Another Life Altogether (22 page)

“Tracey’s my best friend,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and looking into his eyes.

I saw him flinch, step back. Then he looked me up and down, as if he was conducting a quick reassessment of me. When he was done, he let out a disgusted snort. “I thought you had more sense than that,” he said before he turned away and continued his march down the corridor and through the door of the main entrance.

For a moment, I felt a pang of regret as I watched him stride onto the playground to retrieve his book. I had an odd sense of having lost something, and it wasn’t just Malcolm; it was something intangible, something inside myself. But then Tracey strolled back to me and placed her arm across my shoulder.

“Hah, that showed him, didn’t it?” she said. “Good job, Jesse.” She
leaned into me, and any sense of loss was gone. “I can’t bloody well stand him. Such a little homo,” she said. “And such a bloody know-it-all. Always has his head in some stupid book. I never knew he lived in a bloody caravan on the edge of a cliff, though. I bet he has fleas as well as being queer. You want to watch it, Jesse—you were standing a bit too close to him. Maybe you’ve caught something.” She jumped away from me, a look of mock horror on her face. “Hey, maybe we’ll have to have you fumigated.” She let out a sharp laugh.

“You think so?” I asked, making a performance of scratching my head, my arm, my stomach, and, as Tracey started giggling, my buttocks.

“You’re funny, Jesse.”

“But not half as funny as Malcolm Clements,” I said, making my voice high. “Funny peculiar, that is.” In an exaggerated imitation of Malcolm, I took a limp-wristed slap at the air.

Tracey sputtered and folded forward, wrapping her arms around her stomach and laughing helplessly. And although I couldn’t quite find it in myself to laugh along with her, I watched her, smiling, buoyantly happy that I was with her, on firm ground.

OUR FIRST LESSON OF
the day was history, and the teacher, Miss Nutall, spent the lesson lecturing us about the triumph of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. History was followed by maths, taught by a tall man named Mr. Whitman, who simply wrote a series of problems on the blackboard, told us to solve them, and then sat at the front of the classroom, his feet up on his desk, perusing a magazine with a racing car on its cover. While history had been painfully boring, I quite enjoyed this lesson, since my ability to solve all the problems without much difficulty seemed to greatly endear me to Tracey and the Debbies. “I told you she was a brainbox,” Tracey said, addressing her three friends as they passed my exercise book among them to copy my answers.

The school dinner menu was unspectacular, the choices being very much the same as those at my old school: Spam fritters and chips, toad-in-the-hole, or liver and onions, with treacle pudding or pink blancmange afterward. But I wouldn’t have cared if we had nothing to eat at all, because there, in the dining room, I felt utterly content. While I sat between Debbie Mason and Tracey, the other two Debbies opposite us, I watched as several other girls vied to sit closer to us, battling one another with their dinner trays, leaning across the table to try to interject themselves into the conversation, their eyes wide and yearning for approval. I sat, mostly quiet, listening as the giggling and the gossip flowed over me, basking in this newfound safety, never wanting to leave it again.

The first hour of the afternoon crawled by as Mr. Livingstone, our religious-education teacher—a skinny man with big ears and a red bow tie that made him look as if he were planning to host a television quiz—droned listlessly through the story of the Good Samaritan. Our final lesson of the day was English, and I only hoped that the teacher, who, Tracey told me, was new to the school, would prove to be a little more inspiring. As we trudged along the corridor to our classroom, we looked at her name on the timetable.

“It says here, ‘M S Hastings.’ ‘M S.’ What the bloody hell is that about?” Tracey asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe they wrote it wrong, maybe it was supposed to be Mrs.,” I suggested. “Or maybe it’s her initials.”

“What, like Mary Samantha?” Tracey said.

“Or Marks and Spencer,” I offered, delighted when Tracey sputtered out a giggle.

