Listen to the author reading this piece:
Our history teacher, Mr House, had motor neurone disease. We noticed it most when he walked between campuses. His left arm swung loosely by his side. We still said hello when we saw him, but we stopped twisting our bags around our bodies, and we ducked our heads and hid our eyes behind our fringes. We’d say sorry with a quiet hello Sir. He was our history teacher, who scared us, but who we loved.
He’d mostly sit and talk behind his desk. His mind of history had no need of chalk. As if he’d been to all the places himself, and met all the people, even been all the people.
My friend, Kel, and me, always sat together somewhere in the middle row near the window. Sometimes, when history was in the afternoon we shivered with fatigue and folded into our navy blazers.
It’s colder than this on the Russian front, Mr House said. There was a shuffle of pensive laughter, did anyone get that? What was the Russian front? I thought he must have been there too.
I elbowed Kel to keep her awake. Her mum had gone off to Spain with some short man. Kel had been shunted to her Auntie Angie’s place, which was on the rough estate. The one with chalked out bodies with bubble gum blots inside them. And people who answered their council doors with needles swaying from their arms.
Kel had to pay rent. She worked for her uncle in the mornings before school. He had an underwear stall at the market that sold the bright red and black shiny kind. You’d think we would have giggled at that, but we didn’t.
I’d wait in the sleet on the mound outside All Hallow’s church while I shuddered away the smell of rotting orange peel, of wet-ink and cigarettes, of petrol, violet and grey in the gutters. Of the church bell gongs that would shatter our future of getting to school on time, just once.
It wasn’t that history wasn’t important. I just had too many things to worry about. Like the worry that Kel would become a chalked outline of bubble gum blots, or the worry that we’d miss a clump of mould in her sandwiches. We spent lunchtime picking out the mould. And there was the worry about the Big Scary Girls, worry for the Pregnant Girls — which was reasonable, as our head of year, Mrs Lucy, yelled at us in an all-girls assembly to stop this sluttish behaviour.
Then there was Mum to worry about.
I never knew if it would be good or bad when I got home. One day she was lying at the bottom of the stairs, crying, in her Betty Boop nightie. Her slipper had fallen and landed sole up, filthy. I held open the heavy brass letter box, and tried to calm her, without shaking the fragile stained rose in the window. I asked her to open the sitting room door because I could hear my baby brother crying. And I worried he would do that breath holding thing. And Mum would have to hold him upside down. Then he’d turn from purple to red.
I worried about being ugly, about never getting a boyfriend. Although that was less of a worry because I did not want to get pregnant. But I did get bullied because of the ugly thing. Tina Marlow set fire to my hair in the toilets and pushed me in the back all the way home. And I took it because she was friends with Kel, and I didn’t want to lose my friend.
I never fell down.
Being ugly was a problem, though. The Big Scary girls were alley cats at night. The only way out was to find a boy, the best boy they could. They knew the length of each other’s legs, the ratio between calf and ankle, the thickness of each other’s hair, the shape of each other’s lips and eyes, the size of each other’s breasts and bottoms.
They sized up, friendly, and cut eyed.
There was one shop in town, Dorothy Perkins, and one nightclub, G-Spot. They spent all week vying to be the best and sexiest girl in that glittery crop top. I did not really need to worry. It would not be Kel or me that would be a chalked out body.
What I worried about most was never getting out of there.
Between the worry in history class I stared out of the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the sports field, the cemetery across the road where Nan and Grandad lay, and the Sycamore trees.
I was good at wakeful dreaming. Sometimes I’d drive a pink Cadilac along palmed beaches, other times I’d be like Margaret Thatcher, or I’d be a police sergeant like in The Bill, or a doctor like in Casualty. Or an explorer. That’s what I really wanted to be.
Sometimes Mr House would see me gazing and shout, Ethel Burger, where are you?
I didn’t understand the name. But Ethel felt like something to do with my ugliness.
I replied,
I’m here Sir. On the Russian front.
Katie Piper is British and now lives in Australia with her son and her hubby. Her work has appeared in Reflex Fiction, The Cabinet of Heed, X-ray Literary Mag, Janus Literary, and Ellipsis Zine. She was longlisted for The Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2021, the Bath Short Story Award in 2024 and 2025, and the Newcastle Short Story Award, also in 2025. Katie is a nurse with a passion for Narrative Medicine.