Laughter

At nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning in March, about ten years ago he calculated, as he walked along the river, a teacher’s R.S lesson was in progress. She was a dynamic and inspiring teacher, with a sheathed authority which she very rarely displayed; she did not have to display it any more than rarely for it to lend the lessons its firmness, concealed but palpable beneath her agreeable, encouraging, and generally upbeat disposition. The moderate heft of her breasts, along with her general feminine attractiveness, did arouse lewdness, fantasies in the minds of some of the boys, and unnumbered private comments and quips. She had found a way, because she had had to, of being tough as nails without being too outwardly tyrannical. While inside any classroom of hers, there was simply no way of objectifying her, no way of, in any respect, diminishing her.        

She was leading a discussion about creation myths. A broadly relevant tangent was permitted, concerning the thin but possible overlap of the theories of evolution and intelligent design. 

A bespectacled boy by name of Robert was volunteering something fairly coherent on the subject. His voice did not sound much different from those of the other boys but his mother was a Leeds woman and a trace of the North was to be found in certain of his vowel sounds. At that point, he was using the word “monkey” a lot, and he was pronouncing it the way it was spelt. 

He didn’t seem to notice it, but the teacher became tangibly aware of a general and hushed atmosphere of sniggering among the other boys. She stiffened. They tittered with stifled but shared derision. There was a further Northernly pronounced “monkey” and the laughs at last sprang forth, aloud, like a gush of cold water in the room’s warm quiet.

The teacher reacted immediately. She didn’t need to say very much, or anything really. There was a strongly-intentioned throat-clear and a stern gaze which fixed the boys who had laughed in its intensity, letting them know, without ambiguity, that they were seen, that the teacher had them in her sights. Amazing how little was needed, how little was enough. There was no requirement of shouting, or formal caution, or tirade. Robert continued talking, grateful for the teacher’s intervention. He fixed his eyes very intently on her hard, attractive face. He thought about but did not look at the breasts beneath it. He had not been spared from the knowledge that his pronunciations were a source of amusement. But he pretended that he had and the teacher was just about able to believe that this was so.

Robert had been a very gifted student of the humanities; the sciences- excluding biology- less so. Third period was Physics.

When Robert got bored he misbehaved. In RS, a seating plan dictated where pupils sat. In Physics, there was no seating plan and he was free to sit next to his friend Alfred. They were both easily bored by physics and passed the time by laughing at whatever there was to laugh at. The way the physics teacher pronounced “hour”: (argh). Half an argh. The biggest laugh at the physics teacher’s expense came outside of his classes. He had mentioned to Alfred, because Alfred was a decent trumpeter, that he himself sang in a shanty band: and then, to his peril, he had named it (The Infamous Motley Crew of Harwich), concluding with a semi-ironic “Look us up online”. For some reason, the image, large and central on the homepage of the poorly designed website, of ten or so bearded, old men in sailor suits on the poop-deck of a large boat, each of them rather hangdog, each of them holding a pint of ale, and the physics teacher among them second from the left in the front row, was a source of hysterical amusement to Robert and Alfred.        

After attaining a despicable 25% on the New Year’s test, Robert had promised to try harder in Physics lessons.

That morning, Robert was seated beside Alfred- (secretly amazed that the physics teacher hadn’t yet split them up)- in his usual stool on the front lab bench. The lab benches were old and wooded. The lab had a light chemical smell; something a little acidic, sharp like vinegar, was in the air. 

…A woodpecker. The wooded trill of its work lit up the present moment with significance. He stopped, attended the staccato bursts of hammering. When all was quiet, and the present moment relaxed into dullness again, he went on…     

Little was needed to make them laugh. One mention from Robert to Alfred of the Motley Crew was enough to make Alfred sweat and redden with his efforts to suppress the revelrous laugh it provoked. One sotto voce mutter of “argh” from Alfred was enough to make Robert’s insides ache. He tried to concentrate on what the teacher was saying about magnetic north but he simply could not get the man’s more hilarious features out of his mind. The physics teacher’s voice was, he realised, very sleep-inducing: it had about it a tender, dulcet somnolence. His arms, revealed by sleeves rolled up to the elbow, were farcically hairy, almost freakishly hairy in places. The physics teacher clocked the laughter, somehow intuited that it was at his expense, but said nothing about it. 

