It had been going on for over a month now. Relentless, energy-sapping and unprecedented. Everything solid appeared to be melting. “Do not try to cross a road in high heels,” a regular listener advised his local radio station drivetime presenter. “The tarmacs have become gluey. You will get stuck and most likely run over. I saw it happen to a woman outside the Co-Op. Disappeared under the wheels of a recycling truck she did!”

As the temperature soared into the high thirties the Met Office issued a red warning and the schools decided, after examinations had finished, to become relaxed about compulsory pupil attendance. If you were susceptible to fainting from heat exhaustion ‘better to inconvenience your parents than your teachers’ seemed a logical manifesto to many who laboured in the front line of the profession. Working parents in particular raised objections to this philosophy. “We must all broil equally together,” insisted a supermarket checkout operative on the same phon- in show. “The economy must not be allowed to grind to a halt. And neither should the learning expectations of our young people. I suggest regular hydration breaks and electric fans in every classroom.”

As the station went to the ad break Jim Sutcliffe, familiarly known to his students as Sooty, changed the car radio to a popular music station. If the chit chat had reached new levels of banality at least the traffic had diminished. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to get to work and a sudden virtue rush took possession of Sooty’s torso. Already that morning he had written three emails, including one to The Guardian, read a chapter of his current book club choice, a five hundred pages long academic history of the USA called Fantasyland, completed fifteen minutes of stretches plus a five miles run. He was well up for the day ahead and whatever challenges it might hold.

By the end of class registration, however, only four students had turned up out of the fifteen allotted to him. “Has anybody seen – ?” Sooty rattled off the names of the absentees but nobody answered. “In that case we have a decision to make,” he added “Whether to proceed with today’s timetable of subjects or – “

“Or what, sir?” A question posed by Jason Sage who had suddenly lurched open the door thereby causing the speaker to hesitate in mid-sentence as the lanky youth trundled into the room. It may usefully be mentioned at this junctor that of all Sooty’s family of learners who enjoyed a sobriquet Jason stood out. He had garnered over the years not one but three of them which in descending order from most to least affectionate were – Onion, Wise Guy and Twat. Jason was also something of a pugilist so nobody ever used any of these terms to his face. “Abscond to the lido where all the truants are no doubt hanging out?” the youth continued.

“Sit down please, Jason,” Sooty instructed. “I was going to say, ‘Use the time to chat, to revise, to explore issues of general but maybe burning importance to you all’.”

“Burning as in ‘Cor Blimey! What a Scorcher!’ you mean, sir?” scoffed Jason who had dropped into one of the nine vacant seats around the tutorial table.

“That’s not funny,” remarked Liz who sat gazing at the screen of her lap top.

“Are you checking the latest ICC projections of global temperature rises,” retorted Jason, “or just egosurfing?” Liz deigned not to reply to this sarcasm. “I came in prepared for our usual Friday morning dose of double English, sir,” protested Jason. “Aren’t you returning our exam papers today?”

“I haven’t finished marking them yet,” explained Sooty. “And anyway I’m minded to postpone the exam feedback lesson until cooler times and we have a full complement. Otherwise I’ll be obliged to repeat myself.”

“Will this formula be replicated in the other subject classes we attend after you?” asked Jason craftily. A question to which Sooty had no idea of the answer. Clearly it would depend on the individual teachers involved. “But what if the cooler times, as you put it, sir, fail to materialise? I mean we’ve been promised a thunderstorm by the Met for weeks now and nothing has happened.”

This caused a few murmurs of interest. A boy in the class who rejoiced in the nickname Shuteye suddenly stirred in his apparent hibernation to observe, “Stars hide your fires. Let not light see my black and deep desires.” And then sank back instantly into an inscrutable reticence.

“I would be interested to know what the rest of you think about my ad hoc proposition,” said Sooty hopefully. “Please raise your hand if you approve it.” Three gestures of support ensued and hovered limply.

“Let me get this straight, sir,” said Jason, who was not yet committed. “No subject is off the table? Can we delve deep into the hidden curriculum?”

“Deeply,” corrected Sooty. “Do not use an adjective to qualify a verb unless you are writing poetry. But yes we can certainly delve as much as you want and wherever you want.” Two more arms stretched into the ascendancy and thus the initiative was agreed without dissent. “So who will start us off?” smiled Sooty casting his gaze around the group.

“Me sir, if you don’t mind,” piped up Giles. “I would like to know why you allow Liam to keep his eyes closed during your classes? I find it unnerving, as if he isn’t interested.”

“Come thick night and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife sees not the wound it makes,” droned Shuteye.

“Perhaps he has a vampirish intolerance of daylight?” suggested Jason. “Perhaps this circuit of ugly mugs makes him want to throw up? Who knows? Who cares? We all without exception have our idiosyncrasies, don’t we Giles?”

Giles who was known for his social conservatism and discipleship of Jesus looked slightly put out but refrained from rising to the bait. “With respect, I’m addressing Mr Sutcliffe not you,” he asserted. Sooty quickly offered Giles reassurance. He was convinced Liam’s concentration never flagged for a moment. Liam listened, he answered when spoken to, his assignments were always punctually delivered and not one of them had been marked lower than a B. So what Liam chose to do with his eyelids concerned nobody except himself. Giles grimaced as if dissatisfied by this all too liberal explanation but refrained from challenging it.

“I have a question, sir,” said Jason. “Rather it is an observation – but I shall frame it as a question in case I am incorrect in assuming there will be no serious disagreement.”

“I think what he means is we’re bound to disagree,” murmured Liz.

“How far is it true that we – by which I mean homo sapiens, of course – “ continued Jason unabashed, “know only that we know nothing for certain? That the world when we try to observe it, however attentively, is always slipping away from us, going out of focus, so to speak, and it is only very rarely that we seem to glimpse beneath that thin film of perception we call reality?”

