Education & Loss
There are some cons to being the only person who lives in walking distance of the school I teach. Every single time the alarm goes off or someone forgets to lock I’m called in, and at times I feel like this has become more of a custodial job than anything. It’s gotten so bad the school had a silent alarm installed years ago, and just to add insult to injury they routed it to my phone. Of course, the head tends to call me up to make sure I’m on my way, just in case.
“Just have a quick little walk around,” Mrs Wares says to me over the phone, “just make sure some of the kids haven’t tried breaking into the pool again. It’d be awful if something happened.”
Right, yeah, except it never is a just quick little walk around. There’s always something to keep you lingering, some noise that needs investigating, some mess that can’t be left for kids to find. In the day that school is nothing but a shrine to the banal and mediocre. The walls are plastered with kitschy GCSE art of local beaches, bronze awards in athletics, and cardboard thermometers used to count the hundreds of dollars we’ve raised to stave off cancer or the apocalypse. With light streaming in and the halls buzzing with running children, it’s nothing but another part of the world whistling through space with fuck all to do except keep busy.
But it’s different in the dark, or perhaps just when it’s empty. Maybe it’s because I see it so alive and full of activity in the day. There’s something innately unsettling about a place only recently emptied of life. Perhaps there’s a lingering body-heat in the air, or a scent too subtle for the conscious mind to register, something that tells you that a thousand eyes have looked away from this place and now it exists outside of anyone’s notice but yours. You feel alone, walking those empty corridors whose walls look unusually tall and where the distance stretches away into dizzying perspective.
And it always looks so much worse at night. Maybe it’s the effect bright fluorescents have but I swear it looks cleaner in the day and come night the floors look filthy and cracked in a way that makes me wonder if this is really the elitist private school it pretends to be. But I hate it. I hate how I only notice the rot at night – mouldy tiles, cheap laminate flooring that’s buckled from moisture, and equipment that was dated in the nineties.
It’s such a silly thing, to let the dark get to me like that. But then again, it’s not at all uncommon to hear giggling or to see shadows moving in the corner of your eye. It is impossible to escape the feeling you are following something, tracing the path of a laughing child as they run from classroom to classroom. Doors will swing gently ajar just as you turn a corner, chairs will squeak seconds before entering a room, and TVs will blare with documentaries only to switch off just before your finger touches the button. And for some reason, I just keep looking. I keep going, from room-to-room, sometimes twice around, sometimes for hours. Once I sat alone in my classroom, lights switched off, and listened quietly as someone took a seat and the sound of a scribbling pencil filled the silence. By the time it finally stopped, the sun was rising, and the only thing left behind was a badly chewed pencil, the wood bloodied and rancid, like it’d been dragged out of a septic tank. It was so late, I didn’t even bother going home. I just stayed until 7C filed in as normal a few short hours later.
I’ve thought about leaving but I didn’t exactly exit my last school in good standing. This place doesn’t seem to mind so much if I skip a lesson or two or turn up hungover. And despite my regular difficulties there is still a monthly bonus attached to my cheque that I was told the other staff should not hear about. I have to figure it’s for the extra work and I wonder if I’d be mad to turn this place down. I know with some certainty that if I ever told Mrs Wares I couldn’t check in on the school I wouldn’t keep my job for much longer, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m the butt of some big joke.
Sometimes I find myself going there even without being called. From my house I can see the chemistry lab which is a large glass building that’s freezing in winter and scalding in summer. It’s all windows and on a bright night I can see people moving around in it. Sometimes there’s a light, sometimes just the vague sense of a commotion. But I can’t stop myself checking it out in person, walking around the very space I once spied from a quarter of a mile away where my house backs onto the football field. It’s weird. I might find a broken phone, something way too old for today’s kids, or a bag of old pennies, or even a few teeth scattered around the floor.
What are they doing, I wonder?
I found out from the IT teacher that every day he has to come in and restart all the computers because their screens will be frozen on shock porn. He didn’t make a big thing of it, he just said it wasn’t nice and if he was ever ill, I’d have to do it. So, I went one night, went and sat in the IT room with fifteen old computers in three rows of five. It’s small (we’re not a big school, just 500 kids) and the room doesn’t catch much light where it is, so it felt more like a dungeon than my own room that’s usually a clean greyish blue at night. It was pitch black in there and once again I turned off my light and waited for something I didn’t know until one by one, the monitors thunked on and internal fans started up, going from a silent brrr to a frenetic and unnatural whine.
