At least I hadnât mentioned his twitches and tics.
He had two main sorts. The first sort involved closing one eye, while the same side of the face made a kind of flutteringmovement. It was a bit like a wink performed by a ham actor in a Restoration comedy with wigs and frock coats and ornamental snuffboxesâour class went to see a performance of some play,
The Fondling Fop
or something, by Sir Humbert Halfninney (1643â1701) at the theater in town, so I know all about this. The second sort of tic involved at least one additional eye in a sequence of rapid blinking, his face otherwise immobile.
Iâm honestly not trying to be mean about Stan, who I love like a brother. I just want to give you the whole picture, and if you miss out on the blinking and winking (oh, and the compulsive knee shaking) then youâre not seeing him like he is, in the round.
Anyway, he went and sat on one side of Gonad, and I sat on the other, and, given Philâs bulk, that was a long way apart.
We were doing colloids. I had a soft spot for colloids. A colloid is a mixture of two different things: a mixture, but
not
âand this is the important bitâa compound. Thereâs no chemical reaction between the two, nor any physical bonding. Just two or more things rubbing along together. For instance, a gel is a liquid suspended in a solid, an emulsion is a liquid in a liquid, smoke is a solid suspended in a gas, fog is a liquid suspended in a gas, and foam is a gas suspended in a liquid.
I could go on.
I told you I liked colloids.
Mr. Brightman taught chemistry, and he was one of the teachers who mysteriously seemed not to hate us. He told us jokes and tried to make chemistry interesting with stories about what stuff explodes and what gases are the most poisonous, and how much of them it would take to kill, say, a million people, or an elephant. He was very tall, yet drove a tiny Ford Fiasco, Imean Fiesta, which was also quite funny, and which tended to earn him not insults but rather points for a good visual gag. Seeing him climb in and out of the little car was like watching a giraffe trying to have sex with a tortoise.
As I was getting my books and pens out, Gonad said, âHeard you fainted.â
âDidnât faint.â
âHe did,â said Stan from somewhere beyond Phil.
A girl called Sarah Wrigglesworth said, âYes, he did. He fainted, and he drooled.â
She wasnât talking to anyone in particular, just adding her bit to the general humiliation. I didnât remember drooling. Drool-ingâs one of the things Iâd most like not to do in life, and itâs not even one of those things, like cannibalism or sheep-shagging, you could imagine getting into in certain extreme circumstances. Itâs just a complete no thanks, and I donât care how many parallel universes there happen to be.
But then Mr. Brightman came to my rescue, and it was colloids for the next hour and twenty minutes.
Smurf in Love
W eâd all given up on school lunches. It wasnât just the stuff they gave youâthe eyeball-and-scrotum burgers, the sardines, the mashed turnipsâit was more what might happen to it before it got into you; the things done to it while your back was turned, or even in your plain sight. As a bare minimum your water would be spat in and youâd find chewing gum or fag butts in your rice pudding. (Okay, so that provided a mild improvement in flavor, but still, not a good thing to have happen.)
So it was packed lunches for me and Stan (chess maestro) and Gonad (small ears) and Smurf (big lips), eaten in the same place every dayâa kind of crinkle in the outside wall of the school library, out of the way of the wind, and, as it was partially hidden by a ragged line of dying rosebushes, easily missed by passing psychos.
To begin with, today, there was just me and Smurf. Like I said before, Smurf had âniceâ written all over him. He usually joined in
Bill Evans, Marianna Jameson