“If you are saying that the world is infinitely complex but our knowledge of it is finite, I’d tend to agree with you,” replied Sooty.

“I think he’s saying something different than that,” remarked Liz. “Don’t you, Sal?” This question was addressed to a bespectacled, geekish sort of girl who rarely contributed to class discussions but avidly took notes and, so far as Sooty could tell from reading her essays, although by no means an original thinker, had an unsurpassed gift of factual assimilation. In private Sooty called her Blotting Paper. She unerringly soaked up his every word of pseudo teacherly wisdom and never questioned its accuracy. This characteristic simultaneously flattered, astonished and appalled Sooty. He had never come across it before. Sally was immaculate in her diligence. A model student bar none. Unblemished and machine-like in her application and seemingly endowed with blind faith in her teacher’s pedagogic expertise.

Sal simply shot a quizzical smile at Liz and carried on scribbling. “Oh, yes? And what would that be, Liz?” asked Sooty. Suddenly as Liz changed her facial expression from one of pert exasperation to playful coyness, he noticed for the first time, or rather his loins noticed, how pretty she was in an elfin, short haired sort of way.

“Well, I think Jason’s saying that he hasn’t yet found anything properly to live for,” said Liz, “and so he can’t understand why anyone else might have done.”

Sal stopped writing and glanced instead towards Sooty as if awaiting his approval or otherwise of Liz’s insight. “Perhaps you could expand on that, Liz?” Sooty replied. “That is if Jason doesn’t mind?”

“I don’t mind listening to her flights of fancy, sir,” smirked Jason affably. “They have an incantatory quality that tends to induce sleep. Please wake me up if I happen to doze off.”

Still Sal’s pen hovered in mid air expectantly. Would Liz, who Sooty adjudged far from being the brightest button in the box, be up for the challenge? Or was she simply putting the boot into the Wise Guy’s groin where it very properly belonged?

“We have a pet dog,” began Liz demurely. “He’s a French bulldog called Louis. When we go to bed Louis can be heard pining for a while then he falls asleep on the rug in the hallway.”

“What’s this got to do with the price of bananas?” interrupted Jason contemptuously.

“Liz is in possession of the conch,” Sooty chastised him. “Please hear her out in the same way she heard you.”

“In the morning if I get up first Louis rolls over on the rug and invites me to stroke his tummy,” Liz continued. “It’s like he feels lonely and neglected and needs to be reminded that we still love him. So I do it for five minutes or more and he groans with pleasure. That’s it, sir.”

“And your point is?” snorted Jason.

Liz returned him a benign smile and returned to her laptop screen as if that was where the answer lay. “If I may offer an interpretation then,” Sooty said. “Liz is I think saying that all creatures are depleted in their understanding of life, dogs probably far more so than human beings. Indeed my experience of pet dogs is that they are utterly bewildered by what is going on around them in their owner’s home, especially when they are young and the various humanoid routines and noises are still new to them.” Sal’s pen had begun to rapidly reengage with her notepad, Sooty realised with relief. His spontaneous strand of thought was at least making sense to her and he felt thereby encouraged to expand on it. “We have to ask and ask and ask again yet be satisfied with at best only partial answers. That is the nature of our species being, at least the part of our being that is cognitive and linguistically curious. A puppy dog on the other hand is simply bewildered. He has needs, call them anatomical and ontological – as indeed we humans also have them – but he has no capacity to reason why he has them. He is not burdened with questions and doubts, at least in the same cerebrally intense way we are – “

“Or at least as Jason is!” cut in Giles. “Or rather pretends to be.”

“We emerge from darkness,” smirked Jason. “The light flickers for a while and then we return to darkness. Put that in your churchy pipe of facile certainties and smoke it.”

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” enunciated Shuteye in apparent complicity, “To the last recorded syllable of time and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

“Too many to’s in that speech, otherwise entirely accurate,” quipped Jason condescendingly.

Giles seemed to take this in his stride. He turned to Shuteye now and said, “Liam, instead of just reciting from MacBeth maybe you could make a rather more constructive contribution to the discussion?”

Liz seemed amused by this objection. “MacBeth is our set Shakespearean text after all,” she observed, “or hadn’t you noticed, Giles? I suspect Liam may be trying to hint he would prefer sir to steer us back in that direction?”

Jason reacted quicker to this prompt than the teacher. “Yes, Liam, we all know you have ambitions to be a star performer in the Royal Shakespeare Company but this situation calls for mental agility not just hammy acting.”

“Okay then, here’s what I think,” replied Liam, transitioning adroitly from a Kenneth Branagh impersonation to one of Jeremy Clarkson in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? “Scientific rationalism tries to answer all the how questions while Religion tries to answer the why questions. And that is my final answer.”

“Tries being the operative word,” observed Sooty.

“It’s still very stuffy in here,” said Liz. “This fan hardly makes any difference. Do you have another one by any chance, sir?”

Sooty shook his head. “I asked the janitor on the way in,” he apologised. “He’s been trying to buy some more but all the shops are out of stock.” Liz began tapping away at her computer keys. “Including the online ones,” he added pointedly and she stopped. The classroom lapsed into silence then, an inert lethargy broken only by the dull drone of the table fan as it swivelled one way then the other on its metal axis. “We can talk about MacBeth if you prefer,” he said in an attempt to break through the torpor before it hardened into defiance, “or we can continue to muse about the uncertainty principle?” He looked towards Sal for guidance but she refused to meet his eyes, simply gazing beyond his left shoulder into some private middle distance.

“Or we can do both at the same time,” suggested Jason. “Kill two birds with one stone. Is that an appropriate metaphor, sir?”

“Go on then,” encouraged Sooty. “You have the floor.”

“Well, I reckon it’s far from certain that this Shakespeare bloke was quite the genius everyone makes out,” said Jason. “Alright I’ll admit he wrote good dialogue. We’ve just been hearing some of it from Shuteye. But the stories themselves? I question their originality, at least the ones I’ve read.”

