The Shock of the Fall. Nathan Filer

       prodrome n. an early symptom that a disease is developing.

      There is weather and there is climate.

      If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate’s shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper, that is the weather.

      But if you live in a place where it is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is the climate.

      These are the things we learnt at school.

      I have an illness, a disease with the shape and sound of a snake. Whenever I learn something new, it learns it too.

      If you have HIV or Cancer, or Athlete’s Foot, you can’t teach them anything. When Ashley Stone was dying of Meningitis, he might have known that he was dying, but his Meningitis didn’t know. Meningitis doesn’t know anything. But my illness knows everything that I know. This was a difficult thing to get my head around, but the moment I understood it, my illness understood it too.

      These are the things we learnt.

      We learnt about atoms.

      This illness and me.

      I was thirteen.

      ‘STOP THAT, STOP THAT AT ONCE!’

      His face turned purple, and a thick vein started throbbing on the side of his neck. Mr Philips was the sort of teacher who wanted lessons to be fun. It took a lot to make him angry.

      Jacob Greening could manage though. I can’t remember what he was doing, exactly. This was in science, so probably it had something to do with the gas taps. In the science block there were these gas taps on the tables for fuelling Bunsen burners. It might have been that Jacob put his mouth over one of them and was sucking at the gas to see what would happen – it might have been his face that was turning purple, his neck veins throbbing. Perhaps he was set to exhale it onto a lighter flame, to breathe fire.

      Jacob wanted to make lessons fun too.

      We’d met on the very first day.

      It happened like this:

      Dad had taught me to knot my tie, as promised. Jacob turned up to school without one. In registration he started whispering into my ear, as though we’d known each other for years. He was going on about needing to see the Head Teacher, how it was private, and really important. I didn’t listen properly. My mind kept taking me back to what I’d said to Mum, about hating her. She’d driven me to school in silence. I pressed my face against the cool glass, and she flicked through radio stations. I’d hurt her feelings, and was trying to decide if I cared. Jacob was still talking, only now I realized he was anxious. His words were tripping over each other. He had to see the Head Teacher, but he didn’t have a tie. That was the crux of it.

      ‘You can have mine if you want.’

      ‘Can I?’

      I gave him my tie and he wrapped it inside his collar, then looked at me helplessly. So I knotted it for him. I turned down his collar and tucked the end inside his shirt. I suppose it made us friends. He sat next to me in lessons but at breaks he’d be gone, bolting through the school gates with his rucksack held tight to one shoulder, and his anorak flapping in the wind. He had special permission to go home. This wasn’t something he talked about.

      Mr Philips crashed a fist onto our table, ‘It’s not good enough Jacob! This constant childish, dangerous behaviour—’

      ‘Sorry sir.’ Even as he said it, a smile crept across his acned face. It is strange how fast we change – he wasn’t the sort to give a shit about school ties any more.

      ‘Get out! Get out of my classroom!’

      He slowly moved to pack his stuff away.

      ‘Leave your bag. You can get it after the bell.’

      ‘But—’

      ‘Out! Now!’

      The problem with sitting next to Jacob was that whenever he drew attention to himself, everyone looked at me too. I felt a surge of anger towards him then. Here is a question:

      What do you have in common with Albert Einstein?