My Secret Lover

like!’
    Burst of over-enthusiastic laughter
and particle of chip, which lands on Richard’s tie. Must get hold of myself.
    ‘How about New Andy?’
    ‘Like New Labour!’ says Richard,
discreetly wiping his tie with his jacket sleeve.
    ‘All style and no substance,’ says
New Andy, who’s very much the centre of attention so I don’t think he’s
noticed.
    ‘Oh I wouldn’t say that...’ I begin,
looking at his over-large jacket, his spiky hair, his frankly gorgeous face,
which looks a bit like that actor with the funny Welsh name which is not
pronounced Joan. He is smiling because he didn’t really mean it about style.
    ‘Did you go away?’ I ask Richard.
    ‘Skiing in Klosters,’ he says.
    The bottle of HP I’ve been holding
upside down over my chips suddenly discharges half its contents.
    ‘Only joking,’ says Richard. ‘I was
with Mum.’
    ‘How is she?’ I ask.
    ‘Hard to tell,’ he replies.
    There’s a silence as we all chew our
food trying to think of somewhere to go from here.
    ‘What’s snowboarding like?’
    ‘Fast,’ says Andy. ‘Are you going to
make a chip butty with your bread?’
    ‘I wasn’t,’ I say. But now that he’s
said it, I rather fancy the idea.
    ‘Can I have it?’
    ‘You help yourself,’ I say, relieved
he’s taken the wheat temptation out of my hands.
    Every time I speak to him I sound
like my mother but I’ve worked out that he cannot be less than twenty-four,
which makes the gap only twelve years at the outside. If you’re careful with
the age you pick that doesn’t sound too bad. For instance, thirty-six and
twenty-four is fine, quite exciting. It’s when you get to forty and
twenty-eight that it starts sounding desperate. Sixty and forty-eight is a bad
one too. One with a bus pass, the other still playing football on Saturday
mornings.
    ‘What brings you to this part of the
world?’ I ask him.
    ‘I was brought up round here.’
    I suspect a broken relationship, a
period of recuperation at home (he’s still young and won’t be able to keep up the
rent on an inner-city flat by himself).
    ‘There’s a lot to recommend the
suburbs,’ says Richard.
    ‘There is,’ I agree, and then I can’t
think of a single thing.
    ‘The schools are better,’ says Andy.
    ‘They are,’ Richard and I leap on
this.
    ‘And there’s the tube,’ says Richard.
    ‘There’s the tube,’ I repeat.
    ‘And don’t forget the Chiltern Line,’
says Richard. ‘Ten minutes to Marylebone.’
    I know for a fact that Richard has
not been into town since he took his mother to see Gene Pitney at the Palladium
in 1998.
     
    The methane produced by a classroom
of six-year-old boys should be harvested in some eco-friendly way to heat the
water or something. It’s the bum side of the job (Richard’s joke, not mine).
There’s the salary aspect too that could do with improving and class size, of
course, but if I had a choice of no farting or no above inflation increase in
salary for the rest of my life, the farting ban would probably win out. But you
very rarely get stark choices like that in life.
    Fern, my classroom assistant, believes
in visualizing yourself out of your problems. She takes charge while I stand in
the materials cupboard, breathing deeply and imagining myself in the Alps.
    The sky is clear blue, there’s been
an overnight fall of powdery snow. My nose is too cold to smell anything.
Miraculously, I can snowboard. In fact, I am quite good at it, which is
remarkable since even as a child I could not manage two roller skates at the
same time. I’m zipping down the mountain, there’s a crowd cheering me on, the
noise of shouting is becoming almost—
    ‘Emergency, Miss!’ Geri’s screaming
at me. ‘Robbie has thrown paint all over Ethan!’
    I summon my extremely unamused face
and burst out of the materials cupboard. Fern is wonderful at alternatives but
she doesn’t do discipline.
    Ethan has blue paint on his hair,
yellow on his school sweatshirt.
    ‘Robbie, put the paint down
immediately!’
    ‘It wasn’t me!’
    ‘It was, it was, it was!’ chorus the
others.
    I hold both hands above my head. A
couple of the girls who are paying attention notice and do the same. Gradually
the whole class catches on, and after a few minutes we are all standing there
with our hands stretched up, wonderfully silent, fry it next time, you’re
surrounded by thirty over-excited five and six year olds. It works. But only if
you don’t do it very often.
    ‘Ethan,