May Contain Nuts (28 page)

‘Maybe, maybe not …'

‘Poor Ruby. I'd only just given her that computer. Was it a serious burglary?'

‘Well, robbery's no big news on that estate. Everyone just burgles each other; it probably all evens out in the end, Alice.'

‘Actually, would you mind calling me “Mrs Chaplin”, please? I don't mean to be snobby, but I don't really know you, and I can't be doing with all this Californian pseudo-mateyness.'

‘Oh. As you wish, Mrs Chaplin.'

‘Or just don't use my name at all. Just say “as you wish”, without adding my name on the end? Do you think you could do that?'

‘As you wish.'

‘Thank you … Mike.'

Half an hour later I got round to the Osafos with a rather limp bunch of carnations to find Ruby's grandfather trying to patch a hole in the flimsy door with an ill-fitting bit of plywood. He said he would have cut the wood to size but they had stolen his toolbox. The door had been kicked in for the third time in two years. They had also lost the big telly from the sideboard, the defunct computer, the portable CD player and, of course, my old laptop. All the drawers were emptied out, mattresses pulled off beds, books and clothes scattered across the floor. Mrs Osafo had always seemed to have a philosophical stoicism about her but today she looked utterly defeated. She just sat slumped in an armchair surrounded by the chaos. ‘Why do people have to steal from us?' she said looking at me. ‘We don't have nothing and they steal from us!'

All that nervous energy I had expended worrying about being a victim of crime. But people like me – people with burglar alarms and light sensors and electric gates – we aren't the ones whose lives are ruined by endless burglaries. We've got too much money to be robbed.

‘I'm fed up with it …' she went on. ‘Fed up with it …'

‘Maybe the police will find who did it and get the stuff back …' I offered weakly.

‘Maybe,' she said. ‘The policeman said he was going to make a few enquiries.'

‘Ah right. Well, there you are …'

‘But why did he go and see you?'

‘Well, he just wanted to ask … to check the value of the stolen laptop.'

I was surprised to see Ruby arrive at the door with a small bag of shopping. She placed a bar of chocolate in her granny's
hand and her grandmother pulled her close and held her there as tears spilled from her closed eyes. ‘You are a good girl, Ruby. You're a good girl.' I was embarrassed to be intruding on this private moment.

‘Did you come home from school specially, Ruby?'

‘No, I had the day off,' she said standing up. ‘Gran is taking me to the open day at my new school.'

‘We can't go to that now, Ruby,' announced her grandmother. ‘I have too much to sort out here.'

Ruby's face fell. In the hallway her grandfather threw a piece of wood to the ground and swore in what I now knew was Ashanti.

‘Let me take her,' I said.

‘Oh no, you've done so much for her already …'

‘No, really, I'd be happy to. You'd still like to go, wouldn't you, Ruby?'

‘Oh yes please.'

‘You've been the victim of a crime. It's the least I could do.'

Ruby was proud to be sitting up in the front seat of our big car and called out unnecessary ‘hellos' to friends some distance away on the estate. She was enjoying the job of being my local guide; after so many months of me being the tutor, now the roles were reversed.

‘So you've been to this school before, Ruby?' I asked her.

‘Yes, lots of times. ‘Cause my brother went there. You have to turn left after this garage.'

‘I must say I've lived in this area for years and never known exactly where Battersea Comprehensive was. It's not like Chelsea College; you have to go past that every time you drive to the King's Road.' Inside I winced slightly at the careless mention of the name of the school that Ruby would not be attending. I could feel Ruby staring at me.

‘Did you think Molly would pass the exam for Chelsea College?'

‘Well, I kept my fingers crossed you know!' The lights were red and I braked slightly too sharply.

‘You must have wanted her to go there
very much
…' she continued. ‘Right at these traffic lights.'

‘Er, well, yes I did, Ruby. But of course there are lots of good schools …'

‘No, right! Not left!'

‘Oh yes, sorry.' I swerved the four-wheel drive in the other direction and vaguely heard a cyclist's bell and the sound of somebody swearing at me. ‘What was I saying, er, so, jolly good, yes. I'm sure you and Molly will be able to carry on being friends.'

