The Home Corner (11 page)

‘Mrs Crieff moves in mysterious ways,’ Mr Temple said, winking at me, ‘her wonders to perform.’

‘Sorry?’ I felt oddly alarmed: I didn’t know what to make of that wink at all.

Mr Temple considered me for a moment. He smiled and stepped forward, and I stepped back.

‘Mrs Crieff moves in mysterious ways,’ he said again, ‘her wonders to perform.’

Which did not enlighten me any further. Also, he did not wink at Mrs Baxter, I couldn’t help noticing, who was standing behind me, holding a Custard Cream someone had offered her. At fifty-eight, Mrs Baxter had entered that curious, invisible zone I’d heard my mother speak of. On a different occasion, in Mrs Richards’ absence, perhaps, Mr Temple might have begun to flirt with
me.
He might have tried out one of his one-liners on
me.
‘I
like
the
hair:
very
bold
,’ he might have said, his voice a kind of foghorn across the staffroom. That afternoon, though, was evidently not the right moment. Besides, I was perhaps already looking a little too blotchy and a little too weird that week: not quite flirting material. I thought for a moment of Ed McRae, of his overnight switch from ardour to coldness, and about the way I’d behaved around men ever since. How they had scared me. And I wondered if I was already becoming a person who would be discussed by the staff next term. Maybe I was already becoming
Luisa McKenzie, that funny girl we had last year
. The girl who did not tick all the boxes.

‘Ignore Mr Temple, Luisa,’ Mrs Baxter said in a loud, flat voice, placing the Custard Cream into her mouth, and so I did; it seemed the easiest option. We breezed as a unit past Mr Temple towards the shelf beside the sink, grabbed our coffee mugs and carried on in a kind of arc towards the seats by the windows. Mrs Baxter and I always sat there to eat our lunch. The seats were turquoise – big and sighing and puffy – and people always made a beeline for them. It was a polite, insouciant beeline, but we all still wanted them, those seats.

‘So,’ said Mrs Baxter contentedly, lowering herself onto a seat so it made its usual sighing exhalation and then she opened up the lid of her lunch box.

I felt jangled by the morning and so I didn’t say anything for a while. I just sat there. Sat and waited. Outside the window, on the low branches of a tree, a group of sparrows twittered. Someone hooted their car horn on the road. Mrs Regan, Mr Temple and some P4 teachers moved around conspiratorially on the far side of the room, clattering teaspoons against coffee mugs. I looked down at my lunch box but I wasn’t hungry, so I looked up again. On the staff bulletin board beside the door there was a sign for an
end-of-term social
that Mrs Regan was arranging. It would be taking place in a
local
tandoori restaurant at the beginning of the holidays.
A chance for us all to let our hair down!
Mrs Regan had written in biro at the bottom. I tried to picture myself in a fortnight’s time, sitting in a tandoori restaurant with other members of St Luke’s staff. I envisaged the little silver bowls full of steamed rice, the heated, fragrant hand wipes, the wine glasses sloshing with Chianti. There was a plan, P3’s Miss Leonard had said, to go clubbing afterwards in The Ritzy
.
I thought of cavemen with clubs; of those strange, low-hatted men in
Wacky Races
hitting each other over the head. I
had
signed up for the evening – Mrs Baxter had talked me into it – but it struck me now how I would much rather go up to the Meadows that evening and lie down on the grass beneath a tree.

‘D’you know, Luisa,’ Mrs Baxter said as she prised a sandwich from her lunch box, ‘this is my twenty-fifth year here. I’ve been eating my lunch in this room for twenty-five years.’

‘Wow: twenty-five years?’ I said.

It seemed an impossible number of years to have worked
anywhere
. Even to have
lived.
How could that just happen?
I wondered
. How could that number of years just be allowed to flop and lollop along? You could probably make salt dough models in your
sleep
. You could probably teach
Fun with Phonics
with your eyes closed.

‘That must feel like quite an achievement,’ I said. ‘I mean, you must have taught hundreds of children.’

