This Secret We're Keeping Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the portion at the base end of the ability spectrum, but that didn’t faze me – I loved a challenge and didn’t feel in the least bit intimidated. In fact, if you set aside the fact that the sadist in a boiler suit whom some people referred to as the school caretaker had cranked up the central heating to a temperature formerly unique to the equatorial tropics, I was about as cool and collected as it was possible to be when autumn blew in.
    At the end of last term, my ageing predecessor had been sacked for creative expense claiming, so it was now my job to turn this sorry ship around. I was determined to succeed, promising myself that in two summers’ time my class would ace their GCSEs and prove to the Hadley Hall staffroom that being sour, middle-aged and a big fan of diarrhoea-coloured knitwear were not, in fact, prerequisites for being a good teacher.
    Oh, I was well aware that my habit of dressing for work like I was heading to a rock concert wasn’t exactly popular among my colleagues. I wore my dark hair long, cultivated my stubble and never tucked in my shirt; sometimes I’d eventeam my cords (no jeans allowed) with cowboy boots to really stir things up and get them talking. I saw it as doing them a favour, in a sense, because they needed something to gossip about other than the growing non-attendance at the sixth-form choir rehearsals or the German exchange student who’d been caught dealing weed when she was supposed to be playing rounders.
    But in my quest to work hard, I’d somehow, conversely, become lazy. Too tunnel-vision. Obsessed with grades and neglecting to observe behaviour.
    We were only two weeks in, and halfway through simultaneous equations, I realized someone was crying. At first the sound came at me like the intermittent buzz of an insect, a mild irritation. This was the start of the GCSE syllabus – important stuff.
Why can’t they just pack it in?
    Eventually my eyes followed the noise towards the back of the room, where the Witches sat. (That was my own private term for them, not something I would be sharing around the staffroom over coffee and Dundee cake any time soon. In the year since I’d started at Hadley Hall, I’d worked out that you were allowed to moan about bad behaviour, pierced ears or unfulfilled academic potential, but you weren’t allowed to take the piss out of them. That, apparently, was taboo in the manner of mentioning periods or hormones, or commenting on their legs.)
    The crying girl wasn’t one of the Witches, I knew that much. She was new to the school this term, and I was annoyed with myself for not being able to instantly recall her name. (I’d not taught this year group before, but that didn’t mean I was planning on walking around with a register permanently appended to one hand like most of my colleagues. I was happy with my own personal system – individual pupil ability mapped out on a mental seatingplan – but admittedly I probably did need to expedite the addition of other identifying features, such as their names.)
    ‘Get on with your work,’ I barked at the rest of the gawping class. The Witches obediently and predictably lowered their heads too, a cheap trick to demonstrate their innocence: clearly, the crying was nothing to do with
them
. It was the oldest, most transparent ploy going, which on the plus side made it relatively easy to sidestep.
    ‘What’s going on?’ I strode purposefully forward, mainly because a bit of well-timed striding was sometimes all it took to get them to shut up.
    The Witches twittered. The girl shook her head.
    It was then that I noticed a clump of auburn hair lying on the desk behind her. One of the Witches tried too late to brush it away, and my gaze travelled down to the polished parquet floor, where an entire ponytail – a good eight inches of hair – had been shorn clean away from the girl’s scalp with a pair of craft scissors.
    Actually, my first reaction was one of dented pride: I couldn’t