Thand Thuckth
You are not going to believe what happened next. The Goddess came up to me in art class! She wasn’t dragged or pushed or screaming or anything, so I assumed she had come to make fun of me over the whole yeti versus wimp thing. She just cannot miss an opportunity to sneer. So I wasn’t too concerned that I had just put a spoonful of sand in my mouth. We were making fish collages so we had a load of art stuff out and Ang had this brilliant idea to cheer me up with an experiment. The idea was to put a spoonful of something in our mouths. I chose sand, he chose glitter. And yes, we did check they were non-toxic before we began. We are not idiots. The object of the experiment was to see how long we could keep each substance in our mouths before we filled up with saliva and had to spit it all out. First to spit, loses. We may very well grow up to be brilliant scientists one day; you never know what discoveries could be made using art materials and human saliva.
Anyway, there we were having this sand - glitter face off when The Goddess came up to me for her weekly sneer. But you know what? She didn’t sneer. She just sort of smiled, reached out her hand to me and said, ‘Here. You dropped these.’
Isn’t that just about the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? I was so light headed that she was actually talking to me that I didn’t even notice what she’d set on the desk. I looked at her and tried to say something but my mouth was filled with sand, so it was tricky.
‘I, uh, Loothy... ugh. Thand,’ I said.
I shut up.
I stared at her stunningly gorgeous goddess face and felt my own face glow a stunningly vibrant shade of beetroot. That’s when I started to choke, and before I knew it, I’d swallowed a tiny sand-saliva cocktail (seriously vomitricious, don’t even think about trying it) and that made me choke even more. I started to gag and splutter and panic! What if I choked to death; was love worth that? I imagined my gravestone:
Here lie the remains of Philip Wright
who died tragically from ingesting sand
while valiantly concealing its whereabouts
from the woman he loved.
I held my lips closed tight but still a trickle of saliva managed to escape out the corner of my mouth. And then it happened. I couldn’t stop it. (The impulse to breathe and be alive is obviously stronger than the impulse to look cool.) I opened my mouth to breathe, but that made me gag even more and my tongue shot out and deposited a saliva coated plop of sand at Lucy’s feet. It looked remarkably like a miniature poo. Lucy stared at it horrified. I tried to speak but the sand sticking to the roof of my mouth stopped me from saying anything vaguely sane.
‘Thorry,’ was all I managed.
‘Be like that,’ she said. ‘I was only trying to help.’ And she tossed her long golden goddess locks at me and pranced off.
I turned to Ang who was spitting glitter into a paper towel and at the same time laughing himself to death. Science experiments can be lethal. Didn’t Marie Curie die figuring out how radiation worked?
‘Nice move,’ he said. ‘Sticking your tongue out at her like that. Thmooth. Must try it some time.’
‘Pleathe,’ I said. ‘I have thand in my mouth and The Goddeth Loothy thinkth I thuck my thongue out at her.’
‘You did thick your thongue out at her,’ Ang said.
Sometimes he can really lack empathy.
‘Thum friend you are,’ I said.
And then we both nearly choked laughing because even though part of me wanted to cry, I had to admit that it was really funny. Then I noticed what Lucy had left on the desk for me. My glasses. She had picked up my glasses after the fight and I hadn’t even said thanks.
I looked over at her. She was back with Holly and her other friends and they were all fussing round her like a family of demented meerkats – looking at her and cooing; shooting suspicious looks over at me, then looking rapidly away again. Lucy’s face was all red and thunderous looking. Boy! I’d really blown it. A chance in a life time to strike up friendly conversation with The Goddess and I was eating sand like a deranged toddler.
You wouldn’t think it was possible, but the day just kept getting worse. First The Yeti and detention, then The Goddess-sandpoop fiasco and then, to cap it all, double English. You know how famous people like authors and film directors and actors are always going on about how they hated school but that their English teacher had inspired and motivated them? Well, that’s not true in my case. I like Mrs Gray well enough; she doesn’t shout much and she sometimes lets us read our own books in class, which is cool, but she looks vaguely depressed a lot of the time and she sighs a lot. I can’t figure out if she is sighing at us, at the subject, or at life in general. In any case, it isn’t very inspiring.
To make matters worse she had stubbornly refused to revise the poetry she’d covered last week when I was off. I waited and waited for her to go back over it. I mean, teachers are always doing that, aren’t they? Repeating themselves until you have lost the will to breathe. Death by repetition. Well, what do you know? Mrs Gray decided for once in her life not to repeat herself and did not return to my unrequited love. Honestly, you finally come across something in school that might actually be of some use to you in life and the teacher just brushes it aside as if it didn’t matter. She had moved on to - wait for it - formal letter writing. I ask you: I am twelve, I couldn’t even go on a school trip to the corner shop or leave games practice early without my Mum’s signature. If I need a formal letter written, I’ll let Mum worry about it.
