On her way into form the next morning, Natalia could hear the wittering of Mrs Williams from the stairs, and upon hearing Neill’s name mentioned, she slipped behind the door to catch what was said.
‘Did you see what he was doing with Mrs Coleman? Totally inappropriate but she insists it’s all in good humour. Good humour indeed! He’s one big joke!’
‘He’s an extroverted chap for sure,’ replied Mr Noble. ‘But he’s brought many positive things to the school that have— ’
‘He’s changing PE after Christmas which brings Mr Winterbrook’s workload up short notice,’ interrupted Williams, ‘and with his mum being ill he’s in a pickle right now. Goodness! First time as a Head, and it shows! The man’s far too young, a liability! He simply doesn’t know what he’s doing!’
As Noble muttered back and they parted ways, Natalia followed William’s wibbling bottom on to form class, curious as to what inappropriate thing Neill had done to Coleman. Consulted her on underhand proposals? Scrutinised her coldsore? Peeled and presented a banana to her gob? Does it beat her growing list?
Just as Williams put out her hand to the form room door, Natalia had an idea that she could perhaps make use of the notoriously morally-erect Williams.
‘Miss, can I speak with you?’
‘Yes, Natalia? It’s time to go to form— ’
‘Can I speak with you about Marcia,’ she said, motioning her back from the door. ‘Marcia and Stacey. They tease me a lot. They say horrible things and make me feel so… anxious.’
‘Oh, that’s not nice.’ She adjusted her spectacles, mouth drooping like a fish as she examined Natalia’s face.
‘No it’s not.’
‘Have they, have they… threatened you at all? Done anything to you? Bully you?’
‘I don’t know if it counts as that. I just know it doesn’t make me feel very good.’
‘Pupils tease each other all the time. Chin up! Best to ignore it! You’re a top pupil and you can’t let it spoil your revision. Mock Exams are only two weeks away, remember!’
‘Yes, miss…’
Williams was opening the door and ushering her in.
Useless. Natalia rolled her eyes and slunk into her chair, averting her face from the rest of the class. Did she have to get beaten up first? Have a leg broken before she had a leg to stand on?
It was at hometime when walking up the driveway, Natalia’s heart bolted to see Marcia and Stacey at her bus stop. She never usually saw them here. Were they waiting for the same bus? Were they after her?
They were fingering their pockets for fags. How ghastly a habit it seemed when not in the hands of Neill. Just as Marcia was lighting up, her sly grinning eye caught on Natalia.
‘What you staring at, spoff?’
‘Bit unoriginal,’ muttered Natalia to herself as she turned away, hearing Stacey’s ensuing fit of giggles. Hyenas indeed, Neill was right.
‘You got a problem, bitch!’
‘Bit glib,’ remarked Natalia, this time being heard.
‘What? What did she say?’ They muttered amongst themselves as Natalia’s heart began to pick up.
‘Is she gettin’ mouthy? You gettin’ mouthy, skinny bitch? Do you know what we’ll do?’
Natalia swallowed hard, quaking with indignation, keeping her face trained on the spot up the hill where the bus would emerge from.
‘Leave her Stacey, aw look, she’s going all red, she’s proper scared!’
That kind of condescension was somehow even worse.
Scared of her own growing volition to speak again, and louder; Natalia’s tongue was straining, like never before, that her face stiffened like a brick trying to bite it quiet. As the bus appeared, the duo were muttering behind her in the queue, knocking her shoulder as they barged in front for the doors. They stomped up to the top deck whilst Natalia secreted herself behind an old lady in the front disabled-access seats.
Looking to a frail pensioner for protection, what was this! A few stops later, a large man embarked and sat at the front, and Natalia swapped him for her human shield, going unseen by Stacey and Marcia when they got off at Foundry Avenue.
Flinging off her bag at home, she slammed her bedroom door and knew she wouldn’t be opening it the next morning. Fuck PE and the new yoga. Life felt grey again, and the best way to blot out the grey was in the black of her closed eyelids.
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‘You can’t cook a pie you bought a week ago in the reduced section,’ Natalia feigned groaning from under her duvet the next morning. ‘It really hurts.’
‘Probably a 24-hour thing,’ frowned her mum. ‘You’ll be right as rain tomorrow. Milk and banana for a belly ache, there’s one left I think. I’m going out.’ She motioned toward the door.
‘Mum?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mum, why did dad leave?’
Natalia could see her lips pursed in pause without even looking.
‘He just, you know. He had enough, you know.’
You know, you know. No, she doesn’t fucking know. How is she supposed to ‘know’ when family go for years without talking about the most obvious big things?
‘When you said the other day about dad running away. Did he leave when I was crying all the time? All the tantrums you said I used to have…’
‘No, no, no…’
‘So, where is he now?’
Another pause. ‘I don’t know love. I don’t keep track. I don’t care. Best not to.’
