Welcome to A Wild Green Heart, I'm grateful for your visit here. Solstice blessings to you!
If this is your first time, or if you haven't been for a while, the first thing to say is that today's post is the second half of a story - so you'll definitely need to read or listen to the first half for this to make any sense.
And without further ado, on with our story!
An education in teaching
When they weren’t boring him into a stupor with their infernal A4 documents, teachers were a regular source of amusement to Vincent. They were a most entertaining species of people, and he frequently pondered their inner workings, their motivations and their peculiar little quirks. Most of them, for example, hadn’t the faintest idea how to operate any but the most basic of functions Vincent possessed. They were clearly a well-schooled bunch of people who prized the continuing education of humans most highly. They had devoted their careers toward furthering the learning of children; yet some of them seemed entirely devoid of the very faculties one would most expect from such people. Initiative, for example, was often very noticeable by its complete absence.
Mrs. Upton was a good case in point. A teacher for over thirty years, she appeared almost totally reliant on other people to give her clear guidelines and structures within which to operate. The moment she became unsure of these boundaries, Vincent noticed, a small tic would develop at the corner of her right eye, and she began to look slightly panicky, glancing from side to side as if looking for a means of escape. This had happened on more than one occasion whilst she attempted to make Vincent do her bidding with examination booklets. No longer within the familiar confines of selecting the number of A4 copies required and pressing the Big Green Button, Mrs. Upton would begin to flap - rather like beleaguered penguin, Vincent thought - and to despair (apparently at random) about the way the world was headed and all the unnecessary complications inherent in twenty-first century life. Vincent imagined that Mrs. Upton secretly wished she could copy each paper by hand (possibly using a quill, with only candlelight to aid her) but perhaps that was a little unfair. What was certain, though, was that the despondent teacher would at first try at random to solve the problem before her.
Scrolling haphazardly through the menus on his screen, she would entertain Vincent no end as she selected some bizarre and unrelated function, such as asking for the text to be rotated ninety degrees or entering a setting for copying onto envelopes rather than normal paper. He wondered whether she employed this methodology for other everyday choices, such as what to eat or which route to take on a journey; although if that were the case Mrs. Upton would clearly never arrive at school in the first place! Her food consumption would probably be a little more interesting though. Vincent had observed that she seemed to subsist on a diet of sugary tea, chocolate biscuits and tins of oxtail soup served with Ryvita crackers. He was secretly amazed that she had survived for so long in apparently good health.
When Mrs. Upton’s hit and miss approach of random button-pressing failed to produce the required outcome, she would, after two or three attempts, resort to her second and final means of solving the problem. She put on an expression designed to look exasperated and worn down (as though she had wrestled the copier with every ounce of her wits for several hours but had been confounded by its inhuman cunning and stubborn refusal to comply) but which to Vincent resembled an even more baffled and beleaguered penguin. Then she would glance around the room looking for someone whom she felt was more qualified than herself in the realm of photocopier technology. To be honest this was anyone at all, with the possible exception of random visitors that she did not know. But Mrs. Upton did have a strategy at this point, and chose her victim based on age (the younger the better for technological expertise), previous experience helping her with photocopying, and the amount of I.T. the particular staff member used in their day-to-day work.
Once the individual was selected, Mrs. Upton would sidle up to them and, with an imploring look, plead desperately with them to see if they could help her work out what was wrong with the photocopier. Vincent always shuddered inwardly at this point, knowing full well that there wasn’t a darn thing wrong with him, other than having to replicate these ridiculous exam papers for children who would clearly be happier running around in the playground or squishing lumps of clay or just about anything else for that matter.
Anyway, Mrs. Upton’s latest dupe would be cajoled over to Vincent to see if they could figure out how to copy the blasted papers in the correct manner. “I just did the same as the last time,” Mrs. Upton could be heard wheedling, “But the dratted thing just does whatever it feels like. It just seems to behave at random!” The irony of this less than rational statement was not lost on Vincent, who simply had to endure these tests of his patience whenever one of the less technologically savvy teachers was trying to perform any remotely complicated task on him.
Another quality that Vincent would have supposed was possessed by all teachers (were he not surrounded daily by evidence to the contrary) was spontaneity. Surely every classroom was full of lively discussion and unpredictable tangents, reflecting the energy and multifarious experiences of its learners? Apparently this was not the case, judging by the likes of Miss Maxwell. Here was another fine example of the kind of person perhaps least suited to teaching, in Vincent’s opinion at least. The moment that any of her routines or habits were interrupted – even by the most fascinating of events – Miss Maxwell would transform into some kind of seething monster. Her ordinarily quite beautiful features would cloud over, and even the least perceptive of her pupils or colleagues would realise they had rubbed her up the wrong way.
