"Mister Pierce."

There is no describing how it comes, as it comes down the long, light-filled corridors. It doesn't roll, nor does it glide. It doesn't shimmy or shoot. It simply folds like light itself, billowing a backdraft, although no-one knows exactly what it is. Perhaps light needs it, to survive.

"Mister Pierce."

The eyes are large, light brown, going darker at their own circumference. Then so white, so pure, so not-bloodshot. Brander than new. The mouth is pink and solemn, the upper lip holds onto the bottom lip a little.

"Mister Pierce." It says again. A hand is extended, gently nudging his teacher on the shoulder.

"Danny, mate." Fingers fold his pen a little closer into his grip, poising it above the notebook, as if he had been writing comments. At this stage, he doesn't dare sit up. He knows that his leather messenger bag is laid on the desk, between his head and the classroom. From their point of view, he would be marking. He is marking.

"It's over."

"What's over, Danny?" An unqualified silence, and a swinging door, then the slow, knocking tail-end of a bell, all arrive to suggest that it might be the morning lesson that is over. Danny sighs and looks towards the room's only entrance and exit. His brow deepens a little, he then turns to go. As he confronts the corridor, filled as it is with passing pupils, he stops.

"They put something on. . your bag." He turns to say. "While you were.. marking. In chalk."

"What.. what is it, Danny?"

Danny leans against the doorframe and looks along its upper limit. "It's.. wrong."

Toby 'Warren' Pierce tries to move his head. He lifts it a few inches.

"Wrong. As in. Incorrect? Or wrong. As in. Immoral. Jaded or debased?"

Danny's brow deepens again. "It's rude. I think."

"Rude? On a scale of.." Pierce pauses. "Bum rude or.."

Danny's concern seems to suggest that what is written on the far side of his teacher's bag went beyond bum rude.

"Prick rude? Twat rude? Spaz rude?"

Danny looks at the floor.

"Cunt rude?"

Danny corrects something in his upper left blazer pocket.

"Fruity chutney ferret ru-" Mister Pierce is now in the position of going beyond these words and into more imaginative territory, and he is not unaware that he could be casting the boy onto a raft of phraseology that he has not yet had the requirement or rough seas to need, but also the perfectly valid prospect that the classroom beyond his messenger bag might be filled with a fully expectant 11.00am class.

He has to raise his eyes. He must. Visualization appears as a kind of parallel earthrise, from the globe of light and fresh blue tiles, past an old oblong wallclock, funky pot plants (not his choice) and posters. Neatly, and not so neatly, stacked shelves. Books. Seats. Desks. Structures. Silence. A very welcome void.

The boy is pushed to one side and disappears, as a throng of pupils emerge through the doorway. Mornings they tend to come in from brightest to least, as if enthusiasm and ability might as well be interchangeable. "Thank you. Danny. Discuss that tomorrow." Mister Pierce calls as he finally sits up.

Hanky. He needed a paper hanky. Although no-one called them that. The man in the corner shop just looked him up and down when he asked for that. As in panky? Tissues we have. Tissues I can give you. Drawer. Middle drawer for tissues.

"Hurry up, hurry up!" He calls. Fuck. Turn the thing around, Pierce. They're staring. Turn the thing around. Revolving with a scrape, facing him, he can barely bring himself to look at it. It's there alright. White and capitalized and not exactly literature. Seven or eight letters, at this off-angle guess. Righto. Hand. Fingers find a cracked geometry kit. A lattice of useless rulers, practically a scholastic family tree of abandon and defiance, then to the places beyond, through the small graveyard of pebble grey rubbers hiding one lost pack of Handy Lord Henrys.

Right, let's do this thing. Oh fuck. Jesus wept. He knew he was 'Warren'. Warren he could live with. Whoever blurted or boiled up 'Warren' was at least mid-teens, and not only had a curveball shot at a pun but even gave the guy some proximity to a real literary reference. Warren Pierce was practically affection, a four-eyed nuzzle wrapped in chess club josh. But 'STABBER'? Stabber. Was this what he had become? Or was this what the school had become?

"In you come, Ruby." His hair is sticking up. Oh, God. They're still staring. Mop it. Mop it. Frozen solid, some can't even sit. Ruby actually seems scared to enter. Oh, Jesus. Two of them are taking pictures with their mobile phones. It's on the blackboard, Pierce. It's four foot high across the blackboard behind you.

"Phones.. away and.. seats, please."

