Instant Fires

Last term, my school introduced a one-way system for the corridors. We’ve been reading 1984 by George Orwell and I am beginning to notice the similarities. They installed a tannoy system in all the corridors.

Although it was built during the Sixties, my school bypassed the sexual revolution. I’m not allowed to show more than two inches of thigh. Any more is considered gratuitous.

Most days, I show two and half inches. I’ve measured it. That extra half-inch of flesh blazing like a strip of magnesium. None of the teachers have the guts to tell me to roll my skirt down. They don’t know what I might say.

“Why’ve you been looking at my thigh Sir?”

“You can measure it if you want Miss?”

Last year a chemistry teacher got arrested for inappropriate behaviour with a student. There are three main stories depending on who you speak to. One, that he and the undisclosed student (who we all know is Asha Randel, year thirteen) shared a tent, and possibly a sleeping bag, during the final weekend of the Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award. Two, that when he gave Asha detention, it was his way of asking her on a date. Three, at lunchtimes, in the labs you could find him brewing his own rohypnol.

Mr Ashford, my English teacher says that the school is not doing what it should be doing to defend its teachers. He says the school bows to the parents.

Mr Ashford claims to be an old-style teacher. He says that he’s a maverick.

Some days I come in to school with my skirt hiked up, three or four inches, a light breeze in the air, just to see what’ll happen. Mr Ashford’s the only one who’ll say something: "Anna, please. Put ‘em away."

Like they’re painful to look at. Like my thighs are burning his retinas.

"You’re a peacock, Anna Field," he says.

"Peacocks are male, sir."

Mr Ashford thinks of himself as an outlaw.

"I’m a maverick," he says.

He is my friend Marie’s favourite teacher.

He goes off-curriculum. He says that some things are more important than the syllabus. We rushed through King Lear to leave more time for chatting about our star signs. He told us stories about the girlfriends he had at university.

Mr Ashford studied at Cambridge and was part of the poetry scene. He used to write letters to Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes used to write letters back. When we study Ted Hughes, he calls him Ted.

Some days, he says stuff like: Hands up who’s bored of Shakepeare?

He wants to be my favourite teacher.

At lunchtimes, I sometimes see Mr Ashford talking a stroll down to the school pond – hands behind his back – gazing upwards – walking like he imagines a poet walks.

The pond is full of fanta, lilt and coke cans. It can take one hundred years for a can to biodegrade. Coke cans outlive most humans. At the bottom of the pond, you see them: retro drinks from the Seventies, partly dissolved. Mr Ashford can probably remember drinking from that sort of can.

Mr Ashford says: the sadness of teachers is that they get older while everyone around them stays the same age. He says: ‘old’ is always ten years ahead.

We’ve been studying Marvell’s poem "To His Coy Mistress." It’s basically a bad chat-up line. Transparent. I imagine Andrew Marvell with cold fingertips and nostrils like wheel arches, trying to convince girls to sleep with him by making them scared of death.

And your quaint honour turned to dust.

I imagine him carrying a notebook and scribbling notes about girl’s wrists and necklines.

I imagine that he looks like my English teacher, Mr Ashford, whose hair only reveals its thinness from a certain angle. The rhetoric of his hair.

There’s a boy in my English class who fancies me. Paul Adwell. He’s started updating lines from Marvell to try and get me to go out with him.

"Girl, I’m thinking a half-term on your thighs, double maths on your neck, a lunch-hour to each of your teeth."

Paul says that he’s in love with me because I’m beautiful. At least he’s honest.

My girlfriends fall in to two categories: those who are not beautiful and those who are beautiful but do not know it. Sarah is in the first category, Marie is in the second. Marie has these gangly model arms and sheeny vinyl hair.

Somedays, I wake up and I know exactly how beautiful I am. Stepping out from the library and walking across the playing fields like a meteor. I hate people who say that they feel beautiful. Or, worse still, that their personality is beautiful. I am sixteen years old. I feel every part of my body separately. These are my legs. These are my lungs. It’s taken millions of years to make me this good. The worst thing – I reckon – to look back on your life and wish you could have appreciated your own beauty.

On non-uniform day I was wearing a crop top that said: Hands Off and Mr Ashford said that I should be careful, wearing a top like that. He said, you don’t want to give people the wrong idea.

Sometimes, Mr Ashford spends his lunchtimes with students, not teachers. He says the staff room gets boring.

If we stay with him at lunchtime – me, Marie and Sarah – in his demountable classroom beyond the janitor’s cottage, he lets us drink coffee from his thermos. He tells me I’m an artist because I drink mine black, no sugar. We eat custard creams and shortbread. After a cup of coffee, Sarah talks incessantly. She can’t even hear herself. She’ll tell him anything. She borrows other people’s secrets just so she’s got something to say.

I cut myself sometimes. I’ve had an abortion. I’ve been making videos with my webcam.

At lunchtimes, Mr Ashford tries to be more like us. He leans back on his chair, balances on the two rear legs. He throws his balled-up sandwich foil across the room, aiming for the bin. He curses. He calls the school: this shit hole.

