Chapter 4
4
YEAR 11 AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
Niamh
There’s a special place in hell for the person who scheduled a double lesson with Year 11 first thing on a Monday morning, Niamh thinks.
She wonders if it’s some sort of cosmic karma biting her in the arse. Maybe, she thinks, she’s like the Captain in The Sound of Music and has done something in her youth, or in her childhood, to deserve this. Although, now that she thinks about it, Captain Von Trapp’s karma came in the form of a lovely new romance with Julie Andrews. Niamh’s has come in the form of Ella Devine asking her if she has TikTok.
‘No,’ Niamh replies. ‘I do not have TikTok.’
This is a lie. She, of course, has an account, but she doesn’t post anything on it. She can think of nothing worse than her pupils finding videos of her doing comedy skits or viral dances online – except, perhaps, her own children finding her online. They’d never forgive her. Her pupils, however, would just make her life even more of a living hell than it currently is.
‘Miss, Miss… but you could talk about science and stuff and teach people all about it,’ Ella says. ‘We could help you.’
Before Niamh has the chance to reply that she is already talking about science and, allegedly, ‘teaching people stuff’, Jayden Murray chimes in with some sort of gobbledegook language that everyone else in the room seems to understand and find absolutely bloody hilarious. She’s not sure what ‘no cap’ and ‘Ohio’ have to do with anything, but this seems to make sense to his classmates. Maybe, she thinks, she’s having a stroke. That’s why these words don’t make sense. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever – at least she’d get a lie down and a few sick days off school.
‘Miss, Miss. Could we make up a dance? We could go viral!’ Ella shouts, already out of her seat and scrolling through her (forbidden) phone.
‘Ella! Phone in your bag now, or I’ll confiscate it,’ Niamh, disappointed that it looks less likely that she has in fact had a stroke, says, just to earn a roll of eyes from Ella and a chorus of groans from her classmates.
‘Miss, I was just looking for a song for you,’ the dejected teen says, slumping back into her seat and dropping her phone, performatively, back into her bag.
‘And I’m just trying to teach you lot,’ Niamh replies. ‘You have exams coming up, if you haven’t forgotten. So maybe we could stop debating the merits of TikTok and instead return our attention to cell division?’
A mumble of disappointment travels around the room like a Mexican wave. Niamh just waits for it to pass. If she had her way, she’d tell them all, very clearly, that she would rather be doing just about anything right now instead of going over the basics of cell division, once again, to a class who really should know this inside and out by now. If she had her way, she’d tell them that, ideally, she’d like to be a on beach somewhere drinking a Margarita for breakfast (yes, for breakfast) and bitching with her friends. She’d like to be as far away from this cold and rainy January day in Derry as she could get, and away from the troubles in her life.
Namely:
(1) Year 11 – the bane of her life and the one year group she would describe as feral, knowing that was putting it mildly.
(2) Her teenage sons, Ethan and Cal, who have taken to communicating in grunts and mumbles and whose shared bedroom has become a biohazard that she just can’t find the strength to deal with but knows she has to. A pungent aroma of body odour mixed with God knows what else has started to seep out into the landing and it’s enough to make her gag.
(3) Her youngest child, sweet, beautiful, surprise-baby Fiadh, who is almost eight, seems to be fast-forwarding into the tween years with hints of the trouble to come.
(4) Her husband, Paul – heretofore the love of her life and stalwart in every single crisis they have faced together – who is not handling their latest crisis all that well.
Which brings her to:
(5) Her eldest child, twenty-year-old Jodie, is pregnant. This is not what she had hoped for for her precious firstborn who should be enjoying her university years and the freedom to ‘act the hallion’ that only comes in your younger years.
And last but not least:
(6) Perimenopause is kicking her square in the vagina and nothing seems to be helping. In fact, she is currently experiencing the worst hot flush of her entire life and is afraid she might actually combust – which Year 11 would find totally hilarious and which they would create a TikTok about before her charred remains had the chance to cool off. No one warned her the hot flushes would come with an unhealthy dose of extreme sadness and rage which she is desperately trying to keep under wraps.
She takes a deep breath and instructs her pupils to read page sixty-eight of their textbooks while she walks to the window and opens it wide, desperate for a blast of cold January air. She is aware that external temperature has no impact whatsoever on the ferocity or length of her hot flushes, but still she feels as if she should be doing something to help her poor, overheated body. She also knows that the quicker she cools down, the less likely she will be to burst into tears in front of her class, which would be akin to a fate worse than death.
After all, the first rule of teaching in a secondary school is ‘Show no weakness’. Teenagers will take a rogue fart, mispronounced word, swear or show of emotion and use it to forever change your future for the worse. Niamh knows this. She has seen it time and time again as colleagues have succumbed to unfortunate nicknames that have stuck. You just need to ask Toot Toot McGuigan, the French teacher who, to this day, bitterly regrets the five-bean chilli they ate for dinner one Tuesday night in 2003, how that feels.
