The Rye Man Page 12

  He opened the mail, scanned three or four circulars from the Department then filed them in the bin. He went down to the office where Mrs Patterson was running off the half-term news-sheet he was sending home. It was an idea new to the school and he’d included some children’s descriptions of their outdoor pursuits day. In the foyer he paused and looked at the bare notice-boards which stretched round the walls. They made him nervous – they could so easily turn out to be a permanent and inescapable monument to a failed idea. He decided that if the worst came to the worst he would beg or bribe Emma to paint murals on them, but he wasn’t quite prepared to concede defeat so quickly, and getting a felt-tip pen from the office and some paper, he made an arbitrary division of space and pinned up the respective class names at intervals. At least now if they remained blank the responsibility would be clearly allocated. Mrs Patterson read his thoughts and smiled.

  ‘I don’t think you need worry. By the amount of coloured paper and glue I’ve dispatched from this office there must be something going on. It was very devious of you because no one wants to get shown up by anyone else – a bit like going to church and everyone wanting to have the best rig-out on display.’

  He pleaded a wide-eyed innocence but hoped she was right.

  It turned into a day for parental complaints. He took another phone call from a mother who claimed her daughter was being teased by two other girls about her appearance, a call from a father who wondered if Miss Fulton was setting enough homework and at the end of school a Mr Watson arrived carrying a copy of The Ghost of Johnny Franklin, a class reader used by Mrs Haslett. It was obvious that he considered that he had come to school on a matter of urgency, explaining that he had been compelled to close his funeral parlour early and switch on his answering machine. It seemed there was no time to lose in his desire to confront the Satanic threat the book represented to any child who read it. His daughter had brought it home, he had discovered it by accident and been horrified by what he had read. He had brought a little bit of paper and he displayed the page references where offending words occurred, reading them in a rising tone: – ‘poltergeist, spirits, exorcism’ – building up to a crescendo in a manner which suggested he was presenting a damning indictment in a court room. When he had finished he launched into a homily on the damages to young minds from the occult, citing lurid and improbable examples of demonic possession.

  He didn’t know the book but even a cursory glance through it told him that it was nothing more malevolent than a children’s ghost story and the possibilites of it leading to devil worship and ritual sacrifice seemed extremely remote. However, he resisted the urge to be facetious, realising only too clearly that for the man opposite it was a matter of considerable importance. He made some calculating, conciliatory remarks about how many potentially negative influences were affecting children’s development, using examples of videos and anything else which came into his head and when Mr Watson was nodding he suggested that as he hadn’t read the book himself he was not in the best position to pronounce judgement on it, but promised he would give it his full and early attention.

  The man remained unpacified and asked to speak to Mrs Haslett. As a rule he would have insisted on acting on his staff’s behalf in such a matter but he thought it probable that she would have read the book and thus been able to give a more effective response than he had constructed. He excused himself and went to her room where she was rummaging in the depths of her handbag. Before he had time to explain his visit she snapped at him about the notice-boards.

  ‘Mr Cameron, I don’t feel it’s a very fair distribution of the available space when junior classes get as much space as senior ones. One of my children is surely going to produce more display work than a child at the bottom end of the school. I don’t see how I can get all their work on and they’ve all worked very hard at it. I wouldn’t want to disappoint any of them.’

  Her sensitive concern for her pupils was most touching except for the fact that he knew her complaint was motivated by her persistent and petty fixation with the gradations and demarcations of status. On a better day he would have judged it a trivial enough issue over which to find some placatory compromise, but on this particular one he felt he had encountered one more miserably narrow perspective on life than he felt able to take.

  ‘We’ll have to discuss this at another time, Muriel, because at the moment I have the parent of a girl in your class in my office who thinks you’re trying to recruit his daughter into the legions of Satan, through one of the books you use.’

  Her mouth slipped open and she dropped her car keys back into the black hole of her bag.

  ‘I’ve a meeting now with Miss Fulton, I wonder if you could speak to Mr Watson, try to assure him that wasn’t your intention. I assume it wasn’t?’

  He turned away briskly before she had a chance to formulate a reply and everything inside him was skipping. When he was in the corridor he did a little soft-shoe shuffle. Two girls coming round the corner caught him in mid-movement and simultaneously contorted their faces to suppress the rising giggles. Slipping on his stern face, he stared at them as they approached, daring them to laugh but then as they drew level he started to sing the words of ‘Ghostbusters’.

  He was still smiling when he opened Miss Fulton’s door. She was tidying away books and paper. He had grown used to how young she looked but now he noticed how tired and pale she was. She seemed down, subdued in her movements and obviously in need of her mid-term break. He asked her if she was old enough to remember Abba but it elicited only a neutral response.

