She dreamt she was in a swimming pool. As she swam, her bikini floated away from her body like a small doll’s outfit toward a candle burning at the other side of the pool.  She tried to reach it, but it grew to the size of the sun. There was a huge Bang! as her eyes jolted open to the light blaring through the window.

Her mum rapped again on her door. 

‘Natalia! Are you not up for school yet?’

 

***

Natalia chewed slowly on her toast, as her mum hissed in liquor-scented breath over the breakfast table: ‘Quarter past eight. You’ll have missed the bus. You got done for skiving off school last week and now you’re late?’

Natalia arose, fingering the maligned report card in her pocket. ‘I’m going now.’

The dim October morning made the walk down the school’s long driveway even more soulless than usual. But cheered by the music in her earphones, she mused that she had only eight months left in Thornwood High, that this was the last winter she would have to watch the grey sky outlined against the pale orange, geometric ugliness of its building, like a monstrous ship looming closer as her size 5 feet carried her like automatons into its rectangular mouth.

Everyone else was already in form class as she headed to sign in late. Deafened by her music now, as she crossed the driveway she was oblivious to the huge moving shape coming from her left… just as she turned in surprise, one earphone dropped - and she stared aghast at a black Mercedes halting with a screech of its brakes a metre away. 

She leapt back startled, and out of embarrassment she didn’t dare to look to see the driver, scrambling to the Reception doors before the person driving the car - whomever it was - would have chance to call: 

‘You need to look out, young lady!’

She glanced back to see the caller of these words, delivered in a lively shout from a face sticking out of a rolled-down window. Squinting to discern which teacher it was, she didn’t recognise him: a flash of blonde-ish hair, an arm of suited grey, didn’t fit the description of anyone she’d seen here. He must be a visitor. She swept through the doors and pushed the late book back to the sour-faced receptionist, sighing as she headed for her form class and handed the conspicuous green rectangle of shame to Mrs Williams.

‘The spoff is late!’ 

‘And she’s on a report card!’

‘Where’ve you been, skiver?’

She sensed the puny grinning faces of Luke, Bernard, and Tom trained on her, heckling as though she were a bad performer, someone who had done them some wrong in a previous life show. She knew that a fourth boy Ryan Welsh would be sitting staring - as she’d learnt last term that he fancied her - which apparently meant no more than blushing wordlessly in her direction and slightly flinching at the insults his friends threw her way.

As she returned to her desk, glancing to Bernard she wondered at how lovely he used to look at primary school, singing the Assembly hymn Shine Jesus Shine!... with the unblemished face of a Cabbage Patch doll - now more like a Chucky doll - hardened like a convict after four years in this wretched high school on a council estate. 

Steeling herself at moments like this with thoughts of her literary heroine Jane Eyre, always ‘suffering, browbeaten, accused, condemned’ - the book which she had the serendipity of having to read for her GCSE exam. Soon, like the quietly ardent Jane herself, Natalia would have the freedom that she too craved… she was nearly 16, the first milestone of freedom to reaching the ‘busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen.’

 

***

The day dragged on: slow with atomic structure and study of cloud formation, better when filling sketchbooks and picking apart poetry; interspersed with a jacket potato and the quiet whirr of half an hour in the IT suite, idly browsing future careers, something that felt like as real as reading fairytales. PE, Natalia’s least favourite subject of all, was the main reason she’d diverted into town to truant last Thursday morning and the reason she was on a report card, which had to be signed at the end of the day by the Head Mr Neary.

3pm came and she was at Neary’s door. She heard more than one voice from within, as she gave a hesitant knock.

‘Yep, come in,’ came the beefy grunt as she pushed it open to see, as usual, Neary’s stout, bullish figure in sports clothes, standing perfunctorily beside his desk. He would normally sign the card and hand it back with a grunt, but this time there were other people in the office. 

There was Mr Clarke, the balding IT manager, sitting in the main chair at Neary’s computer. There was the short and softly-spoken Deputy Head Mr Dinkey standing by the window, opposite another man whose height loomed over him by comparison - and who, evidenced by the blonde hair and suit she could see in full now - was most certainly the man she had nearly been run over by this morning.

Painted in full like a regal portrait before her, there he was: his large stocky form in full tailor-suited grey, centred with a navy blue tie and a buttoned waistcoat beneath that made him an unusual sight of quaint middle-class formality in the school. Long, light brown hair swept up from a widow’s peak on a large forehead into honey blonde coming down behind his ears. He was looking out of the window so she could only glimpse in profile, the thinking-furrowed brow of his facial features. 

Despite his detachment from the company he seemed to loom over the rest of the men, and as Natalia put out the folded green card to Neary, her eyes flitted back waiting for the visitor to turn round fully. Was he an inspector? A prospective parent?

Neary had unfolded and was squinting at the card. ‘Late today?’

‘Yep sir, sorry.’

Upon their exchange, Dinkey had moved over to Clarke at the computer to sit and mutter together about something onscreen. The eccentric man by the window turned, only just realising someone else had come into the room. His large blue eyes were on Neary’s hand where her card was held, and she sensed that his scrunched, majestic eyebrows held something he wanted to know.

‘These are report cards, Neill,’ said Neary, as if in answer. ‘The kids get them when they bunk off school. They get them signed by every teacher and then by me at the end of the day.’ 

The stranger, Neill, was again gazing out of the window in contemplation. Natalia put out her hand but the card stalled in Neary’s hand as Neill now spoke:

‘Another one of your ideas, John?’ he said still looking out. Now he turned and with a glance toward Natalia, not quite looking at her, added: 

‘And do you ever ask the pupils why they truant?’

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