The Boy Who Made it Rain

Rosie Farrell’s First Impression

Rosie Farrell’s First ImpressionWe met when Clem first came to our school. It was two weeks into term. He was from somewhere down in the south of England. I don’t know. I’d never heard of the place. Still haven’t, even though he told me about it loads of times. Sounds rubbish wherever it is though. He had a funny accent, that’s why everyone sort of fancied him. Including most of the out guys. Cora said he had that Robbie Williams thing going on…all the guys wanted to be him and all the girls wanted to…well, you know. He didn’t say much at first; just did his work and kept his head down. Bore a minute.

Yes, he was smart. Dead smart. He’d read all these things that we couldn’t even pronounce, all this foreign stuff. Get a life, right? But he wasn’t a big-headed bragger or anything like that. I wasn’t much of a reader so I thought I was well out of his league. Not that I really wanted to be in it in the first place. I usually find all that stuff dead boring. Reading and all that.

English was his thing though; he sat down the front like a pure teacher’s pet. He was into challenging them all the time. The teachers. Having all these debates about dead dull stuff. Nonsense. Boreathon, right? I thought Miss Croal flirted with him from day one. She was one of those fresh-out-of-training- college teachers. And they’re all the same. They come breezing in with heads full of Hollywood films and a desire to ‘make a difference.’ Airheads with no clue whatsoever. To tell you the truth it was kind of embarrassing watching her make an eejit out of herself. Revelling in thinking she was this kind of fountain of knowledge. Fountain of lavvy water more like! Honestly, Miss Croal was as bright as a blackout. No, I didn’t take the mickey. Not my style, I’m a passive observer. Yes, some people did. But not bullying or intimidation, or anything like that. Well, it’s a bit of a red neck, but my friend Cora used to say Miss Croal's gagging for her hole when she started flirting and flicking the eyes to all the guys. Once she actually said it to her face, but in rhyming slang.

She said, erm, gantin for your Nat King, Miss? Croal would never have guessed what it meant. She was probably from the posh part of town. The West End or something.

She was like that, Cora, real brash, in your face stuff. But she was a howl.

Yes, he was different from the other guys and not just because he was clever, or good-looking. Well, he wasn’t good-looking in a conventional sense, but he could’ve definitely been one of those Benetton models. You know, the ones who are borderline ugly. That’s what Cora thought anyway. There were loads of girls who thought he was like all Mr Mysterious, but to me he was more like Mr Weirdo. I said to Cora that there was something no right about him, like concealing a secret or something. Sometimes I’d catch him staring right at me, not in a freak-show way, more in a crying-out-for-a-friend way.

Was I popular? When I was in fifth-year all the fifth- and sixth-years kept asking me out. I kept telling them to blow town. Which is a way of saying go away. Or rather Cora did on my behalf. None of them did anything for me. I snogged a couple of them but nothing beyond that. Or enough to get the heart cartwheeling. I wouldn’t have gone that far with the guys at my school. No way. So, yes you could say that I was popular, but I wasn’t a b***h or anything like that…it wasn’t like The O.C. it was real life, and we were into keeping it real. Real real not in the rap way. I had friends from all the groups. Apart from the NEDs that is…Up here we call them NEDs…means Non Educated Delinquents. Could be a lot worse I suppose, like t**s…Total i***t Thickos.

He was just different…well…because…because…well for a start, he had an accent. Anyone who had a different accent was automatically deemed to be cool. It’s a sort of unwritten law in schools, isn’t it? I mean if I went to an American school I’d be fighting them off with a big stick. He said words like girl and film without pronouncing the R or L properly. Gewl. It was kind of cute. And then there was his name. Most guys here are bogged down in all this I-want-to-be-Irish guff. Just because they were seventeenth generation Irish, or something like that, they all thought they were pure dead Irish. I mean, get a life! I blame their parents. Look around, everyone’s called Liam, Keron, Conor, Sean, Niall or some other duff Irish name. It’s really boring and predictable. So when we first heard the name Clem we thought it was pure hilarious. Then we realised that the name Clem made him sort of stand out from all the Irish wannabes. It was bomb how his name had that whole alliteration thing going on as well, Clem Curran. You know, C and C. That’s one thing I can thank Miss Croal for. I’m not exactly like Shakespeare at English but she explained what alliteration was by using his name as an example, that’s how it sunk in. When I’m an old woman, forty or fifty or something, and I hear the word alliteration I’ll automatically say ‘Clem Curran’ in my head. ‘Cool Clem Curran’ I said to Cora. ‘Classy Cora and Cool Clem Curran cruising and kissing in a convertible coupe’ she said back. I don’t think kissing counts but. Suppose that was the start of it. No, it was that badge.

I had a Bright Eyes badge on my bag. Not the wee rabbits! Bright Eyes, the band. They were my favourites at that time. Not now. I still like them and all, but you know what young people are like. We change our favourite things from one week to the next. From one day to the next. Anyway, I was listening to loads of Bright Eyes stuff, couldn’t get enough of them. So I went out and bought some badges for my bag. You know this fad with bags full of badges? I was tapping into it. If my mum put badges on her bags I’d be pure morto… Mortified.

Right, so me and Clem were partnered together in our Italian class to do some role-play stuff about tourists asking for directions in Rome, or somewhere like that. I mean, when will that ever come in handy? Don’t get me started on language classes at our school. Anyway we were giving it all the ‘you need to go straight down the road and turn left then take the first right and then you will see the Spanish Steps’ jargon, all in Italian of course, when he clocks the Bright Eyes badge on my bag.

‘I didn’t know you were an emo chick’, he said.

I said, ‘who are you calling a flippin emu? And never call me a chick again.’

I didn’t actually say the word flippin, did I?

Then when he told me what emo meant I felt like a total Paris. Then we had a conversation about music and school and students and teachers and just general angsty teenager car-crash stuff. He had some good chat. He told me where he was from, but it sounded too dull so we spoke about me. When I went home that night I was thinking about him loads and the next day I sort of fancied him.

I’d just then discovered The Smiths.