  Suddenly he felt a little guilty, aware that he hadn’t been able to give her the degree of support which he had hoped. His own induction to a new job had required more of his concentration than he had anticipated and there hadn’t been a great deal of time left for anyone else. He tried to cheer her up by telling her of the interview going on in his office and she smiled for the first time, but when he gently mentioned the phone call about homework she started to cry, slowly at first, then more openly, searching in the top drawer of her desk for tissues. She turned her head away in embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I feel rather foolish.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he heard himself saying, ‘everything will be all right – the first term’s always the worst.’ But it sounded bland and ineffectual. What he wanted to do was put his arm round her until she was cried out, but as she gradually staunched the tears he restricted himself to patting her on the back.

  ‘You must think you’ve got a right cry-baby on your hands,’ she said, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

  He smiled gently but said nothing more until she was composed enough to talk.

  It came scurrying out in a breathless rush, fuelled by a lack of self-confidence – the widening gap between her aspirations for her class and the daily reality, the inadequacy of her college training, a negative comment she had overheard between Vance and Haslett about her classroom control, a problem she was having with a boy in the class. He let it all come out, disappointed with himself that he hadn’t detected any indications of her unhappiness earlier in the term. Then when she’d finished he tried to address the most important of the problems – her lack of self-belief – assuring her that she had made a good start in a very difficult job, repeating some of the favourable comments he’d heard and when he couldn’t think of any more he made up some. He told her about some of the monumental mistakes he had made as a new teacher – the science experiment which set his desk on fire, the army of tadpoles which had swollen into frogs and invaded the whole school, the day he had taken a class to the Ulster Museum and left a child behind.

  She looked as if she wasn’t sure if he was making them up or not but it didn’t matter because she had left her tears firmly behind. They spent some time discussing the problems in detail, working out a range of options and positive approaches, and he promised her that he would give her more active support than he had previously managed. He tried
to make her feel the potential of her value to the school, the contribution she could make, and without mentioning names he let her know that he needed her support in the struggle against what he laughingly described as ‘the forces of darkness’.

  She had brightened to her normal self and was grateful to him for his help but he dismissed his contribution.

  ‘Some day soon I’ll probably need you to do the same for me,’ he said, ‘everybody gets down sometimes.’ As she started to pack up her things he glanced round her room. ‘You didn’t manage to produce any display work for the entrance?’

  ‘Yes, it’s over there on the back table, all ready – I just didn’t want to be the first to put it up.’

  ‘You’d be doing me a big favour if you’d lead the way – I wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares about bare boards.’

  She laughed and promised that she would.

  In the morning after assembly she had her class in the foyer and in a short while her display space was covered with a mosaic of autumnal leaves, both real and paper, along with poems the children had written on leaf-shaped pages. Pictures of squirrels peeped out from the camouflage of leaves edged with crimson and the garland of hips, berries and acorns which formed a framework. By lunch-time, three other displays had appeared and by the end of the school everyone’s was there, including Haslett’s and Vance’s. Most of the other classes had gone for firework displays and the foyer was a sudden frieze of colour where rockets made out of coloured paper and cardboard tubes from toilet rolls zoomed across black, sugar-paper skies awash with glitter. Wooden Catherine wheels whirled luminous fantails of sparks and Roman Candles erupted like Vesuvius in cascades of tinfoil and fluorescence.

  He stood in the middle of the incandescence and when he was sure no one was watching, stretched out his arms like the wings of a plane and spun himself in a slow circle. It didn’t matter that Mrs Haslett’s display looked like someone had thrown a plate of pasta against the wall, it didn’t matter if Vance’s rockets only followed perfectly vertical and parallel trajectories. What he saw was infinitely beautiful to him and he re-lived that feeling he’d had on the first morning when he’d stood on the stage and watched the sunlight wash over the upturned faces.

  ‘It looks well,’ Mrs Patterson said, coming out of her office.

  He could have kissed her but confined himself to a smile that felt as though it stretched from ear to ear and nodded his head in silent agreement. Only Eric’s appearance from his dark hole of a store splashed cold water on the moment. He stared at the displays with a look of confusion, as if assessing some abstract work of art of which he did not quite see the point.

  ‘The heating’s going to dry out those leaves, Mr Cameron, and those berries and things, and then they’ll fall off and get tramped into the floor.’

  ‘Look at those fireworks, Eric!’ He wanted one of them to ignite his soul, even for one fleeting moment.

  ‘Sure isn’t it a Pagan festival just like Christmas,’ he replied, pushing his brush and his misery further down the corridor.

