I have another problem, too. This story is all about
a drama teacher, and I’m a drama teacher. So people will say, Oh, it’s you!
And I’ll have to say, No it isn’t – but it could have been. Or it could be.
Or it might be in the future – except that I’ve written this story, so that
makes it less likely that it’ll be me. And the next thing that’ll happen is
that they’ll try and identify the kids in the story, and they’ll say That’s
him! That’s her! That’s you! That’s me! And all they’ll be looking at is
the surface: glasses, hair-colour, height, age, face-shape – not the deep
things, not the character, not the soul. That’s where you need to look. And if
you do look there, then everybody ought to say That might be me!
And some people ought to say, after they’ve heard the story or read it, That
might have been me – but now I know this story, so that makes it less likely.
OK – so you’ve read the Health Warning, but you
still want to open the packet. Here goes.
He knew he shouldn’t have done it. But it had seemed
like a good idea at the time: so many things do seem like good ideas at the
time – getting married, or the next drink, for instance. But sooner or later –
in half an hour or so, when you can’t walk straight or begin feeling ill, or in
six months, or maybe in four or five years’ time, when you realise that you
have nothing at all in common with someone that you once thought you had
everything in common with – sooner or later you are forced to admit that the
goodness of the idea depended solely on the particular moment when you had it,
and that it is now time-expired, the use-by date long gone, “best before” but
worst after... Only ideas (and relationships, for that matter) don’t have such
convenient labels (more’s the pity).
What was it that he shouldn’t have done? That’s hard
to say. So let’s just say what it was that he did, and you can decide
for yourselves which part of it it was that he shouldn’t have done.
What he did was to confront a set of Year 9
kids with the idea of death. Nothing so very terrible in that, perhaps. After
all, they were always killing each other in drama lessons. Not for real, you
understand. Nothing that happens in drama lessons is real. That’s the whole
point. It’s just – drama. A bit more real than just plain real – but
also a bit less. That’s the whole point, as I say. And as he said. And as he
would have said in his own defence, if anybody had queried what he was doing.
They know about death he had said to himself. And
what they didn’t know before, I’ve told them. I’ve told them about Agamemnon,
who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to the goddess Artemis, so that she
would give the Greek fleet favourable winds to sail to Troy and besiege it.
I’ve told them about Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, who vowed to kill her
husband in revenge, despite a prophecy that said he would die neither naked nor
clothed, and neither in water nor on dry land. So she got her lover to kill him
half in and half out of the bath, with a net thrown over him to stop him using
his arms. I’ve told them how Orestes, their son, avenged his father...
I’ve told them about the way down to the Realms of the Dead. I’ve told them how Alcmene took it, to sacrifice herself and rescue her husband Alcestis. I’ve told them how Orpheus took it, to demand the return of his wife Eurydice, stung by a serpent in the flowery fields, how Orpheus played his lyre and sang to charm three-headed Cerberus, the watchdog, how he persuaded Charon, the ferryman, to take a living soul across the Styx, although the weight of him almost sank the boat. I’ve even told them how Orpheus looked back, just to make sure Eurydice was following, although he knew full well he shouldn’t have, and thereby lost his wife again for ever. It’s time they made the journey for themselves.
So he made up a road-map, out of bits and bobs. Odds
and ends. Scraps and fragments. That’s all that’s left after death, after all.
A bit of Greek Myth. A bit of Roman – how Aeneas went down to the underworld. A
bit of mediaeval Italian – Dante, guided by the Roman poet, Vergil, who had
taken Aeneas there. A bit of Finnish – the hero Lemminkäinen, who came to grief
in the underworld, and was torn into pieces which his mother had to fish out of
the water with a sieve and put back together again. The Tale of Gilgamesh and
Enkidu. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Pieces.
Shards. Smithereens.
He put it all together, so that no one flavour
predominated. Death didn’t taste of tarragon, or coriander, or basil. He split
it up into a chorus, that chanted mysterious responses. He spread it around
individuals, who each had one line or a couple, separated but answering, far,
far apart, but together. He knew that the words had power, he knew that the
words were dangerous, but, just like the elements of a bomb, they were safe, if
you didn’t actually let them touch.
And what about the kids? It was a ritual. They knew
about rituals. They knew about counting-games and skipping-games and
ball-bouncing games, and the dreadful things that would happen if you stepped
on the cracks in the pavement or left out a word. They didn’t understand, but
they felt the magic. That’s the thing with people all together. Each one only
has to believe a little bit. That’s the thing with drama. You need everyone to
do it – then it’s real. For the time being. It’s a good idea – that, like all
good ideas, has a limited time.
They used the stools, rattling metal with
sweat-drawing plastic seats, to mark the safe path through the minefield, to
make up a maze he had stolen from turf-tracks on Catherine’s Hill (he knew what
it meant, but they didn’t). A passage into the grave and out again. And he was
the one to walk it – not just because he was “in charge”, but because he was
oldest and nearest, and knew the risk he was taking.
Only, of course, there shouldn’t have been a risk,
because it was just words. And what can words do, when all’s said and done? If
you’d asked the kids before, they’d have said Not much, but afterwards
they wouldn’t have said anything, because by then they knew and didn’t want to
admit it.
Dark dark dark they began They all go into the dark The
vacant interstellar spaces The vacant into the vacant and so they carried
on, and they watched him walking along the narrow passageway that was only
marked out, after all, by rattley, sweaty stools, and they were quietly amazed
by the way he seemed to be struggling through what was after all thin air as if
it were something solid, but they didn’t know (though they felt) that as far as
he was concerned he was walking down the passageway of a passage grave, as it
might have been at West Kennet, or New Grange by the River Boyne, down the
narrow opening where the sunlight only found its way for a week either side of
the winter solstice, so that was why he looked as though he was wading through
time’s ever-rolling stream. And for that moment, they were all of them in the
same world.