It is. It really is. There is no describing how it comes, as it comes down the long, light-filled corridors. It doesn't roll, nor does it glide. It is SHITE.

Duster in hand, 'Stabber Warren' Pierce moves a broad swipe right through the middle, being six or so uprights. Act one: reduce to randomality. That'll get them seated at least. "Now, did anyone have trouble with their homework? Not Latin America was it?" Act two: take control. Another broad swipe makes nonsense of the 'T' and 'E'. "They have odd names for wines there, as they do just about everywhere. Hardly the time of day to be discussing that, really, but we came up with a fruity example. Una jarra de.. Ribera del.. Shee-tay. Por.."

Turning, Toby Pierce attempts to flip the chalk into the air, only to spring it back into his hand off a flexed bicep. "Favor.." It rolls unevenly along his desk, then takes to the floor. "Ruby, whatever is the matter?"

Fingers and creasing faces suggest that Pierce should remove his jacket, before carrying it across the school to the gents lavatory, should he want to fully conclude this situation.

It felt illicit being out of class, in the uncanny atmosphere of these corridors, between the coded, checked and attended hum of think. At least there had been nothing of his on the board. Shite wasn't a critique of his lesson plan, more a burnt offering, a snap at the world in general.

He wasn't a terrible teacher, he wasn't a terrible teacher at all. He wasn't the best but a hell of a lot better than.. well, him. Pause to consider a painful misuse of overheads; a looming monster of Stabilo silhouette jiggering and circling like the compass on a wrecking ship. Set on the slide, it looked like a distracting blimp, a blot. A thin paper overlay, failing to disguise the fluttering transfer of transparencies. The kids might as well be watching finger puppets. Off. On again. Fiddle the blimp. The relaxed use of smudge, and treat us all to a thumbprint. Top marks. Who is he? Can't see. Just a whirl of distracting mannerisms. Ear scratch one. Walk in a box, then some subconscious tapping of the chest with a now-airborne blimp. Why the tit and not the tum? It's practically lunchtime. You should be onto the tum. Ear scratch two, and a check of a text just to keep the world's mind on.. shite.

Mister Pierce passed on, eyes to the floor, dutifully waving through the window of the next classroom. Daphne was good. Daphne was excellent. Daphne had the shite by the scruff, and milled it into inescapable bullets. Her old pro head span to and fro like an autocannon. A brief half-smile, the only response to his wave.

As he turned into the corridor leading to his classroom he listened for signs of further abandon. The Transcarpathian Steppes would have to be re-irrigated next week. Another light-filled box: Sophie She'll Do And Then Some. Frighteningly professional, shitefree and futuristic. "They prefer men. They. just. do." Open fluster in the staffroom, at the end of her first week. Hand to shoulder. Confidante and buddy. Cross the touch barrier early (though Mrs Pierce would have his wotsits for garters, some habits die hard). "Course. they. don't." Thinking (not thinking, just knowing. Not knowing, absolutely sensing) that hot was not the word. Toby was loyal, but he wasn't blind. Still, she was coming on leaps and bounds. Fearless. He waved as he passed, but she ignored him. At the last window, he caught her eye again, ready to make a drinking motion with his cupped right hand. More offer than accusation but, just as he was bending for a careful glance at the back of her box for inspectors, her face took to her notes. "Table shakers and warlocks. Ofcock." Daphne called them.

Right. Year 8. Relative calm, they were no doubt poised, expecting a man not in the best of moods. A good way to kick off, really, rewind the whole scenario in his.. favor.

"Right. You may have guessed that this hasn't been my morning." They gradually turn back from their chat. "Rogue elements run wild and will be dealt with." Notes, mate. Lesson plan. "Where are we? We all had fun with the virtual volcano. You're happy with earthquakes." Involve, Stabber. "Happy with earthquakes?"

A few nods. One "Yes." Someone missing? The boy with the stalker from the Pupil Referral Unit? Pierce thought that was all a hand jive. Time to face the post-shite Steppes. Chalk limbering. "Now. New unit. Can The Earth Cope? Ecosystems, populations and.. resources. What is a resource? Anyone got a suggestion?"