“And how many would that be?” Sooty interjected.

Jason enumerated them with the aid of his fingers. “Julius Caesar. Totally ripped off plot,” he scoffed. “The one where everyone is lost in a wood and some dopey woman falls in love with a bloke who’s got a donkey’s head. And – er? – that tragedy about the sulky prince who takes the whole play to make up his mind to kill the evil king who’s been bedding his mum.”

“Absent thee from felicity awhile,” commented Shuteye, “and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you that, Shuteye, the whole saga’s pretty painful,” said Jason. “Isn’t it true, sir, that a lot of scholars question that it was even Shakespeare who wrote the plays?”

“That’s correct,” answered Sooty, “but I can’t see it matters who the real Bard was. Somebody wrote them and over the centuries those plays have consistently been found to have merit.”

“So has the Bible,” said Jason, “but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the book is a collection of silly fables and hocus pocus nonsense.” Sooty glanced towards the obvious target for this barb but Giles remained stoney faced as if he had not heard it. “Anyway it’s not just about who authored Shakespeare’s plays,” continued Jason undeterred, “it’s about the way we fetishise them.”

“You know there’s a word for people like you,” said Shuteye. “And that word is iconoclast.”

“Which play is that a line from?” asked Jason mock seriously.

Giles began to snigger then said, “I’ll give you two better words, Shuteye. Neurotic and narcissist.”

“If I can get a word in edgeways please, sir,” appealed Liz. “Like I said before, we are not dogs. We have to believe in something.”

“Okay, so what do you believe in then?” demanded Jason, making an ironic all ears gesture. “String theory or Loop theory? The Big Bang theory or Creationist theory? Growthism or climate change?”

“Jason, you’re getting out of order!” cautioned Sooty protectively.

“It’s alright, I’m happy to answer his question,” smiled Liz. “And I don’t mind being teased but I’d prefer not to be interrupted or I’ll probably lose the thread.”

“Understood,” said Sooty, shooting Jason a withering look of admonition.

Liz closed her lap top and took a deep breath. “Basically I believe I’m lucky to be alive,” she began. “When I was born I almost died. The details of the birth don’t concern you. Just to say I was premature and starved of oxygen. They kept me in an incubator for several weeks. Of course I don’t remember any of that but my parents told me when I was old enough to understand.”

“So as a consequence you were spoiled and mollycoddled?” scoffed Jason.

“Shut the fuck up!” snapped Sooty. “That is a final warning!”

None of them had heard a teacher swear like that before and the tension felt palpable. Ann, who hadn’t been writing for a while now, instantly put her pen down, closed her notepad and turned full on towards Liz.

“I very likely was spoiled,” continued Liz, who appeared unperturbed. “I’m not going to complain about being loved so much. My parents taught me to count my blessings from an early age and I still do. Reading has never interested me as much as it has some of you. I like looking at things, touching and listening. We have a nice long back garden. My dad is a keen gardener and I used to take huge pleasure in helping him. I used to enjoy sitting there counting how many different shades of green I could see. Green is my favourite colour. It’s such a relaxing colour, why it is I have no idea. It’s a mystery of sorts. But everything is a mystery once you put your mind to it. I don’t see what’s to be gained from puzzling over such things. It’s enough that certain things and people give me pleasure and are to be embraced. If I watch the news I’m always reminded how fortunate I am not to be living in a war zone or some other place where there’s famine or a danger of earthquakes. Or a brutal dictator breathing down your neck. What else do I believe? Mainly I believe people are essentially good. Do as you would be done by, my grandad always used to say. He’s passed now and that caused me a lot of grief. I visited him in hospital the day before he died. Be sad for a while but not too long when I’ve gone, he said. Remember me in your prayers and I promise to get back to you. This really puzzled me. Firstly I’ve never prayed and secondly I’m not religious and neither was he as far as I knew. Everybody is religious in their own way, he smiled. Just try to do what I say, Lizzie, and never be too busy to say your prayers. To me saying a prayer is a way of being honest and sincere. I don’t know if that person we call God is listening but I’m sure grandad is. If I’ve got a problem or a disappointment I always think what would he do in that situation and within a few minutes the answer just pops into my head. I’ve come to believe that if we put positive thoughts in our head it tends to heal whatever may be wrong with our body. It repairs us. What else? Oh yes about people in general! They move from innocence to experience, grandad used to say, and they get corrupted by it, often through no fault of their own, mind you. They get trapped or burdened by responsibility. They feel put upon and unloved and then look around for someone convenient to blame. Grandad was a car enthusiast so he always used to be comparing people to motor cars of one sort or another. He’d say things like, Her body work has seen better days but she’s still powered by a Rolls Royce engine. Or another one I remember, He parades around town with the swagger of a top of the range Bentley but his chassis has rusted away through neglect and he doesn’t put enough oil in his engine. You can hear his big ends knocking if you listen carefully.”

Suddenly Liz started to cough and gasp for breath and Sooty hastened to help her. “Can I have a glass of water?” she spluttered. “My throat is so dry.” Once he poured it out and she took a few gulps the emergency appeared to have been resolved. “Where was I?” she asked.

“You can hear his big ends knocking,” offered Jason with what might have passed for contrition.

“Anyway all I was going to say in addition is that I believe there’s far more good kind people than bad ones,” Liz said. “You may think I’m naive and I know there’s numerous awful social problems in the world. But I believe we can solve them. In the meantime I try to see the good in everyone. As grandad might have said, whatever is hiding under their bonnet.”

Liz lapsed into silence and Jason slowly raised his hand as if requesting permission to speak. “Have you finished, Liz?” asked Sooty, ignoring him. She gave a little nod and sipped at the water.

“Sir, I have a question if I may be permitted?” Jason asked, his features a mask of phoney humility. “For Liz, I mean.” Sooty deflected his request to Liz with a gesture of his hand and she acquiesced. “Speaking as someone who’s far more cynical than you about human nature,” he continued, “I wonder if you’ve ever been disabused after putting your trust in someone. I mean someone who’s gone on to cheat or betray you?”

