Mark
A glass of wine and a pile of marking, classic Stones playing loud from the dining room, and my first real autumn fire crackling in the grate. I was enjoying the haven, relaxing into my space as an email alert pinged from my tablet. I don’t get email alerts on my regular accounts, and the hairs on my arms prickled. I clicked into my inbox. My new inbox.
ArtyHelenPalmer is recording a message! Click here to View Live. Click here to Save for Later.
I’d done all the self-talk, put myself through all the self-chastisement I deserved at succumbing to my base urges and knocking one out to my teenage student’s sweet rapture, but in spite of all this, and in spite of my better judgement, I put Jagger on pause and clicked to View Live.
Helen was lying on her bed, the laptop screen at the side of her, angled towards her head. I admired her face in profile, the sweet little point of her nose, her soft lips. She looked sad, contemplative… more than sad. She looked as though her world was breaking. It hit me unexpectedly, the sorrow, right in the gut. I pushed my marking aside, all sensibility obliterated.
“This is supposed to be honest, right? I guess it is, I mean, what point is there otherwise?” She took a breath and so did I. “I know this is meant to be about art, that’s what you want, right?” She glanced at the screen for just a second. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Maybe I never do. But tonight… I just want to talk. Not about art… but about me… about life. I feel… I hope… I just think you might get it. What it’s like for me…” She took another breath and I took a healthy swig of wine. “You said creatives are rarely accepted by their peers, and you’re right, except it’s more than that. Creatives are rarely accepted by anyone. That’s how it feels.”
She rested her head on her arm, eyes fixed towards the ceiling. “Sometimes I feel like I’m invisible. Like nobody sees me.
They see a shell of me, a shell that spends her whole time trying to be normal. Trying to say the right thing, and do the right thing, and live up to all the expectations I’m supposed to live up to. It’s easier that way, without all the questions and the judgement, you know? It’s easier to just smile and pretend to be just like everyone else. But I can’t. No matter how hard I try, I never manage to be just like everyone else.”
My mind zig-zagged through her words, the same words I’d thought myself in years gone by, until life became simpler. Until I met Anna. Until I learned to be alone without her.
Had I really learned to be alone?
Helen’s voice had a soft melody; a perfectly reflective lilt that sucked me into the screen.
“…I don’t want to be like everyone else, and I just want that to be ok. I mean… they don’t even have to understand, I just want them to see me.”
She rolled onto her side, her pretty face against her palm, her eyes staring sadly towards the camera.
“Art is everything. Without creativity I’m nothing. Without expression my soul would shrivel and die, and I’d be an empty corpse… drifting through the motions. Without creativity there is no soul, but none of them see that. They think life is about work. They think I should sail my dreams down the river in favour of a real job, a real life, like it’s some silly phase I’ll grow out of, like I’ll realise art is a silly nothing pastime and settle down to an average, boring, mundane existence like everyone else. They think I should give it up. They’d never say that… but it’s true…”
Her eyes were watery lakes of hazel and earth. God, she was beautiful in her innocence.
“…they think I should give up on everything I care about. They think I should give up on my art. They think I should give up on you.”
My throat tightened.
She smiled at the camera. “Don’t worry, they don’t know about this coaching thing. They just know I like you. They think it’s some other silly pointless dream thing I have going on. I guess it is.” She sighed. “I’m supposed to be a woman, an adult, yet all the world sees is a stupid girl who doesn’t know anything. Who doesn’t know what she wants, or how she feels, or what’s important. I mean, sure, they humour me with the whole university thing, pretending like I’ll do a degree and get it out of my system and find some proper job to do when I leave, but I don’t want their normality. I don’t want to meet some okay guy and settle down to an admin job and knock out a couple of kids in my mid-twenties and forget I ever had a soul. I don’t want any of it.”
My stomach knotted.
“I want more than that… I want so much more than that…” She stared at me through the screen. “I have this… darkness… inside me… it’s more than a muse… it compels me, consumes me…” Another breath. “I’m not like other girls.”