I felt a kind of panic, something I attributed to the surprising volume of the computers and the epileptic sight of the monitors’ glitchy flashing. I steadied myself though and waited it out until the monitors clicked from buggy displays to images of mutilated and brutalised bodies. Smashed mouths with exposed teeth and cracked bone, ribcages held open by groping fingers, soft thighs shredded by broken bottles – each image was different and riddled with pixelated artefacts. After a moment the fans died down and the monitors settled, and the room was lit up from within like a Christmas tree and I suddenly became aware that I couldn’t see anything else. The bright light unsettled my eyes so much that all I could make out were the screens that floated in the abyssal darkness. Something deep within me started screaming that I wasn’t alone, and my eyes darted to the spaces beside and behind the computers, even under the shadowy desks, but it was all impenetrable shadow. Suddenly the images animated, and I suppressed a gasp and a shudder. Each one looped at different rates, some juddering with half-a-second of motion, others playing out elaborate acts of violence across the silent seconds.
I turned my torch on and tried to force myself to move but didn’t even manage to take a step. The door I’d entered from, the one I’d firmly closed before settling down, was open, and tar-black footprints led into the computer room and stopped by one of the computers. I shone the light down a fraction to see beneath the desk, and I found myself wondering if there had been a glimmer of motion as I moved the light, as if something had retreated from the beam. A few pale fingers? A scrap of fabric? Or the tip of someone’s foot? My mind was racing, and I was paralysed with fear, and in the end, I simply waited it out until the sun rose and the room lit up naturally.
It took hours, and those hours were not silent. Whoever was in there with me was sobbing quietly, their muffled cries ebbing with the changing of the gore-streaked monitors. God, it’s strange to say, but over time those images didn’t look so pixelated and for the very last hour I swore I wasn’t looking through a screen at all. It really was like standing around 15 windows looking into torture cells. It wasn’t about clarity, there was a sense of depth you just don’t get from a computer.
There were hours of unbridled suffering - assaults, torture, sadism. Groups of people laughing at a shivering victim who was left to pick glass out of their body. The gleeful joy in humiliation, in the power of what a gun can do to the human body and its owner. It all blurred together into a moving montage and at times I wonder how much of what I remember I actually saw. By the time I was ready to turn the monitors off I was pale and shaking, and my face was streaked with tears. The footprints had disappeared in the light, but I couldn’t bring myself to check the desk where they’d led. I merely thumbed the off switch on each computer before hurrying out like a child afraid of the dark.
It'd be a lie to say the things here make me drink; I’ve always had a problem. But it was different before. I was prone to bad bouts of drunkenness for most of my life, but I might spend months, even years, reasonably sober. I either didn’t drink, or I drank a lot. It’s just that when I went off the deep end, I went in headfirst and wouldn’t resurface until I was dragged kicking and screaming out of the pool. But now, I drink every day. I keep a flask on me, just to take the edge off. It makes things a little fuzzy, makes the kids funnier, makes the staff friendlier, makes me a better liar.
I wake up in the school some nights, unsure of how I got there or if I ever even left. Sometimes I open my eyes and don’t even know if I’m awake or asleep or alive or dead because there’s just blackness. Only the cold feel of the tiles beneath my shirt and my hands lets me know where I am. In the distance a door will groan as it swings open, I might hear the shuffle of a few chairs, or the barely suppressed whispers of a fleeting presence. And I lie there, ears pricked to these sounds and I wonder if I even really hear them at all or if I’m just going mad.
But I wait, I wait for the sun and for my eyes to see again and I find myself lying on the floor of my classroom with the desks piled up high around me and I find it hard to answer anything except ‘yes’ to that question.
Once I awoke with an old pencil case in my hand, a faded Space Jam logo on the gel-plastic front. It was coated with dust and stuffed full of long-dead felt-tip pens. The weight of it in my hands stole some of the dream-like haze away from my mind and I grabbed my phone for light to check where I was. I sat up in the middle of my classroom and steadied myself while I studied the strange object in my hand. It was 3am, the school’s distant halls buzzed with an uneasy silence, and I pulled myself up to go looking around. For what, I didn’t know, but the strange case in my hand gave me an unusual sense of purpose and I searched until I found a loose ceiling tile in the assembly hall, the height of which is easily thirty feet.
