Wheel of Fortune (Ch 1)

WHEEL OF FORTUNE  by Humphrey Muller

CHAPTER ONE:  In the hub of things

           It was horrendous. He knew, after ten minutes of trying to shout above the hubbub of voices, that he'd never get control. He felt distinctly panicky as he tried to expound the possible subtle implications of a poem called Mr Kartoffel, about a whimsical man given to drinking his beer from a watering-can and parting his hair with a knife and fork.

           'Would you say,' he flung his question into the din of voices, 'that Mr Kartoffel is a nonconformist, unconventional, or simply anti-social?'

          'Anti-wha...?' queried a freckled-face girl with rippled brow and nose.

          'Quiet! Quiet! For heaven's sake, be quiet!'

          The din modulated to a hum, then took off again like a swarm of bees regaining the feverish pitch of spring-pollination.

          Somehow Derek pressed on, eliciting a few half-hearted responses from girls whose eyes he was able to catch. Thankfully, the bell shrilled through the din and he sighed with relief as the boisterous girls surged out of the classroom. But the next lesson was equally disheartening.

          It was the Lower Fourths, and being a 'library' period, merely required him to assist the girls in their choice of books.

          'Sir!' piped a pixie-faced girl, eyes a-giggle with bravado. 'What's "pubescence" mean?' She held up a book, her finger latched onto a word from a scene of sordid lust. Derek tried to supply the 'dictionary' meanings of the words, ignoring the obvious intent of the questions.

          'Coltish?' he said, responding to another question. 'Well ... er ... it means young, and lively, like a colt or foal, doesn't it?' Who on earth, he wondered, put the pot-boilers of Wilbur Smith and Ian Flemming on the shelves? It was too much when a pug-faced girl, barely suppressing the heaving of illicit laughter from her ample bosom, came forward and asked him to explain the meaning of 'this page - this page, here, Sir, where this bloke thing-um-a-bobs this girl ...'

          Derek sank into one of the stuffed chairs in the staffroom, taking refuge in his cup of coffee. He wished the coffee were laced with brandy. Dismay spread through his heart. How the hell was he going to get by, year after year, surviving as a teacher? His eyes rested on the first signs of a paunch. He had promised himself that before he reached thirty in the following year - 1988 - he would be securely settled in England. He felt much older than his twenty-nine years. A burnt-out case, he thought. He lifted tired eyes, surveying the women teachers around him. They gabbled in enthusiastic groups, of Oxbridge candidates and divorcing parents. Could he break into this alien world? He had been a lecturer in English at the University of Zululand in South Africa before the creeping menace of Apartheid made him move to England. He had unsuccessfully applied for all of the few academic posts he saw advertised. With the academic cutbacks, teaching now seemed the only option open to him.

          'Call for Mr Mann!' shrilled Mrs Taylor, the Deputy Head, peering short-sightedly across the room through her owl-like spectacles. When she spotted Derek she beamed. 'Girl to see you!'

          Derek made his way to the door. Outside stood a slim sixth-form girl. She looked frail and vulnerable in her school gym, but her delicate features contrasted oddly with her penetrating dark eyes.

          'Jacquie,' said Derek, surprised.

          'It's the poem I promised you, Mr Mann,' she said. She handed him a page of embossed paper. 'It's my effort on South Africa. My homework for the next tutorial!'

          'Thank you, Jacquie.' He smiled generously. 'I'll certainly read it!'

          'Thanks!' Her eyes crinkled. 'By the way ...'

          'Yes?'

          'I was hoping you'd come to dinner next week.' Seeing his surprise, she added quickly, 'I've a friend who's a priest. He would like to meet you. My Granny too.'

          Derek hardly thought the headmistress would approve. 'That's kind of you. I'll let you know ...'

          '... tomorrow, after the tutorial. Fine!' She shot another of her electric smiles and swung round, swinging her chestnut-red pony tail. Her slight figure descended the stairs and was gone in seconds.

