susan-something-or-other

There is something of the parakeet about her as she flaps through the rain, her bright colours bringing glimpses of sunshine amid the steady, dull, downpour. People hurrying past on their way down to Singers Station, or stuck, a job lot, clustered around the doors of the DHSS building on Kilbowie Road, gawp and then look away. The red lipstick seems smeared on by the thumbs and fingers of a five-year-old wielding a stub-nosed crayon and trying to keep within the lines. Her pale blue eyes flicker from left to right, long-sighted, taking in the traffic, the junctions, the old whitewashed façade of the La Scala cinema on the hill. She whips across the road at the juncture before Amilio’s hairdresser’s shop.

The bucket-nosed driver, thin vermillion blood vessels mapping out his cheekbones, sitting at the lights in his battered purple Ford Escort is caught between looking at her and looking at the lights. The traffic behind him toots their displeasure. The cough and roar of air- fried engines is breakfast for pedestrian’s lips and mouths, leaving the bitter taste of phoenix fumes.

Her face is expressionless, but her rouged cheeks pantomime some kind of animation and the possibility of some kind of private joke bubbling out. People hurry past. The wind whips and drives the rain, like collie dogs suddenly let off the leash, but students' feet turn to lute then stall at the speed of stone as they get nearer and nearer to the entrance to the techie block of Clydebank College. Some of the boys make a detour here, flinging off their shackles bouncing down the steps and disappearing into the glass doors that sparkle, in sudden sunlight, like rusty rubies. A pale flicker of a smile appears on her lips as she nears the art’s block. Students eddy past her, some of whom she knows, but she is not a believer in fraternising by being overfamiliar. One of the girls, a Susan-something- or- other, actually shuts her eyes to avoid looking at her. In her denim uniform, it looks, to Ms Cotraine that she’s been at some kind of all-night orgy, taken too much crack, or cock, or cocaine; whatever the young people’s drugs of choice now is. Either that or she’s fallen asleep standing up. Ms Cotraine waits, her clothes neutralised by the damp, to the lower red and pink spectrum and stares at the girl until her eyes winkle open. Susan-something-or-other blinks into existence, nods at Ms Cotraine and flounces down in a curtsy amid the giggles of her girly clones. Ms Cotraine’s lips widen slightly, her small yellow teeth showing a canine smile.

‘My class starts in precisely six minutes.’

Susan-something-or-other blushes, as Ms Cotraine knew she would, which makes her almost pretty. Her little friends’ faces programmed to giggle like a pre-set washing machine shakes themselves up. The skanky one at the very back of them, pushed up against the wall, like a wrong- sized wardrobe, with Doc Martin boots and bright yellow laces, puts her index finger to her temple and screw loosens it back and forth, back and forth. Ms Cotraine makes no comment. Her ridiculer made ridiculous by her own feeble bent-backed attempt to ingratiate herself into a group in which she is far the most unprepossessing. Ms Cotraine feels the sudden urge to shake her and tell her to at least stand up straight. She has other pieces of advice, but the clock is ticking.

‘I lock the doors at 9.05am and if you’re not in by then…I don’t open them ‘till the break at 10.25am.’ Ms Cotraine jounces out her golf brolley. She never uses it, because it is never wet enough and even if it were, she has a perfectly good hat.

‘She’s completely wacko,’ says Susan-something-or-other, as she watches Ms Cotraine boulder away towards the ground-floor lifts, but there is something like respect in the way she says it. The explosion of relieved giggling fills the space of her absence, comes a heart-beat later, with hands covering thin mouths, thin faces and thin bodies bulked up with outsized clothes.

Susan-something-or-other-Doyle takes the stairs rather than the lift. Most other students hide behind their fringes and dawdle up the stairs. Susan Doyle takes them two at a time, outflanking the boys and pushing through the nests of girls with arms linked. She’s out of breath by the time she’s reached the third floor. The bell begins to ring and it’s like school again, the kind of school she thought she’d left behind when she enrolled in college, but now she finds herself scurrying along the corridor and shouldering herself through the last classroom door on the left that looks down onto the L- shaped car park. Adulthood sits lightly on her like a frog unsure which way to jump.

Ms Cotraine eyes sparkle at her desk as if she’s been given a shot of adrenalin. She takes no notice of Susan-something-or-others’s entry into the classroom. Her mouth works like a glove puppet throwing out words, throwing out anecdotes, stories of the time she worked in Singers and what really happened during the war. Her pupils are listening machines propped up among the three avenues of empty chairs.

Susan-something-or-other Doyle slides into a seat. She has the whole second row to herself. She fakes not noticing Dek, close enough to smell that musky-boy smell in the third row in the desk diagonally behind her. The chair doesn’t seem to fit him. The desk doesn’t seem to fit him. He taps his HB 1 pencil on his notepad and flaps about like a fish in the dock before the old beak. His tight black jeans are crushed with indecision, ready to run, his headache inducing green and orange sport shirt ready to stay still, his body poised one way then the other.

Ms Cotraine, her mouth bent into a primma donna smile, segues past the black board and turns the key in the lock. The only other girl in the class is older than last year's calander and sits as impassively as a woman can that wears a blue-polka dot blouse. Maureen and stares down at her notepad. She is primed to not noticing and not speaking as a grey be-speckled novice nun. Anything Ms Contraine says works its way left to right, evenly across her A4 notepad, as if she is employed as stenographer.

‘All hatred comes from the protection of property,’ Ms Cotraine says and Maureen records. Her other two pupils look out into the car park, squint at each other and wait.