And that was when someone interrupted them who came
from another world.
I think that’s probably the best way of putting it.
There are other explanations, of course. Social background. Bad experiences.
The desire to be different. The yearning for attention. The odd neural synapse
out of order, who knows why? But in the long run we have to be concerned with
the effect in the here and now, rather than the cause in the there and then.
Someone who doesn’t take part. Someone who always
has something else to say, even if no one’s listening. Someone who never really
listens to another voice, let alone the teacher’s. Someone who chooses to
ignore the reality that everyone else acknowledges. Someone who lives in their
very own private world. Boy or girl? Age? Height? Face-shape? Hair? Glasses?
Those things don’t really matter. What matters is that nothing that matters for
anyone else matters for them. And sometimes not out of ignorance or
carelessness, but on principle. If they like it, break it.
Someone from a world with only one inhabitant came
into another world whose inhabitants were in the process of creating it. That’s
what it’s like when you’re doing a play: everyone who’s part of it is involved
in its creation. I’m afraid it isn’t like that with English lessons, however
good they are.
And seeing concentration which they couldn’t share,
this person did the only thing they could: they broke it. Broke what, you ask?
The concentration. The spell. They walked across and kicked one of the stools
hard into another which spun away and knocked over two more, while the first
one dislodged a further three from their places in the ceremonial row.
And silently the teacher crumpled to the floor and
lay motionless.
“He’s acting!” said the person who carried their own
world round with them, and they called the teacher a rude name (it doesn’t
really matter what). The rest of the kids were standing sharp and jagged,
half-in half-out of the positions they’d been in before they’d had to dodge
flying stools. They stared at the person, and the person laughed and went away,
with no one following.
The kids stood and looked and did nothing. Why?
Because they didn’t know what to do. They knew what ought to have come
next. They didn’t just know it. They felt it. That’s the way it is in a play.
Even if you don’t know the lines, you know where the play is taking you. And
because they couldn’t go there, they didn’t move.
If they’d been rational, they’d have done something
about the teacher, used their mobiles to call help, or put him in the recovery
position – even though they had no idea what it was he was supposed to recover
from. It wasn’t that they hated him. On the contrary. In a strange way, he was
just like them. Perhaps more so. He taught them that play was far too serious
to be merely played at. He taught them that the best way to deal with serious
things was to treat them as games. You didn’t have to believe in discipline to
conform to it. If you kept to the rules, you had a lot more freedom to do what
you wanted. He was probably more of a child than they were, because he wasn’t
ashamed of it. And now it had got him into trouble.
When the bell went, they were rational enough to
send some of their number to get food and drink for all of them and bring it
back. When other kids from their year barged in, they told them they had a
lunchtime detention, and that was why they were there. Fortunately, none of
them noticed the teacher still lying there.
Two-thirds of the way through lunch-hour, the
trouble-maker came back. They looked in and didn’t say anything, but they
noticed that the stools were still lying where they had been kicked, and that
the teacher was still on the floor in the same place. That wasn’t right. If you
did something to disrupt the order, it wasn’t any fun unless people tried to
restore that order. That was why you did it – to make people run around at your
beck and call. To take control. So, still without saying anything, they walked
across to see what was wrong with the teacher and whether he was really acting.
When they got beside the teacher, in that space at
the end of the avenue of stools, the kids suddenly knew what to do. They all
stood up and moved forward, outlining the avenue themselves. They picked up the
stools and put them back in place, and they closed off the end of the avenue,
so the troublemaker couldn’t get out. The troublemaker just looked at them and
didn’t try to move. Dark dark dark began the kids. And the troublemaker
suddenly fell down and lay quite still.
The kids moved back and waited. And the teacher
began to rouse. The right arm moved. The left arm moved. Up on his elbows. Up
on one knee. Then he stood, a little staggery, and turned, and walked out down
the avenue to light and life. Only at the end, shaking his head as if it had
emerged from deep water, did he look back and see the sprawled body.
Without hurry, as if it was part of some ceremony,
the teacher walked back, alongside the avenue, outside the avenue, to the space
he had defined, at one edge of which the troublemaker lay. Carefully, he knelt,
and slipped an arm through the legs of one of the stools to feel the
troublemaker’s pulse, without breaking the closure of the space. Then he withdrew
the arm, not even brushing the rungs of the stool, stood up, and moved round so
he stood facing straight down the avenue. Then he raised his right arm and
pointed it, palm downwards, at the motionless figure, and said I give you a
year of my life.
Drama is a terrible thing. Maybe Hitler knew that
secret. Education ought to set you free to make your own decisions. But once
you’re part of the cast, you don’t have a choice any more. One by one, the kids
said I give you a year of my life. As the last one said it, the
troublemaker began to stir, began to sit up, began to rub their head. It was
like when we flew to Lanzarote they said people checking in at different
desks and waiting and watching the screens for their number to be called.
I
don’t want to know the teacher said. But he thought Drink? Drugs? Car-crash? Suicide?
Then the bell rang for afternoon registration.
“Put
the stools away, please,” the teacher said. “And remember – this never
happened.”
And
of course it didn’t. Because it was only drama.
9-10.30 pm 17.iii
and 8-9.30 pm 19.iii 2003