Tall Story - Candy Gourlay [43]
And incredibly, Mum pressed her lips together and stood aside and we walked into the house and had cold pizza for tea.
24
Bernardo
School was as alien as another planet.
It wasn’t just because there were no nuns and no statues of saints in the corridor and no electric fans whirring on every ceiling and no children forming orderly queues the way we did at Sacred Heart Academy.
From the second Mama, Andi and I walked through the gates, it was clear that Saint Simeon’s was a place with a different … attitude.
The entire student populace turned to stare at me of course.
But I was too busy staring back to care.
Although they were all younger or about my age, and although everyone was dressed in the green tie and grey flannels that was Saint Sim’s school uniform, the children all seemed so … old. The boys were broad and tall, with hard faces, sideburns and stubble; the girls were all willowy and curvy and not afraid to show it. Everyone either had earphone wires dangling from their ears or were thumbing mobile phones or both. In one corner, there was a boy and a girl with their arms around each other.
Here I was, thinking that my peers at Sacred Heart were just as giddy as the next teenager. The nuns had stopped wearing the veil a few years ago, but Sister Mary John, who was in the habit of pulling at her veil when she was vexed, continued to pull at her short grey hair in the same way she used to yank at her veil. If Sister Mary John had to teach here in England, she would have ended up completely bald. Compared to Saint Sim’s, the Sacred Heart boys seemed puny and beardless, and the girls doll-like and demure.
Mum and Andi took me to the school office, where we were met by a teacher named Mrs Green who said, ‘Welcome to Saint Simeon,’ and smiled even while she stared at my Tall Man T-shirt and Tall Man jeans with distaste. The school had agreed to let me wear my own clothes but Mrs Green clearly didn’t approve.
She whisked me off so quickly that Mum barely had time to blow me a kiss and Andi only just managed to mumble, ‘See ya, Bernardo.’
Mrs Green marched me along so smartly, my first impressions of the classrooms were fleeting flashes – fancy electronic white boards instead of blackboards and chalk, loud laughter, computers everywhere, faces in doorways gazing at me in amazement.
How were my new classmates going to react when I stepped in through the door? Would my legs fit under those desks? Would they laugh at my broken English? I had not slept a wink the night before, worrying.
But then I realized that all my anxiety had been pointless. Mrs Green led me straight to an empty classroom and sat me at a table – and yes, I could get my legs under it because Mrs Green found a lower chair for me to use. And then it was multiplication and long division and sines and cosines and geometry and radius and pi and wind speed and vectors and …
It took hours. ‘Aptitude tests, Bernard.’ Mrs Green smiled her tight little smile. ‘We want to know where you’re at so that we can place you in the right classes. You might need some additional work on your English but I can see that you have no problem whatsoever with the maths. Well done.’
But it was hollow praise. My fingers ached from writing. Surely my eyes were crossed from staring at papers. And I couldn’t feel my feet, I’d been sitting in the same position for so long.
‘Ma’am?’
Mrs Green looked up from the papers she was marking, the smile still attached to her face like a brace. ‘When does I go to my classroom?’
‘Do. When do I go to my classroom.’ Mrs Green’s smile didn’t waver or change, even when a bell somewhere far away rang. ‘Tomorrow you will meet your classmates and form teacher. For now you need to complete these tests.’
‘That bell is for recess time now?’
‘We don’t call it recess in this country. We call it break,’ Mrs Green said. ‘But no, that’s the lunch bell. The morning break happened ages ago. Shall we go to the lunchroom?’
I