Vincent recalled the time she had been leading a staff meeting on science, for which she was the curriculum representative. In the middle of Miss Maxwell’s presentation, Mrs. Hoskins had spotted a red kite descending on a dead pigeon on the school field, which the staffroom overlooked. As she excitedly rose from her seat to get a better view, naturally the rest of the staff turned to look as well and spent a few minutes watching the unfortunate bird being torn apart and devoured by the beautiful predator.
It was only when they returned to their seats and the hubbub died down that anyone realised Miss Maxwell had not moved a muscle, except for those in her tightly clenched jaws. She was the very picture of restrained rage, every fibre of her being looking fit to explode but knowing she must remain calm. She delivered the rest of her interrupted talk from between gritted teeth and the rest of the teachers had looked like naughty children caught eating sweets in the middle of a lesson. What life was like for the poor kids she taught in class five, Vincent could barely imagine. In fact, he preferred not to.
Instead, he turned his thoughts back to more pressing matters; namely that he was in serious danger of being re-examined and potentially even taken apart if he kept dropping off on the job. Giving vent to his creative urges had so far made this an even more imminent possibility, thanks to the annoying sweaty man whose ear he had nearly severed in the origami parrot episode. What Vincent needed was an alternative plan, and it wasn’t long before he came up with one. “As long as I’m stimulating my creative impulses and following what comes naturally at some point each day,” he mused to himself, “Then it follows that I should be better able to cope with the rather more boring tasks I’m forced to do by these wretched teachers during school hours! I’ll just have to find a more appropriate time for my artistic expression to take place.”
Plan B
So it was that, at around midnight, when teachers, children and even caretakers were all safely out of the building and tucked up in their beds, there was a small click in the staffroom at St. Columba’s Primary School. This was accompanied by a greenish glow in the corner of the room and then a gentle humming sound as Vincent warmed up his components ready to express himself and give full vent to his creative urges.
“Let’s start with a few sketches,” thought Vincent. Stimulated by his daily encounters with the various staff at St. Columba’s, Vincent decided that he would take these familiar faces as his subject for the night. He buzzed and hummed into life, his inner parts whirring and clunking as he directed his toner and jiggled his papers around. After about twenty minutes or so, the first completed picture emerged: a perfectly pitched caricature of Mrs Upton, replete with her desperate look of panic when faced with a non-compliant copying machine. The small tic in her right eye was in mid-spasm, and her hooked nose was overstated just enough to make it look like a penguin’s beak. Although this was not what you could in any way designate high art, Vincent was delighted with his picture, and immediately set about starting another, this time of Mrs. Maxwell, a small piece of chalk bouncing off her head in the middle of a well-planned lesson; her jaws clenched and bulging eyes ablaze with fury!
Around five hours later, a small stack of pages lay neatly in Vincent’s finisher tray, each one portraying a comically exaggerated version of a class teacher, a classroom assistant or another member of staff. The top page bore a veritable comic masterpiece of Mrs. Booth, one of the dinner ladies, capturing to perfection her meanest stare, her cauliflower ear and a rather bushier version of her already-impressive facial hair.
By this time, although it was still dark outside, the birds had started trilling their dawn chorus. Vincent felt thoroughly satisfied with his night’s work, if a little drained. It was high time he switched off and got some rest before it was time to return to the daily grind of document replication. As he powered down, he drifted off, not into the dulled stupor born from his usual repetitive labours, but instead into a tranquil sleep.
For the first time ever, Vincent found himself dreaming as he slept; and although he had no face with which to display emotion, he was, on the inside, smiling broadly as he slumbered. In his dreams, peppered subconsciously with the birdsong from outside, Vincent found himself flying. Up amongst the clouds, he looped and wheeled, swooped and soared, a powerful feeling of raw energy pulsing through his circuits and flooding his systems. He had no sense of his true form, no awareness of his bulky cuboidal mass; instead, he felt as light as any bird and as aerobatic as the most manoeuvrable of them. The experience was accompanied by a sense of absolute freedom; pure, unfettered joy. When he finally awoke, Vincent had never felt so peaceful.
His sense of tranquility didn’t last long though. There was such uproar in the staffroom that one would have thought burglars had come and stolen everything in sight!
