A to Z of You and Me (6 page)

They fuss and meddle with it a bit, alternately taking the mask and trying it at their own noses.

Sheila looks down at me. “Sorry about this. How are you doing? Can't clear your lungs properly?” I shake my head. “It's all right. I'll get the other one if we can't… Oh, wait, oh, there we go.”

Jef passes me the mask. Triangle of rubbery plastic over my nose and mouth.

“There now,” says Sheila. “Hold that to your face, OK? Don't worry, it'll pass, it'll pass. I want you to concentrate on getting your breathing down, to slow down, so it's more comfortable, OK? Breathe normally there, don't try any great gulps, and just take in the oxygen. It's going to help you.”

Jef gives me a small smile and leaves.

“There we go,” says Sheila. “Keep it on your nose and mouth, all right? You need to make sure you've got a good bit of oxygen going into your system.”

Through the door, I hear the woman in the next room has started up her groans again.

Uhhh
.

“Oh, hello,” says Sheila. “Old Faithful's started up again.” She smiles at me.

“I'm…I'm sorry,” I say. “Causing all this bother.”

“You're all right,” she says, thrusting her hands into her tunic pockets and balancing absently on one foot like a young girl. “I've got to earn my wages somehow, haven't I? OK, I'm just going to look in on her now. Keep that mask on until you're feeling better. I've reset your buzzer, but press it again if you want anything, OK? Don't hesitate. That's what it's there for.”

Come on now, baby.

What have you got to say to me?

What would you say?

Think calm. Get yourself into a good state of mind, and it'll come. Easy.

Easy. Ease.

Diaphragm

“Right, well, if you're going to persist in showing the capabilities of juniors, I'd better treat you like juniors. Who can spell
diaphragm
for me?”

Mr. Miller stands at the front of the class in his weird blue blazer with its six gold buttons and those ever-present musty trousers.

“What sort of blazer's that?” mutters Mal to me and Kelvin. “It's like it's from the nineteenth century or something. Who does he think he is? King Dickface the Turd?”

Kelvin and I crease up laughing. Dickface the Turd.

“Kelvin!” says Miller. “Well done. You've just volunteered to spell it out on the board. Come up here.”

Kelvin reluctantly leaves his lab stool with a wooden creak and shuffles up to the front.

I look at Mal and do an eye roll. “What is it about Kelvin that makes him Miller's whipping boy?”

“OK,” says Miller, handing him the chalk. “Off you go. Oh, and I forgot to mention. Anyone who gets it wrong gets a detention.”

A prickle of suppressed outrage crosses the class.

“Kelvin?”

Already resigned to his fate, Kelvin fumbles the chalk, drops it, picks it up, and then tries to hold it like a pencil.

D
.

Miller places the eraser on the board next to Kelvin's tremulous and malformed letter
D
. Kelvin looks up at him, questioningly. “Carry on,” says Miller. “It's going very well so far.”

Chuckles from around the room.

I
.

“Excellent!” Miller cries sarcastically.

A
. Kelvin pauses, and Miller's head shifts fractionally, sensing the kill.

R
.

“Nope!” Miller whips the board eraser across Kelvin's efforts, knocking his hand away and flicking the chalk across the room into a table of girls.

“Detention for Kelvin, and the chalk's landed with you. Up you come.” He points a knobby finger at one of the girls. She gathers up the chalk and tries to brush its mark off her sweater, before replacing Kelvin beside Miller.

Kelvin dumps himself back on his stool beside me.

D
, she writes.

“Good—”

Y
.

Miller pauses awhile before mugging around to the rest of the class. Then he wipes her away and picks the chalk up himself.

“
D
,
I
,
A
,
PEEEEE
,
H
,
R
,
A
,
GEEEEE
,
M
. Anyone who gets that wrong after I've spelled it out so plainly will deserve the detention they get, OK?”

Spirits broken, we mumble our assent.

“Right, now, as you'll hopefully remember from last year, the diaphragm is a membrane, just here in your chest, and when you breathe, you are using your muscles to pull on that diaphragm, and in pulling, it draws the air in through your nose and throat and into your
lungs
, which enables you to
breathe
.” Miller scrawls
breathe
tetchily out onto the blackboard and underlines the final
e
about eight times. “Now,
that
is exactly what you
can't
do…” He picks up the large book that has been sitting on the bench in front of him all this while. “Can't do…” He struggles to find the page, and an adventurous few begin to giggle. “If your lungs look like
this
.”

