The Good Girl
Authors: Fiona Neill
THE GOOD GIRL
In
memory of Hattie Longfield
The
truth may be stretched thin, but it never
breaks, and it always surfaces above lies,
as oil floats on water.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
Don Quixote
March 2014
It was Matt Harvey, the new head of Biology, who first drew her attention to the problem. Although now of course she wondered how many other people knew. Matt had knocked on her door, unannounced, in the middle of the first lesson after lunch, and asked if he could have a word. Ailsa was midway through an email to a local biotech company, requesting work experience for sixth-formers hoping to study science at university.
‘Can it wait half an hour?’ she asked apologetically, as he poked his head around the door. ‘I really need to get this off.’ She gently massaged a small circle between her eyebrows, hoping to ward off the frown line that was threatening to settle there.
‘Sorry,’ Matt said. ‘It really can’t.’ He had such a panicked expression that Ailsa wondered whether he was about to resign. She glanced at his hand. He was holding something. To her relief, it wasn’t an envelope but a mobile phone. This reprieve was immediately tempered by irritation that he needed to bring his phone with him at all. It was difficult enough to persuade students to
sever the digital umbilical cord when they came into school, never mind if teachers failed to set an example.
Matt came in and shut the door abruptly so that the leaves of the cheese plant by her desk quivered. ‘Sorry.’ He opened his mouth and licked his lips a couple of times. Ailsa smiled in a way that she hoped was encouraging while retaining a professional distance. He looked away, unable to meet her eye.
‘I’m not sure how to most effectively sort this one out,’ he said, staring at his feet and drawing attention to the sort of casual footwear that sixth-formers were discouraged from wearing.
He must be in trouble
, thought Ailsa, trying to ignore the split infinitive. She ran through typical problems encountered by teachers in their first year at a new school: he had fallen foul of Mrs Arnold, her tricky deputy head pastoral (everyone did); he couldn’t master the new internal communication network (no one could); he was worried he was going to miss his GCSE targets (she would agree with him that league tables were blunt instruments, but funding depended on results and she would suggest he organize some extra classes on Saturday to avoid any disasters).
She was good at getting these messages across in a way that was sympathetic but firm. All the psychometric tests she had completed during the interview process for this first headship came to the same conclusions: Ailsa was a natural born leader. Where she went, her staff generally followed.
‘Sorry about the mess. I’m trying to do a million
things at once.’ She spoke with a cultivated informality appropriate for a workforce which, for the most part, was younger than her. ‘How can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Help me?’ He squinted at her quizzically as if she were being deliberately obtuse, and his thick dark eyebrows caterpillared into a single line. She squinted back, vaguely remembering from a management course that the best way to make people feel comfortable was to mimic their body language. Perhaps it was a less orthodox issue: a pupil with a crush maybe. When Ailsa interviewed for a new head of Biology, the only point against Matt Harvey made by Mrs Arnold was that he was too good-looking. Ailsa had said, only half joking, that if that meant more girls did Biology A level, it was a risk worth taking, especially now that there was extra funding for students who studied science.
Ailsa abandoned the email mid-sentence and invited Matt to sit on the small sofa in the corner of the room by the radiator. The heating was about to go off as part of a new money-saving scheme that had been disguised as an example of the school’s commitment to environmental issues, she explained.
‘But don’t tell anyone.’
‘It might be more convenient to stay near the computer,’ Matt suggested, walking purposefully towards her desk. ‘I need to use it.’
Ailsa stood up to make way for him. There was an awkward moment as they repositioned themselves. He removed his jacket and sat down on her chair in front of
the computer screen. She noticed shadows of sweat under his armpits. He undid his cuffs, carefully rolled up his sleeves and clicked each knuckle once, making Ailsa wince.
‘Sorry. Forgot how you hate that,’ he said, looking up at her with a smile so quick it had gone before it reached his eyes.
‘It’s like fingernails on a blackboard,’ she said, and then instantly regretted betraying her age to someone who had only ever known whiteboards. Matt pulled the chair towards the computer screen and it screeched across the floor. Despite being someone who liked to melt into the background, everything he did was very loud.
