Volte-face
By rlawless
- 609 reads
Volte-face.
style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">Today was going to be
different. For a start, Trevor had decided to take the rustbucket into
work. It chugged angrily, as he waited at the lights before turning
into Burstyn Lane. Trevor groaned as car upon car filed past. This
morning the tailback had surpassed itself; he was barely able to turn
into the lane and join the end of the queue. The glut of vehicles put
the mockers on the semi-rural setting of Knowles High School, where
Trevor worked; the mechanically-munching sheep somehow added to the
gloom. The remaining few hundred yards would take longer than the rest
of the journey put together. To add to the frustration, the entrance to
the school was a complete disaster area. Convoys of buses, largely
responsible for the clogging-up of the lane in the first place, swung
dangerously through the narrow gate-posts. County had been dragging its
heels over the proposed separate entrance for buses. Moreover, a
motorised army of parents continued to deposit their pampered progeny
just before the school gates, superciliously ignoring the school's
wishes.
There she was again, Mrs "Butter wouldn't melt in
her mouth" Banks in her little B.M.W. run-around, dropping off her
neatly but seductively turned-out daughter, Jade. Trevor felt his fist
ball up and, for a moment, thought he was going to mindlessly hammer
his horn but some innate sense of decency stopped him. With no sense of
urgency, Mrs Banks kept her daughter at the open car door, to remind
her of some non-event, before finally moving off. Somehow Trevor kept
the lid on, turned off the lane, parked the banger and made his way,
fuming, into school.
To add insult to injury, Trevor's
"free" first lesson had been taken. He had to supervise a class for the
Head of R.E., a besuited, hidebound Tory, minor public school-educated,
holier-than-thou sleaze-bag. As Trevor entered the classroom, the Year
11 group reluctantly stood up. Trevor signalled them down immediately.
The work set was old-fashioned, High Church codswallop, the
instructions poorly written and with a number of spelling mistakes. (It
must have been a very minor public school.) Trevor explained the work
(as far as he could understand it himself) and asked the class to get
on quietly.
A few minutes later, sensing that the High
Church trappings had miraculously evaporated, one lad blurted out,
unbidden:
"Why do we have to do this crap?" Why indeed,
thought Trevor, but wasn't going to have his authority challenged.
"I don't recall giving you permission to shout
out," intoned Trevor.
"Well, I'm asking you now. It's a
load of cobblers."
"You're entitled to your opinion, but it
would hardly be appropriate for me to comment. I suggest you take it up
with Mr. Pratt, when he returns."
I should bother with all this. It's a waste of time." class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">"I
agree. This is wasting my time, which is of the essence. Now, just
because you have a chip on your shoulder, I don't see why you should
waste all our time."
"What dya mean? Chip on my
shoulder?" At this point, the lad slewed his head shoulder-wards and
patted himself there, as if to ascertain that there was indeed a chip
on that spot. Oh, no. Not a literalist! Trevor sighed
audibly.
"What are you doing? Are you actually looking for
a greasy chip on your shoulder?"
it."
"What are you on about? I didn't say anything
about greasy chips," said Trevor, incredulously.
200%">"Yes, you did." style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">"No, I didn't,"
Trevor retaliated, warming to the task now. "What would I be going on
about chips for? I don't even like them. You're weird, you are,
imagining there are chips on your shoulder. Do you think this is the
school canteen or something?" By now, sporadic tittering had broken
out. "This is seriously strange!" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">"No, it's not. You're
taking the Mick, you are," said the boy, on the verge of tears now,
because the rest of the class were laughing openly. class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT:
200%">"No, I'm not. I'm seriously concerned. If we have an alien in
our midst, I should have been informed by the office staff. It might
pose a threat to us." That silenced him, although the smans of the
other pupils persisted.