A tumble of thoughts, all at once. Thoughts and memories. Of me, of Anna, of that wistful girl I’d met a lifetime ago, saying those exact same words before my lips pressed against hers and we found each other, truly found each other. I’m not like other girls. Helen’s eyes and her soft breath, wanting the same thing, needing the same thing, some validation, some other lonely ship on the waters. Needing someone, needing me.
A teacher. She needed a teacher.
I pressed my fingers to my temples. Focus.
“…can you see me? Do you see me? Sometimes it feels like you do, when we’re talking in class… or when you look at my work. Sometimes I feel like you see through my pictures and straight inside me. Like you get it. Not just the art, but me, too.
That gives me hope, you know that? The hope that I can one day be myself, totally, not beholden to anyone or anyone else’s ideas of normality…”
She closed her eyes, and I watched her eyelashes flutter with her breath.
“…other times it feels like I’m all alone. I mean I have Lizzie, I love Lizzie… but…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. It’s just one of those times. I guess I feel alone today.” A long breath and I couldn’t take my eyes off her soft lips. “I feel alone… in a houseful of people, in a world full of people… I still feel alone…”
And I felt alone, too.
Teacher and man collided. They knocked heads, and fists, and somehow they drew a truce, a middle ground. I opened the comments window, stared at the flashing cursor for seconds that felt like hours before I tapped out the words.
You’re not alone.
I pressed send as a knock on wood sounded through the speakers, and there was a sudden fear in me. As though those simple words had condemned me, doomed me to some terrible retribution I didn’t yet comprehend. I heard the ping of my message being received, but Helen didn’t look, she didn’t see. Her languid body jolted to life, her face disappearing off- screen, body tense at the creak of a door. “Helen, I just wanted to talk to you… about dinner… I’ve spoken to your dad about the panto… he says that…”
And the screen turned black. Disconnected.
I logged out and pushed the tablet aside. Professionalism, where the hell was my professionalism? Listening to the ramblings of a teenage identity crisis on webcam, pretending this was normal, that this was coaching, that this was in any way decent. But how could I not? Helen was my student, and she needed a sounding board, she needed a guide, a friend. She needed a teacher.
I would be that teacher.
Just a teacher.
But a good teacher. A great teacher. The teacher an exquisite soul like Helen Palmer deserved. I turned Jagger back on and poured myself another wine.
***
Helen
You’re not alone.
My heart was pounding with the need to tell Lizzie, but I was scared to. The words felt fragile, a quiet sentiment in the stillness that I feared would shrivel into nothing if spoken aloud. Speculation would be dangerous, a simple scoff from Lizzie could crush my flutter of hope, and yet the opposite was so much more dangerous. The what ifs could pound me into putty.
I held those words tight inside.
You’re not alone.
One little utterance on my chat window had picked me up from the floor. And I was going to paint the panto set. Go Mum and her powers of Dad persuasion.
Maybe I wasn’t so alone after all.
“So, what did you say to him?” Lizzie jabbed me in the arm, smiling her pretty little face off. “I so know you cammed for him last night. Don’t go holding out on me.”
I kept walking, focused on the cloud of my breath in the frosty morning. “Just stuff… art stuff.” “Oh come onnnnnnn. Seriously?! That’s all you’ve got for me?!”
I shrugged. “It’s a coaching video, what did you expect me to say to him?”
She grabbed me so hard her satchel swung around to thump me on the ass, and her mouth was at my neck, warm against cold skin. “I love you, I love you, I love you, Mr R, let’s play school, I’ll be the naughty little girl, you can be big bad teacher man.” Her mock kisses were squelchy, they tickled.
I pushed her away. “Yeah, right.”
She groaned. “You need to up your game if you’re going to land him anytime in the next lifetime, Hels.” I stopped in my tracks. “This isn’t a game. I’m not playing at anything, I’m just… talking.”
She rolled her eyes. “Are you for real? You have the best opportunity in like, forever, and you’re going to be all puritan about it?”
“I’m not being a puritan, I just don’t want to wreck it.” The thought of blowing it all made me feel sick. I resumed walking. “Being an idiot slut on webcam could ruin everything.”
