My Lies, Your Lies - Susan Lewis Page 0,4

and I wonder if he means it.

I feel upset, rejected even, but then I comfort myself by thinking of a time when he was looking at me. It was when I was playing hockey in the top field and during a pause in the game I happened to glance back across the pitch towards the main school building. I’m not sure if I actually felt him watching me, and that was what made me turn around, you know how that happens sometimes, or if it was just coincidence that he was standing at the music room window and caught my eye as I glanced his way. He didn’t look away and as I stared back at him I stopped feeling the chill air on my bare thighs and panting breath in my lungs.

I think that was when his lessons first became the true light at the centre of my week and I, like a moth, circled it constantly, so drawn to him that each Wednesday afternoon was like being burned with the intensity of my own feelings.

Today, as we file into his class, there is a buzzing anticipation infecting us all for it’s one of our pop days, as we call them, and several of us have brought in the new records we bought while at home over the weekend.

The night before, in the dorm, we’d taken bets on what he would or wouldn’t like.

‘A shilling says he’ll love “People Got to Be Free” by The Rascals, or “Stone Soul Picnic” by Fifth Dimension.’

‘Sixpence says he’ll hate “Mony Mony” or “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream.’

They’re all wrong about ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, apart from me, because I knew from the minute I first heard it on my parent’s record player that he’d love it. My parents are groovy people. At weekends when their friends come over wearing bright-coloured kaftans and fake roses in their hair they drape themselves around the place like exotic furniture to chill out, smoke weed and drink gimlets or whisky sours. They talk about Vietnam or cricket or how to change the world. During the week, my mother is a senior civil servant writing speeches for ministers and my father is a lawyer specializing in tax and finance. They morph into hippies at the weekends and immerse themselves in the same sort of bands that Sir likes, which is how I knew he’d dig ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.

There really is no other teacher in the school like him. He feels more like a friend than someone who’s supposed to instruct and discipline us. I’ve never heard him tell anyone off, not even when some of the cheekier girls ask him for a kiss as a reward for saying something to impress him. He just arches an eyebrow in a comical way, almost as though he hasn’t heard, but the colour that rises over his neck gives him away. It’s why we do it, to see the little tell-tale spread of embarrassment that, according to most, proves that he really does want to kiss them.

I have no idea when class starts that day that I will remember it forever. It’s not my choice of record that changes the background music of schoolgirl crushes and improbable dreams, it’s Mandy Gibbons’s. She’s brought ‘Young Girl’ by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. It was released a couple of weeks ago, but this is the first chance we’ve had to play it with Sir, and every one of us secretly thinks the song is about her and him. We can hardly wait for Mandy to slide it from its paper cover and put it on the turntable. She’s allowed to do the honours while Sir peels off his corduroy jacket and drapes it over the back of his chair.

Mandy sets the needle carefully on the revolving disc, stands back with taut anticipation and as those two magical words – Young Girl – fly into the room with all their tragedy and passion Sir lowers his head. We’re all watching him, waiting for the blush, certain it will come and it does. What I don’t expect is the way his eyes find their way to mine. I can feel my heart pounding as the song tells me to get out of his mind, that his love for me is out of line, I’m too young and he needs to run. I feel the heat of the moment, intense and fateful, while in possession of all the charms of a woman.

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