All of Me by Kim Noble Page A

climbed into Dad’s car I thought I’d better seem willing.
    ‘What time shall I see you tomorrow, Clare?’
    ‘Same time as today should be all right.’
    That doesn’t exactly help me …
    ‘So, about ten then?’ I suggested.
    ‘Only if you want to be an hour late,’ Dad said.
    ‘Yes, let’s do half eight again, shall we?’ Clare added.
    Why is everything such hard work? I wondered. As I made my way home I stared at my poor, puckered hands and realised, I don’t even know if I’m being paid for this.
    Just another one of my typical scrapes.
    School was equally confusing, more so in fact now that I was at Tavistock Secondary. Some of my friends spent a lot of time covering exercise books with their names. Signature after signature. I think they were practising autographs for when they were famous, like the Bay City Rollers, David Bowie or David Cassidy. That never appealed to me. Having ‘Patricia’ scrawled all over my English book seemed ridiculous. I don’t actually think I had my name on the front at all. It didn’t matter. I knew whose book it was.
    More importantly, trouble and accusations still seemed to follow me around just as they had at West Thornton. Mostly I was punished for talking when I hadn’t been, missing lessons or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then there were other things along the lines of the black paint incident. The worst was being held back after school for trying to climb out of a window. They said my skirt had snagged and I got trapped, and that I was still swinging, head first, when I was found. Rubbish. Just rubbish. Someone had it in for me. That was the only explanation.
    Meanwhile, it didn’t matter how long they made me sit there, I would never admit to something I just hadn’t done. I was prepared to wait all night. Unfortunately, so was the teacher by the look of the stack of books he had next to him ready to mark. For more than an hour he just ignored me, head down until he reached the end of the pile. Then he leant back in his chair and tutted.
    ‘Still denying it?’
    ‘Denying what?’
    ‘You were caught red-handed.’
    ‘I wasn’t.’
    ‘You had to be cut down from the window.’
    ‘I didn’t.’
    ‘Look at your dress. It’s still got the hole where the window snared it.’
    There was a rip. I had no idea how it had got there. Must have been a thorn playing on the field at lunchtime. Maybe my coat zip had got stuck. It didn’t matter. All I knew is it hadn’t been caused by a window.
    Unsurprisingly, when it came to reports I feared the worst. If staff were prepared to lie to my face, who knew what they would come up with when they had a little time to prepare. I thought about hiding them from my parents but chickened out. In the end Mum and Dad weren’t annoyed by what they read – just mystified.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ Mum said after her second read. ‘How can they all have such different opinions?’
    I shrugged.
    She read some bits out to Nan.
    ‘“Lovely, good-natured”, this one says.’
    ‘That’s good.’ Nan smiled at me.
    ‘But then you’ve got “disruptive” from this one, “attentive” from another one and your math teacher says “needs to control her temper”. What are you doing there? It’s like they’re talking about different people.’
    I couldn’t help. I was at as much of a loss to explain it as anyone. I’d never lost my temper during math, what was he on about? Mum was right. They must have got me muddled up with someone else. Or they had another agenda altogether.
    At West Thornton Primary the worst that happened was a visit to the head or an occasional rap across the knuckles. At Tavistock they had a complicated disciplinary system – first you were put on report by your form tutor, then your year head, then the headmaster – but all of it entirely non-violent. Even if you’d exhausted all those steps, the final punishment was equally pacifistic compared to a clip round the ear –