''Natalia cannot take part in Games today as she has a cold and is unable to,'' Mrs Luxton read the note sarcastically. 'Unable to what? Is that your mum's signature?'
'Yeah, it is. Sorry, mum worded it.'
'So she actually wrote it for a change! Sit down on the bench.'
As she watched the girls holler over each other in Netball, she thought of the new Head. This school had never seen anyone like him. Someone intelligent with gravitas and authority, well-groomed even, yet the mischief she witnessed in him from the outset was something to behold. Smoking in his office, and then setting fire to her report card. Wouldn't he lose his job if it was seen by another teacher? Surely he couldn't keep the habit secret for long. He was smoking when she entered the office, and she could have been anyone coming in.
Roll on break time! She was interested in what he would say, but just as much, from what she would find herself saying, with this strange jolt of confidence she felt on their last two encounters.
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At bell for break, the blood quickened in Natalia's legs as she walked to the Head's office - when she heard footsteps behind her - and there was Mr Neill, breezing ahead of her in an air of sweet cologne.
'Whoops, here I am! Coming through,' as he pressed the handle, and with a flourish of his palm, beckoned her in first.
'Thanks,' as she stepped in.
The door closed behind them. 'Natalia, isn't it?'
She nodded.
'Cup of tea?'
'Er, ok!' she laughed. She'd never been offered a cup of tea in school before. Then she realised they weren't alone. Mr Neill was gesturing to the IT teacher Mr Clarke, who was rummaging around near where Natalia could see a kettle had been plugged in.
'Jim!' Neill clicked his fingers. 'Fill that kettle there, would you. With the water next to it.'
Natalia was startled by his order delivered to Mr Clarke, and was about to politely protest, but Neill continued: 'By the way, don't mind old Jim. Talk as if he wasn't here. He usually isn't anyway, lost in the virtual world of repairing networks and debugging and defragging and god knows what else, isn't that right Clarkey?'
Mr Clarke just chuckled amicably, not seeming affronted at all, as he moved from the kettle back to the computer.
Mr Neill pulled up his swivel chair to the side and motioned for Natalia to sit opposite. He levelled his gaze at her which she found almost too much to reciprocate and her eyes double-blinked, faltering to the floor with:
'So, what did you want to know?'
He arranged his fingers together in a temple shape. 'So, I've been looking at huge past files of report cards and it does seem that truancy happens often enough here.'
He paused. Then he leaned forward and added, after a sly look sideways:
'They would make a glorious bonfire.'
They both smiled.
He sat back. 'And as you know, from our - let's say, rather inflammatory meeting earlier - I'm doing away with them. They're clearly not working, are they?'
'Well, the thing is this,' responded Natalia - who'd been thinking a lot during her PE lesson of what she wanted to tell Mr Neill - 'they coerce the pupil to have to record their attendance, what's recorded on the register anyway, so they merely serve as a point of humiliation. You might as well stand me like Jane Eyre up on a 'pedestal of infamy' whilst I wish the earth would swallow me up, or like Helen Burns wearing a Slattern pasteboard, till her friend' - she glanced at him knowingly - 'throws it into the fire.'
He reciprocated her gaze with one curling corner of his lip.
She added: 'So, far from being a deterrent or meaningful punishment, it only surely makes the pupil want to escape from the misery all over again.'
She stopped talking, just as the kettle reached its loudest then started bubbling.
As it clicked off, Neill jumped up as if from a trance. As his back was turned preparing the teas, he coughed:
'Jane Eyre - that's the set text for the exam isn't it?'
'Yeah, but I read it years ago,' she said, as he turned to catch her scrunching her nose nonchalantly.
He looked startled, then turned back away with a clink of mugs. 'Do you take sugar?'
'Yes please, two.'
'Tea, Jim?'
'No thanks Neill. I'll be off in a minute, your connection's all fixed.'
'You are a gentleman, thank you.'
The teaspoon stirred with a clink, as Natalia now spoke - undeterred or rather even motivated by the presence of Clarke - in a torrent of words like a smooth-talking lawyer that even surprised herself:
'If you want my opinion, report cards are downright useless, a pointless indignity, that does nothing to address the conclusion of the truancy, let alone the root cause.'
Neill turned with the teas, putting one solemnly down in front of her as she thanked him.
He sat down with a half-smile on his face, and she looked at him with a 'what?' expression.
'Tell me Natalia, do all pupils here talk like you?'
She paused. 'I don't know,' she said cautiously, just as Neill looked up to say bye to Clarke, who was leaving and the door closed again.
