Sweet Sorrow(3)

But now came Blur’s ‘Girls & Boys’ and, as if some signal had been given there was a great surge onto the dance floor, everyone dancing wildly, then staying on to bellow along to the pop–house anthems that followed. Mr Hepburn had hired a strobe light and now he jammed his thumb down with a wild disregard for health and safety. We stared at our flexing fingers in awe, sucking in our cheeks and biting our bottom lips like the ravers we’d seen on the TV news, arms punching and feet pounding until sweat started to soak through our shirts. I could see the ink on mates4ever starting to run and, suddenly sentimental about this relic, I pushed my way back to the bench where I’d stashed my bag, grabbed my old sports kit, pressed it to my face to check that it met the lowest of standards and headed to the boys’ changing rooms.

If, as horror films had taught me, the walls and foundations of a space absorbed the emotions of those who passed through it, then this changing room was somewhere to be exorcised. Terrible things had happened here. There was the pile of fetid lost property, mouldy towels and unspeakable socks as dense and ancient as a peat bog, in which we’d buried Colin Smart, and there, there was the spot where Paul Bunce’s underpants had been pulled up so violently that he’d been admitted to A&E. This room was a caged arena in which no blow, physical or mental, was forbidden and sitting on the bench for the very last time, carefully locating my head between the coat-hooks that had claimed so many victims, I suddenly felt fantastically sad. Perhaps it was nostalgia, but I doubted it; nostalgia for the pencil cases filled with liquid soap and the snap of wet towels? More likely it was regret for the things that had not happened, changes that had failed to take place. A caterpillar forms a cocoon and inside that hard shell, the cell walls dissolve, molecules churn and reorganise and the cocoon breaks open to reveal another caterpillar, longer, more hairy and less certain about the future.

Recently I’d found myself susceptible to bouts of this kind of soulful pondering and now I shook off the introspection with a literal toss of the head. Summer lay ahead and in this interval between past regret and future fear, might it not be possible to have fun, live life and make something happen? At this very moment my friends were nearby, dancing like robots. Quickly I tugged the old T-shirt down over my head, looked over the scrawled inscriptions on my school shirt and saw, near the tail, in blue ink, crisp and neat, these words: u made me cry.

I folded it carefully and put it into my bag.

Back in the hall, Mr Hepburn was playing ‘Jump Around’ and the dancing had become wilder, more aggressive, with boys hurling themselves at each other as if breaking down a door. ‘Goodness, Charlie,’ said Miss Butcher, Drama, ‘it’s all so emotional!’ Throughout the day the familiar passions, malice and sentiment, love and lust, had been ramped up to a degree that was not sustainable. The air hummed with it and, seeking some escape, I climbed the monkey bars, folded myself in between the rungs and thought about those four neat words written with care and purpose. I tried to recall a face, find it amongst the faces in the hall, but it was like one of those murder mysteries in which everybody has a motive.

A new craze had started now, the boys climbing on backs and crashing full speed into each other, jousting. Even above the music you could hear the slap of spines against the parquet. A real fight had broken out. I glimpsed keys bunched in someone’s hand and in the spirit of public order Mr Hepburn played the Spice Girls, a kind of musical water-cannon for the boys, who scattered to the edges, the girls taking their place, skipping and wagging their fingers at each other. Miss Butcher, too, replaced Mr Hepburn on the decks. I saw him raise his hand to me and dart across the dance floor, looking left and right as if crossing a busy road.

‘What d’you think, Charlie?’

‘You missed your vocation, sir.’

‘Clubbing’s loss was geography’s gain,’ he said, folding himself into the bars beside me. ‘You can call me Adam now. We’re both civilians, or will be in, what, thirty minutes? In thirty minutes you can call me anything you like!’

I liked Mr Hepburn and admired his perseverance in the face of vocal indifference. No offence, sir, but what’s the point of this? Of all the teachers who’d aspired to it, he’d best pulled off the trick of seeming decent without being ingratiating, dropping tantalising hints of ‘big weekends’ and staffroom intrigue, displaying just enough small signs of rebellion – loose tie, stubble, shaggy hair – to imply that we were comrades. Occasionally he’d even swear, the bad language like sweets thrown into a crowd.

Still, there was no world in which I’d call him Adam.

‘So – are you excited about college?’

I recognised the beginning of a pep talk. ‘Don’t think I’ll be going, sir.’

‘You don’t know that. You’ve applied, haven’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Art, Computer Science, Graphic Design.’

‘Lovely.’

‘But I didn’t get the grades.’

‘Well, you don’t know that yet.’

‘I’m pretty sure, sir. I didn’t turn up half the time.’

He tapped me on the knee with his fist once, then thought better of it. ‘Well, even if you haven’t, there are things you can do. Retake, do something less conventional. Boy like you, boy with talents …’ I still treasured the praise he’d lavished on my volcano project: the last word, the ultimate in volcano cross-sections, as if I’d uncovered some fundamental truth that had evaded volcanologists for centuries. But this was a small hook from which to hang the word ‘talent’.