Biology teacher

Mr Kandevski?s class was always the quietest and best behaved in the
school. Christchurch school had, and still has, one of the worst
records for discipline in the borough. Pupils were disruptive and rude
as a matter of course. But when they were in Mr Kandevski?s classroom,
they turned into polite and obedient students. I had just joined the
staff at the Hackney comprehensive and I was having real difficulty in
maintaining control. Naturally, I wondered what it was about Mr
Kandevski that seemed to make his students so quiet and apparently keen
to learn. He did not seem exceptional. He was old, close to retirement,
but his white hair was still thick and wavy. His nose was hooked and
seemed to pull the skin over his gaunt, bony face, like a stretched
plastic bag. His eyes were just slits in the plastic. When he walked,
he stooped as if leaning on an invisible walking stick, and indeed his
whole demeanour seemed quite fragile. I was surprised when he first
talked to me. His voice was crisp and clear and he enunciated his words
meticulously, but it was the contempt that he somehow expressed that
shocked me. In fact, I remember thinking that I had rarely met someone
so devoid of charisma. An air of cruelty surrounded him like a
suffocating gas. Even the common room cat, one of the laziest animals I
have ever encountered, would hiss and then run when Mr Kandevski
entered the staff room. This still didn?t explain why his classes were
so orderly, but as the months passed, I managed to piece together his
story.

Mr Kandevski had joined the school some thirty years before. When he
arrived, he had been a bright and enthusiastic teacher. He taught
biology, but his personal fascination was entomology. His classroom
walls were lined with illuminated tanks in which he bred all manner of
insects, from the common fruit fly to more exotic species that he would
trap during the holidays His passion took him around the world,
rainforests in South America, jungles in Belize and deserts in Africa.
At the end of each holiday he would come back to the school with glass
petrie dishes of samples, and tubes with their live counterparts. At
the time he was liked and respected by his colleagues. They thought him
a little eccentric, but he was harmless. When not studying his insects,
he was generally fishing. He had no shortage of interesting baits from
his glass tanks to tempt the fish, and was something of a legend in the
tackle shop, which had only maggots to offer.

Since his teaching career began, it had proved to be the only area of
his life that seemed wanting. His classes would sit before him, and
almost immediately he would lose their attention. The basic problem was
that the kids found him funny. When he was turned to the blackboard,
the class would squirm with their impressions of Kandevski the stick
insect, the cockroach or the preying mantis. He knew what they were
doing. He tried to hide it, but sometimes when he was writing at the
board, he found himself blinking back tears of anger, frustration and
hurt. The whispered snide remarks, the giggles when he passed huddled
students in the playground all served to remind him of his own bitter
schooldays. As a child, he had been tormented and bullied by a freckled
boy who had dogged him unrelentingly throughout his school career. He
had felt isolated and unpopular, and as an adult these feelings were
being forced back on him.

The boy who seemed to get deepest under Mr Kandevski?s skin was called
Malcolm Partridge. Malcolm was the youngest son of a large family. He
was the class clown. His short cut hair, bleached into an orange blonde
emphasised this. He was quick to smile and quicker with his tongue. His
interruptions and pranks would have frustrated and humiliated the
strongest of teachers. They crippled Mr Kandevski. To Malcolm it was
all good fun, and the whole class supported him in their laughter.
Chewing gum on the teachers seat, pictures of insects sellotaped to his
back, chalked insults on his jacket and plastic flies in his school
lunch, these all took their toll on Mr Kandevski. As the months
continued his expression seemed to be increasingly bitter, his skin
tightening as if he were constantly sucking a lemon. He had tried to
retaliate with detentions and punishments. When he had been explaining
metamorphosis to the class and Malcolm had asked what he was going to
turn into next, the whole class had erupted in laughter. He had sent
Malcolm to the head, but the result had just been a short telling off.
The head had then asked Mr Kandevski not to be hard on Malcolm as he
was having problems at home. Kandevski had then turned his hatred into
a private thing. To him, Malcolm and the freckle faced boy who had made
his youth hell were merging into one. When he went home at night to his
empty flat, his thoughts festered and rotted in his brain until his
mind almost suffocated from the stench of his loathing.

The summer term finally came and the long holidays were not far off.
Malcolm and his friends were looking forward to their school trip. This
year they were going to spend a night camping in the New Forest. Past
school trips had been outings for the day to a museum or a historical
monument. Spending a night in tents together held great promise of fun
and pranks. Malcolm was particularly excited. His enthusiasm was not
even dampened when he heard that Mr Kandevski was to be the teacher in
charge.

At last the day of the trip arrived, and at four O?clock, Malcolm and
his friends were milling around the school gates, waiting for their
coach. They boarded without much ado, perhaps because Mr Kandevski had
reminded them that he had the authority to call off the trip at any
point. Soon they were off. Malcolm and his closest friends were
laughing in the back row and tossing paper darts. One of them had a can
of cider and they were surreptitiously passing it between each other.
At one point Malcolm, to the delight of his jeering friends, even did a
moony at a minibus behind them. Mr Kandevski simply sat at the front,
gaze fixed firmly forward. When the jokes about insects were loudly
exchanged, his face seemed to harden, and his eyes moisten. Fortunately
the driver was too intent on the road to have noticed.

They arrived at the campsite and stood in a circle as Mr Kandevski
showed them how to put a tent up. They separated into pairs to put up
their tents. Malcolm?s disruption of the camping lesson meant that he
was assigned a tent by himself. It was at the end of the line of a
dozen tents that were being erected. While the class struggled, Mr
Kandevski and a fellow teacher prepared a barbecue and dinner. By nine,
the hamburgers had been consumed and the students had endured a
woodcraft lesson from a rather eccentric man who worked with the camp
site. Drops of rain slowly started to spatter the intrepid group, soon
accelerating into a downpour. Amidst laughter and pretend panic,
everyone made for their tents, to continue whispering into the night.
Malcolm was less happy, alone in his. It was clear to him that he must
take revenge on Kandevski for making him sleep alone. He listened as
the rain beat down on the canvas and resolved to go to sleep so that he
could wake early to put his plan into action. He tossed and turned,
disturbed by the rain, the buzzing of insects, and the feeling of grass
in his ear. Eventually he dropped off.

The next morning was bright and sunny. The class queued for their
breakfast exchanging stories of leaky tents and sodden sleeping bags.
Even Mr Kadinski seemed more cheerful. As breakfast finished, and they
were about to go to archery practice, Malcolm?s closest friends noticed
his absence. One of them jogged over to his tent ad drew aside the
canvas flap. He shook Malcolm, who had not yet opened his eyes. No
reaction. As he shook again, he realised that Malcolm seemed very cold.
In fact Malcolm was dead.

The rest, I pieced together from an article in the local paper. Due to
the unusual nature of his death, a post mortem was performed on
Malcolm?s body. Over sixty live maggots were discovered feeding on his
brain. The maggots, strangely enough, were of the species Adricus
Carnivoralis, indigenous to the rainforests of Belize. It?s pupa is
particularly voracious, eating over eighty times it?s own body weight
of carrion in a single day. The maggots had entered Malcolm?s cranium
through his ear. Inspector O?Neill, the detective in charge of the
case, was not able to find evidence of foul play, and a verdict of
misadventure was ruled. The class who had been on the camping trip had
a different verdict. When school started in September, the politest
group of students he had yet encountered greeted Mr Kandevski.