The Home Corner (10 page)

And I felt quite cold. I felt like someone who has swum too far out to sea without realising it, too far to swim back –

‘Yes, it
was
quite funny,’ I said, ‘the way she just, you know, said it: “What happens when the break-down truck breaks down?” It was just . . .’

But now Mrs Crieff seemed to have switched off altogether. She was looking past me and out of the window, at the trees on the other side of the playground. She looked as if she was listening to something – the wind in the branches, perhaps – or considering some holy set of instructions. And I wondered if, in some unfathomable way, I had just failed my assessment. Maybe I had just said something very bad, and Mrs Crieff would not, now, be able to tick any more boxes. And I would lose my job. And then what would I do? How much further would I fall?

But then, quite suddenly, she snapped out of her reverie. She sighed: it was a snorting kind of sigh that came through her nose, the same sound I’d heard horses make up at the Braid Hills Riding School, when I’d walked past it with my mother.

‘Well, children do say such funny things sometimes, don’t they?’ she said. ‘That’s what keeps us on our toes, isn’t it, Luisa? As teachers.’

And now, without any warning, she was standing up. She was concluding our meeting and rising from her chair.

‘Oh,’ I said. I grabbed my coat off the back of my chair, picked my bag up from the floor, and stood up, too.

‘Well, Luisa,’ Mrs Crieff said, striding across to the door. She looked down at her watch. ‘Eleven fifteen,’ she added, and then she reached out and put her hand on the door handle. ‘So, as long as we can turn those two “Unachieved” boxes into “Achieving” ones over the course of this week, I’m sure the council will be happy to approve a permanent . . .’

‘But which ones are they, Mrs Crieff?’ I blurted.

And there was a moment’s silence. ‘Which ones are what?’ Mrs Crieff asked in a small voice.

‘Which are the boxes that still need ticked? The Unachieving ones? Because I’m still not quite . . .’

‘The Unachieving areas’, Mrs Crieff interrupted in a low, measured voice, ‘are the same as last time, Luisa. The ones about punctuality and focus. Those are still the areas you need to . . . focus on.’

‘Right.’

‘However. I’ve no doubt you’ll be redoubling your efforts in those areas before the end of the week’

‘Yes.’

‘Because we don’t want to lose another of our classroom assistants.’

‘No.’

‘And soon the holidays will be upon us and we can all relax.’

‘Yes.’

‘And if there’s anything you want to come and talk to me about, Luisa, over the next few days, relating to your work here – anything at all,’ she said, as she opened the door onto the vast, draughty corridor, ‘then do come and tell me. Even if it’s outwith school hours.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, doubting the sincerity of this.

‘That’s OK,’ said Mrs Crieff, closing the door.

I turned and headed down the stairs, my heart a kind of low weight in my chest. I walked past the big
Truth and Fidelity
sign that had been nailed above the dinner-hall door, headed back through the doorway, along the corridor, into the playground and crossed over towards the Portakabin. And for some reason an RE teacher I’d once had at my old school – a bald, quite peculiar man called Mr Sloper – suddenly appeared in my mind. I think it was the sign in the dinner hall that brought him back. ‘What is the truth, ladies and gentlemen?’
he’d used to ask us,
little bubbles of spit forming at the corners of his mouth like cuckoo spit on an ear of corn.
‘
Quid est veritas?
’ Which was something Jesus was supposed to have said. Or was it Pontius Pilate? I suppose I’d never taken much notice in Religious
Education
.

Dinner was at half past twelve, but Mrs Baxter and I always had to stay behind for ten minutes or so after the lunch-time bell had gone – weary, grown-up drudges – picking up bits of Lego and squashed Play-Doh and sweeping the sand back into the sandpit. I was caught, as I often was, between the desire to salvage everything, every single little plastic wheel and axle, and to just sweep it all into a dustpan and chuck it in the bin.

Mrs Baxter and I made it outdoors at twenty to, clutching our Tupperware lunch boxes and locking the classroom door behind us. The weather had broken, spots of warm rain falling onto our faces as we hurried down the ramp and across the playground.

Mrs Baxter did not ask me about my meeting with Mrs Crieff. ‘Humid,’ she observed instead, looking up at the clouds above the school roof. They were darkly bright, an almost luminous grey now: they were certainly not the benign sort of clouds we sang about at Assembly.

‘I think it suits the end of term though, doesn’t it: weather like this,’ I replied. ‘I mean, these are the dog days, aren’t they? The dog days of term.’

Mrs Baxter glanced at me, as if some opinion she’d held about me was regrettably, inevitably, beginning to unravel. Her expression had, in recent weeks, adopted that look.

