Ah, the novel. Now there's a genre for the illusion of the impartial author to flourish.
I do rant a lot, and I've been getting fed up with the sound of my own voice. So, for a change,
please enjoy today's stories. I hope you're all sitting comfortably... and listening at the
back.
Gareth leaned against the wall, fingers groping for the stub of chalk in the wooden tray by the blackboard. He was waiting for the teacher to correct the spellings in his book, and she was desperately trying to decipher his handwriting.
"And don't write on the blackboard." She instinctively knew what he was up to, despite squinting at his exercise book with furious determination.
"I'm not going to, Miss."
"I thought I said not to write on the board?" She leant back in her chair.
"I'm not... I'm just..."
Voices started to pipe up at this squealing opportunity.
"He is, Miss, he is, look, he just did!"
"Gareth, go on, write 'cock'," hollered a voice over the rest.
The teacher was just about to go to the effort of telling Gareth to sit down, a tricky decision to make, between calming the mass hysteria of the chalk hijack or upsetting the volatile Gareth, when the situation started to resolve itself.
"Oh, bollocks. Look at me sleeve." In his attempts to snatch the chalk stub, Gareth's jumper sleeve had trailed in the piles of dust in the chalk tray. It made a change, as the dust normally leapt out and stuck itself to whatever the poor teacher was wearing, or her forehead, or even more obscure places.
Gareth started rubbing the chalk dust, the first mistake of course, as it then spreads even further and becomes stuck between the material fibres or skin pores.
"That's what they call karma, Gareth," his teacher sagely informed him.
"You what?"
"Karma. You do something bad and then something bad happens to you."
"Korma, Miss?" Russell had woken up.
"No, Russell, that's a curry. We're talking about karma. That means if you do good things then good things happen to you."
"Like Es, Miss? Pills an' that?"
The teacher sighed.
"What's she talking about?" she heard Stacey whisper to Gill.
"Dunno," said Gill. "I think she's going to buy us a curry if we're good."
"Really?" Stacey's face lit up. She spotted Gareth still brushing at his arm. "Gareth, sit down now," she ordered. "C'mon, you can sit by me."
Darren leaned back on his chair legs. "Miss, you got a ruler?"
The teacher chuckled to herself, albeit with a grim menace. "Funny you should ask, Darren. The last time I saw my last remaining self-provided ruler was this very time last week, when you borrowed it to whack Liam."
"What's happened to it then?"
"That's what I was wondering, Darren."
"Are you saying I nicked it, Miss? 'Cos I never."
"Nah, me neither," joined in Liam. The teacher's eyes fell upon his pencil case, where a grubby off-white 30 cm special projected through the broken zip. He followed her gaze.
"Nah, nah, Miss, that ain't yours. Is it Dar?" he protested in the strongest terms.
"Nah, Miss. He nicked that one from Mrs Owen in Textiles."
added 8/11/03
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