The Home Corner (12 page)

‘Shall we go in then?’ she said. 

And we proceeded down the sidepath, through the back door and into the kitchen. ‘Oh, by the way,’ my mother added, putting the trug down beneath the table, ‘I made some more cakes today for your jumble sale.’

And she went  to the sink to fill the kettle.

I leaned against the side of the fridge.

‘The jamboree, you mean?’ I said. ‘Really?’

‘I just thought they could maybe do with another batch from someone. I mean, I shouldn’t think many of the mums have got time to bake, have they, in the middle of everything else?’ she continued, over the noise of rushing water. ‘And it’s a pretty funny week to be having a jumble sale at all.’

‘Jamboree,’ I said.

‘Whatever it’s called.’

I didn’t reply. I looked at the wall opposite and noticed that the Family Organiser had already been turned to July’s page. There was a recipe for
Smoked Seafood Dip
and some advice on stemming the flow of blood from a wound.

‘Mrs Baxter makes Melting Moments,’ I said. ‘Apparently she’s famous for them.’

‘Is she?’

‘You don’t have to make cakes for the jamboree, Mum. I mean, there’s no obligation.’

‘I know there’s no obligation, darling, I just feel like it. I like making cakes,’ she said, sounding slightly hurt. ‘And it’s for a good cause.’

‘I’m not sure a load of gym equipment is much of a good cause,’ I replied, not in the mood suddenly to be conciliatory, or even nice: sometimes, when I got home, something happened to me and I started behaving like a bad-tempered nine-year-old. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘since when is a gym horse a good cause, exactly?’

‘Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,’ my mother retorted. Which was true, of course. A gym horse was definitely better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It wasn’t even one of her expressions though, it was one of my dad’s.
We are all living a lie
, I thought, and I sighed and looked across at my old framed picture on the wall. 

Happy Days Are Coming
.

‘So what sort of cakes have you made, then?’ I asked.

‘Another batch of gingerbread men. Look – there they are on the cooling rack. They’re bigger this time because I found another cutter. I’d forgotten all about it and then I found it at the back of the drawer. It’s that one we bought in Bakewell years ago.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and I looked across at the table top. There were twelve new gingerbread men lying there, twelve apostolic gingerbread men.
Tonight one of you will betray me . . .
One of them had a face that reminded me of Ed McRae’s. Spacey and cruel, one eyebrow raised. ‘Mum, I’ve got a question,’ I said.

‘What’s that, love?’

‘You know some children have imaginary friends? You know, invisible friends that they play with?’

‘Yes?’ She sounded a little wary.

‘Well, did I ever have any? When I was little?’

My mother’s face suddenly brightened,  as if she was pleased to be asked a question about my childhood – an altogether happier part of our lives together.

‘Why do you ask?’ she said.

‘No reason, really. Just, there’s this wee girl at school who keeps telling me about this imaginary friend she’s got. Her name’s Mindy Moo. The friend, that is. She’s this cool kind of . . . girl. And today, when Emily was playing in the Home Corner, she . . .’

‘
Mindy Moo
,’ my mother interrupted. ‘Well, that’s quite a name!’ And she stopped talking and gazed off, into space. ‘Well, I suppose you did have Shonky,’ she said, after a moment.

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes. For a while there was this character you had called Shonky.’

‘Shonky?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what she was, really. I don’t know if she was a person or an animal or what. But I suppose
she
was an imaginary friend. She was definitely female, anyway. She was a she.’

I didn’t know what to say. I had no recollection of Shonky at all.

‘Yes, she used to loom quite large in your life for a while,’ my mother continued, a look of fondness in her eyes. ‘She was always following you around. Sort of . . . trailing around behind you. And then she just . . . disappeared. You stopped talking about her. I suddenly thought ‘Luisa doesn’t talk about Shonky any more, and she was . . . gone.’

‘How funny,’ I said.

‘Yes: “Shonky’s here,” you used to say, sometimes in the funniest places! Sometimes when we were in the supermarket or somewhere, or when we were getting changed for your swimming lessons . . .’

She paused.

‘She went on holiday with us one summer. Don’t you remember? She came camping with us when we went to Wales. Slept in the tent with us.’

My mother put the lid on the kettle and plugged it in at the wall. And I stood and watched her and tried to remember.

