Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Take out a piece of paper, everybody,” Mr. Priddles said. “Time to kick butt, guys!”

The much anticipated writing test was today, producing the first marks of the term — critical to establishing Mr. Priddles’s early lead in the Teacher of the Year race. The subject was “The Old Days,” and the kids could write on any period — the objectives were legible handwriting, orthodox spelling, complete sentences. Tooly could provide none of these, for she had forgotten paper. She whispered to the boy behind her.

“You want to borrow some?” he responded. “Or you want to keep it? If you borrow it, you have to give it back. Or you want to keep it?”

“Can I have a piece?”

“ Can you? Or may you?”

Tooly glanced around for someone else to ask.

Mr. Priddles intervened, asking the boy, “ May she have a piece of paper, Roger?”

“She may,” the little pedant replied, handing it to the teacher.

“Now, then,” Mr. Priddles said, holding the sheet out of Tooly’s reach. “Say, ‘Pretty please.’ ”

“Please.”

“Not to me. To him. Pretty please.”

Softly, she did so.

Mr. Priddles lay down her reward, one sheet of paper. “Now what do you say?”

She hesitated, looked up. “Thank you?”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, then.” He left her to work.

Tooly stared at the blank page. Each time she raised her pencil over it, her fingers trembled. Why was she even here? And why did everyone love Mr. Priddles when he was so obviously horrible? Was she the only one who noticed this? She looked at the others writing, then back at her sheet. Several times, she tried to imagine the old days, yet the present days kept intruding.

“Time’s nearly up!” Mr. Priddles said eventually. “Finish up, cowboys and cowgirls. One minute, then hand them in.”

She had written nothing. Everyone else was getting up. Panicking, Tooly joined the mob crushing toward the front, slipped her blank page among theirs, and escaped into the hall.

The next day, she stood before the principal, insisting that she had handed in her work. It must’ve gotten lost. They knew she was lying and told her so. Tooly reiterated her predicament: she wasn’t even supposed to be in this grade. Please.

“Maybe that is the problem,” Principal Cutter acknowledged. “Maybe you have been in the wrong grade.”

Tooly’s despondency switched to excitement. Someone was listening! He placed a few calls and, minutes later, she had a new homeroom teacher, the affable Miss Fowler. In third grade.

Tooly pinched her stomach, saying nothing as she left the office. She had to do two years of her life over now.

After a week in third grade, Tooly was offered the chance to repeat her writing test under the supervision of a parent. If she performed at a superior level, the principal would consider — just consider — fifth grade, where a space had opened up.

Paul set the allotted twenty minutes on his digital watch, found her a pencil and paper, and started the countdown. Although she had an uncanny ability to know the length of one minute, Tooly suffered an equal inability to estimate longer periods: they stretched infinitely, then ended all of a sudden. Paul called time and lifted away her sheet, though her work was unchecked, uncorrected, incomplete. She hadn’t written one-third of what she’d planned to say about the old days.

“I didn’t get to the end.”

“We can’t cheat.”

“Just to put some small things in? Please?”

“They said only twenty minutes.”

Tooly lay on her bed, listening to the computer in Paul’s bedroom whirring and blipping as he began work for the evening. She crept back into the living room, drew her assignment from his briefcase, and resumed writing, continuing for nearly forty minutes, terrorized by the possibility of his return. One last time, she read over her essay. It was perfect:

Intrduction

People led a very different life from us in the Old Days. They did not travel alot because of the bad conditions. They had no radios telephones or any other means of communication. They had no television so they saw plays or listened to music instead. The punishments were very hard and cruel. Their clothing was very different from ours. The rich ladies wore beatiful colorful dresses and lovely hats. The poor had less clothes.

People were tougher and noisier than we are now they were quick to lagh and sing but also quick to quarrel and fight.

They were fearful of wichcraft, but respectful of others of higher rank.

They were usually married at 14 yrs, or there about, middle aged at 30 yrs, and not many lived to an old age.

They made cheese. Alot of fruit was grownwas grown especially apples and cherries. The rich and powerful land owners siezed the common land and fenced it in as their own.

People liked to have their houses decrated beautifuly with carvings. They also liked attrative chimneys. Not all houses were made of wood. Infact many of them were made of brick.

The sailors who manned ships in the Old Days lived a hard and often dangerous life. Their ships were small and cramped. The men lived in front of the ship which was damp and like the rest of the ship infested with rats.

A woman who nagged her husband was tied to a ducking-stool and ducked in a pond or river. She could also have a scold’s bridle put on her head. In the bridle was a piece of iron which was fastened across her tounge and kept it still.

THE END.

She counted the paragraphs — eight, the most she’d done in one go. She slipped the test back into Paul’s briefcase. The following morning, he stuffed it into an envelope and signed his name over the sealed flap, sending it with her to school. Tooly handed it in, jittery with excitement.

That evening, Principal Cutter telephoned her home to give the result. She handed the receiver to Paul and ran into her room. After he’d hung up, Tooly rushed back, heart pounding, to learn the grown-ups’ verdict on her life. “Did he say I can go in fifth?”

Paul collected his binoculars. As a special occasion, he said, they were going to look for birdlife at Lumpini Park.

In the early-evening heat, he gazed up at the trees, as she gazed up at him in agony. “Keep your eyes out for bulbuls and bee-eaters,” he said. “You hear that? That was a coppersmith barbet.” He directed Tooly to a leaking hose, at which a blue-winged pitta drank.

Paul pressed the binoculars to her eyes, his unsteady grip making for a dizzying view. “Your principal,” he informed her, “says it’s not believable that you wrote so much in twenty minutes.”

“But you timed me! Did you tell them?”

“I can’t cause a commotion. Can’t draw attention over this. Do you like that bird?” he asked, by way of apology.

“I don’t know.”

“You can stay in third grade.”

“No, please,” she said, looking at him.

“Or you can go up a grade.”

“To fifth?”

“Back to fourth, with your teacher from before, the one everyone says is so good.”

“Mr. Priddles?”

The Thai national anthem burst from the loudspeakers, as it did each evening at 6 P.M. Everyone fell silent and stood at attention, even the joggers, chests heaving, sweat rolling down their faces. In hired boats on the lake, people stilled the wobbling vessels.

“But I—”

“Shush,” Paul said.

“I wasn’t supposed to be in that grade,” she whispered. “It’s—”

“Shh!”

The school gave her a failing mark for the writing test, which drove down Mr. Priddles’s class average; he might not win Teacher of the Year now. Even more vexing, this girl — whom he’d generously taken into his class — turned out to be a defiant little thing. She never laughed at his witticisms, though others were in hysterics. She was a dud, and he was saddled with her.