"Oil." Good. Front of class. Clear, obvious. Smiler. "Good." Future: successful, own media relations firm before thirty. "Cardboard." Who the hell was that? Gradually, a raised finger appears in the background. "Shall we say wood, timber?" F-factor: loaded, network of commercial vehicle hire firms. "Probably manganese." The Specialist. "Okay, mate." F-factor: brittle, biotech. Wrestling with other specialists ad infinitum. Bright though. Main thing. All the usual characters. "Anyone? Ruby?" "Antelopes." Holy moly. Someone flips around to tut and screw up their face, but it's hard not to want to pick her up and squeeze her. "Yup. We'll run with commodities for two ticks. And in that we have Re. new. able.. Flow.. and.. Non-re. new.." Mister Pierce wonders why he careers them but, in a way, the capacity for personal happiness seemed already written, or writing. Ruby, F-factor: question mark.

Where are you, Stabber Warren? "-able." His father, bless the soul of the letch and flogger, seemed to treat women as representative of life itself. When you're up you rest at their feet, when you're down you rein them in. Ruby, he imagined, had the kind of face you'd see when you buy the farm. Just at the quantum crossing, beyond fighting and fear, slipping off the second clog. "Adieu, fascinating, forgiving friend. We were up and down. Can't bloody see any more now, Ruby. Can't think. Just.. mwah."

Where, again? Pausing, he tried to find a blank space, a plateau above all the darker moments when he'd considered if what he did for a living was shite. And another above the fact that next week's 10.00am would pass without incidence, and no-one would suffer anything. For two reasons. The off-chance that he had sleepwalked himself over to the board. And the burnt hole of irony at our core, which is always around a corner, and always ready to say hello. Stabber Warren had no guts.

"A change of school is often not the best solution, nor the only option. I can assure you."

Val Parish leans forward and holds her head in her hands, something she has done since childhood. A primary school teacher had, in fact, scolded her for it, assuming it to be an indication of idleness or disinterestedness. Val imagines that the incident fixed in her mind because it was the first time that an adult beyond her family had told her what to do, or perhaps it was the first time she realised that people could be so cold, or perhaps it was the first time she saw her own power surrendered in public.

What is frustrating is that Mr and Mrs Rowntree seem like a pleasant, sensible enough couple. If only they could be like the Traynors, one slicked-back rat dad and a mouthy, king-sized mum, perennially in her face for a verbal spar. If only some underground tables were turnable.

"We've tried everything else, Mrs Parish." Mr Rowntree seems a bit frustrated by the lean.

"She plugs holes. Give her a hole and she'll plug it. Sometimes." Mrs Rowntree looks to her husband. "Fissures. Splits. Knots in wood. With paper. Chewy laces. Anything."

"But she cuts too? Curtains?" Val maintains her posture.

"Anything. She'd tear titanium if her mind was made up." Mr Rowntree, Ruby's father, is more convinced on the matter of his daughter's transfer.

The third in two months. "There. is. no. gang. culture." Val told the last pair. We take every measure to ensure that.. We'll happily provide a report.. We have a list of recommended.. But no-one seemed to believe her. Was Evenbridge's reputation being dismantled? Out there, beyond reach or control - was someone picking Val Parish apart?

"Wouldn't we all? A former life as Queen's seamstress perhaps? Wouldn't we be a young Napoleon, clearing the streets with a whiff of grapeshot? Sudden fame and a fawning Josephine? So, does she complain of being bullied? Is the work too much? Too little?"

No, Ruby sensed things. Menace, fret. The tang of neglect, they seemed to suggest. The cold world beyond hand-hold. Who gives a bat's arse? Val almost came out with it. Sensing. Then she reminds herself that not everyone visiting her office was a Traynor.

"Well, I sincerely wish you'd stick at the counselling." The problem with so much sensing, as with the Rowntrees' impassive gaze, is there is little development to be had in arguing around it. Perhaps they were Buddhists. Val felt a calling at times. Middle way, beyond craving or aversion, although she couldn't do without a decent bed.

As she leans back her concentration strays to a clear plastic sack, stuffed solid with paper shreddings. "Ray, what is going on with maintenance? That thing has been watching me since Domesday." And still it watched, till it had become, in its own way, a surrogate work of art. Why not? Just leave it there, Ray. I disclose to it, it reveals to me. Put it on my desk, Ray. We'll bullet point budgetary shortfalls for the Audit Commission.

"Mrs Parish, the Evenbridge Echo?" Mr Rowntree again indicates a feature in the local paper, as if this represented their deepest fear, as well as their opening gambit.

