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  Jim was very close to saying something that he didn’t want to say. But he took a deep breath, and said, ‘OK . . . let’s talk about it this evening, when I get back from college. Right now, I don’t think I’m in any fit state to talk to anybody about anything.’

  Mrs LaFarge leaned forward and kissed Tibbles on the nose. ‘Au revoir, mon petit chaton. Safe journey. There is a golden basket waiting for you in heaven.’

  Jim climbed the steps back to his apartment and opened the door. He carried Tibbles’ body through the living room, opened the sliding doors and laid him on one of the sunbeds on the balcony.

  He stood there for a while, half-expecting Tibbles to jump up and give him one of his disdainful looks, and then start licking himself. But Tibbles stayed there, not moving, not breathing. He had been flattened by a two-ton automobile, and Jim had to admit that he was dead. Blood was leaking from his anus, and dripping on to the sunbed.

  ‘Why did you have to do that, Tibbles?’ he demanded. ‘Why did you have to come after me?’

  He turned around and punched the wall, and said ‘Fuck!’ because it hurt so much.

  TWO

  He arrived at West Grove Community College fifteen minutes late. As he walked along the corridor, his sneakers squeaking on the freshly waxed tiles, he could hear Special Class Two from more than a hundred yards away. Shouting, laughing, hooting and playing gangsta rap. He stopped for a moment, next to the lockers, and thought: You don’t have to do this, Jim. You could turn around and walk away and never come back. By this time tomorrow morning you could be fishing for steelhead on the Umpqua River in Oregon.

  He was still standing there when the classroom door next to him opened and Sheila Colefax came out. Sheila was a petite bespectacled brunette who always dressed in pencil skirts and formal blouses, with a brooch at her neck, as if she were attending court. Jim always fantasized that she wore a black garter belt and black stockings and black lace panties underneath her skirts, and that once she had taken off her spectacles and shaken her hair loose, she would be a tigress in bed.

  ‘Ah, Jim. Do you think you could keep your class a little quieter, please? We’re trying to discuss our Spanish reading list for the coming semester and the noise they’re making. It really is very distracting.’

  ‘Sure. Yes. Sorry, Sheila. How was your vacation?’

  ‘My vacation?’

  ‘Yes. How was it? You have quite a glow about you. Did you go someplace exotic? Bali, maybe?’

  ‘Sherman Oaks.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, well. Staying at home, that’s always pretty relaxing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really. I was taking care of my mother. She has Alzheimer’s, and she’s doubly incontinent.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry to hear it. I’ll – uh – tell my class to put a sock in it.’

  ‘Thank you, Jim. I’d appreciate it.’

  Sheila Colefax went back into her classroom and closed the door. As she did so, however, she looked back at Jim through the circular window and he was sure that she lowered her eyelashes at him. He blinked back at her, but she was gone.

  Pull yourself together, he thought. You’re dreaming. She probably wears fifty-denier pantyhose up to her armpits and goes to bed every night with a mug of hot chocolate and a Mary Higgins Clark novel.

  He walked along to Special Class Two and opened the door. All of the students were out of their seats. Some of the boys were throwing a basketball across the classroom, while some of the girls were perched on top of their desks polishing their nails. Others were scuffling or pushing each other. A tall black boy in a spotted silk headscarf and impossibly droopy jeans had a huge boom box on his shoulder. He was playing a G-Unit song and mouthing along with it, with his eyes closed. Another boy was dancing and jumping and spinning on the floor.

  ‘Shawty you know I want dat cat – drop it now, pick it up, drop it, work dat back – hustle now, hurry now Shawty, make dat stack—’

  Jim walked across to his desk and put down his canvas bag. He rummaged inside it until he found the book that he was looking for. Then he sat down, opened it, and started to read. He said nothing, and didn’t even look up.

  Gradually, the class realized that their teacher had arrived. One of the boys caught the basketball and tucked it into the crook of his elbow, and when his friend said, ‘Come on, man, throw it over here,’ he shook his head and said, ‘Wait up, OK?’ Almost all of the girls climbed off their desks and sat down, although one black girl with elaborate gilded cornrows remained where she was, one long leg raised up high, polishing her toenails in purple frost.

