Do you ever have the sensation that anything that
was interesting happened just before you arrived somewhere? And that that makes
you the Odd Person Out? Being Doubting Thomas is one thing – at least you were there.
But Five Minutes Late Michael is quite another: “Guess who’s just been here!
Didn’t you see Him as you came up the stairs? He said He couldn’t stay...”
Mark you: what I missed at Western School may have
been interesting, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant. That’s why nobody told me about it until they had to. I’d taken
home the first set of books from the Year 9s for marking – a traumatic
experience in itself. Apart from repetitive strain injury brought on by all the
wiggly red lines you have to draw, there’s the danger you may actually end up
spelling like them because of long-term exposure to that kind of environment –
the educational equivalent of farmers’ lung or hairdressers’ hands, when they
get allergic to shampoo. You know that line from The Scottish Play, “Mark, King
of Scotland, mark!” – I’ve always thought that was one of the nastiest curses
the Three Witches ever delivered.
Anyway, one of the most reliable displacement
strategies to postpone the grim moment until the Malbec has taken effect is to
check that you have all the books, by comparing the names on them (where
present and legible) with that well-known work of utilitarian fiction, the
class-list. That was how I discovered Ryan Lee. I had his book, but I didn’t
have him. Probably a fair exchange, I thought, when I glanced through it. By
then, it was time for bed, so I left the problem till the following day, when I
asked one of my more forceful colleagues in the English Department about the
lad.
The moment I mentioned the name, she took me to one
side, in a corner of the staff room where the other new recruits couldn’t
overhear us (I must confess, I was beginning to find the fact that half the
staff were freshly recruited a little suspicious – but extremely
understandable.)
“Ryan Lee,” she said, “nearly got this place closed
down. Even the P.E. staff were afraid of him.”
I swallowed hard. “How?” I asked.
“He hanged himself in the gym. No, don’t go all
namby-pamby and sympathetic on me,” she said, gripping my arm as I flinched
away from the harsh tone of her voice, “it wasn’t like that at all. That’s just
what he wanted everyone to think. Fortunately, the policeman on the case was an
old boy of the school and heavily into yachting – Fastnet Race and all that.”
I was appalled – Freemasonry, of course, I knew all
about as a source of corruption, but yachting? – my colleague was an
experienced enough teacher to understand the look of horror and incomprehension
on my face, because she almost shouted at me, in her best explanatory mode,
“Knots! He knew about knots! That silly little boy didn’t mean to kill himself
at all – he just wanted to be found swinging from the ropes in the gym, with a
big placard round his neck saying LOOK WOT THE TEECHERS MADE ME DONE! – only he
botched the knot and it slipped and strangled him. Now you know. Why did you
ask me about it? I’ve been trying to forget!”
“I’ve got his exercise book.”
“Burn it. Shred it. Throw the ashes into the sea.
Have your house exorcised. Have it fumigated. Don’t have anything to do with
anything that’s had anything to do with that boy.” And she strode off to give
Year 11 Hell about compound sentences.
I procrastinate. I’m quite open about the fact. My
wife understands, though she doesn’t approve. And provided I don’t develop
glaucoma, I won’t go blind. I did nothing about the book, except to put it at
the bottom of the pile. When I’d finished the marking, and all the books on the
pile to my right, except one, were in a pile on my left, I put them all back on
my right, on top of Ryan Lee’s. So when I came to gather them up for school the
next morning, I was surprised to find Ryan Lee’s on the top.
It wouldn’t have been my wife, I knew that. She’d
been a teacher for a year – that was how we met – and had never regretted
leaving the profession. She really loved her present job: answering telephone
calls for a company’s complaints line – “so much less stressful than teaching,”
she said, “combined with the knowledge that it isn’t your fault, and you can’t
really do anything about it.”
“Doesn’t that sense of impotence worry you?” I’d
asked her.
“Does impotence worry you?” she’d replied, and I
made a note that as an English teacher I ought to be more careful in my choice
of words.
“No,” she said, “if I feel frustrated and want to do
something positive for the world, then I go and change Mark, on the theory that
he’s bound to need it.”
Simply touching an exercise book would have brought
her out in a rash. But I thought nothing of it, and just grabbed the whole pile
and put them in my briefcase with the sandwiches.
Maybe I was in too much of a hurry. Maybe I’d
wrapped the sandwiches badly. (Anne was sleeping in after a disturbed night
with Mark.) Was there another explanation for why the mayonnaise was all over
the inside of my briefcase? I don’t think the kids cared, or particularly
noticed the extra stains when they got their books back.
At the bottom of my bag, without salad dressing, was
Ryan Lee’s book. I left it there. It was still there when I threw the bag into
the corner of the box-room we had designated as “my study” – a place where I
could work into the small hours if and when I had to, without disturbing
anyone.
When I heard the noise and woke up, I thought it
must be Anne, dealing with Mark, and felt guilty. But she was fast asleep
beside me, and Mark was gurgling away in the darkness, practising labials and
plosives to his heart’s content without needing to be awake – if only all
language learning were that easy!
Burglars? I thought, and decided that if you’d
taught 7BS at Western School for a double lesson last thing on a Friday you had
nothing else to be afraid of in the world. So I went to see.
