Usually Jodie and the teacher haunted different wings of the sprawling high school. She preferred the quietness of the arts and languages prefabs while Mr Gillespie hid in the teachers’ study. Occasionally she would look up and find him peering down at her through the wired safety glass at the head of the main stairs. A smile would ripple across his face, a spark of lust in his eyes, and then it would be snuffed. Jodie had liked that. She thought she was slick.
Thursday was their day to meet and fuck – and the occasional Saturday when he told his wife he was at the golf – but mostly Thursday evenings when they would drive to the tin caravan. He had stood her up before, left her standing in the shadows of the tenements, and later he would give her some excuse: a wean with measles, a wife with a sprained back. Then he would haunt her more that following week, floating down corridors in the cloud of her Cachet. Sometimes he would shout at her in the hallway, contriving some small infraction, anything that would allow him to drown her in his shadow and make her cast her hazel eyes in his direction.
This past week when he missed their Thursday at the caravan, she was glad of the peace. After the weekend, he didn’t haunt her in the hallways, and when she went to the Modern Studies block, he was not there as usual.
Her brother was getting dressed in front of the electric fire when he sang, “I know something you don’t know.” He was alternating between buttoning his school shirt and bending over and spooning heaps of dripping Weetabix into his gullet. He never took his eyes from the cartoons. “Are ye not gonnae guess?”
Mungo was bare-arsed and innocent as a wean. There was no heating in the rest of the flat, but it wasn’t right that he was naked in front of her, not now he was fifteen. He was physically a young man, if not yet inside his head. A rash of light brown hair dusted his groin and thighs, and the round chubbiness of his buttocks was becoming lean and square with muscle. He waggled his bare arse at her.
“Stop your nonsense and put your underpants on.” She mourned the sweet little boy that he used to be. At night she could hear him through the wall, rubbing fast and finishing much too quick. She knew what he was doing when his bath took an eternity and the immersion ran out of hot water. There had been a time she’d had to chase him with a washcloth just to get him clean.
“I know something you don’t know.” He baited her with a grin but Jodie would not guess. “Fine! Fat Gillespie has run away. Mr Goodart says he’ll be teaching us from now on. I heard him say Gillespie didn’t show up for work, didn’t phone in sick or nothing. He just vanished.” Mungo was pulling on his long black socks. “Goodart asked us if Gillespie had given us homework and we fuckin’ lied.” He sank to one knee, strummed a fantastic air guitar. He didn’t expect Jodie to start sobbing.
Jodie felt the floor tilt underneath her. Like a gable end slated for demolition, the front facade of her fell away and the private contents of her life rolled out. She was being torn down, and every mismatched bed sheet in her mind was to be exposed for all to see. She knew why the teacher had gone away. She knew what she had done to make Mr Gillespie disappear.
* * *
Mungo wouldn’t sit next to her on the bus. He sat on the bench opposite and flattened himself against the glass, his eyes fixed somewhere over the black fields. Jodie couldn’t remember a time when he had been this disappointed in her.
It was a long while before she could stop crying. Then she had told Mungo all about Mr Gillespie, about his holiday caravan, the frontier of the vast sea and the excitement of the screaming waltzers. For every thing she told him, there was a thing she could never tell. She didn’t tell him how Mr Gillespie had said he believed in her. How easily he had groomed a daft wee lassie into believing that she might get out of the city; that she might escape the dreich streets that held them all stuck and be free, at last, from the burden of her brothers. She had a good brain, sure, but she was nothing special, not compared to these Perth lassies with their tutors, and the Edinburgh debutantes from the Mary Erskine School. She had a good head on her shoulders but he was the one who would make sure she would go far. How could she tell Mungo that as he was fingering her that very first time, she had already started to trust him and doubt herself?
Mr Gillespie had promised to help her get into Glasgow University, and she had doubted she was bright enough to manage that on her own. To Jodie, the university was another city altogether, one whose postcode was a moat that kept East End middens like her out. It was the ancient seat of learning that respectable Englishmen came to when they wanted a sense of frontier plus a top-drawer education, not to mention four years of shenanigans with local girls who liked to get fucked off their faces on eccies and pints of snakebite and black.
Hamish said he knew all about it. When he had a supply in, Hamish sold dank hashish to the university freshers. He cut it with plain rolling tobacco and crumbled a beef Oxo cube over the top of the mixture. He could make the smallest amount stretch across a whole class.
His timing had to be perfect. He had to catch them during freshers’ week while they still had envelopes of money from their grandmothers and before they learned the hard lessons the city had in store for them. He always struggled to straighten his grin as Toby and Dom sniffed at bags of tobacco and Mo-Maw’s out-of-date Bisto and exclaimed it smelled just as good as the skunk they had “that one time in Goa.”