James Hannah: The A to Z of You and Me

‘Detention for Kelvin, and the chalk’s landed with you. Up you come.’ He points a knobbly finger at one of the girls. She gathers up the chalk and tries to brush its mark off her jumper, before replacing Kelvin beside Miller.

Kelvin dumps himself back on his stool beside me.

D , she writes.

‘Good—’

Y .

Miller pauses awhile before mugging around to the rest of the class. Then he wipes her away, and picks the chalk up himself.

‘D, I, A, PEEEEEE, H, R, A, GEEEEE, M. Anyone who gets that wrong after I’ve spelled it out so plainly will deserve the detention they get, OK?’

Spirits broken, we mumble our assent.

‘Right, now, as you’ll hopefully remember from last year, the diaphragm is a membrane, just here in your chest, and when you breathe you are using your muscles to pull on that diaphragm, and in pulling it draws the air in through your nose and throat, and into your lungs , which enables you to breathe .’ Miller scrawls breathe tetchily out on to the blackboard and underlines the final ‘e’ about eight times. ‘Now — that is exactly what you can’t do—’ he picks up the large book that has been sitting on the bench in front of him all this while ‘—can’t do—’ he struggles to find the page, and an adventurous few begin to giggle ‘—if your lungs look like this .’

He cracks the book open at a double page that is completely taken up with a photo of a pair of lungs, branched through with black, like burnt cheese on toast.

One of the girls pipes up: ‘Ah, sir, that’s nasty.’

‘And that,’ concludes Miller with a self-satisfied flourish, ‘is exactly what is currently growing inside one of you.’

A sudden hush. He paces the room, bearing the chalk eraser before him, in his usual manner of dramatic pause, loving it. Loving it.

But what can he mean? What can he mean?

‘The only question is, which one of you currently has this growing inside them?’

From the left three-quarter pocket of his big blue blazer, he teases out a pack of cigarettes, and wields it between thumb and index finger in front of the class.

‘Which one of you is missing a nearly full packet of these from this morning’s session?’

We sit aghast. I look at Mal.

A pack of twenty Embassy No. 1.

He sits there impassive, watching with absolute innocence as his cigarettes are dropped with a light pat back on the desk, and Miller takes up his favoured place, leaning against the slender edge of the blackboard.

‘Well, there they are,’ he says. ‘Whoever wants to come up and collect them may do so now.’ His eyes seem to settle on Mal, before the bell for the next lesson rings off down the corridor, but nobody moves.

An impossible, unnatural silence descends as the game of chicken settles in. Outside, the corridors begin to fill and churn with kids making their way slowly to their next lessons, with maximum noise.

‘I know,’ says Miller, ‘you think I’m going to let you go.’

Shimmering silhouettes of students’ heads begin to imprint themselves on the frosted wireglass of the classroom door.

‘I know you think I’m going to have to let in the next class. But I don’t have to do anything.’

Mal looks at me, and I look at him, and an idea begins to form.

Miller makes his way slowly over to the door, and opens it. His presence immediately hushes all activity out in the corridor. He slowly fixes the door shut and returns his attention to us.

‘I have let classes stand out there for the full fifty minutes before today, and I’d be willing to do it again now. So.’ He sits down, and once more picks up the packet of fags. ‘So.’

Miller loves to have his enemies, and he’ll be even more triumphant to get the new kid. I’m sure he’s been zeroing in on Mal ever since Mal started sitting near me. And he seems all right, Mal. He’s got a lot about him. Miller’s just a twisted, bitter old has-been. Everyone hates him, and he knows it.

I don’t look at Mal. I raise my hand and it takes Miller a while to see it. Some of the girls see it, but they’re too scared to draw Miller’s attention to it.

‘Sir,’ I say.

Miller swivels his eyes first, and then turns his head to face me.

‘Yes.’

I want to say this without fear.

‘They’re mine.’

The class finally drains out and down the corridor, and Mal takes hold of my heavy schoolbag and shifts it to the next class ahead of me.

Noted.

Miller is already carefully manoeuvring himself between the desks and discarded chairs in my direction. I know what his response is going to be. Not anger, but sympathy. Annoyance, yes, a longer detention, no doubt, but sympathy because of my home situation, and him not wanting to step over the line.

The classroom door clicks shut behind him, and he softly begins to speak.

‘I must say, I’m disappointed—’

‘What did Miller actually say, then?’ asks Mal, sticking two Rizla papers together meticulously, the zips on the sleeves of his leather jacket jangling as an accompaniment. He lays the papers on his bag while he roots around in his coat pocket for his pouch and tin.

I’m sitting on the floor at the end of his bed, sucking on the thankyou beer he bought me. I’m a bit pissed.

‘Well I thought he was going to start going on about my dad, and about cancer and all of that stuff. But he didn’t really go there. He started talking about how he’d fallen in with a group of friends who’d got him to smoke a cigarette once, but that he hadn’t liked it, and it had made him sick, and he didn’t know why people ever did it.’

Mal laughs dirtily at the ceiling. ‘That tells you all you need to know about him, doesn’t it? Made him sick ? I bet he gets home and whips himself every night after work.’

‘Ha! Yeah.’ I begin whipping myself with an imaginary lash. ‘I must not let anyone spell diaphragm wrong .’

Mal cracks up, satisfyingly. ‘I must not glance down the girls’ tops and rub one out in the staff toilet at break time .’

‘Wet break,’ I say.

Mal laughs and points at me. ‘You’re a funny lad!’

I laugh myself and bask in the glory. Try desperately to think of something else funny to back it up with, but nothing comes.

Kelvin’s still standing, leaning against the door frame and nursing his can of Coke. He laughs a gurgly laugh. ‘I must not ever let anyone get away with anything! ’

The laughter expires, and Mal sets about twisting and mashing up the machine-made cigarette, emptying its contents into the fresh flat paper, before crumbling gear carefully and fairly up and down it.

‘So what’s this about your dad then?’ says Mal.

‘Oh, he died of cancer when I was six.’

‘Ah man, really?’

‘Yeah, that’s kind of why I did it, because I knew he wouldn’t want to push it too far.’

‘Ah, mate,’ says Kelvin, frowning, ‘that’s well low.’

‘What?’

‘It’s well sick, using your dad like that.’

‘Is it?’

‘No, it’s not, man, it’s genius,’ says Mal, compacting the mix, and rolling the loaded skin back and forth in his fingertips.

‘Ah no, not my style,’ says Kelvin, crouching down in the doorway and eyeing the joint with increasing nervousness.

‘The dad thing makes you untouchable. And, you know, it’s a shitty thing to happen to anyone, so if you can make it work for you, I think that’s a smart thing to do. It’s not like you haven’t earned it, is it?’

Mal dabs a piece of cardboard from the fag packet into the skin as a roach.