‘Generations,’ Mrs Baxter replied, opening up a little pot full of Ritz biscuits and sliding a couple in between the slices of her sandwich. ‘Did the children ask you about your hair this morning, by the way?’ she added insouciantly, changing the subject in one deft move.

‘My hair?’

And I pictured myself – as I might appear at that moment – to the other teachers in the room: I was a peculiar, fretful flamingo, sitting there with my carton of juice and my sandwiches.

‘It’s just that it’s a little . . .’ Mrs Baxter continued, ‘. . . unexpected. And I wondered if any of the children wanted to know why you’d done it?’

I pierced the carton with its little plastic straw.

‘Only Emily mentioned it, in fact,’ I said. ‘In Circle Time.’

‘Ah, yes.’

I cleared my throat. ‘She did also mention it’, I confessed, ‘while she was playing in the Home Corner with Jade and Lauren.’

‘And what did you tell her?’ Mrs Baxter asked. She seemed oddly intrigued.

‘Well,’ I said, thinking back to the conversation Emily and I had had. ‘I just told her that some people dye their hair.’ I sucked some juice. ‘And I told them it was up to them if they wanted to dye it. And so I’d decided to dye mine pink. Only it was a mistake,’ I continued. ‘The pink colour. That turned out to be a mistake. And I told her I’m going to be washing it out over the next week or so.’

I trailed off. I did not go on to mention the conversation Emily and I had proceeded to have about the words ‘dye’ and ‘die’. I did not say we’d touched on the subject of mortality: to die, as in to no longer exist. (‘
Dye
is another word for colour,’ I’d said. ‘It’s not “die” as in . . .’ ‘Yes, I know,’ Emily had chirped back. ‘My mummy dyes her hair, too, because she doesn’t like all the grey hairs. She thinks they make her look like an old lady.’) And a little picture came into my mind for some reason of Ed McRae and his T-shirt, that T-shirt I had loved because I’d thought it had said something about him: about his honesty and his alluring cynicism.
Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die.
And I thought about those pills I’d swallowed, the one in the clinic and the one in my room at home. And about what had happened after that. And I thought about people not being as clever as you might once have believed; that sometimes they just wore T-shirts with other people’s ideas on them.

‘Oh, so did you not mean for it to turn out that colour?’ Mrs Baxter asked lightly. ‘Was the pink a mistake? Oh well,’ she concluded, laughing, ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft awry!’

I looked down at the foil-wrapped sandwiches on my knees. There was something about packed lunches that had always caused me to feel both pleased and gloomy. I don’t know, maybe it was a hope over experience thing.

‘Is it a problem then?’ I asked Mrs Baxter. ‘The colour of my hair? Is it’, I ploughed on indiscreetly, ‘something that’s going to be yet another question mark on Mrs Crieff’s form?’

Mrs Baxter frowned and did not reply.

‘Oh well,’ I said.

Along with the pineapple juice I had peanut-butter sandwiches that day, and one of my mum’s gingerbread men and an apple. Lunch for a six-year-old. The Golden Delicious apple was neither golden nor delicious. The gingerbread man smiled its raisiny smile and hurt my front teeth when I bit its head off.

‘Ooh: a gingerbread man!’ Mrs Baxter said.

‘Yes.’

‘So, will you be making biscuits for the big event on Thursday?’ she continued, settling back more comfortably with her lunch.

And for a moment I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Big event?
Then I remembered: Mrs Crieff’s end-of-term jamboree. Her celebration of another school year successfully concluded, after which we could
all relax
. On the wall behind Mrs Baxter, to the right of her head, there was even a poster about it that one of the children had recently designed: a picture of an enormous fairy cake beneath crossed wooden spoons. It looked like something heraldic. 

‘Well,’ I said, ‘my mum’s making a few things. She’s really the . . . biscuit-maker in our family.’

Which was true: a week or so earlier, I’d made the mistake of showing my mother Mrs Crieff’s letter about the jamboree, the paragraph where she’d said how wonderful it would be if ‘. . . mums, dads, grandparents and carers could spare the time to grab a spoon, don an apron and rustle up a batch of fairy cakes or flapjacks . . .’ And my mother had obliged! My mother, who wasn’t remotely connected with St Luke’s, apart from the unfortunate fact that I worked there. She’d made twenty-four fairy cakes and eighteen slices of chocolate fridge cake. She’d already bagged them up and put them in the freezer, ready for me to take in.

