Here we are, my September flash fiction piece.
Obsessed
Sitting in the church, my memory started the familiar replay of everything he had put me through. He, being Mr Mills, my French teacher and my tormentor. From the day I started at secondary school, he had been obsessed with me.
My mind took me back to the detention room. It was just him and me. Nothing unusual in those days. No-one cared that a teacher and pupil were alone together. The other teachers were just glad to get away on time.
He would sit me in the middle of the room and walk around me, jeering almost, as I completed the lines he required as punishment.
‘You’ll never amount to anything’, ‘You’ll always be a failure if you don’t work hard.’ Then the accompaniment of a clip around the ear, or a flick on the back of the neck with a ruler, often came. He would lock the door, and only open it to let me free when he deemed that I had received enough humiliation.
After both of my parent’s untimely deaths, I was raised by my aunt and late uncle. I was understandably a wayward child, and I admit I was a handful, especially for a childless couple. I tried to tell them about Old Millsy but they dismissed my complaints.
‘Just try to keep out of trouble,’ they said. ‘Keep your head down and work hard.’
It didn’t even stop after I had left school. I got a job as a mechanic and the bastard even started bringing his car to the garage. He asked for me personally and would interrogated me about what I had done to his car, and why.
Then I didn’t see him for weeks. And although I should have felt relief, I felt a sense of unease.
‘I thought you would have heard,’ my aunt said, when I eventually asked her, ‘he’s had a stroke. He’s in hospital, and it doesn’t look good.
It was her who persuaded me to come today, and it hadn’t been as hard as maybe she had imagined. I had wanted to come. To make sure he was gone; get some closure I think is the phrase in vogue.
‘It’s a real shame your mum isn’t here.’ The words hit me like a thunderbolt and brought me back to the present.
‘What?!’ I whispered as loud as I thought I could get away with, staring at her.
‘Oh yes, they knew one another very well. I’m sure I’ve told you before. Your mum even asked him to keep an eye out for you, before she passed. It was just a shame that he was in France for her funeral.’
That trip that I had done everything to avoid, and the trip that I needn’t have worried about, as it coincided with my mother’s funeral.
‘Oh yes. I wasn’t surprised when you started becoming obsessed with him. Just like your mother!’
She was right I supposed. With him dead and buried, who would I obsess over now?
Janet Stock 