THE RAT
A short story by Ashley Stokes
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THE RAT
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Dominic had told himself that he'd never get involved with a pupil. Others might it went on, he knew, with the older members of staff, the white-haired art teachers and cello tutors, reliving 1966 and all that but not him. His friends joke that screwing pupils is a perk for an English master at an isolated, exclusive girls' boarding school. They sometimes nudge him suggestively, as if they can prise an admission from him. Dominic always laughs. He's thirty. Why would he want a relationship with someone half his age? What would you say? What would you learn? What would you have in common?
Even when he was a teenager himself he'd never had a rapport with teenage girls. One of his first girlfriends was called Jenny Cort. He liked her, but there were monstrous pauses when they went out. He couldn't talk about himself then. He had no experience to draw on, nothing to share. He found himself reciting passages from Brodie's Notes on DH Lawrence. She let him down gently after their third date.
Later, it turned out that she was seeing the biology teacher at their school, a man younger then than Dominic is now, but who seemed ridiculously old at the time, with his moustache and clogs and pilot style glasses. He kept pet snakes in glass tanks and collected antique pistols. He'd already resigned when the scandal hit. Jenny dropped out of sixth form college to marry him. Dominic used to see them in the street sometimes, or heaving shopping bags into the boot of a Mini Metro in Sainsbury's carpark. He remembered that Jenny had wanted to be an aid worker, and wondered if she would ever see the African dusk. He wasn't going to settle like she had, stay at home and forget all the things he promised himself. Travel. Knowledge. Passion. Ideas. Art. In his early twenties, he now asks himself, would he have settled for the life he has here?
He moved to Norfolk two years ago. A career move. Steady job with ample pay. But he's not even had a date. Despite the dinner invitations from colleagues and the evenings in the pub and the parties he finds boring, he isn't meeting women. If there's a shortage of single men it hasn't reached here. There is simply a shortage inside him. Things missing. Nothing between the hours talking and teaching, and the hours reading and preparing and thinking and regretting, and the long walks across the fields on Sundays, alone, counting down the days until his thirtieth birthday. He realised he was beginning to wonder where the time had gone.
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