Electric Guitar

photo by ^riza^

Kate was a teacher and she hated it.

She closed the front door of her flat and dropped her keys in the china dish. Her arms were full of exercise books and she staggered through the dark hallway, trying hard to step around the cat, and on into the living room.

She sat down on the sofa and wished she was elsewhere. Teaching had been something she had gone into with high hopes. Now she wondered what on earth she had been thinking of. What pulse was inside her, what wash of colour in her mind, what whisper inside the heart?

She visualised herself, ten years younger, in her mind.

’What were you thinking of?’ she asked herself.

Her younger self was nervous, hesitant, reluctant to submit to such scrutiny. She didn’t like being consulted in this way and just wanted to get on with doing her own thing.

’I wanted to create colour in the world,’ said her younger self.

’You also wanted to make homes for hedgehogs, but you didn’t become a nature poet,’ she snapped.

’Has it all gone wrong?’ queried her younger self. A furrow had formed on her brow. Like a young girl afraid that her mother was coming to her with bad news.

’Yes, teaching is no good. And teaching Maths is especially no good.’

photo by Silenceofnight

’I wanted to paint the sky a new colour,’ she said.

’Yes. I don’t think teaching was the answer, dear.’

’What about the children?’ asked the younger self. ’Are you forming them and moulding them?’

This remark took her back. Yes, indeed… she had thought like that when she was younger. She had a fantasy that as she became an older schoolteacher she would be able to point at her ex-schoolchildren in the street and say – perhaps to a sister or a friend – ’That person is a success because of me.’

It would be a pride in her ability. That would be the petrol in the engine. That was where the pleasure lay. Wanting to have a power to shape other people, to mould them at a young age. Get in there early and change someone for life.

When she was younger she had another fantasy image she liked to play with, and that was a picture of herself in old age, in a wheelchair, in the middle of a town park, and many of the people walking around her in the park would be the people she had moulded in the local school for decades.

As the years went by more and more of them would take up local jobs so that her empire would be expanding and filling up the town. If one or two went further afield – London, or New York perhaps – then she could feel that a tentacle of her empire was reaching out across the globe. ’There goes a part of me on the train down to London. There goes a bit of me on the plane to New York.’

photo by Yves Lorson on permanent vacation

And she had told herself that when she was on her death bed, taking her last gasps, she could tell herself, ’I’ve had my vision – I have controlled, and ultimately created a part of the world. I have created something in the world that I shall leave behind me.’

Had she gone through life wanting to receive it? No. To observe it, revere it, record it, serve it? No, no, no and no. She wanted to create it, control it, stamp her mark on it. Whether the pupils would be happier for this or not was not the point. What mattered was her control. For better or worse.

But it had all gone wrong. And she blamed the Headmaster.

The Headmaster was keen on Pop music, and had formed his own band with some of her fellow teachers. They got to play on the school stage once a week in front of the pupils. He had asked her to play bass and wear a short tight leather mini-skirt but she refused.

At first the Headmaster was keen on the drums, and liked to trash his kit at the end of every gig. He’d put his feet through the bass drum, put his head through the snare drum and take the cymbals off their stands and throw them against the windows of the school hall.

photo by talicat2000

He felt that only with a fervent display of violence could he communicate to the pupils his frustration about life. When his colleagues pointed out the expense of this, he boasted that he was on a good wage and could afford a new kit every week.

Kate remembered how at the end of school assembly it was odd that, after the usual announcements about school meals and the first eleven, he would say something like: ’A note to Mrs Stevenson and Mr Cartwright: band practice will take place tonight in Room Seven. We will work on ’All Cats Are Grey’ and ’Hanging on the Telephone’.’

She knew the pupils resented the Headmaster doing this. They didn’t like the rebellion of it. The selfishness and anarchy of it.

They wanted a Headmaster who was a four-square fellow with his feet on the ground who would hound them to pass their exams and bring honour to the school. Not someone who knew more about Punk Rock classics than they did.

photo by hywell

The Head soon got tired of the drums and took up the electric guitar. Once, a pupil was mucking about in Kate’s class. This was Evans. He never had any interest in Geometry and wanted to throw paper aeroplanes soaked in ink at Collins instead.

She sent him to the Headmaster’s office. But the Head refused to open the door and see him because he was too busy on his electric practising some tricky chords.

’Please sir, aren’t you going to give me a detention or something?’ the kid pleaded through the door.

’Can’t it wait,’ snapped the Head. ’I need to get this chord for ’Seven Seas’.’

[end of extract]

~ by Paul Badger on 25 April, 2008.