Sliding his swivel chair back to his computer, as she shuffled along too, she asked: 'How do you mean?'
'The way you talk,' he said, leaning forward on his elbows over the desk as his chair levers clunked beneath, 'is like no pupil I've heard in the three high schools I've worked in over ten fucking years.'
Natalia looked down, her cheeks pinkening. 'I, I've barely said anything.' Then she raised her head and added slyly:
'The way you talk sir, or rather swear, is like no teacher I've ever heard, let alone Headmaster.'
He gave a long chuckle and sat back. 'Sorry,' he began, 'I don't usually... well anyway, back to the topic we started on. I recall you saying you truant because you feel as though this wondrous Thornwood High School feels like jail to you in every sense, and that browsing the paraphernalia of Homebase DIY fares superior.'
'It was B&Q, sir.'
A laugh erupted on his face, followed by a 'yeah yeah!' in a boyish tone, going slightly pink in the face himself. 'Cheeky,' he added, then frowning: 'Did you really go to B&Q?'
'Yeah - well no - not for seven hours.'
'Well, anyway, what makes this place a prison? You're clearly studious, so doesn't it satisfy you in that way?'
'Somewhat,' he imitated girlishly, and laughed. 'But you say you have no friends, which can't be pleasant. Why is that?'
'I don't know. I guess I find it hard to fit in with people. Since primary, although at least that was nicer because it was a Roman Catholic school - '
'Ah, you're religious?'
'Well, no. We went to Sunday mass when I was little, before my mum went all... anyway. High school is different, brutish almost, and I guess my protection is to be alone... deep in my own thoughts. Any friends I do make, are similarly odd loners.'
'You don't seem odd. You seem to me to be an engaged and intellectual girl.'
'Well, if that's true, it's not the kind of engaged intellectualism that interests most other 15-year olds.'
He paused and sat back with his arms folded, pursing his lips and screwing his eyes a little, scanning her face with growing intrigue as though she were a most peculiar specimen, and spoke:
'So that must make school generally disagreeable on a daily basis, just by your own personality, the way you perceive it and the way others perceive it. I can't so much help there. But I want to know, as the new Headmaster, how I can begin to make improvements to the school.'
She looked intrigued at him. 'That's pretty good, wanting to know our opinions.' She paused. 'Are you talking to other pupils too?'
'Oh yes. But starting with you, well, makes sense. You talk on my level. In fact, you talk like someone twenty years older.'
He sipped his tea and smiled a wide smile. She liked his mouth. He had a wide palette, with well-formed straight teeth, that were not a fake brilliant white, but a more naturally off-white, as if they'd happily taken a more human, tainted tinge from years of smoking.
'Oh, thanks, Mr Neill,' she said with a muffled laugh.
'By the way, all the pupils can just call me Neill.'
'Oh, sorry, Neill. Well, of course,' she chimed in now with a mock air to set some humour against the self-consciousness she was feeling: 'I'm the main pupil you should talk to, the only one in probably the entire school who pays attention to anything around her, the nuances of the shitty teachers, the general moribund feeling that's present in most every lesson, a feeling that, well, life is all happening out there, and not in here, with these miserable failings we call teachers, most of whom don't even seem to like working with young people.'
He was still smiling. 'See? Twenty years ahead.'
He got up and walked to the window, fidgeting around his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter, then spoke:
'Where you are from? Your accent is clearly Yorkshire but not that Yorkshire when you rattle off like that like some bookish nerd. Your surname is what, Russian?'
'That's right. But I've always been from here.'
'Where in Leeds do you live?'
'Gipton.'
'That posh?'
'Nurh, it definitely in't posh,' she drawled in a mock Yorkshire tone.
He stared at her and chortled.
'Well anyway. If there's pupils here like you then heading this school will certainly be interesting. But the teachers are what I'd like to look at.'
Just then the bell went for the end of break.
'Tell me about the teachers from your perspective.'
'Sir, the bell just went.'
'Did it?'
'It's lesson time. I need to go.'
'Oh, shit,' he said glancing at the clock. 'What lesson is it?'
'Maths.'
'Do you like it?'
'No.'
'Good, then you won't miss it.'
She stared dubiously at him. 'You're having me - miss a lesson?'
He replied with a reassuring lean toward her: 'No, this is an important meeting.'
Natalia stared. Just how unbelievable was this man?
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Continue reading to find out how crazy this meeting gets in Chapter 4, Charm and Alarm!
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