[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show? by Paul Magrs

Author:Paul Magrs [Magrs, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Contemporary
ISBN: 1590216539
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2018-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Vince was hoping he could duck into the staff room at lunchtime and quietly go about his business. Get some coffee, set about marking. Keep his head down. But it was at this point that the PE teacher decided to acknowledge him.

That face coming across the room at him. That bloody monkey face! His pitiful strands of hair over skin the texture of an avocado. This man was avocado-shaped, in fact, in a too tight, unwashed tracksuit. Mrs Bell had made Vince smirk once by remarking that they should all complain about the PE staff wearing their tracksuits in the rest of the school. Teaching other subjects dressed like that! She thought it was awful. And she thought it was unwise, his blithely stomping about the place in his tight tracksuit bottoms, showing the plain impression, as she put it, of his genitalia. It wasn’t right.

He came up to Vince and there was the smell of cheese-and-onion crisps on his breath. ‘Have you been in the wars, then?’

It took Vince right back. This bloke’s face was always bearing down on him when he was in his early teens. Whether it was cross-country, swimming, rugby or the long jump, there was his bloody awful face coming into view and screaming at him to put some effort in. His face going scarlet. The other lads sniggering. Once he’d stood them all in a line and thrown a cricket ball at every one of them so they could catch it and get over their fear of hard balls. He’d taken Vince’s glasses so they wouldn’t get smashed and of course Vince couldn’t see a thing. In protest Vince went from being hopeless to not trying at all. He simply wandered around the cross-country course down the Burn, twenty minutes behind everyone else, trudging through the black mud. And then he’d have this face screaming at him. And again, when everyone was showered and dressed and he showered alone, he’d have this face bellowing at him through the steam to hurry. To get out of his sight.

‘Yeah,’ Vince said. ‘I’ve been in the wars.’ Under all his bruises he could feel himself colouring further.

There was a kerfuffle at the door as the careers master came in and caught sight of him. ‘There’s someone wants you,’ he said. ‘Penny Robinson has locked herself in the sixth-form ladies’ toilets and she wants to talk to you and no one else.’ Vince turned to go, frowning.

‘Well,’ said the PE teacher. ‘Isn’t that the girl you were out having lunch with?’

‘What?’

The careers master had turned to listen, too.

The PE teacher said, ‘You heard. Someone saw you out on the town and then catching the bus with one of the sixth-form girls.’

‘So?’

‘One thing you have to learn,’ the PE teacher said, ‘in this job. No matter who they are, no matter how much they’re begging for it, no matter how much you want to give it to them, you have to stop yourself. Isn’t that right?’

The careers master nodded. ‘Oh, yes.

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