The Case of the Distasteful Drawings
Other than Billy Baynes, who had only briefly popped into the staffroom to brew up and turn on the lights, the first member of staff to enter St. Columba’s that morning was Virginia Healey, the headmistress. Mrs. Healey was a large, jolly woman with a penchant for vast, tent-like dresses that flowed airily behind her as she strode through the corridors of her school. She tended to wear lashings of make-up of every kind, all smeared on top of a thick layer of foundation akin to builders’ mortar, and enough exotic perfume to kill most small animals within fifty metres.1 She entered the staffroom in an upbeat mood, not least because it was Friday and her husband had promised her a nice relaxing weekend, starting that evening, when they were booked in to dine together at a particularly posh local Italian restaurant.
So it was with great consternation that, in leaning over to open the blinds, Mrs. Healey discovered a pile of what she could only describe as vulgar drawings sat in the tray of the photocopier. In fact, she very nearly threw them in the bin then and there with the intention of forgetting all about them and having a more peaceful day as a result. But when she noticed the incredible likeness of the top drawing to Mrs. Booth the dinner lady, her curiosity got the better of her and she began leafing through the pile of pictures.
As she flipped, casually at first, through the pages she realised with growing horror that in her hands were grotesquely exaggerated sketches of almost every member of staff at St. Columba’s. Her face was a picture of abject dismay, brought on by the shame of seeing her staff team portrayed with all their worst traits so blatantly highlighted, combined with the realisation that she had some kind of bizarre crime to try and solve on top of everything else on her plate that day. The only thing she really wanted on her plate was cannelloni, or perhaps tagliatelle with a nice arrabiata sauce, and the quicker the rest of the day went by the better.
Again, Mrs. Healey came close to chucking the evidence away and forgetting about the whole sordid affair. But just then she came to the caricature of her good self and completely flipped her lid! The picture resembled an enormous female circus clown, wearing as a dress nothing less than the Big Top itself. The clown’s face was plastered with make-up, and around her feet lay the prone bodies of children, pegs on noses and hands clutching at their throats, as they gagged and retched. Mrs. Healey would never have imagined for one second that this preposterous monstrosity was anything to do with her; but under the make-up and clown clothes, the face was undeniably her own. She was utterly livid and immediately began planning a mass investigation into the Case of the Distasteful Drawings, starting with a telephone call to the police.
The police arrived at St. Columba’s in the middle of the morning; a couple of hours after the suspected break-in had been reported. Two young constables appeared at reception and announced themselves as PC Wrigley and PC Palmer. Both were clean shaven, with short hair and identical smart uniforms. But PC Palmer was taller by a good six inches and sported a pair of unusually large ears, while PC Wrigley’s blessings were more in the nose and Adam’s apple departments.
When the two men examined the pile of drawings it was evident to Mrs. Healey that the officers struggled tremendously to suppress sniggers, both of them valiantly pretending to cough violently at the last second; a fit that went on for a little longer than the exasperated head teacher thought necessary. Nevertheless, with the evidence thoroughly scrutinized, they went on to look all around the school building and grounds, much to the delight of the curious pupils, who obviously never allowed a potentially exciting event to happen under their noses without milking it for all it was worth.
Several dozen children asked their teachers repeatedly what “those coppers” were doing in school and whether Mrs. Hoskins (one of teaching assistants who was off ill on that day) had been murdered, or arrested or possibly both. Eventually all questions pertaining to the presence of police officers in school were vetoed in every classroom, and the line of children sent to wait outside Mrs. Healey’s office, for asking them again anyway, grew steadily longer. Mrs. Healey was not in the mood for reprimanding individual children when there was an objectionable mystery to be solved, so the line merely became longer and rowdier, until Mrs. Fuller appeared in the corridor and hissed threateningly at them all to be silent.
The police officers, having searched the premises thoroughly, declared that there was no sign of a forced entry anywhere and that it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the building without leaving signs of a break-in and triggering the alarm system. “It must be an inside job,” they declared, and followed this up with a line of questioning regarding the commitment, mental stability and possible criminal backgrounds of any key-holding members of staff.
The only obvious suspect was Mr. Baynes the caretaker, whose own face was conspicuous by its absence in the pile of caricatures. But Billy was a good-natured man, liked by everybody, dedicated to the school and without an artistic bone in his body. They all remembered his hilarious efforts at Pictionary at the staff Christmas party two years ago, where even the most basic objects he drew looked like some kind of deformed sea creature.
So, when this line of questioning produced no obvious leads, the two officers shook their heads and tutted. More than a little perplexed at the rather bizarre nature of the misdemeanour under investigation, they eventually gave up and drove off to their next crime scene.