‘It’s funny,’ I said after a moment, ‘because Shonky’s an actual word, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes. But
you
didn’t know that, did you? You just made it up. You were three. And you used to like making up words.’

‘Shonky,’ I said. But all that came into my head, for some reason, was a little picture of Mrs Crieff and her plastic lawn.

‘We used to like having her around,’ my mother said. And she suddenly looked rather sad.

I walked over to the table, sat down, and tried to recall the space my imaginary friend had once occupied in my life. I suspected that I would have believed in her more than I’d ever believed in, say, God. She would definitely have been more
fun
than God. God never went swimming with you, for a start, or camping, despite what some people might say. ‘Shonky,’ I said again. But it was impossible to summon her up, or who she had been.

‘It’s difficult to know sometimes, isn’t it,’ I began, ‘when something’s made up and when it’s real. Or even when . . .’

But my mother had surfaced from her reverie.

‘No, I don’t think so, particularly,’ she said. ‘Anyway, shall we sort out tea? Maybe you could spin the lettuce for me.’

Because she had that ability: to snap out of fond recall. It was a skill she had. A kind of pragmatism.

‘Oh,’ I said. And I looked up, and out through the window, as if she might be standing out there, my old friend Shonky. She wasn’t, of course. There was just the camper van belonging to our neighbours Audrey and Donald Faulkner.
Sirrocco Breeze.
It was slowly reversing past the side wall of our house. It crunched noisily into a new gear and trundled off down the road.

I found the lettuce in the salad drawer. Then I went to the sink, dropped some leaves into the salad spinner, ran water over them and whirred them around. When you turned the handle fast, the salad spinner made a noise that sounded like the trains on the London Underground. That accelerating, whirring noise that got commuters from A to B.

‘So I think I’ll have a bath after tea,’ I said, letting go of the handle and watching the salad spinner continue on its own, like a zoetrope. ‘I’m going to try and sort my hair out.’ It was the first time I’d mentioned the disaster of my hair, since I’d dyed it. ‘I thought it was one of those wash-in, wash-out ones,’ I explained, as if this might, in some way, make my decision seem more normal.

‘Did you?’ my mother said, airily, from the other side of the room. And she glanced quickly across at my hair, where it was coming loose from a kirby grip.

I was in bed extremely early. It was still light outside, and would be till nearly eleven. I sat up against my cloud-print pillows and listened to a blackbird making its warning call from the branches of our cherry tree. I read an old copy of
Cosmopolitan
, dated November 1992, when my life had been something else. But they were always the same anyway, those magazines. They always said the same things. There was a picture on the cover of a startlingly perfect young woman, probably about my age but different in most other respects. Her hair was a successful kind of tawny colour and her teeth, revealed in a joyful smile, were dazzlingly white. She looked as if she had some important job writing advertising copy or working for a TV station. She would definitely have a boyfriend and at least three close girlfriends she had lunch dates with. I turned the page.
Things happen after a Badedas bath
, it said, over the picture of a young
woman
draped alluringly in a bath sheet. When I was small I’d used to wonder what was meant by that Badedas slogan: by ‘things happening’.
I’d thought it might be something like Christmas presents or a sudden, exciting fall of snow. The magazine smelled of old perfume, which depressed me but also gave me, at the same time, a curious sense of hope. And it occurred to me that perfume might be designed to do exactly that: it might intentionally have a kind of double edge. Then I read an article I’d read at least five times before, about losing two pounds a week through keeping a calorie-counting diary and only eating, as far as I could see, nuts and yogurt and fish. I read another article called
‘
Make Time for
You!’
, which was all about disguising your imperfections with the deft use of concealer, spritzing your face with lavender water and practising yoga for inner peace. Then, just before nine, I turned off the light. I think I must have fallen asleep pretty quickly. And at some point that night, I had a dream about Stella Muir. She didn’t look like Stella, she was just this vague, floating presence – the kind that turns up in dreams – all spirit and no substance. But I knew it was her, and in the dream she was called Shonky.

‘Hi, Shonky,’ I said in the dream.

‘Hiya,’ Shonky replied.

‘What happened to you? Where did you go?’ I asked.

