A LOT CAN CHANGE IN AN HOUR: PART TWO

 In the first half of this story I shared how learning of my brother's engagement over Zoom allowed me to stop feeling bad for ending his previous engagement. What I didn't tell you was that later on the same Zoom call I learnt something that let me off the hook for failing to prevent a woman's murder nineteen years earlier.

So as you know, it was a couple of Friday's earlier and I was on the family Zoom with my parents and my brother Jason and his new fiancée, Amy. Everyone was in an understandably good mood. I can't remember what prompted it, but my mother asked Amy if she was good at math. Amy said she was OK with numbers but it was her worst subject in school, as she never got on with her math teacher at school, and that Jason was better at mental arithmetic than she was. I suggested that this must be because Jason got on so well with his math teacher. I was being facetious. The man was a freak.

Now there's a teacher that cares!

On these Zoom calls I rely on the terrible Wi-Fi provided by the care home I am currently residing in, which is pretty fucking slow, and I am constantly lagging, freezing or dropping out. When I initially made my sarcastic remark it didn't go over clearly, so Jason asked me to repeat myself. I immediately felt anxious, this was exactly the sort of remark that he can take as an attack if he's in the wrong mood, and things can go south quick! Fortunately he was in good spirits and took the comment as I intended: a cheeky prompt for him to share some of the run-ins he had with the notorious Mr Shipley.

Shipley was my brother's home room tutor as well as his math teacher. I had him for two years whilst taking GCSE math, and he also supervised me and a few other nerds who would stay after school under the pretence of working towards a GNVQ in ICT, as there wasn't enough allotted time during the school week to attain this advanced qualification. He had no problem with me, none of the teachers really did, but he was in constant conflict with my brother, who seemed impossible to motivate. Shipley would often have to let my parents know that my brother had earned some level of detention, and my brother would often complain to my parents that Shipley was a weirdo that shouldn't be teaching. In retrospect, he was absolutely right.

There were a number of things that were weird about Mr Shipley that I had experienced first hand. The most inappropriate behaviour he exhibited in my presence was to be constantly surfing pornographic websites whilst teaching. He would teach us a mathematical principle at the front of the classroom, set us a series of exercises to work through from the textbook and then sit at his desk at the back of the classroom looking at porn on one of the school's desktop computers. There was never any audio and the screen was never in the view of a student, but the classroom was a level above the ground floor and he had his back to a window, so if you stood facing him at his desk you could see the reflection of the lurid pink websites in the glass. He had somehow talked the IT department into giving him Admin privileges, the only teacher to have them. I once hacked into his account, and it is a regret I hold to this day that I didn't cause some serious mischief in the form of a school-wide e-mail. I say hacked, really I just guessed his password on my first guess. It was "maths."

The most noticeable weird behaviour was that he wore the same outfit every day, presumably owning several identical sets of clothing. Whilst most male faculty members wore some variation on "smart casual" attire (smart trousers, a shirt, sometimes a jacket and/or tie, I don't know why I'm telling you how teachers usually dress) Shipley had decided at some point that he would only ever be seen in a purple polo shirt and navy blue track suit bottoms. He was a wiry man with glasses and short hair, and the ensemble looked about as good on him as you could hope for, and I don't remember him smelling bad or whatever. Still, it was odd, and it was no surprise that he was always seen outside of school in the same wardrobe, usually pushing a wheelbarrow full of firewood.

The most bizarre thing about him I was aware of was that he drew margins in our exercise books. Math books were always filled with leaves of graph paper, and whenever you got a new one you would open it to find that Shipley would have used a ruler and a ball point pen to draw a margin one centimetre out from the left hand edge. He would also have folded every page in half, and drawn a margin one centimetre to the right of each fold, dividing each page in two columns. He must have taught at least five different classes of kids, each with a little over thirty kids. He must therefore have started each schoolyear with about 170 exercise books with the margins already drawn in, and had enough on hand to replace any that were lost or filled up, probably giving out a further 170 books throughout the year. I suppose he probably got in the habit of preparing an exercise book to his liking every day, though what compelled him to undertake this Sisyphean task I have no idea. Certainly no-one else in the math department was spending their free time in this manner.

My brother was all too happy to tell us that Shipley was no longer working for the school. having been ousted for being a paedophile. I don't know exactly what happened, all my brother said was that he had been given a number of warnings and had been moved out of the math department and was instead teaching Religious Education before ultimately being dismissed. I only have my brother's word to go on but it wouldn't be the first time a student/teacher relationship had crossed the line at that school, in fact my brother also shared the story of a teacher who had taught us both PE at one time or another. He had been in a relationship with a 16 year old girl in my brother's year despite being more than twice her age, and they had shared the happy news at an off-campus leaver's day party, meaning he had no legal responsibility towards her for about five hours before he started grinding up against her on the dancefloor.

I  asked my parents if they remembered Mr Adams, the literacy teacher I'd had for just under one year; he had been forced to quit the position after murdering his wife. He was a fussy, spiteful little man, devoid of humour and taking no joy in teaching teenagers the correct usage of the English language. I can't remember any specific thing he taught us, I just remember the whole class would work in silence, he was the only teacher we would do it for. By contrast, our literacy teacher the previous year was a rather plump young woman with no real ability to control a class; on one memorable occasion a kid in my class had ran out of the class and showed off by climbing a tree, forcing her to go outside and plead for him to climb down. He wasn't making a point, he seemed to be doing it for the sheer joy of it.

