Leavers Day

‘ Give a man a mask and he will tell the truth ‘
OSCAR WILDE

Beasley opened the door to the empty classroom, stepped into the semi-darkness, pulled out a chair and sat down. Gazing into his coffee cup he saw his reflection staring back at him through the coal black liquid; hollow eyes set heavily inside a tired face marked by worry lines which resembled a living road map of the last fifty years. Staring deeply into the impenetrable blackness he began to wonder how a young man of acute sensitivity and artistic ambitions became lost in a mist of lowly employment in a middle ranking High School, the mythology of the suffering artist turning into the nightmare of mediocrity, an imagination too fatally flawed for the limits of its skills, tempered with the realisation that his suffering would not be validated by either the production of great works or posthumous fame. Sipping at the bitter brew, Beasley felt a steady rise of bile begin to engulf his very being as the sickening reality of a life lived through imagined alter-egos, the heroic and romantic, exotic and alluring, began to eat at him like a cancer. Here was a man weighed down by his native environment yet consumed with a longing for the glamour of metropolitan bohemia. Like Billy Fisher, the mainstay of his Film Studies lectures, he had somehow conspired to miss the train.

After twenty something years together (Beasley had never been too good when it came to dates) he had finally concluded that Penelope knew absolutely nothing about him outside of the fact the he preferred to sleep on the left hand side of the bed and had an annoying habit of leaving toenails in the bath, which served as a source of both merriment and derision, depending on which particular doppelganger was inhabiting her head on any given day.
“They’re just a bunch of kids”, she’d said in that annoyingly condescending tone she adopted when seeking to gain the moral high ground.
Beasley had chosen to ignore the remark, instead opting to recite in his head the words to a song from his extensive collection of recorded artefacts, a library that could be traced back to his teenage years.
‘ Born a lady to the last – perfumed stationery,
Does it make you feel good to make me feel ordinary?’ he sang, in a perfect imitation of the original artist. Of course none of this could be verified with any degree of accuracy as Beasley always restricted performances of this nature to the confines of his imagination, but the fact that he had been doing so for neigh on five decades was a testimony to both his unswerving belief that there wasn’t an emotion known to man which couldn’t be expressed in a line from a popular song, and his uncanny ability to carry a jukebox around in his head. Indeed, this knack of total recall had been a source of both great frustration and brittle amusement to Mrs. Groombridge, the evil dragon who taught him French (with little success it must be noted), back in the days when twenty shillings made a pound and training shoes were things that teachers hit kids with rather than wore. She never tired of reminding him that, although he could never count past trois, he could recite the words to ‘Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ without once pausing for breath. As he sipped his java, luxuriating in the seductive aroma which evoked images of Fred & Ginger flying down to Rio, he thought of her wild grey hair, nicotine stained fingers and those tweed two-pieces she wore which smelt of palm violets and mothballs and reminded him of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, although what man would be seduced into throwing himself into a life threatening fling with that old bird was beyond even Beasley’s wild imagination. He’d heard on the school gossip grapevine that there’d once been a Mr. Groombridge, although he was long gone, driven into the arms of a pneumatic blonde half his age, with a smile like ice and the kind of figure that would make a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window. Thinking of this reminded him of Raymond Chandler and how, in the full fruit of his teenage intensity, he’d wanted to be a writer of pulp fiction paperbacks, working out of a tiny apartment, tapping away at a rusty old Remington for a dime a word, a half finished bottle of Early Times and a crumpled pack of Lucky’s at his side.
Another useless dream.
As Penelope engrossed herself in The Jeremy Kyle Show Beasley imagined his hands around her throat, grasping at her neck, squeezing the very lifeblood out of her bitter, rancorous body. The very image of her produced a sickness in his stomach and thoughts which bordered on pure evil. Beasley hated himself for feeling this way, as it was not in his nature to think ill of others, although where Penelope was concerned he was prepared to make an exception.

