bits, whine a little and put your paws over your eyes.
How do I remember myself? Or Lucy? Or Suzy? Why should I?
I cannot bear dogs, they disgust me. Why would a civilised person welcome such a creature into an otherwise orderly home? No matter how cunningly disguised by fluff and fealty, all I see is a shameless slobbering arse-sniffing leg-humping scrotum-toting arsehole-flaunting filth-spreader: as profligate a shitslinger as Kahlil Gibran, only closer to the ground. If I presented myself like that I’d be hauled away, no matter how much I licked your face or howled on your grave. No dogs in heaven.
I particularly detest my neighbour’s dog, whose hideous noises are sufficient to awaken the dead, or at least the dying. I gather it is called Spike, and it looks the part, with a face composed of overlapping layers of fat mysteriously transformed into muscle. Hard blubber, hideously prophylactic: not even his proud owner could have stroked that face tenderly.
I don’t know what sort he is. Are they called breeds? I can’t tell one from another. I’m not even very good with people. When I taught, I would make up a class physical appearance list on the first day, correlating physical characteristics to names in my desk diary. It was ever so helpful, and within a couple of weeks I wouldn’t need it any more. But for the first days, it gave me a sense of intimacy with my new charges that I could recognise them so easily, as long as I could take a peek at my list and their faces.
One day, leaving the teaching room with a surprisingly pressing need for the loo, I left my (closed) diary on my desk, rather than putting it in the top drawer as usual. On my return, five minutes later, Fatboy Linus was crying at the back of the room, Cross-eyed Charley had exacerbated his disability so radically that he can have seen nothing but his own nose, and Acne Andy – I was told – had run out of the room, scratching himself madly. I didn’t see him again for a week.
The next morning I received a brusque note from the Head:
Dear Darke,
I have had one or two parents on the phone, regarding an unfortunate incident in your classroom. Could we have a word about this? I will be free between 4.15 and 4.40.
Best,
Anthony
He was a pacific fellow, liked but mildly mocked by his staff, and he hated confrontation. The very word ‘parent’ made him anxious, and if you attached ‘concerned’, or even worse, ‘irate’, he reached for the Panadol and drew the curtains.
I entered his study at 4.15 on the dot, to find him pacing in front of the fire. His room was over-heated, as if some objective correlative of his state of mind, and he had never been known to open the window. He smoked a pipe of some noxious Balkan mixture (not Sobranie) to add to the fug. It was hard to see, and harder yet to breathe. The idea, I presume, was to make the place uncongenial to visitors, while he himself was inured to it, smoked as a kipper.
‘See here, James, we have something of a to-do about some damn book of yours . . .’
‘Book, Tony, what book?’ I called him ‘Tony’ when I wanted to irritate him, for he much preferred ‘Anthony’ or, better yet, ‘Headmaster’.
‘Apparently you have a book that you use to write insults about the boys, and you left it for them to see. I must say – ’
‘You are referring, I presume, to my desk diary, and to the unpleasant incident in which the boys opened it in my absence?’
‘And uncovered the most appalling descriptions of themselves! I have two sets of parents threatening not merely to remove their boys, but to sue for damages. For trauma, humiliation in front of their peers. It’s just dreadful.’ He pulled at one of the few strands of what was left of his hair, which resides largely on the lower left side of his bald pate, somewhat further down than anatomically plausible.
‘Guilty, Tony. And innocent.’
‘How is that?’
‘I do keep such a diary, and at the start of term it helps me to remember which new boy is which. To do this, you fasten on the single defining characteristic: curly hair, very tall, that sort of thing.’
He looked down at some notes jotted on a pad next to his telephone: ‘Acne, cross-eyed . . .’
‘Very defining characteristics, wouldn’t you say? I learned their names in only one lesson. Most of them I still can’t remember. I’m always grateful for ugliness, or better yet disfigurement.’
He was sufficiently agitated that he could not be further provoked. ‘But what,’ he asked plaintively, ‘am I to say to the parents?’
‘Tell them the truth. Tell them that one of the boys, wholly without permission and entirely dishonestly, contravening every law of privacy and good behaviour, opened my diary, and – what is worse – read the contents to his fellows. I have some idea of who that was, and I suggest that he be expelled, and that the angry parents assault him with sticks and rocks.’
‘I really don’t think your levity appropriate here.’
I have no time for the schoolmaster’s pastoral role, which most use as a way of cosying up to the gentry and currying advance favour with the soon-to-be celebrated, rich and powerful. I will not do this. ‘I’m a teacher, not a damn curate.’ In spite of my insouciance, I never managed to say ‘fucking’ to the Head. ‘Let them move on to pastors new.’
The headmaster winced. ‘Must you, James?’
I was dismissed. Not from my position, but from the study. The Head would no more fire me than rusticate the culprit. I’d have respected him more if he’d done both. But, as often happens in schools, the matter blazed merrily for a few days, and then was forgotten, though attendance in my class diminished somewhat.
Only a couple of years later, to the not entirely secret pleasure of his staff, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, rather than the emphysema he had courted so assiduously. He should have drowned in his own Latakia-infested sputum, lungs burbling like a hookah. Instead, he was found slumped over his desk, looking rather peaceful (according to the school secretary, who found him), that smirk of wimpish sanctimony wiped finally from his features. Lucky bastard.
Spikedog, sadly, was more reliable in his attendance than my former pupils, and I don’t need any mnemonics to remember him. He had a thick black collar with fearsome nails sticking out, which, had he aimed properly and generated the right momentum, might have crucified a toddler. I didn’t know his owner’s name. Spike too, probably. Ugly enough, though without the muscles, but equally dangerous. He bore more than a passing resemblance to his brutal pet, and if he lacked the neck-nails, he had various bits of steel protruding from his ears, nose and lips. I suspect many other bits of him were also highly metallic. God knows how they got him through security at airports. Though proud of his doggie – he tended to simper at the mutt – he never did anything as normal or desirable as taking him for a walk. Instead, every evening he would let the dog loose in the garden for a crap, and leave him there for an hour or so, while he retreated to his flat to receive his conjugals from his visiting girlfriend. I never heard her name. She was a Gothic, dark, black-clothed, steely, pale, skinny, silent, miserable.
Spikedog hated being excluded from the fun, and would first yap, then whine, and finally howl at the back door, demanding to be let in. He never was, and he never learned. He knew enough to do his business on what passed for a lawn – a bit of uncut scrubby grass – before returning to demand readmittance. Every now and