We were told that Adams had been arrested for the murder of his wife and would no longer be teaching us, and the manner of her demise soon spread around the school. They had been out for a walk on a local moor when he had caved her head in with a rock. Another rambler had seen the act from a distance but was unable to intervene, they were on the peaks of two different hills with a valley in between them. Adams was arrested and the rambler was treated for shock.

I saw Adams fifteen years later when accompanying our delivery driver on his rounds. The driver told me that Adams was living on the same street as him, having served time for the murder of his wife. He told me he had caved her head in outside of her place of work. I didn't contradict the driver's tale or reveal my previous encounter with him. The horrible truth was that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a cold-blooded psychopath, but had done nothing about it, due to either stupidity or cowardice. If I had shared what I knew then maybe she'd still be alive. My inertia made me culpable for her death.

When I was fourteen I showed up for one of Mr Adams' interminable lessons five minutes early. There were three of us in the classroom at that point, all boys, including Sam, one of the kids that was prone to mischief. He took the opportunity to riffle through the drawers in Adams' desk. I don't know what he was hoping for, but he was rewarded with the discovery of a used condom, tied in a knot. We weren't friends. not that I had anything against him, we just moved in different circles. Nevertheless, Sam called me over to look at his newfound treasure and I, for whatever reason, took it upon myself to pick up the prophylactic with a ruler and place it in the centre of the desk. This was extremely uncharacteristic of me, I just remember imagining Adams finding the thing on the desk and panicking. I thought it would be funny to see him get all embarrassed and indignant, maybe shouting at the class and demanding an explanation, It was going to be great!

Other students filed in and soon the class was full of chatty teenagers, nobody noticing the used Johnny left out in the open. I was full of nervous excitement to see Adams lose his shit in front of the class, but what actually happened was so much worse.

Mr Adams entered the packed class carrying a briefcase and took his place at the front, behind the desk. He placed the briefcase uptight on the desk, using it to both shield the condom from view and drag it over the edge of the desk, into a drawer he had simultaneously opened with his other hand. The motion was so fluid as to appear rehearsed; you couldn't program a machine to perform the same task more efficiently. As he did this he bade silence and began his lesson. Nothing in his face or voice betrayed a modicum of panic or anger or embarrassment.

I didn't react to his lack of human response other than to feel the same weird primal mixture of fear and respect that you feel looking at a shark or an alligator. The number of hours I've spent imagining myself getting up and marching off to the headmaster's office, demanding his resignation and refusing to return to class. I know it's irrational - there's no way I'd hold a 14 year old responsible for the actions of a man in at least his forties - and that there's no way anyone could have predicted what he'd go on to do a few weeks later, and that blowing the whistle may have made him worse, but fuck me with a chainsaw if I didn't consider myself partially responsible for his poor wife's death. I figured I was about 3% responsible, and I carried that with me for nineteen years, and it probably did as much psychological damage as believing for seven months that I was 100% responsible for a woman dying. Every time something shitty happened to me, at some level I thought "Well, you did get away with letting that woman die, maybe you deserve this on some level." It was a big deal.

That was true until a fortnight ago, when, after nineteen years, I finally invoked that bastard's name. After my brother told his teacher horror stories I asked my parents on that Zoom call if they remembered Mr Adams, the teacher I had that murdered his wife. They told me that he had attempted to murder her by hiding outside her place of work and attacking her with a hammer. He failed in his attempt and spent 12 years in jail, whilst she moved out of the county to a different part of the UK. I couldn't believe what I was hearing at first, but it tied in with what the van driver had told me and I have to believe the memories of three adults who at one time lived on the same street as the evil, impotent prick and his poor wife, and who had children in the school at the time. I don't know where the moor murder rumour originated, bur it doesn't matter: I was off the hook! You can't be 3% responsible for a man not killing his wife.

I still feel ashamed of my lack of action, I can't defend it morally. But by the same token I can't justify eating meat, buying shit that was made by children in sweatshops, illegally downloading TV shows or looking at pornography on the internet; part of living a full life in the 21st century is accepting that you're contributing to evil practices on a global level, and that it wouldn't make a difference if you stopped.

So that's how over the course of one hour I was able to let go of a lot of baggage that I've been carrying for more than half of my life. I learnt this stuff at about the same time as my head meds started taking effect, and the change has been noticeable. I've been laughing out loud at Impractical Jokers episodes I've probably seen half a dozen times before. I decided to post comments on a dirty little blog I've been visiting on and off for about eight years, which led to me writing this blog. I've reached out to my brother and told him I want to have a closer relationship with him, as I have so few people in my life. I've become more charry with the staff at the care home, and put my foot down at breakfast for about a week before someone in charge finally came to speak to me, and now I start each day with a meal I enjoy rather than a disappointment or an argument. Things are pretty good.

I decided in January to look at getting over some of my many hang-ups, but I could never have predicted this. Time to start seeing what life has to offer.

Peace! ✌