  The last to wake up to the fact that Jim had walked in was the boy with the boom box. He was still singing ‘No discrimination – blacks and da Asians – even Caucasians – got dem all shakin”when he opened his eyes. Every other student was staring at him. Immediately, he switched off the music and sank down into his seat, although he stuck one leg out into the aisle, with a red Kanye West sneaker on the end of it.

  Still Jim didn’t look up. He continued to read, while the class watched him in silence. Over three minutes went by, and the students looked at each other and frowned and shrugged and started to grow restless. The boy with the basketball tossed it over to his friend, who caught it and tossed it back again. Jim turned the page, and sniffed.

  Eventually, one of the girls raised her hand and said, ‘Sir? Is you our teacher?’

  Jim tucked a Hot Tamales wrapper into the page he was reading, as a bookmark. He raised his head and looked around the classroom. ‘Do you want me to be?’

  A short black boy with a polished head and glasses said, ‘Aint down to us, sir, is it? If you da teach, then you da teach, whether we likes it or not.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Jim asked him.

  ‘Arthur, sir.’

  ‘Arthur What?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. How jew know that?’

  ‘How did I know what?’

  ‘My name, sir. Arthur Watt.’

  Jim thought: This day is becoming more surreal by the minute. He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk.

  ‘Do you know something?’ he said. ‘I ran over my cat this morning, before I came here. I killed him. Right now he’s lying on a sunbed on my balcony, and he’s dead.’

  ‘And what?’ asked a sallow-faced boy with a large bony nose and masses of black curly hair. He wore an orange and brown T-shirt that was much too tight for him, with a picture of the Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu on the front of it. ‘Are we supposed to feel, like, sad or something?’

  ‘No,’ said Jim. ‘Why should you feel sad? You didn’t even know him. But I am. I’m sad.’

  ‘And this relates to us how?’ asked the sallow-faced boy.

  ‘I’ll tell you how it relates to you. You all came to this class because you have difficulty in communicating. You find it difficult to express your feelings to other people. And there are two reasons for this.

  ‘The first reason is that you didn’t pay enough attention when your grade-school teachers were showing you how to read and write. You always thought you knew better, and that reading and writing were a waste of your valuable time.

  ‘The second reason is that you never try to put yourself into other people’s shoes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to put myself in Mikey’s shoes,’ said a ginger-haired boy at the back of the class. ‘They totally stink!’

  Jim ignored him, and stood up. ‘You want to know the secret of being a great communicator? Like Ronald Reagan, maybe, or Barack Obama? The secret of being a great communicator is to know what other people want to hear, and what they need to hear, too. I told you that I ran over my cat. And what did you say?’

  He approached the sallow-faced boy’s desk and stood right in front of him. The boy leaned back, looking uncomfortable.

  ‘“Are we supposed to feel sad?”’ Jim mimicked him. ‘That’s what you said. So tell me. Did you seriously think that saying that to me was going to make me like you, or make me think what a
chilled-out, together kind of guy you are? Because all it told me about you is that you’re a thoughtless, insensitive, self-centered idiot.’

  ‘Hey,’ said the sallow-faced boy, in a voice that was obviously much more shrill than he had meant it to be. ‘Who are you calling an idiot?’

  ‘I don’t know. What’s your name, idiot?’

  ‘Leon. Leon Shulman. And if you think I’m an idiot, at least I wasn’t stupid enough to run over my own cat and expect everybody to feel sorry for me.’

  Jim said, ‘You’re missing the point, Leon. I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me. I simply expect you to show some sensitivity, you know? So that I think – hey, this Leon Shulman is a nice, considerate, respectful young man. In return, I’ll pay him extra attention in class, and when it comes to marking his papers, I’ll be more inclined to mark him up than down.

  ‘That’s communication, you idiot. And that’s what I’ve come here to teach you. But, like I said, only if you want me to. If you don’t, you can carry on playing basketball and polishing your nails and dancing and fighting and listening to “Chase Da Cat”, and I’ll just sit here and read my book and go home when the bell rings. It’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ asked the boy with the boom box, suspiciously.