I might have been inclined to leave it, especially after I turned on the lights and found myself staring at the distant corners as if firm in the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. But there was no giggling in the air tonight, nor squeaking chairs or anything else. It felt as if the school itself was holding its breath and I dragged out the enormous step ladder used by maintenance and began my shaky ascent. God, even now I wonder how I found the courage. I’m terrified of heights, but I climbed up anyway until my fingertips could reach out and gently push the tile further away.
A flurry of empty crisp wrappers and crumpled paper fell out and I clutched the stepladder with white knuckles and wide eyes as my startled reaction sent it wobbling side-to-side. When it finally settled back onto all four legs, I breathed a sigh of relief and rapidly began descending, feeling only some mild sense of safety when my feet were back on the ground. I knew the ceiling was too lightweight for anyone to actually be up there, and yet I stared at the small pile of rubbish with a worrying sense of unease. The food was ancient, the paper covered with felt-tip drawings, and I found a dried-up pen that matched the others in the pencil case. More than that though, there was a stench that emanated from the pile that made me think of desperation and neglect. And amongst the rubbish was a plastic bag with bottles of unhealthy-looking piss, and a wet rag that looked like it had been pulling toilet duty for quite a while.
When I finally turned my attention back to my surroundings, I saw I was not alone. From the size of him, I’d say he was around thirteen and he had somehow approached me without me hearing or seeing him, stopping only when he was a few metres away where he crouched low to the floor and swayed from side-to-side. He looked like an animal, certainly feral in the way he moved, but it wasn’t his demeanour that made me cry out. It was the gaping hole where his face should have been, the skull caved in like a hollowed-out egg. His remaining skin was pock-marked and lesioned, and it took me a moment to register that he was naked.
He was waiting for something, though I didn’t know what. I tried to take a step towards the nearest door, but he took one too. He knew where I was, that much was clear if I couldn’t quite figure out how. I considered shining my torch straight at him given that the far away ceiling lights made the hole in his head pure shadow. But there was a faint impression of wriggling amidst the darkness that made my stomach churn, and I had no idea how this thing would even react to the stimulation.
I’m still not sure what put the connection in my head, but I eventually reached around to my back pocket and took the pencil case out. The boy started gibbering at the sight of it, and I cringed at the realisation the wet excited sound was coming from his cave-like skull, but I slid the case across the floor anyway. He snatched it up eagerly and immediately ran to the nearest wall where he scaled it with the wet sound of a gecko running up glass. With one final flourish, he stuck to the ceiling and slithered behind the loose ceiling tile like a spider. After a few seconds the tile shunted back into place, and it looked like nothing had ever happened.
Some of the kids, I think, know more than they’re letting on. They’re not difficult kids, most of them are quite smart. This place pumps out Oxbridge candidates like crazy and the parents pay big fees to help smooth things over when stuff goes wrong. Suicides and runaway aren’t uncommon, but we’re always told it’s a consequence of pressure, ambition, social difficulties, so on. So now we hand out questionnaires twice a year to ask our students about stress, the RE teacher doubles as a counsellor (pfft!), and we have a mental health awareness day every October, but it has never sat right with me to act like the two things are related.
James Kinsberg, for example, went missing a few years back. He was a rugby player who wanted to study medicine, and rumours were he could even be looking at a contract to play under-21s for a local team. He was a big strong boy and yet one day I found myself trying to drag him out of the pool, half-conscious. In the moment you just think, ‘oh shit a student is drowning’ and in my head my students are all kids, you see? But it was only after I dragged him out that I found myself wondering how the hell he’d found himself in trouble. He looked like he could wrestle an orca and win, but there he was on the floor, shivering and sputtering water out of his mouth.
When I looked back at the pool there was a kind of moment of recognition. I’m not sure what, exactly, just a dimming of the overhead lights, a muted silence, a tinny laugh I could not place amidst the gaggle of kids you crowded around us. But I looked back at James and wondered if he’d run into any real trouble at all, because the look in his eye wasn’t one of someone who’d nearly drowned, but instead of someone who didn’t care.
He made me think of myself, lying there on my classroom floor in total darkness. And that was how we’d found him. It had all started with screaming and shouting, and I ran over from the bleachers where I was acting as substitute for the lesson only to see him pale and blue, lying down at the bottom of the pool. He didn’t resist when I dove in and hauled him up, but it was like he wasn’t really there, like the lights were on but nobody was home.
