‘When Shakespeare said music is the food of love, he didn’t include those screeching recorders,’ Neill was murmuring to a chortling Miss Francis as Natalia entered the office, where he was sorting through a box on his desk next to the demure and raven-haired Music teacher.
His face beamed up. 'Oh hello, Natalia!'
'Hi,' she returned hesitantly. 'I, er - '
Neill turned to Miss Francis. 'I'll let you go now darling. Let me know if you need more exam samples before the end of play.'
'Fine, thanks Neill,' said Francis, as he waved her off, and not waiting for her to be out of earshot, spoke warmly at Natalia.
'How are you? All good, I hope? Sit down if you like,' as the door clicked closed again.
'Well Neill, I just er, wanted to say - ' as suddenly she felt awkward, lowering slowly at his desk.
He tapped his computer to put it to sleep, turned his freshly shaven face and ran his eyes over her.
'No pigtails today?'
She stared as her mouth opened to talk, and then faltered, her eyes meeting the gleam in his for the next three or four seconds. There was a sudden pressing hot feeling in her bladder and she shifted in her chair.
'Er, no,' she quietly laughed, whilst he held that enigmatically unwavering look, as if either mocking her pigtails or expressing it was a shame not to see them.
Oh god, she thought, Neill's sitting there, not thinking there's anything wrong with staring at her wordlessly, like he's holding and inspecting an insect between his fingertips that wiggled its legs in the air without a clue of what to do or where to go.
'Pigtails would be useful I guess,' she began, 'if someone swings me round by them and hurls me over the gates like a javelin, as one way to escape this place.'
He stared some more, bemused.
She added: 'Trunchbull, from Matilda, you kn--'
'I know,' he smiled.
She double-blinked and recollected the reasons she had come to his office.
'PE's amazing,' she piped up. 'I don't know how you did it. Just...' She laughed. 'Wow, just, yeah.'
She avoided saying thanks, for fear it would look like it was all about her.
'Lost for words again?'
She smiled.
'Does that mean you won't mind me increasing PE lessons to twice a week from January?'
'Oh...'
'This school falls short of Department of Education recommendations of 90 minutes minimum per week,' he said smoothly now, leaning back in his chair, 'and will not meet the criteria for top-notch grants, awards, and inspections should they ever descend upon us. Teachers don't like mid-year rejigs of the timetable but fuck them -'
'Do it,' she shrugged.
A smile crept across his face. 'I've improved PE that much have I?'
'I didn't want to slit my wrists by the end of lesson. That's as much improvement as I need.'
He chuckled. 'Miss Barnes is that good?'
'So good I no longer need counselling for Luxton.'
'I gave you the counselling.'
'True.'
They both smiled politely.
'Firing teachers,' he continued in a business tone again, 'as you may suspect, is both tricky and costly. You have to have valid grounds, of course.'
'Of course, yeah. And you... did it so quickly?'
'Oh, I don't waste time Natalia. I get to work like that!' - he snapped his fingers in the air dramatically. 'If something needs removing it should be gone like a shot, like that blackhead from the end of Mrs Williams' nose - '
Natalia chortled.
'...Even if I have to pull a few strings! And besides,' he now smugly put his fingers in a temple shape, 'the faster I sort things, the faster I erase that look of misery from your face.'
'What do you mean?' she smirked now.
'See? Right there. From melancholy to pretty Polly.'
She couldn't believe what she was hearing.
'It's not for me is it, but the school...' as a blush started.
'With Cohen, I mustered enough to file him for incompetence. I cited pupils' accounts of his rudeness - well, yours, and fleshed it out with a few others - but I also found he's not covering the full syllabus every term. When I nuked him, he barely said anything, just made a face like I'd told him his dog's died, and padded out like he's wanted to do for the last ten years.'
'Oh! And Luxton?'
'Well I tried to do her for being a decrepit incompetent too. She fought back tooth and nail claiming ageism. I had to think harder, so I got her for discrimination.'
Natalia paused. 'Of what?'
He pursed his lips for a second. 'Not letting Shaziya Begum play netball in her full niqab.'
'Shaziya in Year 8? Thought she takes it off?'
'Until someone told her she shouldn't have to,' he replied slyly.
'Huh?'
'Poor Shaziya ended up with a hole ripped down her backside and a chipped tooth. Luxton excoriated her with a lecture which I just happened to come round the corner and film on my phone. I filed it under defamation of religious orientation in my report which then completed her dismissal.'
Natalia stared. 'And is Luxton reeling from that?'
'If she did try crawling back she wouldn't fit the remit of the job anymore,' he exhaled as he reached for his bottle of orange juice. 'She'd need a hip replacement before she could teach Yoga and, well, two new eyeballs to go anywhere near Archery.'
