To Be Honest(27)

The radiator’s stopped working for some reason; I noticed at lunch but it’s taken ‘til now for anyone else to comment.

“I’m well frozen,” Alicia snipes. “Miss is too.”

“Oi, Miss, I can see your ...” Lloyd does a pointed throat-clear; taps his pecs.

I think Donna must feel sorry for me, ‘cos before I can even worry about if Kai’s looking, she swoops.

“Went shopping at the weekend Miss. Got boots like yours.”

I smile a thousand suns at her. “That’s very flattering, Donna. Harry, how about you?”

Harry Brigham sighs deeply and looks like he’d rather be shot. “Dunno, Miss.”

I do. It’ll be black tracksuit bottoms and an Arsenal shirt with stains. But I choose to be kind.

“I’m sure you’ll look fantastic, whatever it is. But what do you think Tom would wear?” He looks blank. I prompt. “From The Glass Menagerie. Tom Wingfield. Or Laura. Or Amanda.”

More stretching, looking at watches, “Miss, can we pack up now?”-ing. I hold my ground.

“Because what I want each and every one of you to do is come to school — if you’re brave enough — on Friday, wearing what you think one of the characters would.”

The classroom froths, spills over: I’ve done it. I’ve managed to give them the biggest laugh of the day so a part of me’s glad and I smile too but I’m really cold now in the flimsy cardi-coat and another part’s scorching ‘cos I feel like they’re laughing at me. And it’s horrible.

They pack up and paw the ground, stamping while I make them put chairs up and stay ‘til they’re quiet ‘cos I’m the teacher so they do what I say. Right?

Then the floodgate’s released and they empty the room in thirty seconds flat; hoodies all over the place; one chair falls down, but there’s someone who’s left at the end and it’s Alicia. She’s knocking on the edge of my desk and ‘cos I’m standing on it to turn my speakers off I have to grip the board to stop the wobble. She looks like a child from where I’m standing but I suppose that’s ‘cos she is.

“Miss?” And I think, did I take her phone? Do I need to sign her report? Is she here for another verbal spar? I study her whitewashed cheeks and feel something like sympathy. It’s never good when you choose the wrong foundation. Someone should tell her.

“Yes, Alicia. What can I do for you?”

And slow, like it’s agony, she shifts her eyes away from the field and Velcros mine.

“I need help, Miss.”

And I nearly fall off the desk, I swear.

But instead, I clamber down carefully, in case she turns bad in the five seconds it takes me to find my feet and her eyes let me slip. When I’m down, she slumps in a chair. Her neck claims her chin like quicksand.

“I wish I was better at English.” The words pierce me somewhere up left, ‘cos it’s a mumble, but the meaning’s sparklingly clear. She really wants help. From me.

I have options here. It’s three fifteen and I have no meetings, no detentions coming in and to be honest I could spend some time with Alicia Payne, helping her make sense of things. Or I could revel in the fact that I know she’s crap at English and tell her to go away ‘cos I don’t have time.

But that would be lying.

So, mainly because I have to and only a little bit ‘cos I want, I sit down, pull up my chair, indicate she does the same. Turns out she missed last controlled assessment. So Miss Mint sorted her out and she’s got to do it again, on her own and after school. Next Thursday. That’ll be with me, then.

So of course, she’s come to me for help now, just as she’s realised there’s no way out; nowhere to go to make it not real. She thinks she can’t produce creative texts. She thinks she can’t imagine. She thinks she can’t write right. And I think who am I to tell her no problem, it’ll be fine, you can do this; you just need to concentrate.

But I do.

And we open her book and we think about viewpoint; finding original voices. Something she thinks she’s crap at, ‘cos her brother’s a quite well known actor now and he’s always been good and she knows she’s just rubbish.

But I don’t.

We talk about the poem she has to dive off, Charge of the Light Brigade and I know this one; did it in year 8 and the only way I got into it was with sound. So I take off my heels and I almost make her snicker with my ‘half a league, half a league’ drumbeat, so then I ask what character she liked or who she thought of and she says none and I say there has to be one, what about the soldiers on horses? She says she hates horses.