It was the last period of the day and everyone was tired and listless in the hot, late-spring classroom. Miss Gilchrist had colourful, kind of funny philosophical posters on her walls: a cartoon child on a stool, fist on chin, thinking, with a bubble above his head saying, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.’ Four cows in different fields, separated by barbed-wire fencing, each cow poking its head through the fence to eat the other cow’s grass. We were doing the poem ‘In the Snack Bar’ by Edwin Morgan. I don’t know why she suddenly rounded on Banny that day. Maybe she’d had enough of his staring out the window, blatantly not listening, defacing his jotter, or the desk, never paying attention. Maybe it was the near-ceaseless babbling and sniggering with Tommy sitting next to him. Whatever the reason, she interrupted Jackie Shaw’s endless monotone reading of the poem (‘hiss-of-the-coffee-machine-voices-and-laughter-smell-of-a-cigar-hamburgers-wet-coats-steaming’) and said, ‘Derek Bannerman?’ Banny looked up, breaking off from whatever he was saying to Tommy.
