Teacher's Dead (12 page)

When my mother returned the subject changed to matters more intellectual: the difference in prices between the various local supermarkets. It was all above my head. Just as that conversation was running out of steam my mother invited everyone into the dining room. Miss Ferrier and Mrs Joseph offered to help her bring the food to the table. I offered too and all I got was, ‘It’s all right, son, you just sit down and we’ll bring the food to you. Besides, I can’t risk any more broken plates.’

So when we sat down to eat the topic of conversation was set up.

Mrs Joseph went first. ‘Well, Jackson, you’ve broken a few plates, then?’

‘No, not a few. Two.’ I replied.

‘Come on, Jackson,’ said my mother. ‘Tell the truth.’

‘Two,’ I said.

‘And yesterday?’

‘That was you,’ I said. ‘I was passing the plate to you and it was you who dropped it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said my mother.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘Jackson,’ said Mrs Joseph. ‘There’s nothing wrong with dropping plates. I drop them all the time.’

Just then I noticed that Miss Ferrier was looking intensely at Mrs Joseph. Suddenly she stood up and spoke.

‘I’m really sorry about what happened to your husband. I tried my best to raise my son to have good values but I wasn’t the one that he listened to, I wasn’t important to him. I’m really sorry, it wasn’t my fault. You don’t have to pretend that you like me, you know, I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me, because if I was in your shoes I would be angry and I wouldn’t be as calm as you. Just say what you want to me. Go on, say it, you don’t have to be nice to me, and we don’t need all this nice talk. Just say what you want to say.’

Mrs Joseph was as cool as anything. She smiled and said, ‘Look, I’m not pretending, I’m not blaming you,
I’m not angry with you, and I’m not trying to be nice to you. Well, I am trying to be nice to you but only like I’m trying to be nice to Jackson, or his mum. Please relax, come on, sit down. Jackson thought we should all get together and we all agreed. There’s no secret agenda. When I said I was pleased to meet you I really meant it.’

‘You must hate me,’ said Miss Ferrier.

‘I don’t,’ said Mrs Joseph.

It was me who brought them together so I thought I should say something.

‘No one’s blaming you, Miss Ferrier, no one’s angry with you, and no one’s judging you. Trust me.’

‘I trust you, Jackson,’ said Miss Ferrier, looking into her food. ‘I do trust you but this is all a bit strange to me. I can’t understand why anybody would want to be in the same room as me.’

My mother joined in.

‘Talk, that’s what I say, communication. If we communicate we build up understanding, if we have understanding the world will be a better place.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Joseph. ‘I agree with that. The world will be a better place if we all talked more and did a lot more exercise.’

Miss Ferrier jumped up and freaked out again.

‘I’ve had enough of this. What do you want? What do you want? You didn’t bring me here to just feed me, you didn’t bring me here to talk about traffic, and
supermarkets, and your communicating, and your exercise. Exercise? Who cares about exercise? You’re up to something, I know it, you must be up to something.’ She stood up and walked towards her coat.

‘I’m going. I don’t understand all this. I’m going.’

I knew that if I let her walk out I would probably never see her again, so I jumped up and pleaded with her.

‘Honestly, Miss Ferrier, we’re not up to anything, I can promise you that there’s nothing going on. I just wanted you to meet my mum and meet Mrs Joseph. I did it because when you told me about the things that happened to you I could see you were not a bad mother, and I know that Mrs Joseph is not bitter, and I just thought that you both have something in common.’

‘What do we have in common?’ shouted Miss Ferrier.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Firstly, you’re both very different from what most people may think.’

Miss Ferrier’s voice was still raised. ‘So if that’s firstly what’s secondly?’

‘You are both women who have lost someone. In different ways of course, but you have both lost someone.’

She seemed to relax. She turned and sat back in her seat.

‘Now,’ said my mother, ‘let’s eat up.’