So there was Mrs Gray going on about when to write yours faithfully or yours sincerely, and really I couldn’t have cared less. But I don’t like to offend so in between making bored faces at Ang I took down notes from the board, which was big of me because my glasses were broken and I could only see out of one lens. I had to keep the other eye closed because the cracked glass made it look like I was seeing everything through a kaleidoscope. I still hadn’t given up hope on the poetry so I looked around the room for signs of unrequited love poems but I couldn’t see any. There were just posters reminding you what a metaphor is and telling you to put i before e, except after c, which is totally stupid because if you put i before e in words like their or weight or neighbour, your teacher would kill you. Anyway, there was nothing of any interest on the walls. That’s when I made up my mind – I would ask Mrs Gray for the poetry myself. If Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain, then the mountain would come to Mohammed. That’s a metaphor. See, my education has not been wasted.
When class was over and everybody else had escaped, I hung around to speak to Mrs Gray. She sighed when she saw me. Honestly, between teachers sighing and girls sneering, a boy could develop confidence issues. Mrs Gray looked like she wanted rid of me PDQ but her face brightened when I told her I would like a copy of the poetry she’d done last week. I’d never seen her smile before. Once, when I was having a moan to Mum about English she asked me what age the teacher was, and I said about a hundred. But looking at her actually smiling, I didn’t think that was true anymore. I must tell Mum. She’s always on the lookout for anti ageing cures. That smile knocked about sixty years off Mrs Gray.
‘Philip Wright interested in poetry!’ she said, still smiling at me. ‘Really? What’s brought this on?’
‘I was off that day,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to fall behind.’
Her smile changed slightly: definitely a smirk this time, ‘Really?’ she said. ‘It’s never bothered you before.’
How is it that teachers are allowed to come off with sarcasm but if we do, it is straight to detention?
‘I’m very interested in poems’ I said, which was untrue. ‘I was sorry to have missed that day,’ I added, which was true.
‘Really?’ she said again.
Did she know she was over using the word really? She looked at me like I was up to something and I could see she was not convinced by my poetry loving credentials.
‘I even write my own poems sometimes,’ I lied. ‘When nobody’s looking,’ I added to make it sound realistic.
‘Really Philip,’ she said (really again, she r-e-a-l-l-y needs to expand her vocabulary). ‘Aren’t you the dark horse!’
A what horse? Never mind. Just get the poems.
‘Well,’ Mrs Gray said eventually. ‘It just so happens that I have a few spare copies. I can let you have one of each.’ She was smiling again. ‘It’s good to see a young man who’s not afraid of poetry.’ She went over to her cupboard and unlocked it. ‘So many of you put on a big macho act and refuse to engage. This is refreshing.’
And she handed me a wad of papers.
‘Just the poems please,’ I said. ‘From last Thursday.’ She had obviously mixed the poems up with some other work. Poems fit on one page, don’t they? That’s the glory of them.
‘That’s it,’ she said beaming at me.
There were pages of the stuff. It couldn’t be right.
‘Are you sure you’ve just given me the poems?’ I said, hoping she’d mixed up some sixth former’s fifty million word essay in the pile. I wanted to know about unrequited love but I didn’t want to read all that.
‘We looked at different expressions of love,’ Mrs Gray said. ‘Some of which examine unrequited love; Gilbert in particular, who’s a lyricist really, and Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems, which deal with the concept of...’
‘Lucy,’ I said beaming at her like an idiot.
‘Well Philip, this is refreshing,’ Mrs Gray said beaming back at me.
Now refreshing was the word. What did I tell you about teachers repeating themselves?
‘I will be very interested to hear what you think about them. Come and see me next Wednesday at the start of lunch period, and bring some of your own poetry. I’d love to read it.’ Her face had gone all pink and she was grinning at me like I was some kind of prize she’d won. I wondered if she might be a bit mad.
Ang was waiting for me outside the classroom.
‘I write my own poems,’ he said in a whining voice that was supposed to sound like me but didn’t because I don’t whine. ‘You are such a prat,’ he added.
‘A poetry loving, poet prat,’ I said. ‘What the heck am I going to do? She wants to read my poems. On Wednesday.’
‘Better get scribbling,’ Ang said. And he looked so smug I could have punched him.