Val's look darkens as she examines her watch. "I'm aware of the author. Dicey." The article expanded on the theft of spare keys (although not the media and technology block), meaning they had had to renew twenty seven locks. "Can I tell you about the author? Failed solicitor. Hypochondriac. Determined to spread the torment, never the love. Lives for the off-colour thrill of giving corner shop trolls the laughing gas of publicity they live for. Do you know what her last scoop was? Bouncy Castle Snatch Leaves Blamebathed Aftermath. She'll move April-one to nine-eleven if it gets her to the next box of bennies."

Mrs Rowntree adjusts her bag further up her shoulder as Val Parish stands. "What do I read into this? Stir. Stir is story. Trying to relive the Bouncy Castle glory days, when the prose itself appeared to fold like a dying swan. And now she is upping the ante. Why a modest, decent school doing its business finds her ire and wrangle is worth anyone's tuppence." Val suspects it may be last summer, as independent town councillor, and her shot at mayor. All political.

Crossing to the window, she picks up a box of Parrot Crumble and makes a kissing sound at Billie Holloway and Ella FitzPentonville, two Rainbow Lorikeets teetering to and fro in a large blue cage. Ella, poking at sugar cane, turns to examine the fresh seed and dried fruit slip down the feeder. Not having been hand-reared, they proved fussy, and Val had tempted them with everything from Bill's Finch Feast to a deli seed-bell glazed with honey. Tongue clicking, Billie Holloway slips up a rope towards lunch. "Box of b-bennies." He stutters.

Mr Rowntree takes the opportunity to stand, and places his hands into his pockets. "Headmistress, I'm just looking for some degree of confidence."

What is frustrating is that Mr and Mrs Rowntree appeal to the core and never the outer walls. Such is the earnestness of educated classes. Val turns her head a little. Confidence was a tricky business. Sometimes you had to be it, in order to offer it. Which was, Val considered, the thing that turns an adult into an adult. "Hold in for the league tables. We're eight miles above benchmark and pride ourselves on keeping open dialogue."

When Mr Rowntree approaches the cage, she goes on. "I sense we can turn this situation around. Harness all our pupils' hidden talents; release any economy of mental effort."

He begins to tongue-click, coaxing Ella FitzPentonville with the corner of a TweetTreet. "I am not blind, and I do sometimes wonder if we are all underachievers, in our own small way." She turns her head some more. "Such notions are a beast that a headmistress must keep beyond her gates. You understand?"

"Of course." Mr Rowntree appears to empathise, and finally smiles.

With the parents departed, Val shifts the plastic sack of shreddings to the table, intrigued by her own concept. Email. Eight twelve. 'J tried early. Can you mobile?' The Board, wanting words. Shredder Buddha, usher in good fortune and golfing weather. "Jack! Lucky character. How's par on the back nine?"

Her relationship with the Board we could descibe as healthy. Vigourous at times. Dynamic. Boards, thank Buddha, were people, and people she could usually do. A light wind buffets the receiver. "Par is sayonara. The quickest slip in the south-east bar none. Whoops. We're having words, but no lessons learnt and a narrow window for contingency. P45s, Val."

Shredder Buddha gazes impassively, knowing all, transversing thought and through the other side, a lucid brainful of Dharma, where the omniverse finds its perspective. "I'm hearing you." It was P45s last year. They should be onto P46s and 7s. Sometimes she wishes Jack didn't talk such tosh.

"It's a two-footer, Terry! No conceding till lunch! Listen, Val, we need movement before the Board has a collective headstagger. I need good news. Do we have good news?"

Detention up. Staff turnover turning over. A missing sports cup. "I persuaded someone to give us their daughter till term's end."

Silence but for the fairway breeze. "We have Iterative Development and Active Listener sessions."

"Do we?" Nothing but the voice of Buddha.

"Can we? Can we make that clear? Spell it loud as possible? What are they doing new in Finland?"

The fairway breeze feels like it has passed across the Head's office, as Val hangs up. Was this really the year the Board would sense her out of a grammar school? She did, she preferred to think, put the pupils first. Would a changed regime change anything she couldn't? If one's vocation is sacrificial gimp, she'd box up the Rainbow Lorries now. Buddha ruthlessly under her arm, she sets off to see Ray about the maintenance horrors, but is made to pause at a quiet corner.

