The Man in 6B

               Harry’s fingers hurt. He’d spent the last two hours using a staple remover to take down all the work on the walls of his classroom. It was the last day of the year, an inset day, and so it all had to come down. Every essay, every drawing, every poorly scaled bar chart. The names on the work felt as familiar to him as his own, but each year on this day he made a point of reading them aloud, one last time, as he packed things away. Sabrina Church. Tyler Cox. Vikas Bashir. Alex Truss. Over the years there had been so many names. Class sizes had increased in the past decade, but Harry estimated that he’d read aloud some six hundred names over the course of his career. Six hundred ten-year-olds who were no longer ten-year-olds. Six hundred people, adults, out there in the world, most of them alive and well, he hoped, and most of them having fond memories of one particular teacher from primary school, he also hoped.
               Jane knocked on the door. It was almost time for leaving speeches. Harry smiled and said he’d be right behind her. He liked Jane. She was young and enthusiastic, and when he'd observed her with the little ones she taught, the energy in the room felt cartoonishly magical, like she’d stepped out of one of the books she would read to them. She’d last, he thought. He’d seen a lot of young teachers come through the school, and he could tell when someone wasn’t going to last. They carried a tension in them that permeated every lesson, and the kids would pick up on it. He’d walked in on many teachers crying at their desks, but that wasn’t the strangest thing in the world. Tears after a hard day at work could be reasonably expected every now and then. It was those that he’d found crying before the day had even begun that would never make it.
               Throwing a stack of solar system drawings into a box destined for recycling, Harry finished up tidying and looked around at the bare walls of the room. Besides one year of black mould, he’d taught in this room every year for twenty-three years. He’d slept in it, drank in it, laughed in it, screamed in it, and cried in it. When his wife had left him, coming to work in this room was the only thing that had kept him glued together as a man. The room felt like a person to him. A friend that embraced him every morning at 8am. Room 6B. Another name to say out loud.

               Each year the speeches got longer. Barry, the headteacher, had hit a homerun a few years back with an admittedly beautiful tribute to a beloved deputy head who was retiring after four decades at the school. There had been both tears and belly laughs, and now he was forever chasing that high, rambling tirelessly in his commendations of teaching assistants who had worked six months on a fixed-term contract. More people left every year too. They were only halfway through the speeches, and the palms of Harry’s hands were already stinging from the punctuative applause. He made a mental note to half the speed of his claps for the next leaver.
               As Barry handed off the token gifts of wine and chocolate to a trainee reception teacher who had often cried in the mornings, he headed back to his little step ladder, allowing his face to reconfigure from a wide smile into a look of sincere sadness. He had a surprise announcement. Anita was leaving, moving to a new school across the city, joining her husband who had moved there a few years ago. There were gasps, and Harry felt a sickness rise up to the root of his throat. Anita was just as much a part of the school’s furniture as Harry. He’d met her there twenty years ago, and they’d fallen in love.
               People were jokingly heckling Anita from the crowd, booing her decision to leave their lives. Others were choking up. Harry remained stunned, unable to look at her, staring only at Barry, who nervously glanced at him every few seconds. In fact, a lot of people were nervously glancing in Harry’s direction, but he ignored it all. The only thing worse than being humiliated is other people knowing you’ve been humiliated. It was something that Harry had learned to live with, but not out of choice. Ever since the rumours had first started to circulate about his wife cheating on him with another teacher in the same school, people had looked at him the same way they were looking at him now: out of the corner of their eye, empathy dripping from their upturned lips, regarding him like a wounded puppy. He would often receive a reassuring hand on his shoulder, and it was always surprising when it was a relatively new member of staff who provided it, meaning that the sympathetic looks of his long-term colleagues only really extended to the point where they were able to gossip to the new hires about this sad old man’s pathetic life. He didn’t hold it against them, he knew that people loved stories, loved telling them and loved hearing them, but he did wish that everyone would just be a little bit more subtle about it.
               Anita was talking now, and from the cadence of her voice, Harry figured she had been talking for quite some time. He’d zoned out, staring at Barry without thinking. He turned his full attention to Anita now, swallowing the bowling ball that had been attempting to roll up his windpipe. Unlike everyone else in the room, Anita was making a very strong point of never looking at Harry, at all. She seemed to make eye contact with every other person there, but whenever her gaze drifted towards where Barry stood at the back of the crowd to her left, she whipped her eyes back to the centre. This had been the general blueprint of their relationship for quite some time now.
               As the clapping began again, Harry forced his hands together. They felt like bricks. Barry reached behind a table and produced a large, framed photograph of all the staff from Anita’s first year at the school. She cried out in surprise, and then held it, taking a closer look, pointing out faces long forgotten. She had once told Harry that people she knew from her childhood would often show up in her dreams, the faces of those who were once her best friends now just the faces of passersby in dreams about nothing. Harry wondered if his role had also been reduced to that of an extra.
               In the photograph, Anita and Harry were stood right beside each other. Young and beaming. It was obvious from the look on Barry’s face that he hadn’t considered this fact until now, and he was doing an awfully good job of urgently talking around it, asking pointed questions about the other people in the picture. Harry turned and walked away, not really thinking about where he was going, letting his feet make the decision for him. After some meandering down the empty halls, his footsteps echoing and lonely, they took him back to 6B.