After that it was all good really. I felt a little left out because they talked about a lot of lady things, but it was all very civilised. At times they laughed together and at times they debated together. It was all so good that when I took Miss Ferrier home in the minicab we dropped Mrs Joseph off on the way. When we arrived at Fentham Road it was deserted. Miss Ferrier stepped out of the minicab and looked up at her house as if she had been away on holiday and was seeing it for the first time in a long time. She turned back to me.

‘Thank you, Jackson.’

‘It’s OK,’ I replied.

As she was about to shut the door she put her head in and said, ‘Jackson, can I trust you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘You can trust me.’

She closed the door and the cab headed back home, and I felt an overwhelming sense of fulfilment and responsibility on my shoulders.

I returned to school two weeks later to find that nothing much had changed, except that I had to start preparing myself for my GCSE exams and the school had to start preparing itself to be inspected. Sounded like great fun. We have had some pretty negative reports before, and some good ones, but now there were lots of jokes going around about how this school report would read. Must do better, and stop stabbing teachers.

Maybe we weren’t the best school in the world, but we weren’t that bad, and most of the comments were lighthearted. Overall it was a pretty positive first day back considering what had happened last term, and just like Mrs Martel said in the morning assembly, we were a school looking to the future.

When l was leaving school I was looking to the future, I was certainly looking forward, but when I felt a slap across the back of my head it felt familiar. I turned round to see Terry Stock and his gang who had attacked me in the playground before. I
wondered if they had a reason this time.

‘You lot again,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

They didn’t say anything but they looked a lot more serious than they did the last time. Then Terry raised both his hands and pushed me in the chest. I fell over and they gathered around me. The other boy kicked me and I heard someone shout ‘fight’. This attracted the usual crowd, which I thought would work to my advantage, after all, the four of them wouldn’t want to be seen beating up little helpless me. It turned out that they didn’t mind at all, so when the four of them started kicking me on the ground I decided it was time for me to go. With the crowd trying to encourage me to fight back, I managed to stand up, put on a brave face, and run. They ran after me and the spectators ran after them, but my will to survive was much stronger than their will to see a fight, so I soon outran them. When they were out of sight I walked as quickly as I could in the direction of home but a couple of streets away I felt that now-familiar slap across the back of my head. It was them again; they had given up the chase so that they could intercept me on the way home.

‘What’s wrong with you lot?’ I asked as calmly as I could. ‘What have I done to hurt you?’

Terry tried to slap me in my face but I jerked my head back and he missed me. I was close though, I could smell the cheese and onion crisps on his hand.

‘Why don’t you just give it a rest?’ he shouted.

‘Give what a rest?’ I said loudly.

‘All your nosing around,’ he said.

‘Yeah, why don’t you mind your own business?’ said one of the girls.

‘Yeah,’ said Terry. ‘Stop asking questions, will you?’

‘I’m not hurting you,’ I said.

The other boy spoke.

‘You think you’re really clever, don’t you, you think you’re someone special, don’t you? Well you’re not that special, and if you want us to show you why we’ll show you now. I reckon we could knock you out in less than a minute. That would prove that you weren’t very special, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?’ he shouted.

I was beginning to feel a bit worried now and I didn’t mind showing it.

‘It would,’ I said.

‘And you’re not special, are you?’ Terry said, now smiling wickedly.

‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’ he said. ‘You mean no, don’t you? And I’ve heard that you’ve been speaking to Lionel Ferrier’s mother.’

‘What’s wrong with that?

One of the girls started laughing.

‘She’s a witch,’ she said.

‘She’s not a witch,’ I said. ‘She’s nothing like a witch. People only say that because of Lionel, but
she’s so different to Lionel. I’ve spoken to her, she’s even had dinner at my house and I can tell you she’s no witch.’

‘What, she had dinner at your house?’ they all seemed to say at once.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘You let that dirty woman into your home? What did you talk about?’ asked one of the girls.

‘Mind your own business,’ I said.

Give him a kicking,’ said the other girl.

Mr slaphappy Terry made another strike for me, I managed to avoid him again, and once more I did my favourite self-defence move. I ran.

