Brentjp99 (completed)
Higher education
Second period: 9.30 to 10.15 am. A bell shrilled in the distance.
Joe stood absolutely still, hands clasped behind his back, as they filed noisily in and were seated in a rattle and scuffle of chairs, bags and youthful chatter. Outside, the leaves were falling in a cascade of ochre hues. He watched them fly down and whirl around to gather in small drifts next to gutters, mowed pitches and smooth concrete. Little eddies of wind would spiral the yellows, golds and browns around in a blur, or trap them in the spokes of bicycles parked against the Autumn-shedding trees.
Joe never watched them enter the room, but would wait until they were all seated before turning round to face the thirty pairs of eyes. For forty-five minutes they were his. And he, theirs.
Joseph was a teacher.
He had taught Biology since first being employed by the exclusive school of Punnrich Eton. It had been a marked step up from his previous job. There he thought, he was less employed than deployed, given the nature of the inner city school in which he had laboured hard and with frustratingly little success to reach the kids who slouched or strutted into his run-down classroom.
Trying more to reach them than to teach them, Joe had abandoned educational conformity after his first semester. He’d had enough time to think about it while recuperating from the stiletto jab to his back, sustained one grey day while trying to break up a fight in the boys’ locker room. He recalled it was a fight over ‘turf’. It was always over turf. Or drugs. But here, at ‘Eton’, the only turf the boys argued over was that on the cricket pitch. That was one of the benefits of a more exclusive school posting. No, the boys were not the problem here.
Joe turned to face them. Eyes looked up at him. Intelligent. Expectant. “Good morning, sir”, they intoned dutifully. He smiled. They smiled back. Soon, he was involved in the intricacies of the differences between the endoplasmic reticulum and the membranes of the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells.
A bookishly handsome man who looked much younger than his thirty-nine years, Joe had a lean build borne of his time spent cycling, and hawkish but kind eyes. Although he dressed well, in a conservative way, he was the only male teacher who did not wear a tie to work. That fact alone, for some strange reason, had endeared the boys in his class to him more than anything else.
The girls… well, what endeared him to them was the fact that Joe was still single.
Young enough not to understand the full potential of their beguilement, but old enough to want to test it, the girls would drive him nuts, using weapons he had no means or training with which to cope. Joe would often wonder how and where they learned such subtleties. Like a contemporary Humbert he would struggle to keep from showing any signs of their success in distracting him. They were like… Joe couldn’t think of an appropriate simile – he was, after all, a biology, not a literary major … magical creatures not yet fully aware of, nor indeed able to control their power.
Joe had never married. His colleagues sometimes wondered if Joe was gay. The highly charged atmosphere of the staffroom was hard that way. If you reached forty empty handed, as it were, then you were automatically labelled a ‘Randlethwaight’, after the ancient librarian at the school. Nobody actually knew how old old Randles was – not even the Principal – but consensus was (accurately, as it turned out) that the Bookmaster was well over ninety.
Randlethwaite was a bachelor, and had been since woolly mammoths roamed the tundra.
It was not that Joe didn’t like women, quite the opposite. It was just that most of them found him rather… unconventional. An accountant that takes his work home is one thing; a biology teacher is something completely different. The jars containing little animals in formalin, the dumpling-weevils growing fat and happy in the fish tank, not to mention the great maggot experiment of ’98 (even Joe had admitted that had been a mistake – he couldn’t go into the basement for weeks afterwards). Joe couldn’t help it; he loved that stuff. It was why he taught Biology. The problem was, he had yet to meet a woman who could handle such predilections.
And while he waited for a response to his online profile (those things never worked, or did they?), he had to deal with these woman-children whose methods were quite beyond his own ability to handle.
Tamara was a case in point. Dyed black hair, extremely bright but lazy, whose father bred race-horses (for crying out loud!). The class assignment for the day set, he would just be sitting down at his desk to let them get on with it when she would rise and approach. Like clockwork. Dear god, he thought, not again. She had breasts that were far too big to be fake, and would press up against him on the pretence of asking some question much too inane for her intelligence. Joe would have to lean away, so that by the time he had dealt with her query, teacher and pupil were like badly balanced sculptures, canting wildly off to one side.
