Bang, Bang, You’re Dead

Father Ignatius

MF <*>

© October 2000

This story appears here by kind permission of Ruthie’s Club, its official home.

When I was a teacher, I got quite ho-hum about bomb scares.

The first was pretty memorable, though. I recall doing all the right things—keeping calm, exhibiting a relaxed attitude to keep from scaring the kids, directing them to the gazebo at the bottom of the garden for roll-call, having them file quickly, but in an orderly fashion, towards the nearest exit, teacher to be the last one out of the class, leaving all doors and windows wide open to dissipate the blast, the whole nine yards. And then the Deputy Headmistress zoomed in.

The stupid bitch chivvied the kids into panicking and created a stampeding horde that got jammed on the staircase. Two kids got trampled and broke glass to get out of the window before running, screaming and bleeding, into the suburban hinterland. We didn’t see them again that day. Apparently satisfied with her superior supervision skills, the bitch then chewed me out for the shortcomings in mine. Our relations were already as strained as they could get, though, so no loss.

We had started out on the standard, neutrally cordial terms of new colleagues, but things went rapidly downhill. This was a shame because she was intensely fuckable. Her name was Anna-Marie van der Westhuizen and she had Absolutely No Sense Of Humour. This I discovered when, as would any red-blooded male not actually dead, I started trying to chaff her into bed. Furthermore, she had a good, thick coating of Dutch Reformed Church mentality behind her.

Frankly, we had nothing in common except, maybe, strong physical attraction. I certainly lusted after her, but I wasn't sure that feeling was mutual. In the face of her scornful rejections, I fell back on the standard male rationalisation that her hostility meant she was attracted to me. I might have been right. It was moot, though, after the day I discovered her friends called her “Bunny,” and I was tasteless enough to find it funny.

My first bomb scare, I followed the guidelines enunciated by the Health and Safety Officer. I opened the classroom doors and windows “to dissipate the force of the blast,”. This is good bomb-procedure. But, because of how bad things were between us, Bunny reacted by clicking her tongue irritatedly, shutting them again, and locking them. In the words of the Health and Safety Officer, this both “contains and accentuates the blast” and “hinders escape.” It is a bomb-procedure no-no.

It turns out that Bunny knew more than we did, though. There never was a real bomb all the time I was there, but the one time she was off sick the doors and windows stayed open. When it was all over, the school stationery cupboard had been cleaned out of five hundred bucks worth of supplies. But I digress.

Bomb scares became pretty routine. We all got comfortably into the habit of trooping off down the garden where I got to stand up in the gazebo, right where the shards of flying glass would cut me up for the amusement of the kids, and take roll-call. Then we’d stand around, bored. The kids would flirt, and bullshit, and sell each other dope, and fight, and sneak off in pairs into the bushes, and so on—the standard high-school kid repertoire. When the cops and the sniffer dogs finally arrived, we’d watch them go through the whole school looking for bombs, room by room, and closet by closet, and find nothing.

The most fun for us was when the dogs would insist on someone’s locker being opened. One time a girl who’d been surprised by her period had to open her locker to reveal bloodstained underwear that the Dobermanns wanted sacrificed to them. Another time, one of the dogs that had been on the airport run sniffed out a bunch of cocaine and marijuana stashes. Bunny nearly died of shame and the relevant kids were hauled off to the cop shop. They got their best excuse ever on the well-worn, but evergreen, topic of “Why I Did No Homework Yesterday.”

After enough bomb scares, it all became routine. The whole circus took around ninety minutes so two lessons out of the teaching day were completely torpedoed.

As the final act in the drama was the interview. The cops would interview whoever took the telephone call announcing the bomb. How long did you keep the caller on the line? What time, exactly, did the ’phone ring? At what time, exactly, did the call end? What were the exact words of the caller? What time did they say the bomb would explode? Where did they say the bomb was located? Why was there a bomb at all? What kind of bomb was it? What sex was the caller? Did they sound cultured, irrational or what? Were there any background noises—machinery, street traffic, voices? Anything at all to establish a pattern of whodunit.