At my old school, our English lessons had involved grammar exercises, spelling tests, and long diatribes from our teacher, Mr. Knighton, on the shrinking vocabulary of today’s teenagers, the dreadful, corrupting influence of American television on the English language, and the long-forgotten virtues of the semicolon. Like everyone else in Mr.
Knighton’s lesson, I’d spent most of my time gazing out the window onto the playground. Almost from the first moment I stepped into Ms. Hastings’s room, however, I realized that English lessons at Liston Comprehensive were going to be very different.

I had never seen anyone quite like her. Big-boned, broad-shouldered, and towering above six feet in a pair of knee-high black leather boots, she wore a patchwork skirt with a jagged hem and a billowy red cotton blouse. Her hair was cropped so short that it lay against her scalp like a shiny little cap, and her ears, wrists, and neck were adorned with beaded silver jewelry that clinked and jingled as she moved. She took up more space than any woman I had ever seen, and, judging by the way she moved around the classroom—in big-booted, jingling strides, making broad, audacious gestures as she spoke—she seemed to delight in the immensity of her own presence. Even Auntie Mabel, who always managed to fill up whatever room she entered with her brash energy, seemed at times ashamed of her own size and impact, pressing the force of herself into smoking cigarette after cigarette, as if she were somehow trying to make herself fade into the cloud of smoke that filled the air about her. But there was no shame in Ms. Hastings.

“Right you lot,” she thundered as soon as we were all seated. “First things first. I’m Ms. Hastings, your new English teacher.”

“Hello, Msssss,” one of the boys at the back of the room yelled, extending the S into a long, hissing syllable that echoed against the bare classroom walls. The entire class fell about in high, shrieking laughs. Ms. Hastings raised her eyebrows and shifted an icy gaze over our faces. Within seconds, the laughter died in our throats.

“And what’s your name, sonny?” she asked the boy who’d yelled.

“Erm, Paul Kitchen, Ms. Hastings.” This time, he added no extra hiss to her name.

“Well, Mr. Kitchen, it’s a pleasure, I’m sure.” A few scattered giggles moved around the classroom, but with a single look from Ms. Hastings they petered out into throaty coughs. She turned her attention back to
Paul Kitchen. “And just so we understand each other, Mr. Kitchen, I’m going to tell you why I’ve chosen what you seem to regard as a humorous form of address. See, while you, Mr. Kitchen, for your entire life will never be expected to change your name, we women are. When we’re single we’re supposed to use our father’s surname, because we’re seen as our father’s property, and when we marry we have to change our names and call ourselves Mrs., because then we’re supposed to belong to our husband. So, by calling myself Ms. I am demonstrating that I have my own independent identity and I’m not the property of some man. Is that clear?” She gave him a cool, expectant look.

“Yes, Ms.” He nodded sheepishly.

“Good, because I’d hate to have to punish you by making you write ‘I must not be a male chauvinist’ a thousand times after school. I’ve never liked giving out lines.”

“No, Ms.,” Peter Kitchen said.

I watched with utter fascination as Ms. Hastings chastised Peter Kitchen, whose face, as she continued to stare at him, became an ever-deepening shade of red. I had never even heard the term “Ms.” before, but as soon as she explained what it meant I thought it made complete sense. Why should women change their names when they got married? She was right. Of course, women shouldn’t be regarded as men’s property. It was wrong and unjust, and it made me even more determined that I would never, ever marry. What’s more, I resolved that I was going to start calling myself Ms. immediately. As I considered this, I peered around the classroom to see if anyone else was as thrilled as I was with Ms. Hastings’s remarks. I was disappointed to see that most of the other students, including Tracey and the Debbies, had perplexed expressions on their faces, but in the very back there were a couple of smiling and nodding faces—Dizzy and Malcolm. I hadn’t realized that Malcolm was in my English class, so I was a little surprised to see him there. For a moment I wanted to try to catch his eye, to show him that among all these other ignoramuses he and Dizzy and I were the only
ones who understood the important point Ms. Hastings was making, but then I remembered our encounter in the corridor, the decision I’d made, the line I had crossed, and I turned away.