We talk to him about boys. About who fancies who. He tells us the origins of words. “Fancy”: meaning whim, caprice, vagary. He tells us not to let any of these boys get us pregnant. "They’re just walking hormones," he says. "Anna, don’t go near that Paul Adwell. I’ve seen the way he looks at you."

Paul’s head-boy and, if we are to believe the rumours, has already started two families.

"Imagine all those little Adwells running around," Mr Ashford says. "No-one wants that."

Mr Ashford reads me my horoscope in his Laurence Olivier voice: "Leo: as Venus moves into your chart, you may notice a newcomer with a skill for telling jokes. Soon you both feel the attraction. But be careful because others may want what you are getting."

Mr Ashford calls us his girls. As he waves us off, after lunch, he says, "Be good," and I think of him imagining what not being good might be.

At parent’s evening, Mr Ashford told my Mum and Dad that I was struggling. I only got a C in my mock English exam and he said that I might want to get some extra tuition, two hours a week, twenty quid an hour, at his house.

I only went for one lesson because my Dad said it was either tuition or driving lessons.

I remember the house was really warm. One of a semi-circle of detached houses at the end of a cul-de-sac. The central heating was right up. The whole place was carpeted. He was wearing a loose white T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms with no shoes or socks. He had badges of hair on his big toes. His face had turned pink from the heat. I saw his wife, walking back and forth behind the glass door to the kitchen. She had dyed brown hair and was wearing a dress. His kids were in the next room watching TV. I heard the theme music from Neighbours.

We were working at the dining room table, studying To His Coy Mistress and for those two hours only, at his request, I called Mr Ashford by his first name: Graham.

He said, "you can see how the speaker uses humour to seduce his mistress."

I said, "I don’t see what’s funny about this poem."

He said, "What about: 'my vegetable love should grow?'"

I said, "That’s not funny. That’s just disturbing."

In the exam, I’m supposed to make the distinction between the speaker in the poem and the poet.

"So I can’t say that Andrew Marvell is a sleaze?" I asked.

"You can say that the speaker is a sleaze," he said.

I asked him, "how old was Marvell when he wrote this poem?"

"It’s not entirely clear, Anna. He could have been in his late twenties."

"God, Graham, that’s old," I said.

I remember it was so hot in that house – I was sweating – but I didn’t take my jumper off because, underneath, I was wearing my crop top that said: Hands Off! It was the only thing clean. I didn’t want to give Graham the wrong idea.

Mr Ashford played electric guitar for the school musical. It was a band of teachers. Mr Wright, Geography, rocked out on keyboard. Mrs Hadley, Maths, was a machine on the drums: years of suppressed aggression flowing out through her cymbals. And Mr Ashford on lead guitar, the rebel, head down, baldness showing, jamming.

This year’s show was called Nosferatuneful! The sixth-formers wrote it. It was a horror-musical and I was playing one of the young victims.

I tottered on, never looking behind me, Mr Wright played some spooky arpeggios on the piano, my neck in moonlight and then – aaaaah! – fake blood pooling in my collar bones.

Mr Ashford was there during rehearsals, playing his red guitar.

He said: Anna, you have the neck for horror movies. He’s not afraid to notice my body. I could have him suspended if I wanted to. I could probably get him arrested.

I was screaming, covered in blood, Nosferatu with his teeth in my neck, and I saw Mr Ashford looking up at me from the band pit. I imagined he thought it was symbolic of my loss of innocence.

Mr Ashford says that, in poetry, everything means something. Purple means wealth, black means death. Red and white are colours emblematic of female beauty. Red blood, white skin.

I fell to the ground and faked spasms in my leg, like a genuine corpse. I was dead but with my eyes open, unblinking – Mr Ashford watching me, a sad look on his face as though I might really be dead.

Worms shall try that long-preserved virginity.

In sex education, our classes are segregated by gender. Mrs Bird dismissed the myth that horse-riding or cycling is likely to damage your hymen. She told us that the hymen is a brilliant piece of design. Mrs Bird is a Christian.

It happened on the first night of Nosferatuneful! It was a packed house: parents and siblings in every row. I had my moment of glory: bitten, screaming, then dragged off stage by my ankles.

I was behind the scenes, with blood on me, and Paul Adwell was there, black around his eyes, wearing a frilly shirt and top hat. We were surrounded by last year’s props – a roman tunic, a cardboard column, plastic swords – and he says: I’m the undertaker, you’re the dead body: we’re meant to be together.

I could tell that he’d been working on that line for days. But still, it made me laugh. Or him trying to make me laugh, made me laugh.

Then we found a spot behind the curtain and kissed until our lips were swollen. Paul Adwell is not as experienced as everyone says he is. He snogs like a pestle and mortar. We heard them singing the grand finale out on stage.

Drack-u-lar! Spectacular! There’s gore on every neck!
To use a crass vernacular, he’s chomping them to heck!

Time seemed to be moving slowly. I heard the sea in my ears.

Paul didn’t even put his hand up my top. He was a gent.

We were there for ages.

Until the applause rippled back through the thick curtain. Like the sound of wings flapping. And I heard Mr Ashford unplug his guitar. And Paul had fake blood on his shirt.