The noise was coming from my study. I went in and
turned on the light. The furniture had been tossed around a bit. There was a
big blue smear of indelible marker across one wall, and the pen and pencil pot
had been upended all over the floor. In the middle of the desk, where I had
most definitely not left it, was Ryan Lee’s book. Even professional
procrastinators know when they’re beaten, so I sat down and began marking.
As I did so, various sarcastic observations began to
form in my head, such as: What is it, Ryan? Won’t they let you into Heaven
without a C in SATS? And then I gradually began to see his point of view. He
was a kid. And he was scared. And he was dead. And in some ways it wasn’t that
different from when he was alive. He still wanted attention. And the only way
he could get it was, as before, by being disruptive. Needs don’t go away unless
they’re met. And some people have the need to meet them.
“OK, Ryan,” I said, very quietly, “let’s look at
it.” And I opened the exercise book and began to go through his work.
None of it ever seemed to have been marked. “Did you
never hand it in, Ryan?” I asked. “Did you always – ‘forget’ ? But you didn’t
really forget, did you? You were scared it’d be wrong. You knew it’d be wrong.
You knew it’d be wrong, because you always got things wrong. You knew you
always got things wrong, because people always told you that you always got
things wrong. When they told you that, you felt you had to believe them. But
you didn’t want to believe them. So you decided to ignore the things they said.
And you also decided to try and prove them wrong. Did it work?”
There was a sort of rattling among the heap of pencils and dead ballpoints on the floor, as if someone were running their foot over them.
“No, I didn’t think so. Because you were trying to
do too many things at once. And they paid too much attention to the things you
were doing wrong and not enough to the things you were doing right. And because
they didn’t pay attention to what you were doing right, you had to get their
attention. And you could only do that by doing things wrong. That got you
attention. Lots of attention. From all your classmates. From all the other
kids. Even from all the teachers. And after that the right and wrong bit didn’t
seem to matter any more, did it? Well, not on the surface, anyway. Besides,
right wasn’t an option. There was only attention or non-attention. So you
decided to get attention, because you knew how to do that.”
I don’t know how to say this, but I could almost see
him standing beside me. And this was the moment in this kind of thing when the
kid starts shifting from foot to foot and the teacher shouts, “Listen to me
when I’m talking to you!” and blows it completely, because it’s the moment when
the kid has to face up to the truth about itself, and nobody, but nobody, does
that easily or willingly – least of all when it’s being shouted at them.
“You know how to get attention very well,” I
said, “but you don’t know how to pay attention – and particularly you
don’t know how to pay attention to yourself – otherwise you wouldn’t be
in the – state you’re in.”
There was another rattling among the pencils, and
the curtains twitched a bit, but he was still there in the room with me,
wanting something but not prepared to admit what.
“Let’s look at this book together, shall we? And
let’s be clear: I’m not your judge. I’m something far worse. I’m your mirror.
I’m here to help you see yourself. Let’s read these sentences you’ve written,
and see if they make sense – to you, not to me. You wrote them, I didn’t, so if
they make sense to anybody, it ought to be to you.”
I was aware of him at my shoulder. I was aware of
his concentration. He must have had that gift, otherwise he’d never have been
able to hang around as a ghost – at least, that was how I rationalised it. And
I was aware of his anger. That was what gave him his energy: anger with the
world, and in the long run with himself.
We worked through that whole book, sentence by
sentence, grammar exercises, essays, stories. I watched, fascinated, as the
writing unwrote itself, and the words assumed a new and comprehensible order,
missing ones inserted, redundant and incorrect ones obliterated. I began to
wish I could go back over my own life in a similar kind of way – but then I
thought about the prerequisite and decided against it.
When we got to the end, a single word appeared, in
red, with a question mark after it. “Mark?” it said. For one dreadful moment, I
thought he was talking about my son – but then sense prevailed.
“It’s the process that matters,” I said. But two
deep red lines underscored the word, so I said, “What do you think you’re
worth?” and the figure 8 out of 10 appeared. “You’re too harsh on yourself,” I
said, “call it 9 – nothing and nobody’s a perfect 10.”
And just then I heard Mark starting to cry. I knew
how tired Anne was, and I knew where my duty lay: the dead are the dead, and
the living are the living.
“Please excuse me,” I said, “I’m sure you understand
– ” and went out.
It took half an hour to get him changed and back to
sleep, and fortunately Anne hadn’t woken up. I went back into my study,
wondering what I’d find. The answer was: nothing. It was exactly as it had been
when I went to bed, the desk as empty as it ever was and my brief-case in the
corner where I’d flung it. There was no mark on the wall, and the pot of
pencils and ball-points prickled as it should. I felt somehow disappointed. All
a dream? I thought. A symptom of stress?
I got out Ryan Lee’s book and began looking through
it. All just the way I remembered it – all those laborious corrections had been
reversed, all those moments when my finger hovered over a word and the correct
spelling magically appeared – as if they had never been. Typical, I thought:
you tell them, and you tell them and they never remember it. But I went on
turning the pages, because I didn’t want to be Doubting Thomas. I wanted to
believe that what I knew had happened had happened. But everything was still
the same. Except for a single word at the bottom of the last page that had
writing on it in the book. Only one word, that I didn’t remember having seen
before.
Thanks.
Started 9.45, finished 12.48 2.xi.2001