  ‘How did I know what?’

  ‘How do you know that I was playing “Chase Da Cat?”’

  Jim closed his eyes for a moment, so that he looked even more exhausted than he actually was. Then he opened them again, and said, with monumental patience, ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Neville Brown. But most people call me Top Dime. Or T.D. for short.’

  ‘Well, T.D., let me tell you this. I’ve been teaching Special Class Two for longer than I want to remember. Students who have difficulty with the English language try to find other ways to tell people how they feel. Sometimes they do it through aggressive behavior. They carry knives, or guns. Sometimes they do it through the way they dress. Sometimes they clam up and say nothing at all. A lot of the time, they express themselves through the music they play, the way you do. And if I didn’t know every hip-hop artist and every gangsta rap track that there ever was, then I wouldn’t be much of a teacher, would I, because I wouldn’t know what my students were trying to say to me.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘Kind of ironic, wasn’t it, that you were playing “Chase Da Cat” – today of all days?’

  ‘What’s “ironic”?’ asked Top Dime.

  Arthur’s hand shot up. ‘I know!’ he said. ‘That’s like made of metal. You know – same as Iron Man.’

  Jim marked the register. There were eight boys and seven girls in Special Class Two this year. He never tried to learn their names all at once, but he had to be careful because he tended privately to give them nicknames, like Squinty or Hellboy or Britney or Bart, and last year he had inadvertently come out and called a girl Hooters to her face.

  The class started to grow noisy again. The girls started chattering and several of the boys began to flick paper pellets at each other.

  ‘Tamara Wei?’ said Jim. A Chinese-American girl put up her hand. She was wearing a dark green silk blouse with a cheongsam-style collar, and her hair was immaculately cut in a shiny black bob.

  ‘Looking pretty dolled-up for college, Tamara,’ Jim remarked.

  ‘I want to be an anchorwoman, sir,’ Tamara told him. ‘I auditioned in July for KTLA. They said I have a terrific TV face and a terrific TV voice. All I have to do is learn to read more better.’

  ‘OK, we’ll see what we can do,’ Jim told her. He stood up, went to the whiteboard behind his desk and wrote the word ‘euphemism’ in large blue letters. ‘Do you want to try reading that for me?’

  Tamara stared at it for a long time, and then slowly shook her head. ‘I don’t know how you would say that. I don’t even know what it means.’

  ‘It means using an inoffensive word instead of a word that could be rude or upset people. Like calling it an “image enhancement community” instead of a “fat camp.” Or “wind” or “gas” instead of “fart.”’

  The ginger-haired boy let out a whoop and said, ‘I don’t believe it! Did my ears deceive me? My teacher said “fart!”’

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry!’ said Jim. ‘What do you normally call it?’ Jim waited until the laughter had subsided. Then he said, ‘OK . . . anybody else want to try reading out this word on the board? How about you, Arthur?’

  ‘Oopahooism? Yoopahooism?’

  ‘Good try,’ Jim told him, and then told him how to pronounce it properly. ‘There . . . you actually learned something, and it’s only your first class. Think what you’ll know by the end of the year.’

  ‘Yeah,’ put in the ginger-haired boy. ‘How to talk about poop and stuff like that in polite company, without nobody getting offended.’

  ‘Well, you’re nearly right,’ Jim told him. ‘The reason we sometimes use euphemisms is to spare people’s feelings. But it’s not just a question of respect. It makes for good communication, too. If you swear a lot, it gets in the way of what you’re trying to say. It devalues your argument. Bad language makes you sound like you’re ignorant, like you only know words beginning with F.’

  ‘I know a word that don’t begin with an F,’ put in Top Dime. ‘It begin with an M, like in M for mother, but I have to admit that it do have an F in it halfway through.’

  Jim sat down. ‘OK, T.D., very hilarious.’ He ran his pen down the register, and then he said, ‘Last name on the list, then. Kim Dong Wook? Which one of you is Kim Dong Wook?’

