From sheer boredom she found herself clicking on porn spam on her phone that night, and fell asleep dreaming she was riding a wave in a swimming pool.
Her bikini spun away from her like a small doll’s outfit toward a candle burning at the other side of the pool. She tried to reach it, but it grew to the size of the sun. There was a huge Bang! as her eyes jolted open to the light blaring through the window.
Her mum rapped again on her door.
‘Natalia! Are you not up for school yet?’
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Natalia chewed slowly on her toast, as her mum hissed liquor-scented breath over the breakfast table. ‘Quarter past eight. You’ll have missed the bus. You got done for skiving off school last week and now you’re late?’
Natalia fingered the maligned report card in her pocket. ‘I’m going now.’
The October morning, dimmer than her class’s IQ, made the walk down the school’s long driveway just as soulless as conversation with them, she thought. But cheered by Lady Gaga on her earphones, she mused she had only eight months left in Thornwood High, that this was the last winter she would have to watch the grey sky outlined against the pale orange, geometric ugliness of its building like a monstrous ship looming closer as her size 5 feet carried her like automatons into its rectangular mouth.
Everyone else was already in class as she headed to sign in at reception. Deafened by the rah-ah-ah, Gaga-ooh-la-la! of Bad Romance, she crossed the driveway oblivious to the huge moving shape coming from her left.
Love, love, love! I want your… uh?!
She turned in surprise as one earphone dropped and she stared aghast at a black Mercedes halting with a shrill screech of its brakes a metre away.
Leaping back startled, out of red-faced embarrassment she didn’t dare to look at the driver, scrambling to the Reception doors before whoever driving the car would have chance to call:
‘You need to look out, young lady!’
Delivered in a lively shout from a face sticking out of a rolled-down window, she squinted to discern which teacher it was, and didn’t recognise him: a flash of blonde-ish hair, an arm of suited grey, didn’t fit the description of anyone here. Must be a visitor.
Walk, walk, fashion baby… move into Reception, mortified, quick. Pushing the late book back to the sour-faced receptionist, she sighed as she headed to her first lesson, French, handing the conspicuous green rectangle of shame to Mrs Williams.
‘The spoff is late!’
‘And she’s on a report card!’
‘Where’ve you been, skiver?’
She sensed the puny grinning faces of Luke, Bernard and Tom trained on her, heckling as though she were a bad performer who had done them some wrong in a previous life show. A fourth boy Ryan would be sitting staring - he ‘fancied her’ - which apparently meant no more than blushing in her direction and slightly flinching at the insults his gobby friends threw her way.
She returned to her desk, wondering at how lovely Bernard used to look at primary school, singing Shine Jesus Shine! at Assembly with the unblemished face of a Cabbage Patch doll; now he was more like a Chucky doll, hardened like a convict after four years in wretched high school.
Steeling herself with thoughts of her literary heroine Jane Eyre, always ‘suffering, browbeaten, accused, condemned’ - the book which she had the serendipity of having to read for her GCSE exam, soon like quietly ardent Jane herself, Natalia would be free. She was nearly 16, the first milestone of freedom to reach the ‘busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen!’
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3pm came and she was at the door of her Headteacher Mr Neary to have her report card signed out. She heard more than one voice from within, as she gave a hesitant knock.
Admitted by his beefy grunt, Neary stood stout and bullishly by his desk in sports clothes as usual, but this time there were other people in the office. Mr Clarke, the balding IT manager, sitting at Neary’s computer, and the short and softly-spoken Deputy Head Mr Dinkey standing by the window, beside another man who, evidenced by the blonde hair and suit Natalia could see in full now, was most certainly the man she had nearly been run over by this morning.
Painted in full like a regal portrait before her: a stocky body in tailor-suited grey, centred with a navy blue tie and a buttoned waistcoat beneath, that made him an unusual sight of quaint middle-class formality.
Long, light brown hair swept up from a widow’s peak on a large forehead into honey blonde coming down behind his ears. He was looking out of the window so she could only glimpse in profile, his thinking-furrowed brow of his face.
Despite his detachment from the company he seemed to loom over the rest of the men, and as Natalia put out the folded green card to Neary, her eyes flitted back waiting for the visitor to turn round. Was he an inspector? A prospective parent?
