conjugate this

The wad of chewed gum sails through the mellow afternoon sunlight and plants itself with damp precision in the centre of the window blind.

“Who threw that?”

I repeat the question a couple of times in English, to slack-jawed silence, and finally in French. Elodie raises a listless hand.

“What’s that all about?”

She replies, as she always does, in exasperated French. “Obviously I was aiming for the window.”

“…You what?”

“Allors, you’d prefer I try for the bin from here? That’s an impossible shot.”

And so the weeks pass. They say you should never work with children or animals. Teenagers, aside from being nascent statesmen, philosophers and poets, are occasionally both of the above. You set a rule. They ask why. With a gleam of respect in your eye that acknowledges their natural sense of justice and enquiring spirit, you explain the logic behind the rule. They blink at you, blink at each other, and then: “Yeah, but, like… why?” And you suspect that they are mentally three years old. Of course, both ideas are true simultaneously, like the vase and the two faces in profile. If the faces had liprings and zits.

We had a row on the way back from Cambridge last week, over a quick toilet break and the subsequent getting or not getting of take-away Burger King. There were sharp words and eloquent continental gestures on both sides before we all slouched back onto the bus. I sat down with that morning’s edition of The Independent, and they flopped out on the back seats, got out an MP3 speaker phone and started blasting out the Chilli Peppers. I frowned at the political articles and tried to concentrate, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever walks out of an argument and puts on Red Hot Chilli Peppers is sort of spiritually in the right.

I’m going to quite miss them all when I go.