  Everybody turned around in their seats, but there was nobody in the classroom who looked as if they might be called Kim Dong Wook.

  ‘Guess Wooky’s playing hooky,’ suggested the ginger-haired boy. His real name was Teddy Greenspan but Jim had already nicknamed him Splatter because of his freckles. He was tempted to change it to Motormouth.

  Jim marked Kim Dong Wook ‘absent’ and closed the register.

  ‘Right, then,’ he said, ‘because this is your first morning I’m going to give you something real easy to do. I want you all to pretend that you’re on Death Row, right? At midnight they’re going to take you out of your cell and give you a lethal injection.’

  ‘But I’m innocent!’ howled Teddy.

  ‘Maybe you are,’ Jim retorted, ‘but the governor has turned down your last appeal and you’re going to die anyhow.’

  ‘Yeah, Fanta-pants,’ said Arthur. ‘You shouldn’t of left that bright-red hair in the toilet. The CSI knew right off it was you.’

  ‘How would you like to die right now?’ Teddy challenged him. ‘I can give you a lethal injection, bro! I can shove a hockey stick right up your fat black ass!’

  ‘Teddy! Arthur!’ said Jim. ‘What the hell did I just tell you about using bad language?’

  ‘Hey, I apologize, OK?’ said Teddy, raising both hands in surrender. ‘I am beyond contrite. What I meant to say was “economy-sized Afro-American sit-upon.” That’s a euphemism, right?’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Jim told him. ‘Like I told you, I don’t care if I teach you guys or not. You want to spend your time scrapping with each other, go ahead. I can find plenty to do without you. I have a great book here, and I can’t wait to finish reading it.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Arthur. ‘We was only messing.’

  A girl in the front row cautiously raised her hand. She had a pinched triangular face with buck teeth and protuberant green eyes, so that she looked to Jim as if her great-great-grandmother might have had a fling with a stick insect. ‘Please, sir,’ she asked, almost in a whisper, ‘why do we have to pretend that we’re all on Death Row? What are we supposed to have done?’

  Jim smiled at her. As far as he remembered her name was Janice Something, but he had nicknamed her Sticky. ‘It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, Janice. The only thing that matters is that you’re scheduled to die tonight, but you’re allowed one last meal, of whatever you like. Steak, ribs, lasagna, thre
e-bean salad, anything. That’s today’s project. That’s what I want you to do – write down a menu for your very last meal.’

  ‘Isn’t that kind of sick?’ said a heavy-jawed, muscular boy with sculptured sideburns and designer stubble, and a single pirate-sized earring in his left earlobe. He wore a black T-shirt with Marco’s Gym printed on it, and his bulging pectorals were noticeably bigger than Janice’s breasts. His name was Grant Bronowski, and he had already told Jim that he was a tight end on the West Grove football team, with fifty-five catches to his credit last season – just in case Jim got the laughable idea that remedial English was more important to him than touchdowns.

  Jim said, ‘I’m only asking you to make-believe, Grant, that’s all, and make-believe is a very good exercise for the brain muscles. More than that, when I see all of your various menus, they will give me a very clear idea of what kind of personalities you are. You know what they say? You are what you eat. Or, in this case, what you feel like eating as your very last supper.’

  He went to the stationery cupboard in the corner of the classroom, unlocked it, and took out a pad of yellow lined legal paper and a boxful of blue ballpens. He walked up and down the class, tearing off a sheet of paper for each student, and handing them each a pen. He had long ago given up any expectation that Special Class Two would think of bringing their own writing materials.

  Teddy, however, had taken out a black plastic case with both pens and pencils in it, as well as a pencil-sharpener and an eraser. He also produced a spring-bound study book, with a marbled cover.

  ‘Glad to see you came prepared,’ Jim told him.

  Teddy shrugged. ‘It’s an English class, right? I wouldn’t show up to a swimming class without my swim shorts.’

  Jim said, ‘You’re good at English, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘You’re more than OK. Admit it. You knew how to pronounce “euphemism”, didn’t you? You knew what it meant, too. In fact you have a pretty extensive vocabulary. I never heard a student of mine use the word “contrite” before.’