Darkroom (3 page)

J
im walked into Special Class II without even looking at the fifteen students who were there, sitting with their feet on their desks, tossing paper darts, listening to garage music on their earphones, phone-texting their friends in other classrooms, reading
X-Men
comics, fixing their lip gloss, and practicing their dance steps.

He sat down at his desk and laid both hands on it, palm-down, like a lounge-bar pianist who doesn't think he can face playing ‘Strangers in the Night', not again. He looked tired and gaunt, and he had two days' growth of stubble on his chin. His mousy hair was messed up as if he hadn't bothered to comb it, and his blue check shirt was crumpled as if he hadn't bothered to press it. His tan corduroy pants had a stain on the left leg that could have been anything from tomato catsup to cat food.

He opened his briefcase by untying the string that held the broken catch together. He took out a dog-eared book, opened it and started to read it in silence. One after another, the students became aware of his presence, and even though they didn't all stop what they were doing, they turned their eyes on to him, and spoke more quietly, and gradually the dance steps petered out.

It was ten minutes before he said anything. ‘Today,' he finally said, taking off his thumb-printed glasses, ‘we're going to talk about
time.
What time is, and what time does to us, and how we express our feelings about it.'

‘About time,' said Freddy Price, and everybody laughed.

‘Well, I'm sorry if I'm two weeks late,' said Jim. ‘I hope that Mrs Lakenheath kept you entertained. I wasn't really expecting to come back here at all, as a matter of fact. But that's time for you. You stroll off into the future, whistling to yourself, and before you know it, you're right back where you started from.'

Sonny Powell raised a long black arm. ‘Pardon my saying so, sir, but it don't seem to me like you is exactly overjoyed to be back.' Sonny was 6ft 7in tall and everybody called him the Shadow because of his obsession with his Saucony Shadow running shoes, and because he overshadowed everybody else in the class. ‘Like, if you don't feel like learning us or nothing, we don't mind just carrying on doing what we're doing. Let sleeping dogs sleep, if you know what I mean.' He bounced his basketball three or four times just to make the point.

Jim stood up and walked to the classroom window. ‘Tempting, I have to admit. But the trouble with
that
idea is, I came back here to West Grove Community College because I need to find out something about myself.
I
need educating, even more urgently than you do. Now, none of
you
may be interested in learning anything, and quite frankly I don't care if you don't. If you want to stay ignorant and illiterate, that's entirely your choice. But
I
need to learn something, and I'm sorry if it's an inconvenience, but I need your help to do it.

He turned around to face them. ‘This class may be called Remedial English, but it isn't going to be all about spelling, or reading, or writing. This class is going to be all about living in a world that doesn't give anybody an even break; and what to do when your luck runs out – if you had any luck to begin with – and all of the tricks and traps and petty cruelties that make you wonder if it's worth getting out of bed in the morning.

He had his students' attention now. Even Vanilla King had stopped in mid-nail-polishing, her brushful of Tangerine Sparkle poised in the air.

Jim said, ‘This class is going to be all about survival. How to stay alive and well on a highly dangerous planet.'

‘What, you going to be learnin' us road safety and like that?' asked Roosevelt Jones, from the back of the class. Roosevelt was short and stocky, with a shiny shaved head and mirror sunglasses.

Jim shook his head. ‘I'm not going to be telling
you
anything. You're going to be telling
me.
If you must know, I've forgotten how to keep going. I've lost my faith that everything's going to turn out for the better. I don't believe that it's going to be another bright sunshiny day.'

‘We can't learn you nothing, man,' said Shadow. ‘You the Teach.
You
suppose to be learning
us
.'

Edward Truscott put up his hand. ‘Actually, you don't “learn” somebody something. You teach them. Otherwise, think about it, you wouldn't call him the Teach. You'd call him the Learn.'

‘Are you messing with my head again, geek?' Shadow demanded, with exaggerated anger. ‘If education turns a person into
you,
you pasty white string of spaghetti, then I don't want none of it.'

Jim said, ‘Like I said – if you don't want to be educated, that's your concern entirely. But you're wrong when you say that you don't have anything to teach me. You do. You're young, you're fresh, you're unsullied. You still have confidence in who you are, and what tomorrow's going to bring you, and that's what I want to learn.'

‘You was here before, sir, wasn't you?' asked Ruby Montes. She had a mountain of black wavy hair and earrings like Christmas trees.

‘Yes, I was. Three years ago. But I was offered a very interesting job in Washington with the department of education, and I went.'

‘So why'd you come back?' asked Roosevelt. ‘Wasn't the pay no good?'

‘The pay was fine. The job was fine. Something happened, that's all.'

‘Like what? You was caught in the stationery closet with some foxy teacher?'

Jim gave him a weary smile. ‘Let's put it this way … Something bad happened. Something tragic. Something that made me realize that you can run away from everything in this life, except yourself.'

‘That's very true,' said George Graves. He had very badly chopped hair and a long, horse-like face. ‘No matter where you wake up in the morning … well, you're always there, aren't you?'

‘Where else would you be, fool?' asked Shadow.

Freddy Price said, ‘I don't know. I woke up the morning after my New Year's party and I
definitely
wasn't there.'

Nervously, hesitantly, Sue-Marie Cassidy put up her hand. She had long, straight, gleaming blonde hair, and a face that could have been classically beautiful if she hadn't applied so much eye make-up and so much lipstick, and her mouth hadn't pouted so much. For her last birthday, her mother had paid for collagen injections for her lips. Now she looked more
Baywatch
than Botticelli.