          Derek returned to his seat in the staffroom. She was certainly very different from the other girls, he thought. Of course, she was sixth form. But her electric energy and candid sincerity set her apart from her peers. He avoided the obvious possibility that she had a crush on him.

          He looked at the poem. It began:

          Port Elizabeth, midnight, in a cell

          Who laughed ...

          Another Steve Biko poem, he thought. She had cottoned onto some of the themes in his own poems he had read to the group.

          He thought back to his black students in Zululand. He missed their dignity, their respectful silence when he explained the technicalities of a word in cultural context. The neatly dressed and well behaved girls in the sixth form at least shared something of the same dignity. He thought of his small, enthusiastic, appreciative third-year degree tutorial group, also neatly dressed, their eyes shining ... And then he thought of the police, the army-occupied campus, the dogs, the unexplained bruises across the faces of students, and the students thronging in singling, seething masses of hatred, and his mind exploded: 'No, I won't go back there. I hate that bloody country!'

          In the late afternoon Derek returned to his single bedsitting room. It was a seedy ground-floor room with a kitchenette. Here he sat up late, most nights, marking essays. Methodically his red pen filled the margins with fine lines of what he hoped were helpful notes. Next door in a similar bedsitter a young couple loved and fought like cat and dog. It was customary to hear the dapper young man's voice raised, punctuated by bloodcurdling screams from Ruth, his beloved, who eventually locked herself in the bathroom Derek shared with them.

          'Ruth! Ruth! Don't be a silly girl. Open the door!' The young man's pleading whispers would go on interminably. His tap-tap-tapping on the door drove Derek crazy: he didn't know whether to attempt to rescue Ruth or leave well alone.

          At other times Derek would awake to her screams of pure ecstasy. It usually went on for half an hour, stop abruptly for five or ten minutes, then start up for an encore: her voice would trill to a high operatic pitch, culminating in an intense rhythm of jiggling bedsprings. It wasn't unusual for this performance to be followed, after another interval, by the screaming and bathroom ritual.

          In the morning he might pass Ruth in the hall. She was thin, almost skeletal, but her warm smile never betrayed any depths of unhappiness.

          The following morning Derek set out to work as usual. It was a very dark and cold winter's morning in February and he negotiated his Rover carefully into the traffic. He lived on the outskirts of Bradford and had to follow a complex route to the school which required starting out early. He missed the bright crisp mornings of Zululand and the fast easy drive to the university. He pulled the car off the street halfway into the driveway of a garage in Shipley where he usually stopped to buy the Thursday edition of the Daily Telegraph - to check the educational posts. There was a petrol tanker half blocking the entrance so he couldn't pull right into the forecourt. He climbed out and was half way to the shop when he was stunned by the sound of a shuddering crash behind him. It sounded like metal and a shower of glass. His heart sank, realising that something had hit his car. He ran back, expecting to see his car merged with the mangled remains of another vehicle. But the driver's side was immaculate. When he rushed to the other side he gasped. The door was dented in and instead of a rear-side window shards of glass lay everywhere. There was no sign of a missile, until he noticed an isolated wheel lying on its side a few yards back from the car.                                                                      

          The wheel had come off some other vehicle. His car had stopped its random career down the hill.

          Derek cursed. There was no sign of the other vehicle! He flung the offending wheel into his boot. His car (a near-new Rover, bought with South African funds already depleted by the collapse of the rand) was a shabby sight, but still derivable. He spent a miserable day at the school and drove home, that evening, with the cold wind whistling through the gaping hole that was a window. He'd have to wait until the following week before he could have the damage repaired. The next morning he stuck a piece of stiff cardboard over the gap to keep out the cold and the snow that began to blow horizontally

          Once again, he joined the traffic crawling to Bradford. In the dark of pre-dawn, he was unable to see anything beyond the cardboard-patched window on his left as he gingerly crept across Wharfdale junction. He was craning forward to see to the left when, from the right, tearing brakes and rushing lights smashed his tail, spewing glass. He coasted to safety with a galloping heart, hardly believing this second blow to his once-immaculate car.