But Shonky didn’t reply. She’d just come round to my house with some little pots of paint, for some complicated, dream-like reason. She’d brought dozens of colours, with names like burnt umber and vermillion and cerulean blue. We were supposed to be painting some picture. But she’d forgotten to bring any paintbrushes.

‘So how are we supposed to
paint
anything?’ I asked. I was pretty annoyed with her. ‘How are we meant to paint our pictures now?’

I walked past Emily Ellis’s mother the next morning as I was heading through the school gates. She was leaning over Emily’s upturned face, wiping toothpaste marks from the corners of her mouth with a paper hanky.

‘Look at you!’ she was saying. ‘Honestly; look at you!’

‘But I can’t look at me, Mummy,’ Emily replied. ‘People can’t look at their own faces.’

Mrs Ellis paused.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said.

And her own face suddenly became rather blank, as if all the thoughts in it had momentarily gone AWOL.

Mrs Ellis was nothing at all like her husband. She was actually one of the few people at St Luke’s I ever felt any connection with. There was just something about her that seemed oddly familiar – probably because she looked as if she didn’t want to be there either, she just looked as if she’d wandered into the playground by mistake. She wore a white trench coat and a pair of high heels, and that was pretty much all I knew about her, apart from the fact that she owned a purple VW Beetle with a sticker on the windscreen that said
Purple Bug.
Also, there was the fact that she was pregnant. Probably about six months
gone
, I’d heard some of the other mothers say in their hushed little groups in the playground – which always made pregnancy sound like a kind of madness. As in
Maud Gonne’s gone maud
, a joke my old English teacher had once told us. We’d been reading Yeats –
‘. . . tread softly because you tread on my dreams . . .
’ – and that was what he’d come up with.

Maud Gonne’s gone maud.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Anyway. Sometimes I’d see Mrs Ellis standing there in the playground, her stomach already this big
fact
in front of her, this
gone-ness
, and I would feel sorry for her. And I would try not to think of the day I’d put those little yellow pills into my mouth and swallowed them down.

‘Well, I hope you have a nice day, sweet girl,’ she said now to Emily. And she put the paper hanky back into her pocket.

‘Is it long or short?’ Emily asked.

‘Is what long or short?’

‘The day. Is it going to be long or short?’

Mrs Ellis hesitated.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think it’s probably going to be medium-sized. And then there’s the trip of course, isn’t there?’ she added. ‘To that Waterways place.’

I saw Emily frowning at this unsatisfactory explanation. She frowned across the grey playground, focusing her gaze on the set of monkey bars at the far end, which Mrs Crieff always referred to, excitingly, as ‘the adventure playground’. The only thing you could do with the monkey bars, really, though, was to revolve around them, like a cotton reel on a spindle, and sometimes fall off them altogether.

‘You always say things like that,’ Emily said to her mother.

‘What? Things like what?’

‘Things that are upside down and funny.’

‘Upside down and funny. Oh dear.’

‘You’re not thinking straight today, Mummy, are you?’ Emily tutted.

If I had been a different sort of classroom assistant, I might have intervened at this point. I might have swept in, as Miss Blythe from 1C would have done, or Mrs Richards from 1A. I might even have cracked a world-weary joke, as Mr Temple did. ‘
Oh, Emily,
I might have chuckled,
‘it’s like Twenty Questions sometimes, isn’t it, Mum?!’
Because, at St Luke’s it was OK to call the mothers Mum. You could call the mothers Mum but you couldn’t call the fathers Dad. It was just one of those things.

‘But how long are we going to be at the Waterways Visitor Centre? And why aren’t you coming? And how long is a medium-sized day?’ Emily was insisting as I edged mutely past. Then she began to twist one of her mother’s protruding coat buttons around, between her fingers. Mrs Ellis frowned and prised her daughter’s hand away.
How the hell should I know?
she looked as if she was thinking.
How long is a piece of string?

‘What it is, sweetheart,’ she said after a moment, ‘is it’s a day you spend at school – well, some of it today at the Waterways place, actually; and then you come home. For tea.’

Emily’s frown deepened.

‘But why? Why because you have tea at home? That doesn’t make sense! And anyway, I always have tea at home. And why aren’t you coming to the Waterways place? Some of the other mums are coming!’

‘Oh, Emily.’

