Thursday
‘BASTARDS!’
Ted Berry whips his eyes to Wedge . .
‘You FUCKING . . . little . .’
. . . drops them back to his exercise book, closed on his desk.
‘. . . BASTARDS!’
The freshly demented teacher slams the wooden bat against the blackboard.
Bang.
Face red like the man spreading the bars of his cage. A prison guard with his truncheon, finally breaking under years of strain.
Bang.
Released into violence.
‘Shit the fuckin bed,’ Berry gasps. ‘We’re dead.’
They'd had it coming, had it coming a long time. But it was a shock just the same; soft-arsed, boy-loving Mr Fenwick - man oh man, he’s lost it, gone, left the map.
This the first time he’d sworn in class.
‘I ffknnn . . .’
Ever.
‘. . . HATE you lit-tle . .’
And with such foul abandon.
‘ . . . cuh-unts.’
The word comes out like ‘currants’.
‘WHO?’ Mr Fenwick screams and scans, chalk dust settling in his jazz beard. His audience nailed to desks at the elbow.
Three columns of fear.
‘EH?’
Mr Fenwick stands before the class in his rolled up shirt sleeves. An executioner, a waste paper basket on his desk for the collection of heads.
The rounders bat his axe, held now in both hands.
‘WHO?’
The teacher whacks the blackboard hard with the bat.
Bang!
‘WHO?’
Bang!
‘WAS?
Bang!
‘IT?’
Berry's guilty pen twitches, held in a rare position – switched on, humming - poised for learning, for the first time ever in an English class. A little late in the day to be showing an interest – this the very last English lesson of the school year.
Frankland High School closes today at 3:45pm, freeing all its 967 teenage inmates for a six week parole.
The Summer Holidays.
Mr Fenwick’s battered wooden empire sits beyond the main school building, a Portakabin hut dropped by a crane on a spare bit of a grass between the school hall and the gym. Too cold in winter, too hot in summer – such is life at a northern comprehensive; too many pupils, not enough classrooms.
Berry turns his face to the window. Arthur the caretaker is out there in the firestorm cutting the grass. He sits bare chested, shorts sticking to the municipal tractor’s red plastic seat as he drives its spinning blades over the football field, perfuming the air with the sweet green smell of fresh cut grass, the oversized lawnmower sounding like a huge metal insect.
He flicks his cigarette butt to the blades.
This just happened:
‘Quick, he’s fuckin comin,’ - chair legs screeching - the English teacher bouncing like Bambi towards the wooden shed holding a rounders bat and a tennis ball, happy he’d survived to the end of another school year - throwing open the door - a vacuum of hot air and suppressed laughter - then; sucked into the trap.
‘Right class, no work today, who fancies a game of round . . .’
The waste paper basket they’d balanced overhead between the half-closed door and the frame had spun and hung for a fraction, adjusting, before - clump - swallowing Mr Fenwick’s head whole. The class exploded into laughter, even the swots and the girls couldn’t resist; Ned Kelly - sure as shite - standing there on the torn lino.
‘Cunts,’ the teacher finally articulates the Australian term of endearment.
His teeth grind.
Bang!
He smashes the bat into the blackboard.
‘CUNTS!’
It was the dog shit that did it.
‘CUNTS!’
It was Wedge’s idea to scoop up the steaming turd and mix it in with the pencil shavings, snot rags and chewing gum that usually lived inside the bin.
Bang!
A stinking monster of a shit to be proud of, laid fresh at the extent of her leash by a guilty-looking hound. Mr Fenwick’s beloved beagle; Karma. Tied up outside in the shade.
Bang!
Bad Karma.
‘ANSWER ME!’
He looks, seeks, pleads to Nathan Boyle and Jo Mole, king and queen of the front row. Swots, one of the handful here keen to actually learn English prose. They look back in horror, not sure of whom they’re most scared. Normally an easy equation - Bez and Wedge. Not today though, their mild-mannered teacher’s been replaced by Captain fucking Caveman.
And he’s armed.
Fenwick’s nose twitches to his shoulder, face curling away from the still warm turd dribbling down the front of his beige shirt like a platoon of slugs.
‘Oh Jesus Christ! Come on. Class? Who was it? Please tell me. Who was it? Just tell me who it was? Eh? TELL ME who it fucking was!’
Bang!
Bang!
BANG!
Thirty-two faces stare back.
‘NOW!’
And, for the first time – ever – Mr Fenwick can read them.
Ted Berry turns his face back from the window.
‘Fuck,’ he mumbles.
Mr Fenwick snaps his head to the right, brain cells twisting and aligning like frayed copper fibres seeking a connection, reaching out into the void; from the weird pumpkin head of Jason Wujkowski, sitting at the front desk next to the window.