As she heard the closing bang of the front door, Natalia’s eyes flicked open, thinking of the fruitbowl. She slipped out and down into the kitchen and saw there was indeed, just one banana within it. One was all she needed.
One banana, to feed not her stomach but her soul right now. Take it, Natalia… as she took it into her hand. Do it in love for me. Oh she’d eat this, for him, right now!
She would stand and peel it as meticulously as Neill had done, just as lovingly, for herself. Slowly, smiling, laughing; far more sensually than she possibly was able to do in his office.
The top didn’t break on this one, so she had to bore a hole with her nail. The banana in the office had been slightly under-ripe; plucked from a fresh bunch her mum had just bought, bearing a stripe of green that Neill had snapped like a seal, that had made a scouring noise as the first peel came down, when she’d watched with innocent bemusement thinking he was going to eat it.
Unlike this banana with flecks of ageing brown upon its softer, quieter skin as she stripped it down, the strands on the office banana had come away easily, none of those horrible dangly bits, and the whole shaft had popped neatly from its skin as she ate it piece by piece, reducing time for awkward pickings of strings from sides of the banana and god forbid from her mouth.
It wasn’t every day she was called to observe banana differences, she mused. The main thing was getting that fragrant moving mush in her mouth again, lulling her back into that awkwardness and delight all at once, and how it ended with a curious confidence, as if she’d just swallowed a dare, and washed out the final taste and looked up unnerved, a notch up of nonchalance. Notchalance.
Incremental incredulousness. Every time she went into Neill’s office and tasted something. Eat me! Drink me! Grow bigger, twenty years bigger you difficult bugger, and ask mum where the fuck’s dad!
She chucked the skin with the same exhale he’d made, went upstairs and slipped back into bed, closed her eyes, the lyrics from This is My Body on loop in her mind. Filled with Neill’s spirit, how you will grow! You're the banana, I am the tree! Over the face of Marcia and Stacey in her head, she plastered over the image of Neill, blowing a bigger cloud of smoke than they ever could over that giggling, greasy-fringed pimp.
She dared her memory to wander through everything they’d spoken in their last meeting, smiles hitting like popcorn in a pan on her face as she recalled his corkers. ‘Bollocks bigger than mine,’ he’d said of Miss Bailey. ‘Drawing the most amusingly detailed cock graffiti.’ Enid Blyton’s dick and fanny. He’d even said cunt. He joked he’d need her to hold his hand, the most outrageous bit of all to imagine him needing her emotionally just as she needs him.
She closed her eyes and saw crude graffiti of bollocks and bananas rising from lunchboxes and pissing over toilet seats as she lay smiling, singing: ‘Do it in love for meee!’ which turned into: ‘Don’t give up now, little Donnn-key!’ louder and louder, till she heard her mum clatter through the front door, and she fell into thoughtful silence, then into mouth-hanging sleep, happy to wake to a sheen of banana dried like glue on her tongue.
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The next morning, Natalia arrived late on purpose to avoid form. Leisurely walking down the driveway toward reception, she saw Neill’s bulging black Mercedes parked up leaving scant room for Mr Allsebrook’s Toyota Yaris. Ageism alliteration, a girl after my own heart!
A dim ray of sun was squeezing through the clouds glinting off the contours of his bonnet. She always marvelled at the huge bonnet. In fact there was just something deeply inner pleasing about seeing Neill’s car outside the school. It was a signal, a flag of reassurance that he is here. He is here. He is already here. He is able to be here, and he has chosen to be here. He is parked, he is inside, he is with us.
Joining the tail of her class filing into Assembly, her attention was sucked like sand through an hourglass so intently at the sight of beige-suited Neill arriving at the front, that as she fumbled to sit down, she didn’t notice that Stacey and Marcia in a mortifying moment had suddenly appeared and slipped in at either side of her.
As the rest of the school settled and awaited Neill’s bellow that would signal the hall to silence, sniggers came from the fiends now bookending her with pointy elbows, breathing right into her space a low vitriolic conversation, thoroughly intended for the now crestfallen Natalia to hear.
‘Tonight,’ rasped Marcia, ‘we’ll batter her.’
A sinister giggle came from Stacey. ‘Why are you gonna beat her up?’
‘I can’t stand her.’
Natalia’s blood ran cold and slow, as she began to feel as heavy as an iceberg that could crack and melt into a pool of slush on the very spot.
‘Quiet, everyone! QUIET!’
A hush fell over the hall as Neill began to speak, whilst Natalia’s excitement from a moment ago now drooped like a burst pimple, her gaze faltering into her lap where her hands clasped anxiously, blinking to the sides to curse the knees of the two whispering bullies that had it in for her. Between them, right here, she felt like a small, sallow, weak, pathetic, undergrown thing. Twenty years ahead, what a fucking joke! Just like Williams said, everything Neill said was surely a joke!