‘Were you worried that Molly might fail the exam?'

‘Goodness, you're being very inquisitive today, Ruby. Well, all mothers worry, it comes with the territory – oh, look at that advert, that's a funny dog, isn't it?'

‘But, like, would you have, like, given anything in the whole world-wide-web to get Molly into Chelsea College?'

I looked across at her.

‘Carry straight on down here for a while,' she added.

‘Er, well, no – I knew there were other schools. We just were keen for her to go to the same place as all her friends, like you're going to. Are we nearly there?'

‘Nearly; it's left down here. But you must have been pleased when she got the scholarship?'

‘Well, she's always been a very bright girl; she just didn't always do well in exams. She struggles a bit with her mathematics, but then she gets that from me. I'm useless at maths.'

‘I know,' said Ruby. And then we were there.

My first impression of the school was of the incredible
diversity. I looked at what I think is traditionally referred to as the ‘rainbow mix' of children ambling round the playground: scruffy kids, smart kids, black, white, tall, short, Sikh boys chatting with Chinese boys, children who judging by the iconography on their hats and bags worshipped gods ranging all the way from Nike to Adidas. We were taken round the school in small groups by a couple of sixth-formers whose job it was to answer any questions with an embarrassed mumble.

‘How long has the new art block been open?'

‘hmnem nmemn …'

‘Really? Fascinating …'

‘It's even better than the one at Chelsea College, isn't it, Ruby?' I wasn't exaggerating either; even the students' paintings on the wall were more interesting. Here the self-portraits weren't all the same colour.

Battersea Comprehensive actually looked a lot better than I'd expected. There was a sixth-form common room where a girl was about twenty pages into
Ulysses
, which was a lot further than I'd ever managed. There were computer suites where pupils were designing their own web pages and no one was shouting, ‘David! Everything's disappeared off the screen again!' From the way that other mums had gossiped at Molly's school, I'd imagined some unruly run-down New York holding pen, with subway graffiti in the corridors and hooded youths selling the first years Bostik behind the bike shed. Spencer House parents were frightened of the pupils in this school without ever having been here. All fear is based on ignorance really. Except if you shared a flat with that American serial killer who ate all his victims, I suppose – then your fear wouldn't be based on ignorance. ‘No, no, I am not at all ignorant about Jeffrey. There's nothing in the fridge and he's suggesting I have an early night; this fear
is based on a thorough working knowledge of my flatmate's eating habits.'

The tour of the school allowed us to step into lessons that were in full flow, and a few of us stood at the back of a room of children learning French. It was remarkable – this boy couldn't have been more than thirteen but he read absolutely perfectly in front of the whole class. I wondered if Molly would learn to speak fluent French like that at Chelsea College.

‘Thank you, Jean-Pierre,' said the teacher as he sat down.

I have to confess that when I saw the other mums and dads waving hello to one another and chatting to friends, I felt a little jealous of them. Ruby said hello to lots of people as we walked round. ‘Who's she?' I quizzed when she first waved at an elderly white lady on the other side of the playground with a family.

‘That's Vera.'

Oh right, I thought, that explains it. ‘No, I mean, where do you know her from?'

‘She used to help at Brownies.'

‘What about them?' I asked when a passing mother and daughter said hello. ‘Are they from your school?'

‘No. Church.'

‘What about her?'

‘Er, I dunno where I know her from. She just lives in Clapham.'

I was learning that in the place where I lived there was a complex local community like some huge Venn diagram. There was, of course, a big overlap between the parents at Battersea Comprehensive and Ruby's junior school. Ruby's school also overlapped with the church in the high street. Both of those overlapped with the local charities and youth
clubs, and then there were other rings containing babysitting circles and dog walkers on Clapham Common and evening classes at Lambeth College, and pub quiz teams who knew people who were involved in local politics who had neighbours who ran kids' football teams in Battersea Park who had shared a flat with the lady who delivered the meals on wheels to the old woman who used to be the lollipop lady outside Ruby's school. All of their lives were intertwined and connected, everybody knew someone who knew someone else, they were all stopping and chatting with one another, and I realized that I wasn't in this Venn diagram at all. I didn't overlap with any of them; my family and friends were in their very own isolated high-security private circle, somewhere on the edge of the page.

