Invigilation

My binôme is already in the exam room, making me feel late even though I'm not. There is an unspoken hierarchy between two invigilators: the boss and the navvy; bad cop, good cop.
I'm not the boss and can't play bad cop.  The boss sees the pupils as potentially treacherous, cheating exam candidates.  I see them as nervous kids 
I know my place and hunker down at the back of the room. 
Today's boss is a fusspot maths teacher who has checked the kids ID cards several times, fretted that a Maghrebin boy has an Algerian passport and that another's passport is out of date.  Confronted by these anomalies she scuttles in and out of the room, seeking advice from the boss of the bosses. 
There's always an awkward half hour at the beginning of an exam.  This should be a restful moment; the kids are concentrating on getting their heads around the questions, they haven't been in the exam room long enough to want a pee and they haven't yet run out of draft paper.
The fusspot teacher exerts her superiority by remaining standing at the front of the room.  She writes stuff on the board, shuffles papers  and glances over at me as I try to slip my book out of a bag.
Reading would be too frivolous a thing to do during the first half hour, so I look at the kid's shoes; Converse, Nike, Addidas.
This quickly gets boring so I concentrate on the backs of their heads. 
Apart from the Algerian boy who has shoulder length black curls, the other boys all have short hair with that little right-turning whorl on the top of their heads. I always long to find one that twists the other way but never do.
The girls are not so interesting; their uniformly centre-parted hair falls around their faces as they crouch over their exam papers.
When this gets dull I think back on days of yore and invigilations  at the Jesuit school in North London. The gymnasium, rank with the smell of flaking rubber and feet, converted briefly into a vast  exam room with rows of desks meeting at the line of infinity.
No luxury here of sitting down with a book.  No luxury of sitting down at all.
A P.E teacher told me how many times I'd have to walk up and down the gym to make a kilometre. Between laps I counted the number of polystyrene tiles on the ceiling until my eyes crossed. I made tallies of hair colour (ginger, black, brown) which allowed me to calculate the sociographic of the school in any given academic year; more Irish than Italian, more west coast African than Irish etc. Once I'd run out of heads and had a few kilometres in my legs, sheer boredom reduced me to to reading desk graffiti.  One table informed me that I 'give good head'.  The boy sitting there looked up at me, a rabbit caught in headlights, opened his eyes wide and used some kind of nervous body language to profess his innocence. 
Half time.  A hit of coffee and a chocolatine (didn't get that in England either).  
Back upstairs the boss was ushering the kids back into the classroom.  She handed out more papers, shuffled various documents around and, to my relief, settled down with a detective novel.