One day I happened to be in the front office, transferring Bunny’s latest bunch of memos from my pigeon-hole to the waste-paper basket, when the ’phone rang. The secretary was in Bunny’s office taking dictation, so I took the call. Big mistake—it was the next bomb scare, and the subsequent interview took a whole ’nother chunk out of my day.

I was mildly interested to pick up, from what was said by the cops in referring to earlier bomb threats, that there is quite an art to making these calls. A minor form of performance art, you might say. It matters a lot, in police circles, what you do and don’t say and how you do or don’t say it. They are endlessly seeking to tie different threats together against the day, they hope, when they tie the threats to individuals. Nothing upsets them more than a bomb scare that doesn’t fit into an existing pattern; it means there’s a new kid on the block and they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to go on. They have a lousy job.

The scares continued until some unsung genius in the staff-room noted that they always seemed to interrupt a test in some class or other. The penny dropped. The students, the little bastards, were arranging the bomb scares to turn tests into smoke-breaks in the sun. So much for the love of learning. Bunny made a shrewdly-worded announcement to the student body advising that, for any future bomb-scares, the school time-table would stop when we evacuated and pick up from that point when we came back inside. That is to say, bomb-scares would torpedo no tests and would cut into the students’ after-school free time. They stopped immediately, like turning off a tap. One round to the education system.

All this eventually faded into memory following an unfortunate understanding involving one of the prettier, hornier Grade 10s and me. Teaching and I decided that we weren’t for each other. Bunny, faced with the prospect of the labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures that go with dismissal in these enlightened times, invited me to resign. She unblinkingly gave me a rip-roaringly good reference, designed to get me off the premises and into a better job as soon as could be managed. I soon found myself going steadily crazy with boredom doing office work in a large corporation.

The job was “better” in terms of money only (nothing except nursing pays worse than teaching). Saturated in the stultifying boredom of well-paid routine, these offices can get pretty childish as under-utilised brains try to find ways of keeping themselves fully occupied. The office grapevine hums and thrums to the least little snippet, be it real, made up or misunderstood. There is petty bickering over the flextime records and whether someone did, or did not, arrive three minutes into core time and so on and on and yawningly on. This is the sort of atmosphere that leads to the expensive appointment of motivational consultants and productivity measurers and what all. This tends to stir up interest as people fear for their jobs and either are or are not fired, but it eventually wanes, and the cycle wearily repeats itself in a fresh enlargement of the administrative overhead.

Now and again the arrival of a physically attractive female consultant varies the monotony. She provides material for prurient speculation around the tea-table about her relationship status, her desperation level for the relief of her psycho-sexual tensions, and who the right man (or men) for the job might be. The racier spirits might make book on who the lucky guy is. The traditional lies are told with greater or lesser conviction. Interest wanes with the newcomer’s novelty value. If, through a failure in good taste, she rejects all come-ons, she inevitably takes on the label of “either-frigid-or-a-lesbian-who-cares-which?”

One day it was different. We all vacated our cubicles to do gather-round-folks and welcome the new motivational consultant. Who should it be but Bunny van der Westhuizen? What the fuck was she doing here? And as a “motivational consultant”? Her schoolmarm clothes had been replaced by executive woman power-suiting and the schoolmarm bunned hair by a knockout hair-do: short, glossy and sleeked back. The Dutch Reformed Church does Lilith Crane. She was stunning, and there were the usual anonymous, unattributable little grunting oohs and aahs from the gathered bull-penners. She caught sight of me during the chairman’s welcoming speech and looked startled and annoyed. She was not charmed at the thought of a reunion with yours truly. For my part, I scented the chance of some spiteful fun.

I approached her afterwards and, as a good Christian, she tried to start fresh with a clean slate. It was a brave but hopeless attempt.

