Some Rain Must Fall (2 page)

Exercising authority like a physical skill, Frances calmly took hold of the flailing ends of the dispute and wound them around her little finger. The yelling stopped, the threat of mayhem disappeared without a trace, and within ten minutes she had her entire class sitting at her feet, spellbound as she paraphrased text and showed photographs from a book about albinism. Frances had quite a number of these sorts of books:
odd enough to promise children a frisson of the bizarre, informative enough to fill their heads with the crunchy cereal of fact, irrelevant enough to be unthreatening. The sight of white Aborigines with pink eyes was enough to keep even Tommy dumbstruck while the cleverer ones frowned over the finer points of genetics.

As the rain dimmed the skies outside and the fluorescent strip-light took over, the children looked a bit albino themselves, a phenomenon Frances pointed out to suppressed squeals of queasy delight.

‘Maybe it’s catching,’ she teased.

At hometime it was raining so heavily that even those children who lived easy walking distance from the school were picked up by relatives or neighbours in cars. All except Harriet Fishlock and her tiny brother Spike from the tots’ grade. (Frances found it hard to believe his name could really be Spike, but that was what everyone called him.)

‘I don’t know how I’m going to get Spike home,’ sighed Harriet, fussing her pet-sized sibling into his greasy duffle-coat, ‘without him getting totally soaked.’

Harriet lived in a shabby caravan park on the edge of the village with her alcoholic mother and a stepfather who could get spare parts for cars if necessary. There were rumours of sexual abuse, and a social services file running into dozens of pages.

‘I have an umbrella,’ said Frances. ‘A super-duper giant umbrella. I can walk with you as far as the petrol station.’ She watched the flicker of calculation cross the girl’s face: yes, the petrol station was not in view of the wretched caravans: yes, the answer was yes.

Together they walked through the streets of Rotherey, the pelting rain screening the shops and houses as if through frosted glass. Everything was an indistinct and luminous grey,
a vast sea with a mirage of a village shimmering on the waves, through which car headlights cruised slowly like distant ships. To get the best cover from the umbrella, Spike and Harriet walked on either side of Frances, and after ten minutes or so Frances was surprised and delighted to feel Harriet fumbling to hold hands with her.

Near the edge of the village, a red light pulsed luridly through the gloom: a police car parked outside the MacShane house. The police were there every day, apparently, though what they hoped to achieve at this late stage was hard to imagine. Perhaps they thought David MacShane would come back to pick up his mail or feed the dog.

The rain was thrashing down absurdly now, as if in fury, almost deafeningly noisy against the fabric of the umbrella. Luckily there was no wind, so Frances was able to hold their protecting canopy still as spouts of water clattered off the edges all around them.

‘This is awful!’ shouted Harriet.

‘No it’s not!’ Frances called back. ‘We’re safe under here, and the rain won’t last!’

They passed the petrol station; Frances said nothing. She understood she was crossing a Rubicon of trust and would soon glimpse the farther shore of caravan-land.

‘This is where we live,’ said Harriet when the park was in view. The rain, softening now, shimmered like television static all over the dismal junkyard of permanently stalled mobile homes. Frances knew that to accompany the children any farther would be to push her luck.

Yet, as Harriet and her brother were leaving the canopy of their new teacher’s umbrella, Harriet made a little speech, spoken at a gabble as if escaping under pressure.

‘Mrs MacShane used to come here sometimes after school. To see a man who’s moved away now. They made loud noises together inside his caravan for hours, then she’d go home to
the village. It was sex – everybody knows that. That’s why Mr MacShane got so angry. He must of found out.’

The secret relayed at last, Harriet grabbed her brother by the hand and hopped gingerly into the marshy filth of her home territory.

In Frances’s home – or rather, the house she would live in for the duration of this assignment – all was not well.

The wild weather (highest volume of rainfall in a single day since 1937, the radio would have told her if she’d known how to find the local station) had battered through the roof’s defences, and there was water dripping in everywhere.