Monitoring and Assessment
Throughout the course of the morning, word of the bizarre finding made its way around each member of staff; and one by one each had gone into the headmistress’s office to have a horrified look at the Distasteful Drawings and to be surreptitiously questioned by an increasingly frustrated Mrs. Healey. Each teacher, classroom assistant, secretary and dinner lady had his or her own idea about whodunit and the probable motives, and one by one they were dismissed by Mrs Healey as unlikely, impossible or just downright mad! Several teachers seemed intent on pinning the blame on one or more of the unruly pupils in their own classes; the main problem with all these accusations being that precisely none of those children were that good at drawing! Because what none of them could deny was, no matter how offensive they were, the caricatures were the work of a skilled artist.
Nevertheless, the speculations continued, and how wild and varied they were! Some of the staff proposed that one or another particularly notorious ex-pupil, or perhaps just one that they remembered as showing artistic promise, had cunningly broken into school with the pictures. The problem with such arguments was that, among the caricatures, was one of Miss Finch, a teaching assistant who had only been at St. Columba’s just over a year and who had moved into the area only shortly before that. Surely even the most vengeful and talented ex-pupil would not have taken their bile out on poor Julia Finch, whom they had probably never even met? Miss Finch, incidentally, had been portrayed as a rather anxious looking hamster in a cage, presumably due to her somewhat nervous disposition and her habit of constantly munching on nuts, cereal bars and not much else. In the background was a hamster wheel, bearing the strange inscription “welcome to the treadmill.”
Other members of staff concocted yet more fantastic stories to explain the mysterious appearance of the caricatures. But the problem with them all was clear: there was no explanation as to why anyone would go to the trouble of breaking into St. Columba’s and photocopying the pictures there when they could simply have done it anywhere and then posted them to the school. Or even fly-posted the sketches around the area under cover of darkness, with a far more devastating impact. This fact, coupled with the lack of visible forced entry to the school, left people feeling suspicious of one another, and these feelings grew stronger as the day went on.
This was enhanced by the pleasure some staff members appeared to be taking from the whole affair. Even though everyone was appalled at their own likeness, most of the victims found several other pictures very entertaining indeed. In fact, throughout the course of the morning many of them were secretly discussing their favourite portraits, with the representations of Mrs. Upton and Mrs. Fuller coming out as the most popular by quite some margin! Mrs. Upton and Mrs. Fuller, incidentally, were two individuals who were not in the least amused by any aspect of the ordeal. Indeed, Mrs. Upton felt closer to a breakdown than she’d ever felt, to the point where she had nearly decided to declare herself sick and go home. She only stayed in the building in case some twisted colleague decided such a course of action was an admission of guilt, which of course would only exacerbate matters.
Mrs Fuller meanwhile was the very picture of seething anger, to the point where she was practically debilitated by rage. She had been depicted by the mystery saboteur (she refused to even consider the term “artist”) as an ice queen, sitting coldly on a glacial throne. From her head, sprang Medusa-like writhing snakes, and surrounding her were the solidified bodies of staff and children, turned to stone under her icy glare.
The final touch – the thing that made her shudder inwardly – was a pair of fangs in her mouth, dripping with lethal venom. Or was it honey? It was quite hard to tell. Either way she was disgusted that some pathetic lowlife with nothing better to do should portray her this way. Mrs. Fuller considered herself a delightful asset to the school: always playing by the rules, consistently polite and well-mannered, who sought nothing more than that the reputation of St. Columba’s be guarded and upheld. Who on earth could be so cruel and heartless about such a blameless pillar of the school community? The whole ordeal beggared belief, and she remained aghast and dumbstruck with fury all day.
Special Measures
Towards the end of the morning, Mrs. Healey announced an emergency staff meeting would be held at dinner time, enabling them to meet while the children were occupied in the playground and dining hall, under the watchful supervision of the dinner ladies. Before lunch though, all the children from nursery right through to year six were herded into the hall and given a stern talking to by the aggrieved headmistress. The benefits of honesty, the value of good manners, the importance of respecting one’s elders and the profits of using one’s talents in the right manner were all espoused by Mrs. Healey, much to the bewilderment of most of them.