‘What was it exactly that happened to you in Washington?' she asked in a husky voice. ‘I mean, you say it was tragic.'

Jim said, ‘It was, yes. But it was something I'd rather not talk about, just at the moment. I want to move on … so I'm going to make believe that I never went to Washington. In fact, I'm going to make believe that I'm still thirty-four years old and that I never left West Grove at all.'

‘Shouldn't you, like, face up to it, whatever it was?' asked Delilah Bergenstein. Her real name wasn't Delilah but she had dark, cat-like eyes and a beauty spot on her cheek and she liked to think she looked like an Old Testament seductress.

‘Are you interested in psychiatry?' asked Jim.

Delilah nodded with enthusiasm. ‘That's what I eventually want to be, a psychiatrist. But – you know – my English needs a little work.'

‘Yeah – like you can't spell psychiatrist,' put in Randy Bullock, who sat right in front of her.

‘I'll bet money that
you
can't spell it, either,' said Edward Truscott scornfully.

‘Like, I don't need to, genius. I'm going into fast food, me.'

‘Looks like the fast food went into
you,
fatso.'

Jim returned to his desk. ‘OK, that's enough free association. If you're going to teach me anything, we're going to need some structure. Some starting points for discussion. Let's start by defining time.'

Special Class II looked at each other in bewilderment. George Graves noisily blew his nose on a crumpled-up scrap of toilet tissue and Ruby Montes flapped her hand at him in disgust. ‘I just had breakfast. I really want to hear your snot bubble, you know?'

‘OK,' said Jim. ‘What do we mean by time? Can anybody tell me what it is?'

Roosevelt leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Time is like what allows you to stop doing something, say like eating pizza, and do something else, say like crashing out in front of the TV. I mean, if it wasn't for time, you'd be eating pizza over and over, because it was never time to do nothing else, and you'd be sick to your stomach of eating pizza. You'd also start looking like Randy over there, you know, like three people rolled into one.'

‘Hey,' Randy protested. ‘Just because you look like a famine appeal.'

David Robinson stood up, right at the back of the class. As he did so, the sun lit up his bright red crewcut and his scarlet ears. He said, ‘Time is the difference between human beings and God.' Then he hesitated and looked around. The rest of the class were all noisily pretending to yawn.

‘Go on,' Jim encouraged him.

‘Well,
we
grow old, don't we? but God never does. That's why God knows so much more than we do. We spend our whole lives learning stuff, but when we die, everything we ever learned, it's all forgotten.'

‘That's totally right,' Shadow interrupted, with a mock serious frown. ‘Like, what is the point of going to all that stress of filling up your head with how to spell psychiatry and what the capital of Paris is, when you're only going to end up dead, and what good is all that information then? They don't have no spelling bees in the boneyard.'

Jim opened the dog-eared book on his desk. ‘I'm going to read you a poem,' he said. ‘It's all about time, and fate, and I want you to think about it and tell me if it affects your view of things. It's called “The Clock and the Cake” by James McFadden.

Vanilla King started polishing the nails on her right hand, her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration. Randy Bullock twisted his finger in his left ear and then examined it. There was a lot of coughing and shuffling and somebody at the back was having an intense, whispered conversation, but Jim carried on.

He closed the book and looked around. ‘Was anybody listening to that?'

‘
I
was listening to it,' said Edward.

‘You was
listening
to it, geek,' Shadow challenged him. ‘But did you
hear
it?'

‘How about you?' Jim asked him. ‘Were
you
listening?'

Shadow was taken aback. ‘I wasn't listening
specifically
. Not to every single individual word. But I was digging it.'

‘OK, if you were digging it, what do you think it meant?'

Shadow sniffed, and shrugged. ‘I wasn't digging it
that
much.'

Jim slowly walked the length of the classroom. When he came to Sally Broxman's desk, he picked up a velvety doll of SpongeBob SquarePants and turned it this way and that. SpongeBob SquarePants was the hero of a Nickelodeon cartoon about creatures who lived under the sea. ‘You like SpongeBob SquarePants?' Jim asked her.

Sally blushed and looked embarrassed. She was very fair, and plump, with wild bunches of hay-colored hair. ‘He's kind of my mascot.'

‘“Absorbent and yellow and porous is he,”' Jim quoted, from the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song. He held up the doll so that everybody in the class could see it. ‘See this guy? Absorbent. How about you following his example?
Absorb
things. Absorb everything. Just because you think you don't like something – just because you think it's boring, or you can't understand it, or you don't
want
to understand it – that doesn't mean it isn't going to give you the key to getting the most out of your life.'

He walked back to his desk. ‘That poem that I read you is all about time, and what time means to you. And I mean you personally. You were all born, but even when you were lying in your cribs, you were already lying in your coffins. You are all going to die. You are, and
you,
and
you
are, too. You can't place any bets against it, because it's going to happen to you, each and every one of you – and me, too. In a hundred years' time this classroom may still be here, but we'll be gone, and forgotten, all of us, and whoever walks in here, no matter how hard they listen, they won't be able to hear us.'

Every student in Special Class II was silent now, and staring at Jim with their mouths open. ‘Was this
news
to you?' Jim demanded. ‘Did you actually believe that you were going to live forever?'

‘Shit,' said Freddy Price. ‘I woke up this morning feeling on top of the world. Now I feel like hanging myself.'