The comp across the Burn from them was a school not unlike the one in Durham city she was used to. At least that is what she told Liz. ‘It’s fine. It’s a nice place. And the sixth form is quite separate anyway, and they treat you properly, like grown-ups.’
Liz pursed her lips. She knew exactly what reputation the comp had in the town. And she knew that it was best not to be in the precinct at lunchtime when the kids from the comp were on their dinner hour. She could see that Penny was protecting her. It made her sick that her daughter felt she had to.
Having smoked her cigarette right down to the filter, Penny squelched it in the mud and plunged her hands deep in her cardigan pockets. Her back to the wind, she had to toss her head to keep the hair from her eyes as she surveyed the fire damage to the home-economics department. That was a subject she had always despised, back at the old school. When she started the comp at eleven she’d had terrible rows with the hag of a teacher who told her that her hands were dirty. Penny had been in tears by the end, denying it, and the teacher marched her to the sink to scrub them herself. The water was scalding. The school soap was globby, yellow, antiseptic. All the girls were laughing. ‘See! Your fingernails are black!’ the home-economics mistress shouted. ‘They’re always black!’ Penny was sobbing. ‘They’re already clean!’ And eventually the teacher had given up in disgust.
Here there was a black oblong of scorched earth. Not for the first time Penny said a silent thank you to whoever did this and prevented her having to resit HE. Oddly, four or five burned cookers stood among the wreckage. They looked like rotting stumps of teeth.
The town clock bonged out nine o’clock from the far side of the field and Penny stirred herself to go in. Actually, she was keen this morning. Young Mr Northspoon was starting them on Forster.
Her first morning there had been grim. The lino in the sixth-form common room was dirty yellow and fleshy and it put her off. She never told Liz but that first afternoon she skived off down the park. The skiving could easily become a regular thing for her again. In Durham she had routinely sloped off, but with more shops to go round there had been less chance of walking into her mam. Penny loved the indoor market there, freezing cold, backing on to the river, reeking of damp, dead pheasants and old books.
In Aycliffe there was the park or the new covered-over bit of the precinct. That was where Nobles Amusements was and, although she hated fruit machines, she found herself going on them again and again. The air was smoky and everyone else was over sixty. The music was the cheesiest she had ever heard and by the end of September she was thinking she must find somewhere nicer to skive to. Next door there was a cafe run by Christians where they sold arts and crafts: wreaths and baskets of dried fruit and flowers. She couldn’t bear it in there, she found. Everyone smiling.
She was at a bit of a loss really. The lessons she skived didn’t worry her much and, somehow, she managed to get work in and no one bothered her. She slipped through, she thought. The bits about the sixth form she liked so far were: having a locker she could fill up, having full run of the art rooms when she liked, and being able to slip in and out of school whenever she fancied.
The only lessons she was always there for were English. They were a group of six and they had two teachers. They began with Mrs Bell who, in their first few weeks, rattled them through selected highlights from Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy. But a few weeks into term there was a new member of staff. In their very first lesson together, in a tangerine-coloured room at the top of the school, he declared he was losing his teaching virginity with them. Joanne, sitting next to Penny, gasped. She said afterwards that the new teacher thought he was being risque. But Joanne was just snotty, Penny thought, because she lived in Heighington, a bijou village out of town. Penny didn’t think Mr Northspoon was trying to be risque. She thought he was marvellous.
That first lesson seemed to evolve quite naturally and easily into a class discussion in which they all pulled their chairs round in a circle and talked about their first-ever snog.
Mr Northspoon was in a sharp black suit with a beautiful shirt. He had his legs crossed and listened patiently to all their stories and had them all laughing, tapping one hand continuously on the air as if he was dying for a cigarette.
Alison Bradley fled and Mr Northspoon said it was probably because she was sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Penny thought he was out of order, especially since she knew Alison was pregnant, but there was still something enthralling about Mr Northspoon. He was young and auburn-haired, he had this great floppy fringe… and he set his head in his hands to listen and gestured eloquently and sometimes wildly and he laughed, he laughed loud and infectiously.
What she remembered most was that he even told them a little about his own first snog. For the first time he looked sheepish and talked vaguely about rolling around under hedges down the Burn. It turned out that he had grown up here in this town, too. He talked about how, on this day of his first snog down the Burn, right near here, some
