Short fiction

Frizz

“Frizz up the boundary,” he says. “Frizz up the boundary, and burn what’s left. Once you’ve done this, there are no limits. The word ‘limit’ does not exist. You never even encountered it. The first time you heard it, describing … oh, I don’t know … used in conjunction with the berating of some poor school child in ‘Grange Hill’ who had offended a teacher’s sensibilities and in doing so had upset a ‘limit’ … well, that time never happened. You get me, brah?”

   The children look back at him. While they’re impressed by his mention of the CBBC mainstay ‘Grange Hill’ that forms such an important part of many of their childhoods, there is an overall feeling that his inflection on the word ‘brah’ just wasn’t quite right. Some found it too violent, and almost as though he had attempted to spit the word out instead of simply saying it. Others thought he didn’t have the gravitas to pull that kind of streetwise vocal posturing off. But they’re prepared to go with it to a certain extent.

   The man standing in front of the lectern and talking about limits is called William Duberry. He’s been paid by this school to make a nice, conventional motivational speech in assembly, but he feels like he’s losing his connection with the children – he disguises a nervous glance at the clock to his right as a casual gaze in the headmaster’s direction.

   Once composed, he continues. “Look, I know as well as you do that we all need rules and boundaries from time to time. But what you need to realise is that there are ways of differentiating between good boundaries and bad boundaries.”

   The children continue to look back at him, uncomfortably cross-legged amongst the dust and fingernails on the wooden floor of the hall.

   He knits his fingers together and flexes them before proceeding with his speech. “I’m seeing slightly blank faces, so let me give an example to clear up what I’m saying to you. Imagine a book. A book about the size of an Argos catalogue.”

   He touches his nose; a gesture with no apparent meaning in it.

   “Maybe a bit bigger, maybe a bit smaller: it don’t make no difference. The important thing to bear in mind is that this book needs heft. It is no coincidence that das Heft means book in German – I’d say that our use of the word ‘heft’ probably derives in some way from our Germanic cousins. Yes.”

   William’s at a slight dead end: he becomes aware that his musings on the etymology of ‘heft’ have no relevance to the message he is trying to give. He licks his lips and stares at his feet, which are pointing inwards, pigeon-toed. He shakes his head and opens his feet up a bit, spacing them a shoulder-width apart, just like his tennis coach used to tell him, in the days when he was something of a revolutionary, his fingers in many subversive pies; when he was a card-carrying member of the Anarchist Federation and the Animal Liberation Front. But those days are long behind William now – much as he misses the romantic life of a wandering radical, there’s no way that he can go back to it.

   “Imagine this book covering the opening of a water fountain. Okay. At the moment, there is no water. But in a second, it’s going to start gushing out of there like no one’s business. And yes, it’s just started. But notice how this book bears the brunt of the water’s force: it certainly holds steady, doesn’t it? Sure, after a while, the sustained barrage of water takes a slight toll on the aesthetics of the book, but it still retains its overall shape.”

   William concludes this with a querying little raising of his hands, which is accompanied by a sudden slant of sunlight through the school hall’s windows.  Seeing the length of his resultant shadow across the floor, Duberry feels that a sense of drama and occasion is being added to his speech by this gush of light; like he’s at the climactic point in a film or something. It’s little moments like this that make the events of William’s ill-fated jaunt to the 1999 anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference in Seattle seem less regrettable. A smile spreads across his face, and he starts talking again.

   “Now imagine a smaller book, about say the size of one of your school exercise books. Imagine that in the place of the Argos catalogue sized book, right on top of a fountain. Now, if your idea of a school exercise book is in any way similar to mine, that exercise book ain’t gonna last long. It’s going to be flapping about, maybe even thrown high into the air by the water, depending on the force of the fountain.”

   Fluttering hand movements on the part of William, to help the less imaginative children visualise this.   

   “That exercise book represents all the pointless rules of this world: all that stuff that’s ever made you feel so bloody angry you could punch a dent in your workstation or whatever you call them nowadays. Contrastingly, the Argos catalogue is a fine example of good workmanship; a sign of time being spent on the careful consideration of the merits and demerits of a set of rules.”

   He stops again. Places his hands expectantly on the lectern in front of him that holds his sparse notes, hoping for a response from his ‘set’. He likes to refer to his audience as a ‘set’ because it gives him a paternalistic feeling, although he isn’t sure what it is about this feeling that appeals to him.

