The House of Sleep (13 page)

When the sleepiness started she could feel it, but not fight against it.

The words zoomed in and out of focus before her eyes.

She willed herself to concentrate, but it was no good. Her eyelids were getting heavy: heavier…

Catherine woke her, ten minutes later, by shaking her shoulder gently and saying: ‘Sarah, wake up. Break’s almost over.’

‘Was I asleep? Oh, hell.’ Sarah sat up in her chair and blinked around the room. Her colleagues were all beginning to leave: even the bell had not roused her this time. Just as he
was going through the door, she called after Norman (a tall, rather anxious-looking student teacher in his early twenties): ‘I’ll be along in a little while, OK?’

‘Yes, that’s fine.’

‘Twenty minutes or so.’

He must find me very peculiar, she thought, opening her bottle of mazindol and popping a couple of pills in her mouth.

Too polite or too scared to say anything, though.

When the room was empty, she refilled her coffee cup and gradually, effortfully, managed to remember what she had been reading in the newspaper. It was a film review by Terry. Strange to think that she still received these weekly updates on his critical opinions, even though she had not actually seen him for more than ten years. From her passing acquaintance with his journalism she could draw a surprisingly complete picture: she was familiar with his tastes in music and films, she knew that he still lived in London, she could imagine what his social life was like, she could even hazard a reasonable guess at his income (three times more than hers? Four?). And yet to him, she must have become completely invisible. Did he ever think about her? she wondered. Ever remember the time they had shared a flat together, after graduating; ever ask himself what had become of her?

Not that it really mattered. Not that it made any difference.

She looked at the review again and couldn’t remember how much of it she had read. Skimming through it now, she found it more comprehensible than most of Terry’s outpourings. The general tenor, at least, appeared to be enthusiastic. ‘Fun for all the family’ was his (hardly very groundbreaking) conclusion, and on reading this phrase Sarah indulged herself in a bitter little smile. Well, she thought, that was just fine, for people with families. What about the rest of us?

This was an area into which her thoughts seemed to be leading her more and more often, these days, and she resolved to escape it immediately. Throwing the newspaper aside, she reached for a tall, unstable pile of folders and took out a
handful of Key Stage 2 assessment forms – one of the many new administrative by-products of the National Curriculum – and these distracted her, after a fashion, until it was time to go and check on Norman and the progress of his English class.

She did so with certain feelings of foreboding, for Norman aroused in her a complicated mixture of amusement and sympathy. In his favour, he was enthusiastic and good-natured, and seemed to take a genuine interest in the children (which did not translate itself, unfortunately, into anything resembling a rapport). But he was dangerously naive, and for someone so young his teaching methods seemed curiously old-fashioned. Sarah knew, all the same, that this was an easy criticism to make: the classroom atmosphere had changed so much during her eleven years in the profession that she shuddered to think how
she
would have fared if she was starting out now. She admired anyone who was prepared to try it, really.

Yesterday’s lesson, of which she had attended only the last ten minutes, had been largely shambolic. In accordance with a government ruling that pupils should be made to familiarize themselves with ‘classic poetry’, Norman had attempted to steer the class through John Donne’s ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, which Sarah had thought far too ambitious for a group of nine- and ten-year-olds. Their initial response of stunned boredom had transformed itself, by the time she arrived, into a chaos of facetiousness and hilarity. The chief troublemaker, as usual, was a boy called Andy Ellis, who when asked to respond to the line ‘Teach me to hear the mermaids singing’ said that it reminded him of the name of a film which he and a friend had recently rented from the video library because they’d heard it was about lesbians. Ignoring Norman’s attempts to change the subject, he went on to explain that this had been a deeply disappointing experience, owing to the film’s paucity of what he disarmingly referred to as ‘girl-on-girl action’. This had led to an animated discussion among the
male members of the class, not about Donne’s use of marine imagery, but about whether it was possible to get a glimpse of Sharon Stone’s pubic hair on the video of
Basic Instinct
by skilful use of the freeze frame. At the end of the lesson, very unwisely in Sarah’s view, Norman had asked everyone to write their own poems about stars and to bring them into class the next day.

