Class (A Story)

The boy’s face was almost perfectly circular. It was red, now, in the same way that a basketball, or else something vividly red – a belisha beacon, say, or a slapped arse - was red. Philip found that if he concentrated on it properly he could separate it from the rest of the boy’s body. He could send it bouncing across the room.

This was what you did. You turned it – turned him; the boy - into an abstraction, so that you could absent yourself. Alfie no longer seemed to be doing, quite, what he was doing: he was no longer shouting, or chanting, quite at you.

“You can’t make me!”

He was banging his hands on the desk.

“Go on, arsehole.”

Bang.

“Try it!”

This time, he shook the table. His curls – smug, oily-looking little things – were bouncing up and down. Usually, there was something jowly about the way that his cheeks pushed outwards, forcing his mouth into a pompous little slot. Now, though, he looked as barbarous as a toddler did when it was throwing its arms and legs around. Philip continued to look at him. He gave – he displayed - a smile that blurred, out at its edges, into a smirk. He looked at the class, pretending to present Alfie to them, opening one hand in his direction and then shrugging so that his shoulders nearly touched his ears. He said,

“Mary. Could you just pop down to the office for me?”

He was pretending to study Alfie. He was staring at him, fingering his lower lip.

“Tell them.”

Alfie was still shouting. He was banging the table and drumming his feet. Philip tilted his head; it was as though Alfie was a clumsy daub that any right-minded individual would fail to understand.

“Tell them that Alfie’s …”

Somebody shouted “fat”. Philip was looking up at the ceiling.

“Struggling”, he said.

He nodded. This was part of his performance; a visible note to self.

“Yes. Struggling.”

He paused.

“Poor lamb”, he said.

He chuckled. Again, his shoulders came into play. It was a gesture that was meant to reach the girls in the back row. A demonstration of control, it showed you that Alfie’s response was both humorous and meaningless; that it was humorous because it was meaningless. That it was also perfectly possible to dissect him - to diminish him, in other words. Philip sat on the edge of his own desk. He steepled his fingers.

“Tell them that if they don’t come soon he’ll almost certainly explode. There’ll be bits...”

He gestured around the room, appearing to sprinkle water, in a staccato fashion, over the ceiling and the walls. The class were tittering. He still had them: he had managed to isolate Alfie; to keep his influence – to keep him - from spreading. He walked slowly to the whiteboard.

“So”, he said.

But Alfie was surging upwards, pushing the table over as he did so – it was as though he was expanding, revealing an irresistible otherness; an inner core. Philip skipped, nimbly, backwards. Alfie was swinging a chair as though it were an axe; was throwing it two-handed, so that it bounced off the window and hit the computer screen. He was sobbing, now; it sounded like he was gagging, and then retching, continuously. Hurling himself into the corridor, he slammed the door behind him. There was a moment, a sort of bubble, of silence but then it broke. Philip called out names and watched the pupils jerk or else reluctantly twist back their heads as though he had cast a line to bring them back. In the end, all that was left was an ambient murmur. Afterwards, of course, when he talked to the Headmaster, he would almost certainly get away with it. He could say, with perfect honesty, that he had been calm. Indeed, he was always calm. He had a reputation, he knew, for a certain – what? Coolness? Elan? Detachment, call it.

He liked the school: there was an orderliness, a hierarchical list of punishments, which meant that students were processed quietly through the system. And he had always liked teaching. There were times when your voice became super-supple, as it were, and seemed to stretch to fit the job’s requirements. You lowed; you barked; you all-but-crooned. You lobbed a joke – you threw it underarm, let’s say - but then you crisply marshalled the pupils into obedience. You emphasised certain words with a precision that made it seem as though you were following notation; as though you were the piano and the pianist all at once. The trick was to retain a certain likeability. He was remote but warm. That is, he performed warmness.

Still, he avoided the corridors and ate in the English office. Outside the classroom, the students troubled him. A school is an anonymous space – a box – that is only made meaningful by the people in it; by their effort to will it into being and to keep the idea of it aloft. You end up identifying with it. When students smeared each other against the walls he wanted to shout at them – to grab them. That night, he said,

“King George the Third.”

