gym

‘Put your Janet and John books away.’ Mrs Boyle adds an ominous sounding, ‘Silently!’ to her request.

We try. We really do. Janet and John do all kinds of interesting things. They run. They jump. They stay and they play. But once a week, on a Tuesday afternoon, our class gets gym which drive us near wild. Feet shuffle underneath desks, limbs twitch and the thunder of desk lids banging down passes through us like a wind that has us squealing like bats’ with their mouths sewn shut. One look from Mrs Boyle as she reaches for her grey chequered coat on the back of the door is enough and we sit in a settled frothing disorder. She watches us for signs of discontent as she slips her arms into the sleeves and stands rigid, thin pink lips pressed together, before adjusting her shoulders so the long coat sits like scratch-proof armour. Her hair is a hard bouffant shell around her powdered face. She claps her hands twice and we are snared in the silence. Her arm sweeps out in front of her and locks as she brings her index finger slowly up to her lips. ‘Fingers on lips,’ she commands and flicks at her collar around her long neck.

Feet slide and bums slip on chairs as we inadvertently move sideways and forward on the lacquered wood and there is an intake of breath as everyone complies. It would be the Noel Behan kind of madness not to. I sneak a look across at John Mc Crossan whom I share a double desk with at the front of the class. His grey-blue eyes are looking straight ahead at the smudged chalk on the blackboard, at the indecipherable lines of ball and thin stick letters. Everything about him is neat and tidy. His blue shirt is always tucked into his grey shorts. His black shoes are never scuffed. His grey jumper never rides up his back. His brownish hair is trimmed onto his head, not by a normal hairdresser, but by a wooden ruler. Even when we pencil forked planes on the blank pages our jotters his ack, ack, ack, German bullets always go in straight lines across the page.

‘Now, stand up.’ Mrs Boyle eyes narrow. ‘Quietly. Quietly.’

Quickly we slip off the tether of our seat and stamp impatiently into the aisle at the side of our desk, yearning for the future now.

Mrs Boyle slowly opens the classroom door. She can no longer hold us. A bubble of noise begins to burst behind me filled with the voices of my forty-two classmates all whispering at once. I look across at John McCrossan, with my mouth open ready to say something, but he just stands like a soldier, waiting for his order to march. Mrs Boyle claps her hands twice again.

‘Handies.’ She holds the classroom door firmly open. ‘Two by two.’

I skip round my desk. John McCrossan takes a step forward. His arm is down by his side, his hand is twisted at the wrist and sits below the pocket of his neat shorts, palm outwards, waiting to catch my sticky hand in his.

‘Fingers on lips.’ Mrs Boyle reminds us. ‘There are other classes still working so make sure you keep quiet.’

The dust on the blackboard catches the light from the window drifting down as we stomp out of the classroom, two by two. We choke with keen expectation and stand lined up as we have been taught in the corridor outside out door, looking through the glass window of our classroom from the outside as if it were a foreign country we don’t want to visit.

Mrs Boyle marches ahead. I’m directly behind her, close enough to taste the sharp musk of her perfume and take in the soft smell of talcum powder. John McCrossan’s hand swings in mine as we keep in line. I quickly look round. Behind us are the Hone twins. Awkward mouthed Martin with his ginger hair and Josephine who has all the words. There are another set of twins near the back of the line. Rosemary and Isabel Deeney, with their blond locks, and conventional way of standing and blending into one another. Last in our classroom crocodile is Neil Behan. He stares at the ground with his droopy face and drops further and further behind us. But there’s not far to go. It’s a short walk past two other ground floor classrooms past the cloakroom where our anoraks hang on pegs waiting for the bell and mingling colours and smells with each other. We take a sharp right. Mrs Boyle turns the metallic handle and the wind whips at her hair, but it doesn’t budge. She is outside in the smirry rain wedging open the cloakroom door by standing with her back to it waiting for us to exit. Hands on lips have begun to fall away. Martin Monaghan, in particular, is lax with a smirk and a grin and his finger wandering west near his unknotted school tie. Mrs Boyle clunks him on the head and his finger shoots true north back up to hallowed silence.

Down four stairs and our crocodile stands outside the sooty roughcast wall of the kitchens. Something like a moan escapes into the wind. Mrs Boyle gives us a look, but nobody meets her eyes. In her black shoes with little heels, her hips swing like Tarzan effortlessly between one building and another. She climbs four stairs and stands at the top of the dining-room hall, with the door held inward. It also doubles as the gym and sometimes the assembly hall. We have to pass her to enter the new world that smells of boiled cabbage and sweat shot through with sweets and perfume.

I break free from John McCrossan’s grip almost running head first into the built-up platform for staging school plays and making official announcements. My body hurtles away from such danger and the soles of my shoes expertly slide across the varnished wood of the floor. It’s carefully marked out with white and red paint for formal games. Others in my class funnel out past me, whirling, jumping, and screaming with glee. There’s work to be done, of course, before we can play.

‘Get the mats out. Get the mats out. Get the mats out.’ Mr Galloway growls at the boys in our classroom. He’s our head pitted bald gym teacher, with a Santa belly and is too old to shout. I feel sorry for him because of the war he’s meant to have a wooden leg, but he just leans against the stage and never walks anywhere so it doesn’t matter. He wears a suit that looks as if it is made of lime-green sacking and over his shoulder he’s meant to keep his leather tawse, for belting us, hidden like a black tongue of a devil, but I’ve never seen it.

I’m the best in our class at getting the mats out. They’re in the gap between the stage, a metal netball stand with a hoop and the windows. Windows, looking onto the playground form a separate wall of light that runs all the way up to the roof, so that even in the shadows I can see what I’m doing. Some of the chairs from lunch time are also stacked here, but most are at the other end of the hall, with the fold-away tables. Ian Murray and me haul and pull and leaver the first mat off the second and out into the main hall. It’s spongey material that stinks up your hands, but away from the stage area it slides easily along the floor. Alfie Murray and Johnny Gibbons pull out the other mat and position is beside ours.

Mr Galloway inspects our work before growling more instructions. ‘Right. Get the box out.’

I race towards the stage area, but Alfie Murray beats me and I shove into him. He doesn’t care. He hauls the box with our gym equipment out into plain sight. I pick up a yellow sponge ball and kick it down the hall towards George and his twin brother Jim. I get out of the way as the girls swarm around. There’s red, yellow and blue hand-sized beanbags, plastic skittles and skipping ropes for them.

At first I play football with George and Jim. Then I practice flinging beanbags like exploding grenades against the stage. I’m not to be outdone on the mats. Out of the corner of my eye I see Lousie Mc Fadden watching. She’s limply holding a skipping rope in her hand and there’s a skipping game going on beside her with the chant of ‘late last night, but the night before…’ and twirls and thumbs and jumps that make the wooden floor reverberate, but her hazel-brown eyes are sad. For some reason I like her for that. I like her for her shiny straight black hair and her pretty face. I’ve already promised Susan Robertson that we’ll get married and we’ll live together for ever, even though she’s always want to be kissing me on the cheek and fussing over me. I know I’ve got what my mum calls the wandering eye. When I’m sure Louise is looking I run over and expertly tumble over my wilkies, almost landing on my feet.

‘That’s it. Time to get the mats away,’ growls Mr Galloway. ‘Time you lot were gettin’ home.’