Frances walked through the upstairs rooms, squinting up at the clammy ceilings. They seemed to be perspiring in terror or exertion. In the bedroom especially, the carpet sighed under her feet and the bed was drenched: Nick had brought the buckets in too late. Returning downstairs. Frances almost broke her neck on the slick fur of the carpeted steps; perversely, this somehow knocked the edge off the contempt she felt for the house – as well as shaking her up badly.

‘I did check all the windows were closed when the downpour started,’ Nick told her a little defensively. ‘I just didn’t expect the place to leak, that’s all.’

They looked up together at the droplets of rainwater gathering on the umbilicus of the light fitting. All the power in the house might blow any second.

‘I want a child with you, Nick,’ said Frances, hearing herself speak as if through the din of a rainstorm, though the brunt of it was actually over now, leaving the after-effects to carry on the harm.

Nick stared at her uncomprehendingly, as if her comment might decode itself into being about buckets or laundromats.

‘We’ve talked about this before,’ he said, warningly.

‘I want it.’

She wanted him to take her upstairs, smack her down on the sodden bedsheets, and start a little life that would grow up to walk under an umbrella with her one day.

‘I’ve told you,’ he reminded her. ‘You could maybe adopt one, as a single parent, and I could see how I feel. No guarantees.’

‘It’s not the shared responsibility I’m worried about, you bastard,’ she said. ‘I want your baby and mine. From the beginning. Nothing on the slate except
our
genetics. A clean start. Adopted children bring their damage with them from the womb, from the day they leave the womb. Already in the cradle they’re soaking up their parents’ fuck-ups.’

‘Oh! Well!’ he exclaimed, gesticulating aggressively. ‘What a pity the fucked-up human race has to keep bringing children into the world, instead of leaving it to experts like you!’

Mesmerised by his violent display, she followed the sweep of his big hands, longing for him to hit her, batter her to the floor. But even in anger he was hopelessly, infuriatingly safe.

‘Damn right!’ she screamed in a misery of triumph.

‘You know what you are?’ he accused her, shoving his face right up to hers so she could see his lips forming the words with exaggerated clarity. ‘A – con
trol
– freak.’

After they’d finished arguing, they stripped the bed, turned up the central heating and went out to Rotherey’s only restaurant, a combination hotel and snooker hall which also did Indian.

Inevitably, the mother of one of the children from Jenny MacShane’s class was there too, buying a carry-out, and she stumbled straight to Frances and Nick’s table.

‘I just want to thank you for what you’re doing,’ she told Frances blushingly. ‘Last night, for the first time since …
you know … this terrible MacShane business … our Tommy slept right through without having nightmares or wetting the bed.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ smiled Frances.

‘I just want to say that I don’t care how much you’re getting paid, you’re worth every penny.’

‘Thank you,’ smiled Frances. Warmth came harder to her when it was parents or other teachers wanting it.

‘I just wanted to know … Is there any chance of you staying on? As Tommy’s permanent teacher?’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ smiled Frances. Her lamb korma, none too hot when it was served, had stopped steaming altogether. And she could tell that this woman was going to go away and tell the other mothers that Frances Strathairn wouldn’t stoop to work at a teacher’s wage.

‘Much as I’d love to,’ she sighed, making the effort. ‘The powers that be wouldn’t let me.’

The mother went away then, walking with a peculiar shambling gait and a posture which suggested congenital inferiority. Frances stared at the door she had gone through, and picked at her food irritably. God, how she disliked herself for pleading impotence when that had nothing to do with why she must move on! This pretence of being the passive slave of higher authority – it was a deplorable lapse in dignity, an act of prostitution.

And to top it all off, she was going to break up with her man.

