Shoplifting at
Dracula's, cont'd.
Alone
with M. Achkar in the sparsely-populated Ecolint Pantheon of Teaching
Excellence we find my history teacher, Mr. McKean-Taylor, an Anglicized Scot.
McKean-Taylor was no teacher, actually, but masqueraded as one. He was a
raconteur who enjoyed the diversions of history and was stimulated by young
minds, white Valais wine, and being on the Continent instead of at some damp
comprehensive back home in Blighty. He was plump, and he drawled, and looked vaguely
like the actor Freddie Jones. I picked up two short-lived affectations from
him: Ascot ties and Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. Thus absurdly adorned
and accessorized, I spent my last year at Ecolint in a confusion of Irishness,
Frenchness, Sobranie cigarette smoke, and affected languor, trying to impress
Melanie, McKean-Taylor's Grecian goddess of a daughter, with mannerisms she
certainly recognized as second-hand versions of her father's.
"Em,
ah, Melanie, a café glacé would go
down very well, don't you think?
No? Tomorrow, perhaps?”
“Jamais, peut-être?"
Jamais, as it turned out; Melanie was
too sexy and glam for the likes of me, and anyway she was a teacher's daughter.
But my experience or lack thereof was typical. I made little headway with my
female schoolmates. I was either oblivious or infatuated: off-putting either
way. As an example of the first, it wasn't until five years after high school
was over that a friend brought to my attention the fact, known to all our
circle bar me, that Michelle M., a sad-looking girl who had, I recalled, made
an awfully big deal about calling me to check our homework assignments, was
pining away for me all the while. I never suspected. In the second case, that
of infatuation (more common), I overreacted, hiding behind bushes and gawking
across fences and writing (and tearing up) incompetent love odes and, in the
extreme cases (two: American Sarah, Indian Rashmi) spending meagre allowance
money on unsolicited and unlovely gifts such as cheap perfume and cheaper watches.
I became an expert skulker behind street signs and parked cars, waiting for the
propitious moment to hand-deliver the trinkets to their destinations, having
obtained the hapless girls' addresses from the phone book or through the
invaluable assistance of my friend and co-conspirator Jamal, son of a Pakistani
diplomat. (From Jamal there might hang a tale or two of debauchery and
fecklessness, were I not constrained by the terms of our current
non-communication.)
The
year I graduated, 1970, was the best year of my life. I went to Greece in the
summer holidays and, by returning there in the autumn to live, I timidly
crossed the threshold of adulthood, although not manhood: that came much later,
if ever.
