11
11
Y OU ARE STANDING OUTSIDE the head teacher’s cupboard. You are supposed to be waiting there nicely, thinking benign thoughts while you gaze at the posters decorating the corridors. At least, that’s what your dad told you to do.
You look at the posters. They show off the work of children you don’t know. For example, there is a poster featuring a diagram of a tongue. According to the diagram, the tip can taste salty flavours, the back can taste bitter flavours, the sides can detect sour flavours, and the middle can detect both umami and sweet flavours.
You think about this for a second before becoming irretrievably bored. Once, just moments ago, the tongue diagram was interesting. Now, it’s far less interesting than the conversation taking place inside the head teacher’s cupboard. As the conversation concerns you – specifically your past, your present, and your future – you want to listen in. You want to know if you will be going to school tomorrow, the next day, the next day, and the next day, or else if you will be arranging to spend your time otherwise and elsewhere.
You press your ear to the door, then your nose to the glass. You can make out your dad (he is sitting in the chair in front of the desk), the head teacher (she is sitting in the chair behind the desk), and the deputy (he is standing cramped in the corner).
‘We really can’t manage her needs here,’ the head teacher is saying. ‘We just can’t.’
There is a pause. You wonder if your dad is giving them one of his looks. Generally, these looks are reserved for workmen who are trying to rip him off, sneezers who don’t cover their mouths, and civil enforcement officers who try to enforce civility.
‘Which needs, specifically?’ you hear him say.
‘All of them, really,’ the deputy says.
Your dad shakes his head, grabs his bag, stands up. ‘And what is she supposed to do now? From now till September?’
For a while, the deputy doesn’t say anything and neither does the head teacher.
‘With the greatest respect,’ the deputy says, ‘that’s not our problem.’
Ten minutes later, your dad is driving you home. I imagine that, during this drive, he replays the conversation with the head teachers in his head. From what they said, he understands you and this Bobby boy initiated a food fight. After this, you both put your health at risk by scaling the height of a temporary scaffolding structure.
According to the teachers, these two incidents amount to blatant disregard for the rules and a total absence of common sense – and are alone enough to merit a request to leave. But coupled with the fact you are struggling so much with your reading and writing, the request to leave is a firm one.
You are fidgeting in the passenger seat, undoing your tie, redoing your tie. You are aware of your dad glancing at you. You know that sometimes he doesn’t like it when you fidget. You know that sometimes he doesn’t like it when you move at all.
‘Want this?’ your dad asks suddenly, handing you a lollipop he had in his pocket. The lollipop’s flavour is strawberry and cream. You know this because the label reads strawberry and cream. You wonder if strawberry and cream constitutes a salty, sweet, sour, bitter, or umami flavour. You unwrap it, stare at the light-pink lolly suspiciously.
‘Is this bitter?’ you ask.
Your dad frowns. ‘Is it better?’
‘Bitter. The lolly. Is it bitter? The flavour?’
‘Um.’ He indicates to turn left but then makes a right turn. ‘Sweet, probably.’
You don’t like this response. His use of ‘probably’ is no good. You don’t want probably, you want certainty. ‘Probably?’ you say.
‘Yes,’ your dad says.
You can’t remember which part of the tongue is supposed to accommodate sweetness, but through a process of elimination, it will be relatively easy to find out. With your tongue stuck out as far as it can go, you put the lolly on the front bit, the middle bit, the middle side, the other middle side, the back, and the very back – something that makes you splutter and gag and cough a little. As far as you can tell, all the parts of your tongue are registering the sweetness, meaning that either your tongue or the diagram is wrong or that there is some fault in the way you are conducting the experiment. Just to double-check, you opt to redo the experiment. This time, however, you lower the sun visor and angle it just so before sticking out your tongue. With the precision of mirror-based experimentation on your side, you again try the side bits, the middle bits, and the front bit. It is when you move on to the back bits that your dad decides that enough is enough.
Abruptly, he pulls into a lay-by, cuts the engine, undoes his seat belt, and turns to you. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks. Though he has never once hurt you, you recoil now, wondering if this will be the first time. You look at his cold, hard stare, countering it with one that is gormless.
‘I’m checking to see, um…’ You trail off. It’s a complicated thing, to explain what you are doing. ‘I don’t know where the sweet bit is. This is sweet but I think all of it’s sweet. The strawberry sides. The middle umami. But all of it’s sweet. The diagram corridor.’
‘Christ. You sound like you’re having a stroke.’
You are taken aback. Normally, your dad speaks to you softly, with words that are gentle, in a tone that is kind. Right now, though, your dad is all jaws and unkindness. Hitting the steering wheel, he speaks himself into a small but frightening frenzy.
‘What are you doing?’ he says. ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you doing?’
Your dad hits the horn. The sound – sudden, loud, and horn-like – makes you jump and also startles a passer-by. The passer-by is on the pavement, wheeling one of those shopper things but also carrying a walking stick. When your dad presses the horn, she yelps, stops wheeling her groceries, and curses.
‘Cunt!’ she yells.
Your dad winds the window down, leans out. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I called you a cunt.’
Your dad looks a little surprised or confused, then maybe a little hostile or angry. You tense, brace yourself for whatever insult exchange is going to come. You wonder if he is good at exchanging insults.
It turns out he is not. ‘Yeah? Well, you are an old, ugly bitch,’ he says.
Despite your youth, you know that is an inadequate response, that being a cunt is far worse than being an old, ugly bitch.
The woman seems to agree with you. She wields her walking stick in his general direction and thwacks it thrice on the car bonnet. ‘Well, it’s better than being a cunt who threatens his son!’
Your dad turns the engine back on. ‘She’s a girl.’
‘She looks like a boy!’ The woman picks up her shopper. ‘You’ve got a daughter that looks like a son!’
‘She’s a girl, she’s a girl, she’s a girl!’
Your dad puts his belt back on, cursing the lady under his breath as he pulls out. You don’t like your dad like this. You don’t like him whacking the steering wheel or threatening members of the public or speeding on the dual carriageway or telling strangers you’re a girl, you’re a girl, you’re a girl.
You don’t like it because he is being loud but also wrong. You are not a girl – you’re an alien. You find this very sad – to be an alien – and so you cry. Your dad brakes too late at a roundabout, another car beeps at him, and for some reason this makes you cry harder – so hard your tears go silent before they are loud again.
In a mile and a half, you will be back home. You don’t want to be back home. You don’t want to be anywhere. You feel like you could cry for miles and miles more. You feel like you could cry for 25,000 miles – the circumference of the globe. You feel like you could cry for 240,000 miles – the distance to the Moon. You feel like you could cry for 140 million miles – the distance to Mars. You feel like you could cry for this much but also more, also a lot, lot more.
Further reading:
So Homeschooling Is Right for Your Child