Elizabeth was the niece of the Vietnamese ambassador. With her raven hair and elegant dancer’s physique, her presence was tangible. Shy with the boys in the class, her speciality was the subtle touch. She could strike with the speed of a tropical cobra. Joe would be patrolling the rows between the desks, relaxed, watching them work, when he would feel a cool hand on his arm, the lightest touch electric. Could he please explain the attractive forces involved with disulphide bridge formation in amino acids? Her long fingers almost imperceptibly kneading the pulse at his wrist. He’d mumble something about covalent bonding and its difference to van der Waal’s forces, and beat a shaky retreat.
And then of course, in the front row, Anni (sorry, Annalisa) McAllister, daughter of Senator McAllister. Razor-sharp mind (when it was out of the gutter), dry wit and white-blonde hair. Her real hair colour, as Joe would now remind himself grimly – a fact demonstrated with abundant clarity when he had bent down to pick up his dropped chalk on one occasion (he should have known when he saw her enter the room: the lack of panty-line under her short skirt now decisively explicable). Sweet Joseph and Mary. She had smiled sweetly at him, fire in her eyes. Beads of perspiration ran down Joe’s forehead.
There was only one time of the year that Joe regretted teaching Biology: semester four, grade 11, Human Reproduction. It was then that he wished he taught mathematics instead. He would soldier bravely on, maintaining decorum in his scholarly, long-suffering manner. After every lesson Joe would reflect on why the only uncomfortable people in the room were male, the boys blushing in their seats, and the teacher, blushing in front of the lot of them.
The lesson continued, while the orange leaves dropped in slow-motion from the trees beyond the window. In the front row, Anni (sorry, Annalisa) shifted in her seat with the languid grace of a veteran pole-dancer. She looked up at Joe, and he saw the naked flame in her eyes.
Fumbling, Joe dropped his chalk.
He left it lying were it was, and fished another out of the box near the board.
Higher education
Second period: 9.30 to 10.15 am. A bell shrilled in the distance.
Joe stood absolutely still, hands clasped behind his back, as they filed noisily in and were seated in a rattle and scuffle of chairs, bags and youthful chatter. Outside, the leaves were falling in a cascade of ochre hues. He watched them fly down and whirl around to gather in small drifts next to gutters, mowed pitches and smooth concrete. Little eddies of wind would spiral the yellows, golds and browns around in a blur, or trap them in the spokes of bicycles parked against the Autumn-shedding trees.
Joe never watched them enter the room, but would wait until they were all seated before turning round to face the thirty pairs of eyes. For forty-five minutes they were his. And he, theirs.
Joseph was a teacher.
He had taught Biology since first being employed by the exclusive school of Punnrich Eton. It had been a marked step up from his previous job. There he thought, he was less employed than deployed, given the nature of the inner city school in which he had laboured hard and with frustratingly little success to reach the kids who slouched or strutted into his run-down classroom.
Trying more to reach them than to teach them, Joe had abandoned educational conformity after his first semester. He’d had enough time to think about it while recuperating from the stiletto jab to his back, sustained one grey day while trying to break up a fight in the boys’ locker room. He recalled it was a fight over ‘turf’. It was always over turf. Or drugs. But here, at ‘Eton’, the only turf the boys argued over was that on the cricket pitch. That was one of the benefits of a more exclusive school posting. No, the boys were not the problem here.
Joe turned to face them. Eyes looked up at him. Intelligent. Expectant. “Good morning, sir”, they intoned dutifully. He smiled. They smiled back. Soon, he was involved in the intricacies of the differences between the endoplasmic reticulum and the membranes of the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells.
A bookishly handsome man who looked much younger than his thirty-nine years, Joe had a lean build borne of his time spent cycling, and hawkish but kind eyes. Although he dressed well, in a conservative way, he was the only male teacher who did not wear a tie to work. That fact alone, for some strange reason, had endeared the boys in his class to him more than anything else.