“That’s a very personal question,” responded Sooty suspiciously. “You don’t have to answer it, Liz.”

“I don’t mind,” said Liz. “I think you have to try and trust people just like you have to try and love them, Jason. It’s the same thing. Of course you will sometimes get your fingers burnt. Someone you assumed to be a good egg turns out to be a rotten one. So you have to be watchful. And one more thing – “

The jarring electronic ring of a fire alarm stopped Liz instantly in her tracks, persisting in three brain numbing bursts. “Come on everybody, we have to assemble in the rectangle,” ordered Sooty. “Let’s hope it’s only a drill. Fast as you can now.” He flung open the classroom door and they joined the scramble along corridors, down flights of stairs and finally into the brazen hot house of the day where the Principal stood, over-dressed in a suit and tie, waiting to break the news that record temperature had now been forecast and that the governors had been advised on health grounds to close the school for the rest of the day. A half hearted cheer arose.

“I’m very sorry you’ve been inconvenienced,” he added. “This is an unprecedented situation and I would advise you to make your way home as quickly as possible. Take bottles of water with you, especially those who have longer bus journeys. If anyone has a problem accessing their homes please stay behind and we shall discuss contingency arrangements with you. That’s all. Have a relaxing weekend. And take heart, I have it on the impeccable authority of the local Meteorological office that the weather will definitely break on Sunday and we are in for a torrential storm. So normality will resume on Monday.”

“Where have we heard that bollocks before?” grumbled Jason somewhere behind Sootly and a bit too loudly not to have been overheard by almost everybody present, including the Principal who was known to have a pliable and a bit too eager to please defect of character.

That evening around seven, unable to settle on anything remotely productive, Sooty donned a pair of shorts and tee shirt and drove out to a riverside pub a couple of miles away. The gardens turned out to be more crowded than he expected and he detected an atmosphere bordering on hysteria amongst the mainly youthful clientele. He had only experienced heat as oppressive as this in the southern Mediterranean countries during the long summer holidays, Sicily and Cyprus to be precise. It accumulated day by day, a kind of invisible mind-altering burden not dissimilar to grief. It weighed you down and all the more so because you knew no remedy existed. You simply watched how other people were suffering, the strategies they employed for bearing up and tried to comfort yourself that if they could survive the inferno then so could you. He purchased a lager and found himself dissolving into the collective effort to remain sane. His mind wandered back to the morning’s abortively brief teaching interlude. They were all good kids in the main. They had turned up when the clear option was to abscond with impunity. They cooperated. None of the five had a genuine interest in Literature, of course, with the exception of Shuteye who would undoubtedly pursue a thespian career, at least in provincial rep or TV commercials if not the RSC. Liz would end up as a hairdresser or nurse. Giles would lose his faith in the church’s God before he was 25 and become a solicitor, probably specialising in family law. How about Ann, the mystery stenographer? He could visualise her as the PA of some thrusting leader of industry or even in the civil service as a dogsbody aid to a hard-pressed Tory politician. Jason would find a way to make money, probably in the city as a dealer. No way that Wise Guy would knuckle down in any sort of hierarchy unless it enjoyed a free flowing spondulux tap.

He had called a waiter over who brought him a second pint when suddenly a voice broke into his consciousness. “Hullo, sir. Is that seat taken?” it asked.

Sooty found himself gazing into the face of Liz. She held a stunted canine on the end of a lead. The beast squinted and tried to lurch towards him but Liz managed to restrain her pet while simultaneously holding a brimming glass in her free hand. “Somebody was sitting there a minute ago,” he replied, helping her negotiate the space. “but I reckon it’s safe to assume they’ve left.”

“I’ll give it up if you’re mistaken, sir,” she said. “I’ve just taken Louis for an hour’s walk and my feet are aching.”

“There’s no need to call me sir out of college,” he told her. “My name’s Jim.” Liz smiled by way of reply. She ferreted a flask out of her bag along with a plastic bowl that she proceeded to fill with water for Louis. When she placed it on the ground he began ferociously lapping it up. “I’ve never seen you here before,” he added. It came out more gauchely than intended.

“Same here,” she replied.

“It’s a coincidence,” he said. “I was just reflecting on the class today. Particularly your thoughtful contribution.”

“Really?” she answered with surprise. “Anyway I enjoyed it. Better than witches and weirdos anyway.”

This made Sooty chuckle. If the truth were known he didn’t much like Shakepeare’s exercise in supernatural horror either. “I’ve been wondering what you were going on to say when the alarm rang and we had to abandon ship?” Liz looked blank and took a sip of her drink. “Jason was asking you about trust,” he reminded her. “If you’d ever been let down by someone you’d trusted?”

“Oh that’s right!” she said. “Of course I have. Not as badly as he’s been let down though. I think I was going to say you can’t allow it to infect you. Don’t you agree, sir? Oops, sorry, Jim.”

“But it’s bound to affect you surely?” objected Sooty who had misheard. “What else can it do?”

“Yes of course it will affect you,” said Liz. “But infecting you is another matter altogether. Have you never had a sting or a cut that you’ve allowed to go septic?”

“I’m sorry,” apologised Sooty, “I think the heat has begun to damage my hearing. Yes, especially when I was a kid. I used to get these abrasions around the lids of my eyes and I was forever scratching them and making them more inflamed. But tell me about Jason. Who’s let him down so badly?”

“His dad,” replied Liz. “Upped sticks and left when Jason was eight and he’s never seen or heard from him since.”

“Really? And Jason’s told you all about this?” asked Sooty.

“Little old dim witted me?” said Liz, pulling a face. “Of course not! Nor anybody else so far as I know. That’s part of his problem.”

“Then how do you know about it?”

