The school kicked me out after that, and thus I missed out on a crucial period of my life. Despite my mother’s best efforts to convince the school committee, I was prevented from completing some of the essential steps that dictated the place at which I was to be educated the following year. The most essential of these steps was the completion of my end-of-school exams, for which I had diligently prepared for the past three years. This was what made the incident so significant- my lack of participation in the exams effectively gave me a score of zero out of four hundred: which was not the slightest bit useful for applying to state schools. Because of this, the only options for me were private schools and homeschooling- the latter of which I would have been completely happy with. The former seemed to be my fate, however, because I never got much of a say in such matters.
Despite sounding like the sorts of places attended by the wealthiest, private schools were quite the contrary. While they were once the epitome of quality education, since the government allocated a larger amount of funding to its state schools for the new millennium in 4000 the standard had deteriorated. Parents had ceased to fund them and almost every child who wasn’t a useless uncreative brick went to one of the many thousands of state-of-the-art government facilities across the country- which when we visited on open days, although ubiquitous in design, were magnificent. They had spacious foyers with clean canteens, massive classrooms and even larger windows. They were modern structures of concrete, metal and glass, which surprisingly gave them a homely ambience rather than making them intimidating places to learn in.
Before the incident I was all-prepared, because I knew I was competent enough to be educated at one of them. My passion was palpable. I felt as if it were imperative that I go, as if it could not be that I wouldn’t go, but unfortunately my destiny didn’t agree with my desires and I ended up going to a private school.
It was called ‘New Lines Community Secondary Academy’, or ‘NLCS’ for short.
So that was that. I had lost my chance and luck’s existence seemed like a fictitious notion that would never bless my life. I spent the last week of the holidays dismally purchasing uniform and gathering stationery for the coming academic year, dejected and pessimistic, while most children my age were as optimistic as can be.
Moreover, to bring more dull tidings to the story, my new school was going to be almost an hour away by bus.
I would be going to a nearby town called Ne’hāllda, a small settlement of about ten thousand people famous for its fresh produce markets. Since NLCS was a small school, located in a small town itself, there existed not many uniform shops that sold the correct attire; out of the six shops that sold NLCS uniform only one was in Elistone, in the city centre (which was fifteen minutes away from where our house was located at the time). Luckily it sold all the necessary garments, so there was no need to make any trips to Ne’hāllda.
One could buy everything there, from the grey and red cotton ties, the annoyingly loose-fitting jackets with the school logo on and the low-waisted trousers that insisted on falling down one’s legs, to the long orange cotton P.E. socks and the school-specific boxing headwear and gloves (boxing was the country’s most popular sport). Thus on the Wednesday of that week Mother, Father and I set out on a shopping trip au centre-ville.
I remember the journey lasting for hours. The council had not long commenced construction on new motorways connecting the outer suburbs of Elistone and other towns in our conurbation to the central area. It seemed as if they made journey times slower, if anything, and I had never been in support of their construction. I even wrote some letters to the mayor to urge the council to consider cancelling the project, but I knew there was no hope. The council always seemed to worsen the city with its new innovations and this was no different. The roads were good for nothing, and they ripped through some of my favourite parts of the city. As we sat in our car on one of the newly-built strips, I became as seething as my grandfather during the incident. I could barely recognise my home city and it gave me an uncomfortable internal urge to vomit, which manifested itself on my face as frustration.
My father had a strong bond with me, but sometimes tried too hard to put me in a comfortable state of being. Often, it would work the other way and make me more agitated. This was a perfect example of such a scenario: he promptly noticed my facial expression and connected it in his brain to an emotion that I wasn’t feeling. From the driver’s seat, he turned round almost one hundred and eighty degrees to ask me, ‘Is anything the matter, Alice?’ To which I responded with a faint ‘No.’ I felt like that was too little for him to go on, so to settle his paternal instinct I said: ‘I’m just contemplating how many P.E. socks I should buy.’ It wasn’t what I was thinking about at all, but it seemed to satisfy him, and he didn’t respond after that. In fact, we had had quite a quiet journey, for I would usually talk anyone and everyone’s head off whenever I had the chance to do so, but on this particular day I was so overwhelmed by my thoughts that communicating them was impossible.
The shop was a three minute’s walk from the car park, so it was only natural that out of all of the places we wanted to visit we went there first. We departed our Lemur 299e SUV and walked on the rugged pavement to the uniform shop. Straight out of the exit of the car park, one right turn two left turns and we were there.
It was two floors, but only occupied the ground and first levels of a five-storey building. The façade of the shop was completely glass, which although obscenely filthy was transparent enough for us to see through. It comprised twelve panes fastened onto a rusty metal frame, which was tilted so that the first floor extended slightly further out onto the street than the ground floor, by about seventeen inches. Above the shop were three floors of flats- the lowest of which having a small terrace above the shop. The top floor’s front was covered in grim lime ceramic tiles that looked as if they had been there since the 3970s, and the third floor had been masked by wood panelling, perhaps saved from the dire state the others were in. It was at first glance that I knew the shop was going to be atypical: for the building in which it was located had a completely chaotic appearance. It blended in well on the old street it was on, which was decorated with large glass windows and 70s-style tiles, but no sensible person would say it was designed in a normal fashion. I wasn’t fond of the building and in fact found it rather horrid, and focusing on the whole picture I realised that the appearance of the uniform shop portended the terrible school experience that was to come. If the only shop that sold the uniform in the city was as bad as this, I dreaded to think what NLCS was going to be like.
Underneath the door frame was a concrete beam that I placed my left foot on before entering the shop. It was cold on my feet, even though I was wearing my hettis shoes, which were magical when it came to insulation. I was the first to enter, and I gave the tatty wooden door a good push to get through. It triggered a bell to sound, which was quite unusual then. A fairly plump woman in a long dress with red plastic glasses gave me a friendly smile and shouted, at a volume I think even she was surprised by, some sort of greeting. (She spoke in a very colloquial fashion, so I couldn’t decipher exactly what she said.) My parents followed promptly, and shut the door carefully behind them. I was about to start talking to the woman when I got cut off by my mother. ‘Hello, I’m looking for some NLCS uniform for my daughter,’ she said, turning her head round to see me. I think the plump woman knew I had been interrupted, because she directed her response at me, ‘And what items would you like?’
After giving my answer, she hurriedly left the customers’ area and went to the storage room to retrieve what I wanted.
It was not long before she came back and gave me some different sizes to try on. She walked up close to me, and I could see all her wrinkles in detail. I could smell her odour as well. She had obviously tried to mask the scent of her perspiration with perfume, but a slightly foul smell was still detectable, permeating the pleasant scent of the perfume.
When she showed me what she had brought, I was pleased. It seemed as if the uniform had been updated, and it was surprisingly decent. Even though I could not find a jacket that fitted me well, and my trousers would not stay on my legs, I adored the luxurious crimson colour and the velvetesque fabric of the jacket’s lapel, that made me feel like someone of importance: a queen, perhaps. We agreed on sizes and purchased ten pairs of trousers, three blazers, the P.E. kit and four ties.
I think we were all happy to get out of there, and after shopping we completed our trip by having lunch at a quaint crêperie near the car park.