“Who can tell me,” the physics teacher said, beginning the year nine, third period class on the Wednesday following, “what is the difference between heat and temperature?”

Robert and Alfred were no longer permitted to sit next to one another. At last, the physics teacher split them up, which he often did with disruptive pairs or groups, if it was in the class’s interest. He had laconically banished Alfred to back at the start of class. Robert was resolved to try and kill two birds with one stone. He would answer the question as well as he could, but he would also misbehave- simultaneously: he would roll scholarliness and villainy into the one utterance. The challenge, pre-discussed, was to try and work the sound “Argh” into an answer given during class discussion. Robert put up his hand and was picked. From the back, Alfred looked and listened on, intrigued.

“…aaarg…” Robert began immediately, making it sound like a somewhat eccentric “er”, not especially convincingly. There was no laughter, not even a snigger. The fun part was over. He tried his best to answer the question. “Is it that…temperature is a way of…a measurement of heat, whereas heat itself is…” He couldn’t think of the word he wanted. What came out, concludingly, was not quite right. “…a sensation,” he said, concluding.

The physics teacher looked at him blankly. And after a few seconds of silence, an odd, gradual, permitted laughter spread around the room, rising in volume, rising from the massed boys, before at last petering out. Robert didn’t understand what was so funny, though he heard a few mocking mutters of that ill-advised word. Its double sibilance pierced the ear of the room, even when whispered softly: Sensation, sensation.

It was on a walk by the river, nearly a decade later, that he remembered all this. He had absorbed though not understood, not until that sunlit afternoon walk nearly a decade after along the river, the way the physics teacher had turned against him. The way that he had permitted the laughter because, for whatever reason, it gratified him, its rolling cacophony, its unction. What had he said next? And Robert remembered, smelling just as he did an acerbic and remembered note of the old, wood-panelled physics lab, the trees outside, always full of wind:

“It’s the best answer so far.” That was a bit of genius on the part of that hairy, lugubrious-voiced physics teacher. Symbolic violence disguised as encouraging platitude. There was a second, more subdued, more vicious rumble of low laughter.   

Robert didn’t understand, back then, why they had laughed at him. Ten years away: he had, maybe, an iota more understanding. It wasn’t that he was wrong. His answer was wrong but that wasn’t the source of the amusement. “Sensation” was, perhaps, an amusing word, as words went. 

Robert’s indifference to the teacher’s subject, his poor New Year’s test, his deriding laughter, the chagrin the physics teacher had inflicted upon himself by mentioning that frivolous shanty band. It was all there, inside the didactic choice he made that day. 

Robert felt fairly certain that the physics teacher, a decent man as far as he knew, as far as he remembered, had suddenly, on impulse, deigned to conjure the class’s laughter, to let it mount, to use it against Robert. Robert thought about the physics teacher. Maybe the physics teacher, deep now into his dotage, sometimes pondered that isolated and particular moment in his teaching career and felt ashamed; maybe he recalled it with elation and delight; perhaps he considered the cruelty necessary; perhaps he deemed it the greatest lesson he had ever taught. Maybe the physics teacher was years dead and lay in the stinking earth, supine and decayed, his mouth parted as if to voice that famous “argh”.

Robert could not remember any of what came after. He could not remember another minute of that or any physics lesson.

And even now, grown, Robert was able to laugh at it all. That choir of men in sailor suits, the hairy arms, “argh” (hour), “monkey” (pronounced as written), “Sensation”. What remained of it all was this rather bleak, echoing sort of laughter. He laughed louder. He remembered when he and Alfred used to poke each other’s privates with a ruler, while the other was speaking aloud during class. He thought of the Religious Studies teacher with a sudden soar of arousal. But the arousal quickly soured and went away again. For that, on this occasion, he was grateful.

Robert looked out at the water, alive with light, lively both with movement and a number of birds. For a time, the present moment was suffused with an intense sense of melancholy. He walked, further, along the riverside path, raising a thin ginger dust with each step. Even though he was still, in actual fact, laughing, really cackling, with his head thrown back and his eyelids tightly shut, he felt that some unignorable part of himself was crying.