“I’ve got an older sister who used to babysit for the family,” explained Liz. “She’s always been friendly with Jason’s mum. Jason took it very hard. Him and his dad did everything together. George he was called. Took him to the golf club every weekend. Taught him how to play. George was a really nice bloke according to Helen.”

“So why did he walk out?” Sooty asked.

Louis had started yapping and mithering, evidently feeling neglected. Liz fed him a small treat then once the dog had settled down said, “It’s like that poem you made us read a few weeks ago – things fall apart. Sometimes gradually, sometimes in a sudden explosion.” Sooty knew all about that but was hardly going to share his romantic failures with a student. After a good minute of silence had passed Liz said, “A penny for them?”

“So Jason’s arrogance is a defensive pose?” he surmised out loud. “Deep down he’s sweet and cuddly?”

“Lonely and frightened are the words I’d use,” she answered and Sooty disappeared again into the torpor of his own thoughts for a while. “He’s got a tender side to him though,” Liz added as an afterthought. “I ran into him once at a friend’s party and he was so complimentary and sweet I let him kiss me. We were both beyond tipsy by that point. In fact if he’d been more pushy I’d have probably let him go all the way.”

Sooty felt lost for words. Why had she needed to tell him that? Had he heard correctly/ An illicit complicity now seemed to hang in the humid air between them. “So do you still fancy him?” he asked eventually.

“He got the ick for me when I told him I wasn’t worried about climate change,” she shrugged as if the matter had long been dispensed with. Sooty must have visibly squinted incomprehension. “It’s his big thing. Didn’t you know?” Liz explained.

Sooty shook his head. “Tell me something, Liz,” he said. “Do you have any plans about a career?”

“If I pass my Biology then I’ll probably apply to train as a midwife,” she answered. “If not then I’ll go to work in Helen’s shop as a trainee hairdresser. Why are you smiling like that?”

“No reason,” he lied. “I hope you pass Biology. You strike me as a naturally warm and caring person. The NHS needs young women like you.”

Not long after that Sooty finished his drink and left, partly because he felt tired but mainly because of the fantasies Liz had set spinning in his heat-addled mind. He needed relief in several senses of that word. On the drive home those words kept echoing in his head – if he’d been a bit more pushy I’d have probably let him go all the way. But for reasons that defied his technical ingenuity the sole electric fan at home went on the blink. The air hardened and congealed in his bedroom and he ended up downstairs on the sofa sleeping in fitful episodes, all plagued by dreams. In one of them he became the thane of Cawdor, stumbling upon a coven of witches brewing their prophecies of imminent disaster. Each leering visage known to him from some failed attempt at attachment. Dawn broke as a welcome relief from this kaleidoscope of horrors. He jogged, he showered, he drank coffee. Still not eight o’clock. How long is a hot midsummer’s day, he thought idly to himself? How long is a piece of string? At 10.30 he had an assignation with an old friend from his undergrad days. They were to meet outside the candy floss kiosk on Brighton Pier. So his Saturday had a distinct shape and a direction. Was it an assignation or a date, he puzzled? What was the difference? It had been her out of the blue suggestion. A third shot of caffeine did not help to resolve the question. If the M25 wasn’t playing up he could drive down there in seventy minutes. Angharad she was called. She had “stumbled” upon him on Facebook, she advised, that indefatigable depository of illusions and shimmering memorabilia – his words not hers. A few brief messages exchanged, the drift wood cleared from the beach and here they now were, faster than double time advanced to Go, very imminently face to face and – who knows? – perhaps even body to body.

At precisely 9am as he was checking the pressure in his tyres Angharad’s apologetic text pinged into his consciousness. “Dire family emergency. Need to take a rain check, So sorry. More info to follow.” He lugged his overnight bag back into the house and unpacked it slowly, item by item, – “along with my faith in human nature”, he thought indulgently and then chuckled. Being an Eng Lit scholar he had learnt to take his disappointments philosophically. His mood swings into self-pity never lasted long. The readiness is all had become a kind of knee jerk mantra when disappointment arrived. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow and Angharad was just another bird. Within half an hour he had galvanised himself into a new plan of action. He ferried the fan to an electrician’s shop nearby and got the genial owner to change the fuse. Then he drove to the garden centre, bought a few plants and the Saturday Guardian which he scanned over a fourth hit of filter coffee, mainly the sports pages that overflowed with speculation about England’s imminent last sixteen match against Mexico and the row over FIFA’s indecisiveness on the kick-off time due to the weather forecast.

Once home Sooty decided not to answer Angharad’s text. She could boil her head as far as he was concerned. If you’ve got cold feet, fair enough, but front up and just spell it out. He began his horticultural labours in the back garden. It bossed the shade until quarter to one which then shifted to the front. And that’s where he was crouched, bedding in yellow and red petunias, when somebody intruded on his attention. A clunk of gate swinging open, long legs marching towards the door, the twitch and snap of the letter flap as the cold caller shoved his literature through it, ignoring the politely worded notice to deter leafleters. “Can’t you read English?” Sooty challenged before recognising the visitor a split second too late.

“Yeah and even its Elizabethan equivalent, thanks mainly to you, sir,” grinned Jason. “Shall I pull them out? They’re still wedged in the flap?”

Sooty dropped his trowel and stood up. “What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked stupidly. Jason’s skimpy red teeshirt had the words EXTINCTION REBELLION printed across the chest in a bold yellow.

“I can sell you one, if you want,” said Jason. “Only a tenner. Of course you may wish to donate more?”

“I assume you didn’t know I lived here?” asked Sooty. Jason shook his head, detracted the literature from the letter flap and offered it to his teacher. Sooty looked through it. Ten climate change bullet points on one side, another ten on the other. “I thought you people went in for acts of sabotage not leafleting residential homes in the Conservative suburbs?”

“We do both,” smirked the youth. “And we don’t use the S word by the way. We call it direct ecological action. I couldn’t tap you for a glass of water by any chance? I’ve been dragging this sack around for almost three hours now.”