‘I’m not quite sure what you mean by “dog days”, Luisa,’ she said.

And we carried on in silence across the playground. We headed past the wooden ship that was permanently moored in the tarmac, past the bin and the blasted tree and towards the dinner-hall entrance. Glancing down, I spotted something white lying at the bottom of the steps. It was a piece of checked school paper, torn from an exercise book and now lying in a newly forming puddle. I stooped to pick it up.

it said in computerised font at the top of the page.

– and then there was a child’s handwriting in watery, wobbly pencil –

‘Someone will be missing that,’ observed Mrs Baxter.

I felt a peculiar fizz of sadness in my chest. I felt suddenly very sad for the child who walked up hills and was not good at dodging gym balls.

‘I’ll hand it in to the secretary’s office,’ I said.

‘Yes. That would be a plan, Luisa.’

‘
Look
at this
beautiful butterfly
!’ we heard a voice pronouncing on a classroom TV as we headed in through the main doors. ‘
Now
let’s
fold it
in
half
!’

‘What are they
doing
in there?’ I asked.

‘Symmetry,’ Mrs Baxter replied.

It’s funny how some memories that year were sharp, in focus, while others just receded into the background, waving at me like seaweed beneath the water. I seemed, almost, to recall the wrong things. Or, at least, the things that had gone wrong. I kept remembering, for instance, the day I’d knocked all the sea urchins off that shelf in Moonchild. Also the day of my careers interview in a small, cupboard-like office called
The Resources Room.
I could recall exactly how Mrs Angelli, the careers officer, had stood up when I’d walked into the room, then immediately sat back down with a look of defeat.

‘So, you are Luisa McKenzie . . .’ she’d confirmed. And then she’d looked down at a piece of paper in her hands. It was evident that the information written on it did not bear much relation to anything she’d been led to expect. ‘Now, I have to say I’m a little confused here actually, Luisa,’ she’d said, ‘because the boxes you’ve ticked on your questionnaire – “I am a
PEOPLE PERSON
, my favourite pastimes are
DRAWING AND PAINTING
,
I prefer being
INDOORS
” – well, they all clearly indicate a career in the arts. They link up directly with the arts box.’ She’d blinked. ‘But wasn’t it your plan to study . . . geography?’

‘Well,’ I’d replied, ‘that was the
plan
. . .’

‘But now, here, you’ve got “Perhaps going to Art College”,’ Mrs Angelli quoted.

She looked up again. Her mouth had formed a troubled, rounded shape, a bit like the end of a chanter on a set of bagpipes.

‘I mean’, she said, ‘I’ve spoken to your geography teacher, Luisa, and he was under the distinct impression that geography was what you were going to be doing. I mean, art is a super career for the right person. Art is great. But to be honest, Luisa, there are a lot of young women who want to be artists. And there are scores of ex-art college students flipping burgers out there, aren’t there? I’m afraid to say. And signing on the dole.’

I looked down at my hands, which were bunched up into fists in my lap. They were the fists I should have punched Ed McRae with four months earlier. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life any more: I didn’t have a clue. The plans I’d once had – worthy plans relating to coffee bean production and the rubber industry in Brazil, and Europe’s changing population patterns – seemed to be sliding away, like something disappearing down a hill. Waiting for me somewhere in London there was probably a little anaglypta-papered room in a bedsit and a group of cheerful, life-affirming friends. But I couldn’t picture them any more – the room or the friends or the life.

Mrs Angelli had shifted slightly in her seat. There was a bright pink flowering cactus peeking around the left side of her head.

‘You do seem to have got yourself in a bit of a pickle here, don’t you?’ she said.

I stared down at my knees in their unseasonal black tights: it was nearly May already, the sunshine was becoming warm, and I was still wearing black woollen tights! I had not progressed! I had not moved with the seasons! There was a large, round hole in the right knee of my tights, childish, stretched wide across the whiteness of my kneecap. 

‘So, I suppose I should just carry on with geography,’ I croaked. ‘I mean, as you say, there’s more likely to be a job in geography . . .’

Mrs Angelli stared at me. It was as if she could see something I couldn’t. Some projected life. Maybe she could already see me sitting beneath some upended egg-cup mobile in a classroom, surrounded by little children and cutting out shapes with plastic scissors. Maybe careers officers were good at that.

‘Chin up,’ she said. ‘It’s normal to get jittery at this stage.’ And she leaned forward in her seat and briefly patted my knee. ‘And once your exams are behind you and you’re in London studying geography, you’ll wonder what on earth you were worrying about!’

