Rhinoceros: Ryon's story 4
Sunday
So I started at Special School. I hate that word: SPECIAL. Like I’m some kind of spaz or something. And boy did I let them know about it. If you want oppositional, I thought, here it comes. For the first few weeks I had tables upside down, work ripped up, cupboard doors off, windows through, and I let every teacher know exactly what I thought of their lesson. When they gave me a tablet I slipped it under my tongue and spat it out later. Rewards? Yeah, sure, go-carting sounds fun, but not if you’ve got to behave like a good little spaz for three weeks to get it. So I had restraint after restraint after restraint. Isolation, last sitting for lunch, banned from the pool room, taken home in the school car with Mr Clarke the fucking man-mountain PE teacher restraining me in the back, the lot.
But after a while it got boring. And they were a weird lot, the Greenlands staff. I’ll tell you why. Every morning that I turned up, it was, Good morning Ryon, want some breakfast? Hope you have a better day today, Ryon. They just started again. And again. And again. No grudges, no ‘We don’t want you here any more’, no hate or dirty looks. Just start again, move on. Nearly everyone, anyhow. The Head was a bit of a bastard, I could tell he didn’t like me right from the start. He was always pushing for home tuition (as if that was ever going to work) but the staff defended me. Yeah, I know, somebody actually stuck up for me.
The main one was Scope. A fucking weirdo of a bloke, proper special needs if you ask me. In fact he was a bit of a dickhead a lot of the time, going on about the music he listened to and the books he read and all that. But he was always there. And if I needed a bit of time out, he’d find somewhere. And if I needed to tell someone something – which was rare – but occasionally there’d be something I couldn’t get my head around, and he’d listen, and he’d give a bit of advice. Not teacher advice, wagging his finger, or anything like that. Proper practical advice, ways around the system, you could say. He even got my mum some extra benefits she was entitled to. And if I needed a lift somewhere he’d usually drop me off in his crappy Ford Focus with its shit music.
Of course he still restrained me – at least until I got too big for him – and told me to get out of his room and excluded me, but it was always quietly, like he was a bit disappointed. No, it wasn’t even that. It was more like he was a bit disappointed with himself, like he wished he could do it all better. And that’s a bit odd from a teacher, because most of them are high-and-mighty Mr and Mrs Perfects, like the Head. But he seemed quite scared. Like, scared of life, the world, everything. I even felt sorry for him sometimes.
