Two Truths And A Lie

I’m nobody’s fool. You wouldn’t survive five minutes in this business if you were. And it doesn’t matter if you’re as savvy as the Artful Dodger, if they catch even a whiff of spring grass about your feet they’ll try and have one over on you. This year, I’ve got twins in my class, monozygotic bloody twins. They’re the worst. They’re not those twins who try and carve out their own identities either. These two work their identical credentials like the Weasley’s, if the Weasley’s were black, and girls, and non-magical. Charity and Joy.

Anyway. Usually they put twins in different classes, I have no idea why I ended up with both of them, but I dealt with it by putting them as far apart as I could without invoking some kind of in-classroom territory war. Some of these kids get stupidly attached to their allocated seat. So Tuesday last week, I’m writing the names of Henry the eighth’s wives on the board, and I KNOW Charity loves this stuff, so when I get half way through Catherine Howard, I call out “Charity, the survivor, please?” I like to give everyone a chance to shine, you know. Anyway, to cut a long story short, everyone starts to titter, so I turn around and address Charity directly. “Charity, I think you know this one!” and the tittering gets worse! Charity just sits there, staring at me insolently, and eventually, just as I am beginning to muster myself for a telling off, which I don’t like doing, the answer cuts through the tittering from the other corner of the room.

A split second of confusion and they think I’m an idiot now. Oh, I laughed along with it, ha ha, very funny, you swapped places, but frankly it’s about as funny as a knock knock joke. But now they thing I’m weak, don’t they? Easily beguiled. Gullible. I tried to set them straight with a round of “two truths and a lie” on Wednesday fifth period, and no one pulled the wool over my eyes there, not even once, but clearly not everyone was convinced, which is probably why Solomon thought he could get away with it.

“Solomon, where’s your homework?” I said. To be fair to the kid, he usually hands SOMETHING in, though quality varies.

“My dog ate it” he said. I could not believe what I was hearing. I just looked at him, waiting for him to break.

“My dog ate it. To save my Gran’s life.” The class was silent. I don’t usually go too nuts for the theatrics, but I could have won an Oscar for the way I pulled up a chair and waited for more, yet all I got for my efforts was “She was going to choke.”

“Solomon, please” (I tried to adopt my most gracious attitude here) “start at the beginning. Let’s all hear how the dog came to save your Gran’s life by eating your homework.”

He looked a bit uncomfortable, to be honest, but you pull a stunt like this with me then you are going to feel uncomfortable. Clearly he didn’t know where to start, so I gave him an in. “you left school on Tuesday afternoon…”

“Yeah. I, I left school on Tuesday afternoon and as I came out the gate, this, this, this, MAN came round the corner.”

“Go on” I urged him. The class was as quiet as I have ever hear them.

“Yeah, this man, and he was blue. Like, his whole face and everything was blue, except his lips, which were kind of lip coloured. But not just blue, it was like he had patterns all over him, pictures, and words, and some bits that were just blue, but I didn’t have time to stop and look, because he started to chase me.”

Solomon was hitting his stride now, and I let him run.

“He started to chase me, and I had no idea, but I ran away, and he chased me all down the hill, and when I got to the bottom, the cars were all blocking the road, so I had to run up the bonnet of the font one, and down the back of it and then I jumped onto the bonnet of the next one, and he was still behind me, so I got back down on the other side of the road, over the cars, and there was this kid there, and he had a bike, and I grabbed the bike off him and shouted sorry, and started peddling towards home, but he was STILL following me, and then he grabbed an electric scooter off another kid and it must have been modified or something, like with rockets maybe, because he was catching me up really fast, so I rode the bike up this ramp into a skip and then I jumped the skip, which you can’t do in a scooter, but he did a massive flip and landed back on the road, and was STILL chasing me.”

At this point, half of me was running out of patience and half of me was intrigued.

“So then, I got to my Gran’s house and I ran in and I slammed the door, and my Gran was there going ‘Solomon what’s wrong, what’s wrong” cause I was all panting and looking at the door and stuff, and then the dog started barking at the door and we pushed the chair up against it and ran through to the kitchen. ‘I don’t know.’ I said. ‘This weird green man has been chasing me since I came out from school, I don’t know what he wants.’ Well, she started wailing, ‘Oh, I knew one day he would come for you, my darling, we mustn’t let it happen, Oh Solomon’, all that kind of thing, and I was like ‘what? Who?’ ‘The inked man, the inked man, our family is cursed to be hunted down by generation after generation, all because of what your great great grandfather Solomon the first did!’ ‘What did he do?’ I asked.” (He was kind of doing voiced now and everything.) “’What did he do?’ and then she said ‘Your great great grandfather killed a man, the great grandfather of this man who is chasing you. It was a fight over a woman. And some gold. It was a fight over a woman and some gold, and now the first son of each first son is honour bound to don the mantle of the tattooed man and repay the debt and be revenged!’”

“And the homework?” I interrupted.

“Yes” he said, “I’m coming to that. So, I said ‘quick, we must find a weapon and hide!’ And Gran grabbed a rolling pin and I grabbed a leg of lamb from the freezer, and we ran down into the cellar. Well, that turned out to be the wrong thing to do, because after only a few minutes he had broken into the house and was coming down the steps. I tried to hit him with the ham, but he ducked and grabbed it off me, and then my Gran just dropped the rolling pin in fear. ‘Tell me the final resting place of grandmother Esmerelda and the diamond amulet’ he shouted, but Gran, who had my school bag by her feet, shouted ‘no! You’ll never get it out of me, even if you torture me, I shall never tell!’ and then she reached into my bag, grabbed a piece of paper and started shoving it in her mouth! She was choking and spluttering and I could tell she couldn’t breathe, and just then, Hercules – that’s her dog- launched himself off the top step from the kitchen and landed right on the man’s back and knocked him onto the floor, and then I ran over to the man and started to tie his hands behind his back, and Hercules ran over to my gran and put his mouth over hers and then he…ate my homework.”

“Right.” I said. “That is some story. Can you get the maths to me by 9am tomorrow morning please, with an extra paragraph on the meaning of the work ‘poppycock’?”

Solomon said he would and I dismissed the class. I had made it known, I think, how ridiculous excuses like that will not get anyone out of a piece of my homework. I don’t think I will have any more trouble.

I will tell you one thing though, that Solomon will never go anywhere in life.