#bye doherty you old bastard

[hannahssimblr]

I don’t mean to slam the paper onto the examiners desk quite this hard. Hard enough that he looks over the rim of his glasses with alarm. He doesn’t say anything to me, nor I to him, because I can’t remember the circumstances under which I am allowed to speak in the exam room. 

He peers at my paper, my name and exam number scrawled on the top in the boxes where they are supposed to be, nods, and looks away. I feel he should say or do something, something in acknowledgement of the fact that I’ve just completed the leaving cert, but he might not even know that, and if he does, he might not care.

The moment doesn’t feel as momentous as it should.

So I exit quietly into the hallway. Empty, and warm from the bright June sun that streams onto the old linoleum flooring. I’m conscious that this is the last time I will ever see these floors, and that the steps I take over them are my last, so I do what I did when I was a kid. I try to remember this moment, I try to savour it, to linger in the way that I used to linger in the holiday resort hotel room after we packed our bags, to preserve the memory.

I realise quickly that I don’t want to remember this place. I might like to forget all the details instead.

Mr. Doherty is by the main door, I don’t know why. Maybe he is on duty to ensure that nobody was hiding cheating materials in the bathrooms, and if so he’s not doing a good job. He’s chatting the ear off the secretary, leaning on the reception desk and adjusting his cap over his big bald head as he jaws on about some recent event surrounding the football players who practise at his local pitch.

He spots me approaching and makes a big show of checking his invisible watch. 

“Turner! Leaving the exam a bit early, are you?”

“Finished it, sir.”

“I hope you took the time to check your answers,” He winks at the secretary as though she’s in on whatever joke this is, “I hope you didn’t make some silly auld mistake, now, did you?”

“Don’t think so,” I reply, as though it actually matters, as though he or anyone in the Berlin art academy has a remote interest in my applied maths exam. 

“Where you off to now then, the pub, I’d say, are you?”

I shrug noncommittally, “Might.”

“Well, don’t go mad,” He pokes the tip of his tongue between his front teeth, snickering, and glances quickly at the secretary to check that she’s laughing too, and she is, sort of, more smiling politely in that way that women do when they’re trying to placate men like him, but I bet he can’t tell the difference. “I don’t want to see you around the town tonight in some awful state, falling about, and whatnot, as you’re known to do.”

I just smile, “No, sir.”

“No, Mr Turner?”

“No. You’ll never see me again, sir.” I head straight for the door and heave it open.

The sun blinds me.

I breathe in the air, and it’s the same, everything looks and smells and feels the same as it always has, but it isn’t.

This is the last time. It’s finally over.

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