There were three strands, referred to disparagingly by teachers as the mad, bad or sad exit routes. The department lady had not used these terms; she was exact in her explaining. 

“Strand one, Mr Swan, is for teachers who are consistently experiencing professional difficulties. I know you will understand what that means,” she said, pausing, perhaps waiting for Edward to respond. He didn’t and so she cleared her throat and continued outlining how Strand Two related to teachers whose retirement would provide their school with an opportunity to enhance the education service provided through facilitating change. 

“Would still using chalk classify me as a bad teacher?” Edward asked, his tone an effort at banter to which the department official did not rise. 

“And the third strand, Mr Swan, relates to teachers who are in posts which are surplus to requirements.” 

Edward could tell that she was reading from some document with a level of dispassion that reflected the language of such policies. 

“Hanging on like a bad penny. That would be sad alright,” Edward said, and was about to ask about getting out on disability grounds but stopped himself in time. His hand lingered on the receiver as it clicked back into place. Edward knew he was no Mr Chips or John Keating from Dead Poets’ Society, but he was adequate, ruling out the first two strands, and as the principal he could hardly be described as surplus to requirements. That only left him with retirement on grounds of disability. Becoming permanently incapacitated. 

 Nancy, his wife, wouldn’t be happy about him getting out, he could feel her intolerance of him in recent times, it was evidenced in small ways, like how she had taken to eating her dinner midday and leaving him to eat his alone in the evening. The children were gone. They had been great parents but somewhere in those parenting years Nancy and Edward, the couple, had disappeared. Sometimes he would catch her looking at him like he was an irritating guest who didn’t know when to leave. To be there all day long would surely break her. Then again, maybe, if things went according to the plan he was hatching, she would see a more interesting side to him, and it could reignite something. 

A knock at the door jarred his nerves.  

“Martina,” Edward said, in acknowledgement of the school secretary, leaning back into his chair, the sunlight spilling over him onto the desk. Instead of softening her, the frilly blouse over the tight pencil skirt, and the always heavily made up face gave her the air of an angular drag queen, which was not as derogatory in Edward’s thinking as it might be in other males.  

“I suppose you’ve heard the latest from the Brennanites?” she asked, flicking the door closed in a movement  you might use to swat away a wasp. Her bitter tones whenever she referred to them was a comfort to Edward, it demonstrated her support for him. 

The Brennanites was the name given to those who had and were continuing to support Paddy Brennan, the P.E teacher, who had been passed over for the management position Edward occupied. They consisted of most of the male staff and a few temporary female teachers who helped out with the training of teams. GAA was a big part of the school, showing an interest, getting involved, was a solid step on the rung towards permanency. Edward had not kicked a ball in his life, never mind getting involved in training teams. This accounted for the massive shock when he got the big job, first Deputy Principal and then, less than a year later, Principal, beating, on both occasions, Paddy Brennan, the GAA king of St. Ignatius of Loyola Academy for Boys.

“No, Martina, I haven’t, you know you’re the only one who tells me anything these days. Do I want to know?”  

“They’re organising a separate end of year do.”  

“No, what they are doing is refusing to go to the official one, let them on,” Edward said, sitting up straighter in his chair, “Martina, while I have you, will you check the calendar when you’re back at your desk and let me know when would be a good time to have a mini staff meeting. I’ve a few announcements to make.”  

“You’ve had all your meetings for this year, nothing scheduled now until next August. They’ll go mad. Besides, between graduations, sports day, days for stupid stuff, mental health awareness day, whatever that’s supposed to be about, there isn’t an unplanned minute left.” 

“One class period, that’s all I’ll need. And not one where there’s a double Leaving Cert English, I can’t listen to Emma Hayes again this year about the classes missed and all the extra hours she’s putting in trying to get the course finished.” Edward said.

 
“Will I leave it open?” Martina asked, tilting her head at the jamb of the door. 

“Okay,” Edward said, knowing that it was near to the bell and he liked the lads to think he was available to them as they moved between classes. Besides, their half-formed emotions often badly expressed were the most honest thing in the school, you always knew where you stood with them. 

Paddy Brennan was everything Edward wasn’t, an enormous hulk of loud guffaws, usually either racist or sexist, who still thought that corporal punishment was no big deal. He was considered a ‘shoe-in’ for becoming the first lay deputy principal in the school. Apart from his seniority, there was a sense that he unofficially ran the place. If he said a pupil got suspended they got suspended, and if he said they didn’t, usually because they were needed for a match, they didn’t. He was the teacher who could fill the local pub on a Friday evening by declaring that he was heading there for ‘one’. Edward had been correcting copies during a free period when Father Mooney, the outgoing Deputy Principal knocked on his door. 

“Am I disturbing the work, Edward?” 

“No, no, not at all, come in Father,” Edward said, closing the copy he was working on, rising quickly from the chair. 