She chortled. 'And can she sue for unfair dismissal?'
'Darling it's my job to worry, or rather not,' he sniffed. 'She's on video shouting at the Muslim girl. She's done. Be happy.'
'Oh, er, I am. And... O'Callaghan?'
He swigged the orange juice. 'Still working on her.'
Natalia looked around then cleared her throat politely. 'Well, the new Geography teacher's great. Only two teachers gone yet the school feels brand new. Like it's had a haircut.'
'Quite, quite,' he grinned back, as he replaced the bottle on the desk. He leant forward, licking his lip with the look of being about to speak in a low, confidential tone; as she instinctively leaned forward in dutiful reciprocation to hear:
'Well, when word got round all the departments that I'd fired those two, the other teachers - bless them - are quaking in their shoes that they'll be next, and oh, it gives them all reason to be on their best behaviour.'
His eyebrow raised craftily at her. 'Mr Harrison practically bowed when he held the door open for me in the staff room, looking all the more like a beggar with the baked bean he had stuck to his lip.'
She laughed in surprise. 'Well, thanks again sir, not for my sake - well yeah for my sake - I mean, school doesn't feel quite as, you know, skive-worthy right now! And Archery, too?' she raised her eyebrow back at him.
'Hmm. Not sure it's going to be such a good idea to put into the hands of Killingbeck's most notorious yobs, the weapons of inflicting sure-fire death - including that of my own - if I don't dodge fast enough.'
She laughed again, as Neill arose smiling and began rustling empty lunch wrappers into a plastic bag.
'Well at least you're experimenting with ideas,' she sighed.
'It's a start. Try one of these?' His hand dug into a half-consumed pack of M&S salted caramel cookies, to which she gave a hesitant nod, as he brought one toward her face, quite close to her face... too close, as she ducked and put up her hand to take it.
He drew it away again. 'But you haven't had your lunch yet, have you?'
She stared. 'No.'
'You're having that shlop downstairs?'
'After my starter yes,' as she reached and swiftly plucked the cookie from his hand.
'Cheeky!'
'Oh, by the way, I saw on my way in, nice plaque,' as she put it to her lips.
'What, had Miss Francis forgotten to brush her teeth again?'
'Huh? Oh!' she laughed, covering her mouth as she chewed.
'Well we'll both have nice plaque after these,' as he threw a whole cookie into his mouth.
'I noticed you put Headmaster and not Headteacher as Neary did.'
'Yes.'
'Some people don't like it for... equality and all that,' she spoke in between sharp swallows.
'I'd rather think I was promoting it, by linguistically inferring that both men and women exist.'
'I agree. I like it.'
'Good. Besides, I'll be doing more mastering here than teaching, as I once did.'
'Which subject did you do?'
'I was an English teacher, as you may have gleaned.'
'It was either English or French.'
'I do speak fluent French young lady, when have you heard me?'
She just smirked.
'Oh,' he chortled. 'You got me there. So what about the other Brontë girls? Read Wuthering Heights? Agnes Grey? The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?'
'Yes.'
'I knew it, you bookworm,' he remarked as he studied her. 'Similarly staunch female protagonists, from what I can remember. What about Austen, done her?'
'I've read a couple. Pride & Prejudice. Half of Mansfield Park.'
'Like you're only halfway through that biscuit, whilst I've eaten three? Do you read that slowly?'
'Tell you what, I go far faster than anyone in this school,' as she threw the remainder of the biscuit into her mouth.
He chuckled. 'Oh, I know. Well, I have a whole load you can borrow if you can't find them in the library. I've lugged around enough over the past decade that at the very least, your hands will be a duster to blow off their cobwebs. Maybe I should just bring the whole bloody lot into the school, but they'd probably end up obscenely desecrated or prudently pilfered by scatterbrained guttersnipes.'
She laughed delightedly. 'Guttersnipes! Now that describes this school.'
'Scapegrace. Urchin. Mudlark,' he continued.
'You're the thesaurus now,' she smiled. 'But those sound too Dickensian for the scrotes here.'
'Scrotes?!' he enunciated the word as if he had something unpleasant on his lips. 'Now that describes this school.'
'Skanks. Scruffs. Scum.'
'Don't you start!'
She grinned back.
'Want some of this juice?'
'Thanks.'
There was silence as he tidied up papers from his desk into a tray.
'So what literature do you like, Neill?' she asked now.
'Shakespeare of course,' he began. 'George Eliot. Orwell. Dickens, as you observed. H.G. Wells. Lord Byron, Wordsworth.'
'Oh, Wordsworth. The child is the father of the man.'
'Come grow old with me. The best is yet to be,' he rejoined.
They paused.
'Natalia! You have chocolate round your mouth!'