When he went missing, I extended my rounds to include the pool. It’s a huge warehouse of a room and the water paints pretty lights on the walls, even in the dark since the roof is mostly glass panes. But I don’t like it, the bleachers all in a neat row with scaffolding behind to make strange shadows. And the damn filters bang every few seconds from water that churns and makes odd shapes of the tiles beneath the waves.
When I first dove in to save him, I opened my eyes underwater for just a few seconds and got the strangest sense something hideous was nearby, but the pool wasn’t empty, and it could have been anything. But a few times, in the night, I have seen something slithering out of sight as I walk around the water’s edge. It isn’t human, I think. Although I have, on occasion, seen the faceless boy standing at the bottom of the water with eerie stillness. But I don’t think it was him that James saw. I think it was something else, something that looks like a mass of hair drifting in a current, something that effortlessly pushes itself from shadow to shadow. Something that, occasionally, slaps its way onto dry land and watches me from behind the bleachers as I check the perimeter.
I don’t know where it lives, God knows it can’t be in the water all the time. But when I confronted James and asked him what he saw he told me only that it wasn’t going to leave him alone, not now, not ever. And a few weeks later he went missing while out for a jog along the beach. When they found him, he’d been hollowed out and stuffed into a storm drain like an inside-out gym sock.
“It’ll eat you,” he said, but that was all he ever offered me.
We all acted like he’d committed suicide from the pressure, even as the rumours filled the school. How could the two things possibly be linked? I saw the photos of what happened to him, even the police said it’d be treated as a murder. It was almost like the school knew the part it played in his death, so we all played along to the façade that he was just another promising kid lost to the difficulties of adolescence. But he knew clearly what was going to happen to him. I saw that much in his eyes. That’s why he laid there on the floor, that’s why he wanted to drown. That thing in the pool had tagged him and he lay down right there and then ready to be eaten rather than go another second. Something about the sight of it just overrode every instinct inside him and he lay down, ready—no, desperate—to die.
Is that why I lie down too? Why I wake up on the floor of my classroom? Why I shudder into lucidity at 3am, sleepwalking from room to room? Am I waiting to die? To be eaten by the building itself?
I teach lessons in the silence. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes in my sleep. I teach about history, but no one else’s, just my own. I write out episodes of my life on the blackboard like a study of The Tudors or Stuarts, assigning homework and asking questions and even chastising the silent ghostly whispers in the back of the nocturnal classroom.
To what extent was my alcoholism a consequence of modelling my mother’s behaviour?
Compare and contrast the loss of my father with the loss of my wife. Were the negative effects accumulative, or did they interact in unforeseen ways?
How has age altered my politics? Compare and contrast my voting habits as a young adult with those of the last election cycle.
One day I came to in the darkness, half-remembering a lesson on the role music played in my adolescent identity, and instead of continuing I asked an instinctual question that surprised even myself.
“Why do I do this?” I said, my voice unnaturally loud and clear in the silence. One by one the shadowy chairs scraped back as the unseen students rose and ghostly footsteps filled the room as they filed out. “Lesson over,” I muttered as I was filled with a deep despairing loneliness that made me realise just how brittle the truly is.
Lately I’ve started getting things mixed up. I teach the wrong lessons to the wrong students and a few reports have gone in about my behaviour. It’s not always guaranteed that I’ll wake up to find darkness all around me, instead there have been times I’ve awoken to a crowd of kids giggling at finding me asleep on the floor, with the sun out bright and strong. It’d be one thing if Mrs Wares dragged me in to give me a bollocking when this happens, but she just asks me if I’m doing okay, if I’m fine, if my home life is trying. She looks at me with pity and it breaks my heart. I wish she’d be angry instead, because the more she coos the more she calls me to check in on the place at night and the more I feel like the centre of a cruel joke.
Sometimes I visit the playground from when this place taught under-12s. It must have been a long time ago, because now it’s just a giant pile of collapsed metal pipework and—thanks to a hole in the nearby fence that has made it a popular place to fly tip—all kinds of rubbish. It’s isolated from the rest of the grounds by a short hedge and a weak fence, but the kids know about it anyway and sometimes go there to smoke, although not often. I like to look at it from my house. It’s so ugly and brutalist, it looks like the kind of sculpture you’d find at the Tate with a placard mentioning things like “late stage capitalism” or “the inevitability of death”. Whatever it is, I watch it and listen to it, and occasionally visit it in person.
