Read My Policeman for Free Online

I stepped back from the window. I cursed myself for my timidity. I was the teacher. It was she who should move away from my gaze.
    Then a man in a grey overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles stepped into the yard and a miracle occurred. The noise ceased completely even before the man blew his whistle. After that, children who’d been screaming with excitement in some game, or sulking under the tree by the school gate, ran and took part in the formation of orderly lines. There was a moment’s pause, and in that moment I heard the footsteps of other teachers along the corridor, the confident clack of other classroom doors opening and closing, and even a woman laughing and saying, ‘Only an hour and a half until coffee time!’ before a door slammed shut.
    I stood and faced my own classroom door. It seemed a long way from me, and as the marching children came closer, I took in the scene carefully, hoping to keep this sense of distance uppermost in my mind during the forthcoming minutes. The wave of voices began, gradually, to rise again, but was soon stemmed by a man bellowing ‘Silence!’ There followed the opening of doors and the swish and scrape of boots on wood as children were allowed to enter their classrooms.
    It would be wrong, I think, to call what I felt
panic
. I was not sweating or feeling nauseous, as I had been in the corridor with Julia. Instead, an utter blankness came over me. I could not propel myself forward to open the door for the children, nor could I move behind the desk. Again I thought about my voice, and wondered where exactly it was situated in my body, where I might find it if I were to go looking. I might as well have been dreaming, and I think I did close my eyes for a minute, hoping that when I opened them again it would all become clear to me; my voice would come back and my body would be able to move in the right direction.
    The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a boy’s cheek pressed against the glass panel in the door. But still my limbs would not move, so it was a relief when the door opened and the boot-mark boy asked again, with the hint of a smirk, ‘Can we come in now?’
    ‘You may,’ I said, turning to the blackboard so I wouldn’t have to watch them appear. All those tiny bodies looking to me for sense, and justice, and instruction! Can you imagine it, Patrick? In a museum, you never face your audience, do you? In a classroom, you face them every day.
    As they were filing in, whispering, giggling, scraping chairs, I took up the chalk and wrote, as I’d been taught at college, the day’s date in the left-hand corner of the board. And then, for some strange reason, it struck me that I could write Tom’s name instead of mine. I was so used to writing his name every night in my black book – sometimes a column of Toms would form, and become a wall of Toms, or a spire of Toms – that to do the same so boldly in this public place suddenly seemed entirely possible, and perhaps even sensible. That would shock the little bleeders. My hand hovered over the board and – I couldn’t help it, Patrick – a laugh escaped me. Silence fell on the class as I stifled my guffaw.
    A moment passed as I gathered myself, then the chalk touched the slate and began to form letters; there was that lovely, echoey sound – so delicate and yet so definite – as I wrote, in capitals:
    MISS TAYLOR.
    I stood back and looked at what my hand had written. The letters climbed towards the right-hand side of the board as if they, too, wanted to escape the room.
    MISS TAYLOR
    —my name from now on, then.
    I hadn’t meant to look directly at the rows of faces. I’d meant to fix my eyes on the Virgin above the door. But there they all were, impossible to avoid, twenty-six pairs of eyes turned towards me, each pair utterly different but equally intense. A couple stood out: the boy with the boot-mark hair was sitting on the end of the second row, grinning; in the centre of the front row was a girl