A few bright sparks in the juniors worked out that something bad had happened (most likely the gruesome murder of Mrs. Hoskins) and that this was deemed the appropriate way of inducing one or more children to either confess or grass somebody else up. However, as none of them had committed a murder and even the most devious amongst them realised that they’d end up in a whole heap of trouble by accusing an innocent child of killing someone, everyone just sat tight and waited longingly for lunch time, on gradually numbing backsides. Eventually, after receiving what seemed like an eternity of sermonising, the dinner bell rang, and the children were begrudgingly released into the playground. The staff trudged miserably in the opposite direction, towards the staffroom.
Before the emergency meeting began, the tension in the room was palpable and a low hum of consternation buzzed between the various teachers and other staff while they waited for Mrs. Healey to arrive. One or two of them were tucking into their packed lunches, and the familiar smell of oxtail soup filled the air as Mrs. Upton buttered her crackers and waited for the microwave to ping. Miss Finch sat huddled on a stool in the corner, nibbling intently at a fistful of peanuts and cranberries. Miss Maxwell stood erect and immobile, staring out of the window, the tendons in her neck standing out, taut as tightropes. Mr. Thomas, the deputy head, was also on his feet, although rather more relaxed and munching thoughtfully on a cheese and pickle sandwich. He was next to the photocopier, his elbow leaning on top of the lid, pressing it down onto the glass beneath – something that Vincent found mildly irritating, but which he had learned to ignore.
Vincent was in a pensive mood as well. He was on standby, to all intents and purposes “off” but still awake. He had followed the day’s events with growing concern, picking up most of the important facts and opinions almost as they unfolded, because virtually everything was gossiped in the staffroom at some point. When he made the pictures, he hadn’t considered that anyone else would even notice them, let alone become as outraged as the folk crowding the staffroom in front of him. As an artist, a small part of him was overjoyed that his work had created such a furore.
But deep down he knew that it was for all the wrong reasons; and worse still, it was the poor children at St. Columba’s who seemed to be bearing the brunt of it all. They’d spent a day being harangued by teachers in the worst of moods; teachers who were taking out their frustrations on the children and then trying to blame the poor kids for the whole thing. This made Vincent feel about as rotten as he could imagine feeling. He awaited the arrival of Mrs. Healey with a sense of brooding apprehension.
Finally, the headmistress wafted into the room in her customary cloud of perfume, a purposeful look in her eyes, her usually smiling mouth drawn into a grim line of determination. “Thank you all for coming together for this meeting and for your patience on what has turned out to be a rather difficult day, to say the least,” began the flustered head. “As you all know by now, these cartoons,” she waved the sheaf of offending papers in the air as she spoke, “have caused us no small amount of embarrassment, bewilderment and upset. And, as you will probably also be aware, the police have decided, in their wisdom, that this disturbing turn of events does not fall under their jurisdiction and they have turned their backs on the whole affair. Which leaves us all in a bit of a quandary, given that I’m sure we’d all like something done about it.
“Now, despite hearing all your deliberations and notions on the matter, I remain unconvinced that any of the suggestions made so far hold much water. There is no sign of a forced entry, no real motive for the crime and a complete lack of suspects possessing the necessary combination of an appropriate knowledge of the staff team of St. Columba’s and the ability to produce this calibre of offensive picture. In short, ladies and gents, I’m completely and utterly baffled. I have no idea whatsoever where these awful drawings came from, and I wish I’d never set eyes on them. Does anyone have any further suggestions?”
At this point the room erupted from its attentive quiet into a mass of yelling and babbling, pointing and hand waving, and more than a few heated comments. Teachers were blaming one another, and accusations were flying around the room like wildfire. Some of them were literally bellowing at Mrs. Healey for her lack of action; others were, from sheer exasperation, bawling mindlessly at no one in particular. Mrs. Upton stood with her back against a filing cabinet, the entire right-hand side of her face locked in a violent spasm. Somewhere in a corner was the sound of sobbing.
From his position along the outside wall of the room, Vincent stood silent and gloomy. He viewed the proceedings with a great deal of distaste, but that did not change the fact that he had started all this. His desire to express himself was causing misery and outrage on a rapidly increasing scale. And then it dawned on him: he could fix this whole sorry mess in one simple act. With the teachers still jabbering and squawking around him, Vincent clicked into operational mode and began to hum into life.