‘Well, that’s very kind of your mum,’ Mrs Baxter said.

‘Yes,’ I said. It was. And also a little depressing.
Mrs Crieff doesn’t deserve your gingerbread men, Mum!
I’d felt like saying when my mother had taken them out of the oven, still smiling at 180 degrees.
Save your biscuits for someone else!
The whole event seemed to have become a slight obsession for Mrs Crieff.
‘We feel the jamboree would be an appropriate way for us to leap forward into the summer holidays!’
she’d written laboriously in her letter. Which was how she wrote her letters: they were always full of words like
appropriate
and
leaping forward
. The school library had already benefited earlier that year from the kind donation of
one
parent, she’d continued coyly, and the proceeds of this particular fund-raising event would be going towards new gym equipment for the school. She’d asked people to make a big end-of-term effort: to rifle through their children’s clothes drawers; to beg, borrow or steal bunting and balloons; to rustle up cakes and biscuits. They were full of
rustling up
, too, her letters, and
rifling through
and
moving forward
. Though I suspected she didn’t really condone begging or stealing.

‘I might make some rock buns if I get time,’ I said to Mrs Baxter, glancing up at another sign on the wall, just to the left of the jumberlee one.
Besides rain and snow
, it said,
think of other ‘weather’ words for what falls from the sky.

Mrs Baxter sighed and blinked. ‘I’m going to make some of my Melting Moments,’ she said. ‘I’m famed for my Melting Moments.’

‘Are you?’ I replied, and I started to laugh. The words Melting Moments just struck me as funny. That, and the weather that falls from the sky. But then I stopped because Mrs Baxter wasn’t laughing. ‘So,’ I said. I looked down, and then up, out of the high staffroom window, at the pale-grey summer air. There were more seagulls flying through it now, blown in from the coast. The weather felt . . . it was hard to know what it felt like. Something was changing, though. Something was beginning to change.

‘By the way,’ Mrs Baxter said after a while, with renewed dignity in her voice, ‘don’t forget you and I will be needing sandwiches tomorrow, too, Luisa. For the Waterways trip. It’s amazing how often the classroom assistants forget to bring lunch,’ she added ruefully, making me wonder again about the errant, enigmatic Miss Ford.

‘Don’t worry, I’d never forget my lunch!’ I blurted before I could stop myself. ‘Lunch is the best bit of the day!’ Which was true, as far as I was concerned.

But Mrs Baxter was not in the mood. It was the last week of term and she still had her report cards to write and her appraisal forms to fill in, and she didn’t need sarcastic nineteen-year-old classroom assistants adding to her problems.

‘Just thought I’d mention it,’ she said, and she stood up, brushed the crumbs from her cardigan and left the room.

I got up too after a while; after everyone else had gone. I plodded quietly over to the sink in my sensible shoes. I tipped some coffee granules into the ‘I’m a Mug’ mug Stella Muir had once given me, shortly before we parted company, adding hot water from the urn and milk from the dregs of Mr Temple’s milk carton. Then I took my coffee back to the turquoise seats, sat down and watched the steam rising from beneath the lid of the urn. Someone had left a pile of homework sheets on the table beside my seat. I picked up the top one and read it while I sipped my coffee.

There was a picture beneath, of a man being stabbed. Being killed fifty-six times. There was a scarlet fountain of blood and Mary Queen of Scots looking on, huge-stomached, her mouth a felt-penned chasm of woe.

‘Right: upwards and onwards,’ I heard Mr Temple saying in the corridor, as a burst of bright white sunlight suddenly lit up the room and made the steam from the urn look briefly ethereal.

I sat and thought about ghosts; the ghosts of things.