I reached home safely; I knew I would because I was driven by fear and the desperate need to be somewhere safe, somewhere near my mother. But I was getting tired of running. I wasn’t used to it, it wasn’t like running for sport and I wasn’t very good at it. Up until then I was the kind of school kid that had no enemies; OK I didn’t exactly have a long list of friends either, I just wasn’t important to other pupils or street gangs. Being mistaken as someone from central by the kids of Fentham Road was one thing, but I just didn’t understand what Terry and his friends had against me. The more I thought about it the more scared I got, and it really was beginning to get to me. It was getting to me so much that I found it difficult to eat that night and I was becoming reluctant to go to
school, and that was not like me. I was convinced that they would simply carry on from where they left off. Mum had noticed that I didn’t eat much, so I pretended to be ill. I managed to fake it for two days and I could have lasted a few days more but I knew I had to do something, so I called her to my room. She knew that if I called her to the room something was wrong; she wasted no time in asking.

‘What it is, Jackson?’

‘I’m having some problems at school,’ I said, looking down towards her feet.

‘What is it? Has all this investigating you’ve been doing got you behind on your work?’

‘No.’

‘Is it something to do with Mrs Joseph and all that?’

‘No.’

‘What is it, then?’

I slowly raised my head to see her face but I couldn’t speak whilst looking at her, so I lowered my gaze once again and then spoke.

‘I’m being bullied.’

‘You’re being bullied?’ she said with a smile that said she didn’t quite believe me. ‘You. Bullied. You love school, and you’ve only been back one day.’

I wasn’t sure if I should have been angry because of her reaction or if I should explain. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and I began to explain.

‘What happened was, last term I was in the playground and this group of kids came behind me and one of them slapped me in my head. Just like that. They threatened me and stuff and then they went off.’

The expression on her face changed, I could see she was beginning to be concerned. She came and sat next to me on my bed.

‘That was last term,’ she said.

‘On Monday they got me outside the school and the same boy hit me again, then they chased me. I got away first but then they got me again.’

‘But what were they doing it for?’ Mum asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What were they saying to you?’

‘They were just saying silly things. They were just asking me if I thought I was a detective and calling me names. And they were calling Miss Ferrier a witch, but everyone does that. They’re just bullies, and they’re jealous because I’m doing something positive and they’re just time wasters, and they want me to stop doing what I’m doing.’

‘I think you’re right,’ said my mother. ‘And you shouldn’t let them do that. You know the rules about bullying; don’t let them get away with it. You go to school tomorrow and tell the head teacher.’

Just then something strange happened. I could feel my body temperature rising. It started in the pit of my stomach and rose up, and as it rose it seemed to
transport tears to the back of my eyes. I tried not to move, I felt as if any movement would release the tears and I could hear the little man in me saying, don’t cry. My mother continued to speak.

‘I’ll write a note for you and you give it to Mrs Martel in the morning.’

I couldn’t hold on any longer.

‘No, Mum, I’m not going in on my own.’ Once that first wave of tears was released my body just produced more and more, then my nose went warn and runny, and speaking and breathing at the same time became difficult.

‘You have to come with me, Mum. Say if they’re waiting at the gates, what do I do then? Next time they could do something really serious to me. I’m scared, Mum, really scared. If you come with me then Mrs Martel will know how serious this is. When I started to tell you at first you didn’t take it that seriously, she probably won’t.’

‘I’m sorry, Jackson.’ She put her arm around me. ‘It’s just because you’re such a confident boy.’

‘So?’ I shouted and removed her arm from my shoulder. ‘Does that mean confident boys don’t get bullied?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, placing her arm back gently and rubbing my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m going to school with you tomorrow and we’ll sort this out.’

* * *

It’s not cool to be seen going to school with your mother. The playground feels bigger, the corridors seem longer, and the kids look meaner, but it had to be done.

Mrs Martel was surprised to see us. Presuming that I had news about the case she asked, ‘So what’s new? I thought you had wrapped up your investigations.’

‘It’s not about my investigations,’ I said, and then my mother took over.