That One November Night

Chapter 21: Masteries Fenbious

Quickly advancing half way through the academic year, I was enjoying being away from year 11 and the academy I had attended, a lot more fun than I had been expecting. I was now in college and I still don't quite understand my reasoning for choosing Religious Studies as one of my options.

"It's the grave yard shift," Fenbious explained. "So I don't see much point in giving you lots of work because you aren't going to do it".

The teacher was a doll, slumped back in his chair at the desk next to my table on the right hand side of the window - opposite to the door. He had been showing Greg and I photos of his cat which got stuck in the wall and he had posted on Facebook, they thought that they had lost it but heard meowing when he and his wife were lying in bed. he had also mentioned about another cat who had been purposely ran over by his neighbour which led him to scratching his car with keys and then the endless old man 'prank' war.

The classroom was second to last at the end of the top corridor, a computer room was attached to the main room and had a window into the room which allowed the corridor to be seen from inside the classroom and Vice versa.

Labelled N19, the door had a thin strip of glass in it which gained unnecessary attention from passers-by coming back from their lunch leading to teachers wafting children away like flies as they swarmed at it to greet their mates. Tables splayed across the room with four seats to each one. Display boards drenched in revision materials making it impossible not to find answers during a test. At the back of the room fixed to the wall, were tacky blow up planets more associated with a geography teacher than an RS teacher. Fenbious had once been a geography teacher which must have meant that he'd taken them from his old school as he did with the two blue cushioned seats pushed up against the wall (with the window into the computer room) that held no purpose other than for book boxes to be left on top. In the windowsill was his plant (probably as old as he was [early 40s or so]) barely any leaves on its tiny branches, Greg and I often wondered if it was even a real plant.

Once the books were handed out Fenbious came over to me taking my book along with two others and putting them under the magnifier which showed them on the board. At first he said he wouldn't name names, the first two had made stupid mistakes like setting out a D question without a Christian belief or Bible teaching.

He then came to mine, "It's not often. Or ever. That I get to critique Connor's work so let's embarrass him!" squinting from the cringe as he moved the book closer to the magnifier as the image on the board enlarged. In bold red ink were the words Holy and Holly with their definitions. "Now Connor is it Holly Bible or Holy Bible?" he chuckled trying to find other grammar issues woven into my book. That was the only major mistake. Leading on from this he told us about his trip to Tesco, "I went in and on one of the displays there was an apostrophe missing from the caption. The next time I went in I took my marking book with the stickers I use for marking. Straight where the apostrophe was meant to be I stuck 'use an apostrophe for when something belongs to someone as a proposition or when it is used to shorten two words into one' on it". Only the intelligent ones of the class understood it or found it funny.

He informed us that he would recap the design argument as select individuals didn't understand it and how it was different to the causation argument. Taking out a large book of bibles he began lining them up like dominos. Surely that's as bad as moving the Quran off of the top shelf? He went to the other side of the Bibles all neatly lined up and allowed myself to knock them, as dominos do the Holy Bibles knocked against each other until they had all fallen over. "So where did that chain affect begin?" he asked. A select few tried to give answers, someone bluntly stated that it was a human hand. "okay I'll put this another way," he stated walking over to shift a box from the side of the room, "Brogan, where did your mum come from?" the girl turned to him puzzled before responding, "urg her mum?" Fenbious nodded and continued asking the question in an order like the first. In the meantime he purposely squished a blonde girl's blue tack which she had rolled into a long chain only for her to squeal, "oh sir no!" I couldn't stop myself from laughing at it and even the blonde girl smiled.