Further along the corridor, Toby Pierce is waiting, watching through a classroom window. He swings his jacket over one shoulder and walks on, waving and, finally, cupping a hand in a drinking motion. Out of class. Never a good indicator. Unless an emergency. Certainly didn’t resemble that. Geography, though. Field trip round the Near Pavilion? Val kept a soft spot for her core subject. Madagascar seemed to have nothing but geography. Even the people were geography there. Although, back in those days, she had bottle-fed lemurs crying out to sit in for conversational English, and she was using French, and games and songs. Sunshine. Hunger-struck but halcyon. What we measure we cut off, they say, and the statistics and value-adds put their tourniquet on everything. This is the modern world.

Pierce pauses, to barge back into class, and she continues down an adjacent corridor.

"Oof. Fu-" Scampering around a swing door, a quick figure collides hard into the headmistress, splitting the sack about the nether-department.

"Careful, Ray." A girl's voice says, until she unhooks some earphones and looks up from the avalanche of ticker-taping slices.

"Name?" Val's response is gut, for she wanted the f-word herself.

The girl freezes. "Susie, miss."

"Time?"

"It's my parents, miss. They're lazy ba- bag-handlers."

"Have you seen the inside of a Pupil Referral Unit, Susie?"

"No, miss."

"Perhaps you've seen artwork created by sequential killers and the like? It's that but it moves and grunts and grabs at your ankle."

"Miss."

"Have you ever met an Education Welfare Officer?"

Susie looks Val in the eye, turning serious. "He's.. funny."

Val drops the void Buddha and steps forward, although her voice turns a notch. "What's funny is tricks-for-truckers on the hard shoulder. Weekends at Costchopper for sweet f.a. plus perks. Being surreptitious Starbursts under your bra, if you haven't left it swinging round Rubber Duck's rubber doo-dah. Tales of which will tickle ribs at the Edinburgh fringe, starring Susie.."

"Van der Venn."

She places a hand on the girl's shoulder. "Van Der-tention."

Susie screws up her face. "Aw, miss. I-"

Val whispers, so as to be inaudible. "Van Der-tention."

"Miss Parish, I've got-"

Val smiles a little rhapsodically, seeing lemurs. "..an Der-ten.."

"Do you have any idea what you are doing?" Immediately, Val is shocked from her position by a hasty turn in the girl's voice.

"How dare-"

"I couldn't give two f.a.s about dare."

Val had always seen a certain degree of humour in the pupil-teacher relationship, taken it as read. Life itself needed levity, even the darker corners, but Susie's face showed no capacity for that. "Do you give one about any other side of the story? You think you're acting tough but you're pedalling water. You want us passing grades and passing through but never smart. Never thinking. Not much."

As the girl turns, throwing herself back through the swing door and down the steps, she raises a hand. "I just wanted to get to. fucking. school." She chokes out the final word, then wolfs in some air, before bursting into sobs which accelerate as fast as her feet.

Val watches her flee across the yard. "Come back!" She demands.

"Please?" She adds, after a little while, to herself. "We don't approve of textured tights." Her words lose their criticism, and she begins to sweep the shreds into one corner with an instep.

The silver Merc SUV awakens quietly and easily and reverses from her designated parking spot around a corner of her office, beneath the windows of Learning Support and Vocational Studies. Val lived ten minutes away, and got out at lunchtimes.

As she squares the reverse she looks up the hill. Mathematics was settling in, near to ICT, Science, Design and Technology. Knocking the vehicle into first (she used to give her cars names, but what was fitting for a stealthy and dominating V8? Hardly a Maisy there. Succubus? Quaffy?) she looks across to the library and the smallish side rooms reserved for Religious Studies, Economics and Sociology. And as she pulls out she will eventually be confronted by the main building - being English, Languages, Geography, History, and the smaller gym for Physical Education. For the past twelve years, Art had been at the corner, the last window to be passed before the school disappeared behind tall bushes that lead to the main road.

Pause, and a look right. Eight years managing the borders of the unknowable, and Val Parish was even less convinced of what we knew. Or that a leaver saying goodbye to this school was any wiser than someone left to their own devices. The university of life was a phrase she hated, naturally, but, as the body prompts us for what it needs, was there any point in steering a head where it wasn't born to go? Words sit empty, like signposts pointing at other signposts, unless they are built on inherent passion. Maybe Susie had a point.

Pulling away, the Merc goes into second, then third, then shoots up the hill towards the roundabout. Eight years of charge, and eight years to grow unafraid and to learn to say what is required and no more, and doing this trip on autopilot.

The hands-free illuminates. "Mrs Parish. I've been an utterly wicked boy." A voice says.

"Marcus! 'ello guv."