For Beasley Friday had come too soon. For weeks he’d been joking with them that he was counting down the days until he’d finally get to see the back of them with such practiced precision, it might be added, that a few had actually bought into his seemingly casual indifference and questioned as to what they’d done to upset him that he should think of them in such an offhand manner.
Then suddenly it was there; the gifts, the cameras, the speeches and the tears, although Beasley managed to hold his end together. The “we love youse” and “we’ll never ever forget youse” and then they were gone, marker pens in hands, snow white shirts to be signed, camera phones at the ready, poised to capture off the shelf poses and instant emotion for Facebook posterity.
Beasley stood in the centre of the empty room and surveyed the wreckage around him; the half eaten cakes, spilt cordial and discarded whiteboard pens, which lay like spent cartridges on a battlefield. He gazed out of the window and, on the edge of the sports field, saw an old man walking a small white dog. He seemed to be looking across the expanse of greenery and directly into Beasley’s eyes. For a brief moment it was almost as if they were both frozen in time. And then the man was gone, leaving Beasley alone in a room full of ghosts.

“Listen mate”, slurred the bloke at the bar, pumped up arms draped in tattoos. “If you don’t stop soon you’re gonna have me in tears”.
So he’d stopped telling the story to the prison warden who spent his days trying to educate lifers of how he’d been called up in front of the whole of the year in assembly and had been made to stand and listen while some very clever girls from his form had cried their way through a series of emotion laden speeches (none of which, to his eternal shame, he could now remember) while one of his likely lads had thrust a bottle of wine in his hand and patted him on the back as if he were a hero returning from the front line. “Have a drink on us mate’ his cheekily lop-sided grin seemed to say, while the smell on his breath and the glaze in his eyes telegraphed to Beasley that he’d already beaten him to it. As if this wasn’t enough there were more photo opportunities, with hugs and kisses and tears and smiles and more “we’ll never forget you sirs” before they all linked arms and skipped off down the driveway, disappearing into the horizon like Dorothy and her friends, following the Yellow Brick Road, only in this case one that led directly to the local outlet of a multiple chain concern which specialised in family type meals at affordable prices. He’d retreated to the Staffroom with a few other tearful souls; shell-shocked veterans of a five-year campaign where the ceasefire had seemingly taken everyone by surprise. Battle hardened troops. Grown men; hard men; men who didn’t take crap from kids, fighting back the tears and wishing they could turn back the hands of the clock, dreading going home with a backseat full of presents, a head full of memories, and someone waiting for them who just didn’t get it.
Penelope certainly hadn’t got it, which was why he was leaning on the bar talking to a total stranger; the type who looked as if he worked out at least three times a day, bringing this bloke to the edge of a meltdown as he described the wonderful gifts and moving speeches. The horsey woman behind the counter with a Cornish accent as heavy as molasses (and twice as sickly) put her hand on his, called him a treasure and handed him a free pint, all which served to make Beasley even more morose, although it didn’t stop him from wondering what she might be like in the sack, before grudgingly accepting that she probably wasn’t his type. But then again, who exactly was his type? He fancied it would be those elegant women who browsed weekends in bookshops or spent their lunch hours silently wandering through art galleries, musing languidly over a Rodin or Hockney, chewing on their designer glasses while wearing a look of studied intensity. The type he often talked to but never actually connected with. That, he acknowledged through a real ale haze, was the true secret of life.
Connectivity.
There are those who can and those who can’t, which only served to depress him further and reignite the latent feelings of resentment he’d been harbouring of late.
Damn those kids and the emotions they turned on and off like a tap!
He wasn’t saying they didn’t mean it. What he was saying was that they didn’t mean it like he did. But then it was alright for them, sixteen years of age with a lifetime of opportunity, burning off down life’s long highway. Sure, there’d be the odd one who’d screw up, fall in with the wrong crowd, come off the rails, maybe even do a little jail time, and there’d certainly be the failed marriages, substance abusers and a few who just wouldn’t fit in. But the vast majority of them were bright kids. So bright he’d described them as stars. Kids who were destined for big things, would make a big impact, earn big money and end up a long way from where they’d began.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
They’d upped sticks and left him. His kids, for God’s sake! Left him with a few good years on the clock but with no idea of how to do anything apart from stay where he was and watch time slowly slip away like sand through his fingers.
It was at this point that he realised that over the years he’d needed them far more than they’d ever needed him.
He’d climbed down off his perch around seven, bade all a hearty farewell and, after much weaving between parked cars and well-tended hedgerows, navigated a course back home. Penelope was not amused. But then again, neither was Queen Victoria, and judging from the pictures Beasley had seen of her on his albeit infrequent excursions into the History Faculty, she didn’t look as if she’d ever cracked a smile in her life.
‘I’m sorry’, he’d said. But so was Brenda Lee.
He made a half-hearted stab at eating his lunch before making his excuses and retiring to bed. That night he lay in the half darkness listening to Penelope’s incessant snoring and wishing that tomorrow morning he could be anywhere but that empty classroom.