“You don’t believe in peaceful democratic persuasion then?” asked Sooty, as he pushed his house key into the lock.

“Democracy has gone right down the plughole in the post capitalist world,” said Jason, “along with a lot of other things.”

The boy must have been parched. He gulped down two glasses of water then asked for a third. They were sitting in the kitchen. “You’ve got a nice place here,” Jason said as he gazed around. “Big mortgage?”

“Rented,” replied Sooty. “I bumped into Liz Fearnley last night. She told me you only caught the climate change bug during the April heatwave.”

“A bug?” objected Jason. “Do you think I’m sick or something? I’ll recover if I take enough ibuprofen? That’s the sort of daft thing Liz would say!”

“Sorry. My words not hers,” said Sooty. “Committed to the cause. Is that any better?”

“Did you never have an epiphany?” asked Jason. “A moment of insight when the veil fell away, when you saw into the heart of reality?”

“I probably have to be honest – but not as recently as last April,” answered Sooty as he opened the fridge door. “I was going to make lunch around now. You’re welcome to join me. It’ll just be quiche and salad.”

“Yeah, okay then. Thanks,” mumbled Jason in a way that suggested to Sooty he was disguising his surprise. “I feel a bit peckish.” As Sooty set about the preparations Jason said, “You want to know what my nickname for Liz is? Miss Means Well.”

“Oh really? There are worse things to be,” remarked Sooty. “I’d like to know a bit more about your epiphany?” The climate change warrior predictably bristled a bit, wanting to know his teacher’s reason for asking. “Well yesterday morning it sounded like the only epiphany you might have had was a nihilistic one. Our experts couldn’t be trusted, our science was partial and flawed. Epistomologically we dwell in darkness and uncertainty. Bread with it?”

Jason concurred with the menu suggestion but not the rest. “At the theoretical level I was talking about,” he replied. “At the level of mathematical abstraction. This creed material scientists have developed that equations and algorithms alone can unlock the secrets of the universe. And in the meantime while they’re playing their interminable numbers game the planet is burning to a crisp.”

“Was this a sudden conviction that descended on you?” Sooty persisted. “You know, like Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus or what?”

Jason thought about this for a while then said, “It was a jigsaw puzzle epiphany. Did you ever do those huge multi-piece things when you were a kid?” Sooty shook his head. “Over a long period of time you accumulate numerous little islands of clarity. What you can’t tell is where they go in the overall picture, how they are meant to connect. Then suddenly one morning – eureka! For reasons almost beyond your understanding the pieces have all fallen into place and the picture magnificently completed. Except on second thoughts, ‘magnificently’ is the wrong word. You are in a state of astounding lucid confusion, to quote the poet. You see reality for the absolute shit show it actually is.”

“That reminds me,” said Sooty. “I marked your poetry exam paper yesterday. You only got a C plus, I’m afraid.”

Jason shrugged it off. “Fear not,” he joked. “I have every reason to expect your luncheon when I’ve eaten it will earn you at least a B minus.” And Sooty found himself chuckling. Liz was right about the lad. His know-all arrogance could be infuriating but you couldn’t stay angry with him for long.

Over the meal they discussed the nuts and bolts of climate science, Lovelock’s Gaia theory and the nature of ecological balance. Jason’s grasp of the statistical facts and how they had been acquired seemed impressive. “I’ve got two last questions to ask and then I’ll let you get back on the revolutionary road,” said Jason when their appetites were satisfied. Jason invited his host to fire away. “Firstly, why do you characterise social reality as an absolute shit show?” Sooty asked. “I mean for all the ignorance and criminality that informs the history of the human race, surely you have to balance that against the astonishing progress we’ve made technologically, medically, and whatever else.”

“Who was that prime minister who told everybody lucky enough to survive world war two that they’d never had it so good?” asked Jason in return. Sooty told him. “Yeah him, MacMillan. He had a bloody cheek, didn’t he! Eighty-five million dead, eighty-five million families bereaved in a war fought between a few power grabbing tyrants. You’ve never it so good, my arse! Bring on nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction as part of new deal! I’d argue you have to measure progress in terms of changes in behaviour, in human nature. Who was it when he was asked what he thought about British civilization and said he thought it would be a very good idea?” Sooty told him that too. “Anyway these are just debating points. The point is the planet has reached a tipping point. The twelfth hour is nigh. Today’s tyrants either deny it’s happening or make negligible gestures. Direct subversive action is the only thing that might possibly save us. What’s your second question?”

“What happens if it all goes pair-shaped?” asked Sooty. “I mean you cop a criminal record, a prison sentence? Or let’s say your epiphany turns out to be misguided? You realise you’re banging your head against a brick wall?”

“Then I suppose I’ll get a job as a teacher with a wandering eye in some sleepy provincial town and get comfortably numb with boredom,” he smirked, “knowing that at least I tried.”

“You should think a bit more carefully before you shoot your mouth off,” objected Sooty so venomously that Jason visibly flinched.

“I know. I’m sorry,” apologised the youth and a stony silence prevailed. “Why don’t you come down to the golf club tomorrow and play a round with me?” suggested Jason eventually. Sooty ignored this as he began clearing the table. “We can have dinner afterwards. My treat, the whole thing. It’s my way of saying thank you for this lovely lunch and for tolerating my rant. Have you ever played golf, sir?”

This expression of remorse sounded simultaneously both ludicrously over the top and genuine. “Only pitch and putt,” Sooty replied guardedly.

“Excellent! I’ll teach you how to swing a driver,” said Jason. “You’ll pick it up in no time. I assume you know where the Mountford Grange course is? I’ll meet you outside the clubhouse at two o’clock. Okay?”

“But there’s rain forecast for tomorrow,” objected Sooty. “A thunderstorm blowing in from the west.”