‘I’ve seen you like this before,’ observed Nick quietly from the other side of the candles. ‘You always get like this just before the job’s over. Those kids that survived the bus crash in Exeter, remember? A few days before you finished up there, we had almost the same argument’ – he smirked – ‘almost the same restaurant. And that time in Belfast—’

‘Spare me the details,’ she groaned, tossing her fork into
the mound of rice and taking a deep swig of wine. ‘Ask the proprietor if there are any rooms free for tonight. If so, book one.’

Next day, the children started breaking down at last, more or less as Frances had been anticipating, with one or two exceptions. Tommy Munro seemed to have sidestepped the process, behaving with unusual maturity and poise for a brain-damaged kid; maybe, because he was so used to being confused and mistaken all the time, he’d come to believe that the incident with his old teacher must have happened in one of his nightmares.

Greg Barre, however, blew his crewcut top just after lunchtime, starting with a misunderstanding about which times table he was supposed to have learned, and climaxing with a shrieking fit. Mrs MacShane’s name was thrown up in the ensuing hysteria and several children were soon weeping and accusing each other of causing what had happened or failing to stop it when they should have. Martin Duffy wailed his innocence with fists clenched against his day-glo sports shorts; Jacqui Cox wailed her guilt with arms wrapped tightly around her head. The teacher of the adjacent class rushed to the doorway, trembling with fear, her face twitching with a ghastly nervous smile like the ones sometimes seen on people about to be executed.

Frances gave her the hand-signal for ‘I’ll handle this’, and a nod of permission to shut the door.

Then she moved forward and took control.

By the end of the day, she had them all quiet again, entranced by her own soothing murmur and the gentle patter of rain
on the windows. She sat in the midst of them on a high stool, keeping the stories coming and the airwaves humming, hypnotising herself to ignore the fact that her rear end was numb under the weight of Jacqui’s body in her lap. Jacqui was going to be a big girl, at least physically. Emotionally, she was too small for life outside the womb, and she clung to her teacher’s waist with marsupial tenacity, pressing her face hard into Frances’s bosom. She had been weeping for hours, an infinitely sustainable whimper: nothing that half a lifetime of reassurance couldn’t fix.

Greg Barre was playing quoits with Harriet Fishlock and Katie Rusek, happy as a lamb, wearing the sackcloth trousers he’d worn as a shepherd in the Christmas play. His own were drying out on one of the radiators; he’d soiled them at the height of his frenzy. Frances had recognised she couldn’t afford to leave the group to attend to him alone, and had chosen Katie to bear him off to the toilets and help him get changed; a risky choice, given the rigid gender divisions in this little world of Rotherey, but Frances judged it was the right one: Katie was mature and self-assured, Greg was afraid of her and secretly infatuated too. Most importantly, Katie was smart enough to perceive that the situation – half the class weeping and throwing hysterics, a boy with shit in his pants – was beyond the control of just one adult, and she caught the devolution of responsibility as if it were a basketball. In her essay she had written:

From her perch, Frances watched Katie Rusek watching Greg Barre prepare to throw another quoit. Desperation to impress his guardian angel was making him suddenly awkward, a faltering of confidence which both Katie and Frances, from their different angles, noticed instantly.

‘Let’s play something else,’ the girl whispered in his ear, before he’d even thrown.

Frances murmured on. She was telling the class about her squelchy house, her wet bed, how she’d spent the night in the Rotherey Hotel. She made up a story about how she and her husband had tried to sleep at home but the water had come up through the mattress and soaked their pyjamas. She described how she and her husband had balanced the mattress on its side near the heater and watched the steam begin to rise. She kept returning to the theme that her house was in chaos just now but that she could manage because she had people to help her, and soon everything would return to normal. All the while she pressed her cheek against Jacqui Cox’s wispy skull, stroking her gently at key phrases.

She talked on and on, effortlessly, the words coming from a reassurance engine idling deep within her; her words and the rain maintaining a susurrating spell over the children. Most listened in silence, some played games, completed word puzzles or drew pictures. No drawings of guns or exploding heads yet: Jacqui might do one of those for her next week sometime. In the days following that, she would smooth the new teacher in and then move on to God knows where.