Short Story: The Impudent School Teacher

By Beth Kayes

woman cycling illustration
When her car is vandalised and public transport lets her down, a teacher decides she’ll find her own unorthodox way to get to school, but things don’t go as smoothly as she’d hoped ... 

I look out the window in the middle of the night. Paper on the road is dancing a circular choreography in the wind. I gaze into the dark. Will I see car burglars? Mine was stolen recently.

That night, police banged on our door at 3.30am waking us from the depths, blasting us with the news. Two young police officers, COVID-19 masks in place, loomed in the night fug. Someone has died. The police only come to your door in the middle of the night if someone has died. I’ve seen it on the road safety ads. The actor crumpling to the floor in grief, the other actor playing the police officer, grim faced, and the line ‘Speed Kills’. My heart thumps, my daughter is here, asleep. Is it my old dad? I peer at the youthful police officers. Their mothers must be worried sick.

I follow the woman’s gaze to a book by the door titled Over My Dead Body about polio, lent to me by a friend. I feel I should explain it. Will the police suspect me of murder?

“Your ignition has been pulled out and a window smashed. We found your car 10 minutes away.” I imagine the thieves in my old purple-brown Toyota Ractis, RNZ blaring as they joy ride, bouncing over the suburban judder bars, ‘Lately with Karyn Hay’ their soundscape. Annoyance rises in me. If no one is dead, why wake me in the middle of the night? I have a new teaching job starting at 8am tomorrow. I am nervous enough. Couldn’t the police have just rung me at 6.30am?

Tonight, however, I see no car burglars. Just the paper repeating its elegant dance, stuck in a wind vortex.

So …

I catch the bus. I catch the train. (I catch my daughter using the drier on a sunny day.) I give up hope of the bus ever coming. I walk and two buses pass me.

I miss the train by one minute TWICE in one day.

I ride my bike, no timetables to wrangle or buses and trains to miss. My bike is old and green, $69 from Trade Me, many years ago. It goes well. I ride on a cycleway, through parks, on back roads. On busy roads I ride carefully, eagle eyes on the traffic, my innards jolting in fright as trucks roar by.

There is a new cycleway, unfinished, but the orange netting and the road cone have been ridden over. The theme song from Chariots of Fire plays in my head. I imagine hundreds of cyclists in slow motion, riding over the netting, bending the road cone, their wheels seeking the freedom of the cycleway.

Inspired, I sneak into the unfinished cycleway. The workers are gone. It is smooth. It seems finished. It saves me from a very busy road. I soar down it. I open a construction gate at the other end and close it neatly.

I do this often. Every day when the workers are gone.

*****

One day a woman in a hi-vis is on the cycleway. She asks me not to ride there. I keep going. I don’t stop. I mutter, “It seems finished” and pedal away. The next day, the gate is wired shut. I lift my bike up and over and let it thump-land on the other side. I climb over the fence. I wonder if I am on CCTV camera, my old bike and my 57-year-old face.

Next time there is a pile of gravel in the middle of the cycleway. “You think that’s going to stop me!” I yell in my head. I ride around it all the way to the end. I lift my bike over the gate and thump-land it down. I am close to a train station. I hear the train coming. I climb over the fence and leap onto my bike and ride on to the station platform just as the train arrives. Triumphant, I clamber onto the train, bike in hand.

The train conductor bumps down the aisle. I think he is going to tell me off for having my bike sticking out but he points, saying, “You got a flat tyre.” I hadn’t noticed.

The hi-vis woman must have hidden tacks beside the gravel mound, suspecting I would ride around it.

The train conductor smiles at me knowingly. Did he see me thump-land my bike over the wired shut gate? Does he know the hi-vis woman?

He asks me how many stops and I say five. He smiles again, a twinkle in his eye, an orange twinkle, an orange, reflective twinkle. I hear the slow melodic sounds of “Stop” and “Go”. I should be home by now. The dog needs walking. My daughter has offered to cook dinner. I close my eyes and step into an orange swirl.

*****

I wake to my alarm and lurch upwards to turn it off. I hear “Stop”. I stop, frozen in space and time. My alarm clock screams in my ears. I wait for “Go”. “Go!” I grab my alarm clock and turn it off then “Stop” is ordered and again I freeze … the cold metal of the alarm clock digging into my fingers, the tick tock vibrating through my hand. “Go!” I leap out of bed and race to the bathroom. I turn on the tap, and plunge my face into cold water, sloshing off sleep, knowing that “Stop” will come and I will be caught in the frigid water. “Stop!” The water fills the basin, cold claws scratch my cheeks, threatening to overflow onto the floor. I don’t have time to mop up water today. “Go!” I turn off the tap and race back into the bedroom, throwing off my pajamas. I grab underwear and lift a leg. Too risky, I could be stopped on one leg and balance and wobble and fall. I scramble to the ground, and wriggle into my underwear, half sitting and half lying. “Stop!” I freeze on the hard floor, a shoulder blade, a hip, a heel. “Go!” I launch into my bra and blouse but am stopped on the third button. “Go!” comes again and it is longer this time. I get my blouse done up, trousers on. “Stop!” comes in the hallway on my way to eat breakfast. Space holds me, the floor, whorls of dog hair and dust (I must vacuum). I make it to the kitchen. Yesterday “Stop” came in the middle of pouring milk into my cereal. It filled up the bowl, luxuriously creamy, raisins, oats and nuts motivated into movement, pouring over the top of the bowl and racing across the bench. Today I am careful. I make small, quick movements which begin and end clearly. I eat small mouthfuls, swallowing after “Go” so I don’t choke on a “Stop”.

