‘Don’t you agree, Mr Michaels?’ she asks him, and without quite looking at me he smiles and says something like, ‘absolutely,’ or ‘she certainly has talent.’ Of course I love it when he agrees, but it upsets me that he doesn’t really seem to be paying attention.
‘It’s because he’s not seriously into the same sort of pop music as us and Mrs Blake,’ my friend Joy says when I complain to her, and I think she’s right.
As far as pop goes, Sir is mainly into Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, the headbanging stuff that makes a lot of the girls shudder and groan. I don’t mind it, but I especially enjoy it when he puts it on the turntable and laughs when everyone boos and cries ‘Off, off, off.’ We all love it when he laughs. It’s as infectious as measles, and no one wants a cure.
One day he plays us ‘The Gaelic Blessing’ and asks us to write down the images it evokes for us. I think it’s a strange choice, but he’s like that, always throwing something different at us, and collecting up our reactions as if they’re musical notes he’s going to use for a symphony he’s composing.
When the piece has finished he asks Prunella Jones to read out what she’s written, but every time she tries she bursts out laughing.
‘It’ll be something rude,’ someone calls out.
He moves on to Tricia Hill who gets booed when she says it made her see churches and choirs and hymnbooks.
‘Stating the obvious,’ Mandy Gibbons informs her loftily, and rolls her eyes as if Trish is an idiot.
Trish throws her exercise book and pen up in the air. ‘So let’s hear yours, if you’re so brilliant,’ she challenges.
Mandy’s eyes sparkle and we all know something outrageous is coming, but before she can read out a single word, Sir says,
‘What about you? What did you see?’
Startled and thrilled that he’s asked me, and embarrassed and desperate to impress even though I know what kind of reaction I’ll get from the others, I tuck my long blonde hair behind my ears (I always wear it down for Sir’s class) and begin. ‘I saw myself floating over a meadow like a bird,’ I read out loud. ‘I was a weightless ballerina looking down at the flowers in the grass and up to the sun and out across the sea to where angels were beckoning to me to join them.’
A couple of girls actually clapped, but more gagged and Sir says, ‘Very good.’
He’s not looking at me and I wonder if he means it.
I feel upset, rejected even, but then I comfort myself by thinking of a time when he was looking at me. It was when I was playing hockey in the top field and during a pause in the game I happened to glance back across the pitch towards the main school building. I’m not sure if I actually felt him watching me, and that was what made me turn around, you know how that happens sometimes, or if it was just coincidence that he was standing at the music room window and caught my eye as I glanced his way. He didn’t look away and as I stared back at him I stopped feeling the chill air on my bare thighs and panting breath in my lungs.
I think that was when his lessons first became the true light at the centre of my week and I, like a moth, circled it constantly, so drawn to him that each Wednesday afternoon was like being burned with the intensity of my own feelings.
Today, as we file into his class, there is a buzzing anticipation infecting us all for it’s one of our pop days, as we call them, and several of us have brought in the new records we bought while at home over the weekend.
The night before, in the dorm, we’d taken bets on what he would or wouldn’t like.
‘A shilling says he’ll love “People Got to Be Free” by The Rascals, or “Stone Soul Picnic” by Fifth Dimension.’
‘Sixpence says he’ll hate “Mony Mony” or “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream.’
They’re all wrong about ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, apart from me, because I knew from the minute I first heard it on my parent’s record player that he’d love it. My parents are groovy people. At weekends when their friends come over wearing bright-coloured kaftans and fake roses in their hair they drape themselves around the place like exotic furniture to chill out, smoke weed and drink gimlets or whisky sours. They talk about Vietnam or cricket or how to change the world. During the week, my mother is a senior civil servant writing speeches for ministers and my father is a lawyer specializing in tax and finance. They morph into hippies at the weekends and immerse themselves in the same sort of bands that Sir likes, which is how I knew he’d dig ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.
There really is no other teacher in the school like him. He feels more like a friend than someone who’s supposed to instruct and discipline us. I’ve never heard him tell anyone off, not even when some of the cheekier girls ask him for a kiss as a reward for saying something to impress him. He just arches an eyebrow in a comical way, almost as though he hasn’t heard, but the colour that rises over his neck gives him away. It’s why we do it, to see the little tell-tale spread of embarrassment that, according to most, proves that he really does want to kiss them.
I have no idea when class starts that day that I will remember it forever. It’s not my choice of record that changes the background music of schoolgirl crushes and improbable dreams, it’s Mandy Gibbons’s. She’s brought ‘Young Girl’ by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. It was released a couple of weeks ago, but this is the first chance we’ve had to play it with Sir, and every one of us secretly thinks the song is about her and him. We can hardly wait for Mandy to slide it from its paper cover and put it on the turntable. She’s allowed to do the honours while Sir peels off his corduroy jacket and drapes it over the back of his chair.
Mandy sets the needle carefully on the revolving disc, stands back with taut anticipation and as those two magical words – Young Girl – fly into the room with all their tragedy and passion Sir lowers his head. We’re all watching him, waiting for the blush, certain it will come and it does. What I don’t expect is the way his eyes find their way to mine. I can feel my heart pounding as the song tells me to get out of his mind, that his love for me is out of line, I’m too young and he needs to run. I feel the heat of the moment, intense and fateful, while in possession of all the charms of a woman.
Did the others notice? They’re dancing, eyes fixed on him, but not on me. I don’t dance, I just watch him turning away, his movements seeming to happen in a strange slow motion.
When the song finishes everyone’s waiting to hear what he has to say about a man trying to resist his love for a much younger girl.
He doesn’t say anything. He simply applauds, and his eyes are laughing as if admitting that he’s got the joke, but he’s not going to be baited, and now it’s time for someone else to share a record choice.
Tricia Hill steps forward with a Turtles EP she’s borrowed from her older sister. I don’t take much notice of it, I’m too distracted by the way Sir looked at me, during ‘Young Girl’. I can’t seem to shake myself free of it. He’s moved on, he’s talking about The Turtles, and making everyone laugh when he tries to play one of the tracks on the piano and gets it wrong. He does that sometimes, and we know the mistakes are on purpose. It’s his way of trying to change the mood if things have become too chaotic or flirtatious or intense.