Page 14 - WTP Vol.IX #3

Ijust want to tell you: this isn’t a happy story.
No-one dies or gets cancer or has a car accident, but...
it was the night before. When I was a kid.
I knew they shouldn’t be stressful. (I take a deep breath.) But there’s so much pressure.
From the government in their suits, with their laws and their power
down onto the councils,
down onto the schools,
down onto the heads of departments, down onto the staff,
down
down
down through the food chain onto the bacteria at the bottom,
the kids.
Me.
Long story short: I was age 10 and weeping.
And my mum... same one who last week rolled her eyes and said to me ‘No-one likes a quitter, Susie,’ said to me, ‘What’s up?’
I thought... ‘The ceiling? The sky? The planets and the sun and black black outer space?’ But I didn’t say that, I didn’t want the back of her hand.
‘Go on, Susie, tell me.’
I told her my name’s Elaine. She rolled her eyes again.
I didn’t blame her for getting my name wrong—I looked nothing like an Elaine. I just told her, ‘SATS. Tomorrow.’
No reply. She was looking intently at her new eye- liner kit. She was considering the advantages of brush over pencil, gel over liquid.
I was edgy, biting my nails. ‘Do you know what SATS stands for, Mum?’
‘Course I do,’ she said. ‘S. A. T. S. Simple Answers To Simple Questions.’
‘No Mum—that would be SATSQ.’ She didn’t get my sarcasm; she was concentrating hard on delicately dipping the brush.
Actually, SATS stands for Sums And Terrible Stuff.
‘You just have to do your best,’ she said, and applied a perfect eye-wing. She has beautiful eyes. Like a lynx crossbred with a Gorgon.
My ten-year-old self thought, ‘What if just doing my best isn’t good enough? What if my SATS mark is so rubbish that I let down, with my general uselessness, my class teacher Mrs Chestnut who I love and who is the best teacher in the world?’
You see, Mrs Chestnut listened, and said ‘well done’ when I got things right, and told me amazing facts like an octopus has two hearts, and she sorted out my ‘there’, ‘they’re’ and ‘their’ when I got them mixed up... and she smelled nice too.
SATS—Staring At Tomorrow, Sad.
My breathing was fast. Mum was concentrating on the black line along her lower lid. It was smooth, as perfect as the line around the bath. I thought, ‘What
if I forget everything Mrs Chestnut has taught me,
and my marks plummet the class down the league of statistics? What if Ofsted gets angry and blames the Head, and the Head, worried about her career and her reputation in the community, blames Mrs Chestnut for the bad results and Mrs Chestnut gets the sack?’
At that age I didn’t quite understand the phrase ‘gets the sack’. I saw, in my ten-year-old head, Mrs Chest- nut looking at my pathetic test paper and two men in balaclavas running in, stuffing a sack over her head and dragging her out silently screaming.
I thought of the life-advice-things my dad said before he went away:
‘Don’t eat yellow snow.
7
I Love Mrs Chestnut.
Kevin DyeR