I rose early, an old habit, crept downstairs to make coffee, correct the exam papers I hadn’t got to the night before. It was back when people still got up and made coffee and went to work, led what they tried to imagine were normal lives. I guess we were all doing our best to maintain the illusion of a past we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to let go of.
By the time I left the house, dawn was hinting pale against the autumn trees. My wife Maybelline – May – was still in bed. I’d gone upstairs to kiss her goodbye, but when I whispered her name, she hadn’t moved. The morning was cold. Dark clouds massed in the west, obscuring the mountains. Out of the gate and left towards the river, my usual route, past ragged picket-fence gardens and modest wooden houses, lights coming on in kitchen windows. It was that kind of neighbourhood. The last vestiges of the middle class, still hanging on to that dream, still pretending.
I taught my morning class, chemistry 11, and had begun physics 12 – just another Thursday among fifteen years of Thursdays. I was standing at the blackboard describing the radiative forcing effect of carbon dioxide and methane on Earth’s climate when the letters arrived, placed ceremoniously on my desk by Radley, the breathless deputy principal, a short, recently-appointed administrator whose sole joy in life seemed to be the delivery of bad news. No calamity was too small to send him into paroxysms of excitement: whispered news of a recent divorce, the latest teen pregnancy, the now-ritual distribution of draft cards at the senior assembly. The kids, predictably, called him Ratley.
I knew what my letter would say, had anticipated it for months. I finished the class, left the letters unopened on my desk, acted as if nothing had changed. At lunch I sat with a few colleagues, talked about the usual stuff – the war, the shortages, the chronic lack of mobile-phone and internet service.
Later that afternoon, after the kids had settled into the physics 12 exam, I opened my letter. It was no surprise. Except the date. What I had initially thought must be a mistake, a typo of some sort, right there in ragged black ink: the last digit of the year exactly one lower than it was supposed to be, than had been repeatedly communicated by the government over the radio and the TV for the last six months.
It made no difference to me. I had always been well within the cut-off. I was clearly one of theresponsibles, as they were being called – the old ones, those the viruses hadn’t managed to kill off. I’d accepted it long ago. But for May, it made all the difference in the world.
I looked up at the kids, heads bent to their exam papers. Kazinsky with his newly razed skull of stubble, Smith with the tip of one of her long braids in her mouth, concentrating. Good kids. No, not kids anymore. Young men and women, now. Women and men, young, with a future even more uncertain than mine.
I looked at my watch, gave them all a few extra minutes. Then I stood and cleared my throat. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, time is up.’
Groans from the usual suspects, eyes looking up at me, refocusing, the afternoon sunlight in each of those uniquely patterned, uniquely troubled pairs. A few smiles – Smith, inevitably, beaming at me with that beautiful mouth, those unnaturally enhanced eyes, the Cantor dust of freckles across the bridge of her nose, that haunting intermittency. I scanned the rest of the faces, raised the letter in my right hand. ‘I have some good news, for some of you at least.’
Quiet, now. Thirty-two faces directed toward me.
‘This will be the last class we will have together,’ I said.
Even the new kids in the back row were paying attention now.
‘I am being relocated.’
A guffaw from the back, Hernandez and Richards high-fiving.
‘South.’
Then silence, blank stares, information being processed. All the new kids, the ones who themselves had just been relocated, knew immediately. You’re going where we just came from.
I considered saying more, offering some sort of defence perhaps. Instead, I said: ‘I hope you’ve learned something during our time together. Even you, Richards, Hernandez…’
