Between Us by Mhairi McFarlane EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: McFarlane
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Women’s Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
‘Miss, Miss, MISS. Miss? Dirty weekend with your boyfriend? Miss!’
Amir gestured at the trolley case standing sentry behind Roisin’s desk,
which she was poorly concealing by draping with a cagoule. He was in the
naughty-yet-good-natured category among her students, and she responded
accordingly.
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‘Very clean actually, Amir. A spa weekend with some of my girlfriends.’
If there was one thing that both her childhood and her career had taught
Roisin Walters, it was that lying to kids might not be noble, but generally got
the job done.
‘A SPA. Like, a sauna?’ He chewed his pen and made a cheeky face.
‘Back to the text, please. I’m going to collect your papers in …’ She
glanced up at the wall clock, her ever reliable teaching assistant. ‘… five
minutes’ time!’
‘Miss,’ Amir persisted, then seeing her under-her-brow look of scepticism:
‘No no no – it’s about the book!’
Roisin rolled her eyes. ‘Go on.’
‘Right, everyone thinks Great Expectations is good, like. A posh book.
Which is why we’re studying it in an English Lit lesson.’
‘Yes?’ Roisin knew a time-waste trolling when one began, and so did
Amir’s peers, waiting with delighted anticipation for the payoff.
MPs who ran the parliamentary session down with pointless, aimless
debate were filibustering; online arguments that involved repeated requests
for evidence, made with faux-sincerity and excessive civility, was an
exhaustion tactic called sealioning.
Roisin felt neither filibusterers nor sealioners could hold a candle to a
class of restless Year 10s in a so-called doss subject on a sunny Friday
afternoon, right at the end of term.
Last week, one of Amir’s accomplices, Pauly, had arrived at Roisin’s
lesson with a breed of tiny, furious-looking dog she was told was called a
‘Brussels Griffon’ in an old-fashioned white-wheeled pram. Pauly was
allegedly ‘childminding’ this creature ‘for his nan’. The canine, known as
Sprout and resembling an abandoned Jim Henson project, had caused a
disruption akin to the President landing in Air Force One.
‘And this Dickens book is well old. 160 years old,’ Amir continued, in his
quest for enlightenment.
‘Correct.’
‘So, in another 160 years – that’ll be … the 3080s,’ he said, pretending to
count off his fingers. Comic pause. ‘Will everyone in here reading Fifty
Shades of Grey, yeah? It will be a well old proper book.’
The class responded with the required laughter, Amir grinning proudly.
Roisin waited it out.
‘I doubt it, but that’s still a question worth asking, thank you, Amir.’
She judged that with what was left of this lesson, subverting Amir was
more fruitful than trying to get everyone back to pondering the motives of
Abel Magwitch.‘It’s because the worth of literature is not only determined by the passage
of time,’ Roisin said.
‘My mum and my auntie really like it though,’ Amir said, to more
cackling. ‘My auntie reads it on her Kindle … in the bath. If you catch my
drift.’
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