“Oh yeah, they’ve been predicting that for three weeks now,” Jason retorted. “Fig leaf optimism, I call it, to stop the natives from becoming too restless. Look, let’s leave it as an open invitation. If you’re not there at two I’ll just go my own sweet way. No problem, sir. Your call.”

Left to his own devices Sooty decided to abandon the garden to another day. Even in the shade his body felt unbearably clammy. He put Classic FM on, slumped down on the living room sofa and within minutes allowed the music to ferry transport him into the arms of Morpheus. Ninety minutes later it was the jingle of the phone that finally aroused him. A call from his TV provider trying to flog even more channels. On his way to the fridge to make a cold drink the image of Jason wearing that ridiculous tee shirt suddenly formed in his mind. Had the boy really been here in the house or had he just hallucinated it? Like the ghost of Banquo, generated by suppressed guilt? Not that he had anything remotely to feel guilty about. How this furnace warps your memory and imagination, he conjectured. Scraps of pompous tendentious argument resonated in his mind, alarmist scenarios and one hyperbolic image after another. No way I could have dreamt all that, thought Sooty as he searched around for the extinction rebellion literature the lad had given him. It ought to still be on the table – or at least on the kitchen work surface. Where the hell had he put the evidence? He looked in the waste bin then the downstairs toilet and utility cupboard before giving up in frustration. A cold shower will sort my brain out, he reflected, and so he took one, luxuriating in a stream of water that would normally have chilled him instantly to the bone.

Afterwards he settled down in the spare bedroom he used as a study to wade through a pile of end of year examination scripts, divided into three categories across the several classes he taught. Novel, Poetry and Shakespeare papers. Tedious but had to be done. Within the hour he landed upon Jason’s Shakespeare script, a loopy scrawl that extended to six pages. Question 1c, it began. “Macbeth is a story about the disruption of the moral and natural order.” How far do you feel this is a valid judgement of Shakespeare’s play today?

“There are two ways to answer this question,” the answer began. “There is the AI way, which is the fly way which virtually every student now uses and therefore turns the assessment methodology into a complete farce – and then there is the existential way which comes straight from the student’s heart or gut or wherever else is supposed to reside a person’s authentic self. This is my favoured way. But I’ll give you both if only to show you I can plagiarise as well as the next person.”

Sooty did a double take. What Jason was saying about using AI was an open secret that the educational establishment had yet to properly address. But nobody on the student side had ever called it out! And as a way of throwing the gauntlet in his face – well, it could not be more audacious. Several dry academically couched paragraphs followed about Hollinshead’s history of Scotland, the source material Shakespeare used, and about the divine right of kings to rule their domains unchallenged. Macbeth and his wife were usurpers, power grabbers who in murdering the lawful king Duncan were defying the will of God. This is how a Jacobean audience would have understood the play. It upheld the ideology on which regal authority was based and warned them that anybody who actively thought otherwise would come to a very sticky end. Today of course secularism has put an end to the superstitious notion that kings are God’s representatives on Earth. Kings, Presidents, Dictators – call them what you will – with a handful of exceptions all practice some form of despotism that emulates Macbeth’s in its barbarity and paranoia, having established their authority on some arcane economic creed such as Marxism or Neoliberalism. Hence the play for a modern audience, at least a politically astute one, prefigures a situation in which Putin, Trump, and Xi now bestride the world like colossal megalomaniacs, enhancing their personal wealth, extending their national borders, ruthlessly exterminating opposition, ignoring the urgent action needed to reverse man made climate change.

And so the argument continued, predictably enough for Sooty to speed read through its various textual cross references so that he could get to the meat of Jason’s essay, the part that came from his gut. Or so he said. “To me it’s a daft question,” it began. “It seems to assume the moral and natural order are the same thing and we all know what it is and approve of it. But they’re not the same thing, never have been back in Shakespeare’s day and still not now. Nature is red in tooth and claw, as someone once said. The only law of nature is that the fittest survive. The natural hierarchy is predatory and driven by the survival instinct and home sapiens is merely part of it. As for morality it’s nothing more than an abstraction, a fictional code of rules invented by the top dogs in the human social order, designed to keep them at the top of the pile and everybody else in their grovelling subservient place. Take the divine right of kings to rule in any way they want. Who came up with that idea? Some democratically selected representatives of the whole tribal population? Absolutely not! Does Shakespeare discuss these matters in Macbeth? NO. And he doesn’t even seem to be aware of them. So what’s the point of bigging Shakespeare up by asking such a question in the first place? What he’s written is the equivalent of what we would call a slasher movie today. Two crazy psychopaths who appear to have become bored by their humdrum married life decide to go on a massive killing spree that gets ludicrously out of hand. Throw in some supernatural elements and you’ve basically got Nightmare On Elm Street meets Friday The Thirteenth meets Psycho set in the Scottish Highlands. Okay the bad guys come to a sticky end but this isn’t about morality to me. It’s a grizzly horror story, that’s all, scary entertainment. The only thing that elevates it above the mainstream is the quality of the dialogue. Full on poetic imagery coming at you from all angles. Freddie Kruger never spoke like Macbeth nor did Pearl in that movie of the same name talk like Lady Macbeth. And this is especially true in the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech Macbeth makes after he has discovered his partner in crime is dead. For me that monologue was literally a show stopper. An epiphany of despair that obliterates all other epiphanies. It made me realise how utterly insubstantial are all the belief systems on which we build our lives, the strutting and fretting we do to endow our lives with a sense of purpose. They are all just displacement activities. Their true purpose is in just sugaring over the underlying purposelessness of life. In disguising the emptiness and horror of life. And I say this as one who has recently fallen victim to his own delusional way of life as an eco-warrior. I am not by any means exempt from Macbeth’s accusation. My own sound and fury signifies nothing except a strategy that I have chosen to live by, a strategy that facilitates my continuing existence on our dying planet,”

That was the gist of it and although most of the references to horror films went over Sooty’s head the essay overall did succeed in making him question why we all revered the Bard quite so uncritically as we did. No doubt Jason would have an opinion on that too and he made a mental note to ask him next time they met. Sooty awarded the essay a straight A and scribbled at the bottom, “I enjoyed reading this for the originality of your approach and uncompromising honesty. However I strongly suggest you refrain from trampling on the sensibility of next year’s A level proper exam invigilator in the same way you have on mine here. It will backfire you into a failed grade, I fear.”

