Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,70
book among them to copy my answers.
The school dinner menu was unspectacular, the choices being very much the same as those at my old school: Spam fritters and chips, toad-in-the-hole, or liver and onions, with treacle pudding or pink blancmange afterward. But I wouldn’t have cared if we had nothing to eat at all, because there, in the dining room, I felt utterly content. While I sat between Debbie Mason and Tracey, the other two Debbies opposite us, I watched as several other girls vied to sit closer to us, battling one another with their dinner trays, leaning across the table to try to interject themselves into the conversation, their eyes wide and yearning for approval. I sat, mostly quiet, listening as the giggling and the gossip flowed over me, basking in this newfound safety, never wanting to leave it again.
The first hour of the afternoon crawled by as Mr. Livingstone, our religious-education teacher—a skinny man with big ears and a red bow tie that made him look as if he were planning to host a television quiz—droned listlessly through the story of the Good Samaritan. Our final lesson of the day was English, and I only hoped that the teacher, who, Tracey told me, was new to the school, would prove to be a little more inspiring. As we trudged along the corridor to our classroom, we looked at her name on the timetable.
“It says here, ‘M S Hastings.’ ‘M S.’ What the bloody hell is that about?” Tracey asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe they wrote it wrong, maybe it was supposed to be Mrs.,” I suggested. “Or maybe it’s her initials.”
“What, like Mary Samantha?” Tracey said.
“Or Marks and Spencer,” I offered, delighted when Tracey sputtered out a giggle.
At my old school, our English lessons had involved grammar exercises, spelling tests, and long diatribes from our teacher, Mr. Knighton, on the shrinking vocabulary of today’s teenagers, the dreadful, corrupting influence of American television on the English language, and the long-forgotten virtues of the semicolon. Like everyone else in Mr. Knighton’s lesson, I’d spent most of my time gazing out the window onto the playground. Almost from the first moment I stepped into Ms. Hastings’s room, however, I realized that English lessons at Liston Comprehensive were going to be very different.
I had never seen anyone quite like her. Big-boned, broad-shouldered, and towering above six feet in a pair of knee-high black leather boots, she wore a patchwork skirt with a jagged hem and a billowy red cotton blouse. Her hair was cropped so short that it lay against her scalp like a shiny little cap, and her ears, wrists, and neck were adorned with beaded silver jewelry that clinked and jingled as she moved. She took up more space than any woman I had ever seen, and, judging by the way she moved around the classroom—in big-booted, jingling strides, making broad, audacious gestures as she spoke—she seemed to delight in the immensity of her own presence. Even Auntie Mabel, who always managed to fill up whatever room she entered with her brash energy, seemed at times ashamed of her own size and impact, pressing the force of herself into smoking cigarette after cigarette, as if she were somehow trying to make herself fade into the cloud of smoke that filled the air about her. But there was no shame in Ms. Hastings.
“Right you lot,” she thundered as soon as we were all seated. “First things first. I’m Ms. Hastings, your new English teacher.”
“Hello, Msssss,” one of the boys at the back of the room yelled, extending the S into a long, hissing syllable that echoed against the bare classroom walls. The entire class fell about in high, shrieking laughs. Ms. Hastings raised her eyebrows and shifted an icy gaze over our faces. Within seconds, the laughter died in our throats.
“And what’s your name, sonny?” she asked the boy who’d yelled.
“Erm, Paul Kitchen, Ms. Hastings.” This time, he added no extra hiss to her name.
“Well, Mr. Kitchen, it’s a pleasure, I’m sure.” A few scattered giggles moved around the classroom, but with a single look from Ms. Hastings they petered out into throaty coughs. She turned her attention back to Paul Kitchen. “And just so we understand each other, Mr. Kitchen, I’m going to tell you why I’ve chosen what you seem to regard as a humorous form of address. See, while you, Mr. Kitchen, for your entire life will never be expected to change your name, we women are. When we’re single