Rook & Tooth and Claw Read Free Page A

van Winkle’s nagging wife into a feminist icon: ‘He was a typical man with nothing going for him … who took the world easy, would eat white bread or brown, whateverwas less trouble … would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound … and the whole story like blames his
wife
for nagging him to try to get his act together. Like even his dog thinks he leads a dogs life but what do dogs know and anyhow the dog was male and what do
they
know (males I mean.)’
    In spite of all of his students’ shortcomings, however, Jim could feel a real yearning for understanding in everything they wrote. Even in some of the most laboured essays, heavy with crossings-out and misspellings, there was a strenuous groping for knowledge, a genuine struggle to find the key to literacy. Young people in a darkened room, trying to feel their way towards the door. There were times when he could have cried over what they had written; not for himself, but for them.
    ‘Rip van Winkle let his childrin run wile they never wore no shos and his suns pants was alus fallin down.’ That was Mark Foley’s essay in its entirety. But Jim could see what it was about the story that had caught Mark’s attention: the careless, lazy father who never took care of his children, so that his son had to troop after his mother wearing his ragged hand-me-down galligaskins – ‘which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in bad weather.’
    In his own way, at home, Mark had suffered the same kind of experience, with a beer-gut father who owned a run-down automobile body shop in Santa Monica, so the story of Rip van Winkle was much more to Mark than just a legend. Mark had lived it; and now he had taken the first step toward expressing himself through fiction.
    Who knows, thought Jim wryly, as he closed Mark’s book and dropped it into his ‘Out’ tray. Maybe Mark was destined to be a latter-day Washington Irving.
    He was turning to Rita Munoz’s essay (printed incapital letters, as usual, in multi-coloured felt-tip pens), when he happened to turn towards the window. It was dazzlingly bright outside, but he could see all the way across the schoolyard to the boiler-house. A group of boys were playing basketball right outside the boiler-house door; and Sue-Robin Caufield was leaning against a railing talking to Jeff Griglak, captain of the school athletics team and one of the brightest students at Westwood Community College for years. John Ng was sitting on the other end of the bench, eating something indescribable out a box and reading
Treasure Island.
    It was no more than a flicker; a dark shadow passing over his eye. But the door of the boiler-room suddenly opened, and the tall dark man in the Elmer Gantry hat appeared. He hesitated for a moment, looking right and left, with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sunlight. Then he hurried diagonally across the schoolyard, and disappeared behind the science block.
    He left the boiler-room door ajar. But, strangely, it seemed as if none of the students in the playground had noticed him. None of the boys playing basketball had stopped for a moment, and Sue-Robin had carried on flirting with Jeff Griglak without pausing for breath. Her hair bounced and shone in the mid-morning sunlight.
    Jim frowned. He got up from his desk and walked up to the window, cupping his hands around his face to cut out any reflection. Apart from the half-open boiler-house door, everything else appeared to be normal. And yet…
    And yet he had a gut feeling that something was badly wrong. He felt as if he had been shown a picture that had been deliberately designed to confuse him: like a painting by Rene Magritte, or one of M.C. Escher’s drawings of never-ending staircases. He left the classroom and walkedquickly along the corridor until he reached the swing doors that led outside.
    There was laughter and chatter and shouting in the schoolyard but Jim didn’t hear it. He was making his way