Marcel Read Online Free PDF Page B

let’s measure your waist,” the grandmother said.
    *
    There was nothing square about Miss Veegaete. She was all curves and hollows. Sometimes, when she was reading in class and thought no one was watching, she would slip off her shoes. Crossing one leg over the other and holding her book with one hand, she reached under the desk with theother and gave her ankle-strap a firm tug to undo the buckle. Without raising her eyes from her book she clapped her knees together again, placed the point of one shoe against the heel of the other, and released each foot from its prison with a soft, squelching sound.
    When the postprandial torpor wore off and the fidgeting in the classroom mounted, her stockinged feet felt around for her shoes. She balanced them on her toes and gave them a little shake before slipping them on and fastening the straps. She smoothed the shoulders of her blouse and clapped her hands for attention.
    “Put down your pencils, now!’ she commanded.
    She went round the classroom collecting sheets of paper, pausing here and there to bestow praise on a drawing: boxy houses, stiff-legged figures in gardens full of trees with huge fruits, under blazing suns with straw-coloured rays.
    I hated colour, so I did every thing in black. I had made a drawing of the grandmother’s house, but without the front so you could see all the rooms and what was in them. I had put Marcel into the picture, too: Marcel in the attic wearing a helmet and scary bat’s wings.
    “Er …” murmured Miss Veegaete, “it is, how shall I put it, artistic.”
    When she had finished pinning all the drawings to a board at the back of the classroom she swept to the door and flung it open.
    She clapped her hands again: “Time to be excused!”
    The boys poured from their desks towards the door, where the jostling throng assembled into a double file.
    “Forward march!”
    She drove her flock down the corridor, along the windowsills with potted geraniums and discarded lunch boxes, past the coat racks with mackintoshes dangling from the pegs like hooded cassocks. Talking was not allowed.
    We trooped down the stairs and turned into another corridor past a classroom full of boys reciting tables in voices that were already breaking.
    Halfway down the final corridor I sniffed the reek of the latrines: a sickly smell of urine masked by clouds of jasmine spray. I clenched my buttocks instinctively.
    Miss Veegaete lined up her class in front of six cubicles with short doors. Adjoining them was her own private lavatory, with a door that reached down to the floor. She clapped her hands a third time, whereupon the front ranks vanished into the cubicles. Six pairs of shoes were draped first in corduroy or denim, then in underpants of all colours, after which six little streams splashed into the pans.
    “And what do we do when we’ve finished?”
    Six waterfalls cascaded in chorus.
    Miss Veegaete always waited for the last pupils to take their turn in the cubicles before locking herself in the mother of all lavatories, which had a toilet higher than the others. I was fumbling with my flies in the cubicle next to hers, with only a flimsy partition between us.
    I could hear Miss Veegaete hitch up her skirt, then her petticoat. She was having trouble pulling down her underwear; the material kept getting twisted in the elastic.
    I heard a grunt in the cubicle on the other side, signallinga Number Two, then a heavy plop and a sigh of relief.
    I waited, elbows on knees, counting the specks in the tiles at my feet. Miss Veegaete would be lowering herself onto the toilet. I pictured her thighs spreading over the seat. A hen sitting on her brood.
    Elsewhere I heard belts being buckled.
    It seemed an eternity before it came: a wide, motherly stream issuing from a cleft in the rocks, splashing into the pan, tinkling like her laughter.
    The world stood still. The hot ache in my groin became a whirlpool, a funnel. The blood rushed to my cheeks, tears stung my eyes. My