Mrs. Pummelo was a young woman with a tanned, lithe figure showed to advantage in a tight skirt of pale peach and a severely tailored blouse of bright orange. Her hair was braided into cornrows and she had brilliant hazel eyes that the orange of her shirt made greener. She was tall and of some racial mixture of African and Arabic with mysterious, exotic features. Most of the lads in her class spent the time drooling. She taught languages and English.
“Good morning, Aidan,” she said in Dutch Afrikaans and I answered the same. One of the other boys already seated sneered and whispered ‘suck up’ as I slid past him for an empty seat in the back near the cloakroom.
The classroom was medium sized and held thirty old-fashioned desks with attached chairs. Overhead fluorescent lights made the dim walls brighter and the green chalkboard glaringly shiny. A smaller dry-erase board hung to the side and had conjugated Latin verbs on it. Her desk was in front, covered with only a few papers and a laptop. Every desk had room for a monitor and terminal. I saw no evidence of papers, spiral notebooks or pens and pencils. This class was all digital.
I took my seat in the corner and leaned my back against the wall; cold paneling painted mustard yellow. It smelled like old cigarettes and mud.
“Good morning, class,” she said. “I know you’ve all studied for your test today so let’s sit and go to today’s lesson and review.”
She opened her laptop and everyone did the same. I flipped mine open and stared at the blue screen, perplexed. It asked for a password and user name and my mind drew a blank. She must have seen my face, and asked me what was wrong.
“I forgot this,” I muttered. She came around and studied my screen.
“Your user name is aidanargent,” she told me. “I have your password in my files.”
Her fingers performed some ritual and in five minutes, she told me. I pretended to remember it and the thing came to life and brought me into an advanced lesson on Mandarin. My test was simply to translate it into another language, preferably one she could read.
Mandarin was notoriously difficult and flowery; it took me nearly an hour to make the correct translation, mostly because of all the errors in the original. For extra credit, she gave me an actual paper with a cryptogram on it and asked me if I could break it. I studied it and was perplexed. “Can I take it to my room and work on it later?”
“I don’t expect any of you to solve it now, Aidan, or even today,” she said with mysteriously. “Everyone has a puzzle to figure out for extra credit. I expect some kind of result by next Friday. I will tell you this, one is unsolvable and the others are guaranteed to have a solution but only if you’re given the key. I do not have the key. However, it is a language and is in English. Those of you who are done with your tests may leave and go to your next class or the study period in the Library.”
Half of the class departed, she spoke to me in a dialect of the Bantu of Ethiopia and told me not to go out the door I’d come in by but to leave through the cloakroom.
I nodded and slipped into the small closet and found a door that opened into a maintenance hallway and housed linen carts, mops, brooms and the like leading to a freight lift. I stepped in, closed the inner barred grate and then the outer steel hatch, pushed the button for the top floor and the thing creaked slowly to a rise giving me a narrow view of different floors as I ascended.
The door opened on what was the attic, little cubbyholes and rooms tucked into strange shapes and ells, a warren of passageways. My feet knew the way better than my memory. I found myself in a small room tucked into a dormer with a window that merged onto the roof.
The room was big enough for a bed, dresser, and chair. A small lamp stood on the top next to folded jeans. No pictures on the walls, no photos, no identification or personal items of any kind to make its ownership yet I knew I lived there.
There was no heat up here and the only light was a 40-watt bulb. I punched the mattress, hard with a thick feather comforter so I knew well how cold it must be. I opened the drawers and found only a few pair of pants, underwear---plain white briefs, socks worn thin, t-shirts, and a thin, leather belt. A beautiful emerald covered cross in gold and on a gold chain.
I remembered my mum had given it to me. Raised my shirt and fingered the scars on my chest and belly, remembered falling from the roof onto the fence spikes and dying.
I sat on the bed, the cryptogram forgotten. I mourned Cammy and Tom, wondered how she fared now that he was gone, I wondered how a further sixteen years had treated my mother and father, wondered what had happened to the 10,000( Tom had invested for me, who was paying for my schooling and how.
I knew I had no other classes that day; the rest of the afternoon was mine. I sat at the open window and looked out on the skyline of trees and distant buildings, the steeples of churches and smokestacks. A fairish sized city lay some twenty kilometers away and the glow it made as night descended could be seen from my perch.
I was just about to close the panes when I spotted the string nailed to the sill and pulled it up.