I considered what to reply. In truth, they hadn’t been doing very much at all. ‘Standing in the way.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘Not that I remember.’
‘Were you afraid of them, is that what it was?’
‘I’m not afraid of anyone.’
‘That’s good, Colin. That’s the right way to be.’
‘Aren’t you going to cane me?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I prefer not to. And I think you’re sorry for what you did, aren’t you?’
I didn’t answer that one. He wouldn’t have liked the response and I wasn’t prepared to lie: I was neither sorry, nor ashamed of myself. In fact I’d rather enjoyed the encounter; it had relieved the boredom of the day.
‘Well, in any case, you realise I will have to suspend you.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said.
‘A week?’ As though he was asking me rather than telling. If I give you a week, will you promise to behave afterwards?
‘Alright,’ I said.
‘I’ll write a letter for your mother. I did speak to her on the phone earlier, I asked her to come in, but… anyway. Go and collect your bag and coat, and then come back to the office to collect the letter.’
I turned to go.
‘Colin?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t do it again.’
I didn’t do it again, at least not on school property, because in a strange sort of way I liked the head teacher. He wasn’t as weak as he appeared; he was a fair man who was trying to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances, and I wanted him to like me. Besides, by then my mother, who had been through what she later described to anyone who’d listen as ‘a very trying time’, was starting to recover. Whilst the head teacher seemed incapable of genuine anger, my mother was not.
My mother had spent a good couple of years in a semi-official state of mourning after my father’s death. It was the sort of person she was. Eventually she’d realised that people had stopped paying attention when she had a tantrum and so she’d decided it was time to be brave and move on. She had never been a patient woman, however, and now it was just the two of us she was even less so. Her friends, my father’s family, even her sister, had all reached the point of wanting nothing more to do with her, therefore I was the only person who was still available to whom she could direct her frustrations and her ire. She stopped taking the antidepressants and moved on purposefully to medicating herself with alcohol.
We hated each other with a fury that was as powerful as it was unspoken. She was violent until the point when she realised I was big enough to fight back, and then her bitterness was restricted to verbal assaults that were in many ways just as damaging.
‘You killed your father,’ she said one evening. ‘You know that? I always knew it. It was the stress you put him under, always answering us back, never doing as you were told.’
We were both sitting in the living room, having had dinner together in silence. This happened with increasing frequency – civility giving way to hostility with no apparent warning. She’d had wine with dinner, gin before it, sherry before that, but, even so, she was not what anyone would describe as drunk. The television was on in the background, and, because we’d disagreed over what to watch, the tension in the room had risen. She blamed me utterly for my father’s death, just as I blamed her. It passed the time.
‘You killed him, you little piece of shit. He was so happy with me until you came along.’
I searched for a suitable weapon to use in response, and settled on Kafka.
‘“To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to a nothing.”’
‘Kafka again?’ she said. ‘What a load of codswallop.’
‘Kafka was a nihilist,’ I said. ‘And if you take his views on board, whether either of us is to blame for his death is rather beside the point.’
‘I wish you’d never been born,’ she answered coldly.
‘So do I,’ I said.
Sometimes these exchanges were even funnier. She was so easy to respond to. The more she hated me, the more amusing she was. And yet we carried on living together in the same house, even after I left school. She cooked dinner, sometimes, when she wasn’t too drunk to stay upright. I did most of the washing and cleaning. She did the shopping, so