His wife went “Hah!”, which may or may not have meant that she was laughing. Her tongue was layered in a coating, a sort of compost, of uneaten food. Her slip, tilting beneath her skirt, had a serrated edge. Philip was saying,

“He’s like this.”

He blew his cheeks outwards, stretching his arms into a pair of precarious-looking brackets. He was a balloon; a bouncy castle. He said,

“He’s like a Hogarth print. He looks like he has gout; like they’re about to wheel him off .”

“Listen to you.”

“What?”

“Such contempt.”

“Miriam, the boy threw at chair at me.”

“I’m not surprised. And don’t do that: don’t stroke your moustache at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some. Some giddy shop girl.”

“That’s the last thing that you are.”

He said it with a certain amount of resignation. Miriam prodded – she seemed to spear – her fish.

“Poor little sod”, she said.

The next day, Lucy touched his arm.

“Are you OK?”

“What? Yes. Of course.”

He made a Churchillian grimace, seeming to shrug his lower lip.

“I’m an old man”, he said.

What did he mean? That he was tough? Seasoned? She said,

“You’re not.”

He watched her walk away. She had a way of minimising her presence by sloping forwards. She had bright, furtive little eyes and a face that was almost pretty; a half-baked sort of face. But she was shapely, too: her thighs flared outwards so that her rear seemed to be displaying itself. Its weight seemed to affect her walk; she swayed, as though she was conscious of carrying it.

Her voice, meanwhile, came through the wall. That day, he was speaking to his sixth formers, suavely suggesting that,

“Nobody dies for love. Kingdoms don’t topple; castles don’t fall. It’s being used, here, as a metaphor and, actually – you’ll like this, Watkins, so pay attention – actually, if you consider that “die”, in the Elizabethan lexicon, means…”

But her voice was swelling and subsiding, seeming to tug at him. She had a way, he noticed, of carefully placing a full stop – she poised her pen above the page as though she was taking aim. Miriam’s hair seemed to have its own weather system; stray hairs flickered around her head. She’d bumped against a door and now a bruise – a spreading purple stain, like jam – discoloured her upper thigh. Her thigh was mottled, in any case. It had a casing of fat, like a cold chicken wing. She said,

“Did you clean this?”

And it seemed to him that, in essence, this was all she ever said. Lucy was 22. She could twist her legs, like pipe cleaners, around each other. When she leaned forward, it looked, from behind, as though somebody was embracing her. Miriam was an MA. Her field was modernism; its intricacies and austerities. Her seriousness had a Grand Guignol quality. She was sharp; outrageously so. Lucy was just like everybody else. Her intelligence, if such it was, was bound up in her desire to look professional. Her nails, discreetly polished, were like small pools of sunlight. Whatever she did, her hair seemed to arrange itself.

But she was uncertain too. Sometimes he’d joke and she would seem to smile, to try to think of a reply, but then she wouldn’t say anything. She bowed her head and blushed; it was ridiculously alluring. He took to walking into her classroom and staring at the boys that were giving her trouble. He felt, on these occasions, as though his assurance and experience were the equivalent of a good suit. Once, he lent her a book of poems. Blushing – bowing, almost, towards the cover - she said,

“You’re so clever, Mr Hamilton.”

She never mentioned it again. He chose to see this as more proof of vulnerability; as a gap, or lack, that was tantalising. That Christmas, she sidled up to him. The whole room was tinselly – disco lights formed glittery patches on his jacket and on her dress – and they were playing something from his youth, a Christmas song whose harmonies were like the breath of an opened oven. Her dress exposed her shoulders. The dress itself went straight down – it was more of a smock, a period costume, than a dress – and its simplicity and the scalloped dimple in her neck, as well as the complicated look she gave him, half-way between a simper and a challenge, made him feel as though he was floating above the ground. He was expanding, basking in the song, then, suddenly, he was standing up; he was taking her fingers and leading her out onto the dance-floor. There, they did a stilted, decorous waltz. She leaned into his ear.