And it was apparent that the school's intake wasn't all Joe Public, there was the occasional Charles Public and Phoebe Public as well. Using the sophisticated polling method of counting the boys with angelic choirboy haircuts and the youths with shaven bullet heads, I could see that the middle-class kids were in the minority here, just like in the rest of society, I suppose. But there was enough of a social mix to make you feel uplifted about how everyone seemed to be getting along together. Because although it was the noisiest, busiest, most bustling, excited place imaginable, there was something about the atmosphere of this school that was like being allowed to lie back in a warm bath after years and years and years of running on the spot. There was far less urgent anxiety about all the other parents or their children; it was as if the place was saying to me, ‘It's fine, Alice, it's OK. Just relax.' I caught myself rushing to be first through a door for the head teacher's talk, but then realized that another visitor wasn't competing to be first into the hall
at all. She held the door open for me and Ruby and said, ‘After you.'

‘Sorry, thank you, sorry.' I felt ashamed of myself. Ffion wouldn't have held the door open for me. She would have brought a shepherd's crook to yank all the other people's children back by the neck.

As we filed into the hall, the school choir was singing on the stage. It had the effect of making you tiptoe swiftly to the nearest seat in case you distracted the children from their performance. No one left a gap – the other parents came and sat right next to you, half crouching lest they block the others' view, then discreetly waving at friends in the crowd or proudly pointing out children they knew in the choir. Ruby was transfixed by these older singers swaying gently to the tune they belted out from the stage, singing in imperfect harmony, which somehow made it all the more perfect. And when the hall was completely full and the doors were closed, I thought they would stop, but now that they had everyone's attention, the music teacher nodded to the piano player and began conducting one last number.

I couldn't help but chuckle to myself as the student piano player bashed out the opening chords of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water'. A 1970s weepy, aimed straight at the heart of all the grown-ups in the hall. I'd owned this album when I was a wide-eyed student but at some point in my mid-twenties I must have decided it was a bit corny because I hadn't listened to it since. I adopted a benign smile to hide the cynicism that so many years had put between myself and this song. Then the children started singing. Softly at first, but with a gentleness that alerted you to the vocal power they were holding back. And as the song built, the command that the choir had over their increasingly spellbound audience was almost
tangible. I felt a lump building in my throat as the raw emotional power of all these beautiful children connected with some lost part of my life. The head teacher hadn't even spoken yet, but already he had me. In pure marketing terms it was the most persuasive argument that could ever be advanced for sending your child to a school. OK, Battersea didn't get as many children to the top universities as Chelsea College, and maybe the kids didn't look so smart or win the National Debating Competition two years in a row, but just listen to that stirring crescendo: how could anyone sitting there experience the passion of that tragic climax and not want to sign on the line there and then? Please let us send our children here, we haven't even looked at the league tables, we don't need to read the Ofsted report, the siren voices have persuaded us. There is no more direct route to a parent's heart than the sound of children singing, and as for a whole stage full of kids singing a song from our own childhood, well, that was it – total and unconditional surrender.

‘Why are you laughing?' said Ruby.

‘I'm not laughing, dear. I'm crying.'

Once they had finished there was an explosion of applause which had most of the room standing up and cheering, so that when the head teacher walked out to talk about his school he could have said whatever he wanted – he could have announced he planned to sell all the children for medical experiments on the first day of term, everyone would have agreed that this was a wonderful idea. Instead he thanked the choir and politely asked them to step down from the stage, which they did in perfect order, one row at a time, filing out of the hall, smiling with a quiet pride for what they had just achieved together, which broke into laughter when we
applauded all over again. And then he gave a talk that was unlike any head teacher's talk I had heard since I had started worrying about secondary transfer about three weeks after Molly had started primary school.