   Having returned from Seattle 1999 with a debilitating back injury inflicted on him by an overzealous cop, tail between his legs and hat in hand, Duberry decided that the speech-making circuit would become his new vocation: he could disguise his anti-establishment messages under layer upon layer of youthful slang and metaphor without much threat of physical harm. Yet out in the rows of heads, there isn’t much activity. Here and there, someone sneezes in a flurry of movement, but the crowd remains largely uninspired by his words. This makes him angry, causing him to lose some of his hard-earned composure for a moment; he’s trying to say interesting things, meaningful things, and all they can do is gaze slackly at him, eyes glazed over. Morons. Maybe he’s not involving them enough. Maybe they’ve lost interest because they’re not being directly involved in his talk; to remedy this, he decides to bring in some audience participation.

   “Okay, so can anyone give me an example of a bad set of rules?” Frowning like a big grumpy wolf, he patronisingly emphasises the word ‘bad’, hoping to appeal to some affinity for fairytales and suchlike in the children. However, they fail to recognise his wolf impersonation for what it is, instead seeing him as being inept at controlling his facial muscles. But whatever, this doesn’t matter to him: in their slightly incredulous faces, he fancies he can spy the aforementioned affinity.

   After a few empty, awkward seconds, a girl puts her hand up unsteadily.

   “Yes; you,” he says, pointing a finger at her.

   “Well, I was thinking of one of my parents’ rules when you mentioned the exercise book. It really does just make me ever so angry sometimes,” she says.

   “And why is that, sweetie?”

   “Oh, they don’t let me have chewing gum. They actually purchased a breathalyser that can pick up traces of mint to stop me chewing gum at school; they test me with it as soon as I arrive back home, even before they’ve found out if I’m okay, or if I had a good day, or if I got any merit marks,” she says with a tremulous little voice.

   “That’s a wonderful example – it contains all the classic hallmarks of the shitty rules that face most of us every day. It has no real basis or reasoning behind it, it’s insensitively enforced, and it’s downright restrictive of your overall happiness.”

   “Yes, that’s exactly right – that’s what I keep saying to them, but all they do is ignore me and tell me that I’m too young to understand anything of importance,” she says, excited at this confirmation of her being right. She’d suspected all along that her parents were bullshitters, but it was only now that she’d received tacit agreement with this from an outside source. Excellent, she thought, and settled back into her seat.

   “But let’s not forget the Argos catalogue; does anyone know of rules which they agree with?” William flashes a grin that seems pearly to him when he does it in the mirror at home, but kind of murky to anyone else.

   “I think that all the rules our school enforces are good and justified, sir,” an overweight boy in the front row answers.

   “Okay, and can you tell me an example of one of these rules, mister?” Duberry asks the boy, his smile diminishing in its radiance. He didn’t think that these kids would be so ready to praise their school and the establishment; he thought he was rescuing them from an hour of abject boredom when he asked the head if he could give a talk here.

   “Yes sir, definitely. I mean, there are some pretty tight restrictions on what teachers are allowed to talk about in assemblies, because the headmaster feels that everything has to be linked in a clear and informative way to the close-knit community that is our school. But I think this is completely valid: without these rules, we’d probably get more people like you standing in front of us in the morning, bumbling through ill-thought-out talks, trying to make an impression on us and failing completely in the process.” The boy takes a deep breath and stops. He’s satisfied with himself.

   Mutters begin to spread outward from the boy in a subdued, aural Mexican wave, reaching the outer limits of the room. A minority of the whispers express assent with the plucky lad, but the rest of them support William Duberry, even if through sympathy rather than agreement with what he’s been saying – his cheeks have become flushed red with embarrassment and shock up there on the stage, and he looks pretty pathetic. His lips open and close as he tries to think of a reply that’ll suitably put the portly child in his place without making William Duberry seem harsh or bitter.

   “Okay,” William D. says. “You have every right to think that, I guess. But I want to tell you one more thing. Do you think you can wait for that? Do you really? Or are you thinking that you just can’t take any more of this shit I’m feeding you; you’re just going to have to get out of here before you go loop-de-loopy listening to me? Don’t answer me. Do not answer me, okay? I want to tell you something. Every time you ever feel sad; every time you feel like the heaviest boy in existence; every time you feel unloved, unappreciated and ugly – just remember…”

    But the headmaster has got up and is standing next to William Duberry at the front of the assembly. He begins to clap his hands before William can finish what he’s saying – before he can complete his epiphany.

   “Mr Duberry, everyone! Give him a big hand!” The children begin clapping with a degree of hesitation.

   William attempts to quell the applause first by waving his arms about and then by placing a finger on his lips, but to no avail. His ‘set’ sees no paternal authority in him, and instead follows the head’s lead. This must be the first time he’s ever tried to stop a crowd’s applause; normally, he’ll bask in it for as long as his schedule allows, closing his eyes and letting it waft over him in waves, savouring every single clap that makes up the rush of adulation in a standing ovation. But not today.

   The headmaster turns to Duberry, all smiles, disturbing his reverie of more successful times, and whispers in his ear: “Now get the fuck outta my school, you hear me?”

Ben Taylor