Mindy Moo seemed more real to me, sometimes, than the people I’d just spent the day with at St Luke’s. More
there
. I always liked it when Emily mentioned her, because her name  sounded like one I’d been familiar with once, a long time ago.
Mindy Moo
sounded like someone I’d known and liked. Standing at the bus stop after school that afternoon, I thought about something I’d read once in a book at school – a tradition gypsies used to have, when naming their children. They gave them three, in total, the book had said: there was the baby’s official name, and then its family name and then the name whispered into its ear by its mother. That last name was something known only by the mother and – in some subliminal way, I supposed – the baby. There was something nice about that tradition, I’d thought. Names could be like that, though; they could be funny. Also, they could give people a character they didn’t actually have.
Stella
, for instance, had once sounded like a bright, uncomplicated name to me. Just as
Ed
had been a salt-of-the-earth name, an honourable name; manly and a good laugh.

I was never late, going home: punctuality was never a problem at the end of the day. I had to wait almost ten minutes before I saw the 42 bus heave itself mirage-like around a distant bend at the bottom of the hill. A maroon rectangle, advertising student bus passes.
Just the ticket for your Uni days.
It trundled past the chemist’s, moved on past The Gift of Time gift shop, with its faded fish mobile hanging motionless in the window, then stopped at the bus stop before mine. I waited while some silent figures plodded up and down its steps like people in a Lowry painting, before it launched itself back into the road.

‘Single, please,’ I declared, getting on board, and I dropped my change into the machine.

The bus seemed to be full of old people that afternoon. People of my age had all been whisked away, like the children in
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
. I sat down beside an old woman in a green polyester turban who glared briefly at me before turning her gaze out of the window. In the seat in front sat a woman with a toddler. The child was standing on the woman’s knees. She was wearing big, jangling sandals, the kind Stella had used to call
Jesus creepers
. ‘I’m not a climbing frame, Crystal,’ the woman said mildly to the child, but it made no difference: the child was just clambering, her little fingers creasing her mother’s summer blouse. ‘Mummy, make your knees a lap, Mummy, make your knees a lap,’ she complained. They were on their way home, I supposed, from some crèche or playschool or toddler group. I’d heard some of the mothers at school talking about toddler groups. I pictured the noise and the thick-wheeled plastic trikes and the snacks. Halved grapes and chopped bananas. Nescafé and Bourbon biscuits.

‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ the child trumpeted, her sandals’ crêpe soles threatening to rip the fabric of her mother’s skirt. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’

‘Oh, Crystal!’ sighed the woman.

She reminded me of someone Stella and I had once used to observe through the windows of our old school bus: a woman we’d used to call The Mummy Woman, because she’d always seemed such an epitome of saintly motherhood. She’d stood at the corner of Cumberland Road every day, surrounded by infants – and Stella and I, sitting high and superior on the bus, had always used to shriek when we saw her.
‘Look – there she is! There’s the Mummy
Woman
!’
She had been shortish, this woman, late thirties, with a weary face and a practical padded jacket, and always with this huge entourage of small children.
Who in their
right mind
would sacrifice themselves to a life like that?
we used to think. We’d counted them once, the children: there were five of them, not including a baby strapped to the
woman
’s chest and a larger baby, often yelling its head off, in a buggy. What on earth was she
doing
? What was she
doing
with her life? She was like the old woman who lived in a shoe. And we were the girls who were not going to get trapped. ‘Excuse me, this is my stop,’ said the old woman beside me, as if it
was
her stop, in some way.

‘Sorry,’ I replied, standing up to let her past.

‘Mummy,’ the little girl was still complaining, ‘Mummy, make your knees a lap! Make your knees a lap, Mummy! Mummy –’

‘Boo,’ I said, as I sat down again: I couldn’t resist it. And the little girl stared at me, wide-eyed, like some sort of marsupial, then slunk down to hide beside her mother.

This was, I felt, a small achievement. And now I considered just carrying on past my stop – because maybe you could do that; maybe you could sail straight past where you were supposed to be going, and by doing this, alter the course of your life.