‘Woo-fuckin-cow-shkee?’ he whispers - no teacher ever got Wedge’s name right.
To . .
. . . Mr Fenwick’s eyes flick left a millimetre.
The circuit completes.
‘Berry? BERRY!’
Ignition.
‘CUNTS!’
Berry tips his face down to his Work In Progress (he'd been grinding ‘SHAKESPEARE SUCKETH COCK’ deep into his wooden desk since well before Christmas).
‘YOOO? ARRRRAAAA!’
Nine months, eight half-hour lessons a week of stupid questions and comments – ‘sir, sir, was Bill Shakey a bender?’ ‘sir, sir was Dylan Thomas in the Magic Roundabout?’ - giggling and farting from these two little fuckers long ago dragged to the front row from their natural berth at the rear – ‘sir, sir, sir?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Wedge splutters. ‘I was the last one in.’
‘The last one in?’ Mr Fenwick points the bat at Wedge’s ample head, then the door. ‘YOU! Were the last one in!’
‘Ehm? I mean,’ he lies. ‘It wasn’t me. The. The, y’know. The poop and that.’
Mr Fenwick stares to the back and closes his eyes.
‘Aaaaagh!’
The tractor rattles by.
‘Aaagh!’
The teacher wrenches himself one hundred and eighty degrees to face the blackboard, spilling pencil shavings, chewing gum and a slug of Karma shit onto the torn, badly-fitted linoleum as he goes.
‘Aagh!’
Imminent summer freedom and the fact he’s had these two little cunts demoted out of his class next year – their last at Frankland Community High - coaxes Mr Fenwick back up the pacifist’s path.
He takes in and holds a chest of air.
‘Agh,’ he sighs, deflating.
Wedge twitches against Berry’s shoulder, shakes, snorts, splutters.
Stops.
Silent.
Berry turns and looks at his fat head in true horror.
Always the same story. No escape. Whenever a teacher blew a gasket, Wedge was somewhere in view - pulling spastic faces or making fart noises with his armpit, drowning Berry in spasms of his own laughter. Hours and hours added to his school sentence, serving detention after school for laughing in a teacher’s face.
‘Fuck!’
Berry looks down, trying to lock his chest. He studies the art, the majestic curl of that beautiful S in ‘Sucketh’ - carved in Ye Olde Worl
de letters. Ground into the wooden desk with a dozen Bics borrowed from girls with fluffy, lime-green pencil cases, an ambitious project way superior to the scrawls of previous generations, it really is a work of some distinc . . .
‘Fuuuuuck!’ he whispers, trying not to breathe.
The sheer weight of his creative genius won’t flatten the fizz. His neck grips hold of purple reins, pulling tight on muscles concealed in the pink valleys of his brain like a horse breaker. He squeezes and pushes the laughter bubbles back down his spine. He follows up with a well worn mantra.
‘Wedge, don’t laugh!,’ he says. ‘Wedge! Don’t! I’ll piss me fuckin pants!’
Mr Fenwick can’t hear them. He sighs, sags and improvises, working a theme he performs at drama class every Wednesday evening in white gloves - a mime. He reaches into the blackboard’s gutter for the chalk. His Thai Rolex wobbles loose around the ginger freckles of his wrist.
He sags.
The armpits of his beige shirt wet pools in sand.
He sighs.
‘Right.’
Mr Fenwick exhales and lifts the chalk, creased shirt hanging out from one side of his trousers.
‘Right, OK. Rightio! Class? Rightio, we’ll . . ?’
He’s still got the rounders bat in his other hand.
Rounders. A good, unisex English summer schoolgame. Americans had made the bat bigger and used a heavier ball and renamed it ‘baseball’. Fucking Yanks - the Brits invented everything.
‘Wedge,’ Berry hisses. ‘Don’t man. Just fuckin don’t! We’re gonna get away with it man.’
They both turn to look at the teacher.
Mr Fenwick had left home with his shirt tucked into his underwear, probably by his mother.
‘Right, OK. Rightio!’
On his way to the hut, he’d pulled at his shirt – probably to get some air up his back in the heat. But his bright yellow Y-fronts refused to let go of the shirt and have been pulled up his back into full view.
The elastic in the waist of his kecks is now taut as a rubber band.
There’s also signs of a stain.
‘Ah,’ Berry breathes out, seeing the future. ‘For fuck’s sakes man.’
Wedge’s face begins to peel back for laughter. A hand rising to point, just in case anyone has missed it.
Mr Fenwick's treacherous wrist creeps from the blackboard, sneaks behind his back and down to deal with this moist pressing irritation. He lifts a hip slightly then firmly buries his chalk fingers into the arsehole of his worn out corduroys.