His fingers moved deftly across the keyboard. So quickly that she couldn’t see what he had typed into the Google bar. Ailsa watched the screen, intrigued to know what could be so important that he had to interrupt his lesson to show her. The afternoon was always the worst time to deal with a crisis. By then the optimism had been sucked out of the school day and she was filled with a wired energy fuelled by too much caffeine and too many unfinished to-do lists.
She impatiently smoothed down her skirt, trying to iron out the wrinkles and persuade it back towards her knees. You have to be careful what image you are projecting, she had told her seventeen-year-old daughter recently when she appeared in the sitting room wearing a minidress so short that when she bent over you could see her knickers. Ailsa understood the mys
terious equation whereby teenagers responded to exhortations to be responsible with a similar urge towards independence, but was singularly unable to apply the science to her own children.
‘It’s a fancy-dress party. Dress code: Professor Green meets
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I can’t exactly wear a burka,’ her daughter had laughed. ‘The trouble with you, Mum, is you’re obsessed with what people think of you.’
It was true, Ailsa thought. She often wondered how others might see her, especially her team of teachers, but also people whose opinion she didn’t need to worry about, like the locum doctor who had missed her mother’s heart problem or her New Age next-door neighbours.
‘Someone in my A-level set gave the game away. I wasn’t sure whether you already knew,’ said Matt. He paused and held his head in his hands, staring down at the desk. He was behaving more like a drama teacher than a biology one. ‘Christ, I feel like the messenger in
Julius Caesar
,’ said Matt, his sweaty palm hovering near the screen.
‘
Antony and Cleopatra
,’ Ailsa corrected him, instantly regretting her fastidiousness. Once an English teacher, always an English teacher. She wondered how he really saw her. A hard-working and confident superior whose innovative schemes for incentivizing students had been adopted as policy by the Department of Education. A stickler for detail with an annoying radar for split infinitives in internal emails. Or a forty-two-year-old woman with a tendency to wear too much lipstick who didn’t
notice when flecks peeled from her lips and stuck to her teeth. Ailsa made a quick sweep of her front teeth with her tongue. Maybe someone past youth, but still worthy of sexual fantasy. A MILF perhaps. When her eldest son, Luke, had finally explained what the term meant last week she couldn’t work out whether it had given middle-aged women a new lease of life or added a new layer of pressure.
It struck her that this was a good example of cognitive dissonance, the ability to hold contradictory thoughts about the same subject. She had covered this in that morning’s assembly, using the example of smoking as something that gave pleasure but everyone knew was bad for them.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘You’ve got filters. Give me a moment. I’ll get round them.’
Ailsa was taken aback by his language. He was the teacher who had recently sent out a student for swearing in class.
‘I’m in,’ said Matt. His tone wasn’t triumphant. He paused briefly, clicking his knuckles again. ‘It’s short. Shouldn’t take more than two minutes.’ He clicked play. ‘I’ll play it slow so you can absorb it properly, frame by frame.’
‘Because of the resolution?’ asked Ailsa, fumbling for the correct terminology.
‘No. Because it’s a sequence,’ he said, furrow-browed as though puzzled that she still didn’t grasp what was going on.
‘Hadron Collider, string theory, meta data,’ said Ailsa breezily. ‘Technology is leaving me behind.’ She was looking for words of reassurance. None came. But then she was unworthy of his sympathy. Later, when she couldn’t remember how it felt not to be anxious, she realized that this was the last time she had felt truly light-hearted.
Ailsa focused on the screen. At first it was a little hazy; the person taking the video clearly wasn’t a professional. There were half-head shots. Limbs at comical angles. And overuse of the zoom feature. Or maybe it was a faux hand-held technique to give authenticity to what followed? There were two figures. Judging by the length of her long fair hair, the one at the front was a girl, although it was difficult to tell any more. The camera zoomed out unexpectedly and Ailsa caught a glimpse of a low-ceilinged space with a light blub swaying in slow hypnotic circles. There were no windows and apart from what looked like a pile of rocks on the floor behind the boy the room was apparently empty. As more frames played, Ailsa could see a narrative forming.
‘It’s a lot to take on board,’ Matt said apologetically.
‘Why are you showing me this?’ asked Ailsa, wondering if this was how twenty-something men hit on forty-something women. Except she knew how twenty-something men hit on forty-something women. Their eyes locked. He knew what she was thinking and just as quickly she knew that this time she was wrong.