"No more Marcus. A man of the people these days. What are they like?"

"People? Busy. In need of some of Wellsie's famous passion." Val says.

"Friends now call me Daveboy." He drawls. "My publicist sees me as 'the white Stelios'." As a baronet, Sir Marcus Wells has always been somewhat ashamed of his hereditary Sir. Or, at least, he had always politely asked people to relax and be more familiar, usually before they had even had any opportunity to get uptight and unfamiliar.

"You'll be rumbled, Daveboy. Costchopper Quaffer in Quoits Humiliation."

"Even then I get something called tangent sympathy. Plucky. Public cheek."

Val laughs. "Stick to being wicked, will you? Easier to get our heads around."

"See, that's kind of the problem. I'm a wanted man. Bangkok Police have been asking after my health via the Met. Vanishing ladyboy. No friend of mine, or should I say china plate. Last seen with one Gaius Burke. Still, I need to be very much the benefactor at the moment."

"Oh dear." Val tuts. "Careless. We can always do with more sports equipment, if there's any win-win in that?"

"Consider it done, but I've got my eye on bigger monkeyshines. Can I come by tomorrow?"

Intrigued, Val agrees. There was always a tone in Marcus' voice, like he was about to suggest something insalubrious. Fancy just disappearing to Mexico? Come back next year? That kind of thing. And just when she had travel on her mind. "Any news of a wife?"

"Too rich to be romantic, Val. Puts them off, in all honesty. Planning to go undercover in a Hessian sack."

"You're very hard on the world, Marcus. But I can ply you with sixth form poetry if that helps."

By the time he clears off, Val has pulled along her drive. It was time to talk holiday, and say the things we only ever think.

The rear ground floor salon of the Parish's home, a place would have once been called the parlour and would, in many other houses of that style and along that curving cul-de-sac, have been knocked through to enlarge the living room, has instead been converted into a makeshift main bedroom. Drawn curtains hold back the early afternoon light.

Mal Parish's story is a war story. Nobody told him he had MRSA. The wound resultant from a knee operation that refused to heal properly, and he kept going back for antibiotics until he himself turned a medical report around on his GP's table, while the doctor was investigating the health service intranet. A second operation was required, to remove infected tissue, and soon, although less alarming terms were used, the diagnosis tended to go without saying. He felt increasingly ill, in more and more places his organs felt under siege, capitulated and colonized, and soon the phrase 'months not years' was the only thing he could hear as he pushed his head into a pillow at night.

It's the cleaners, boozers yarned, back when he could still get to the pub. They're not paid enough to care, and no matrons. Then a surgical nurse admitted that the whole system was pushed beyond capacity. Disinfecting between ops, a luxury. Stretched resources produce what might be described as field hospital circumstances. And so, at forty-five and fitter than most, Mal's story became a war story. There'd be no granite memorial, no eternal flame, no peaceniks or poetry, no windless Sunday service after it all - perhaps because it would never end - but this thing is a war story nonetheless.

He manages to push himself up in bed, while Val waits above him with a tray. Some juice, spare salad and a corner of last night's lasagna put through the microwave. "I'll eat from the dish. Don't dirty anything on my account." He says. He was developing a 'please don't bother' outlook which was quite unlike him. The best things in life are, at one level or another, bother. But his old extravagance seems to have been taken.

He pokes the thickened corner of the lasagna with the forks edge as Val moves to part the curtains by a fraction, which he agrees to, before she collects a cereal bowl from the side cabinet and sits down at the bed's edge. She asks about his back, because his kidneys went bonkers on Thursday, although they calmed after something the nurse gave him. In general now, they tended to talk colonization very gently and with a kind of voided emotion. They talked dosage, mainly, and schedules. They didn't talk needlessness and human waste.

