Studs and Stilettos

Lesson 7 - don't get over-familiar with strange females.

Friday.

I've got through a whole week and so far nobody has told me not to come back on Monday.

Thing is – do I want to play out this farce for another week. There are young peoples' lives at stake here and I may be permanently affecting their development.

I stare out across the rows of empty lab benches. Its lovely being alone with no brats pestering the hell out of me or chucking questions at me or making snide insinuations about my physique.

Tonight, it's the pub with Pippa and her new Romeo. I haven't met him yet and Pippa's been keeping him close to her chest – and other parts as well judging by how few times we have seen her over the past few weeks. I'll thrash them at darts, maybe pick up a beer swilling gut enhanced roly poly soul mate, get pregnant, have a baby called Verruca or Candida, live in an inner-city tower block with my lover-boy javelin hurler and go on the dole. That's it. Solved. No more boys, boiling tubes or bunsens.

Charlie puts his head round the prep room door. He's a bit like a handsome version of Kryten on Red Dwarf but with hair. Wouldn't mind seeing his upper torso without the pink linen shirt and silk tie.

'Hi there! How you doing? Just a few things. There's a full staff meeting today at first break (we have one every Friday) and Doris rang to say she needs to see you pronto.'

'Does that mean now?'

'''Fraid so. Doris said it was urgent. You've got time while the boys are in assembly.'

Doris is behind the bullet proof, plate glass, quadruple glazed screen.

I tap gently, then louder and finally smack both palms manically against the glass crushing my nose against its cold surface feigning a slide down to the ground. Doris must have seen my shadow but she carries on writing with a long sloping spidery hand.

Figs, senna pods, porridge, marmite....

She's engrossed in a shopping list and if the first two items are anything to go by, she's got raging constipation.

At last she decides to look up and slides the screen to one side. I imagine because I am such a threat to her security, she has a sawn off shotgun under the counter and a huge red emergency button.

'Yes!' she snaps.

'Syryp of figs is fantastic for loosening the bowels and I highly recommend All Bran over porridge.' I whisper smiling beguilingly at the crumpled mouth amazed by how quickly Doris' skin is able to compete with a cuttlefish in the changing colour stakes.

She sweeps the list to the floor and fiddles round with a pile of papers, extracting a typed sheet and shoving it in my direction.

'Fill this out immediately,' she barks, 'and return it to me with your passport and a utility bill.'

'Why....?'

Doris snarls. 'It's a police check form. Don't you know anything?'

'But I haven't done anything wrong.' I feel I'm sinking into the floor as Doris gets bigger, inflating before my eyes. Unpaid parking tickets hang round my profile like confetti and I know I forgot to pay for that mascara at the bottom of my shopping basket a few months ago. My room has more than its fair share of traffic cones and I definitely altered the thirty mile per hour speed limit on the A40 to eighty.... but that was two years ago....

'Everyone says that,' Doris's voice booms out across the reception area where a couple of posh parents are waiting to see the Head. 'Judging by that disgusting lesson you did the other day – in front of the Mayor and the Headmaster, we should have checked you out well before offering you the job. I think you have paedophilic tendencies!'