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More Luke and Walker can be found over at Scatter Patterns, which includes another ficlet about their divergent musical tastes. Comments are, as always, welcome .
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The radio in the staff room was always on – a low murmur of Radio 4, buried deep in the background during breaks and providing a comfortable blanket to wrap around the quieter class period when there were one or two teachers slaving over workbooks with red and black pens. Walker would agree wholeheartedly with the importance of the social aspects of sharing the space before school and over lunch, but the self-important hush and the obdurate babble of the radio during his precious non-teaching sessions grated on his nerves.
Once upon a time he'd been able to escape by taking fag breaks to justify a few minutes outside alone. These days he was grateful that he wasn't dependent on the kettle for his caffeine and took his breaks and prep periods in his classroom with a can of coke and discrete in-ear headphones to cushion the constant murmur of noise from the surrounding classrooms. There was a small pile of cd cases in the bottom desk drawer, should any curious pupil peek, claiming to be suitably respectable classical – Bartok, Prochofiev and Stravinksy. In fact they contained a selection of dance compilations, some big band swing, and several home-burnt discs labelled 'mix tape #12' and so on in Luke's rounded handwriting.
Numbers one through six had been given back when Luke had first been just his housemate and then his friend. The first summer he'd spent in the house Luke's hair had been too short to tie back and Walker could remember any number of conversations that had gotten interesting right around the point when Walker would knot his fingers in his hair, tugging on it and exclaiming that it wasn't possible that Walker didn’t know the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or whichever band it was that night. Conversations that had ended in compilations cd's that Luke insisted on calling tapes, which arrived without track listings, so Walker couldn’t pre-judge filled with music that made him smile, grimace, or skip forwards depending.
Number seven was still in his drawer at work. He'd found it amongst a pile of workbooks when school had re-started in the weeks after Luke's New Year revelation. Dancefloor remixes of some songs that Walker recognised from Luke's 'all time classics' listing in their original versions, and handful of the sort of electro-dance that Luke had admitted to quite liking. Mashes that pitted guitar gods against top-twenty pop and alt. classics against Euro-cheese, and to top it off the last track was the Cure's Lovecats, somehow all mixed together into a cohesive and listenable whole. You didn’t have to have read Nick Hornby to know that that was a message.
***** ***** ****
The radio in the staff room was always on – a low murmur of Radio 4, buried deep in the background during breaks and providing a comfortable blanket to wrap around the quieter class period when there were one or two teachers slaving over workbooks with red and black pens. Walker would agree wholeheartedly with the importance of the social aspects of sharing the space before school and over lunch, but the self-important hush and the obdurate babble of the radio during his precious non-teaching sessions grated on his nerves.
Once upon a time he'd been able to escape by taking fag breaks to justify a few minutes outside alone. These days he was grateful that he wasn't dependent on the kettle for his caffeine and took his breaks and prep periods in his classroom with a can of coke and discrete in-ear headphones to cushion the constant murmur of noise from the surrounding classrooms. There was a small pile of cd cases in the bottom desk drawer, should any curious pupil peek, claiming to be suitably respectable classical – Bartok, Prochofiev and Stravinksy. In fact they contained a selection of dance compilations, some big band swing, and several home-burnt discs labelled 'mix tape #12' and so on in Luke's rounded handwriting.
Numbers one through six had been given back when Luke had first been just his housemate and then his friend. The first summer he'd spent in the house Luke's hair had been too short to tie back and Walker could remember any number of conversations that had gotten interesting right around the point when Walker would knot his fingers in his hair, tugging on it and exclaiming that it wasn't possible that Walker didn’t know the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or whichever band it was that night. Conversations that had ended in compilations cd's that Luke insisted on calling tapes, which arrived without track listings, so Walker couldn’t pre-judge filled with music that made him smile, grimace, or skip forwards depending.
Number seven was still in his drawer at work. He'd found it amongst a pile of workbooks when school had re-started in the weeks after Luke's New Year revelation. Dancefloor remixes of some songs that Walker recognised from Luke's 'all time classics' listing in their original versions, and handful of the sort of electro-dance that Luke had admitted to quite liking. Mashes that pitted guitar gods against top-twenty pop and alt. classics against Euro-cheese, and to top it off the last track was the Cure's Lovecats, somehow all mixed together into a cohesive and listenable whole. You didn’t have to have read Nick Hornby to know that that was a message.