Peace, thought Trevor,
taking some books for marking out of his brief-case. Peace, that is, if
you ignored the incessant stream of communication filling every cavity
of silence. On the horizon, apparently, were specific preparation and
marking lessons built into the time-table, where he wouldn't have to
cover for stuck-up R.E. teachers. Wow! He thought of his time in
Germany. There, if the teacher was absent, the kids went into town and
had a coffee. And if this had been Germany, Trevor wouldn't have had to
come in until the second lesson. "Nanny State!" steamed
Trevor.
So, peace at last. But no. Here was the notorious
Naomi. Her obsession was the toilet, and her right to go there. She was
from one of those families that are basically dull-witted but know all
their rights. She was about to launch on one of her tirades, when
Trevor rose from his seat and, putting the back of his outspread hand
to his forehead in mock alarm, cried out in, for him, unfamiliar
histrionics:
"Oh no. Not the dreaded toilet routine!
Spare me, please."
"But I've got to go."
class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT:200%">"Yes, and you're going to wee yourself, I know. Well, please
don't do that (histrionics again), because we haven't got any
air-freshener and the pong of ammonia might just knock us all
out."
"Are you suggesting I smell?"
class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT:200%">"Oh, good Lord, no. Heaven forfend!" (More
theatre.)
"What're you on, Sir?"
class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT:200%">"The promise of a whiff of ammonia, I think." class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT:
200%">"You're weird, you are, Sir!" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">"I'm weird! That's
rich. We've got laddo over there, who's from another planet. According
to you, I'm a Martian, too. Seems like everyone but the girl's
stark-raving bonkers, and she who has to be pandered to, who has to
visit the little girl's room every five minutes, although she's Year 11
and her bladder's in perfectly functioning order, she's O.K., yeah?
She's perfectly sane. She's a paragon of sanity, a role-model to be
emulated. So, in your "normal" world, we'll have everybody popping off
to the bog every five minutes, teachers included, queues all day long,
sporadic bits of teaching and learning going on. And to cap it all,
cleaning staff out on strike for stress reasons, unable to cope with
the over-production of urine." style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">Trevor paused for
breath. His diatribe seemed to have taken the wind out of Naomi's
sails, too. One for the record books, that. During all this, the class
had listened on, gob-smacked. Now, in the pregnant pause, they
disintegrated; the whole class was seized by a fit of uncontrollable
laughter. Trevor felt he had to milk the situation with one more tweak
of the teats:
"So, I don't want any more griping or
whining from you, Naomi. Is that clear? And by the way, did you realise
that Naomi spelt backwards was "I moan"? I got that out of a book
called "White Teeth". Perhaps you should read it some time, that is, if
you read."
The rest of the morning passed without
incident, except for one minor irritation. In the lesson after morning
break Mrs. Banks' daughter, Jade, breezed in to Trevor's Sixth form
history lesson without so much as a by your leave to apparently pass on
a message about the French trip to Gary Biggs, but it was obvious she'd
used this ploy to whisper sweet nothings into her boyfriend's ear.
Trevor simply made some cryptic comment about not minding him and the
ingenuity of true love. He secretly wondered where his theatrics were
coming from.
At lunchtime he cursed when he saw that
Bunthorne was responsible for the cryptic crossword in the Guardian
that day and decided to join the resident alkies, Jim and Jed, for a
sandwich and a pint or three at the Swan. They escaped most
dinner-times for a pit-stop and refuelling and Trevor also found being
off the track a tonic. Nevertheless, Trevor wondered about their
alcohol tolerance-level and the tolerance-threshold of Senior
Management with regard to their alcohol tolerance.
200%">Buoyed up by the fuel injection, he looked ahead to his Year
11 class on the Soviet Union, or more specifically, the effect of
Stalin's Five-Year Plans on the morale of the Soviet people. A good bit
of Socialist breast-beating would restore him. Considering the soft,
politically correct road the Western World had gone down and the
resultant timorousness and moral laissez-faire, he thought a
Soviet-style, fixed-term, ethical tightening of the belt wouldn't go
amiss here. Did the recent Queen's Speech announcing New Labour's New
Drive to counter Britain's insidious anti-social behaviour really ring
true? Was there a New Mindset in the making, ready to embrace such a
radically New Enterprise? style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%">The sluggish response
to the lesson was not encouraging. Briskly combating unhelpful comments
about the dullness and irrelevance of Russian history ("My dad said
Communism died ten years ago in that revolution thingy."), Trevor
slapped down books and worksheets. The conscientious, no-nonsense girls
at the front immediately got down to business but a huddle of lads in
the middle were still weighing up the relative merits of Rio Ferdinand
and Gareth Southgate.