Later that evening he ordered a takeaway delivery then read a few chapters of his book while waiting for the football match to begin. The TV build up would be intolerably long with punditry, video analysis of previous games, crowds in a state of intoxicated frenzy. In Jason’s skewered way of looking at things The World Cup represented nothing but a gigantic global displacement activity, taking your mind on an extended fantasy holiday away from whatever would otherwise be oppressing it. Of course he would participate as a spectator if for no other reason than that he lacked the self-discipline to resist this great surge of tribal energy. It carried him along in its slipstream. In Macbeth’s day there existed nothing like the mock surrogate battles of soccer to displace your angst. You had to go in for the real thing with swords and axes and crossbows. Life was short, dangerous and brutal. If only Shakespeare could be resurrected to witness how 21st century technology fed humanity’s glutinous need for fantasy and displacement!

The next day Sooty woke up at mid morning. The match had gone to extra time with England winning by the odd goal in three. The media howled with triumphalism. Another stage in the fantasy to bring the trophy home had been just about accomplished. Only two more to go. Nobody but a complete curmudgeon would deny the nation its euphoria and untrammeled optimism. By midday the unbroken blue sky had become blotted with clouds. Then a WhatsAp arrived. Don’t forget the golf. 2 sharp, it read. How did you get my number? he replied and a skull and crossbones emoji bounced back. By half past one the air had thickened considerably. A dark grey pall had now taken full possession of the skies, pressing visibly in from the west and tinged at the distant edges by angry purple. Rain is coming, he texted back to Jason. Thanks but I’ll give it a miss. Suggest you do the same thing! But still for as long as another hour, as if intimidated by the drought that had preceded it, the storm improbably held off.

When it finally broke the water fell in sheets, in stair rods, in every cliche known to amateur weather watchers. A deluge that puddled the ground within seconds of hitting it, tore Sooty’s petunias into ribbons and shredded the delicate fronds of his acacia tree. He rushed upstairs to extend his view of this spectacular assault on the neighbourhood. The pavements, the parked vehicles, the houses, the tarmac all being sunk into an oceanic darkness. Visceral claps of thunder and shards of forked lightning orchestrated the inundation. And so what seemed to him to be the recrimination of the natural world continued for almost forty minutes. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, like a torturer laying aside his scourge, leaving the world drowned and excoriated.

Monday morning arrived with an eleven degrees fall in the temperature, episodic news of flash flooding, traffic accidents and damaged roofs. The cloud cover remained but in a more fluffy and benign condition. The oven had been decommissioned. So when Sooty strode into the staff room at 8.40 he expected to be confronted by colleagues, if not blissfully happy, at least animated with relief. Instead a funereal atmosphere predominated, a colloquy of serried brows and whispered exchanges. He gazed around for a conversation to latch onto. “You’ve not heard, have you?” said his friend John Turner, the history teacher, beckoning him over. “Jason Sage was found dead yesterday evening on a golf course.” An ad hoc assembly was convened and the news imparted to the student body, some of whom openly broke down and cried. The gossip and speculation reverberated throughout the day. It was an early evening local news report that finally confirmed the boy had been struck by lightning while sheltering under an oak tree close to the third green. What a waste, thought Sooty. What a stupid, reckless idiot!

He found it impossible to settle to anything after that and made his way to the riverside pub in the idle hope of bumping into Liz again and finding solace in her homespun wisdom. The deserted exterior of the premises had been ravaged by the storm. Pools of water, branches of trees and litter everywhere he looked. A booming hostelry only two days previously now gave the impression of an abandoned hulk. Inside only a handful of customers lurked around the bar. He ordered a supper of fish and chips and sat down at a table with his usual pint of lager to await the meal’s delivery. “Do you think this is the end of the heatwave now?” he asked the man who eventually brought it. “Or just a temporary blip?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, sir,” replied the waiter lugubriously.

As he climbed into bed that night Sooty remembered he had an English lesson to take with Jason’s group the next day. What did he say to them? He could not just carry on without registering Jason’s absence, pretending normality had been resumed. He needed some kind of closure and he assumed so must they, at least a few of them. By morning an idea had occurred to him. He parcelled up all their Shakespeare exam essays and shoved them into his brief case. As luck would have it when he turned up at his tutorial room the first lesson after mid-morning break a full compliment of students minus one stared uneasily up at him from their seats. “Good morning,” he began. “I’m going to give your Shakespeare essays back today and offer some feedback.” Instantly Sal picked up her pen and opened her notebook. “But before I do so I want to tell you about the one Jason wrote. It’s not like any student essay I’ve ever come across before. It made me think differently about Shakespeare and indeed about a lot of other stuff too, including Jason himself. They say that still waters run deep but it occurred to me when I got to the end of the essay that so can turbulent ones.”

He proceeded to read it out to wrapt attention and at the end nobody spoke. Sooty retrieved the other scripts, handed them around and proceeded with his debrief of their contents. Once he had finished the class was summarily dismissed and only Liz hung behind. “Sir, may I have a copy of Jason’s essay please?” she asked. “I’d like to keep it as a memento.”

“Certainly you may,” said Sooty. “I’ll have the office staff make you one.” She thanked him but still seemed reluctant to leave. Was there something else she wanted to say? An epitaph of her own perhaps? When nothing was forthcoming he asked her how Louis was, her French bulldog puppy, and Liz’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, he’s as needy as ever,” she replied.

Aren’t we all? Sooty thought as he picked up his briefcase and ushered her out of the room.