Neill was doling out certificates to Year 8s on behalf of their absent Head of Year, Mr Noble. Then with a sudden shift in timbre which piqued Natalia’s interest to look up, he was announcing new canteen meals, and the hall whooped into a pronounced round of applause.
As he stood smiling, she saw him spy her, picked out by his eye because tellingly, neither she nor the two girls either side of her were clapping.
His face bore a quizzical, ‘why aren’t you clapping?’ look, but also ‘why on earth are you sitting with those two?’ In fact, the latter grew evident to be the emphasis. His eyes, still fixed on her as the clapping waned, moved from one girl to the other, and in a flash she knew, right in this moment, she’d been busted.
He said he’d find it out, and he did.
Her gaze falling to her knees again as the clapping subsided, she knew he was still looking at her - boiling red with embarrassment now at being seen sandwiched between the hyenas - as he thanked and dismissed the school.
As soon as Assembly was done, she was out of here, she decided. She would walk straight out of the school, and walk all the way home, if she had to. Right now she couldn’t face anyone, least alone herself.
As the hall full of pupils began to rise and leave in a slow bottleneck through the doors, Natalia turned with a spluttering growl from her throat as if it had opened, unlocked, activated:
‘Just leave me ALONE! You are nasty, awful twats! Go fuck yourselves!’
Before Stacey and Marcia could even blink, Natalia had burst away like a thunderbolt several bodies ahead, toward the doors. The staff, including Neill, were all moving ahead of the pupils through the same doors. Natalia bit her lip, wondering whether she’d be able to get away when Neill was ahead. Would he try to corner her?
She was thrown more than one indignant ‘watch it!’ as she wormed her way through the doors with a shove here and there, and made headway in the widest part of the corridor, until the narrow part began, which siphoned the pupils into three a head. And from over the tops of all the heads, she could see a few feet away, Neill stood with Mrs Coleman, anchored to the right side of the moving traffic. She groaned. Why were they stationed right there in the way? A pulse of adrenalin deep in her pelvis both adored and abhorred that she would have to pass Neill within a metre proximity.
The volume of Neill’s laughing chit-chat grew nearer, and now over bobbing heads his eyes met hers, as she lowered her face, and crossed her arms lest he might grab her wrist again. But the closer the traffic moved along, she knew something would happen, she just knew…
She looked up again, and found herself suddenly transfixed, veering toward him, reeled in like a tiny fish in a strong current passing a hair away from the underbelly of a Great White.
In a flash she felt across her waist, his stout suited arm stopping her in her tracks like a barricade, preventing her from proceeding - he was still facing ahead, continuing to talk to Mrs Coleman - catching Natalia in a snare.
With the flow direction of the crowd moving forward, no-one else could see Neill’s tactful interception, nor even could Coleman, occupied in conversation on his other side; Natalia barred from her view by Neill’s body itself. And lest she try to slip round it, the fabric of her jumper was being gathered tight in a decisive fist, pulling her into him like a curtain caught in a hoover.
She was barred like an unticketed passenger in a turnstile. Caught like prey, by a friendly predator, whose tentacle was now curling around her left hip under her coat, and for the moment Natalia was pulled into his body, she had almost little choice but to take refuge in his jacketed upper arm that softly brushed against her cheek. Blinking slowly, she inched her right nostril over an increment to inhale it. For one infinitesimal, peculiar glimmer of a moment she drops her heavy bags of emotion - or rather, is suspended lightly just above them - and basks in the warmth that had once encircled her wrist, that now encircles her torso.
It was barely a minute he could hold her there, but in that short time something seemed to happen within her middle body: his arm, his hand, the pressure on her stomach and her hip, pressed right where she felt her deepest sadness, fear and loneliness, and the touch seemed to do something amazing but terrifying to it; it seemed to stir it up like powder from the bottom of a glass of water, and at the same time she embraced it, she wanted to run a million bashful miles from it. As the moving crowd quickly thinned out to an end, it ended the surreal moment that could only be couched within it, and as the last people drifted out, Neill had no choice but to let go of her from his side, well before anyone including Coleman could see.
Natalia stumbled away on legs that were weakened by two things: her misery, and the tender, unexpected encounter with Neill. Was that just a mistake, did she get caught upon his body accidentally? Confused, ashamed, in denial, she furled her brow and flung herself through the nearest outdoor exit, finding herself at the side of the school leading to the old bike and gardening sheds, which she would pass by and make a swift getaway through the back gate.
She turned in surprise to hear rapid footsteps on the gravel behind her. There was Neill, yet again! Coming for her? Was he that determined? Fast walking toward her with his face trained on her, restarting further swirls of adrenalin in her thighs as her mortification gave way to amazement, slowed her pace with this new shock, and he advanced upon her, his fingers slipped through the back of her hair and his hand grasped her neck, gently, but firmly, and after he looked round to check no-one was watching, yanked open a brittle wooden door with a grunt and pushed her straight into the bike shed.
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What happens next? Read the next chapter, Tear Shed.
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