The Butterfly Effect (7 page)

By the time Monday came, I was still buzzing. Olga had phoned to say how well I’d done, so that was good, but in my hierarchy of things to feel happy about, Richie was number one. We can’t help the old biological drives, can we? In terms of achievements, the audience response to my song should have been way up there at the top, but the fact that Richie had come, had talked to me, had looked at me in that certain way, had kept it down at number two. The apparent resolution of the Greg problem was there at number three, slightly ahead of the rapidly approaching school holiday and the chance to relax and catch up on lost sleep. With so many things to feel happy about, even the thought of Christmas Day with my parents did not seem so bad.

The remaining days of the term flew past. There were some difficult moments, times when I struggled to control classes that were becoming increasingly demob happy, but mostly, I coped. It was comforting to know that I was not the only one, and I was able to join in with weary conversations around the coffee machine in the knowledge that this was part of the deal. Teaching is often an uneasy truce between joy and anxiety, but as long as the joy outweighs the anxiety, you carry on. I only wish that was all I had to worry about now, whether the noise from the Year 9 class would filter out into the corridor, or whether enough of them would pass the end of term test.

The staff Christmas party was directly after school on the last day of term. The pupils would be let out early, and then we would have an hour or so to remove all evidence of Christmas from our tutor rooms before sharing a buffet and some drinks. It was more or less obligatory to attend, as the Head liked to show his appreciation for our efforts by buying a few bottles of wine and making a very dull speech. That is what Richie told me the day before, on one of the several occasions since the gig that he had sat beside me in the staffroom for a few minutes. The conversations had been friendly but nothing more, and I wondered sometimes if I had misread the signs at the gig, but at least we were talking.

That’s why I spent some time deciding what to wear on the morning of the last day, and put my make-up into my handbag. I even thought about taking my straighteners, but decided that would be too much. Apparently it was common for people to leave their cars at home if possible, and the younger ones would often head into town and get wasted in a succession of pubs and bars. Would Richie be part of that crowd? Would he ask me to come with him?

As it happened, events overtook us and that was all decided well before the end of the day. When I arrived at school, the receptionist stopped me and handed me a huge bouquet of flowers.

“Here, these came for you, about fifteen minutes ago. It’s lucky I was here,” she said, as if it was my fault they had been delivered at such an inconvenient time.

I thanked her, picked them up and took them to my tutor room. How lovely! I was hoping they would be from Richie, although it did not seem very likely, or maybe it was something to do with the gig. Maybe they were from Olga and the others. There was a little envelope tucked between the blooms, with my name on the front and a card inside.

‘Something beautiful and precious for someone beautiful and precious,’ it read, and my blood ran cold.

Suddenly, whatever emotion I had been feeling at that moment – fear, suspicion, anxiety – was replaced by another: anger. How dare he do this? How dare he intrude into my life when everything was going so well? He had no right, no right at all, to expect me to receive these flowers with what? Thanks? Is that what he was expecting? I had given him absolutely no reason to expect anything from me at all and he could fuck off. That’s what he could do.

I almost growled aloud as I crammed the flowers, head first, into the bin and squashed them down, but it was hopeless as it was a fairly small bin and most of the stalks, together with a lot of the cellophane wrapping, protruded from the top. The more I pushed them down, the more they sprang up again, until I sat down on the floor with my head in my hands. I couldn’t leave it like this, the kids would be bound to see it and then there would be a barrage of questions.

“Miss, why are them flowers in the bin?”

“Miss, did you fall out with your boyfriend? Did he cheat on you?”

“Ahh, look at her. Bless! She’s all upset!”

I didn’t hear Richie come in. If I had, I would have leapt to my feet and tried to push the bin out of sight, but as it was, he was witness to my despair and there was nothing I could do to hide it.

“Shall I go away again?”

I looked up, and part of me wanted to make a pretence that everything was fine, but it was overwhelmed by the apparently greater need to burst into tears and tell him the whole thing. There was a moment when I thought I’d blown it, as he, naturally enough, thought there was some kind of relationship between me and Greg and didn’t want to get mixed up in anything complicated. But when I told him what had happened, he was sympathetic and sat me down at one of the tables.

“Look, do you want someone to cover?” he said. “We’ve only got ten minutes until the bell, but I could say you suddenly felt sick, or dizzy or something.”

I didn’t want that. It was the last day of term and I had cards for my tutor group, each with a little chocolate snowman or Santa inside. I wanted to hand them out myself and, besides, it was only a bunch of flowers. I was over-reacting. I shook my head and said I just needed a couple of minutes to fix my face and look respectable, then I would be fine.

“Thanks for listening, though. I bet you think I’m completely flaky now, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t think that,” he said, and then he patted me on the shoulder and gave it a brief squeeze. “I’d better go, and so had you, but I’ll catch you later.”

So that was when it all started properly, and who knows what might have happened if Greg hadn’t sent those flowers? I might not have been in my tutor room when Richie came to find me, I might have been in the staffroom, having a coffee. And our paths may not have crossed during the day, and maybe the PE teacher with the raven hair – such a dark, glossy black that sometimes it almost appeared blue – maybe she would have made a play for him after a few glasses of wine and then who knows? I like to think that he already felt enough for me to reject her advances, but if she’d been draped around him just as I stumbled across them in a corridor – well, the chances are I would have gone home in a huff and then … Well, there is no point in pursuing this, but maybe I have to thank Greg for Richie; that’s all I’m saying.