“Such grace.”

“Oh please.”

“No, really. You’re a…”

She paused. He had the impression, sometimes, that words were things that had to be hoisted up into her mouth.

“A cut above”, she said.

She smiled. Her arms – you could only feel this; you couldn’t see it - tightened around him. But there was a hint of tolerance, too, in the way that she was allowing him to lead her around the floor. Outside, she smilingly presented her face to him. Here, in the moonlight, it didn’t look quite like her. She had been, as it were, balletically playful, taking his hands and leading him into a patch of darkness, nuzzling him lightly on the nose. After they’d kissed, she left her lower lip inside his mouth, just like a piece of fruit. There was a coolness about the gesture that he found a little bewildering; it was as though his experience had been rendered irrelevant. He watched her walk back beneath the trees. In the end, all that he could see was her dress; it was like the after image that you see when you have been staring into the light.

In the staff pantomime. Lucy played a pirate. She forced her prisoners to take part in a brutal, souped-up form of callisthenics, taking off her pirate’s jacket to reveal a gym outfit that clung to her. Smiling up into the lights, she placed her arms together so that it looked as though she was going to swan dive into the audience. Her slenderness was a revelation; it preoccupied him all through the holidays, re-emerging in a candle’s flame or in the way that his niece went skipping, on resonant tiptoe, up the stairs. He’d both wanted and hadn’t wanted to ask Lucy for her phone number. He’d waited in his classroom but she never came. Now, covertly, he watched Miriam; he eyed her chins; the broad bump on her nose; the way her stomach went bulging outwards when she sat down, just like someone was squeezing her chest and thighs. He drank too much. He wouldn’t follow her upstairs. He lay with one hand underneath his waistband, attending to the gaudiness in his head.

The first week back, the school came in and out of focus. It felt as though, if he didn’t concentrate, it might waver and drift away. The thought of Lucy – how near or far she proved to be; her voice, lilting beyond the wall – felt infinitely more material: it made him hot or cold; aware of his posture and of his breathing. He found that he was watching out for her. He became adept at calibrating her expression but it was only, really, because she was expressionless. This Lucy – this unlurid; quotidian Lucy - was disturbingly autonomous; her movements and her conversation had almost nothing to do with him. She was heavier, too, less sleek, and her nose was lumpy, like someone had pressed a piece of unshaped clay into her face. Nevertheless, he cherished it. He said,

“How was your break?”

She smiled, brightly. Too brightly; she wasn’t communicating anything. She said,

“Lovely.”

She bent over a book.

“Thank you”, she said.

He didn’t know what to say. He nodded, thinking: here; I’m over here. He stumbled on his way out, barking his shin against the filing cabinet. The next day, walking past, he did a sort of smile cum shrug – more of a flinch. So much for grace.

At home, he read all of the usual poetry but kept returning to the obviousness –the lexical shamelessness - of “Be My Baby” and “Hey Jude”. Pop songs promoted a rush of blood that made you feel, obscurely, as though you were doing something. In class, meanwhile, he found that his voice could carry on without him. He surfaced, finding that his students were writing or asking questions - it was like discovering that you had negotiated five miles of motorway traffic. He handled Alfie mechanically, as though they were at a practice net. His classes weren’t noisier so much as woollier; he couldn’t always say exactly what students were doing. Once (it was during a group discussion) Lucy shut her door. On a night out, he made sure to sit beside her. He couldn’t tell if people knew or if the sense he had that their movements were warped, somehow – that they were behaving just as though they were under a magnifying glass – was a result of his imagination. Everything, these days, was exaggerated. He joked loudly, as though he was still in class; he thumped the table for emphasis. Politely, pulling her chair away with a precision that was unusual even for her, Lucy went to sit with someone else.

He cornered her. He said,

“Tell me.”