Suddenly there was a knock at the door, as she hurriedly pulled up her sleeve to her face.
'Come in!' he cried, as he tossed her a tissue from a box.
Natalia turned round nervously, although she wasn't sure why; their meeting was perhaps unconventional but hardly clandestine.
It was a boy pupil.
'Sir Neill, I've been asked to bring you this from Reception,' and handed over some papers.
'Sir Neill?' Neill scrunched his face. Natalia stifled a laugh.
'Thanks, Dave is it?'
'No sir I'm just dropping that to you.' The boy left and the door closed again.
Neill frowned at Natalia. 'What did he say that for?'
'Day visit?'
'Dave is it.'
'His name's Craig.'
'Oh!' He laughed, and sat down and peered through the sheets he'd been handed. 'Well we have a new girl starting in your class when you come back from half term. Who knows, maybe you'll be besties.'
'What's she like?'
'I've no idea but her name's Marcia Adams.'
'Addams Family?'
'Well she is black. Which brings me to mention on the other end of the spectrum, that super-white-as-a-sheet, gaunt German girl I've seen you with. You claim to live the life of some tragic Robinson Crusoe but isn't she your friend?'
Natalia tittered. 'Laura. She doesn't count.'
'Not unless you mean Dracula. I avoid smiling at it, lest Lestat will smile back at me with those canines, locate my jugular and suck me to death.'
'Lestat,' she giggled. 'Fangs good enough for the canteen burgers then. But not for a no-job?'
'Ha. You pay attention then,' as he took back and finished off the last mouthful of juice and tossed the bottle in the bin, frowning thoughtfully as he asked:
'What about those other Year 11 girls, with the pleasant complexions and athletic arses... Alana, one is called, who have a notch more an aspirational vibe about them? Can't you get in and on with them?'
'Those aspirational, athletic arses are in the other class.'
'Do you want me to move you?'
'I already tried them ages ago,' she shrugged. 'They're on a different wavelength that I can't stomach. If one end of the social spectrum here is toxic chav, then at the other end is pretentious, fake-arse lipgloss lush.'
'Hmm,' he frowned again. 'You're a difficult bugger aren't you? So you just prefer to be by yourself?'
'Yes,' she said firmly.
'So why are you in here with me, Natalia Ma-loner?' he mocked with a raised eyebrow.
'You're calling me what the twat boys call me in form?'
'But you're smiling.'
'Because, Sir Neill, I can tell you how much everyone is a twat here, without you trying to correct me, silence me or put me in detention.'
'Indeed,' he chuckled. 'Twats are twats, but some twats are twattier than others. Don't you want a better class of twat to twat around with?'
She licked her lip with the same look he'd given her earlier as she inclined toward him, and said:
'If you were talking to me in Year 7 when I was half-dying of embarrassment I'd plead for your help. But five years has acted like fifty years and I'm now a little old elderly dear who doesn't give a fuck but to get away from these twats into the next life.'
He guffawed now. 'Your fixation on that word is absolutely unacceptable, young lady!'
'Sorry, we can say dicks instead,' she shrugged.
He smirked as she continued:
'So what have you made of the dicks... I mean, the school, in the three weeks you've been here?'
'Mostly making a list as long as my... arm, to improve,' he replied.
'How's it going with the lunch rehaul?'
'I'm changing our caterer pronto, boss,' giving her a bemused look.
'Better than M&S?' she said, glancing at his bag.
'Probably not.'
They laughed.
'Well you deserve a rest at half-term from your efforts,' she said, adjusting herself back into civility as she arose politely.
He made a weary face up at her. 'It's Open Day tomorrow, I have to be here on a Saturday of all days, to warn all the prospective parents to keep their kids well away.'
'Does that mean your family will miss you on a weekend?' she asked out of curiosity.
'I'm not married,' he held up and wriggled his empty ring finger.
'Oh right.'
'Can't you be here standing on a chair like Jane Eyre like you said? Wax on about the awful teachers we fired and how the new Miss Barnes' thighs are like two halves of a nutcracker? I'll give you half my wages for this month!'
She laughed. 'Oh, you can totally offer my testimonial that we have the best Head ever.'
'Hmm,' his eyes widened at her remark.
She frowned.
'Well enjoy your lunch - whatever's left,' he sighed, as he arose patting his pockets for his cigarettes. 'And think of me tomorrow whilst you're indulging in your freedom and musing on your next life.'
'Ok. Bye Neill!'
She skipped off for the last of lunch break; almost colliding into Mr Noble, not hungry to eat, her belly happily still gorging on their feisty, feckless, forty minutes of banter.
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Natalia gets a surprise from Neill next in Chapter 8, Wristful.29Please respect copyright.PENANAidIlwMRuvK
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