first installment of brilliant novel in progress

October

It could go either way. That time of day where all is good in the world if you are going home to a warm, busily distracted household. The time of day that is good if you are going home. Even if no one is waiting for you. The time of day that is almost unbearable if everyone is going home, except you, and whatever you are doing, no matter how important is suddenly irrelevant. Only you know it won’t be tomorrow when I’m hunting down this train of thought only to find it never really existed in the first place. And now I’ve lost it again.

Everyone was going home. This last room in the school with its lights on was still busy. But even these tired teachers were looking forward to joining the traffic homeward. They all knew that feeling. Shutting the driver’s side door and suddenly they’d left work, though outside the car, struggling with a satchel of student’s workbooks, they had a long way to go home. But now, inside the car, home was where they got out of the car and whatever happened between now and then was the same insignificant journey as yesterday, regardless of what the radio station played. This period of time, at the mercy of traffic lights, was like foreign currency – it couldn’t be spent anywhere else and so was loosely spent.
Almost there. Ticking off a mental list of things to do before you leave on Friday night. Things you don’t want to do over the weekend. Then mentally rearranging your weekend plans to accommodate the things you don’t want to do tonight.
“You off?” Mark turned his chair to her desk as she stood.
“Yeah. Jane said she’d call and if I’m not there she’ll never let me forget it.” Catherine swung a bulging satchel over one shoulder, picking up a stack of books that wouldn’t fit in it with the other hand.
“And yet you never call her up on the countless times she lets you wait by the phone all night.” It wasn’t a question. “Come on, stick around, it’s Friday, you know, we all pretend to go out for a quiet drink but us poor teachers can’t afford dinner as well, so we get horribly drunk and hope we’ll be able to walk away from our humiliation like intelligent people who get drunk with strangers,”
“Good night Mark,” she’d heard this speech before. She pushed a stray dark wave of her shoulder-length hair behind her ear, waiting for him to finish.
“And then we have to pretend we have normal, respectable relationships with our fellow teachers and be a good example to our impressionable students.”
“When really it’s the students who corrupt us.” She finished his rant for him. “Goodnight.” She yelled back from the hallway.
“Nice try.” Matt swung his chair around, “What do you reckon?” he held out a paper dart.
“What? Some kid throw it at you?”
“No, I’m perfecting the design. Well, I’m trying to improve the curriculum but I decided to work with my talents.”
“Paper darts?”
“Yes. Aeronautics was my favourite subject at college.”
“And you became a teacher?”
“Oh, Mark.” Catherine poked her head back into the lounge; “You should write that speech down, laminate it and just point to it in future. You’d save us all a lot of time.”
“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the lyrical sound of my voice.” He smiled, spinning his chair to face her but she was gone again.
“So I figured I would teach a subject that included aeronautics. Turns out social studies doesn’t.” Matt was still talking.
This would be more interesting if I were drunk, Mark thought, turning back to the stack of exercise books and a grim red pen. Only 1…2… 3… no, don’t count how many books, this is depressing enough. Why is it easier to mark thirty identical descriptions of the causes of world war two when Catherine sits three desks away laughing at misquotations of Shakespeare? She leaves and all of a sudden I’m questioning my choice of career. Or maybe just why I didn’t find a desk further away from Matt. But that would mean being further away from Catherine. This is ridiculous; he threw his red pen down emphatically.
“I never knew you felt so strongly about joining the science and social studies curriculums.” Matt sat upright.
“Yeah? Well it doesn’t come up in conversation very often.” Mark stood, stacking his books into a neat pile he hoped he could carry to the car before they insisted on becoming a no-longer-neat-pile.
“You getting an early start at Jerry’s?” Matt watched him.
“Ah, no. I think I’ll just take this home and have a quiet night in.” he hoisted the books onto one hip, carefully crouching to pick up his backpack without losing the books.
“Oh. Right. But isn’t it Friday night? You know… Quiet drink. No money. Horribly drunk. Humiliation. Strangers. Relationships. Students. Bad example.”
“Next week.” Mark grabbed his keys off his desk with his little finger, desperate to escape. Maybe Catherine was right about the speech.
“Catherine didn’t get off that easy.” Matt noted.
Oh no. Not this again. Was he really that transparent?
Probably. But if he got defensive and denied his interest then he might as well just carve their initials into a staff toilet door. Matt wasn’t exactly the epitome of intelligence, but he had a knack for picking up any non-platonic vibes in a hundred-mile-radius. All those day-time-soaps he caught in the cafeteria between aeronautics lectures paid off.