BEAMERS WAS PUBLISHED IN INTERTITLES: AN ANTHOLOGY AT THE INTERSECTION OF WRITING AND VISUAL ART, PROTOTYPE PUBLISHING, EDITED BY JESS CHANDLER, AIMEE SELBY, HANA NOORALI AND LYNTON TALBOT, 2021

The face in its red state is called a beamer. The process of the blood filling the face is called taking a beamer. Taking a beamer triggers an infinite feedback loop. The redder the face gets, the more they point and say the word beeeeeeamer. They lick the pads of their fingers, point them at you and make a sound with their mouths, like spit hissing on a hotplate. Multiple hissing hotplates. Sympathetic nervous system, nowhere to go. Nothing to be done but sit it out and hope their attention is distracted elsewhere, to a fresh beamer. Or a teacher arriving to unlock the classroom door. 

Sean Abernethy sits on the carpet with his legs splayed loosely before him like a baby gorilla. Mrs Slater has stepped out and left us quietly at work in the grid. There is a fat hot fizzing pushing us against the walls. Pinned, afraid, and glee inside the accelerating eruption. He’s under the longest table in the room, eight pushed together. Small shining eyes in a wide face in the semi gloom. Laughing, bellowing, flinging out random objects pulled from the tabletop. Regarding his missiles, riding the wave, catching his breath. With each fling there’s a formless roar from Sean Abernethy and a swell of panic from everyone else. In between flying objects, someone tries to find a safer position by edging along the wall to a new spot where there are already several people jostling to get behind each other. Tables get turned. 

Lynn Beattie has a spike. The hair on top of her head is gelled upward, vertical spikes. This only works with straight hair but everyone does it, so the wavy-haired people with their gelled tufts look like guinea pigs. Lynn Beattie has full soft cheeks and a small wet mouth. Translucent skin with freckles floating beneath. There is something of a middle-aged woman about Lynn Beattie, it may be the length of her school skirt. She is eleven and hilarious. The spikes shake slightly with some of her movements. When Lynn Beattie gets excited, she screws up her face tight, raises both hands to it, pointed inward, and rapidly moves her fingers in front. Two taut fast spiders dancing at her screwed-shut eyes. Then she turns to you, facing you with her face still screwed, and does the same to your face, her rapid spider hands hovering at your eyes. Then they turn back to her face, then yours again. And all the while she’s making this small sustained sound, a tight squealing. A sound of something at the very edge of itself. At morning break we all get ejected into the playground. A song by Stevie Wonder has just been released, the one about the telephone. There’s a payphone in the playground, on the wall at the foot of a ramp. When we spill out of the glass doors, Lynn Beattie walks over to the payphone, lifts the receiver on its steel cord and sings the whole song into it while I watch. 

Winter afternoon, 3pm light falling, some yawning. Leftover from six weeks ago, the north wall of the classroom has been refashioned as the flight deck of a spaceship. Elaborate controls framing a view of deep space. Mrs Slater disappears into the cupboard to the right of deep space, reappears with a cardboard box and carries it over to the windowsill at the back of the room. She hands out white paper, a square for each of us. We fidget and wait, no one speaking. We’ve to put in the box any questions we have, she says, and it’s anonymous. We can ask things, she says, things we want to know but have been too embarrassed to ask. The box gets brought to her desk at the front of the room. One by one, the squares get taken out and unfolded. Someone’s written what’s a blow job. Mrs Slater tells about how this is something her sister likes to do, to get ready for sexual intercourse. Someone else has written what’s it like to be in love. Mrs Slater says, imagine the love you have for a pet. It’s like that but bigger. 

The first house is a small granite bungalow at the edge of town. Once a gate house for estate staff, now for rent. In the front room, the living room, two public service announcements, on different days, forty seconds each. In one, a cliff face explodes in slow motion, a volcano erupts, an industrial drill bores into a vast block of rock, and the acronym is chiselled into a granite headstone. There is a deep rumble. John Hurt speaks. So far it’s been confined to small groups, he says. But it’s spreading, he says. Read the leaflet that’s coming. In the other, the camera glides past icebergs at night. There is bass hum and ice creak foley. Inscribed with the acronym, icebergs crash into the sea. The camera submerges. This all happens after the 6 o’clock news. Then the leaflets drop onto all the doormats at once. In the school - single storey and built from pink composite blocks, the acronym in people’s mouths is: Got Aids Yet? 

First day of secondary school, new smells and a shift in timbre. We’re swimming in a wider channel. Mr Murray the guidance teacher opens his desk drawer and takes out a short, stiff, brown leather strap. He’s making a general introduction to his classroom. We sit at our single desks facing him. He says it’s called a tawse. He shows us how it’s forked. The brown leather is split in two, half-way down its length. He tells us it’s deliberate - it’s designed that way so it hurts more. He had it made. He tells us he will use it. 

