Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

In the end it’s a good enough project. We laugh at some of the ruder messages, then Alex finds one which says You see a ship! And we stop wanting to play.

We have a break, then Elizabeth says we should change activity: to real remembering.

‘Who wants to go first?’

When nobody volunteers she begins:

‘Dad used to talk about memory. He said there was short-term, and there was long-term. Can anyone tell me what the difference is?’

Nobody wants to say and get it wrong.

‘All right, so short-term’s the thought you just had. It doesn’t last, unless you remember it again. Long-term lasts, but sometimes you need to remember it to keep it strong. Otherwise it can fade, and you forget.’

She waits for us to understand. I try to remember what I had for dinner – no, it’s gone. I should’ve practised.

Elizabeth: ‘Who’ll go first?’

No one answers. Calum Ian looks up at the cracks on the ceiling, then stretches out his arms and collects back like he’s years after being bored.

‘Will you try, Duncan?’

Duncan pretends to be reading his jotter. But then, to surprise us all, he stands. He stands for the longest time, even past the point of my being nervous for him.

‘Dad used to have a game where he pretended he was a robot,’ he says in a hurry. ‘You’d control him, except he might attack.’

He waits for us to say anything. When nobody does he goes on: ‘I remember he was friendly after the pub. If he’d gotten drunk he had a joke about people annoying him to give him a trophy. He didn’t want it. They’d run up the street after him, chasing him. It was sort of stupid…’

He looks out at us, seeing if we’re still listening, looking like he’s sure we’ll be bored.

‘I thought he was trying to make himself out to be important… I thought he was worried about being too ordinary as a dad. That’s why I always practise my fiddle: so he can see how good I am when he comes back. So I can make him proud.’

He stops. Elizabeth makes a go-on face. We’re meant to be writing it all down for Duncan to keep in his diary, but I mostly prefer just to be listening.

‘Mam, she played I spy. She said it in the Gaelic. Said it with sounds, as well: I hear with my little ear. You could hear the kettle, or the wind. Or the fridge. Once she did it for her stomach rumbling. Then for her baby.’ He stops for a while, picks at some fluff on the edge of his sleeve. I can see all his face now. There’s new scabs on his chin.

‘Dad didn’t play the robot game when everything went bad. There wasn’t much I spy then either.’

After a long time and with a quiet voice he asks: ‘If a baby isn’t born, does it still get up to heaven?’

Calum Ian stops writing. He leans across and raps Duncan hard on the arm.

‘That’s you finished. You’ve done your bit. I don’t want you talking about them, all right? So, you’re done, suidh sìos . Now get your arse in and sit.’

Duncan wants to stay standing – but when Calum Ian gets up and folds his arms, he sits. His big brother looks annoyed, or maybe sad, I can’t tell. He gives Elizabeth a look like she did a stupid thing for encouraging Duncan.

‘Know what I think?’ he says. ‘There’s just as much stuff we need to forget. So get on, Big Brains, answer that: how do we stop ourselves from remembering?’

We wait on Elizabeth.

‘Remembering is all we’ve got,’ she says.

It feels like the right time to change topic. Elizabeth writes down Duncan’s memories then gives them to him.

‘Let’s move on to sums,’ she tells us.

It’s my job to hand out the workbooks. We all know the pages, but I say them anyway because that’s what happens in a class. My lesson is counting money. I have to count picture-bundles of spending money in under a minute. I use the clock on the wall. It takes me two minutes, but only forty seconds if I cheat.

Alex, who’s young, has to read Kipper’s Birthday , which he’s done before but this time with feeling. Duncan’s the same age as me, yet he won’t be encouraged. He mostly lies head-down until it’s time to go. Calum Ian is one year below Elizabeth, so he copies her mostly.

I turn the pages and stare at the sums I know I did last year. The book is very good – giving examples, sums that are worked through, but even so, it’s not enough. I don’t want to tell the boys that I don’t know. The last time I did that they called me Gloic, which means brainless idiot, not even anything to do with the truth.

Then the sun starts to shine on my desk, and now I want to be outside. I think of the gardens we saw on the way here, with flowers I haven’t the name for, either in the Gaelic or English. I recognised some very big daisies, but the rest I didn’t know. Daffodils? Roses, maybe? There might be a book in one of the houses, or the library. For learning there can’t be a better place to start than there.

‘This is dumb,’ Calum Ian says.

I look up at Elizabeth, who pretends not to hear, at least not until he says it for a second time.

‘Why is it dumb?’

Calum Ian scratches his pen across the lid of his desk. ‘It’s the same page, over and over. Plus I never cared about sums in the before. How can they help us now?’

Elizabeth lines up her jotter and pencils. Then says, ‘Sums are needed for lots of things.’

‘Say some.’

She tries to think of examples. In the long run she says, ‘Sums can tell you what the date is.’

‘No they don’t. All you need for that is a calendar. And there’s plenty of those in the post office.’

Me: ‘People used to tell the time by the sun. True. There was a shortest day and a longest. The olden-times people used sums to work it out.’

Calum Ian: ‘We’ve got calendars.’

Elizabeth: ‘Which nobody can agree the date with.’

Calum Ian: ‘Because you got your count wrong.’

He takes out his can opener – twirls the head of it, squinting his eyes at Elizabeth.

‘Why’d you get to be teacher? It could just as easy be me, or Duncan. Or Alex sitting quiet there. Or her. But it’s forever you.’

Elizabeth puts her pencils back in her satchel.

‘It’s not even as if we learn anything. We’ve been at this same page for days. Weeks. ’

Elizabeth leaves the teacher’s seat and goes to sit beside Alex. Then she takes out her things and looks patient.

I know Duncan will never get up to replace her: he’s too shy. Alex is both shy and too young: he’s only six.

We hear Calum Ian’s chair screeching. He scrumples his pages then goes to the teacher’s desk.

On the whiteboard he writes his name, then underneath:

‘There’s no point pretending to be a teacher, because I’m not,’ he says. ‘There’s no point in any of us pretending because none of us are. The – bloody – end.’

After this he draws an arse on the whiteboard, and I have to admit this is kind of funny.

But when we start to laugh he gets furious; he rubs off what he’s written then shouts: ‘Shut your traps! Sguir dheth sin! That means you as well, Ugly-face!’

He’s talking to his brother, Duncan.

Duncan hides as deep as he can in his jacket, to match the quietness of the rest of us.

Now Calum Ian looks worried to have said what he did. He goes back to his seat, rolls down his sleeves – but they’re clarty, so he rolls them back up again.

‘Duncan could teach us the fiddle,’ Elizabeth says in a quiet voice. ‘We could get them out of the music cupboard?’

‘I’m going home.’

Calum Ian begins to pack his bag. Duncan begins to collect his things, too.