Neary squinted at the card. ‘Late today?’
‘Yep sir, sorry.’
Dinkey had moved over to Clarke at the computer to sit and mutter about something onscreen, whilst the eccentric man by the window turned, only just realising someone else had come into the room. His large blue eyes were on the card in Neary’s hand, and Natalia sensed that his scrunched, majestic eyebrows held something he wanted to know.
‘These are report cards, Neill,’ said Neary as if in answer. ‘The kids get them when they bunk off school. They get them signed by every teacher and then by me at the end of the day.’
The stranger, Neill, was again gazing out of the window in contemplation.
‘Another one of your ideas, John?’ he said, now glancing towards Natalia, not quite looking at her, adding:
‘And do you ever ask the pupils why they truant?’
His voice was instantly striking, melodious to her. The drawn out vowel of ‘ask,’ and the bass tone dip of ‘why,’ was a Queen’s English seldom heard in an inner-city Northern school.
Neary replied benignly:
‘Well, no, the report card monitors their attendance, deters it from happening again, you see Neill.’
Natalia’s eyes ping-ponged back to the mysterious challenger.
‘Really.’
Neill cocked his head unimpressed, and blinked his two piercing blue interrogators squarely at Natalia:
‘And how many times, young lady, have you truanted from school?’
She was just pocketing her card, as her mouth dropped open with a pang of surprise, when Neary’s rasp interjected, without looking at either of them:
‘This would be the third time I know of.’
'Deterrent indeed.’ Neill’s eyes roved back to Natalia:
'May I ask you, young lady, why you truant?’
Neary now exhaled impatiently, whilst Natalia’s face grew warm realising she had a moment of opportunity. Speak, she told herself! What could she say? How honest could she be?
‘Um,’ she began, looking right back at Neill, whose expressive dancing eyebrows, suspended above kind twinkling eyes, despite his overall slightly intimidating demeanour seemed to assure her of his sincerity.
‘Well, I truant because this place feels like a prison to me’ - as Neary blinked up in surprise - but her words tumbled out in a train of passion:
‘It feels like a prison physically, intellectually, and emotionally. I truant because for one day I can pull myself out of the prison even for a humiliating and pointless punishment of a report card, to feel part of a world that looks at me like someone worthy - even if that’s standing around in B&Q for seven hours pretending to be interested in drill bits and raw plugs, because even then, even then—’
Her words faltered just as Neary curtailed it with ‘ok Natalia, I think we’re done, eh.’
She glanced back at Neill, whose quizzical eyebrows had softened into surprise, not pity, but somehow a tenderness, as his eyes wandered off slowly round the room as hers had done. The other two men at the desk were still murmuring between themselves, not paying any attention to the exchange. Neill nodded at Neary who was shifting papers on his desk, then back to Natalia, smiling politely: ‘Thank you.’
Natalia slung her bag to her shoulder and left the room as a low conversation continued between Neary and Neill. Down the corridor she met with Mrs Coleman, her English teacher, slightly breathless on her way to the office.
‘Is Mr Neary in?’
‘Yes Miss, he’s in with an inspector or something.’
‘Inspector?’ Mrs Coleman breezed past bemused.
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As Natalia walked on to the bus stop with rain blowing in her face, she couldn’t get the meeting out of her mind. She was surprised to find herself speaking so boldly to Neary. But she felt that courage had been pulled from her by the uniqueness of the moment. It was something to do with that eccentric stranger, Neill. It was as if ‘a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave,’ in the words of Charlotte Brontë, and imparted strength, an ‘extraordinary ray that bore her up… her soul expanded, exulted with a strange sense of freedom, as if an invisible bond had burst’!
She thought back to her dream this morning, that bright light! Shining as Bernard’s sweet child face once did! As for Jane Eyre, so too for Natalia, ‘life had its gleams of sunshine.’
Just a gleam, she assumed. A proud man like that wouldn’t hang around a shit school like hers for longer than an afternoon.
Surely?
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Natalia's life is about to become quite surreal. Read on to Chapter 2, Firestarter!
Give me your thoughts on any chapter, I always love feedback.
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LS x
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