After three days the dark clouds that had been following him around had turned into a thunderstorm, pouring even more memories on to his head, drenching him in their bitter droplets.
‘Rain drops falling from heaven
Could never wash away my misery
But since we're not together
I look for stormy weather
To hide these tears I hope you'll never see’
Trust Beasley to get caught without an umbrella.
He did what he always did in times of crisis and reverted to default mode. Busied himself with administrative tasks, marking essays from lessons he couldn’t even remember teaching with students he’d long ago lost interest in, entering numbers on to spreadsheets; projections, assessments, targets. Nothing but mumbo-jumbo designed to keep middle managers (a species he despised) in a job. But it was a poor distraction and Beasley was nothing if not a poor actor, and soon others began to comment on the changes in him; the tired, washed out complexion, stooped shoulders and faraway eyes, which all served to radiate a demeanor of studious ennui, an affliction Beasley had actively courted during his younger years when things like that seemed to matter, but which now hung off him like an old raincoat. His performance began to suffer and he was invited into an office for a chat about things.
Things.
How he despised that word.
Big things. Little things. Things that make you go ooohhh. Things that go bump in the night.
They asked him about lots of things and he responded as he always did when placed in awkward situations; he told them what they wanted to hear. How he embraced the vision, was committed to future development and excited by the challenges that lay ahead. All lies of course. Like Rhett Butler before him he frankly didn’t give a damn. As far as he was concerned they could take their things and stick them where the sun didn’t shine. He had other things to attend to.
Things of his own.

The worst time for him was that early registration bell which heralded the start of the school day. For five years Beasley, always a believer in the power of the fashionably late entrance, had sauntered into the classroom wearing a look of abject detachment to be confronted by twenty-six smiling faces. Okay, he now admitted to himself, they may have not all been smiling in syncopated unison, but there was a sense of optimism, a collective purpose, an acknowledgement that the very act of being in that room was somehow an enriching experience. The cheery greetings, requests for assistance, forged sick notes and frankly lame-arsed excuses had all served to set up the day. The collective sigh at the announcement of yet another tediously time consuming assembly and the good-natured way they went about the daily business of being rebellious teenagers. This, he realized, was what teaching was all about. He became a defender of youth, championing their cause and railing against the small-minded bigots who took pleasure in deriding their achievements, visions clouded by the warped rhetoric of a thousand Daily Mail leaders. He even tried to convince Penelope of their importance in the great scheme of things although, with crushing predictability, she was having none of it.

The idea had first planted itself in Beasley’s head some two years previous after one of those all too frequent blazing rows they’d had over nothing of consequence. She’d told him he was drinking too much wine and coffee and she wasn’t getting any sleep, living on the edge of this indulgence like a vulture shadows a man dying of thirst in a desert. He’d stormed off on one of his overly dramatic huffs and had ended up in a bar drinking cheap own brand scotch and confiding in some used piece of beat up jet trash, the kind of woman who has a couple of husbands in the bone yard and exists on a diet of cigarettes, brandy and cheap one liners. They’d chewed the fat over the way a bad romance can screw up a good thing and taken it for a walk around the block a couple of times. Then, after much audible shushing which necessitated exaggerated hand movements and the winking of what Beasley later came to realise was a glass eye, she spilt the beans, confiding that she’d dispatched hubby number two to Potters Field with a couple of heavy blows to the head courtesy of a frozen leg of lamb.
“Harder than a hammer” she’d slurred, her breath a multiple pile up of cheap booze, unfiltered cigarettes and last night’s takeaway. “The poor sap didn’t know what hit him”.
Beasley, although somewhat taken aback by her casual demeanor, was nevertheless intrigued. She’d told the law that he’d tripped on a ball the pet pooch had left lying around, fell heavily and cracked his bonce on the side of the Welsh Dresser, which sounded plausible enough, although still left a nagging doubt as to how and where she’d concealed the murder weapon.
“Easy!” she cackled, looking and sounding more like a witch with every shot of liquor. “I cooked it then ate it!”
Beasley was astounded by the incredible simplicity of it all.
That night he lay awake, listening to Penelope’s snoring, and thought deep thoughts.
Thoughts about things.