  Two children appeared with a message for the office and he asked them both to point out their work and talk about how they had constructed their fireworks. It suddenly struck him that it would have been a good idea to have organised a Hallowe’en disco and firework display. Perhaps the P.T.A. might have got involved but when he reflected on it he supposed the cost would have been prohibitive. He was feeling the way he did when he was happy, fizzling away inside like one of the fireworks on display and wanting everyone to feel the same way. Three days’ holiday coming up if only he could clear the hurdle of the in-service day. It would be a day bristling with danger and he knew if he didn’t handle it well it could all end in disaster. As his euphoria started to ebb he took one last look at the displays then set off to photocopy some of the material he intended to use.

  *

  As a kind of softener, an attempt to set people off in the right mood he had scheduled the start of the day’s programme for 9.30 a.m. He dressed casually as did most of the rest of the staff. Only Vance wore his school uniform of suit, white shirt, graduate tie. When they had gathered in the staffroom he began by thanking them for the excellence of their displays, hoping that Mrs Haslett wouldn’t resurrect the matter of space, and quickly went on to outline the schedule for the day. He had tried to set precise times for the different sessions, attempting to ensure that things wouldn’t either get bogged down or ramble into inconsequence. The morning would cover the new programmes of study in Maths and Science and in the afternoon he would attempt to grasp the nettle of assessment.

  He tried to begin with an air of confidence. ‘When I was preparing for today, wondering exactly where to start, I came across a Chinese proverb. It says, “Chaos equals opportunity”, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the key to finding a positive attitude to what’s going on in education today.’ He looked round the ring of faces, eager to enlist any evidence of support.

  ‘What we need to find is some sensible path through the welter of changes which have been legislated, keep the best of what we already have, and gradually absorb the best of the

  new ideas.’

  He reflected on the difficulties which change brought and the need for all organisations and individuals to constantly engage in self-assessment and seek to evolve. But he could tell by some of the faces that change was a word filled with fear and suspicion. For some, too, he suspected that it represented an impossibility – they had evolved to the limit of their ability and couldn’t psychologically or physically cope with any more.

  Mrs Douglas led off with a discussion paper on the proposals for science and she was well prepared and efficient in her delivery of the changes they would be required to introduce. When she finished there was a discussion on the implications for curriculum time and resources. Haslett made a disparaging comment about the standard of training and soon everyone was chipping in. Then Mrs Craig read out an example of a suggested experiment involving the counting of insects and there was a frenzy of criticism which he made no attempt to deflect. There were too many attainment targets, too many problems in trying to assess them. He was thankful when they ran out of time despite his awareness that while they had discussed things openly, they had made no progress whatever in developing a strategy for moving forward.

  Vance’s presentation of the proposals for maths was concise, logical and cynical. He used an overhead projector, but setting on and taking off the transparencies almost with distaste, as if he was handling slides of some sexually transmitted disease. At the heart of everything he said was his belief, reiterated in a variety of different ways, that maths was about numbers and the supreme goal should always be a high level of basic numeracy. In his eyes group work, projects, interactive learning were irrelevancies which only sought to distract from that basic principle. Vance’s presentation turned into a statement of his personal creed and what was just as depressing were the heads nodding in agreement.

  As Vance finished and gathered his materials together he could feel the spirit of Reynolds seeping into the room. He glanced up at the postcard which was still pinned to the noticeboard as if it was some holy object which couldn’t be removed by mortal hands, and gradually he felt an urge to fight back, to take the situation by the throat and shake it. Crazy ideas raced through his mind, each more desperate than the other. He wanted to shout words at them, wanted to take their hands and swear sweetly and profusely. Wanted everyone to be shocked into something that would crack the rigid corsetry which hooped their souls and set them free for even one joyous sacred moment.

  Watching them take their coffee break he felt isolated and ineffectual. Even Miss Fulton seemed slightly distant as if the day before had never happened and he wondered if perhaps she saw greater long-term security for herself in siding with Vance and Haslett. Maybe Liam Hennessy had got it right – keep your head down and let the shit fly overhead and stick somewhere else.

  The morning d
ragged on and the sterility of much of the discussion was halted only by the approach of lunch. When the session ended there was a feeling of kids being let out from school, and as he gathered up his bits of paper he could hear some of them planning to eat out, but he was not invited. As he made his way back to his office he met George Crawford lumbering up the corridor, and a few minutes later he was sitting in his car being taken out for lunch. He sensed the purpose of his visit was neither spontaneous nor purely social. There was a flatness about his manner, an absence of his usual ebullience, but he kept whatever was in his mind until they reached a local hotel and had ordered their meal

  ‘We have problems, John, problems with our friend the Reverend Houston.’

  ‘The gaffe about the Girl Guides’ display?’

  ‘No, that’s chicken feed compared to this one. He’s gunning for you at the next governors’ meeting and he won’t be firing blanks. We need to get organised now.’ He paused long enough to sip his drink. ‘It’s this Hennessy business and your EMU scheme – what a bloody stupid name!’