Читать книгу Zero Per Cent - Mark Swallow - Страница 7

The best place to start is on the stairs at home where we used to spend a lot of time sitting. Always the same formation, my little sister on the top one and Tommy on the second, with me down a couple and leaning against the wall. Our legs had habits too. Rosie bunched hers under her chin, Tommy’s were all over the place, never still, while mine pointed down the stairs with the right foot on top of the left trying to line itself up with the bottom of the hand rail. This is how we used to sit – for the clicking of the Christmas photograph, for the looking at ourselves in the mirror above the stairs and for the listening in on the grown-ups.

The photographs are still an easy present for Mum to give lucky friends and relations each year. We used to spend hours finessing our poses in the mirror but our ears were always on the kitchen where we might just be being talked about by Mum and Dad.

Five years ago I was the hot topic. I have been discussed a lot since but it was five years ago, when I was about to leave primary school, that I first picked up some interesting stuff.

My ‘educational destination’ was still undecided. Dad was finally losing what had been a long and cold war to send me to a private school rather than the local comprehensive. Still he refused to believe Mum would not change her mind at some point. She was furious he would not just roll over and accept her passionate belief in the importance of supporting state schools “with our own flesh and blood”. But even she was not as cross as Rosie and Tommy, who had nothing else to listen in on for weeks.

Dad worked very hard in a bank. He still does, in the City of London. Apparently that is the main reason we were able to afford this house, the biggest on Rockenden Road and just in either Hounslow or Isleworth depending on how you look at it. He travels all over the world so doesn’t mind being close to Heathrow. Mum has lived in the area all her life and works as a secretary at the health centre.

And how did I feel? I didn’t like the idea of leaving my mates, who were going to Chevy Oak Comprehensive. But I didn’t like the idea of disappointing Dad either when he had put me up or down or by for a school somewhere else. He kept on about the facilities and class sizes and the paintballing club they ran on Saturday afternoons. Mum seemed to have heard enough of it.

“This is where we live,” I heard from my stair. “It may not be particularly peaceful or lovely, Martin, but we are here in a neighbourhood – yes, neighbourhood – we know and in which we are known. And Jack, as one of our children, lives here too.”

“I am well aware—”

“The hell you are! This is not some computer package or bloody car we’re talking about here. It’s Jack’s education. You can get excited about your heated wing mirrors waggling for you at the push of a button, about your gleaming veneer and your plush velour, but Jack does not need extras. He needs the local school, solid, sane and free.”

“It’s got nothing to do with cars, Polly.”

“What are these posh schools of yours if not shiny cars with tinted windows which purr shut on the smog? You can go paintballing whenever you like but leave Jack here with us.”

“Very funny. A few months from now you’ll be sorry for this, Polly.”

“You want him schooled, Martin, and I want him educated. It’s as simple as that. Heir-conditioning with an aitch! That’s what you’re after.”

Our teacher at Primary was our friend. The floor of our form room was thick with rugs and cushions. The walls were beautifully decorated by all of us. I used to think that’s why they were called primary colours. There were amazing displays by our teacher with her perfect handwriting which I longed to copy completely perfectly. How could anyone (except Razza who has always had Special Needs) hate reading in our Cosy Corner? There was so much friendship in that room we even had loads to spare for the slimy lizards in their tank. There wasn’t even a bell. Instead, at the end of break, a toddler would proudly brandish that sign, ‘Please walk in now showing care and respect to everyone in are school’.

But Dad’s descriptions of secondary classrooms, delivered in chilling detail when he tucked me in at the end of the day, reminded me of Mexican Indian arenas we’d done in comparative civilisation where they played football with prisoners’ heads and volleyball with freshly ripped-out hearts.

On his way back to the office from Moscow, he invited me out to lunch in my last primary school half-term. I went along a little nervously. We sat in the window of a posh place in Richmond and Dad, in a grand mood, ordered caviar.

“I’d like to introduce you to an expensive habit of mine,” he said when it arrived. “Mum doesn’t like it, of course…”

“Caviar – or you eating it?”

“Either, Jack.” He spooned the shiny black stuff on to some fancy toast. “Would you like to try it?” For each go he pouted his lips like a gibbon to make sure he didn’t drop any.

“Eeeerrr! No, thanks, Dad.” I gobbled at my melon.

“Go on!”

The caviar did look quite beautiful, like a load of full stops.

“Naaah, Dad!”

“I won’t offer often, Jack!”

So I craned forward and took a nibble from the toast he held. It tasted sensational. All my buds were up and quivering and demanding more.

“Steady,” said Dad, snaffling the last of it himself. “But, I tell you what – last a couple of years at this comp, establish yourself as a survivor – and then I’ll stop banging on about different sorts of schools.”

“I’ll try, Dad.”

“And if you hate it after two years, we’ll try somewhere else. Either way we’ll celebrate with some more of this black stuff!”

When his phone rang all this rare enjoyment drained from his face. He said he had been “summoned”. I said I’d take the bus, expecting him to tell me I was too young and that he would give me a lift. But he didn’t seem to know I was too young, so I did it. No bother.