Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Chloe said something but her voice was muffled by her bag and her head-down position. ‘Tell it to fuck off. I don’t need the stress.’

‘You heard what she said,’ Emma said, still rubbing, and made a clicking noise in her throat. It could have been asthma, or purring. ‘Why don’t you take the hint and go and sit with one of your other friends?’

Her smile made her flat face even wider.

Chloe calls you panhead , I wanted to say.

The walls of the art room were covered in drawings mounted on sheets of black construction paper. One wall was devoted entirely to still life: carrots and tomatoes arranged suggestively and sketched by some joker, wobbly bananas done in felt pen, and a painting of a crumpled crisp packet almost hallucinatory in its detail and accuracy. Another wall devoted to blotchy and smudged attempts at pointillism and one more of pictures of knotted rope, balls of wool, hanks of tangled string: all vivid in black and brown oil pastels, thick enough to scrape your initial into with a fingernail.

I got up, dragged my bag roughly out from under Chloe and went to lean against the paintbrush sink at the side of the classroom. Of course there was nowhere else to sit. It didn’t feel like anyone else had been paying attention, everyone all caught up in the intricacies of their own dramas, but I scanned the room and saw the gaps close up and the empty stools disappear as if the walls themselves were absorbing them.

I should mention this to Donald, I thought, because he will know something about this: herds, mass minds, schools of tiny fish insignificant and edible as individuals, but fearsome and magnificent as one huge flickering shoal. People do it too, I thought, but I already knew that.

Shanks emerged from his office patting the back of his collar. It looked, I thought with a jolt, and before I could stop myself, as if he’d only just put his shirt on. The thought of him being naked in front of a poster of Marc Bolan, maybe even painting like that, made my feet tingle. I closed my eyes and waited for the sensation to pass. Chloe would have called it a cheap thrill. He clapped his hands, as usual, and sat on a corner of his desk, put one ankle on the opposite knee and reached for his register.

‘Glad to see you back in fine fettle, Miss Farley,’ he said.

‘Thanks, sir,’ Chloe said, her cheeks colouring up.

Then he leaned towards her, spoke quietly while the usual classroom noise surged around him, but I heard what he said.

‘Come and see me afterwards. A quick word, please. Bring,’ he waved the corner of the register in Emma’s direction, as if he was wafting away a bad smell, ‘Laura if you want.’

He didn’t sound pissed off, only stern and calm and determined to be kind. He was going to do his pastoral care voice, I thought, and force her to go and see the nurse.

In the first year or two of high school, the nurse, whose real name was Patsy, was called Nitty Nora the Biddy Explorer, because if you went to get a plaster or a suck on your inhaler, she’d always sneak in a check of your head as well.

In Year Nine the girls would call her Dr Jamrag, because you had to go to her office for supplies if you were caught short. She had a drawer filled to the brim with Dr White’s – the sort of hospital-issue sanitary towels that made you waddle and weren’t even for sale in pound shops. Someone once asked for a tampon, and got a lecture about toxic shock syndrome, natural flow and the importance of the hymen. Seeing her for the hymen talk was such a terrifying prospect that none of us were ever caught short – there was a trick you could do with toilet paper and a folded-up sandwich bag that would hold you over until home-time, and we taught it to each other in whispers during PE.

If the Year Tens and Elevens spoke about Patsy at all it was with a bit more respect because there was a rumour that you could get little paper bags full of condoms from her, or at least she knew where you could get them for free, no questions asked. It might have been a rumour, but being sent to the nurse, or being seen coming out of her office meant only one thing to the rest of us. And all of us, well, all of the boys, at least, were obsessed with condoms – there were always one or two stuck to the windows, and such a plentiful supply of them spare for water bombs that the rumour about Patsy and her paper bags was probably true.

I imagined Chloe in her office, and under the folding sick bed, a treasure chest of foil packets shining like coins.

‘What are you doing perched there?’ Shanks said. He looked at me, up on the sink, and shook his head. ‘You’ll give yourself piles – that porcelain must be freezing.’

I know he didn’t mean it. Most adults have completely forgotten the way things are at school. The word ‘piles’ released such a great gale of laughter that it took Shanks several minutes to get the class under control again.

He was standing in front of the longest wall – the one covered in all the coursework from the Year Elevens who were taking art for GCSE. Usually the ones who had problems reading or writing, or getting themselves dressed properly. They were the best pictures though. Chalk, charcoal, pencil, on blue and white and grey paper. Glasses filled with ice and something carbonated, so well drawn you could almost hear the fizz. Car wing mirrors, windows, the curved reflective bonnet of a car. Lightbulbs, more windows, and the strange lozenge-shaped bulbs of streetlamps. I fell into the pictures, gazing at the glass and water, ice and bubbles, until Shanks banged the spine of the register against the edge of the desk and demanded silence.

‘For those of you that have been watching the news,’ Shanks said, and held the closed register in front of his crotch like he was taking a penalty, ‘the rumours that the school is going to close so you can all stay safe at home and in bed have no doubt got your little minds working.’ He put down the register and started to pace. His hair sprung up from his head in thick pale tufts – there was a touch of red in it, as if he’d been a full-on ginger in his younger days. Strawberry blond, although that’s not a very manly way of describing it.

‘I’m here to tell you that’s not even half true – there are no plans for closures, and if there were, I’m sure I’d know about them before Terry Best. While the council has had a chat about 8 p.m. curfews for the under-sixteens, that’s not something the school would decide, so there’s no point passing around that petition when you’re supposed to be listening to me, Rachel Briggs. Thank you. In your bag until home-time.’

The thing is Shanks wasn’t even that tall. Chloe said height, the ownership of a car and foreplay were all you needed from a man – expecting anything else was being picky, a perfectionist, and the reason why I shouldn’t be expecting to get a Valentine from anyone but Donald this year. Again. She could talk. Carl had both ears pierced.

‘No closure, no curfew, but I’m asking you – for the sake of yourselves, your parents and my nicotine-addled heart – to be careful with yourselves. I know what you get up to at night. Monsters, the lot of you, sneaking out of the back bedroom window as soon as your parents are asleep. I know what you get up to in the bus shelters, in the back of the train station, on the roof of the Spar, round the docks, underneath the jungle gym in the kiddies’ swing park – Danny Towers.’

He stopped for the expected laugh, which came. Danny was shoved and punched by his friends, and smirked proudly.

‘I’m a realist,’ Shanks said, glanced at me on my porcelain perch and almost winked. ‘I’m not asking you to stop. I’m not telling you to stay in at night and I’m not telling you that you need to spend the whole weekend hoovering up for your mother and arranging flowers at St Peter’s. I’m not that old that I don’t remember what it’s like. What I am doing, is asking, imploring, beseeching and warning you that whatever you do, do it in pairs. At least. Promise me, 3Y1, that you’ll be sensible until this pest is caught.’