‘Look at the uniform,’ said Matt, tapping the screen to get Ailsa’s attention as the girl fumbled with the boy’s
zip. She leaned over his shoulder and he enlarged one of the frames until it filled the screen. How could she not have noticed? The girl’s sweater had the distinctive green and yellow stripe of the Highfield Academy uniform around the neck and cuffs. Another of Ailsa’s innovations. To give pupils high visibility.
Not so clever now
, she thought. He pressed play again and the girl inexpertly released the boy’s penis from a pair of underpants. It was too much. Ailsa stepped back from the screen.
‘How did you get hold of this?’ she asked, casting around for something to say.
‘I caught Stuart Tovey watching it just now.’ He gave Ailsa the phone that he had been holding when he came in the door. ‘Obviously I’ve confiscated it. To look for clues.’
Why did he talk in such short sentences? wondered Ailsa. Was he nervous or had his brain been atrophied by Twitter?
‘Did you ask him how he got hold of it?’
‘He said someone had forwarded it to him.’
‘What do we know about the boy?’
‘He’s left-handed,’ said Matt. ‘That’s about it.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Look,’ he said as the boy gripped his penis in his left hand.
‘It’s not Stuart Tovey, is it?’ asked Ailsa, reluctantly turning her attention back to the screen, feeling like a grubby voyeur. ‘You’d expect it to be but he’s much shorter than this boy.’
‘You don’t get to see his face. Unfortunately. I can’t work out if that was deliberate or down to poor technique.’
The girl was kissing the boy. He kissed her back. The passion was real or at least the acting was convincing. Just as Ailsa thought she was about to see the boy’s face, the camera teasingly panned down for a mid-body shot. The girl got on her knees in front of the boy. Ailsa knew instinctively what she was about to do.
‘What about her? Do you recognize her?’ asked Ailsa, recoiling from the screen.
‘Yes,’ said Matt.
She wondered how she was going to deal with this. Cyber-bullying, contraception, chlamydia, chemical highs – even the drugs were high tech. But she had them all covered. It was the unknown unknowns that always got you in the end. She felt so bad for the girl. How would she tell her parents?
‘Who filmed it? Do you think they did it themselves? Do you think the girl even knew?’ She turned towards him, searching for answers. ‘I think I’ve seen enough, Matt.’
‘You need to watch to the end, Ailsa,’ he insisted, using her name for the first time. ‘I’m really sorry.’ He got up from her chair. ‘I think maybe you should sit down.’
When it was finished he leaned over her and dragged the file to the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
The email she had been writing popped back up on screen. Ailsa glanced at the last word she had written,
aspiration
. It sounded like a medical procedure. She wished someone could perform it on her and wipe her memory of the images she had seen. But even if this were possible, she would be reminded of it in other people’s faces. Because by now surely most of the school must know. People would tread on eggshells around her. It would be like when her mother died almost exactly a year ago. Already she knew this was different. Any sympathy this time would be tinged with judgement. How could you allow this to happen on your watch?
Matt explained to Ailsa that he was going to speak to the head of IT. ‘We need to get the film taken down as quickly as possible,’ he said gently.
He made the phone call without waiting for her response. Certain phrases from this conversation reverberated around her head. ‘Inappropriate content … YouPorn … RedTube … Facebook … gone viral.’
She was relieved it was he who had approached her – his calm measured approach to helping nervous A-level students work out anything from revision timetables to genetic sequencing was exactly what she needed. The scale of the problem was beginning to dawn on Ailsa. Tsunami, earthquake, avalanche. The metaphors all involved natural disasters. But this was an unnatural disaster. It shouldn’t have happened.
‘No one will hold you responsible,’ Matt said. His hand hovered by her shoulder but he didn’t touch her.
‘Of course they will,’ Ailsa said. ‘I am accountable.’
This was clear minutes later when the chairman of
the board of governors called to talk about the situation. In lieu of sympathy, he discussed strategy, for which Ailsa was grateful because she couldn’t face any platitudes. He talked about crisis management and media blackouts. He pointed out that she was running a flagship academy and adverse publicity could be used to score political points. For legal reasons, he was overly concerned about whether ‘the incident’ had taken place on school property. He pointed out that a school scarf was visible in the background but agreed with himself that this wasn’t conclusive evidence.