“Stay where you are, I just wanted to have a quick word, “ Father Mooney said as he whipped a chair from the front row of desks and placed it down at the side of Edward’s table. 

Edward could feel his hands getting clammy, the unexpected always made him nervous. 

“We’ve noticed that you haven’t applied for the job,” Father Mooney aknowledged his own statement with nods, “and we can understand why you might feel you’re not in the running—“ 

“It’s not that I don’t care about—“ 

“Oh we know, Edward, we know how much you’ve given to the school, we know you care, and here’s what I’m going to say to you, but you didn’t hear from me. You know how you can’t turn on the news or read a newspaper these days without seeing another religious person walking up steps into a courthouse, well, the Jesuits have a great reputation and we want to keep it that way.” 

Edward wasn’t sure where he was going and his confusion must have been obvious. 

“It’s like this, Edward, winning the Schools All Ireland championships is all very well, but...” Father Rooney stood up and extended his hand, “when it comes to school management, you can’t have a bully in the office. We live in litigious times. We look forward to receiving your application.” 

That was three years ago. Edward got the job of Deputy Principal and a year later when Father Mooney died suddenly from a massive heart attack, Edward got his job and became the first lay Principal the school had seen. Even without Paddy Brennan and his cohorts challenging him at every opportunity, he would have found the role too much. It was Nancy in the end who had convinced him to go for it.  

“Do you really want your legacy to be, the fella who was the lackey to the Principal?” 

“The Deputy Principal is just as important a role, Nancy.” 

“Ah, you tell yourself that, but you know better, as does everyone else.” 

Edward swivelled out of his chair to stand in the doorway, ready to greet the passing throng of pupils. As he rounded his desk, he caught sight of Paddy Brennan coming towards the office and he instinctively moved to the corner away from the door. Brennan must have already seen that he was there. 

“What’s the story with sports’ day?” Brennan said, not looking to where Edward stood, but instead stooping his shoulders slightly to look out the window, “The boul Timmons sauntering in, you’d want to do something about the latecomers.” 

Edward ignored the last comment, “We usually wait until we get a forecast for a week of decent weather and decide then.” 

“And what do you call that out there?” 

“What are you, saying, Paddy?” Edward said, an inevitable sense of defeatism in his tone. 

“I’m saying it could be pissing down next week, and if it is, you’ll be running it by yourself, nobody will put in the day they did last year in the torrential rain. A wash out, that’s what it was.” 

“So will we say this Friday?” 

“Will we say this Friday. We will not. Have you any idea the work that goes into putting teams together from each class, pitch marking, lugging equipment to the field, putting up goal posts? Will we say this Friday. You haven’t a clue, have you? Arty farty shit is all you’re good for. This Friday…” 

Edward could hear him repeat the refrain as he stalked back down the corridor. This was how Brennan and the Brennanites operated, always looking for ways to provoke. They were out to get him, a bit like how he felt the students used to be when he started in the school. 

The early years for Edward had consisted of him shouting like a maniac, ducking paper missiles, ignoring loud farts and forced persistent coughing, while threatening punishments that had his classes laughing uproariously at him. Father McGreal, the Principal at the time, must have seen something in Edward other than the teacher who couldn’t even control the first years. He made sure that Edward was given upper stream classes where the pupils had more of an inclination to want to learn, and it was he who encouraged him to put on the first ever school musical. And so, Edward became that teacher, the magnet for all the lads who didn’t play football and even some who did, much to the annoyance of Paddy Brennan, especially when his star player, Chalky White, got the female lead role in Grease.  

It was the school’s most successful show ever, sell outs every night as Chalky brought the house down when he appeared at the top of a makeshift stairs, his male athleticism bursting out of the iconic black leather jeans and off the shoulder cropped top, the costume Olivia Newton John made famous in the film version with John Travolta. The laughter, the friendly banter and hero worship of Chalky to renditions of ‘I’ve got chills…’ reverberated around the school for weeks, and Edward by association was bordering on cool with the pupils, and in the eyes of management, he was progressive. It took daring to cast the lads in female roles.  

The bell, sounding like the introductory notes to a supermarket announcement, heralded the end of a class period, the doors were wrenched open and the corridors became a raucous shove of testosterone. It was an hourly miracle that nobody was seriously injured. Edward stood in his doorway, hoping his presence meant something. Polite students greeted him politely, ‘Morning, Sir’, ‘Sir’, ‘Morning’, while the gruffer population greeted him inappropriately, often in an over familiar fashion. ‘Well, Sir, how’s she hangin’’, ‘Sir, Miss Hayes was goin’ on about ya again, think she has the hots for ya’. Edward nodded and smiled, a mime of pandering he would soon be putting behind him.  

