At last they shore up in the Geography Room. Overhead, thunder roars continuously, as though they are in the foundations of some celestial interchange, into which bodiless locomotives come crashing every instant. ‘We’ll have one quick drink and then we’ll go back,’ Miss McIntyre says. She searches through the carrier bags for the ingredients – apparently she was serious about the Cosmopolitans – while Howard, hands in his pockets, looks at the pictures on the walls. The Geography Room is covered from floor to ceiling with photographs, charts and illustrations. One wall is devoted to aerial shots of the earth, wild weaves of colour that reveal themselves, when you read the text below, to be clouds around Everest, a rainbowed view of Patagonian ice-sheets, a hundred thousand flamingos in flight over a lake in Kenya, a blue faro of the Maldives. On another, pictures of happy banana-pickers in South America, happy miners in the Rhine-Ruhr Valley, happy tribes in their rainforests, rub shoulders with graphs depicting the CHIEF EXPORTS OF EUROPE, MINERALS AND THEIR USES, COLTAN – FROM THE CONGO TO YOUR PHONE! The room is like a shrine to the harmonious working of the world: a panoply of facts and processes, natural, scientific, agricultural, economic, all coexisting peacefully on its walls, while the human fallout from these interactions, the corollary of coercion, torture, enslavement that accompanies every dollar earned, every step towards alleged progress, is left for his class: History, the dark twin, the blood-shadow.
‘I really like these volcanoes,’ he says, stopping at the pictures by the door. ‘You don’t see enough volcanoes these days.’
‘Vodka… cranberry juice… damn, there’s something else…’ Miss McIntyre says to herself. ‘Sorry, what was that?’
‘I was just remembering what you said before, about the Earth being forged out of all these grand forces… It’s true, you look at these pictures and you realize we’re walking through the set of this incredible epic they stopped filming a hundred million years ago…’
‘Cointreau!’ she exclaims and returns to the carrier bags. ‘Cointreau, Cointreau… oh, to hell with it.’ She takes a swig from the vodka bottle, and passes it to him. ‘Come on, it’ll warm you up.’
‘Cheers, so,’ he says. She makes a fist and playfully punches the base of the bottle. He drinks. The vodka burns all the way down to his stomach. ‘I can’t hear the music at all now,’ he says to distract himself from the discomfort.
‘We’ll go back in a minute,’ she says. She hops up on the teacher’s desk and crosses her legs beneath her; from here she regards Howard mockingly, like an imp on a toadstool. ‘So you’re nostalgic for the Palaeozoic now, is that it?’
‘Definitely quieter, these days. No new mountains, same old continents and oceans. Occasional earthquake kills a few thousand, that’s as much drama as we get.’
She receives this with an amused smile, like someone holding a royal flush in a poker game for matchsticks. ‘Dramatic things can still happen,’ she says. ‘All this, for a start.’ She gestures behind her, at the blackboard, on which is written:
GLOBAL WARMING:
DEFORESTATION –> DESERTIFICATION
LOSS OF HABITATS –> DECREASE IN BIODIVERSITY –>
MASS EXTINCTION
RISING TEMPERATURES –> DROUGHT –> CROP FAILURE
POLAR ICE CAPS MELTING –> RISING SEAS –> FLOODING
DIVERSION OF GULF STREAM –> GLACIATION –> ICE AGE
‘An ice age, that would be dramatic enough for most people, no? Or Dublin, London, New York being underwater?’
‘That’s true,’ Howard says.
‘Some scientists think we’re already past the point of no return. They give the world as we know it another fifteen years. We could be the very last generations of the species.’ She reels this off in a conversational tone, the same mischievous light flickering in her eyes, as if it’s some rambling shaggy-dog joke, not for young ears. ‘The boys take it very seriously. Recycling their Coke cans, using energy-efficient lightbulbs. Yesterday, they were all writing letters to the Chinese ambassador. The Chinese government want to build a dam in a UNESCO Heritage Site, it’s going to destroy the homes of millions of people, including the Naxi – they’re one of the world’s last surviving matriarchies, Howard, did you know that? The boys were so angry! But most people seem to be able to let that stuff just slide over them.’
‘They don’t have you to inspire them,’ Howard says.
‘I suppose we can’t really conceive of our way of life ever changing,’ she says, ignoring his clunky flattery. ‘Let alone coming to an end. It’s just like the boys here doing stupid things – you know, climbing electricity pylons, jumping their skateboards off ten-foot walls – because they can’t imagine getting hurt. They think they’ll go on for ever. So do we. But nothing goes on for ever. Civilization ends, everything ends, that’s what you teach them in History class, isn’t it?’
She utters these words softly, like a lullaby. Her stockinged knee is rested against his thigh. The air seems to shoot with sparks.
‘History teaches us that history teaches us nothing,’ Howard remembers.
‘That doesn’t say much for history teachers, does it,’ she whispers up at him.
Standing before her at the top of the class, Howard is aware, suddenly, of the empty rows of pupils’ desks behind him, that nobody in the entire world knows where they are. ‘You teach me something, so,’ he goads her gently. ‘Educate me.’
Her eyes wander ceilingward, as she makes a play of scaring up a thought; then, leaning forward, she confides in a whisper, ‘I don’t think you’re in love with your girlfriend any more.’
This stings, but he keeps smiling. ‘You can see into my heart now?’
‘You’re easy to read,’ she says, tracing a fingertip over his face. ‘It’s all right here.’
‘Well, maybe I can see into your heart too,’ he retorts.
‘Oh yeah? What do you see there?’
‘I can see you want me to kiss you.’
She laughs coyly, and swings her legs off the desk. ‘That’s not what you see,’ she says. She retreats to the far side of the room, smoothing down her dress. Then, in an amicable, impersonal voice, like a television interviewer putting a fresh question to her guest, she says, ‘Tell me why you left the stock market to become a teacher. Did you suddenly feel the urge to do something meaningful? Had you become disillusioned with the pursuit of wealth?’
Howard understands that this is a hoop he must jump through; he has erred, and this conversation, artificial as it is, is now the only possible route back to what those lips seemed to promise a few seconds ago. He takes a moment to draw breath, consider his tactics, then, keeping his position by the desk, responds in the same pleasantly neutral tone, ‘It was more that the pursuit of wealth became disillusioned with me.’
‘Burnout,’ she says expressionlessly.
Howard shrugs. He is realizing that this is still too sensitive for him to be ironic and off hand about.
‘It happens,’ she says. ‘It’s a stressful job. It’s not for everybody.’
‘The people whose money it was weren’t so philosophical.’
‘Is that why they call you Howard the Coward?’
‘No.’
‘Was it something to do with what happened in Dalkey Quarry?’ Her eyes narrow in on him predatorily. ‘The bungee jump? Where your friend got hurt?’