Free The Rye Man by David Park

salesman wasted twenty minutes of his time trying to get him to agree to a demonstration of a colour photocopier which he knew he could not afford. Unannounced and without any coherent explanation, two men arrived from the Board’s architects’ department and proceeded to measure the school then ask technical questions about the building for which he did not have the answers. There was a query from someone in the pay branch about what hours Eric had worked during the six-week summer scheme. He felt increasingly frustrated, pushed from one petty task to the next. The only saving grace of the day was P7 history. It was his main subject and while Vance took Miss Fulton’s class for music he would take P7 for their year’s history. He had instructed Mrs Patterson that he was not to be disturbed during the lesson except in an absolute emergency, and as he entered the classroom as a teacher this time he felt as though he was finally pitching on home ground, back where he belonged.
    He had planned to follow a unit of work springing from local history and centred on the Celts. It had struck him, too, that it was a project which would easily become part of the EMU scheme, proposed by Liam Hennessy, with the two schools going on joint field trips to visit local sites. After showing the class slides of the Book of Kells he got them to decorate the covers of their history notebooks as ornately as they could. Emma had cut out stencils for him, including decorative lettering, so that even the weaker children were able to produce something that was pleasing to the eye. He got them to move their desks and work in groups of four. They used tinfoil and the insides of chocolate wrappers to create the impression of silver and gold leaf. They worked well for him, enjoying the novelty of the degree of freedom he offered, not bold enough yet to talk openly but whispering conspiratorially and looking at him guiltily to see if they had infringed some rule. And though he felt the urge to do something to free the children from the tight parameters which bound them, he knew he could not undermine Vance’s relationship with his class, so he held himself in check, restricting himself to encouragement and a smile.
    The smile faded as he walked to the back of the room. In his excitement and pleasure he had not noticed that the blonde-haired girl had joined no group but sat crouched over her desk, her arm curled round her book, hiding it from view. As he came down beside her the arm tightened round it, her head dropping lower. Playfully and gently he pulled at one of her locks but at his first touch she dropped her face into the book so that her cheek rested on the cover and her eyes stared away from him. He drew back his hand, startled and confused by a reaction he had not anticipated and struggled to interpret. Its suddenness, its defensiveness, shocked him, and for a few seconds he found himself unsure of what to do.
    He went round to the other side of the desk and squatted on his haunches until his eyes were only about a foot away from hers. They were blue, bright, translucent, and in the corner of one was a tiny blear of mucus. She stared into his and did not blink. A blue pen mark ran across the paleness of her cheek like a varicose vein.
    â€˜What’s your name?’ he whispered, as if playing a game.
    The eye closest to the desk blinked twice, a nervous involuntary pulse, but she did not speak. He did a funny smile at her but got nothing in return and then her lips moved almost imperceptibly and she was saying her name, so faintly he had to strain to catch it.
    â€˜Jacqueline.’
    The three syllables came out as if they were only loosely connected and he heard the final two and guessed the first.
    â€˜Jacqueline.’ Still on his knees, he repeated the name slowly.
    Her tongue quickly touched her top lip before disappearing again. Standing up slowly, he asked her in the same whispering tone if she would show him her