The lesson was already in some disarray when she arrived, although things calmed down a little when she appeared and made her way to a vacant desk in the back row. Sarah got the sense, however, that each successive poem was meeting with greater waves of derision, and one girl – Melanie Harris – was clearly struggling to fight back tears. Following Sarah’s arrival, a couple of unexceptional efforts were read against a steady but containable backdrop of murmurs and giggles; and then it was Andy Ellis’s turn.

It was the very first line of Andy’s poem –
Listen up now, you dirty motherfucker
– which, for Sarah at least, set off the initial alarm bells. If it had been up to her, she probably would have intervened at that point, but Norman was locked into a horrified silence and allowed the whole performance to proceed uninterrupted.

Listen up now, you dirty motherfucker
If you messin with my bitch I’m gonna git you sucker
Gonna go down on the street, gonna get me a hit
Then I come round to your house and I beat you to shit
You gonna see stars, motherfucker, see stars
You gonna see stars, motherfucker, see stars
Gonna kill the little bitch if I find you in my bed
Gonna take out my Uzi, pump her pussy full of lead
Then you’re the next one, you know the score
Ain’t no one allowed to go fuckin with my whore
You see stars, motherfucker, see stars
You see stars, motherfucker, see stars.

While about half the class looked on open-mouthed with
either awe or amazement, Andy was rewarded with a noisy ovation from most of the boys and even one or two of the girls. Sarah could not help being professionally interested, in spite of her mounting unease, to see that responses to the poem seemed to divide up along gender rather than racial lines. Andy himself was from a (rather well-off) white family, which made his attempt at gangsta rap quite creditable, she thought; and she also liked the characteristically inventive way he had managed to incorporate the star motif. She wouldn’t have said any of this, of course: a simple request to see him afterwards and a hasty transition to the next reader would have been her way of handling the situation. Norman, on the other hand, seemed determined – once he had recovered his powers of speech – to wade on into ever deeper waters.

‘That was very interesting, Andy,’ he said, when the hubbub had partly died down, ‘but I wonder if you yourself have really
understood
what you’ve written.’

‘Of course I understand it.’

‘Yes, we understand it, sir,’ said another boy.

‘We understand every word, sir,’ said another.

(Sarah resisted the temptation to cover her face in her hands. She knew that they never called the teachers ‘sir’ unless the mood was particularly evil.)

‘Are there any words you don’t understand, sir?’

‘Don’t you know what a pussy is, sir?’

‘Of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t even seen
Basic Instinct.
’

‘That’s enough!’ Norman shouted, above the laughter. ‘This “poem” of yours, Andy, is nothing but a farrago of obscenities.’

‘Please, sir,’ said someone, putting up his hand, ‘I don’t know what a farrago is.’

Norman ignored him. ‘It’s just a lot of filthy nonsense, isn’t it, without rhyme or reason.’

‘It does rhyme, actually,’ said Andy. ‘
And
it’s got a story, just like the poem you made us read yesterday.’

‘A story, eh? Well I didn’t notice any story.’

‘Well, sir’, said the boy sitting next to Andy. ‘This black man is very angry with his friend, so he’s going to kill him.’

‘Yes, sir. And his woman.’

‘Because she’s been a bitchin’ whore, sir.’

‘Shut up! The lot of you.’ He homed in on Andy. ‘Is this your own work?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nonsense. How could you have possibly made up something like that?’

‘Well, I listen to a lot of rap music, and that sort of gave me the idea. People like Onyx, and M. C. Ren, and The Notorious B.I.G. Miss Tudor says it’s very good for us to open ourselves up to influences from other cultures and traditions.’

Norman glanced at Sarah with a look that was half accusation, half desperate appeal. She smiled back sweetly.

‘Anyway,’ Andy continued, ‘yesterday you told us that Pulp and Oasis wrote poetry.’

‘Well, yes, but–’

‘So what’s the difference here, sir? It isn’t because Onyx are black, is it?’

‘You’re not a racist, are you, sir?’

God, these boys are good, Sarah thought. For a moment she was almost proud of them.