Val checks the steadiness of her husband's hand. It is time to talk about the holiday. Mal was not at a stage were travel was impossible, emerged mid-morning and slept early, and Val was not unaware that the rest of his life was going to be spent in this bed, looking about this room, until the level of required painkilling robbed him of any effective living. An unfamiliar ward waited, perhaps, waited with strangers. Strangers, themselves, waiting. The end itself will be long and unended, kind of infinite, atomish. The imagination goes, he explained, when with every piss I'm expecting blood. I'm hijacked when that happens. The real deal, when it comes, will be formality. But if they moved, weeks not months, he could see the sun and the sea. He might, Val considered, meet his old extravagance somewhere on a beach. She'd always taken Mal as quietly debonair, a borderline eccentric on his vintage bicycle, mixed flowers emerging between handlebars, and even through a long workaday week their Saturday nights still threw up some dash. An aimless drive became a sudden cinema excursion, or a quiet dinner party hushed and coughed through his latest stinker poem, before a lewd descent into whiskey with ginger and seven card stud. Nothing radical, nothing world-turning or childish, just a private refusal to forgo every scrap of social edge. She knew he resented being reduced to something slow and inward-looking, and knew him well enough to know that even he felt lost inside this jim-jammed field commander, this bathroom inspector stalking a killer on the geography of his own body matters. Sea air might open the guy he really was. It would be a logistical hell, possibly dangerous. And he might take off, quoting mistakenly and aloud, kissing her as he starts an unchained moped, that zigzags unevenly along some cheery pier, just for that kind of adieu. Just so the world could say he did it his way. Terrible, but an end on his terms might even be worth it.

Departing, each morning, with some cornflakes readied by his bedside, lunchtimes had become their proper hello. "I turned the thermostat down. Oh, I bookmarked an offer for-"

"I know what the bloody sun looks like." He interrupts and looks up, fork wavering. "I've done the beach, Val." He brings the laptop back across the bed. Forums and petitions. Trust watch, ward watch. Names to be named. This war was, ultimately, against silence. Silence first, then 'fucking scorecards and advisory documents and any old crap that's cheap to pull out and avoids doing what's needed'. He had a taste, now, of something greater than himself and his own pain.

"A week. One week." Val circles the cornflake spoon around in the bowl. "Please." She didn't want to suggest that it might be the last thing he did for her, but her eyes somehow do just that.

Mal Parish tries to return a look which suggests that, if his wife assumed his crusade was selfish, that he'd prefer this kind of selfish. Was he allowed? Was that too much to ask for?

He tuts and lowers the fork and looks to the parted curtains, eventually asking, "What do you think a trip is going to do? Memories we have. The best in the world. This isn't going to add to them or take anything away."

Val shrugs. "Quality. Of living. Here and now. That's what it always was, and we know it'll add to that." For a sense of something impending, something that wasn't altogether bleak, she would put up with a thousand complaints.

They sit in silence, until - "Don't you ever feel like you've only ever been on the surface of things, that you want to taste the deepness and richness of life around you instead of social niceties and personas and centre grounds and bullshit. Something real." Which one them said this? It could have been either. If Val had said it, she may have been patterning her career onto home circumstances, for Mal was long past personas and niceties and bullshit. If Mal had said it, and it probably was him, he would have held himself back from completing such a sentence, for even his old self would be shocked by any assumption that internet forums held life's greatest riches.

He swallows a mouthful of lunch, capitulating to his own counter-argument. As he had lain in his bed, or pottered across the living room, he could almost feel his thoughts grow darker by the day. In a way, looking back, the thing that holds people together, stops them going crackers, was some carefree remnant of childhood, and the hope that something approaching that joy will be rekindled. This had been his thought of the day. Darkness everywhere, and sometimes he couldn't counter-argument it at all. "Where is it? When is it?" He prods some shredded bell pepper and asks.

"So he stands up and says.." She mentally prepares, then finds an approximate accent. "'In my culture women do not judge men. This is not their position.' And he point blank refuses to accept my grade."

And what did you say?

"I said 'When I gave you an A+ culture walked on Mars. Why the big discovery now, Columbus?'"

Sophie Easterby-Smith pushes up her glasses and sucks breath, to suggest that this had been a wrong response to make. She initially thought that Toby Pierce had 'my wife doesn't understand me' eyes when he invited her to the pub, but the meeting had proved a little more interesting. Honestly, she had occasion to think that the others didn't like her much. They were drawn so far, and then bounced off a force field she felt she emanated. Whatever it was, Toby Pierce seemed to pass straight through. In this, she grew curious. If she could find out why even one of them seemed at ease with her, perhaps she could project it at will. She draws a straw through her diet cola and watches as he wipes his lips with a napkin, glancing around the beer garden.

"Anyway, you're not alone. I'm getting so immune to nudge and hiss. I'd call it thicker skin if I didn't sound like custard. Something shifted.. outside.. around. One becomes.." Sophie was disappointed that Pierce didn't listen while she was genuinely enthusiastic. ".. the role."