“All right, so let’s get some work done,” Ms. Hastings boomed as she lifted herself onto her desk and sat there, legs apart and swinging. “Today we’re going to start by reading one of the most important allegories of our time. This,” she said, holding up one of the books that sat in a stack on her desk, “is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century.” I thought I recognized the cover and leaned forward to see it better. When I did, I realized it was the book I’d seen Malcolm reading that first day I’d met him. It was a copy of
Animal Farm
.

AN HOUR LATER,
as we filed into the corridor, I turned to Tracey and the Debbies. “So, what did you think?” I asked, excited to hear their assessment of the fascinating Ms. Hastings.

“Jesus, what a bloody dippy hippie,” Tracey declared without hesitation. “I mean, look at the state of her. You’d think she got all her clothes from the rag-and-bone man. And, my God, her hair. Looks like she had a fight with a pair of garden shears.”

“I sort of liked it—it’s different,” I ventured, having imagined cutting my own hair short like that during the lesson, running my hands over its fine and silky sheen.

“Different? Yeah, it’s definitely different all right!” Tracey rolled her eyes. “Ugly and different. God, I can’t stand women like her!”

“Really?” I asked, genuinely perplexed at Tracey’s vitriol.

“Yeah, really.”

“Well,” I said hesitantly, “I did think she had a good point when she talked about not being a man’s property.”

“Now, that was a load of old crap,” Tracey countered. “She must be one of those bloody women’s libbers. But, like my dad says, they only say that stuff because they’re too ugly to get a man.”

“You’re dead right about that,” Debbie Mason said, while the other two Debbies chorused their agreement.

When I didn’t join in, Tracey narrowed her eyes and studied me. “God, Jesse, don’t tell me that you
like
her.”

“No,” I said cautiously. “I don’t
like
her. I just thought she was, well, I thought that she was interesting.”

“She’s a bloody freak, if you ask me,” Tracey said. “And really, Jesse, only freaks like freaks.”

W
ITH THE SCHOOL DAY OVER, TRACEY AND I WALKED TO THE SCHOOL
gates to say goodbye to the Debbies, who, because they all lived in Liston, could walk home. I’d been looking forward to the end of the day, when I’d get a chance to see Amanda again, and had spent much of my time planning what I might say to her when I finally saw her again. Unfortunately, I needn’t have bothered. When we got to the school gates, Amanda was there with a couple of her friends, smoking and throwing back her head to blow long puffs of smoke into the air between bouts of giggling conversation. I tried to catch her eye and even wiggled my fingers toward her in a feeble wave, but despite my efforts she didn’t notice me. What finally got her attention was the harsh buzz of a motorbike coming down Liston’s main street. As soon as she heard it, she turned toward the sound. “Oh, look, it’s Stan,” she said, waving an outstretched arm.

I watched the bike veer around an elderly couple who were in the middle of the zebra crossing. The woman’s coat lifted visibly in the bike’s wake, and the man’s flat cap was blown from his head. “That’s Amanda’s boyfriend,” Tracey said, tugging on my sleeve. “Frankly, I have no bloody idea what he sees in her.”

I remembered the evening I’d first met Amanda and the boy in the
Ford Cortina who’d yelled at her from across the street. I’d already decided I didn’t like him. Now that he seemed to be on his way to interrupt my opportunity to talk to her, I liked him even less. “Does he always drive like that?” I asked. “It looks dangerous.”

“Motorbikes
are
dangerous,” Tracey said with unrestrained enthusiasm. “Really dangerous. Last year Larry Kirk came off his bike and had to have both his legs amputated. He’s in a wheelchair now.” She said this with delight, as if Larry Kirk had won some sort of competition. “You might have seen him; he works at the newsagent’s. It’s a bit weird, him with no legs and that. Can’t help feeling sorry for him. But don’t worry, nothing like that will happen to Stan.” I was about to tell her that it wasn’t Stan I was worried about as I observed the elderly couple, pale and open-mouthed, apparently immobilized by shock or fear or both, standing stock-still in the middle of the street. But Tracey continued. “Stan’s not like Larry Kirk. He’s a really, really good driver.” This, clearly, was a matter for dispute.