It took Beasley a long time to outwardly get over the fact that they were never coming back. I say outwardly as inwardly he’d resigned himself to the fact that never in a thousand years would he come to terms with their passing. Not a day went by when he didn’t think of them, both collectively and individually. He missed their wit, angst, effervescence and that self-assurance which often borders on arrogance, a product of young minds that know the world is theirs for the taking.
“Be sure not to waste time” Beasley had often chided, warning that three years was a long burn on the back of a bad decision. But it wasn’t, was it? While three years to Beasley was a good sized chunk of any healthy dementia free years he could expect to have left, to them it was but a drop in life’s ocean. They were natures natural pyromaniacs, torching minutes, hours, days, months and, God forbid, even years in an orgy of extravagance. They were sixteen and immortal. Not for them the time honoured warning that it’s gone before you realise it, or that in the blink of an eye you’ll be married with kids of your own. They’d nodded and smiled at his well-meaning advice, treating him with the forced deference one affords a kindly old uncle at Christmas.
God how he missed the girl with the Technicolor smile who could light up the room with a flash of ivories, or the blonde who’s retro style on non-uniform days would instantly transport him back to 1973 and Miss Albright’s English lessons. Then there were the cheeky lads, all football and pulling birds, and the girls from some eastern European backwater with the permanent grins and happy hello’s, who spoke more languages than he’d had hot dinners and left with better qualifications than he’d ever managed.
He’d often sit in solitude after his colleagues had departed, listening to the mournful hum of a vacuum cleaner in an adjoining room and wondering if he wasn’t on the receiving end of a truckload of bad karma. For although not a man frivolous enough to align himself to any particular persuasion (Beasley was nothing if not pragmatic in both mind and body, preferring to keep his afterlife options as wide open as possible) he had the distinct feeling that, at this very moment in time, somebody up there sure as hell didn’t like him. After all, wasn’t he being punished on a daily basis, tormented by the loss of his children? Was this not something straight out of the Old Testament, the product of an angry and vengeful creator?
‘Why don’t you tell me, brave Captain
Why the wicked are so strong.
And how do the angels get to sleep
When the Devil leaves his porch light on?’
Beasley was not a religious man, but that night he knelt down and prayed.

I’ve got to start making things happen thought Beasley as he reached into the freezer and removed a Bernard Matthews Turkey Joint, special offer at Morrison’s, which was why the top shelf of the icebox was full of them.
It’s time I quit dreaming and got on the beam. And the first thing was to get rid of Penelope, the she-devil who had blighted his life for far too long, holding him back, cramping his style, constantly questioning his integrity. He’d casually asked if there was anything he could get her while he was out in the garage fetching a beer, the very beer she always complained about, saying that it meant more to him than she did, which wasn’t far wrong. The beer was cool, always tasted good and never failed to give him a warm feeling inside, unlike his Dear Penelope, once a beauty in body if not mind, but now a faded old has been teetering on the edge of her sell by date. She’d grizzled about him getting the drink but then suggested that he bring in one of those joints she so liked.
Beasley smiled to himself as he reached into the frozen expanse of the freezer.
If a turkey joint was what she wanted then a turkey joint was what she’d get.