So Trevor, in theatrical mode yet
again, embarked on his own personal appraisal of the relative merits of
Communism and Capitalism:
Communism may be dead. But Capitalism seems to be pretty poorly, too,
languishing as it is in the Roman decadence of Fat Cats and American
Capitalist colossi thinking they're above the law but declining and
falling in the face of their arrogance. And even Stalin, evil bastard
that he was, might have a use in our torpid, post-Communist age. He'd
certainly round you bunch of wasters up. He'd have you serving a
Five-Year Rehabilitation programme at a Forced Learning Camp in
Siberia. Maybe heavy industry was the wrong focus on his part and
spelled Communism's downfall but his methodology would have come in
handy with you lot!"
"You what?" was the tacit, global
response, or that was the message the pupils' puzzled faces gave out.
They' d never seen Mr. Dier in this light before. Trevor, himself, had
never been here before. Some connection somewhere had come loose, but
it was somehow exhilarating.
across the faces of the conscientious girls and, for a minute at least,
silence, a concept so alien and unsettling, reigned. After that,
however, the mindless morsing and messaging resumed. No man should be
an island. Silence equals exclusion. Talking is the new
security-blanket.
Just then Trevor saw that the ubiquitous
Jade Banks had gone walkabout yet again. Normality reestablishing
itself. She was leaning over a desk facing the huddle of lads, with her
synthetic hipster trousers hanging off her shapely hips and her skimpy
white blouse riding up her back. In his new persona, he envisaged
himself just giving the slightest of tweaks to the top of her thong
(ouch!), which was neatly but seductively exposed above her slacks, but
an innate sense of decency prevented him. With no sense of urgency, she
sauntered back to her place at his half-hearted behest.
200%">Were parents really so ignorant of their offspring's antics?
The manipulative cajoling, blatant arrogance, the not so secret
groping, the clandestine experiments? Or were they part of the
conspiracy, like Mrs Banks? He was well out of it. Sod "in loco
parentis". No one was going to call him a surrogate
parent.
Trevor was reminded of the daughter of a J.P.
colleague of his wife's. The older son had made his parents so proud,
shining at school and now studying business law. The daughter, however,
was another Jade. Once a typical, middle-class, pony-loving girl, at
age thirteen she'd undergone a teenage Miss Hyde transformation and was
from then onwards into make-up, clothes, boy-bands, boys, adult-free
zones and all-night discos in grimy cities across the Pennines. She'd
scraped a handful of Cs at G.C.S.E., which had got her a job as a
County Court clerk; this just about fed her disco habit, so she was
"happy" for the time being. A more obnoxious young lady Trevor had
never met. Her parents had put her anti-social behaviour down to the
phenomenon of the A.D.D. Syndrome. Had they actually been told this by
their G.P. and, if so, had they had anything done about it? Of course
not. A.D.D. was just a convenient tag to conceal the fact that their
daughter was a prize brat, reinforcing the notion of parental
complicity in the birth of the teenage monster.
the end of the day, Trevor was one part frusty and one part
exhilarated. At least he wasn't 100 per cent frusty. Something in him
had snapped. He sensed a new freedom. He walked, with a certain bounce,
to his jalopy. As he was manoeuvring his way out of the car park, he
noticed Mrs. Banks' B.M.W. near the exit. Approaching the gate, he saw
the nose of her car jutting beyond the kerb. Blissfully shedding any
remaining inhibitions, Trevor put his foot down, rammed into the front
of her car, victoriously taking the trophy of her front bumper with
him. He knew there'd been a reason for coming to school in the
rust-bucket.
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