"Hmm?" There were three younger teachers, newish sorts, rarely seen around the school lunch tables. Unless they were on monitoring duty they slipped from prying eyes and down here, to the beer garden at the Standing Eight. It wasn't for lack of friendliness, Pierce was chummy with them alright, and they were congenial right back, but they came for three-for-two paninis, the Caesure salad station, a jug of hickory spirals. Their absence was never discussed but stayed underwritten around the first and second sittings, as the softest sleight imaginable. Compared to the corridors or play areas, verbally all blurt and splodge, an unreliable kind of splodge, the teachers' table was increasingly defined by things unsaid. A reliable kind of silence.

"The Eight gets more upmarket every time I'm in." Sophie changes the subject. She'd been doing the talking, he drinking. "Quail porridge, artichoke foam."

"Fig cuppuccino, pepper and zest soldiers." Toby offers. The in-group weren't in, however two builders had a habit of looking them over, one poised over a mobile phone. Balls. Half of Bishops' Evenbridge had their hands on this morning's hellscapade, or would do soon. Triple-clicking some contagious link to a MeBox slow-wipe of narcoleptic bedlam set to Pachelbel's Canon in D.

He confesses his thoughts as he drains a pint (which he so very very shouldn't). "Have you seen the student chat forum?" Sophie livens. "I've gone in there myself, to praise the Easterby-Smith skill set to high heaven. Learn quite a bit. Goss." She makes an uncertain smile. "Roger honks of cauliflower cheese. I'm a lesbian if I'm anything. And Mrs Parish?" Stabber Warren raises an eyebrow, turns an ear. "Husband hangs around a greenhouse, stoned as.. something good and stoned."

Jesus. "The man's ill." Greenhouse. "Certain you didn’t write this yourself? You and she don't exactly resonate."

She begins to blow her nose. "Thinks I want her boots."

"Do you?" Pierce could imagine it. Imagine Easterby-Smith rising to perceived challenges where there were none. In truth, he has sudden but lasting image of Easterby-Smith in stark leather zip-ups. Then he wonders how long it will last before that fades, and is even more aware that much of what she now says will be said by this neuro-transmitted phantom. Please don't husky up a petulant 'Yes'. Anyway he needed porcelain.

"Smart.." Rumbles one of the builders, rattling through 'Snakeshaft' or 'Dmitri's Soccer Incident', to the moderately impressed stare of a colleague lost in the Gear-Rate section of an unrolled 'Crack'.

"Running a department before thirty. Suddenly head? Not half. Val and I are too alike to like." Very convinced. For someone looking herself up on chat rooms. "Suicide watch. Smart Water. Gang on gang, kitchen knives? Everyone waiting for the first gunshot? I'd be the queen of the locker hall Gestapo. Of course I would." Sophie plucks some ice from her glass and turns it through her fingers, and smiles. "If that's the name of the game."

As a dark, belted uniform with gloves reach to buff the resurfaced boot, she checks her watch and asks, "And you? Been there a bit?"

Stabber Warren stands and gestures across the patio, giving her a 'not you and all' expression that is clear enough to understand. "Excuse me. Stupid Water issues. I'm more than happy with where things are, Easterby-Smith. Stress. Bollocks, really. Better off without it."

And so, Sophie sniffs and looks around. Spring was here, and she feels suddenly revealed in her solitude, but she'd brought a book along. In case. She'd brought a book along in case.

"You trying to break the ice, darlin'?" A builder winks.

She pops it back in the glass and turns the novel over.

"'Call it quits for a crispy duck'. That used to be the height of it down the Eight." He turns back to his friend.

"It's all yer symbolist tease nowadays, John." The magazine fans as much as it can in a soft and sudden wind. "Yer pester by compound metaphor."

Uurf. Sophie eventually locates her page. Another uurf. It was Flyday, the real birth of spring, when plump fanatics found a life out of nothing. Where've they been all winter? And who's been setting their pot of marinated olives on pupae?

Zip. Slow inhale. Urgency, Stabber Warren. What this morning has been telling you. Urgency. Sometimes we forget we're all doing this thing now. Then it comes along light-filled corridors, straight for you. What face will it wear when it catches us out? The biological clock, the dirty bomb? A bailiff's low thump or a mother's scold refracting to infinity - across a head that seems happier dodging some flak or other? Ruby Rowntree, or a off-centred bookworm burning swastikas in your..

Zip. pity doo dah. He crosses to wash his hands. Zip-pity doo dah. Zip? Pity Doo-dah.