               Harry sat at his desk, opening and closing his laptop three times in as many minutes, forgetting each time that he had nothing left to do. He was in a daze. The room felt hot and uncomfortable, but he couldn’t face going back out. Too many eyes. Too many eyes following him and looking for a sign of what he was thinking. They’d seen these signs before, some of them. Some of them had even walked in on him crying at his desk, before and after school. But that had been a long time ago.
               He stood up and walked over to the window. The field was still and quiet, the comforting sounds of children playing, silenced for now. The only thing out there that hinted at their existence was the two football nets, child sized. For the longest time they hadn’t had such extravagancies at the school. The goals they’d used for football had been two wooden posts, hit into the ground with a mallet at the start of each day. Harry would stand at this window and watch the kids playing. He’d watch as they would score a goal, celebrate, then chase after the ball as it rolled away into the distance. For a while he figured there was some kind of lesson to be learnt from this, perhaps something to do with remaining humble in victory. But eventually his rational mind won out, and he purchased the two nets that now stood there with his own money, installing them on a Sunday afternoon. At lunch on Monday, the kids ran out onto the field and lost their minds. They spent five minutes running their hands across the metal of the goalposts and dangling from the crossbar before they remembered that they actually wanted to play football. Harry watched from the window with a smile on his face.
               There was a knock at the door. Harry turned sharply, prepared for the worst, but softened when he saw that it was Jane. She came in and crossed the room quietly, her head down. Harry had never seen her like this, and he found himself feeling somewhat guilty that he was, in a roundabout way, the cause of such a severe change in her disposition.
               “Are you okay?”
               Jane seemed shocked he would even ask. “Am I okay? Are you kidding?”
               Harry shrugged and turned back to the window. He didn’t feel as hot anymore. His heart rate had returned to normal. The room felt like home once again.
               “Tom told me what happened. I…I had no idea. I’m sorry Harry. That must have been awful. Seeing them together, every day. I would... Fuck, I would go insane.”
               Harry turned and regarded her with a raised eyebrow. It was the first time he’d heard her swear. He was surprised at how much it suited her. “It was a long time ago, now. Life goes on. She seems happy, there’s nothing to be done.”
               They stood in silence for a while. Outside, two crows had landed on the crossbar of one of the goals. They were dancing back and forth across the pole, pecking at each other, briefly taking flight then landing again. Harry felt like he was looking into the future, long after he was gone. The goalposts still there, the school still there, the birds, always there. Jane gently touched the side of his arm with the back of her hand, making him turn to face her. She looked a bit more like herself now. Her smile was sad, but kind. For once, the sympathy didn’t make him feel small.
               “Seriously, how did you do it? Coming here every day, seeing them. You’re probably the best teacher here, you wouldn’t have struggled to find a better situation. Why didn’t you move schools?”
               Harry looked at Jane, acknowledging the sincerity of her question with his eyes, then allowing his gaze to drift around the room. Empty seats - thirty little red chairs, neatly tucked under desks. Thirty clothes-hooks screwed to the wall - patiently awaiting rain jackets and book bags. The room was empty but it wasn’t really empty. The children weren’t there but their presence could be felt in every inch of the space. Six hundred names floated in the air, just beyond the visible spectrum. If Harry closed his eyes, he could see their faces, hear them laughing. He looked at Jane, smiling now.
               “Because this is my classroom.”

               At 3.30pm, Harry closed the blinds on the windows and locked his desk drawers. He put on his suit jacket, straightened his tie, and headed for the door. Before he opened it, he turned out the lights and paused in the darkness of the room.
               He spoke her name aloud:

               Anita.