The other teachers sulked when they had to cover old Combover's after-school detentions. Mr Keogh and Miss Cross muttered in stage whispers about how the 'elderly mother' card was played too often, how they nearly all had dependents, how this was very sad though...
As if Jonno, rocking on his chair along with the rest of the gobshites, were not only invisible but had all gone deaf and all.
He doodled a leaf on the corner of his foolscap.
Some saddo supply had been telling them about adding jectives, pointing in desperation ( thinly disguised as enthusiasm ) at the sorry mess of dead leaves mulching the muddy playing field...it's Autumn ! she declared...the leaves are Golden! and Brown!... and the sky is Gay!... words can be dry, she'd said... and did they know the song ?
They'd been doing Geography for fuckssake....colouring-in some map about flood-plains, but she didn't care about that and neither did they. She had been quite young but Jonno and his mates still thought she was a sad old cow...she'd been pulled in after the watery-eyed secretary had come and asked Mr Comb to 'pop into the Head's office for a minute'...
Jonno was scarfing a bag of salt n vinegar he'd snatched from a year 7, reverting back to some kind of natural order at break around the vending machine. They agreed that Combover's sudden absence probably had something to do with perving...he'd been spotted by a few kids who'd been having a fag by the car-park, fumbling with the keys at the lock of his shitty old Fiat before taking off as fast as it would go...he didn't even have his battered leather bag with him so he must have been in a dead hurry...
Every lesson that streak of piss would bump softly into the classroom with that bag and rummage out piles of papers, his bibles of AQA and OCR... he'd read them out sections of exam board 'requirements' and then scrawl a 'keyword' on the whiteboard with his own blue marker (always kept in his shiny 'newsreader' jacket pocket)... this morning it had been 'Evidence',...his pen never even squeaked on the shiny plastic, he was that shite...then he sat down behind the front desk with a smaller red pen, and made busy little scribbles on the sheaves of paper, ignoring the class...then the secretary had bustled in and breathlessly called him away. He'd gathered all the loose white leaves back into his bag, put his pens back in his pocket and scarpered without a word , bumping back through the door then closing it softly behind him.
Jonno glanced up as the snickering etched its way through the hall...
And there he was...
Combover... heading towards the gate, kicking golden autumn leaves from his path and swinging his bag around in big circles like a sling-shotter or an overgrown toddler...he let it go on the fourth swing and stood staring at Keogh through the glass as it thudded into the pane, white paper flying up and fluttering down onto the muddy ruts and divots...
As he broke into his stride again he glanced over his shoulder and raised his scarecrow arm...
The chairs scraped and clattered as they all thundered over, bellowing and laughing and flicking V's , giving him the two-fingered salute back...
Keogh was trying to draw the torn curtains on the long streak, who was fishing his car keys out of his pocket as he flung through the gate, leaving it open...
They spent the next twenty minutes picking the litter off the field... Jonno saw that a photocopy he held in his hand had 'Mexico' printed on top of a dry looking column of numbers. Some had been circled sketchily in red...and he wondered despondently if that was going to be their next coursework assignment, even as he crumpled it into a ball and sent it flying into the skip with the rest of the rubbish.