I never had so far, though. Sailed on. I’d always just hopped off and gone home. Our nearest stop was at a place people from my old school used to call God Squad Junction – a crossing where four square, greyish churches confronted each other, like people having an argument.
There Is Hope
, it said on a noticeboard stuck in the front garden outside one of the churches. And there was a picture of a rainbow, an arc of pure beauty. I remembered there’d been a poster just like that at my old school, too, stuck above the door of our exam hall.

We lived only five minutes away from the bus stop. It was just an unfortunate fact that Mrs Crieff did, too. There was nothing to be done about this, of course – but, still, it was not a relaxing walk. I strode resolutely along the pavement that afternoon, speeding up as I neared her front gate. Fortunately, Mrs Crieff was never in. She was always still up at St Luke’s at that time of day, working hard. As I hurried past her front gate I pictured her perched in her office on her blue pneumatic chair. She had a very upright way of sitting which always seemed like a reprimand to people who slouched. There she was, I imagined, sitting upright and working out who to keep and who to fire; there she was, collating and ticking and assessing. And there I was, the assessed, the unpunctual, the unfocused Miss McKenzie, schlepping home. Three times during the course of a recent meeting Mrs Crieff had used the words ‘stepping stones’. But the stones
she
meant were not pretty resting points in a river, they were places from which you launched your next move.

The oddest thing about Mrs Crieff’s house was that her front lawn was made from fake grass. I’d clocked this before I’d even known she lived there, and had wondered who on earth would have a fake lawn in their garden instead of the real thing. It was only evident up close: from the distance of my bedroom window you couldn’t tell. My mother and I had had a laugh about it from time to time on our way home from the shops. Who could be so divorced from nature, we’d wondered, that they could bear to confront
that
every time they opened their curtains in the morning? And then we’d discovered that, well, Mrs Crieff could.

‘I suppose it never needs mowing,’ my mother had conceded politely. ‘Maybe that’s why she had it put down. I suppose she’s a busy woman.’

And we’d both just stood and gazed at it for a moment, lost for anything further to say. The lawn was made from the same material that you saw sometimes beneath cuts of meat in butchers’ shops or on indoor football pitches. It was a searing, impossible green. A blackbird had settled on it as we watched, bounced its beak against it and flown off again, puzzled. I’d seen that happen a few times since then: Mrs Crieff’s conning of the blackbirds. The plastic had begun to fade a little now, though. It had turned a kind of greenish-blue, like
algae
on a pond; and hurrying past, it was hard not to gawp. Mrs Crieff also had quite a few garden ornaments. Positioned near the front door there was a stone-effect mushroom about the size of a toddler, several white plastic flower urns and a half-size concrete fox. Sticking up from the flower beds were two moles – the top halves of them, anyway – wearing spectacles and hats. And stationed at an angle near the gate there was a small, white, wheel-less wheelbarrow, within which sat a grey fibreglass rabbit. I was oddly drawn to it, this rabbit: I suppose I almost wondered if it would ever, one day, become real and hop away. As I scuttled past that afternoon I noticed that a new sign had been hung around Mrs Crieff’s front gate. It said
I Live Here
,
and beneath these words there was a picture of an Alsatian dog. Which was something else that made me wonder about Mrs Crieff and her choices.

My mother was in the front garden when I got home. She was standing there pruning the roses. And as soon as I saw her I wanted to run into her arms. My mother was the only sane person I knew in the whole world. The only kind person. The still centre. But I didn’t, of course, run into her arms. It was a Monday afternoon in June, blue and overcast but otherwise undramatic, and I had not been brought up to be theatrical, I’d been raised discreet and stoical. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that I must have disappointed her, not having a nice boyfriend and a rented flat and a proper set of things to do.

‘Hello, darling,’ she called to me down the path.

‘Hi.’

We had big yellow roses in our garden – the kind you see sometimes in municipal flower beds – but we also had the smaller, scented, more disease-prone types with names like Madame Eglantine and Queen of Denmark. Also some great big ones the colour of a pink winter sky. My father had planted all the roses when we’d first moved to the house. I think they were meant as a kind of peace offering to my mother, who’d never (she’d once told me) particularly wanted to move to Pumzika. She’d always wanted to live in a flat in the centre of town, with wide, painted doors, and a balcony and a big kitchen and a room of her own.