I swear the pile changes, sometimes even just between blinks of the eye. I’ve pulled out bloody axes and bike chains, pointed knives with clumps of hair and matted gore along the edge, tricycles smashed to pieces with bits of headlight in the spokes… all these things make me feel queasy in the stomach. Supposedly, the pile eats pets, which is a rumour that works wonders for keeping kids away in the day but has only piqued my curiosity. I have pulled out my fair share of crumpled pelts and torn collars, but for some reason I’m not sure they come from things around here. I have nightmares about climbing down between the endless beams of rusted jagged metal and climbing on forever and ever with no stop. It’s an unspoken certainty, a belief held deep within my chest, but I don’t think that pile rests on asphalt at all. I think it doesn’t stop, I think it gathers things, things of loss and regret and guilt just like everywhere else in this school.
Are there blackboards in the day?
I stopped not long ago and held a dry erase marker in my hand stumped by the most unbelievable thought. When I teach at night, I use chalk. I have even gone home and washed my clothes to clear them of all the dust. But how then do I come in and teach to the class using a whiteboard?
My memories are becoming fuzzier with time, perhaps because of the drink, perhaps not. Sometimes I think back to my experience in the computer lab and my finger is pushing the heavy button of a clunky CRT monitor, sometimes I simply depress the dainty touch-screen button of a modern LCD. Which one was it, exactly? Could it be both? Might it have happened more than once? I’m not sure it’s the same school, come night. And in fact, it feels worse as time wears on. There’s an acceleration happening behind the scenes, just out of sight. Sometimes I visit the hall and half the tiles have fallen down and the faceless boy looks sad as he perches along the vents and wiring. Sometimes the pool has grown thick with algae and the tiles have decayed and the windowpanes along the roof have been smashed to pieces. And the only hint of the aquatic inhabitant is the disturbance of the grotesque pond scum as it tracks my movement from edge to edge, grotty trainers and children’s shoes and human hair rising to the surface as the water churns. But was it always like that? Why do I have memories of pulling James out of a sewage-riddled pool, pushing through thick green water as I dove in to drag him up?
When did I even see the photo of him stuffed into a storm drain? And yet I remember it so clearly.
He was a good kid. I think.
Sometimes he’s there, amid the faces that surround me when I wake up in the middle of the day to bright lights and laughter. Sometimes he asks questions as I talk about my experiences growing up, his hand raised as he asks if my three weeks with mono will appear on the final exam. That doesn’t make sense, but I don’t question it. It’s my duty to educate after all, and I think he needs it where he is.
I hate this place, but I can’t leave it alone. I feel hollowed out most days. I’m forgetting things a little too important, things I don’t want to let go of without a fight. But every time I speak to Mrs Wares, I lose all sense of time and just find myself agreeing to everything she says. Have I met her? In person? I’m sure I have. She’s spoken to me in her office, but is that the same as seeing her in person? I can’t say. I must have interviewed for this position, right? I must have. I remember asking her about lunch, about the canteen, and she gave the funniest answer.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she smiled. “No one here needs a canteen. But they might just gobble you right up!”
Did I laugh at the time? Or leave? I think I stormed out of her office after she said something I didn’t like, something about my wife maybe. Except… Well… after storming out I went straight back to work in my classroom which was always just a few doors down from her office. Which now that I think about just doesn’t seem right.
But then again, my name has always been on the faculty list, I’ve read it there multiple times. But like I said my memory grows fuzzier with time. Things change. This school has changed, I think, but I can never revisit the past, can I? Only what I remember of it. I remember it one way, but sometimes I stand in the silence, in the pitch-black nothingness of a moonless night, and I wonder if it has always been exactly as it is now. Change is so hard to keep track of. Why is it that when I awake on the floor my clothes have gotten bigger? I must be so very old. Was I as old as I am a few years ago? Of course not. What a stupid question. It’s just sometimes I walk around here, and I feel like an octogenarian which doesn’t quite sit right in my mind. Shouldn’t I be… what, mid-forties? Or is that a meaningless question to a drunk?
Still, I keep going. I keep teaching, although lately it feels like I teach more at night than at day. Sometimes I never even see the sun rise. It just keeps going. One long episode without end. I hope to take a break soon, to retire. God knows I need it. I just need to clear my head, to get it all down in one place, to think clearly if only for just a few minutes.
But after writing it all down I feel only more confused than I did before.
My most recent question for the students, written in chalk on a blackboard illuminated only by moonlight, leaves me feeling empty and alone. I don’t like it.
What is eating my mind?