He cracks the book open at a double page that is completely taken up with a photo of a pair of lungs, branched through with black, like burned cheese on toast.

One of the girls pipes up: “Ah, sir, that's nasty.”

“And that,” concludes Miller with a self-satisfied flourish, “is
exactly
what is currently growing inside one of you.”

A sudden hush. He paces the room, bearing the chalk eraser before him, in his usual manner of dramatic pause, loving it. Loving it.

But what can he mean? What can he mean?

“The only question is, which one of you currently has this growing inside them?”

From the left three-quarter pocket of his big blue blazer, he teases out a pack of cigarettes and wields it between thumb and index finger in front of the class.

“Which one of you is missing a nearly full packet of these from this morning's session?”

We sit aghast. I look at Mal.

A pack of twenty Embassy No. 1.

He sits there impassive, watching with absolute innocence as his cigarettes are dropped with a light pat back on the desk, and Miller takes up his favored place, leaning against the slender edge of the blackboard.

“Well, there they are,” he says. “Whoever wants to come up and collect them may do so now.” His eyes seem to settle on Mal, before the bell for the next lesson rings off down the corridor, but nobody moves.

An impossible, unnatural silence descends as the game of chicken settles in. Outside, the corridors begin to fill and churn with kids making their way slowly to their next lessons, with maximum noise.

“I know,” says Miller, “you think I'm going to let you go.”

Shimmering silhouettes of students' heads begin to imprint themselves on the frosted wire glass of the classroom door.

“I know you think I'm going to have to let in the next class. But I don't have to do anything.”

Mal looks at me, and I look at him, and an idea begins to form.

Miller makes his way slowly over to the door and opens it. His presence immediately hushes all activity out in the corridor. He slowly fixes the door shut and returns his attention to us.

“I have let classes stand out there for the full fifty minutes before today, and I'd be willing to do it again now. So.” He sits down and once more picks up the packet of cigarettes. “So.”

Miller loves to have his enemies, and he'll be even more triumphant to get the new kid. I'm sure he's been zeroing in on Mal ever since Mal started sitting near me. And he seems all right, Mal. He's got a lot about him. Miller's just a twisted, bitter old has-been. Everyone hates him, and he knows it.

I don't look at Mal. I raise my hand, and it takes Miller a while to see it. Some of the girls see it, but they're too scared to draw Miller's attention to it.

“Sir,” I say.

Miller swivels his eyes first and then turns his head to face me.

“Yes.”

I want to say this without fear.

“They're mine.”

The class finally drains out and down the corridor, and Mal takes hold of my heavy schoolbag and shifts it to the next class ahead of me.

Noted.

Miller is already carefully maneuvering himself between the desks and discarded chairs in my direction. I know what his response is going to be. Not anger, but sympathy. Annoyance, yes, a longer detention, no doubt, but sympathy because of my home situation, and him not wanting to step over the line.

The classroom door clicks shut behind him, and he softly begins to speak.

“I must say, I'm disappointed…”

“What did Miller actually say, then?” asks Mal, sticking two rolling papers together meticulously, the zips on the sleeves of his leather jacket jangling as an accompaniment. He lays the papers on his bag while he roots around in his coat pocket for his pouch and tin.

I'm sitting on the floor at the end of his bed, sucking on the thank-you beer he bought me. I'm a bit pissed.

“Well, I thought he was going to start going on about my dad and about cancer and all of that stuff. But he didn't really go there. He started talking about how he'd fallen in with a group of friends who'd got him to smoke a cigarette once, but that he hadn't liked it, and it had made him sick, and he didn't know why people ever did it.”

Mal laughs dirtily at the ceiling. “That tells you all you need to know about him, doesn't it? Made him
sick
? I bet he gets home and whips himself every night after work.”

“Ha! Yeah.” I begin whipping myself with an imaginary lash. “
I must not let anyone spell diaphragm wrong
.”

Mal cracks up satisfyingly. “
I must not glance down the girls' tops and rub one out in the staff toilet at break time
.”

“Wet break,” I say.

Mal laughs and points at me. “You're a funny lad!”

I laugh myself and bask in the glory. Try desperately to think of something else funny to back it up with, but nothing comes.

Kelvin's still standing, leaning against the door frame and nursing his can of Coke. He laughs a gurgly laugh. “
I must not ever let anyone get away with anything!”