I gather my bag and coat and open the door. The construction noise is deafening. A large machine is digging and hitting rock. The ground reverberates. There are workers in hi-vis swarming the street, trucks and huge cranes. Two oversized road cones turn and smile at me. They take my hands, hard and plastic against my skin. Their wide skirts bump into my legs. I resist but their grip is tight. They are stronger and bigger than the others, newly recycled – shredded, granulated and reformed. Fifteen per cent of their former selves remains, 85 per cent is new. I could make a run for it but they have back up – hundreds of oversized road cones ready to throw their heavy plastic bodies at me.

*****

Static breaks through the orange. I open my eyes. The train conductor has left his walkie-talkie on the seat next to me. It emits loud static then a voice.

“Is that you? My waters have broken. I tried your phone but …owwwwwwch! I called the midwife. Hello?”

I search the carriage for the train conductor. He has vanished. “Owwwwwwww! Help! Are you there? I need you!”

Tentatively I pick up the walkie-talkie and say, “Hello? Your partner … husband … the train conductor … has left his walkie-talkie and gone to another carriage. I’ll go and find him for you. Hold on. Breathe … you’ll be fine. Great that you called the midwife.”

“Thank you, owwwwwwww!”

I barrel down the train aisle into the next carriage. A passenger is shouting at the train conductor, “You can’t tell me to wear a mask if I have an exemption!” she shouts. I hand him his walkie-talkie.

“Your wife? She’s in labour. You left the walkie-talkie in the other carriage.” He grabs the walkie talkie-and races away. His voice is calm and excited.

The anti-mask woman stares at me.

“His wife is in labour,” I say quickly before she can speak, and I run back to my bike and seat. I get off at my station, dragging my injured bike. I realise that in my haste to catch the train I did not tag on or buy a ticket. If I now tag off then I will be fined. I make a plan not to tag off. One free ride will be okay. But the train stays. They are holding the train, waiting for me to tag off, I know it! I loiter at the tag-off machine hoping the train will leave but another commuter lines up behind me. Embarrassed, I quickly tag off and my balance plummets.

The train conductor whizzes past me and calls out. “The train is waiting for a replacement for me. I have to go help my wife.”

“Good luck,” I call after him.

My bike limps home. I pass a construction site. A man turns signs, green for ‘Go’ and red for ‘Stop’. Cars obey, idling patiently, then accelerating off with a wave. Road cones pile up. I stop and stare at them, waiting for them to move.

A butterfly flutters out from the pile, orange wings with silver reflective spots. I drop my bike and follow it across the labyrinth of road cones, under orange netting. It flies high up over steel construction gates. I clamber up them, digging the big toe of my shoe into the holes in the fence to get up and over. The hi-vis woman appears. The butterfly alights on her shoulder. She stares at me, orange flecks in her eyes. “I told you to stay off the cycle way.”

I catch the bus. I catch the train. (I catch my daughter hanging her washing out in the sun. I praise her and she says, “Don’t be patronising.”)

I see things I have never noticed before. I feel like a tourist in my own city.

I ride my bike. I see the pink clouds in the morning. I hear the birds. I feel the air on my shoulders, in my lungs. I am happy. The car burglar who smashed the window and pulled out the ignition knows. Maybe they are a greenie, a gas-guzzling-car destroyer, disguised as a car thief to liberate drivers.

I stay off the cycleway but ask workers on another part of it, far away from the hi-vis woman and the gravel mound, when it will be finished. At this end they are working on a bridge that has elegant legs over the railway. The entrance is off the footpath and then it curls around and disappears down and out of sight. “In May,” they say.

Six weeks away.

I can’t wait.

 

About the Author
Beth Kayes is the artistic producer of Co Theatre Physical and writes plays that tour kindergartens and schools. She was the winner of the 2021 Playmarket NZ ‘Plays for the Young’ competition for 8 to 12-year-olds with Monarch. This year she has written and toured Drama Gone Viral in North Island schools. Beth has trained in acting and also as a circus artist. Her first job as an acrobat and aerialist was with physical theatre company Legs on The Wall in Sydney. She still likes to break out a cartwheel. Beth is also a drama teacher and sometimes a cyclist.

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