The rest of it seemed to happen as if it had all been decided at that moment. I saw Richie only briefly during the day, but when we assembled in the staffroom for the Head’s Christmas motivational address, he came and sat beside me and we were simply together from that point. I don’t even remember discussing it. It was as if we both knew and understood what was happening without the need to express it in words, and I had an amazing feeling of calm, and relief, whenever I looked up and saw him by my side. Naturally, I also had the butterflies and increased heart-rate that are the staples of the start of a new relationship, but it was different this time. It was like coming home.

We left the party as soon as we could without causing too much comment but, again without any real discussion, we headed to Richie’s car which was parked in a side street so he could collect it the next day if he’d had too much to drink.

“Do you want to go into town?” he asked, but I shook my head.

“Not really. Somewhere quiet, where we can talk.”

“It’s quiet at mine,” he said, with a little smile, and we both knew that was the perfect idea.

The rest is history. It all is, of course, but that evening is engraved in my mind like fine carvings in a cathedral, even if those memories will die when I do. We didn’t fall upon each other as soon as we closed the door, but we started the journey that would only end when he fell prey to the random madness of the street. Poor Richie. Poor me. We couldn’t know what was in store for us. We felt as if we had our whole lives before us, and even if we weren’t expressing it then, I think we both believed that we would be spending them together.

I didn’t say a word about any of this to my parents, when I finally forced myself to appear at their house on Christmas Day. I didn’t tell them that I had seen him a couple of times since, or that we had spoken every day. I didn’t tell them that I was floating on a cloud of happiness, even though I was still being careful about what I said on Facebook and Twitter, the spectre of Greg still lurking there in the background. If they were different people, they would have seen something in me when I let myself in, laden with bags, to face the inevitable reproach.

“We thought you might have been a bit earlier than this. Your mother has been cooking for hours.”

“Happy Christmas, Dad,” I said brightly. “Yes, I’m sorry, I meant to, but I was out late last night. Sorry, Mum.”

Mum presented me with her usual excuse for a smile and told me not to worry, so I ignored the tone of her reply and busied myself putting presents under the plastic tree, chatting about the weather, which was unremarkable, and school. This was, at least, one subject they would struggle to imbue with negativity, as they had both been teachers themselves and had wanted nothing more for their only child than that she would follow in their footsteps. Growing up, it had been such a part of my life, as it stretched out before me, that it had become a reality almost without my knowing it. It was something of a minor miracle that I loved it, that they had been right.

So, it was no surprise that they didn’t notice how happy I was, any more than they would have noticed if I’d been sad. Emotions were not discussed in our house unless it was absolutely necessary, so nobody remarked upon the sparkle in my eyes or the glow on my cheeks and I wasn’t going to spoil it by presenting them with the opportunity to find a fatal flaw in my rosy vision of the future. I could imagine Mum’s lips pinching together in the way that always heralded a criticism. Deep lines had formed around her mouth, although she had never smoked, carved out by a lifetime of disapproval.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” she would have said. “It will be very difficult if you split up, being in the same school.”

Or something like that, I don’t know. I didn’t give her the chance to think of some other reason why Richie and I would not be happy together, because I knew we would be. I knew it with a certainty I have felt about little else, and that got me through the rest of the day unscathed.

As I remember, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. There appeared to be a lull in hostilities between my parents, most of the time anyway, and they seemed to like the presents I had bought them. Naturally, their gift to me was destined to sit in my bedroom until a decent enough period had elapsed for me to take it down to the Oxfam shop, but I had expected nothing more. Dad left all the Christmas shopping to Mum, and she relied entirely upon a catalogue that featured a range of young women wearing middle-aged women’s clothes, so there was little hope of a happy outcome there. I smiled as I held up the horrendous lilac jumper she had chosen for me, and said all the right things. If we all lived long enough, maybe the Christmas would come when I would wear such a thing, so at least there was that to look forward to.

Richie laughed when I showed it to him the next day. We hadn’t been able to see each other for several days, but now, as we sat snuggled up on the sofa in my flat, we shared our respective family Christmases and vowed this would be the last time we would ever spend Christmas Day apart. That’s how it was. We’d only been together a matter of days, but we were able to talk about being together in a year without any feelings of awkwardness as if one of us was rushing things or making assumptions. I got a little shiver when I remembered how I had felt when Greg’s mother had talked about Christmas dinner. That had only been a couple of weeks into the future but it had felt creepy and intrusive. Now here we were, still getting to know each other, but in no doubt about how that would happen. I pushed Greg and his mother out of my mind and leaned closer into Richie.

“I think I quite like you,” I said.

The rest of the holiday passed as holidays do. Quickly. New Year was a mad round of his friends and mine, as we were both at that stage when you are desperate to show off your new love to everyone you know, and there was nothing to burst our bubble. Olga was delighted, and told Richie he’d better be nice to me or he would have her to deal with, laughing and hugging us both as she did, and then we left that party and went on to another at about 11. He whisked me around, smiling this huge smile and introducing me to his friends, some of whom I recognised but none of whose names I could have remembered then. That was almost certainly the first time I met Nat. I’d had quite a lot to drink by that time, and although I love him to bits, Nat isn’t the kind of bloke I would normally even register, but I’m sure he must have been there. He was Richie’s best friend and they had known each other since uni, so I can’t see them being apart at New Year.

So, that was the holiday over. I had been single at the start of it, and now I wasn’t. I had been a mess, worrying about something that, almost certainly, was much less significant than it seemed, and now I hardly thought about it at all. I arrived at school early, full of optimism and enthusiasm, and picked up the contents of my pigeon hole on my way up to my tutor room. I could see that there were a number of envelopes, almost certainly containing cards from pupils, and I wondered how I should acknowledge them, now that I had taken all the others down from the pin board. Should I display them on my desk just for a day or so?