The girls… well, what endeared him to them was the fact that Joe was still single.
Young enough not to understand the full potential of their beguilement, but old enough to want to test it, the girls would drive him nuts, using weapons he had no means or training with which to cope. Joe would often wonder how and where they learned such subtleties. Like a contemporary Humbert he would struggle to keep from showing any signs of their success in distracting him. They were like… Joe couldn’t think of an appropriate simile – he was, after all, a biology, not a literary major … magical creatures not yet fully aware of, nor indeed able to control their power.
Joe had never married. His colleagues sometimes wondered if Joe was gay. The highly charged atmosphere of the staffroom was hard that way. If you reached forty empty handed, as it were, then you were automatically labelled a ‘Randlethwaight’, after the ancient librarian at the school. Nobody actually knew how old old Randles was – not even the Principal – but consensus was (accurately, as it turned out) that the Bookmaster was well over ninety.
Randlethwaite was a bachelor, and had been since woolly mammoths roamed the tundra.
It was not that Joe didn’t like women, quite the opposite. It was just that most of them found him rather… unconventional. An accountant that takes his work home is one thing; a biology teacher is something completely different. The jars containing little animals in formalin, the dumpling-weevils growing fat and happy in the fish tank, not to mention the great maggot experiment of ’98 (even Joe had admitted that had been a mistake – he couldn’t go into the basement for weeks afterwards). Joe couldn’t help it; he loved that stuff. It was why he taught Biology. The problem was, he had yet to meet a woman who could handle such predilections.
And while he waited for a response to his online profile (those things never worked, or did they?), he had to deal with these woman-children whose methods were quite beyond his own ability to handle.
Tamara was a case in point. Dyed black hair, extremely bright but lazy, whose father bred race-horses (for crying out loud!). The class assignment for the day set, he would just be sitting down at his desk to let them get on with it when she would rise and approach. Like clockwork. Dear god, he thought, not again. She had breasts that were far too big to be fake, and would press up against him on the pretence of asking some question much too inane for her intelligence. Joe would have to lean away, so that by the time he had dealt with her query, teacher and pupil were like badly balanced sculptures, canting wildly off to one side.
Elizabeth was the niece of the Vietnamese ambassador. With her raven hair and elegant dancer’s physique, her presence was tangible. Shy with the boys in the class, her speciality was the subtle touch. She could strike with the speed of a tropical cobra. Joe would be patrolling the rows between the desks, relaxed, watching them work, when he would feel a cool hand on his arm, the lightest touch electric. Could he please explain the attractive forces involved with disulphide bridge formation in amino acids? Her long fingers almost imperceptibly kneading the pulse at his wrist. He’d mumble something about covalent bonding and its difference to van der Waal’s forces, and beat a shaky retreat.
And then of course, in the front row, Anni (sorry, Annalisa) McAllister, daughter of Senator McAllister. Razor-sharp mind (when it was out of the gutter), dry wit and white-blonde hair. Her real hair colour, as Joe would now remind himself grimly – a fact demonstrated with abundant clarity when he had bent down to pick up his dropped chalk on one occasion (he should have known when he saw her enter the room: the lack of panty-line under her short skirt now decisively explicable). Sweet Joseph and Mary. She had smiled sweetly at him, fire in her eyes. Beads of perspiration ran down Joe’s forehead.
There was only one time of the year that Joe regretted teaching Biology: semester four, grade 11, Human Reproduction. It was then that he wished he taught mathematics instead. He would soldier bravely on, maintaining decorum in his scholarly, long-suffering manner. After every lesson Joe would reflect on why the only uncomfortable people in the room were male, the boys blushing in their seats, and the teacher, blushing in front of the lot of them.
The lesson continued, while the orange leaves dropped in slow-motion from the trees beyond the window. In the front row, Anni (sorry, Annalisa) shifted in her seat with the languid grace of a veteran pole-dancer. She looked up at Joe, and he saw the naked flame in her eyes.
Fumbling, Joe dropped his chalk.
He left it lying were it was, and fished another out of the box near the board.