‘Right. That’s it.’ Norman’s lips were quivering, and his face had turned chalk-white. ‘Andy, see me afterwards. You’re in
deep
trouble, now. You don’t know how deep. Now the rest of you, just shut the f –… Just shut up’ – as the class erupted into laughter again – ‘just shut up and listen to the next poem. I don’t want to hear another word out of you lot until the bell goes. Is that understood?’

The restoration of order was only superficial, and Sarah was doubly apprehensive when he chose Alison Hill as the next reader. She was by some way the youngest member of class, and was withdrawn and quiet at the best of times. Now, after Andy’s brazen theatrics, her voice sounded weaker and more timidly monotonous than ever.

‘My poem is called “Holes in the Sky”,’ she declaimed at great speed. ‘When stars the they turn into black holes. An astrologer was looking at three stars in the sky. Through his telescope. There was a little star and two big ones. One of the big stars died and turned into a black hole. The other two stars were very lonely. There were no other stars for millions and millions of miles. Just black air and empty sky. I feel sorry for those two lonely stars, said the astrologer. But he was too far away to do anything about it. So they just stayed there in the sky, looking sad, and although they twinkled sometimes, all the darkness and emptiness made them very scared.’

A semi-respectful silence ensued. One of the boys clapped sarcastically.

‘That was very good, Alison,’ said Norman. ‘Really very good. I did however notice one tiny mistake. Did anyone else spot it?’ There were no takers. ‘Well, you said that the man looking through his telescope was an astrologer, when I think you meant that he was an astronomer.’

‘What’s the difference?’ someone asked.

‘Well, it’s a very important difference.’ Norman wrote the two words on the blackboard, and turned back towards the class looking pleased with himself. ‘You see, there are only two letters changed between the words, and yet they mean completely different things. An astronomer is a serious scientist, who spends his time looking through telescopes and other scientific instruments to find things out about the stars, and an astrologer is a frivolous and superstitious person who only pretends to study the stars, and makes up horoscopes and other bits of nonsense.’

Sarah could sense another imminent change of mood. Alison seemed to be paying little attention to any of this: the expression on her face was listless, distracted, and for a passing moment Sarah felt that she could see within it the faded reflection of some other face, some nameless face from the past. (Perhaps it was the way that she held her mouth slightly
askew, and chewed carelessly on her lower lip.) Meanwhile, the rest of the class were recovering their appetite for mischief.

‘Are you saying that horoscopes aren’t serious, sir?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘But they’re in the newspapers.’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.’

‘I think you can learn a lot about people from their star sign,’ said one of the girls.

‘Yes, you can. What sign are you, sir?’

‘I bet you’re Leo, aren’t you, sir? Leos are supposed to be very strong and masterful.’

‘Is Scorpio rising in Uranus, sir – or is it just the way your trousers hang?’

After the lesson was over, Sarah and Norman walked across the playground together on their way to the dining hall. She didn’t talk to him about the lesson much, except to make vaguely reassuring noises and to hint gently that his choice of the Donne poem yesterday hadn’t been very appropriate. He was badly shaken by the experience: the accusation of racism, in particular, had shocked him quite deeply.

‘They were just trying to wind you up,’ said Sarah.

Norman stopped walking and looked at her. The sun was bright on the playground, and his eyes narrowed involuntarily as he said: ‘Do you think so?’

Sarah nodded. She ran a hand through her hair – the thick, almost shoulder-length grey hair by which Norman was already fascinated – and ended, without noticing it (for she had never noticed it) by taking hold of a clump and tugging at it lightly. ‘You’re doing fine. Really.’ She laughed. ‘You know, we’ve all been through it. When I think about my first teaching practice…’

They walked on a little further.

‘I’ve got a letter for you, by the way,’ said Norman. ‘It’s in my briefcase in the staff room.’

Sarah’s immediate assumption was that this was a letter he
had written himself: that there was something he wanted to say to her, some declaration too momentous to make in person. It was a great relief when he added: ‘It’s from a girl at college who says she knows you. I was talking about you with some friends, and this girl-I don’t know her very well or anything-says that she knew you years ago, when you were a student.’