          After waiting for the police and exchanging addresses with the other driver (who was furious at his intrusion into the junction), Derek drove his still derivable but now ultra-battered Rover to school. He suffered the onslaught of adolescent classroom misbehaviour with an even heavier heart, knowing that now his entire month's salary of £500 wouldn't even cover the costs to his uninsured car.

          Driving back at the start of the weekend, he eyed the endless ridges of dull terraced redbrick houses that stretched over what must once have been rolling green hills and dales.

          ‘This is not the England I came to live in,' he thought. But then surely, he argued, it was better than being in South Africa where innocent victims were being tortured. He thought sadly of another stanza from Jacquie's poem:

          The necklace you wore was a burning tyre.

          Though they heard your screams melt into the fire.

          Thankfully, he thought, the tyre that had hit him in Shipley came from a less malevolent fate. But the thought did nothing to dispel the gathering gloom in the life he was trying to establish in this sceptred isle, this England that had seemed a romantic escape from African violence, heat and dust.

          The next month brought something of a relief to the nerve-racking routine of teaching. Mrs Taylor, the deputy head, asked him to join some of the teachers responsible for escorting a group of girls from the Lower Fourth as well as the more senior girls on a visit to Stratford. On the outward journey he sat next to Mrs Taylor on the coach. She was a compassionate woman who radiated calm and normality.

          'You heard the story of old McDonald, of the remote Glen Lockart?'

          'I can't say I have,' Derek replied.

          'Well,' her eyes twinkled through her owl-like lenses. 'He told his son to travel to faraway Jedburgh, or even to cross the border to the land of the Sasanachs, to find a wife.'

          'How so?' Derek smiled.

          'You see, he told his son he had known many of the lassies in the Glen when he was younger; so it wouldn't be wise to marry a lassie from the Glen lest perchance the one he chose were to be a half-sister!'

          'No indeed!' Derek laughed.

          'But,' Mrs Taylor went on. 'His mother called him to her side in private. She said, "My son, ye don't have to gang far at all!"'

          'Oh?'

          'Indeed no,' she said. 'His mother said: "Before ye were born, I was away in London where I met a comely young man. He it is who is your real father ..."'

          Derek roared with laughter. It was all the funnier that the deputy head told it.

          Everyone enjoyed the production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. On the return journey the coach stopped at Warwick Castle where the girls were given a tour of the Castle and allowed to eat their packed lunches in the spacious grounds afterwards. The wayward weather of March had given way to an early outbreak of Spring. The air was crisp and even warm in the soft sunshine, like a promise of summer. A flurry of snowdrops shone white in the lush green of a bank.

          'Do flowers experience a sexual thrill, sir?' asked a pert voice from behind.

          Derek turned around. It was Jacquie, smiling mischievously. 'I mean, when they're pollinated?'

          'No,' he said, in what was meant to be a stern reply. 'They don't have a nervous system.'

          'Oh yes, of course.' Her sharp features, uplifted eyebrows and mouth touched by mirth made her look like a pixie. 'I suppose you'd say the castle looks very grand. I think it's an anachronism.'

          Derek took up the challenge. 'It stands for solid values. Look at its turrets. It suggests etiquette, stability, security - civilisation, in fact.'

          But we’ve had the courage to move on from that,' she insisted. 'Now we have democracy - the British Museum, the BBC, the NatWest Tower. In New York, the Empire State Building...'

          'Civilisation is very fragile, as Kenneth Clark said ...'

          ‘But you have to have change,' she insisted. 'Look at your students in Africa. The young have to change the bad old ways of the establishment ...'

          'And never mind the consequences? The necklacing, the breakdown of law and order...?' Derek spoke almost crossly, but her quick smile dispelled the momentary annoyance.