Mrs Ellis’s attempt at motherly serenity had completely unravelled now. She just looked upset. She was wearing her trench coat and high heels as if she was on some professional assignment, but her shoes needed a polish and her coat had a sticker of Dumbo on the pocket, and beneath it, there was this baby.

‘I’m going to be late if I don’t go,’ she said, mainly to herself. ‘I’m going to say goodbye now,’ she added, stooping to kiss Emily’s cheek. ‘Have a lovely time on the trip.’

‘Oh, but I wish I could go with you!’ Emily exclaimed, lunging forward and hanging onto her arm.

And for some reason, this sudden outburst sent a little shiver down my spine. I was just reminded, I suppose, of the days when I’d used to say goodbye to my own
mother
in the playground; of the way I’d missed her as soon as she’d walked away. How I’d wanted to go wherever she was going, in her white knitted hat and her camel coat and shoes!

‘I wish I could stay with you too,’ Mrs Ellis was saying, freeing her hand, finger by finger, from her daughter’s grasp. ‘But I’m sure school . . . will . . . be . . . great,’ she gasped. ‘Go and join your line now. Bye bye, sweet girl.’ And she turned and headed for the gates.

I watched her go. She half ran, despite being pregnant. She legged it so fast she almost stumbled over a scooter that had been locked to the school railings, causing about half a dozen concerned-looking men to come hurrying to her assistance. When she turned back to wave, though, Emily was already walking up the ramp into the Portakabin. Resigned. She was sandwiched between Zac, the plastic-cow boy, who looked white as a sheet and was probably going to be sick, and a girl called Skye, whose cardigan had rainbow buttons on it, secured two holes away from where they should have been.

‘Walk nicely up the ramp,’ boomed Mrs Baxter, standing at the door of the Portakabin, and  I fell in, at the back of the line. It was like being at the end of the plank.

‘. . . well, you should come and see our bathroom: it’s got ivy growing through the actual window frame . . .’ I heard one of the mothers saying to another as I approached the ramp.

‘. . . and I found myself standing in the hallway this morning going “Shoes and teeth”,’ another woman was saying. ‘I was just standing there going “Shoes and teeth, shoes and teeth” like a bloody parrot! And nobody was even
listening
!’

Bolting the door behind me, top and bottom, I wondered where Mrs Ellis had been going in such a hurry, and what she was going to spend her medium-sized day doing; because mothers’ days, between
drop-off
and
pick-up
, were pretty short. I thought, too, of the contribution she was planning to make to Mrs Crieff’s jamboree on Thursday. Of the sausages on sticks, while everyone else would be turning up with their empire biscuits and their butterfly cakes. Maybe, in Mrs Ellis’s condition, the smell of baking made her feel sick. Or maybe sausages on sticks was just a good response to have; a good, two-fingered, two-sausage-fingered retort to Mrs Crieff’s heart-warming plans.

I had left my Walkman at home that morning, but I was still not being impressive: I was still not the first one in. I
should
have been, considering the chat I’d had with Mrs Crieff the previous day. I should at least have been
second
. Certainly, I should not have been
last in the line
, behind all the children.

‘Punctual as ever, Miss McKenzie,’ Mrs Baxter said briskly when I appeared in the classroom doorway. She was sitting in her chair, the register open on her lap, and had already begun calling out names. Now she looked up at the enormous wooden teaching clock on the wall, as if it might inform us all of the actual time.

‘Sorry, Morag,’ I said, above the children’s heads. ‘It’s just the bus went this strange route again this morning. It was . . . just a bit all over the place, for some reason.’

‘You’re a bit all over the place, my love,’ Mrs Baxter retorted
sotto voce
, as I headed past her. We were, after all, supposed to be talking about respect that week: ‘respect’ was the Word, just as yellow was the Colour
.

I sat down and looked around. The room looked oddly blank, and after a moment I realised it was because most of the children’s pictures had been taken down off the walls; they had been spirited away overnight. I wondered if the janitor had done it, or perhaps Mrs Crieff, working late. There was now just a series of pale rectangular spaces on the walls, where the day before there had been paintings. The beady-eyed figures with enormous heads and sticks for limbs were gone. The ‘I Am Healthy’ series of florid-hued swimmers in bright turquoise squares of water. Even the animal prints and the posters about Golden Rules and Healthy Eating targets had been removed. There was a pile of them on Mrs Baxter’s desk, waiting to be placed into folders or, possibly, the bin. And the children, sitting in their circle on the floor, all seemed tired. They were all dragging themselves towards the shallows of Friday morning, and appeared to have little strength left. There’d been far too many
fun
things going on recently, Mrs Crieff had muttered during the staff meeting the previous week – there had been dozens of birthday parties, for instance, brought forward so they wouldn’t have to happen in the holidays; and the children had been arriving at school ashen-faced and with consumptive-looking dark rings around their eyes.

