Do You Remember the First Time?
face crinkled up in disbelief. ‘Right. OK. Well, why don’t you just concentrate on getting your A levels?’
I suddenly felt a jump in my chest. How old was I? I was taking my GCSEs, surely, where you get points for spelling your own name right.
Crap, I realised. It was September. Back at school. Lower sixth. Tits.
Calm down, calm down. Breathe. Didn’t they make them super easy these days so the government can pretend they can magically make stupid people cleverer?
Jesus Christ. Of all the years I could have picked I had to go for my sixteenth.
Chapter Five
When did kids get so big? This lot were, collectively, absolutely enormous. Huge, milk-reared giants. A lot of fat kids too. When I was in school there was one fat boy and one fat girl per class. It was like a government ration. Now, there were huge people everywhere. Everyone was either enormous – pink, ruddy, like somebody from Trumpton come to life – or skinny as a pick – mostly the girls – who, I was pleased to notice, were still rolling their skirts up. Not everything changes.
I stood at the school gates and took a deep breath. I hoped the teachers hadn’t changed too much. I recognised Miss Syzlack, thank God. She’d been a brand-new junior English teacher when I’d been there, sixteen years ago. They’d given her all the shitty classes, and she had a reputation for running out of the class and crying. At the time I thought it was pathetic; now I thought if I was twenty-two and had fully grown boys shouting sexual abuse at me, I’d probably be out of there too. But she’d clearly stuck with it. A bit of mehated to think of her still there, and, by the sounds of things, not married either. Everyone knows that teachers always change their names the second they get married, because they realise their kids are completely unable to believe they have lives outside the classroom, and it adds (however slightly) to their disciplinary range if they sound a bit more grown up.
I could remember where the registration classroom was too, assuming it hadn’t changed. Sixth form was a lot smaller than the rest of the school, and the two years shared a common room Tash and I were never cool enough to go to. But as to who the hell was who, I was fucked for that. I planned to hang around as long as possible and be the last person sitting down, so that I got the right desk.
It was the smell that hit me first. It hadn’t changed at all. Gym kit, adolescent sweat, strange chemicals, poster paint, dust, formaldehyde, trainers and, overlaying it all, litres of sprayed-on cheap deodorant and aftershave, choking up the yellow hallways and sweaty plastic handrails.
This place hadn’t changed an iota. I couldn’t believe it. The tiles were cracked in exactly the same places they had been when I’d left. Who could go sixteen years and not think to replace a cracked tile? The grim pink linoleum hadn’t changed. The supposedly soothing, prison-like shades of pale green and yellow still haunted the corridors, grubbied and coloured with years of Sellotape. Posters along the walls advertised the periodic table and how to say no to drugs (as usual, illustrated with a revolting shot of a needle going in to somebody’s vein rather than, say, a really good relaxed party witheveryone having a nice time, the point at which someone is actually going to have to make a choice).
I walked along in a kind of a wonder. For the first time, I really did feel transported. This was a world I hadn’t been in for a long, long time. There was a stern exhortation not to run on the stairs. There was a cabinet containing skeletons of animals. A line of kings and queens that I think had been there since I was at school. Some toilets with a telltale whiff of smoke. The school’s rather threadbare coat of arms, and its Latin motto for ‘Let us do our work this day’, ‘Get your homework in on time’, or whatever it meant. My head was spinning.
‘Miss Scurrison!’
That was … I definitely recognised that voice. I turned round, conscious I was wearing that expression that people do when they listen to a ‘blast from the past’ on This is Your Life . I also suddenly felt my stomach seize up in a sort of panic.
‘Don’t you have a class to go to?’
It was Mr Rolf, evil geography teacher incarnate. This man had scared the living daylights out of every one of us. Tashy and I always reckoned it was a possibility that he was actually just sizing us up so he could choose
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