A Signed Confession
At first, amidst all the bawling and hollering, nobody even noticed that the photocopier had sprung to life. After all, a careless elbow or knee can easily cause a hibernating machine to start whirring and buzzing without any premeditated button-pressing taking place. After a minute or so, however, Mr. Thomas – who was still leaning next to Vincent – turned to look at the copier, which appeared to be doing somewhat more than simply “waking up.” There was clearly some sort of job running and Bertram Thomas, who could hold a grudge against anyone or anything with the best of them, couldn’t help but wonder what this blasted piece of technology was going to do next. He still hadn’t forgiven the stupid thing for causing his SEN report to arrive a day late. (The truth of the matter was that Vincent’s sleepiness had made the document take eight minutes to copy rather than five, and the fact of the matter was that a postal strike had prevented the report from arriving on time. But Mr. Thomas wasn’t about to blame a human being when a machine could bear the brunt of his wrath, especially one that stopped in the middle of a job.) And now, here it was, doing a task that nobody had asked it to do! Whatever next?
As the deputy head focused his attention on the photocopier’s activities, his curiosity grew steadily stronger. Until a minute or two ago, the copier had clearly been switched off and idle. Yet now it was involved in processes the like of which he had never witnessed. From inside the machine came rattles and rumbles, clicks and clunks, and a most peculiar kind of whining noise, which sounded for all the world like a distressed child. What he could not possibly have known was that Vincent truly was in deep anguish and was trying his level best to rectify the situation he had initiated that very morning. The noises Mr. Thomas could hear were the sounds of a distraught photocopier trying with all his might to explain his actions to the world.
Mr. Thomas had been transfixed, but suddenly he remembered where he was; looking around at the rest of the room, he employed his most impressive Deputy Head Attention-Grabbing Voice and bellowed, “STOP! For pity’s sake everybody: stop arguing and LOOK AT THIS!” Immediately there was silence in the staffroom. Mrs. Healey was on the verge of reprimanding him with a firm, “Really, Bertram, mind your manners!” but before the words had formed in her throat, she noticed what he was trying to point out. The photocopier was running a job and making some awfully strange sounds.
Before she or anyone else could pass comment on the peculiar noises or on Mr. Thomas’s interest in them, a single piece of paper made its way out of Vincent’s fuser unit and landed in his finisher tray. Every pair of eyes in the room was fixed on this one sheet of A3 paper. Mr. Thomas gingerly reached out, picked it up, scanned its contents and muttered an obscenity under his breath. “Come on Bert, what on earth is it?” asked Miss Maxwell, verbalising what the rest of them were thinking. Mr. Thomas swallowed and said, “I’m not entirely sure… but I think might be some kind of blackmail note.”
He read out the message for everyone in the staffroom to hear: “It wasn’t the kids – it was me!” Then he held up the sheet of paper for them all to see for themselves. The staff team jostled and squeezed around each other, trying to get a better look. Underneath the ambiguously terse message was a picture. At the centre was a photocopier; a Jepson X-Series 470-D to be precise, much like the one from which the page had recently emerged. But this was no diagram from a manual.
For a start, the machine itself was a myriad of colours, each one melding and merging into the next, like something produced by an over-excitable tie-dye fanatic who had taken on a sideline in office technology. From the sides of the multicoloured machine grew two enormous, white-feathered wings, the kind most commonly associated with Renaissance paintings of angelic beings. Around and above the wings swirled motifs of vivid colour and design. Patterns emerged from patterns, spiralling and twisting like some inspired remodelling of a fractal chaos image. Those in the room who looked too closely at this part of the picture found their eyes starting to water and their vision going slightly peculiar.
Beneath the outstretched wings of the photocopier was a veritable aviary: birds of every kind – large and small, common and tropical, predatory and prey – were all depicted flying gracefully around one another in an impossibly small space. At the very bottom, placed centrally under the protective wings, and gazing contemplatively at the viewer was a dove. A pure, white dove, plain in every respect except for a small letter “c” emblazoned on its chest feathers. Finally, in the bottom right-hand corner, was a signature, one that was recognisable and ludicrous in equal measure: Vincent.
A murmur passed around the room as the staff digested the contents of the picture. “You don’t really think it was…” began the normally subdued Miss Finch. Mrs. Healey began to express her thoughts on the matter: “Surely you’re not suggesting that this photocopier…” But her words, too, trailed off.
There was a moment of stillness before a voice from the other side of the room pierced the silence like a rusty knife down a blackboard: it was Mrs. Fuller. “Of course!” she screeched. “Why that crafty devil! I just knew that wretched Jepson man was up to no good!”
Hopefully you've enjoyed the conclusion to this tale of classrooms and creativity. I'd love to know how it landed with you or what else you thought about as a result. See you in the comments, and thanks for reading!
Here I will confess that Mrs.Healey’s appearance and odour are based on a real headmistress from a school of my own childhood.
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