‘Fuckinhell!’
The teacher pulls his uncomfortable underpants away from his anus, freeing his Y-front elastic from his shirt with a crisp elastic smack.
It cracks around the silent shed like a snapped ruler.
Fatal, fatal mistake . . .
Wedge bursts, falls forward, whine-barking like a crushed puppy.
‘Nyaaa!’
Not so much a laugh as a scream.
For Berry, there’s a fraction of clarity, the final nanosecond of life you get after a shotgun has been discharged in your face.
‘Wahaaaah hah!’
He throws his hand over his mouth and squeaks, unravels; snot bursting through the gaps between his fingers. He tries to force the laugh back down his throat, gripping it like a long suppressed turd - but the turtle’s out now and swimming.
The class erupts with them. A teenage tidal wave of humiliation crashing into Mr Fenwick, English teacher of Class 4b.
‘You ffffffffffknnn . . .’
Mr Fenwick begins a new mime, one he didn’t even know he knew, deep-set in DNA.
‘. . . cuuuu . .’
A heavy ache across the lino slats.
A girl screams.
' . . . nnntts!'
The wooden bat is the exact same size and weight as a policeman’s truncheon.
‘FUCKING . . . !’
The teacher swings it at Berry’s head.
‘CUNTS!’
He ducks
It smacks Wedge in the temple - sending his king-sized cranium into the window. The pane cracks, a spider’s web expanding up and out from the point of impact.
Berry collapses onto the desk and covers his head in defence of the next, imminent blow. Mr Fenwick is close by, he can smell him; the bleach-like odour of the frequent, squalid masturbator.
Wedge is at Berrys left shoulder, choking down air. His hands at his throat, breath rasping from his mouth like a nipped balloon.
The familiar death rattle of the chronic asthmatic.
‘Jesus!’ Berry jerks up, forgetting the teacher.
He pushes him back by the shoulders.
‘Where’s y’hooter? Wedge! Y’fuckin inhaler?’
Wedge leans forward and puts a hand in his pocket. He pulls out a white box with a blue stripe – 20 Regal Kingsize cigarettes – and slaps them onto the desk.
‘Y’hooter, fuckwit.’
He slides from his seat, screeching the desk across the lino.
Dying.
The inhaler now in his hand – fags and inhaler, Wedge’s life and death, always in the same pocket.
Mr Fenwick; soft-as-shite easy-target Mr Fenwick is now a sandcastle; teenage waves hitting him, the stares of hated pupils pulling him down and washing him away.
Just a wet hole remains.
‘I’m sor, I didn’t mean. I’m so, sorry.’
Berry pulls the blue lid off the prison-grey inhaler, shakes it and puts it to Wedge’s mouth.
‘Open y’fuckin mouth!’
He does as he’s told, wheezing.
‘Breathe!’
Wedge gasps a blast of the magic gas as Berry pushes the canister down and the medicine squirts out.
He splutters.
Again.
He’s alive.
Saved.
‘Fuckin . . .’
Berry jerks to his feet sending his chair to the floor.
‘Y’bearded fuckin turd!’
Mr Fenwick stands alone, mouthing words, whining, dancing, trying to move his batting arm as if to point, searching for the power which has now washed away.
He opens his mouth.
Closes it.
Squeaks.
Speaks.
‘Look,’ he points the bat. ‘Now, let’s all calm down. You. You? You can’t speak to a . . ‘
Mr Fenwick looks at the crack in the window pane, sees his career.
The class hyenas look out across the Serengeti.
Mr Fenwick isn’t staying.
He drops the bat and turns for the door, rattles the thin piece of wood from its frame, takes three steps down to the ash path and is away, feet puffing dust toward his tied hound and her empty bowels. Soon his green Mini, a classic, skids gravel and dust up through its black and silver number plate.
And he’s gone.
Berry looks down at Wedge, half his fat head shaded by the table.
‘Here Bez?’ he beams, lungs patched - for now - by Ventalin.
Unlit cigarette at his lips.
‘What?’
‘Did y’just call a teacher a ‘bearded fuckin turd?’’ he smiles. ‘Y’can’t do that man.’
Berry kicks at him with his scuffed Oxfords.
‘Y’fuckin twat-bastard! I thought you were havin a proper fit,’ he kicks again. ’Y’fuckin little . . .’
Wedge rolls away and runs out the door.
Free now for the summer, free in the sunshine. All but the class’s swots and cowards behind him, cashing in for a half day.
‘Six weeks!’ Wedge screams as he goes. ‘Woo hoo! SIX fuckin weeks! Six weeks free of this fuckin shit hole! Woo hoo!’