Girl Unknown(42)

‘I’ll be brief,’ Mrs Campbell told me.

Ever the professional, she sat behind her desk and filled me in on the campaign of aggression that my son had been waging against his French teacher, Miss Murphy. It had been going on for some time, apparently, but Miss Murphy – in her twenties, this her first teaching job – had kept quiet on the matter, hoping it would resolve itself without her having to involve anyone else.

At first it was small, silly stuff: using the face of his watch, he would reflect sunlight from the window into Miss Murphy’s eyes as she faced the class; he made a popping noise every time she finished a sentence; he would hum constantly, then deny it was him. Stupid stuff, the kind of petty misdemeanours that drive every teacher mad but not enough to warrant serious disciplinary steps. Lately, however, things had escalated. He had started throwing pens at her whenever her back was turned. When she came into the classroom, someone had drawn her likeness, breasts bared, on the whiteboard, with the caption ‘Come get it, boys!’ in a speech bubble from her mouth. She couldn’t prove it had been Robbie, but her suspicions leaned in his direction.

The incident finally prompting her to tell Mrs Campbell had happened that morning. Having grown exasperated with his constant baiting, she had ordered Robbie to stand up by the whiteboard for the duration of the class but as she proceeded to give the lesson, he began slowly inching towards her. At first, she didn’t notice, until some of the other boys began sniggering and she turned to find him almost upon her. Shouting at him to get back against the wall, she had put a hand to his shoulder to propel him. Instantly Robbie had swiped away her arm and putting both hands to her chest he had shoved her roughly back. Miss Murphy, stumbling over the leg of a table, had fallen awkwardly and banged her head against the seat of a chair. She was still in the sick bay, apparently, shaken.

‘It goes without saying,’ Mrs Campbell went on, ‘that a violent assault on a member of staff is absolutely insupportable and must be treated with the utmost seriousness.’

‘Of course,’ I said, reeling from all she had told me.

‘The most worrying part in this sorry affair is how targeted the attack was,’ she said. ‘In every other class, Robbie is well behaved. None of the other teachers have any complaints about his behaviour.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I have no idea why this has happened, or what he has against this teacher. He’s usually such a gentle boy.’

Her eyes narrowed, and her voice softened. ‘Is everything all right at home? When a student is disruptive in school, it’s often because of some difficulty he’s experiencing at home.’

Neither of us mentioned my year-long absence from the school, my previous indiscretion. I’m sure it must have been on her mind, though.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said quickly.

Robbie was suspended for a week.

How strange it had been, going back to the school. Just standing within those stone walls again had touched old memories alive, and I found myself thinking back to that time as I drove in silence, my son staring sullenly out the window.

If you saw Aidan, the word ‘handsome’ would not come to mind. A tall, thin man, with a longish face and blue eyes, he was affable and self-effacing. His son was in Robbie’s class and we were both on the Parents’ Committee. It was not love at first sight, but from the start we’d got on. Sometimes, after a committee meeting, a few of us would go for a drink in the pub around the corner. On occasion, it was just the two of us. All we did was talk, but it was such talk! Small things and big things, from school gossip to our own individual parenting concerns. Idle chitchat, that was all, but a constant pleasurable flow of it.

We had been flirting with each other for some time – harmless enough – but on one night, a night where we stayed behind for a third drink after the others had left, it began to grow more serious. He told me his wife was a very neat and organized person – there was never any question of them leaving a trail of clothes along the floor on the way to the bedroom as seen in movies: everything had to be neatly hung up and put away before lovemaking could commence. ‘I bet you’re not like that,’ he said, keeping his eyes on me over the lip of his glass.

Outside, he waited while I unlocked my bike from the railings, and when I turned to say goodnight, he kissed me long and hard on the mouth and I let him. I remember standing in my kitchen a short time later, my hands to my hot cheeks, horrified by what I had done and yet thrilled by it, too.

The next day I felt silly and ashamed. I had let things go too far and resolved to stop before it got out of hand. A text from Aidan in the late afternoon and I, foolishly, responded. We began texting every day and soon we were meeting outside committee nights – for coffee during the day and, when we could swing it, at night. We met in dingy pubs I’d never heard of in rough parts of town. We sat in the back row of art-house movies, necking like teenagers, discreetly fumbling in the dark.

We never actually had sex, although we probably would have, eventually, if we hadn’t been caught. And, yes, I did feel guilty about it, desperately guilty, but something kept driving me on, refused to let me stop. The seed of anger planted inside me – She was the love of his life, not me. Somehow it opened out and grew shoots, tendrils sneaking out to grasp forbidden pleasures. Such a heady time. Between the elation of the illicit romance and the crying fits in the privacy of the bathroom when the children were at school, my husband at work, I would think of what I was doing and grow frightened and depressed.