I was summoned to the headmaster’s office at four-thirty in the afternoon. It was one of those stifling days and I’d unwisely chosen to wear my blue shirt that morning. I was hardly cutting a professional persona and acutely aware that the appearance of sweat patches was not going to be improved by the circumstances of my visit to his office. I murmured ‘Good afternoon’ to the head’s personal assistant in her office opposite my destination and as she glared at me in response, I wondered how much she knew. I knocked on the head’s door and was admitted with ‘Come in Mr Bryant.’
‘Good afternoon,’ I said as I sat down opposite him on a staple office chair. He was reading a draft of a letter to be sent out to some parents, hunched over the paper as it lay flat on the table in front of him. He was very tall, slim from a well-known passion for cycling, but without any of the poise and command of his physicality associated with an athlete. The headmaster had one of those chins that sloped down into his neck so his profile looked like two sides on a fifty pence piece, the Queen’s face shunted to the right to provide his nose and stretched left to give him his curly, feathery head of hair. He had an irritating custom of pointing the fingers of one hand towards his face, then using the thumb of the other hand to lift each fingernail in turn, from index to little finder and back again. He would seem to examine underneath each one the let it snap back into place with a disconcerting sound. Apparently, he would sometimes find something of interest under there and quickly bring that fingernail to his mouth to dispatch with the offending particle.
So as to be the first to speak, I cut in as soon as he looked up from the letter. ‘Sir, I am so sorry about what happened to your car. I failed to keep control of my class and I’ve dealt severely with the culprits.’ I was trying my level best to sound assertive and controlled, but felt like a fraud as usual. Also, I was sweating. I continued: ‘Parachutes for eggs was an inappropriate activity for that group of students. I don’t know what I was thinking. I turned my back to help one group of students, then others raided the box of eggs and started throwing them. And may I say, I don’t think they were targeting your car, lots of others were hit too.’ Aware I was gabbling, I paused. The headmaster was staring at me like a bewigged judge at a teenager representing himself after a speeding offence. As he examined me, I had a climbing sickly feeling that he knew I was fabricating details of the incident. ‘I assure you, sir, nothing like this will happen again and I will be sure to instil a much stronger sense of discipline into my students.’ I swallowed. ‘Sir,’ I added, excessively.
How could he know that I’d suggested a free egg lob at the head’s car for any team that could prevent their egg from breaking in its two-storey fall? That I was complicit in the whole scenario, a rogue element in a tiny coup d’etat? I resolved to lock down the hatches, build any deck of lies necessary to prevent his coming below into the hold of my mischievous duplicities. To keep my job, the headmaster could have no notion of the students of mine, commanded to write letters of complaint about the unethical production of the school uniforms in south-east Asia, or slipped a month-old carton of milk to swap for the headmaster’s supply in the refrigerator. Pondering these successes, however, I grew in confidence.
The headmaster still hadn’t said anything since telling me to come into his office. He now turned in his chair and reached down to the floor behind him. When he turned back around, there was something concealed in his hands. He said, simply: ‘This one survived the drop.’ The head spread his hands apart in a dramatic and priestly fashion, revealing an ordinary egg on the table in front of him.
I looked at him and opened my mouth, but he shushed me in an uncharacteristically teacherly manner. Both of us cast our eyes down onto the egg. Only just perceptible was a kind of vibration that made the egg twitch like the nose of a gundog. I had the curious sensation of being in a Philip K. Dick story and we’d hit some sort of kink in the arrow of time. The egg rocked. It tipped so the narrow end pressed against the letter the head was reading when I came in, as though pulled by a thread from across the room to my left. There was the tiniest of dry noises as a crack formed in the egg’s shell. The man opposite me quickly drew in a breath, but did not look surprised; his eyes shined and he looked strangely childish. Further cracks radiated out from the initial breach and within seconds I could see a tiny black cone prodding through the gap it had made. At this point the headmaster studiously leant forward and helped the little bird by pulling back the eggshell, just like opening an egg over a bowl of cake mix. The bird was entirely black and glossy from its albumin bath. It flopped out of the eggshell wetly, but surprisingly hopped tidily to its feet and spread its little wings in some parody of a great bird of prey. Then, on the table between myself and my boss, this unlikely arrival began to visibly grow.
The bird didn’t move from its regal stance, but its legs extended and the fluffy down was pushed out onto the papers it stood upon by large, serrated black feathers. The wings elongated and feathers splayed out of them like macabre fingers. The headmaster arched expectantly over the bird, birdlike himself with his small round eyes and pursed lips. He looked for all the world like a conjuror pulling off some ambitious trick.
As it grew, the bird’s enlargement accelerated and soon it was higher than the level of our heads. It kept its head bent forward like the headmaster, looking at me like he was now, in some weird repeated image of man and bird. Once it reached such a height that the tips of its wings touched the ceiling, the headmaster rose to his feet and the bird lurched forward. I kicked my chair back and jumped to my feet, dodging the bird’s pecking beak and grabbing wings as best I could. Managing to grasp at the door handle, as I slammed it behind me I could hear the headmaster’s distinctive reedy, sneering laughter echoed by a deep-throated, hearty laugh. Then I permitted myself a smile at the head’s PA across the corridor as the former's laugh was muffled by a mouthful of black feathers.
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