Being Dead Part Thirteen

Backwards and forwards...

I watched the boys as they changed back into their more formal school clothes, discarding PE shorts, and sighed. I’d been one of those once, in the comprehensive school down the road from where I had lived, changing for games or changing back after a shower wit a group of other boys, but when I listened to the well honed accents of these boys I knew one thing.

They were not my sort at all. I could smell money and riches oozing out of them with their perspiration. And I came from a very different background from boys who spoke like they did. I came from poverty, and that was a word that these boys would never understand even though they might see it in a dictionary, and I noticed that one of them had stains on his underpants and another wht looked like recent scars on his backside.

Then I looked down at myself and wondered why on Earth I was still wearing sports shorts, though they were comfortable even tey they didn’t seem particularly appropriate. Should I have changed back into a fine pair of trousers? Something tried to tell me to do just that, but something else overrode that. I stayed as I was.

That day soon passed with me I on a kind of autopilot I’d never understand even if I spent half a dozen lifetimes trying to get my head round it. But I was in a classroom and I found myself preaching history. I use the word preaching because that’s what it seemed to be.

I spoke almost affectionately of a world in which the majority of the population existed as shadows who laboured away whilst the real people, the boys’ parents and their ancestors, did whatever real people did with their lives. Like orchestral conductors, they created futures, but their batons were threats and punishments. If I’d been transported somehow to the world I told the boys about I’d be completely lost. I was sure of that. Yet I’d been there briefly, and very recently too.

The end of the afternoon was approaching when one of the boys collapsed. He’d been standing in a short row next to my desk waiting for his work to be marked when he folded up like a three dimensional sheet of paper, and lay on the floor whilst the rest of the class hummed and hawed about him.

I knew the boy because of the magic of translation that had guided me so successfully recently informed me.

He was Peter and he was troubled. He was the boy with scars on his backside, the one I’d noticed as the class changed from their games outfits back into civilian clothes and for the briefest of moments I’d caught sight of it.

“What’s the matter with that boy?” I found myself barking, and I added in a tone of voice that just wasn’t me, “stand up, boy, or I’ve got a ruler rhat says you will!”

He didn’t move.

It was then that the real me took control.

“The rest of you stay in your seats and keep quiet!” I barked, and I made my way from the hated (by me) teacher’s desk to where Peter Somebody-or-Other lay on the polished floor, still as a corpse.

It was then, when I knelt down beside him, that it happened. The magical something that had ended up by dumping me in the middle of a rugby pitch as a referee, the metamorphosis that seemed to take over my whole mind and create confusion if I tried to think of anything else.. This was a public school and I was a snior master there, a man with powers...

“Samson!” I ordered, “fetch the matron! And quickly, boy!”

One of the boys stood up and glared at me before he saw sense and ran out of the classroom. That must have been Samson, though I didn’t know any of the boys’ names when I was myself. I was in a strange dichotomy of being in two worlds at the same time, and it was confusing.

“Peter,” I whispered at the prostrate boy, taking him by one of his hands.

“Pervy teacher,” muttered one of the boys on the back row, though quite loud enough for me to hear.

“Wash your mouth out, you repulsive little erk!” I hissed back, and that made the class giggle for a moment and then fall silent because, I guess, not one of them wanted to be blamed for an outbreak of te sort of punishment that might be unleashed on them, when Peter’s problems were over and done with. Resting on a windowsill I spotted a ruler, and to me it looked to be slightly blood-stained and I guessed way.

The Matron floated in, clad in the kind of dress that thratens to blow into the air on a windy day, but it wasn’t that which caused me to flinch.

“Megan,” I whispered.

She glanced at me, then dropped onto her knees next to the boy on the floor and gave him a cursory examination before administering first aid and a life-saving kiss to him.

But that wasn’t necessary because in a fractured moment Megan and I seemed to lose all substance as if we had turned into autumn leaves looking for a breeze to blow us away. And we must have found that seasonal wind because when I opened my eyes (they had been firmly shut) we were standing looking at the sick boy in his dirty bed back in Victorian England and his caring but woefully uncertain mother, both of whom had undergone a sudden transformation.

Suddenly she gave the impression that she was in charge of her world. There was to be no surrendering to weakness or poverty because she was in charge.

This was a Megan I thought I knew.

And the Peter in the grubby bed sat up and stared around him, totally confused.

“Don’t punish me,” he begged, and then “what have you done to me? Where am I?”

© Peter Rogerson 09.09.24

xxx