The Lady Of Valencia
A story from the Schrödinger's Cat series
This is part of the fictional Schrödinger's Cat series about an ordinary family’s experience of growing up and living in England in the 1980’s.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it :)
1.
It made no sense at all. Nothing ever really made sense, but my sister standing there in that school uniform was a whole new level of bewilderment.
A Sunday roast or even, hallelujah, a Chinese takeaway were like festive godsends in our family where indulgences were sporadic and lean. Oncoming seasons brought shoes or jeans or a jacket, like nautical flags signalling poverty in our oversized outfits, sweating or freezing our way across seasonal boundaries. Or on even rarer occasions a five-pound note might be discovered inside a birthday card, if the envelope hadn’t been ransacked, when the card would turn out, like the cupboard, to be bare.
We were experts in surviving not thriving. Abundance was a word for horn-shaped baskets overflowing with exotic fruit and dates. Bounty came in pirate’s treasure chests. Riches existed in the pages of comics. We had learnt that expectation was an overture to defeat, so our hopes were as slender as our chances.
So when I saw my sister parading about in the kitchen dressed in a perfectly fitting school uniform from The Lady Of Valencia School, nothing made sense. That was a school for kids with home computers that went on family holidays. Kids with parents who played squash and ate at restaurants. Kids that made plans for the future.
We were merely waiting to be elbowed into lives of servitude as our school Headmaster “Knobhead,” would so readily remind us, “Life is to be endured, not enjoyed, and you’d better get used to that.” The man was a fool. Anyone could see we already were used to it.
“Just look at you, will you just look at yourself,” my mother was saying over and over, supping white wine and puffing on her menthol between exclamations, “Will you just look at her in that uniform?”
I stood there like an uninvited guest at a private party, looking at my little sister dressed in a school uniform that would open doors I didn’t even know existed. And I was utterly bewildered. She was all I had, my little sister, and now she being wrenched away by some mysterious power I couldn’t understand.
“Did you know about this?” I said, but she just looked down at her new fine black shoes and shook her head.
“Seems you don’t know everything, do you,” my mother said with a triumphant expression as she wallowed in my dumbstruck demeanour.
She was right, I had no idea what was happening, except that it was somehow normal because when misery is the colour of your sky anything else feels like an approaching storm.
2.
Knobhead was standing in for the geography teacher. He stood at the front of the class performing his entire teaching repertoire, the spot quiz.
“The Chinese name for the Yellow River?”
The usual hands shot up, some rose hesitantly, most stayed heavily on their desks.
The word Yangtze was pushing at the boundaries of my skull but I kept my hand firmly down and my mouth firmly shut.
“Mitchell?”
“The Lellow Liver, sir.”
Laughter all around. Even Knobhead smirked,“Very droll Mitchell, very droll, but no, it’s Yangtze, it’s the Yangtze River.”
“I knew that, sir,” said Mitchell.
“I very much doubt that Mitchell,” said Knobhead.
“I did, sir.”
“Are you answering back, Mitchell?”
“No sir.”
“No sir, that’s right sir, “ he said, chalking YANGTZEE onto the blackboard, “you do realise Mitchell, don’t you, that knowledge is your ticket out of this unfortunate predicament?” Knobhead sort of waved at all of us with the back of his hand, “Why you lot continually refuse to take this opportunity by the horns is a great mystery to me.”
“There’s only one E in Yangtze,” I heard a voice saying, which to my dismay and strange pleasure, I realised was my own. Knobhead turned slowly.
“Well, well, well, seems we’ve got a smartarse in the class, what did you say, boy?”
I kept quiet, my eyes fixed upon him.
“What. Did. You. Say. Boy?”
“I said it doesn’t matter whether we take this so-called opportunity by the horns or not, we’re fucked either way.”
Knobhead seemed to expand as he cocked his arm to launch the chalk, “What did you say, boy? Did you just say the word fucked to me?”
“It doesn’t make any difference, sir," the sarcasm oozing through my voice, “we are fucked, and so are you, except you’re too stupid to know it.”
A kind of low grade panicky laughter broke out. Knobhead’s complexion purpled as he tried to hold his notorious temper.