Martina strode towards him along a path she was forming with flailing arms as she advanced. Maybe if he could have commanded that presence. She threw out random comments and orders as she moved, ‘Mullins, straighten that tie, Fogarty, mammy rang, the dentist cancelled, hey, hey, dickhead, yes, you, Tynan, less of the pushing there.’ Edward retreated into his office. 

“Now, it would appear, like I said, all the Croke Park hours have been accounted for, so there isn’t a chance that you are going to get that shower to agree to another meeting after school, your only option is finish early someday, let the little feckers off the last two periods, and my advice would be not to choose a Wednesday or Friday, Paddy Brennan has the last class free on those days, so you know the reception you’ll get.” Martina concluded by folding her arms. 

“Right.” 

“Right, what?” 

“Right, a class period it will have to be.” 

“Good. When?” 

“Today?” Edward hadn’t planned on it being that day but wasn’t any day as good as the next.  

“I’ll get Assumpta to announce it over the intercom.”  

Edward had stopped making announcements since Assumpta’s appointment into the role of Deputy Principal.  Maybe he did sound a little like her on air.  

“And in the assembly hall, not the staffroom.” 

“Right, you’re the boss,” Martina said, her forehead wrinkled in quizzical wariness. 

The room where old sets and rails of costumes were stored was to the rear of the assembly hall. It used to be where teachers would go during lunchtime to play table tennis, but the tables had long since disappeared under wooden boards, plastic containers of used make-up, rolls of carpet ends, broken chairs, black bags stuffed with forgotten props and costumes, all the detritus of any backstage theatre. Edward loved it here. While someone else might see rubbish, smell mould, to Edward it was a perfumed, technicolour world of memory. By just touching a battered stick he could see Marcus Collins as Bill Sikes slam it down on the table, the threatening thwack drawing gasps from the audience, or draped over a wooden horse was the  patchwork cloak that would always be little Gavin Murray making his debut as Joseph, Gavin who now had his own music school. Edward sang-whispered, ‘may I return to the beginning…’ to the dusty air. He would miss this space and everything it had meant to him. How appropriate that it would provide him with his exit ticket. 

Edward watched the staff gather from a slit in the fold out stand he was waiting behind. They entered and sat down according to their personalities. Some loudly protesting at the inconvenience, some smiling delightedly at avoiding a final class, others quickly settling with a bundle of copies for correction stacked beside their chair. The suspicious, more belligerent ones hung back at the door or the wall; to sit down would indicate compliance. Edward felt nothing for any of them and that was what made it all the easier. It was time for his swan song. 

He had confided in Martina at the last-minute realising he needed help but also feeling that he owed her that much. She closed the door behind Paddy Brennan, the last to arrive, went to the lectern, pressed a phone and stood to one side. To an astonished audience the opening piano thrills of You’re the One that I Want reverberated around the hall, heads spun left and right as John Travolta sang about his multiplying chills, and then as soon as Olivia Newton John came in with her, ‘you better shape up…’ a frozen pantomime of disbelief stilled the room as Edward, wearing the costume Chalky White had worn all those years earlier, emerged from behind the stand, gyrating across the space in perfect choreography with the music. It was a splendid fit, if anything Edwards’ slimmer nonathletic stature gave it a sexier touch than Chalky’s youthful maleness had. Edward swung his hips, his bare shoulders swaying in rhythm to the moves, he skipped across the room in black strappy high heels, perfectly lip syncing to ‘…you better shape up…’ and pouting at an invisible Danny. Edward made use of all the props available to him, seductively holding on to the lectern as he squatted in time with the music, using the span of his arms to drape himself along the length of the fold-out stand, making sure, with one hand on his hip, the other at the back of his head that he was facing Paddy Brennan for the line, ‘…I need a man…’, even beckoning to Paddy with an inviting finger to which for one split second it looked as if Paddy was about to follow.  

Unlike the movies or even a stage production there was no audience participation, no ‘oh, oh, oh, honey,’, not even an unseen toe tap.  

As the music faded Edward bowed theatrically low, coming up to catch invisible single roses being thrown at him. He then pranced jeté style across the room, his swan arms rippling the air, as he exited back behind the stand, not once turning his back on his audience. Martina marched to the lectern, pressed the phone and said that Mr Swan had asked her to announce that they could return to their classes or head on home a little bit earlier than usual. Her tone and expression betrayed nothing. 
Edward again watched from the slit as animation returned to the teachers. They moved in silence. No noisy chatter, no guffaws, no sniggering, no eye rolling, no elbow nudging, no whispering behind hands.  

Putting the costume back in the black bag along with green, permed wigs and angel wings from the same show a dead butterfly caught Edward’s eye. A monarch. Edward had a vague memory of commotion being caused during one of the live shows by a butterfly on the stage. Was it this one? Edward marvelled at how, even in death, it looked majestic in its orange, black and dotted white splendour.  

Or maybe it wasn’t dead, maybe it was just sleeping, hibernating, maybe it would live to disrupt again.