping down. Perhaps if I’d had him, I could have knocked him into shape

– not because I’m a better teacher than my colleagues but because I’m a man, and kids like Campbell lack positive male role models.

The thought struck me again that lunchtime, when I spotted him among a crowd of boys in the basketball cage. ‘Among’ is misleading: he was the ringleader, having purloined a coat from the back of a boy in Year Two — or so I deduced from the boy’s pathetic efforts to snatch it back. Campbell and friends stood in a circle, tossing the coat from hand to hand. Every so often it would be dropped and lie
on the ground until the Year Two boy made a grab for it, at which point it would be retrieved. The boy was persistent, I’ll give him that. For a moment he was even laughing. But then the coat fell at Campbell’s feet. The boy snatched a sleeve with one hand and grabbed Campbell’s leg with the other. As he did so, Campbell yanked the coat up and kicked out. The boy fell backwards on the concrete, shrieking and wailing.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said, striding across.

Silence.

‘Well?’

I helped the boy up from the ground and asked if he was hurting anywhere. He was all right, he said, between sniffs. There was a red zip-mark across his palm, but otherwise he seemed unharmed.

I turned to his persecutors.

‘ Well?’

None of them moved. Most were staring at the ground.

‘Kid fell over and hurt hisself, sir,’ Campbell said.

I insist on the ‘sir', but coming from Campbell the word sounded more disrespectful than if he’d not said it.

‘He didn’t fall over,’ I said, ‘you pushed him, Campbell.’

‘Me, sir?’

‘I saw you do it.’

‘Youse always blaming me, sir.’

‘You’re always the cause of the trouble, Campbell.’

‘S’not fair.’

‘Let Mrs Baynes decide that. You come with me.’

There was a slight pause before he said: ‘I ain’t going nowhere.’

He seemed to think that since he was off to secondary school in September, there would be no comeback.

‘You’re going to see the head this minute,’ I said.

‘No I ain’t.’

I see now that it would have been better for me to send the others inside. Their presence was making Campbell more defiant.

‘Last chance, Campbell. Will you go of your own free will or do I have to drag you?’

‘You can’t touch me.’

You can’t touch me.
Something in me snapped when he said it.

‘Right,’ I said, stepping towards him.

You hear of teachers — even primary-school teachers — being slapped, punched or knifed by pupils. But as I clutched at his left arm I felt no fear. His right arm swung round — whether to hit me or, as he later claimed, to protect himself is beside the point. All I know is that we were pushing and pulling, with me trying to pinion his arms while he tried to escape, until I grabbed his left ear between my forefinger and thumb, something a teacher (or was it my father?) once did to me. The move was surprisingly effective. Despite having both his arms and legs free, he immediately wilted.

‘Tough guy, eh?’ I said, breathing heavily as I led him by the ear across the playground. I say ‘led’ but my arm was stretched diagonally forward with him half a stride ahead, his left cheek tilted towards the sky.

‘Let go, sir,’ he said, from the side of his mouth, ‘you’re hurting.’

Tightening my grip, I said, ‘Now you know how it feels, Campbell,’ adding, for good measure, dreadful cliché though it was: ‘Next time pick on someone your own size.’

By this point he was crying, in part because all the other kids in the playground could see how utterly I’d vanquished him. But my grip didn’t slacken till we reached Mrs Baynes’s office.

The door was open. Campbell, finally released, walked in ahead of me, wailing and rubbing his ear.

‘Dear, dear, what’s the matter, Campbell?’ Mrs Baynes said.

I gave her a full account of the incident, Campbell punctuating it with sobs and strangled objections ('S’not right, Miss'), till Mrs Baynes nodded at me and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Goade. Campbell and I will have a quiet chat about this.’

She had her arm round Campbell’s shoulder by then. In her position, I too might have comforted a crying child. But after the report she’d just been given of his rudeness, bullying and defiance, I was offended by her conciliatory gesture.

Conflict upsets me and I felt shaky for the rest of the afternoon. When Mrs Baynes intercepted me on my way out at three thirty ('Do you have a moment?'), I assumed it would be to commend me for having intervened so incisively, or if not commend (teachers don’t expect to be thanked) to reassure me I had her full support.

‘Campbell alleges that you grabbed his ear,’ she began, unreassuringly.

‘I held him by the ear,’ I said. ‘It was the only way to make him cooperate.’

‘The only way?’

‘When I tried to take his arm, he lashed out. I had no choice.’

‘It seems to me you had several. You could have stood your ground till he relented. You could have rung the bell early, so everyone went inside. Or you could have come and fetched me.’

‘He’d bullied a smaller boy. And he was challenging my authority. I had to act.’

‘Absolutely. But as you know, physical coercion should be used only in extreme cases.’

‘In my judgement this was extreme,’ I said.

‘We have to be so careful, Ian. His ear did look rather sore.’ She smiled. ‘He can be a trying boy. I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt him. And I don’t want to make an issue of this.’ I sensed there was a ‘but’ coming but she staunched it. ‘You get off home. With any luck it will all be forgotten by tomorrow.’

Em thinks that Mrs Baynes has it in for me and she said so again that evening. It was humiliating enough when Miss Cooper, ten years my junior, got the deputy headship, a post everyone assumed would go to me. But for Mrs Baynes to have said, by way of consolation, ‘I’m sure other schools will have deputy headships you can apply for, Ian,’ rubbed salt in the wound. I have applied for seven deputy headships in recent years and all have gone to teachers with less experience. I know I make a lousy interviewee: too nervous, too intense, too eager to prove my worth. But my probity and my record as a teacher speak for themselves.

I saw no sign of Campbell for the rest of that week. I assumed he was either in school, lying low, or truanting again.

The following Monday Mrs Baynes summoned me to her office during the morning break.

‘Sit down, Ian,’ she said, peering over the rim of her glasses. ‘Campbell Foster’s mother came to see me last Wednesday, very upset. I hoped that once I spoke to her, she would calm down. But she was back again this morning.’ She took the glasses off and dangled them from her right hand. ‘Unfortunately, she refuses to let the matter drop.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘She intends to make an official complaint.’

‘What would that achieve?’

‘She thinks you should be reprimanded,’ she said. ‘At the very least.’

I had brought my coffee with me, in a Derby County mug, and smiled at Mrs Baynes before taking a swig — God, some of the parents at this school, what a hassle for us both. She didn’t smile back.

‘Let me speak to her,’ I said. ‘I’m sure when she hears what happened —’