Janet and John

Before I was an unsuccessful writer I was a successful reader. Mrs Boyle never doubted me. She taught my big sister Janet and John and copperplate. My big brother HB pencil stroke and spidery crawl. And my other big sister to shut up and stop hitting me when I picked my nose, but not very successfully, because primary school teachers weren’t allowed in our house. I came from a long line of successful readers, stretching all the way back to Saint Colombo and the Kings of Ireland with their fierce red bushy beards that spoke of the kind of shennanigans that would be best left at the classroom door, thankyou, like chewing gum or a penny Giant Gobstober that should never have been started-in- on, unless we had a week’s holiday. It had barely turned fuzzy pink and purple whilst orbiting my mouth, and biting it with my molars to crush down its colours, was like flinging rocks at the moon. My eyes and Giant Gobstoppers, were too big for my mouth, but it would have been a planet trajectory changing tragedy to ping into the empty cold green-gray metal bucket space beside Mrs Boyle’s desk, with the fancy-dan pencil sharpener ready to whir into pointy life, so I had to sneak it into my grey school short’s pocket for play-time that would never come that side of eternity.

There was no dyslexia. No attention deficit disorder. No disorder at all. Mrs Boyle dressed for trouble. She wore pearls to show she was a lady and a scratchproof herringbone suit that little hands could not clasp. She swished as she clip-clopped about and embalmed herself in the sterility of dead things, the smells of a closed- mouth medical cabinet. Her cuffs rode up her arms just so, and let her cold long fingered corpse hand’s calculate the algebra of the dip and clip and nip as she patrolled her beat, between the three rows of desks, and 46 bums, berthed together like the slave ship in Ben Hur. We were assured of reading Janet and John, Book 1, by the time we left her class at the end of the year as we were of death, only more so.

Everyone shared a desk. Only the exceptional Meta Bell, who never missed a day at school that year, did not. Meta Bell never did anything wrong. Her arm never waved in the air like a car aerial in high winds to answer a question. She never opened her eyes when they were meant to be closed in prayer, with God watching, and took a sneaky look at what everyone else was doing. Meta Bell never did anything much apart from being Meta Bell. Her squat frame carried the putrid second-hand decay of her dad's work, Ping the binman, into the classroom, and she always seemed to wear the same clothes, or so it seemed. The once mauve patterned dress with faded yellow buttercups, glued like one of my blue crayon drawing to the classroom wall, slipped lower and lower down her sweating back as the year wore on and turned our faces ghost white. She seemed moulded into her seats, fat-jam elbows spreading out over two of the wooden backrests, at the back of one row of desks nearest the window, a butterball face with a nose that sucked in snottery-green air like an engine missing a down stroke. Her hair was uncut, but somehow shaped itself around her head like a greasy bowl of a helmet head. The first time I heard her a red faced fire-engine noise ballooned out of her mouth, when Noel Behan accidentally-on purpose- stabbed her with a toy compass when we were meant to making square shapes in the sand pit.

Noel Behan knew what to expect and he was not sorely disappointed. Mrs Boyle picked him up by his outsized ears like a trophy and dragged him to the front of the class.

‘It wasn’t me.’ He tried all the usual bag of crying and squirming and crawling along the floor like a snake.

Mrs Boyle efficiently pincered his flapping wrist, and methodically unfolded the fingers on his left hand, one at a time. The silence was all in the struggle and the scream was made more real when he was hit with the black leather tawse. The back legs screeched as an army of chairs scraped an inch or more forward and then dug in, as if the long stemmed electric lights were flickering, and we were transported en masse to the Saturday morning ABC minors, and we’d got to the gory bit we couldn’t watch, but couldn’t look away. My tongue absently chewed, and teeth clicked like knitting needles, on my Giant gobstopper, before coming to my senses and swiftly shuttling it safely from my mouth to my lap, and underneath my desk to my side pocket, glad Mrs Boyle was giving Noel Behan a thrashing, six of the best, cut to four in consideration of his delicate age, and hadn’t noticed, or else it might have been me up beside him.

Mrs Connelly appeared when it was all finished. She was like the woman, with the little light on her tray that sold ice creams at the cinema. Everybody liked her, because she was old and grey haired and wasn’t Mrs Boyle. When she took you away from the class you got to choose a sweet from a little plastic tray on rollers that she pulled open from underneath her desk. That day she took Noel Behan away first. When he came back he looked as if he had been practicing crying, in a self-satisfied kind of way. I hoped that he hadn’t taken the Blackjacks from Mrs Connelly’s tray. I liked Blackjacks best. Next, Mrs Connelly took Meta Bell away. But she never came back. Not even after lunchtime, when, even if she had been taken to the school nurse for a lie down, she should have recovered. But maybe it was the nits. We were told they could get onto anybodies hair, and I’d caught them before, but they seemed to prefer Meta’s hair best, in the same way that I preferred apples and not oranges, but would eat both given half the chance. The nits were Mita’s way of dogging school while she was at school. She was always getting sent home. I wondered why they didn’t just cut all her hair off, the way Terry Ross’s dad had. But then I figured maybe special scissors were needed, like hedge clippers, to cut through the mat of her hair, and her dad didn’t have any, because he lived in a tenement block in Dunn Street, which didn’t have hedges.

The afternoon ran fine after that because we got reading and writing practice, which I was the best in the class at. I shared a desk three down on the second row with Martin Monaghan, who was ok, apart from trying to beat me at reading our copy of Janet and John, Book 1 and flicking the pages quicker than any normal person could read them, but it didn’t work because I was better than him, and kept my teeth gritted and grinding as one finger spoke the words, and the finger on the other hand pressed like a red button on the bottom of the page. He knew better than to try anything, for I had a history of kicking and a big brother. It was his job to batter people that were bigger than me, even if they were the same size, and it was my job to let him. Martin Monaghan had nobody, but a mother that was dead and, worse than that, a dad that was old and baldy, and made even more so because he wore a Mackintosh, crumpled grey as the smirry rain, tied tightly around his waist, like women did, and hung about smoking outside the school gate for him to get out as if he was a baby, and not six. I was glad when the bell rang and Mrs Boyle told us to put our books away, because I could feel a kick working its way into my legs.