The chalk hit me smack in the face. Then a ripple of cautious giggling as my classmates tried to calculate which side of the bullying they sat.
“Who do you think you are, boy?” He moved another step toward me, a razor edge to his voice. “How fucking dare you?”
Knobhead had long since made peace with his callous and scornful inner self, reeking of contempt and exhaustion in his crumpled polyester suits, his passion for teaching fully exorcised in the decade of cuts and policy changes and finger-pointing. His increasingly low status conflicted with his sense of self-importance. He was a defeated man who readily took out his frustrations on his students. The increasingly callous political climate of the country suited him perfectly, being a man always ready to point the finger and apportion blame. I had long since been boxed and labelled and left to rot in his mind.
“I’m sorry sir, did you just use the word fucking?”
Knobhead was full of pretentious self-delusions that placed himself firmly in the driving seat, but Knobhead has always been a natural born passenger. It was me wrenching the wheel of this journey toward the cliff. Having nothing to lose means plumbing new depths is a lifestyle. Knobhead imagined his power lay in “us lot” wanting to become “his lot”, in some aspirational delusion to improve ourselves. But we had no delusions. We knew how this life worked. We could see clearly what he couldn’t. The country was on a downward spiral and no matter how many times they repeated the lie, there was no tide lifting all boats, there was just cold-hearted men throwing bodies into the water. Eventually only the most callous would triumph and the world would become a place where the passing mood of a single “winner” would decide the fate of entire nations. I knew Knobhead was far more likely to become us than we were to become him. But he didn’t know it.
“You. Are. A. Fucking. Stupid. Boy.” He said through gritted teeth
“Yeah? And you’re fucking moron, so go fuck yourself.”
And that was that.
One week’s expulsion.
He had no idea how good that felt.
3.
We lay in the long grass by the bend of the river watching swallows slicing the heavens. My little sister beside me as the sun pelted down, wallowing in the safe silence that only love can licence.
“I don’t want to go,” she broke the spell.
“You have to,” I said.
“I won’t.” We both knew there was no such choice.
“You have to, Knobhead is a moron but he was right. This is…something. Besides, you’ll get used to it after a while.”
“I don’t like those people.”
“They’re just people.”
“They won’t like me.”
“They’ll love you, who couldn’t love you.”
A honeybee lowered itself onto the pink foxglove that towered above us, swinging like a trapeze artist and wriggling itself into the bell toward the glorious nectar. We both lay squinting up at this diligent little insect with its fat packs of pollen.
“What’s that one again?” she asked.
“It’s a Foxglove, beautiful but deadly, remember?”
“Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers,” she said.
“know there is richest juice in poison-flowers,” I said, “you remembered.”
“Of course I remembered,” she said.
“You’ll grow into a flower in your new school,” I said, “not just some river weed.”
“I’ll be beautiful but deadly.”
“Ha, then you’ll fit right in,” I said.
We laughed like veterans as the sublime silence blanketed us once again.
There was such sweet nectar in all this agony. Someone once said suffering is the soil that grows great poetry. I’ll have no trouble being a great poet one day. That’ll be my revenge. We never knew, they’ll say, how deeply he felt the world, we never knew he too was a human being. And they’ll throw themselves to the ground in regret and rapture as I fly like an angel through their minds. Except no one cares how anyone else feels these days. Even my revenge fantasies are obsolete.
As we walked through the park on the way home I took out a spliff and sparked up. My sister gave me the side-eye.
“I thought you said you were giving up,” she said.
“Nope, but him and Whatshisname are, for tonight anyway,” I laughed.
“You haven’t learnt your lesson then?” she said.
“Nah, I’m a stupid boy, innit,” I said in my best Knobhead impression.
“Give us a puff then,” she said, laughing.
“Nope, girls from The Lady Of Valencia School don’t smoke dope,” I said.
“You are an idiot,” she said and we both laughed as I passed her the spliff for very the last time. This life was going to change, and we both knew it.
Link to part 3
Superb - it just gets better and better.
“when misery is the colour of your sky anything else feels like an approaching storm.” Just wow. Soooo much in this little line alone.
Wow. I’m so delighted you’ve brought these characters, this series, back.
Can’t wait for more.