card tricks.

Sammy Doak chapped twice on the door, shouldering it open just enough to squeeze his body through and into our classroom. He stood waiting at the blackboard, trying to erase himself by looking at his feet. Mr Jordan was half-standing, the desk taking the bulk of a fart-cheek as he backed into it and sat sideways, firing impossible-to-answer geography questions at us primary sevens. The air hung heavy with the damp weight of our thirty-eight entombed bodies and the teacher’s aftershave grew fruity. Outside the wet wind whistled and battered against the windows and inside it seemed suddenly dark, even with the hanging lights brightening the gloom. The knot of Mr Jordan’s two-tone red tie with cream bands, large as the heart of a cabbage worked itself loose as he rattled out one capital city after another until I was no longer sure if Cairo was in Budapest. The sleeves on his white striped wing-necked shirt were rolled up and he was going to wrestle the answers into our thick heads He reminded us we should know this or that. I wasn’t sure what, but nodded as if I did. His head turned sideways away from us. The dimple of black wiry hair on his chin grew stubbley, sharp as a sundial pressed around the contours of his face, marking out time as the day progressed. Mr Jordan puckered his mouth and the bush of his eyebrows dropped his hazel eyes into a questioning face.

‘Where’s the Golden Gate Bridge?’ Mr Jordan asked Sammy.

We sat in three uneven rows of desks, girls mostly on one side near the windows, but Sammy didn’t look to any of us for the answer.

‘San Francisco.’ Sammy’s cosy-pink cheeks warmed as he beamed at us, as if he was a contestant on Runaround; we were deskbound and he was sure to win. He held out the note he was carrying for the teacher and bit at his thick bottom lip to stop himself from grinning outright, but couldn’t help himself.

Mr Jordan’s eyes closed for the briefest of seconds. He didn’t need to shake his head at us, but did anyway. ‘San Francisco,’ he repeated, flicking his wrist so the note in his hand jumped open, like a card trick.

‘I said San Francisco,’ I whispered sideways to Martin Hone, who shared a desk with me three down on the first row near the door.

He didn’t say anything. Martin Hone was good at not saying anything. That was probably why he was seated next to me. He should really have been sitting next to his identical twin Josephine, because it was common knowledge they shared the same brain and didn’t like being separated. They could read each other’s minds and they were able to finish each other’s sentences. I’d seen it on the telly, or some film in which they all had blond hair and a certain way of turning and looking at a teacher until they burst into flames or killed themselves in a freakish and painful accident. I glanced over at Mr Jordan. Neither of the Hone twins had blond hair of course. Martin’s was red and whipped up like a Hone head from his high forehead. Josephine’s hair was coal black and in bunches and she was taller by three or four inches. She was better at football than him too.

As Sammy stood waiting to see if there would be a reply to the note he had brought his foot stepped sideways, one over the other, and his shoulder curled in with his head falling, brown eyes fixed on his black wedged shoes, but he still had that daft grin on his rubbery lips. He scratched under his chin and looked through his blond eyelashes at me and gave the slightest of nods. We both played for the school team. He was number eight. I was number six and Mr Jordan was the manager.

‘I’ll need to pop out for a second.’ Mr Jordan stood and scanned our faces. ‘Read chapter three in your workbook.’ He picked up his book from the desk and frowned as he rifled through the pages and squinting at them. ‘Pages eighteen to twenty-five.’ He tossed the book onto his desk and it bounced against the pencil sharpener. ‘I’ll test you when I get back.’ He looked over us again, as if memorising our faces. ‘And no talkin’.’ He scooted round the desk and plucked his soft leather coat from the back of his chair and put it on, taking a few seconds to make sure the collar sat up around his neck in just the right way. ‘No talkin’, he reminded us, pushing Sammy’s arm and guiding him out of the classroom door in front of us.

‘He’ll be away for ages,’ I said to Martin, ‘cause he’s took his jacket wae him.’ Martin glanced at me, eyes soft as a Spaniel’s, ghostly white hands fiddling and cracking open his book and searching for page eighteen.

I twisted round to ask Stephen Angus what he was doing. Everybody—apart from Martin— was chattering as if they’d two mouths. It seemed no time at all until Noel Behan who was sitting at the front desk near the door puckered out a ‘shhhhhh’ and the room grumbled to a halt and went so silent Martin Monaghan’s nervous nose sniffing boomed in my ear. Mr Jordan held the handle of the door down, but he peered through the rectangular slit of reinforced glass, before pushing the door open.

‘Right who’s been talkin’?’ Mr Jordan glared at us and worked his jacket off his square shoulders before hanging it on the back of his chair. His eyes settled on a knotty mark on the jacket’s cuff, which he brushed at with his hand, before looking up and doing his teacher’s stare with renewed vigour. ‘I said, who’s been talkin’?’ His voice grew angry arms and legs. ‘I could hear the racket you lot were makin’ from the bottom of the stairs.’ His jaw tightened. He looked over at Noel Behan. ‘Where you talkin’?’

‘Me? No sir!’

He took his time examining each boy’s face. His shirt was a half-moon map of sweat stain under the oxters as he reached over and pulled the desk drawer open. The black leather tawse fell on the desk, uncoiling with a thump. The hush of everybody holding their breath gave me goose bumps.

‘Right, I said, who was talkin’?’ His nostrils dilated as he spoke. ‘Stick your hand up if you were talkin’?’

I kept my head down and closed my eyes for a sec. A couple of hands went up. I took a deep breath and held my hand up too.

‘Right,’ said Mr Jordan. ‘Out here.’ He picked up the tawse and stood beside the blackboard, his foot inadvertently kicking against the grey waste-paper bin, making it ring, as he made a punitive space to swing his arm and make an example of us.

I shuffled behind Dougie Kirkland. We held our arms out straight as a rifle and soft white palms crossed over waiting for the tawse to strike. Bang. One hit, changed hand. Bang second strike. I held my hands underneath my oxters after the whipping, to help the pain dull. Anne Gallacher was behind me. The only girl that had stuck her hand up. Mr Jordan slapped at her with little force and sent her back to her seat after one strike. I was too miserable to care about the injustice of it all.

We were cloaked in silence. Mr Jordan's fingers drummed on his desk after he’d put the tawse back in the drawer. ‘I’ve got a bit of bad news.’ He seemed to look at me, then his eyes swept right and left. ‘A former pupil here, whom I taught, has been knocked down by a bus.’ He leaned against the desk and took a deep breath. ‘I’d like you…I’d like us… to say a decade of the Rosary for the repose of her soul.’

‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ he intoned.

Our voices sang out in response.

Later, the school bell began to ring. Desk lids banged as if the wind outside swept through the classroom. Mr Jordan sat at his desk watching us file out. He somehow looked smaller. I smiled at him as I passed, but my hands still hurt like bejesus.