‘Now,’ Mrs Baxter said when she’d finished taking the register, ‘we’ve got a busy day ahead of us today, haven’t we, children?’

‘Yeeesss,’ droned the children.

‘And we’ve just got time now, before we head up to assembly, for our song. Are we all ready to sing our “good morning” song?’

‘Yeeesss.’

And she turned towards the large, clunky tape recorder she kept on her desk.

‘Here we go, then!’ she said, pushing a button and causing some merry electronic notes to bounce out of the machine. It was ‘Peter Rabbit Had a Fly Upon His Nose’, Mrs Baxter’s favourite. We always sang it to the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.

We reassembled, ten minutes later, in the hall, for Tuesday assembly. Mrs Crieff was already there by the time we rambled in. She was waiting by the stage microphone with that stiffly patient look she had. Often at assemblies there was a reverend or a rabbi or a humanist, but Mrs Crieff had had to step into the breach that day. The whole week was just going to be funny like that, she’d already told us; it was going to be funny and different. Ends of terms always were.

‘Good morning, children,’ she said now into the microphone after we’d all gathered a short distance from the stage, the children sitting on the cold parquet floor, the teachers on their bendy plastic chairs. And then she just stood for a second, hands clasped, and waited for hush. She was wearing her turquoise power suit again, I noticed, the one made from a kind of bouclé material. Her steel-grey hair looked newly trimmed.

‘Good morning, children,’ she said again as the noise of small voices abated, ‘on this lovely sunny morning, on this very last
normal
assembly, in fact, of . . .’

‘
Yessss
,’ growled some P7 boys, skulking like assassins in the shadows behind me. Mrs Crieff stopped, peered in their direction and gave one of her cheerful, magnanimous smiles. The boys grew quiet. Mrs Crieff stood still and smiled and smiled and waited for absolute calm. The boys were silent. And then she resumed. ‘Now, I thought that today, children,’ she said, ‘as it’s such a lovely,
bright
day, and as it’s our last
normal
assembly of term, we should all sing the “Golden Rules” song.’

Everyone regarded her a little blankly, some with their mouths hanging open. The smallest children had to tip their heads a long way back to regard her as she spoke because of where they were sitting, right at the foot of the stage. The angles didn’t really work.

‘But we’ve just been
singing
a
song
!’ I heard John Singer mutter, a few feet away from me.

‘Miss Almond?’ Mrs Crieff ploughed on, seamlessly, from the stage.

And Miss Almond, kind, cowed Miss Almond the librarian and thwarted musician, began some introductory chords on the piano in the corner of the hall, leaving no one any further space or time in which to complain.
School hasn’t changed a bit
, I thought, as I stood up and drew breath: it was still full of people singing happy songs about kindness and goodness. When I was at primary school it had usually involved God or the more mysterious
Lord
, but it was still all the same.

The ‘Golden Rules’ was a song Mrs Crieff often chose.

I always suspected she’d written it herself. It was to do with the way ‘sun’ and ‘earn’ didn’t quite rhyme; also because half the words had to be squashed to fit. It had accompanying hand gestures, too: spread-out fingers to indicate the sunshine, and patting the chest to indicate a well-earned sticker.

‘Now. We sang that song this morning because I think there’s never any harm’, she said when the song came to an end, ‘in remembering the Golden Rules. Is there? Even when we are going into the holidays.
Especially
when we are going into the holidays!’

She looked down at the children sitting on the floor and at the staff in our positions of servitude on our bowing plastic chairs.

Golden Rules don’t work like that though, do they, Mrs Crieff!
I felt like shouting out into the stillness that had suddenly overcome the room.
I mean, we had rules at my old school and we had a motto, too –
Per Ardua ad Astra
– and look where that got me!