I was aware that my five-minute careers consultation was up. Some other lost soul was hovering outside in the corridor.

‘OK. Thanks, Mrs Angelli,’ I said. Because what else was there to say? And I stood up, shook her hand, edged past the photocopier and headed towards the door. Then I walked downstairs, all the way down three flights, to Mr Jolly’s geography room, which was where I was supposed to be that afternoon. We were revising surveying and geological contours that week, and Mr Jolly had told us all to bring compasses for something he called ‘mapping purposes’. But when I got to my seat and took my compass out of my bag, I realised I was the only one who’d brought the kind you draw circles with. Everyone else had brought the kind that pointed north. Which said something, I suppose, about the direction I was heading in.

‘So, guess what we’ve just been doing in biology, Lulu?’ I remember Stella Muir asking me that day, as we sat together at the cooked dinners table.

‘I don’t know,’ I’d replied, biting into my sandwich.

And she had paused and smiled.

‘Delivering rabbit babies.’

‘Oh,’ I said, my teeth failing, suddenly, to bite.

‘Yep, that was what we were doing today,’ Stella continued, twisting an overcooked piece of cauliflower rather delicately between her fingers.

And I had no idea what she wanted me to say, what sentence to form about newborn rabbits. About newborn anything.
Don’t you remember, Stella?
I wanted to say.
Don’t you remember what happened to me?
And I thought of all the lying I’d been doing ever since – all the lying and not telling – and all the plans I’d ever had began to hurtle around my head, like shoals of little fish.

‘Hello?’ Stella said. ‘Earth calling Luisa?’

‘Yeah, still here, Stella,’ I said. ‘On planet Earth.’ Although, in some ways, I’d begun to doubt it.

‘So. Anyway. It was Mrs Noble’s rabbit?’ Stella continued. ‘And the babies were really ugly. All pink and blind and naked.’

I was feeling slightly sick now.

‘How many?’ I said.

‘Nine!’ Stella replied, pushing some more cauliflower onto her fork. ‘Nine tiny pink rabbits.’

‘Cute,’ I said, dutifully.

‘No,’ Stella replied. ‘They weren’t cute. I just told you. They were really ugly. And one of them was dead.’

‘Oh.’

‘They have to have a lot of them,’ she continued. ‘Rabbits. Kind of survival of the fittest . . .’

And then she seemed to recall something that had happened once,  and stopped talking.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s not that different from drawing them, is it? I mean, you drew some rabbits once, didn’t you? Dead ones? In art class?’

I didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. I just looked around the dinner hall. I could see my old friends, Mary and Linda, sitting at the packed-lunch tables, eating sandwiches. Theirs had always been a serious, sandwich-eating friendship.

‘This cauliflower’s overcooked,’ I said.

Stella frowned at the gravy on her plate. Then she looked up at me again, and there was something very cool about her expression.

‘D’you know what, Luisa?’ she said, and her voice was different now, sharper-edged. ‘There are plenty of people who might be interested to know what I was doing in biology today.’

It was as if some immutable part of her character was beginning to show through, like the wood beneath a varnished chair.
Or maybe it’s me
, I thought.
Maybe I’m the wood beneath the varnish.

‘I mean, at some point’, Stella said, ‘you’re going to have to start showing an interest in what
other people
are doing!’

And I think that was the point  when we realised we were no longer friends; that we had never really
been
friends. We’d only ever pretended, and I couldn’t even remember why.

Stella sighed, mushed the rest of her cauliflower into a kind of purée and got up from the table.

‘Hi, Ed,’ she called out.

Because there was Ed McRae suddenly – he happened to be there, right at that moment! – lumbering across the dinner hall with one of the canteen’s copper water jugs. He stopped and turned.

‘Oh, hi. Yeah. Hi, Luisa,’ he added, a little shiftily. His mouth, his lovely mouth, was an awkward line.

Stella turned and glanced, a little regretfully, in my direction.

‘Right. I’ve got maths now, anyway,’ she said. ‘So I might as well head up there with Ed.’

And she pulled her pretty green cardigan from the back of her chair and went to join him. Ed did look a little embarrassed, I noticed; he even blushed slightly. But I knew he would soon recover his equilibrium. You had to be balanced, after all,  if you were going to work with cantilevers and lift shafts and supporting walls for a living.
Smiling at Stella, he put the water jug down on one of the used-crockery trolleys, and they walked out together through the swing doors.