“Hi, Bunny, whatcha doing out of the classroom?”

“Hello, again, Simon. Please don’t call me that. I was hoping we could work well together.”

“Sure thing, Bunny. Whatcha doing out of the classroom?”

“I used my retrenchment package from when the school closed to do an MBA. I’d got about as far up the tree as the school was going to get me, so I started out in a new direction. Many of the skills are relevant; men in the workplace are little different from high-school boys.”

“They sure aren’t, I’ll give you that. Fixated on pussy and getting pissed, you mean?”

She flushed. “Please don’t talk dirty. Let’s please work well together.”

“Sure thing, Bunny. I didn’t know the school had closed.”

I didn’t much care either. Frankly, it was a dump. It had even been cruelly and accurately lampooned in a Wilbur Smith novel as a cram school for spoiled brats whose parents could afford to bribe their kids’ way into enrolment when their list of sins got so black or so long that none of the respectable schools in Cape Town would take them.

“Yes, more than two years ago, now. It came as quite a shock to all of us, I must say.”

This was either monumental naïveté or monumental spin-doctoring—the dump had been on the skids for years, and everyone knew it.

“I dare say you saw the reports in the papers?”

I hadn’t actually, for whatever reason.

“No. What happened, Bunny?”

“You didn’t hear? They bombed the gazebo. Several of the children were wounded. The teacher who replaced you was taking roll-call. He was killed. Cut to pieces by the flying glass.”

The chairman turned round at my bark of laughter and came over before Bunny could fully express her deep anger at my insensitivity to the fate of my successor. Oozing professional, distinguished-grey charm, he said, “I see you two know each other?”

“I worked with Simon at my last job,” muttered Bunny, caught between wanting to slap my face and truckling to the boss.

“Yes, indeed,” I said swiftly, “Bunny works for the ‘escort service’ I use to keep our Japanese visitors occupied over weekends.” I used Reagan bunnies ostentatiously to put the quotes around “escort service” and winked laddishly as the chairman reeled, blanched, and beat a hasty retreat.

“You absolute bastard, Simon!” hissed Bunny, humanity cracking through the thick Dutch Reformed veneer. She stalked away to hide in the ladies’ and, with luck, bawl her eyes out, the bitch. I saw the chairman asking the writhing, wrong-footed head of personnel pointed questions. Before the end of the afternoon, the grapevine was completely up-to-speed on Anna-Marie using the name “Bunny” in her second, after-hours career as a call-girl. As the authority on Bunny, I gave the book-making lads round the tea-table all the gory details.

“So, Simon, why’s she called ‘Bunny,’ eh?”

“Only one reason I can think of,” I said, with wink and leer. They nudged each other and chortled appreciatively.

“So, have you been there?”

“Have I been there?“ I said, picking my words carefully and rolling my eyes theatrically. Of course, this was taken to mean, “Is the Pope Catholic?” More nudging and chortling.

“So, Simon, what’s it like?”

“What is it like?” More eyeball-rolling.

“Yes, man. No bullshitting, now. What is it like?”

“It’s very keen.” They crowed a locker-room, masculine-group laugh and looked round furtively. Female eyes all round the floor hooded over. It was only too obvious that men were unashamedly being men again.

I leaned forward confidentially. They leaned forward to me.

“I want this to remain strictly between us,” I said, knowing full well that whatever I next said would be all over the building in twenty minutes. They nodded eagerly, in unison, swearing undying discretion, the lying bastards. Their heads crowded together around mine while female ears came out on stalks from nearby desks.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a little embarrassing, but frankly, I couldn’t keep up with her. Enough is never enough, know what I mean?” They nodded as one man. Yes, they knew what I meant. Like hell; I didn’t even know what I meant. But from that time forward Bunny got hit on by everyone in the office, by Japanese visitors, by postmen, by men delivering water bottles for the cooler, the works. And boy, did she know who was responsible, the frigid bitch. Just like at the school, though, things couldn’t get any worse, so there was no percentage in bothering to mend fences. It was more fun that way, anyway.

