SHE buries her face in her
books in class. Students around her giggle about boys in their old primary
school. They take photos of themselves when the teacher is distracted. She
continues with her work. She feels a strange sort of bond with her teacher. She
can sense that her teacher cares about her, even if it is in some fairly insignificant
way. In class, the students are seated at round tables. It must be a new kind
of learning. There are six girls at most of the tables. One table has eight
students. Her table has two. She has something in common with this other
student. This one, also, comes to the school without a familiar peer from her
primary school. The rub, though, is that they are both shy. Too shy to talk.
Suddenly there are two more students coming over to balance things up. They are
from the noisy table of eight. See, the teacher is thinking of her. She knows
it is an opportunity to shed some loneliness, to discover an unlikely kindred
spirit. To have somebody to communicate with, even to conspire with or giggle
about boys from the old primary school with, and secretly take photos. However,
all her flimsy dreams are dashed when she sees the downcast look of the girls
approaching. They hate this. They are scornful of having to move. The look on
their face says it. Anger and utter contempt for having to move, and
embarrassment and disdain for having to sit with her, the girl who buries her
face in her books.
HE waits for the bell so he
can trudge off to class. The office he has been allocated is dull and
suffocating. Almost everyone is female. He has nothing in common with the other
men. The women gossip and talk about their night out and their dinners.
Sometimes there is nauseating, artificial laughter. The classroom is his
sanctuary. The students smile at him. It is the first smile he has received
since leaving his children at home at the beginning of the day. He feels there
may be some genuine interest. They ask him about mobile phones. His ignorance
of this subject amuses them. He seems of another world entirely. They tease him
about Instagram and they queue up to show him the new applications they have
discovered, ones that are buzzing around the schoolyard.
SHE waits for the bell so
she can trudge off to lunch. All the girls from the entire school sit around in
small groups, talk, laugh insanely, cross their legs and play with their mobile
phones. At primary school she was attached, like an afterthought, to a large
group that tolerated her weirdness. It was somewhere safe to go each day, and
it mattered to her less and less that it was manufactured by a kind teacher. At
this school, the high school, there are new rules and new cliques, and she hasn’t
worked them out yet. A pale, undernourished girl has smiled at her a couple of
times on the first few days, and each morning she thought she might seek her
out more and more. But then, a week and a half into her new environment, the
pale girl has found a place, and now their eyes never met. What to do each day.
There is the beautiful library. Keeping busy by filling her water bottle. Speaking
to the teacher on yard duty. She soon becomes worried that her solitariness
will be noticed, and an uncomfortable primary school pattern will emerge. She
thinks she might have Asperger’s.
HE sits in the staffroom
alone at lunch, eating simple sandwiches, and trying not to feel odd and look
odd, amidst the swarming buzz of teachers interacting with each all around him.
He picks up threads of conversations, and sometimes the earnest discussions
sound important and meaningful. ‘Don’t forget we need to arrange a time for the
guest speaker’, or ‘Have you had time to go over the curriculum that we
discussed at the meeting?’ Then there are other snippets of a more personal
nature that make him feel downcast and solitary, and alien, like he might have
Asperger’s. ‘How is your daughter getting on in her new job?’ ‘When does Marcie
get out of hospital?’ ‘Are the kittens you bought at Christmas showing any signs
of improvement?’ He feels floored by all of this. It makes him feel sick to the
stomach. He cannot find any appetite for his food. He wants to let out a
scream. He knows nothing about any of these people, and yet, they know so much
about each other. He waits for the bell so he can trudge off to class.
EVERYBODY files in. The
high pitched chatter of people who have just met. She finds her seat at the
round table nearest the window. Everyone sits at the same seat each day. She likes
this. It is one of the only things she likes about school. She knows this
teacher better than all the others. She loves his bearded, serene face. She loves
the vulnerability. She knows she is the only one who can sense it. Yes, his
voice booms out sometimes, especially when he is reading. And yes, he strides
around the room purposefully, checking hand writing and checking books. But she
catches his face at other times, and she sees it is sometimes pained. The mouth
pursed, the eyes glazed, the brow furrowed. She yearns to touch his hand.
THE bell goes. He dismisses
them quickly, with a strong sense of relief. His mind’s not right, like the
insane man in that Robert Lowell poem about skunks. He feels the class didn’t
go particularly well. He felt more vulnerable than usual. And now he has to
face the challenge of going back to his office. Suddenly he is filled with
dread. He had a panic attack at the dentist recently, and now he feels
something similar coming on. It’s these walls. He feels like they are closing
in. He longs to rush outside and breathe in the air through to his lungs. He is
glad the students have left. But then he sees her. The quiet girl who has had trouble
making friends. She has, for some reason, decided to linger behind. He glances
up at her, looking at her behind a valley of tears. It is excruciating but he
cannot help it. Then her face puckers up, and she is crying too. Her hand is on
his shoulder, and together their cries reverberate around the otherwise empty
classroom.