No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get the damn song out of his head. It had been there for days, playing on a continuous loop like those awful so called radio stations you get when you shell out for an overpriced pair of headphones on a low cost no frills budget airline.
And the words. Those silly words. Stupid yet profound, shallow yet strangely deep. He’d listened to them hundreds of times when he was a kid, their bitterness laced with anguish and anger in equal doses. For this was his break-up song; the record he spun when yet another piece of teenage head had dumped him for the crime of being different. They were all the same, with their pocket money dresses and narrow perspectives. He offered them an Einstein but all they wanted was a Frankenstein; a skinny rat faced tracksuit clad bloke with biro ink tattoos, a twenty-yard stare and a propensity to talk in clichés. Well they could have them for all he cared. Let them be damned in their council flats with their minimum wage and welfare babies, Saturday nights down the social and a fortnight in Blackpool the second week of every August. Let them wallow in their cheap celebrity obsessed magazines, their wall-to-wall soaps, endless texting and unrelenting diet of processed pap.
That’s why mum’s shop at Iceland.
Because they live in intellectual and cultural ghettos where the only true poverty is that of the imagination.
‘He’d seen the bottom of a lot of glasses
But he’d never seen love so near.
He’d seen love get so expensive,
But he’d never seen love so dear’.
What on earth did it mean?
Was it a sign, and if so, from who?
Across the street he saw the old man and his dog.
Then they were gone.
A voice in his head told him it was time to leave.

Beasley had parked his car at the edge of the golf course, a location that afforded him an unobstructed view of his classroom windows. He’d hung around after the bell, waiting for the caretaker to come along on his nightly round of window shutting and door locking. He’d mumbled some excuse about needing to get some important data on to the system, assuring the custodian that he wouldn’t be too long and promising to douse the Edison’s before departing.
But he hadn’t.
He’d left his blinds open and lights ablaze so that they stood out like a beacon against the darkened skyline.
That was good.
It helped him to remember things he didn’t want to forget.
Like how he’d buried Penelope beneath a plum tree in the middle of the school orchard while the old man watched and the little dog laughed to see such fun. How he’d crept up behind her as she lay slumped on the sofa soaking up Midsomer Murders (how wonderfully ironic), bathed in the eerie incandescent glow of the cathode rays.
“This one’s for Cathy!” he’d screamed as the first blow from the frozen meat struck her like a house brick on the back of the head. She grunted and tried to scream, a look of total disbelief splashed across her otherwise docile face.
“And this one’s for Meera, and this is for Sofi, and this goes out for Alex!’ he chuckled manically as blow after blow rained down on Penelope’s head, turning her face to a pulpy mush.
Finally, after who knows how long, he stopped, satisfied with his evenings work. He gazed down with contempt at what once resembled a human head. No longer would it mock him, point out his shortcomings; ridicule him in front of total strangers.
Beasley felt an overwhelming sense of freedom wash over him.
Now it was time for him to join the Leavers Party.

That years Prom was cancelled as a mark of respect. The Headteacher, as is the won’t of men in his lofty position, spoke of the untimely death (as if he would know when somebody was due to expire) and tragic loss to the school of a well loved and much respected member of staff, which was a bit fresh when you consider how a couple of days previously he’d had Beasley’s ear between his teeth. Still, he oozed practiced sincerity, which pulled all the right strings amongst the largely adolescent audience, although there was more than one cynical glance exchanged between members of the teaching fraternity. Little else was said and it could be deduced that the silence spoke far louder than any words ever could. Beasley’s form all returned and gathered together in their old classroom, consumed by a tsunami of collective grief, unable to comprehend why the nice old man who’d looked after them for five long years should end his days in such tragic circumstances, asphyxiated by petrol fumes in the front seat of a second hand Jag parked in the middle of the eighteenth hole of the local golf course.
But Beasley knew. He knew that there had to be a final gathering where this time he, and he alone, would be the true focus of attention.
“I love you sir,” cried the outrageously talented blonde girl who liked critical thinking, fairy stories and interesting art.
And this time she really meant it.

Lyrics from the following songs have been quoted in this story :
‘Sweetheart’ by Lloyd Cole
‘I’ll Do My Crying In The Rain’ by The Everly Brothers
‘Mr.Seigel’ by Tom Waits
‘King Horse’ by Elvis Costello & The Attractions