          'Like Walt Whitman,' she said gently, 'we have to become everything. Even the suffering.'

          'You're too good a pupil,' he smiled.

          'But not such a good girl,' she whispered and touched his hand softly. She came closer, looking whimsically into his eyes. 'What different worlds we come from! And yet we have this meeting of minds ...'

          He drew away, gently, and began to walk slowly along the path. 'That's what teaching is all about. Minds meeting. We're just learning facilitators ...'

          'Oh, don't!' She stopped, scowling in mock reprimand. 'Stop being a teacher, for once.'

          He looked at her. Her maturity sat awkwardly on her light frame. Yet he found her captivating with her bright eyes and bright intellect. She was fresh and crisp, like the morning. Her chestnut red hair glinted in the sun and traces of freckles peppered her face, giving her a school-girlish petulance. Her willowy body was oddly alluring in her brown uniform buckled tightly at the waist.

          'I'm just being conscious,' he said, still trying to change the subject. 'Life - especially civilised life - is a question of consciousness. You did a good job of expressing your consciousness in your poem.'

          'Being aware of suffering,' she said, biting into a chocolate-coated peppermint. 'Being aware of everything. Being aware of the spring snowdrops, there. And the sun - and of you, and your aftershave.' Her eyes crinkled again.

          'And me being aware of your petulance! And the way some chocolate has stuck to your nose.'

          She wiped it off quickly. 'Chocolate hardly proves you're alive. I thought it had something to do with thinking ...'

          '"Because I think, I am." Yes, in fact consciousness only proves the person that experiences consciousness is alive! I have no proof that you're alive - just of me.'

          'Here,' she said, coming close to him and touching his cheek. 'Can you feel that? Aren't I alive?'

          There was a hint of peppermint on her breath. He said: 'I'm aware of you, but that only proves that I'm alive. You could be a dream, or an illusion. You see, consciousness is like an echo-chamber, a tableau of impressions and thoughts, and what actually constitutes reality...'

          She lifted herself up on her toes and planted a kiss on his mouth. It was like an electric shock.

          ''Jacquie!' he said, 'For goodness sake...'

          But her subtle body had already insinuated itself against his. 'I'm just your imagination...,' she teased.

          Someone sniggered. Derek turned round to discover the incredulous eyes of a group of girls from the Lower Fourth and the shocked faces of their form mistress and the deputy head.

          'Jacquie, return to the coach at once! Mr Mann, please step this way.' The deputy head looked oddly severe as she blinked through her large glasses.

          'Oh, Mrs Taylor, we were just ...,' stammered Jacquie.

          'Do as you're told!' said Mrs Taylor. Derek had forgotten how emphatic she could be. He felt hot and cold all over.

          The next week there was a great deal of sniggering and furtive whispering in Derek's classrooms. Mrs Taylor was very sympathetic and clearly believed Derek that he had not tried to become too friendly with, or had made a pass at one of the Sixth Formers. Nevertheless, Derek felt the full weight of the head teacher's velvet glove when she called him into her office.

          'I'm afraid,' she announced, 'that we will no longer need your services after Easter. You always knew, of course, that your position might be temporary. And Anthea Johnston, whom you were relieving, has now recovered from her hysterectomy.' She smiled thinly. 'We'll have to let you go, I fear.'

          'Of course,' Derek said softly. 'I quite understand.'

          The wheel of fortune turned another notch.

          When Derek left the school for the last time, he was being given a lift by Cynthia Jackson, the Head of English. As the car turned out of the school drive, he saw Jacquie, sitting against the stone wall with a group of girls waiting for a bus. She sat on her haunches, her narrow knees drawn up under her brown school skirt. He waved to her, but she was lost in thought. How vulnerable she looked, he thought.

          'Troublemaker!' snorted Mrs Jackson, swinging the car round the bend.

                                                                  END OF CHAPTER ONE

                                                                                       (Copyright © Charles Muller 2000)

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