‘Miss! Miss! It’s freezing! Can you close the windy?’ Jayden Murray shouts, following it with an exaggerated shudder.
‘It’s window, Jayden. Not “windy”. I’ll close it in a moment,’ she says.
‘But Miss, we’ll all catch colds or Covid or the flu and it might start a new pandemic,’ Ella shouts.
‘You’ll all be fine,’ Niamh says, a rictus smile on her face.
‘Miss, are you like Elsa from Frozen ? Does the cold not bother you?’ Jayden says, clearly enjoying the attention he’s receiving. He and Ella make for quite the double act. If they ever combine their powers, Niamh fears for her ability to be able to control her classroom.
Maybe she is like Elsa, she thinks as she glares at Jayden – hoping that her best intimidating teacher look will be enough to silence him. Maybe the cold doesn’t bother her. In fact, she actively welcomes it. If only she had the power to control it, and the ability to look amazing in a pale blue slinky frock bedazzled with sequins and sparkles. Instead she’s wearing a pair of checked, elasticated-waist trousers and a burgundy jersey top. She hopes she’s looking like a professional but fears she might be looking more like Rupert the Bear, or Rupert the Bear’s granny.
Even the word ‘granny’ makes her feel as if she is shrivelling and shrinking into an old-age version of the person she used to be. She has always hoped to be a granny – one day. Maybe when she is sixty or thereabouts. Sixty feels like a proper ‘granny’ age. Not forty-six. And God, Jodie is only twenty. Lord knows, Niamh felt overwhelmed when she became a mother at twenty-six, but at least she had enjoyed a few years of freedom and adventure between finishing uni and giving birth.
To her relief, the hot flush starts to subside and she finally feels able to close the window and resume her teaching duties. She just has to try and stop her mind from running constantly with Jodie and her ‘predicament’. She hates that she even thinks of it that way.
She thought she’d raised Jodie to be careful. She’s never put limits on her but has always encouraged her to make sure to be sensible and think about what she wants out of life. That meant being sensible when it came to sex and contraception. But nonetheless, here her daughter is ‘with child’ halfway through her second year at university. A part of Niamh wants to scream at her. But at the same time she knows that would achieve absolutely nothing except to alienate Jodie, and give herself a sore throat into the bargain.
She sighs as she pulls the window closed, and hauls her brain into the here and now to deal with her teaching responsibilities. How, she wonders, is it possible to feel this hacked off with it at all so early on a Monday morning at the start of a new term? This is the next-level fatigue that normally makes itself known at the end of term – not after a break. She’s supposed to be re-energised now, not so tired she wants to cry. It would help if she could sleep, but she seems unable to manage more than a couple of unbroken hours each night. The rest of the time is spent tossing and turning, waking in a pool of her now cold sweat, and wondering if Paul has always snored so loudly and if it would really be that bad to put a pillow over his head.
No doubt, she thinks, as she walks to the front of the class, all this is yet another thing that can be attributed to the menopause. She thinks of the small rectangular patch of plastic currently stuck to her stomach, allegedly infusing her with oestrogen. She’s not quite sure it’s having any real effect – except for leaving her tummy covered in little grey patches of adhesive that have to be scrubbed with a Brillo pad to have any chance of removing them. They breed down there now, on her lower tummy. One day she will be entirely covered in little grey patches of adhesive, decorated with whatever lint and fluff they have managed to grab.
No one warned her about that. Or that the adhesive would sometimes irritate her skin. No one warned her that if she wanted to stop her vagina from ‘atrophying’ (she swears she feels it atrophy in fear every time she even thinks of that word), she would have to lie, legs akimbo, as she pops a little pill inside her vagina.
On more than one occasion she has, absentmindedly, swallowed the pill before remembering it is not that kind of tablet.
Still, at least her mouth and throat will be safe from the worry of atrophying.
‘Miss! Miss! Are you okay?’ It’s not Ella or Jayden this time, but Hannah – the class swot – who is speaking. ‘You face has gone very red.’
Hannah’s face is filled with concern. Niamh wishes she had twenty-eight Hannahs in her class. Twenty-eight young people who always remember their books and their homework. Who ask sensible, intelligent questions about topics they are actually studying. Hannah never asks her if she watches Love Island (which she did until she started to feel irrationally jealous of the side-boob and under-boob on display. It has been a long time since Niamh would trust her D-cups in a bikini top clearly two sizes too small).
No, Hannah always asks the right questions. And right now, Hannah is clearly astute enough to observe that her most beloved of teachers is well on her way to a full-blown meltdown. It’s enough to snap Niamh back into professional teacher mode. She cannot show weakness. She must keep control. She does not want to be known as Cry-Baby Cassidy or something much worse for the remainder of her teaching career. She will push all her worries to the very back of her mind until home time.
‘Thank you, Hannah, but I’m fine. Now, let’s talk about mitosis and meiosis.’