They were in the English cupboard. Like Lucy’s, its neatness was a sort of statement and Philip had an urge to go kicking amongst the boxes. He said,

“I’m sorry.”

She looked both sullen and scared. He turned to look at the wall.

“I am. I know I shouldn’t. What I should do…”

“Is go back to your classroom.”

“Yes.”

She wasn’t exactly staring at him. Her face looked bloated, blunted, and there were reddish patches on her neck. He said,

“But…”

“Philip.”

Her voice was soft – incongruously so, considering her face. He felt slightly encouraged.

“Just…”

He flapped his arms, uselessly. He was a big, ungainly bird: all neck.

“Lucy, just tell me. What were you doing?”

“Me?”

“We, then. Me, if you like. What did it mean? To you?”

He didn’t know what was worse, the pitying look she gave him or the way that her jaw was so stubbornly set. He found that he could feel the dimensions of the cupboard – you had to move forward on tiptoe, just as though you were on a precipice – but it was also a kind of world: everything he wanted was right here. He dithered. Lucy left; she shrank away from him.

So this was passion. He’d had no idea. It was the like the wind in The Wizard Of Oz – it hurled you into a landscape that was both familiar and unfamiliar; a refraction of the life you’d lived before. There were phrases that he’d always loved – “the brute blood of the air”; “La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall” - but they were useless, now; no, worse than useless. The thing he’d thought so valuable, the power of words, turned out to be just that: just words. Once, during a free period, he found that he was crying; was sobbing, in fact: his shoulders were going up and down. His room, his old familiar room, appeared to be deliquescing in front of him.

At home, Miriam said,

“Since when did you lose your appetite?”

She was working her fingers through her hair. Philip wanted to look away. She had exposed her skull; had scarified herself.

“You brood”, she said. “When did you start to brood? Where have you gone?”

She cried, and he was sorry. Nevertheless, her sorrow – the way she gestured, grandly, in a pool of light provided by a table lamp – barely affected him. That Easter, there was another show. Lucy wore a mini-skirt but that, too, was something that seemed to be a long way off, far out on the other side of consciousness. It was the consciousness that mattered; the hole that he seemed to have dug for himself. By now, it didn’t matter what he saw.

Nevertheless, after the holidays, the students were still discussing it. Alfie in particular. He had begun to gurn. He made claws of his hands. Philip said,

“Yes, alright. Thank you, Alfie.”

“But did you see it, Sir? Did you see her…”

“Enough.”

“…bend over, though.”

“I said enough.”

Alfie looked at him shrewdly.

“What’s the matter, Sir? You fancy her?”

“Alfie…”

“She’s buff, though, innit.”

“Alright. That’s quite enough. Sit over there.”

“Why? Just because I said she’s buff? She is buff.”

“Alfie…”

“I only said she’s buff! What’s the matter with you? I ain’t moving anywhere.”
Philip stood up. Alfie went “Whooo!”. He placed his hands, palms outwards, in front of him.

“Feeling protective, Sir?”

Philip could feel something begin to rise in him.

“Up”, he said.

“Make me.”

“I said…”

He was beside him now. He’d never stood this close to him before. He bent down into Alfie’s face. He could see a spot, more of a welt, that marred his forehead, making it look burnt. It made him hate him all the more. He said,

“Up, Alfie. Now.”

Alfie leaned backwards.

“Uuurgh. You spat on me. He spat on me!”

He was looking behind him.

“Good job”, he said, “I didn’t say anything about her tits.”

The class were laughing now; they knew Philip was losing. Alfie’s face, when he turned back, was red again, but it was also triumphant.

“Don’t you like tits, Sir?”

He was leering, but it was odd: beneath his outward expression – beneath the laughter – there was a sense that he was perfectly composed.

“Don’t you like Miss Hampshire’s titties, sir?”

He should have walked away. Of course he should have walked away. Instead, he took one step backwards. Here it was again: passion. The pummelling wind. Before he knew, properly, what he had done – before he had registered the pleasure of both surrender and defiance - he had punched Alfie in the face.