The laughter expires, and Mal sets about twisting and mashing up the machine-made cigarette, emptying its contents into the fresh flat paper, before crumbling gear carefully and fairly up and down it.

“So what's this about your dad then?” says Mal.

“Oh, he died of cancer when I was six.”

“Ah, man, really?”

“Yeah, that's kind of why I did it, because I knew he wouldn't want to push it too far.”

“Ah, mate,” says Kelvin, frowning. “That's well low.”

“What?”

“It's well sick, using your dad like that.”

“Is it?”

“No, it's not, man; it's genius,” says Mal, compacting the mix and rolling the loaded skin back and forth in his fingertips.

“Ah, no, not my style,” says Kelvin, crouching down in the doorway and eyeing the joint with increasing nervousness.

“The dad thing makes you untouchable. And, you know, it's a shitty thing to happen to anyone, so if you can make it work for you, I think that's a smart thing to do. It's not like you haven't earned it, is it?”

Mal dabs a piece of cardboard from the cigarette packet into the skin as a roach.

“So what about you then?” Kelvin asks Mal. “What made your dad and mum come down here?”

“The old man got reassigned to a new parish.”

“Your old man's a vicar?” says Kelvin.

Mal doesn't answer but pulls a sarcastic face, like the question is beneath contempt.

“Wow, that must be really interesting,” says Kelvin.

“Yeah? Why's that then?”

“I don't know,” says Kelvin, a little unsettled. “All the confessions he'll get to hear or whatever.”

“Sounds like you already know all there is to know about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Confession is just Catholics, I think,” I say quietly.

“Oh. Is that different from…” He peters out.

“So have you moved around a lot then?” I ask.

“Yeah, following the old man's mission,” Mal says moodily. He looks up at me. “Do you want to swap dads?”

I meet his gaze briefly.

This is Mal all over. He's not afraid to go there.

I laugh ruefully. “No, you're all right.”

“And now from the glorious north down to this shit hole,” he says, stretching and yawning.

“Do you miss being up there, then?” says Kelvin.

Just when I think he couldn't ask a dumber question.

I'm definitely a bit pissed.

“I'll miss the parties,” says Mal.

“What did you get for your exams?” asks Kelvin.

“Eleven A's.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yep.”

“
Eleven?
”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking hell!” Kelvin looks at me with moronic enthusiasm. “I only got one A, and I only did ten exams.”

Mal shrugs, making his leather jacket creak. “It's not hard to get all A's if all you want to do is get all A's… Just learn how they want you to learn, predict how they're going to ask the questions. It's no big secret, is it? But I'm like, fuck it. Not interested. Don't want no tests no more.”

“But you're doing your A levels.”

“No tests no more.”

“Are you going to quit then?”

“I haven't decided. I was thinking about getting a place in town maybe, get out of here. Start up a few things. I've got some ideas.”

Mal runs the paper along his tongue tip and seals it shut. Mal, master joiner. Never too tight. Meticulous mix.

He draws out his Zippo from his jeans pocket.

Flick, flick, and flame.

“Right, now, who wants this?”

He passes it to Kelvin, who pauses just long enough to look uncomfortable before taking it at fingertips' length. He begins to suck on the end. A bit of smoke in his mouth, quickly blown out.

“No, man, come on. Stop fucking about,” says Mal.

“What?”

“You're not doing it right.” He lifts the joint back off him. “Now,” he says, invoking his most imperious Mr. Miller impression, “if you remember your diaphragm, which is this membrane at the bottom of your chest here”—he jabs Kelvin in the chest—“you need to pull down on it to draw the smoke”—he takes a deep toke, holds, and exhales—“into your lungs and out. Into your lungs and out.”

Poor Kelvin. It's so obvious he's never done this before. I watch carefully as Mal shows him how it's done. I've only smoked a couple of Laura's cigarettes, but I think I'll get away with it.

Everything we do is glacially slow.

Seriously, I'm not sitting on this beanbag anymore. I'm properly flat on the floor, and my head is planted where I'd been sitting. I can hear all the little beans inside tumbling over each other: delicately, impossibly light.

I look over at Mal and squint. Blink a bit to see if I can make more sense of it, somehow.

Kelvin's standing again, looking down on us from the doorway.

“Listen,” says Kelvin, “I'm going to go, all right? I've got—”

“You not want any of this?” says Mal, holding up the second joint.

“Nah, thanks, man. I've got my own at home. I'm going to go and…got stuff to do.” He looks at me. “Are you coming?”