Amongst Others, Unnoticed
His hair, which now existed only on the perimeters of his scalp, still looked as though it had somehow been knitted to his head. He was stooped over a newspaper, a pen sagging between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. I sat no more than ten feet away, but felt safely anonymous: when he last saw me I would have been sixteen at most. His checked cotton shirt, the sort he once wore in class, was frayed around the collar, and the turn-ups on his cords were rucked unevenly above his ankles. There was a heedless air about him, a sense of neglecting life itself, and I wondered if he came here every day.
It was perhaps forty years since he gave me A-minus for English. The minus stung a bit, but was probably fair.
‘When you write well you’re as good as anyone I’ve taught,’ he said. ‘But you need to do it more than once a term.’
I’ve thought about those statements, English at the time being my only bastion of self-esteem. For one thing he would have been no older than twenty-five when he made them, so wouldn’t have taught many students. For another I was never someone who could will a thing into fruition, an essay or anything else.
I found it difficult now to see him so diminished. If he wasn’t exactly heroic to my teenage self, he was significant. My father was distant, and Adam Finch had quickly established himself as approachable and straightforward. But more than that he took an interest. You could say he filled a gap.
Bearing in mind he would then be relatively new to teaching, he must have been a natural. Perhaps for a teacher there’s a critical period when you’re young enough to be accessible but old enough to have authority, when you’re experienced but not jaded, and when a single pupil’s gormless face doesn’t merge into all the others you’ve stared at, term after term. Perhaps my class simply got him at a good time. Without doubt, I did.
I continued to observe him now. It seemed a bit indecent, like peering through a one-way mirror: the other party vulnerable in their unawareness of scrutiny. Evidently life had not treated him well, but I’d already known that from what emerged in the press. In the time of my schooldays teachers still enjoyed the default respect of their profession. He would have lost his share, and abruptly.
I cast my mind back, imagining myself behind a sloping oak desk with a hole for an inkwell and gouged with teenage aphorisms. He had no problem keeping order, but there was always a sense that he was that bit more on our side, that bit separate in spirit from the chalk-smeared, elbow-patched orthodoxy of the school staff room.
They were different days, of course, before the syllabus became a trammel and the teacher a weary automaton. He had scope, and he used it. If you showed interest in an author, he might lend you one of their books. If he saw you scribbling when you should have been reading, he might glance over your shoulder and say nothing. Small freedoms, it’s true, but they added up. I switched from football to rugby, simply because he coached it.
I sipped my coffee, an impulse seeping into me. I wanted to tell him about my life. More specifically I wanted to share my small triumphs, at least those I could hope he’d think relevant. I had published some books. They had been well received. I had written articles about the work I did. I remembered his praise as if I was still a teenager.
I wished I could unremember the newspapers. They all said the same thing. The pattern had continued at each school where he taught. Then he’d retrained as a social worker and it had started again. Finally someone came forward.
I visualised the accompanying photo, his mouth slanting curiously to the right, his eyes dead, his physiognomy reshaped by the passing of time and the secrets he must have hoped would never emerge. Could it be possible I still craved the approval of such a person?
I remembered his persuasiveness – a quality he clearly used for a spectrum of purposes. I was lucky in the way he used it on me: others were not. Surely things could have gone differently? At that time life was fresh: he was only a decade older than us and must have envisaged other futures.
I looked at him again. His pen still dangled listlessly. I felt affronted that he should struggle with what was probably a simple crossword. Perhaps he could no longer concentrate. Or perhaps it was a pretext to be amongst others, unnoticed. I wished our respective circumstances were not as they were. I wished I hadn’t been forced to restructure so many memories.
He put the pen down, leaned back, and turned to see me looking at him. I might have been transparent. His gaze was a void, denying its recipient any feeling of common humanity. I dropped my eyes, suddenly a schoolboy groping for points of reference. He had made the world seem a vehicle of possibility, the future a place of truths to be discovered. Surely we were right to believe him?
When I looked again he was standing up, pulling on a tweed jacket. The way it sat on his shoulders made me think of all the teachers I had known, whose clothing inevitably looked as though it belonged to a slightly different body. It was almost a fond memory.
Placing his pen in his breast pocket, he picked up his newspaper and made his way to the door. He had acquired a limp and an air of hesitancy, and perhaps it was this that made me rise and follow him into the oblivious morning street, towards the twist, and shadow, of the past.
Mike Fox is married and lives in Richmond, Surrey. His stories have been nominated for Best of Net and the Pushcart Prize, listed in Best British and Irish Flash Fiction (BIFFY50), and included in Best British Stories 2018 (Salt), His story, The Violet Eye, was published by Nightjar Press as a limited edition chapbook. His collection, Things Grown Distant, featuring photographic illustrations by Nicholas Royle, is available from Confingo Publishing at www.polyscribe.co.uk