Then the day came when we had a bomb scare. People were crowding out of the tea-room after watching yet another South African hopeful, nationally touted for months as a sure-thing gold medallist, finish seventh or eighteenth or forty-first or whatever. South Africa’s greatest Olympic distinction to date was to supply the first arrest for trying to smuggle steroids through Sydney International Airport. I came into the room shortly before the chairman appeared on the floor with a gold-lace-enhanced policeman.

“I need your attention please,” he said into the hush. “We have a problem. We have been advised of a bomb in the building.”

Everyone reached for their coats and started to evacuate. There had been twenty bombs in Cape Town in the last two years. The time for shrugging off hoaxes had passed.

“Wait, please, everybody. Do not evacuate the building. I repeat, do not evacuate the building. The situation is somewhat unusual. Colonel Swart here will explain.”

The colonel of police spoke in flat, guttural tones. “We have been informed that the bomb has been placed low down in the building. The telephone call advising of the bomb specifically warned us that, if there was an attempt to evacuate the building, the bomb would be detonated. It is therefore most important, ladies and gentlemen, than no-one, and I mean no-one, tries to evacuate the building.”

There was the briefest silence and then bedlam. Anything more the colonel had to say was lost. Eventually—and this is ’way the condensed version—things calmed down and people began reacting, each in their own way, to the prospect of imminent death. A couple of people, incredibly, tried to carry on with their work. Mostly we gathered in corners and talked nonsense in hushed voices. Sounds of sobbing came from various quarters. But boredom works even in the face of death, and eventually someone said flippantly, “Well, if I’m going to die, I’m going to die happy, perving those Russian gymnast girlies.”

There was an uncertain bark of masculine laughter and a general movement back towards the tea room. I joined in, sort of. This took me past Bunny’s office. I noticed as I went past that Bunny seemed to be taking things worse than most. She was sitting, white-faced and trembling, on her visitor chair, knees clamped together, hands white-knuckle clasped. She might have been trying to pray.

When she saw me, something leaped into her eyes. Some of it was pleading. Please don’t tease me. Please don’t tease me. I can’t take it. I can’t take it… She was ready to break, waiting for the shrapnel and glass to perforate her pretty pink pelt and bring her life to an untimely, unfulfilled, unprepared end, just like the teacher in the gazebo. Some of it was longing. You’re my friend, really, aren’t you? Please be my friend. Please.

“Hi, Anna-Marie,” I said, walking gently in and closing the door. The blinds were already closed, so we were immediately private. I sat next to her on the desk, and put my hand on her shoulder.

“Are you maintaining, skattie?” They were the first kind words I’d said to her in years. She slumped back, looking down. Her head shook once, vigorously. She wasn’t maintaining. Her hand came up and covered mine. It was trembling. The other hand came up, and she clasped my big hand in both her small ones.

“Oh, Simon, I’m so scared.” A whisper. “I keep remembering the gazebo… all the blood…” A whisper.

“There, there.” I dug in the box of Kleenex on her desk and dabbed at the tears on her cheeks. I sank down on my knees and put an arm round her shoulders. “There, there.”

“Oh, Simon.” She turned and hugged me, very hard.

“There, there… There, there…” I hugged her back and found that she was kissing me and crying and hugging me and trembling and breathing in shuddering, sighing gasps. Startled, I struggled to stand upright. She stood with me, and pressed her cheek to my chest as she hugged me desperately hard and leaned back on her desk. My bastard, ungentlemanly body betrayed me, and—bomb or no bomb—my trousers inexorably tented out as my cock reacted to the woman I’d wanted to fuck for years.

