Mr Steinberg was young and fresh and beautiful, and we
were all dumbfounded by him. On his first day at school,
he had stood before us at the front of Room 8, holding
his black briefcase up in front of him with both hands,
like a shield.
‘Hi,’ he said. And with that one word, we knew that he
was different. We could almost smell the outside world
on his breath.
Everything about him didn’t belong: his perfect teeth,
his modern round glasses, his smile, the biro sticking
out of his pocket, the ring on his middle finger, the word
‘Hi’. He clearly didn’t know that biros, jewellery and slang
were not permitted here. Someone asked him how old
he was and he had blushed and run his hands through
his thick, dark, wavy hair and said, ‘Twenty-two.’ Only he
hadn’t said that, he’d said, ‘Twenny-two,’ because the best
thing about Mr Steinberg was that he was an American.
I had never met an American before, but I knew that
most things that Americans did were forbidden.
I wondered how on earth he had ended up here with
us, all the way across the ocean. They had probably told
him he was saving the world or something; us children,
this new school, we were the future. One day, they’d have
told him, it would be down to these children to spread
the word. (Which was ‘Om’, by the way. And personally,
I wouldn’t be spreading it; I’d be keeping quiet about the
whole thing. We attracted enough unwanted attention as
it was.)
Mr Steinberg had come to teach Ancient Greek, which
was a modern language to us. We only learnt Sanskrit, the
oldest language in the history of the world. I imagined
it was what the cavemen spoke, ‘bahbah dahdah gahgah’
sort of thing. That’s what it sounded like; all breathy and
primitive. Thousands of years ago, the Sanskrit people
had written the first ever book of rules called the Vedas,
and Miss Fowler told us that the mysteries of the universe
were held in just the Sanskrit alphabet alone. Which was
why we had to chant it endlessly, hoping they’d slip in by
osmosis, I suppose. We were sick to death of the mysteries
of the universe. Greek would make a pleasant change.
We could listen to Mr Steinberg’s beautiful voice all
day long, and sometimes we did. He taught us to chant
the first three chapters of the Odyssey from memory, and
boy, oh boy, did we chant. We’d mimic his accent as we
did so, and at first he wouldn’t notice but, when he did,
he would laugh so hard that he would have to take his
glasses off and wipe his eyes. Watching him do that would
make the whole day worthwhile.
Everyone wanted to get betrothed to Mr Steinberg.
Everyone was in love with him, so, naturally, everyone
was good at Greek. Even the thickos were excelling themselves.
But for me, Greek was more than a subject; I
wasn’t just good at it, I was the best at it. I didn’t even have
to try; it all just stayed in my head as if I already knew it.
It was, therefore, most upsetting to be stuck in the cupboard
at the back of the classroom when Mr Steinberg
was out there taking the Greek class. I had been hiding
from Fowler but had mistimed my exit and when I’d
attempted to reappear, it was too late; they had already
started ‘pausing’. Eyes tightly shut, chins up, palms facing
upwards like curling leaves on their laps, clearing their
minds, making space for something new.
I carefully closed the door and resigned myself to the
fact that I would have to stay in the cupboard until the
end of the lesson.
‘Om paramatmanaynama attah.’ As one, they mumbled
the beginning-of-anything prayer.
For a while, I listened in the darkness as Mr Steinberg
handed out the homework, blindly picking the paint off
the back of the door, still annoyed with myself for getting
stuck.
‘Where’s Caroline?’ I heard him ask and I stopped
picking; it felt good to hear him say my name and notice
my absence.
‘She’s ill,’ said Megan.
It was cramped in the cupboard. There was only room
enough for two people standing up, although we did once
go for a record and squeezed six of us in, piled on top of
each other like Smarties in a tube.
I felt around for some jumpers and decided to make
myself a little bed. I sank to my bottom and leant against
the pegs. I must have been leaning against Kate’s blazer,
I could smell her. She’d smelt the same since we were
tiny, musty with a hint of mothball. I leant to my other
side and inhaled an aertex shirt, doughy and milky. Easy
peasy japoneesy, that was Megan. I moved my nose along
the row. Pears soap, that’d be Jane. I tugged at a jumper
above me and pressed it to my face; grassy with a touch
of pee, Anna’s without a doubt.
Whenever my parents were away on retreat, I always
made a point of staying the week with as many people in
the class as possible, just to compare notes. I’d pretty
much stayed with everyone, but our houses were all much
of a muchness; functional, minimal and holy. However,
one thing I had noticed was that whole families smelt the
same, even houses. The moment you entered Anna’s
house there was a whiff of wee. I wondered what smell
my family gave off. I sniffed my knee – chlorine from the
swimming pool. I licked it then sniffed it again. It was
rather nice.
Years ago, when I was about five, before Miss Fowler
and I hated each other, I would ask her every lunchtime if
she could butter my bread for me. She would get up from
the head of the trestle table and come round and put
her arms over mine, and I’d sit there as she buttered the
bread, inches from my face. I could actually butter my
own bread, but I did so love the smell of her hands; they
smelt of Dettol. Now, of course, I can’t bear the stink of
disinfectant.
When I got bored of sniffing clothes, I lay on my back
and stuck my legs up against the boiler and waited whilst
the rest of them did a vocabulary test. I marked myself
with hardly any cheating. Nineteen out of twenty.
Every now and then at the end of a Greek lesson, if
we’d been especially good, Steinberg would make his way
around the table, rubbing his hands, a crafty smile on his
face, and he’d perch on the edge of the table, right at the
front of the classroom and say, ‘Well, Form Two, would
you like to hear the story of Medea?’ or ‘Who knows the
story of Theseus and the Minotaur?’ or ‘Did I ever tell
you about Oedipus?’ Immediately, we would all shut our
books and sit on the edge of our seats in anticipation,
hanging on to his every word. He’d tell us stories full of
gore, murder, incest, sex and death, and our tongues
would hang out. None of us would breathe a word
about these stories out of class, at home. They were our
secret. Mr Steinberg never quite got the hang of the
Organization, and we weren’t going to enlighten him.
When I heard the class hush excitedly, I knew exactly
what was happening. This just wasn’t fair, to be stuck in
the cupboard on a storytelling day! Oh, how I wished to
be out there! I sat up as quickly as I could and pushed
the door a little so that I might catch a glimpse of him.
You had to watch him telling his stories.