She matched her pace to mine. “I wasn’t being serious about the teacher game, Hels, I just mean you should seize the moment. Seduce him.”
“Seduce him?” I laughed at the absurdity. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. How the hell could I seduce him? He’s a man. An actual proper man. He’s not Scottie, Lizzie, he’s not going to go all goggle-eyed over a little bit of cleavage and some dirty words.” I looked down at my chest and smiled. “Just as well, too.”
“You have cute tits, Helen Palmer. More than enough to get a man like Roberts all steamy.”
“Thanks… I think.” I squeezed her elbow. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.” We halted our conversation as a couple of year seven lads came charging past. Their blazers were too big, and they were still playing at being army soldiers on their way to school. How could I ever seduce a man like Mr Roberts while I was dressed like every other kid in town? I waited until the lads were out of earshot. “How is he ever going to want me when I’m dressed like a child every time he sees me? Why do we have to live in the most backwater place on the planet? Most sixth forms don’t even have uniform anymore.”
She smirked. “But you look so cute in it. Maybe you should get some white socks, put your hair up in pigtails… get some sweet little Lolita shoes… maybe that will get his interest.”
“Can you even imagine the abuse I’d get from the Jennings’ posse? She’d never ever ever ever ever stop laughing at me.” “Fuck Sarah Jennings and her bitch brigade.”
“It wouldn’t even work anyway.”
We reached the end of Oakfield alley, and Lizzie grabbed my arm to hold me back. She pulled out her cigarettes and sparked one up. “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
Sarah Jennings’ bitchy smirk flashed before my eyes. “You can say that again.”
“I mean you, not Sarah bitch-face Jennings.” She offered me her cigarette but I waved it away. “Think about the siren myths, mermaids tempting sailors to their doom and all that. The sailors always go. They totally fall for that shit, every time. You need to be the siren, you need to call him out to you, he’ll totally go for that kind of thing. I mean he’s an arty type, all deep and mysterious and… I dunno…”
“And totally not interested?” I folded my arms. “I can’t be a siren. I’m just a crazy weirdo.”
“You’re no weirdo, Hels.” She took a couple of long drags then stubbed out the remnants with her shoe. “And he totally is interested. How many other teachers do you think are cam-buddying all cosy with their students?”
“Coaching.”
Her eyes dug into mine. “Why are you being so utterly defeatist? You told the guy you love him! He saw your dirty pictures!
Shit, Helen, he took you for a cosy ride to his special spot and now he’s watching you spill your quirky little guts over webcam! If that’s not interested, I don’t know what is.” She tutted at me. “You should be happy. This is progress beyond epic progress.”
I turned away, staring at the stragglers in the distance making their way through the school gates. “I’m scared.” “Scared? Of what?”
“Scared of everything. Of getting carried away, of getting my hopes up. Scared of making an idiot of myself and watching every dream I’ve had in this place fall away from me.” I shrugged. “Scared of thinking this could ever be more and being shot down. I couldn’t stand it, Lizzie. I’d rather never know.”
“So, what? You just do nothing? Defeated?”
“No!” I shook my head at her. “I’m doing everything! You can’t say I haven’t been brave. I told the man I loved him. I actually said it.” My cheeks burned at the memory.
She swung an arm around my waist as we walked on. “You are brave, and cool, and cute, and smart, and quirky as hell. And
you have super-dirty pics in your sketchbook. What’s not to love? Believe me, Helen Palmer, you can totally siren the guy in. Trust me, I’m one hundred million percent sure about that.”
I smiled. “I wish I was so sure.”
“You should be.” We passed through the gates, officially on school turf, and my stomach lurched at the sight of his car in the corner of the car park. “I’ll help you,” she grinned. “I know this stuff, I used it on Scottie.”
“What stuff?”
“The art of seduction,” she whispered. “I have secret ways.” I laughed aloud. “Now this I have to see.”
“Mock all you like,” she smirked. “It’s in my Romany bloodline.” We separated at the entrance to the English block and she blew me a kiss goodbye. “Trust me, Hels, the man is all yours.”
Tingles ran through me at her words.
***