Erotic charge, electric jolt of looking down and seeing an upright Tampax, index of her, analogue of wanting.Vertical in the inside pocket of her blue 501 denim jacket, hanging on the back of her black plastic chair. Negative shape, index of outside her, in Modern Studies. On the outside pocket of her jacket, a red hammer and sickle badge. On mine, a gold baby Lenin inside a circle inside a radiating star. Modern Studies, Mr Paterson vibrating. Keys jangling like bursting, red face like conflicting chemicals pushing to get out. He has the flicked hair of a young liberal. Grey suit trousers with a little taper and a slight shine. He’s a chalk breaker. His handwriting is rangey. All capitals and then suddenly none. His speech booms, then trails off. Pausing, looking out at the faces in tables of twos. Maybe it’s for emphasis. Probably it’s the combing of a blank mind for what comes next. Pausing, pacing in front of the blackboard with the blood beneath the surface, fingers through his hair. Frustrated the day after the 1987 general election, he puts me in the cupboard at the back of the room. 

Lesbian becomes lemon in the polyphonic glissando slide of an Aberdeen football chant. They ask Poofy Davies who teaches us German for the word for lemon. He gives them the word, and it gets pulled into their rhyme. The chant is evolving. Poofy Davies shifts about a little, watching a while, hand on hip at the front of the class. I can see the shape of his vest beneath his shirt. He watches until handclaps begin colliding with the chant syllables. Eventually he interjects. Alright now, settle down. He and I are in silent competition with each other. When chanting is directed at me, it’s diverted away from him. Back and forth it goes. 

IRA, Mr Brett is saying. IRA. He says it in a Northern Irish accent over and over. Then he says the word Barry over and over in a Northern Irish accent. He isn’t Irish, but Barry the new boy is. We all sit in a semi-circle while Barry winces. Beamer. The teacher’s foot in its black shiny loafer shakes side to side. The stage remains unlit at the far end of the room, the shaking of Mr Brett’s foot the only movement in the wide dark drama hall. Us in silence. Then the bell. 

A tall girl with fine hair, a slightly protruding top lip and something of a deer about her face, frequently faints. The fainting mainly happens in the thick rush between classes. Two lane traffic in the corridors. Bottlenecks of bodies opening out into the wide reverberating main hall, with multiple corridors branching off it. The biggest thoroughfare. The girl is splayed face down on the floor, static with closed eyes, hair spread out the way it fell. People surge past her, water parting for a boulder. We’ve been told that she’s doing it for attention and that we must ignore it. Walk on. 

In General Science, Mr Kindness passes by our table of four. Handing out pH strips, he calls me Progeny, his wordplay. He asks do you know what Progeny is? I say no. Offspring, he says. It’s offspring. And continues on his way with a tinkling trolley of beakers. Another afternoon he gets me off my stool and onto my feet, pulling me up by my rattail, further up – beamer - until I’m on my toes. 

The second house is larger, granite and two storeys. It looks over a valley. In the dip, a road and a river run parallel, west to east. Daylight is coming and the school bus. Half the road shaded by pines is black ice. Five of us from the village wait on the verge. Two brothers stand apart, smoking with their early moustaches. The oldest has frosted ginger hair and a Rucanor bag between his feet, three stars above the word. He spits. It shoots out like a bar of soap from wet hands. He does this every few minutes. He’s holding a Regal between middle-finger and thumb. The burning end is pointing inward. To tap the ash, he flicks the filter in staccato with his index finger. He does it more than necessary. It’s repeated often, like the spitting. Tapping and spitting take turns. I can’t remember their names, but I can remember which farm they lived at. They have a sister and their mother is a housekeeper on the Laird’s estate. On the bus, the sister says their mother will make Baked Alaska for the Laird today. Because it’s his birthday and that’s his favourite. 

Every morning Donna Bell ties my wrists with my school tie in an alcove. The tie that isn’t compulsory but that I’ve started to wear for its edge, its diagonals. Maroon/silver strip/navy/maroon/silver strip/navy. Those of us on the school buses from the outlying farms and villages arrive earlier than the town pupils walking to school. So you hang around waiting before class. People have their spots for the waiting. Some hiding, some out in the open. Tied in an alcove, a doorway. People pass by. People pass but can’t see because my hands are behind my back. Her wearing Brut. Me silent and the wettest I’ve ever been. 

The floor of the main hall is pine lines. Turning into one of the adjacent corridors, it switches to black linoleum. The sharp catch of it underfoot. The sound of it catching under six hundred feet. I have a job as a cleaner, cleaning the school after school. Everyone is gone. It’s me, one other pupil and three or four adult cleaners. I like seeing the classrooms empty. I like seeing these adult cleaners who I never see any other time. I have long wide corridors to myself, where I swing an industrial machine around to polish the black floors. Circular, droning, heavy manoeuvring. Then back again next morning to walk on them.