I sat at the dinner table for a minute or so. I felt as if I’d had something taken away from me that I’d only just realised was mine. It was early Monday afternoon. One of the table’s legs was shorter than the others and it wobbled ridiculously. I felt a lot like crying, but I didn’t think it was anything to do with Stella, or even Ed McRae. Maybe it was about nothing more than that poor dead baby rabbit. I got up from the table after a while and pulled my big black cardigan properly over my shoulders. I was going to be one of those complicated girls who went round head to toe in black. I went to the corner of the room with my plate of unfinished lunch, scraped my macaroni cheese and cauliflower florets into the Addis bin the school called ‘the scraps bucket’, and left the dining room. I just left. I walked up the school drive, waited at the bus stop for the 41 bus and went home. We were allowed to go home that fortnight for something called ‘study leave’. Some people used to call it ‘study leave-it-out’.

The staffroom was quiet that lunchtime. There were just a few teachers wandering around at the far end of the room, quiet and mildly traumatised by their mornings. There was a respectful, almost mournful kind of hush. People didn’t like to accost each other too much at that time of day: it was one of those unwritten rules.

Then, after a second, Mr Temple turned up.

Mr Temple was always upbeat. He was always fired up and trendy in his pale suit and Cuban heels. I watched him head straight across to the other side of the room, like a bouncing bomb progressing across a still lake. I saw some of the female staff stiffen, like startled deer, at his approach.

‘Ladies!’ he said to them in his big voice.

‘Hi, Mark,’ they carolled.

‘Thank God it’s lunchtime,’ he boomed.

And then he stationed himself by the water urn and began to talk to Mrs Richards. He’d singled her out, the way a lion hunts down a zebra.

Standing beside me, Mrs Baxter tutted. She never thought Mr Temple was funny, she took him very seriously.  To me he was just funny. Which was one of the ways I did not fit in.

Mr Temple had taken up the pose now that he often adopted,  of significant intelligence. He was a very trim person: short, neat, fortyish, bearded like the king of Spain. Sometimes, in conversation with the younger, pretty female staff like Mrs Richards and me too, on my good days, he even stroked his beard.
He’s the sort of person Stella and I would have sniggered about,
I thought; and I felt quite hollow, suddenly, over the loss of an understanding that had once been mine.

As I crossed the room, Mr Temple glanced up over the top of the urn.

‘Miss McKenzie.’

‘Morning, Mr Temple.’

‘Afternoon,’ he corrected, rolling his eyes at Mrs Richards. ‘Don’t they teach you anything, you classroom assistants?’

I didn’t reply. I was no good at ripostes; and now I realised with dismay that Mrs Richards had grabbed her chance to get away: she had already made her zebra-like escape and was almost running across the room to speak to Mrs Regan, the school’s secretary.

‘So, how are you?’ Mr Temple asked me, looking slightly irked.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I replied.

‘Great. So, any plans for the summer?’ he continued, glancing shiftily at my hair.

‘The summer?’

‘Yes. That interlude between spring and autumn.’

‘Well, no. Nothing specific,’ I said. Which was true: the summer holidays ahead of me were just a big, wide-open space, as big as an aircraft hangar.

‘I’m going to the south of France,’ Mr Temple said – a little boastfully, I couldn’t help thinking.

‘Are you?’ I said.

And then neither of us had anything to say. I didn’t know what to say about the south of France and I didn’t know how to speak to men any more, even funny-peculiar men like Mr Temple – I just didn’t know what they expected me to say. And maybe Mr Temple didn’t know, either, how to speak to pink-haired classroom assistants who had no plans for the summer.

‘Sooo . . .’ he began.

‘I’ve just had a meeting with Mrs Crieff,’ I blurted, feeling somehow that I should tell someone this, confess it to someone. ‘She’s doing my end-of-year appraisal.’

Mr Temple raised one urbane eyebrow. I’d heard him making jokes about Mrs Crieff’s obsession with appraisals and assessments, but now there was a chance for camaraderie about it, he didn’t seem to want to make any.

‘I’m not quite sure what she’ll be expecting from me in the next couple of days, though,’ I heard myself prattling on. ‘I don’t think’, I continued, ‘I’m necessarily . . .’

– Mr Temple was frowning vaguely –

‘. . . ticking all the right boxes.’

And I stopped talking again. I stood and gazed at the side of the water urn. There was a label stuck to it that said,
Warning: Urn Gets Hot!
I suspected Mr Temple had been the person who’d attached a Post-It note to it a couple of months earlier, saying
Who’s Urn?

He put his right hand in his pocket now and jangled a set of keys. When he moved he always smelled quite strongly of Davidoff:
Cool Water for Men
. It was an aftershave I remembered some of the boys at my old school wearing and it clashed quite horribly sometimes with Mrs Crieff’s perfume, the corridors struggling for fresh air in their wakes.