29
‘I know it feels as if your exams are a way off yet, but I can promise you, they aren’t,’ Roisin said, to a gallery of catatonically blank Year 10 faces.
She remembered such threats being made to her once, with similar lack of impact.
‘I know it’s hard …’
There was a low-key outbreak of wheezing and spluttering at the word hard, that she waited out.
‘… to concentrate, but put in this last push …’
More sniggering.
‘… and it’ll pay off next year.’
‘Would you say we will come good, Miss,’ said Amir, to shoving and OH NO YOU DITTENT! from his sidekick, Pauly.
Roisin put her head on one side and gave Amir the patented teacher Paddington stare. It was designed to allow time to let the air go out of the balloon without the need for further discussion.
When she was a green, keen newbie, Roisin told herself she’d never deploy such tired methods. She was full of Dead Poets Society fervour. She was going to transform and inspire with the ingenuity of her lessons, and they’d be so transported, they’d discipline themselves. Hahahahaha.
Once she was battle-hardened by the reality of the daily grind, Roisin discovered why the teacher clichés ever became ones in the first place. The only real goals were to get them to: 1. shut up and 2. pay attention. Anything on top of that was major high achieving.
It was the last lesson of the day, last week of term. Investment in outcomes was low, restlessness was high. Staying in charge was like trying to steer a shopping trolley with one wonky wheel along a narrow bridge over a shark pond.
‘I’d like your thoughts on Pip in this chapter, Pauly. As Pip becomes more conscious of social class, he becomes more embarrassed of Joe’s behaviour. Do you think Pip’s response to Joe is snobbish, or …’
Incredibly, Roisin only registered the risk in her line of enquiry seconds too late.
‘Miss, isn’t your husband called Joe? Boyfriend,’ Amir said. ‘I saw his name on the credits. Of that show.’
Roisin’s heart rate spiked. She’d got through today without Hunter even being raised in the staff room at lunchtime. She figured she was lucky that this was the frantic, tie-ends-up final days and not the mid-term lull.
‘That’s none of your business,’ Roisin snapped.
Amir made an under-his-breath wooooooh noise that caused a ripple. Roisin instantly knew she’d mishandled it, revealing it had got to her. She’d put a bounty on a disruptor trying again. Never show them they’ve got to you.
‘Pip versus Joe …’ Roisin repeated, aiming for a confident tone. She paused. ‘Whose phone is that?’
Her eyes swivelled to the intimidatingly self-assured prom queen, Caitlin Merry.
Some kids were embryonic, outline-in-principle versions of their adult selves – Roisin was once in this category. She was sort of a mousy, feather-pencil sketch of a Future Roisin. She did a butterfly from chrysalis around aged twenty and had blossomed into her confident, lairy phase by the time she met Joe.
Others were somehow completely and totally their fully formed identities in their mid-teens. Caitlin Merry was one of the latter. Roisin could absolutely see her in middle-age already; she was fourteen going on forty-seven.
She dripped with languid scorn for her teachers and yet, Roisin was certain, would be one of the ones who would call her over in the supermarket to say a wildly enthusiastic hello in a few short years, her eyes full of affectionate wonder for times that had unexpectedly flown past, and a slight hint of sorrow she’d been such an arsewipe. Funny how patterns repeated.
‘My phone isn’t on! Airplane mode in lessons, always. It’s the rules, isn’t it, Miss,’ Caitlin said, as if she was explaining trig to someone thick.
‘Why can I hear Adele from roughly where you’re sitting, then, Caitlin?’ Roisin said politely.
‘You love her Prosecco Mumrock so much she’s playing in your head all the time, probably?’ Caitlin drawled, to laughter.
‘Haha. Turn it off, please.’
Caitlin, chewing gum and eye-rolling extravagantly, opened her bag. She found the phone, in a case adorned with a photo of her own heavily filtered face, cuddled up to a scowling older lad. She turned the screen towards her teacher.
‘See? Not mine. Can I have an apology, Miss?’
‘Who’s is it then?’ Roisin said.
A silence opened up, albeit one that contained a tinny version of ‘Set Fire to the Rain’ trickling out in the background.
Amir started quietly singing along.
‘Right, either the person playing it turns it off or everyone gets detention, how’s that?’
The room erupted into the sort of jeering howls and boos of objection that were heard when a wild claim was made by an MP at PMQs.
It wasn’t much of a threat: they were too close to the summer break to go through the rigmarole of letters home, punishing non-attendance. Feasibility always counted less than attitude, however. Hold your nerve.
As one of her morbidly pessimistic colleagues, Andy, once observed: persuading up to thirty people that one person stood in front of them was more powerful than them was a sort of mind trick, anyway.
‘The short arse mob could kill you if they wanted,’ Andy said, cheerfully.
‘Then go to prison for a long time,’ Roisin said.
‘Under the age of responsibility, with lawyers for each to spread the blame around thinly? They’d do less time than I’ve got booked away in Crete.’
‘Thank God our Cheadle kids simply have too much conscience to go Lord of the Flies on us.’
‘There speaks someone who hasn’t taught 10E yet.’
It wasn’t a good moment for Roisin to recall that conversation, as her management of 10E disintegrated like wet tissue.
‘Last chance. Is anyone going to admit to Adele, or does everyone get in trouble?’ she said, hand on hip.
‘Miss. Miss!’ Amir said. ‘What song was that at the end of your fella’s show, Miss …? Was it Metallica?’
‘When he was with that waitress, behind his girlfriend’s back …’ Pauly supplied, knowing his role was to keep it going. ‘What was that about, Miss?’
Amir and Pauly didn’t usually upset Roisin. She struggled to find a different gear for them, now ‘rueful chiding’ wasn’t sufficient and outright losing it would expose how sensitive she was.
The Adele song mysteriously shut off, and with a bilious lurch, Roisin intuited it wasn’t a good sign.