There was no way she couldn’t notice.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling my ears burning with embarrassment. It was the first apology she’d ever got from me. I tried awkwardly to stick my bum out and get out of contact, but her fierce hug dropped from my chest to my waist and I felt her small hands on my buttocks, pressing me back into her stomach.

“Oh, Simon,” she said, and one of her hands left my butt and moved in between us. She fumbled at the catch of my trousers until, impatiently, I opened them for her. She slid the front of my underpants down and hooked the waistband under my balls. She lifted her legs and clasped calves to my waist. Her skirt fell back, revealing thigh-high stockings and—would you believe?—sensible, white cotton panties. Here was a woman who hadn’t dressed that morning in anticipation of being undressed by a lover. And, despite all, there was a damp patch at the crotch.

I levered the panties under her buttocks but couldn’t get them off while her legs were gripping my waist. They gave no signs of giving up, nor did I want them to. I found I could lift them just high enough to thrust my cock under the waistband, scraping deliciously on the taut edge and I felt forward for her warm, welcoming wetness. I shuffled around a bit, trying to get the right place—my arms were around her shoulders; I couldn’t see what was going on down there. I wriggled, embarrassed, poking around.

“There!” said Bunny as I hit the bull’s eye. I pushed gently forward and sank into her as her head went slowly back with a long gasp. I saw her gazing sightlessly up at the ceiling. She rolled back, pulling me forward, balanced on her buttocks, clinging monkey-like round my neck, her face in my shoulder, her calves still gripping my waist.

I pulled gently back, and she pulled me firmly forward again.

“Oh, Simon. Oh, Simon. Oh, Simon….” She chanted the time like a little monkey coxswain, leading me forward through the race, slowly building the pace.

“Oh Simon, oh Simon, oh Simon….” Faster and faster and faster, until “Simon, Simon, Simon, SimonSimonSimon. Simon! Simon! Simon! Simon!” And we were collapsing slowly down onto her desk.

Out on the floor outside, by the bull-pen, the chairman’s voice could be heard saying, “Ladies and gentleman, Colonel Swart advises that the bomb has been found and defused and removed from the building. Please carry on as if nothing had happened.” He chuckled fatly at his little joke.

I left Bunny’s office, tie around my ear, ostentatiously zipping my fly. One of the book-making lads saw me, and his jaw dropped.

Did you…? asked his eyebrow. Is the Pope Catholic? replied my smirk and wink. A small, gaping crowd gathered outside Bunny’s door. I heard it slam irritatedly as I made my way down to the bathroom.

“Did you hear that one about the woman in the airliner when all the engines failed?” I asked in the tea-room next day, “There these passengers all are, facing certain death and wondering how to go about it, and the first one to crack is this woman, you see. She goes to the front. She tears off all her clothes and throws them at the other passengers. She stands there, stark naked, and shouts, ‘Who’s going to make me feel like a woman, one last time before I die?’ Well, there’s this stunned silence, you see, but eventually this Australian stands up in row three and says, ‘I’ll do it’. And he tears off all his clothes, too, throws them at her, and says, ‘Wash these, bitch’.”

I laughed uproariously at the punch line—it always cracks me up. Most of the tea-room laughed with me. Oddly enough, Bunny didn’t laugh. Maybe she’d heard it before.

• Thank you for reading me.
• I would be pleased to hear from you, at FatherIgnatius@ANTISPAMananzi.co.za , about whether or not you liked this story, and why.

• The original version of this story was written during the Sydney Olympics, in three hours, as a Write Club duel with Jimmy Hat. Mr. Slot was the referee. Thanks, Jimmy; thanks, Slot.

  The Challenge Words were:

  Jimmy Hat	escort service gazebo pink
  Father Ignatius	bomb stationery closet
  Mr Slot	Olympic perforate reunion

• To the Stories Page of Father Ignatius
• Thanks to DrSpin for the editing, advice and encouragement, to Denny for his usual meticulous proof-reading and to Alexis for a thorough grammatical and stylistic work-over.