‘Good day?’ she asked as I opened the gate and plodded up the path towards her. ‘How was Mrs Baxter? And Mrs Crieff?’

‘Oh, their normal selves,’ I replied, pulling a tiny leaf off one of the rose-stems and squashing it between my fingers. I didn’t really want to talk about my day at St Luke’s, I just wanted to let it recede into the past, just like the children did, when their mothers asked them what they’d been doing that day. ‘Things,’ they would say. Or, ‘Nothing.’

‘So, what did you to today?’ my mother asked, as if she could read my mind.

‘Nothing much to report, really,’ I breathed out, deciding not to mention my meeting with Mrs Crieff. ‘Apart from one girl having a massive nose bleed at lunchtime. It started at lunchtime and it just went on and on.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘It stopped in the end, though. We began to think we might have to take her to A&E or something because it just wouldn’t stop, but then it did, just as we were about to phone her mum. Oh, and Joe fell off the boat.’

‘Joe fell off a
boat
?’

‘In the playground. Not a real boat.’

My mother frowned. ‘Was he OK?’

‘Yeah, he was fine. His head swelled up for a while, which was quite worrying. The top of his nose went all sort of puffy, and I wondered if –’

– my mother was looking at me a little anxiously –

‘– if he might have to go to A&E too, but it was probably some protective sort of response; the swelling . . . It calmed down in the end. And he was fine.’

My mother waited. She seemed to think I might have something else to say. But I didn’t.

‘Well, good,’ she said, in her sensible voice – the voice that was a shield which had always protected me and my father from anything too bad, which had always prevented our lives from straying too far into chaos. Or admitting that they might be about to.

‘. . . hmm, and what else happened?’ I mused, hearing the familiar, slightly sour note appearing in my own voice – I had developed a tendency towards sourness that summer – ‘Oh yes: the lollipop man told me another one of his jokes.’

I watched my mother clip one of the big yellow roses near its base – one of her Queens of Denmark – and place the stem into a wooden trug.

‘He tells me jokes quite a lot,’ I added, ‘when I meet him at the crossing.’

Quietly, my mother bent and pulled a chickweed out of the ground. She was wearing her cut-down red Wellingtons and her spotty gardening gloves. She looked as if she was thinking about all the ways I had disappointed her.

‘Do you want to hear it?’ I asked.

‘Go on then.’

‘So, a bear walks into a bar, and the barman goes, “What would you like?”’

‘Hmm,’ said my mother.

‘And the bear doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he goes, “I’ll have a glass of orange juice, please.”’

My mother looked up.

‘And the barman goes, “Why the long pause?”’

‘Sorry?’

‘“Why the long paws?”’

My mother didn’t speak for a moment. She stood up straight and looked almost a little tearful. Then she said, ‘Yes, but surely you got that in the wrong order?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The pause. Or you should have paused or something. Or not mentioned the glass of orange juice. And should lollipop men be telling jokes about bars?’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why it’s funny. He’s funny, the lollipop man. He’s a laugh. He doesn’t take life too seriously.’

My mother’s frown increased slightly.

‘That’s the way he told it to me, anyway,’ I said. ‘And I thought . . .’ – but I could feel something sliding away now, something failing to amuse my mother, or even me – ‘I thought’, I said, ‘that it was somehow funnier like that. The way he told me.’

‘Oh.’

‘He told me another one, too, the other day. A doctor, doctor one.’

‘Right,’ my mother said, flatly.

‘Doctor, doctor,’ I ploughed on, ‘I keep thinking I’m invisible.’

My mother looked at me, waiting for the punchline.

‘Next, please!’ I said.

I thought it was funny, too, that joke. It was the funniest joke I’d heard for a while.

My mother placed her secateurs on top of the yellow roses in the trug, then lifted it up.
“Trug” – isn’t that a peculiar word?
I’d said to her one afternoon, a few days earlier. But at least a trug was useful, I supposed, now. At least it wasn’t Mrs Crieff’s wheel-less wheelbarrow.