The Home Corner (13 page)

I didn’t, of course: I just sat there, my mouth shut.

‘Lovely,’ Mrs Crieff continued into the microphone, as people began to fidget again and rearrange their positions. ‘Because, you know, the Rules might be coming down off the walls this week, but they should stay in everyone’s hearts over the summer holidays, shouldn’t they? They should stay in our heads and our hearts the whole summer long.’

Outside the hall there were still quite a few mothers hanging around the playground, their conversations floating upwards and in, through the opened windows. Somebody was talking about head lice – about a comb you could get called the Nitty-Gritty; somebody else was talking about camping in France. A couple of
women
standing very close to the window were discussing the marriage breakdown of a friend, and another, larger group was laughing about their children’s manly swimming instructor, and how they wouldn’t mind being rescued from the water by
him
. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would be OK, they said, if it was
him
doing it. They were quite raucous, particularly now it was nearly the end of term. They were quite demob happy.

Mrs Crieff, standing at the microphone, suddenly paused at the noise and the subject matter, and rolled her eyes. She tried to look charmed – amusedly fond of those
chatty mums
disturbing the final assembly of term! – but she was evidently just irked.
For God’s sake!
I imagined her yelling.
Haven’t you got
homes
to go to?
And I pictured her striding across the hall to slam the windows shut.

‘Miss McKenzie, are Mrs Crieff’s rules the same as God’s rules?’ John Singer asked me as we were all returning to the Portakabin again twenty minutes later. And he slipped his hand into mine. It was a warm, slightly damp hand, which a lot of the other children tended to reject. Mrs Baxter and I were really the only people who held his hand.

‘Well, I suppose, in a way, yes,’ I replied. ‘God’s rules are quite like Mrs Crieff’s. If you believe in God.’
And Mrs Crieff
, I wanted to add.

‘But who is God?’ he asked.

‘Hmm,’ I said. I didn’t feel qualified to talk to anyone about God. God had been a big disappointment, as far as I was concerned. God was the person, if He existed, who’d picked me up out of the life I’d planned and plonked me back down in the wrong one.

‘Well,’ I said,
‘do you know about ghosts?’

‘Yes, I know about ghosts. Like the ghosts in
Scooby Doo
.’

‘Well: not exactly. I mean, God is a bit like a ghost, in a way. But a good ghost, not a
Scooby Doo
one. He’s like a cross between a ghost and a friendly sort of floating . . . presence. He’s like a cloud. And also a bit like
Father
Christmas,’ I concluded, fretfully. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’ And I stopped talking.

John Singer stared up at me.

‘So will God bring me presents?’ he asked.

‘Hmm,’ I said.

That was the trouble with working in a school. Sometimes you could say something useful, and sometimes you found that, within the space of two sentences, you were telling people a load of old rubbish. You were likening God to Father Christmas or a Hanna-Barbera character. You’d got yourself into some complicated piece of nonsense. And it was hard to get out of it again.

Circle Time was short that morning – a speeded-up version – because of the trip to the Scottish Waterways Visitor Centre. Mr Innes, the minibus driver, would be driving through the gates at ten o’clock sharp, Mrs Baxter told us, after we’d all briefly sat down again on our mats in the Portakabin. And so unfortunately there would be no time that day for Talking Ted to get passed around. We would just have to hear everyone’s news when we got back. There would only just be time, in fact, to sing one more tune – to sing, quickly, our own class song –

–
and to visit the toilets before everyone would have to traipse outside yet again and get onto the minibus. Life, really, being a succession of songs and little journeys.

‘Miss McKenzie, can you oversee toilet trip?’ Mrs Baxter asked in a slightly airless voice as she stood beside our shelf of papier mâché owls. I looked across at her. One of her eyes was bloodshot, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration across her nose.

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’

‘Not a problem.’

‘OK, everyone: toilet time,’ I said, raising my voice, and I went and stood at the doorway to the toilets, the girls’ cubicles on the left, the boys’ on the right. I had to make sure there was no queue-barging, and to remind each child to wash their hands.

‘And don’t forget to use soap!’ I warned doomily, peering down at my own fingernails which, I realised, were pretty grimy themselves: I hadn’t scrubbed them for a while, I reflected. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d used our little wooden scrubbing brush at home. My standards had slipped since the days when I’d painted my fingernails and perfected French manicures with Stella Muir.

‘You always say that about the soap, Miss McKenzie,’ said Eve Russell, one of the little girls standing at the basin. ‘You always say that,’ she said, turning a sliver of green soap dutifully around in her small hands, ‘but I never do forget the soap.’

‘Well, the
reason
I tell you’, I replied bossily, ‘is because it’s important.’

‘Germs!’ agreed a couple of the other little girls.

‘Exactly.’

‘Do you know, Miss McKenzie,’ observed John Singer, who was peering at himself in the low mirror in the boys’ half of the toilets, ‘I could only see my eyes in the mirror last week, but now I can see my nose too.’

Which somehow seemed a more significant observation than anything anyone had to say about soap.

‘Now, I want everyone to be as quick as they can, walking out,’ Mrs Baxter was shouting as my little group clattered back to go and stand with the other children in the corridor. ‘It’s like an oven in here today,’ she added, to no one in particular. Which was true. The corridor was the hottest part of the Portakabin, and it was not where you’d choose to be for any length of time. A lot of things in it appeared to have finally given up the ghost that week. The sunflower seedlings the children and I had planted were all flopping hopelessly against the window in their empty yogurt pots
(‘What was the result of your experiment? There was too much sunlight’
), and the lentils and pasta shapes were falling off their collages.

‘Less chat and more moving,’ said Mrs Baxter; because there was an increasing volume of little voices now – almost the sense of a slightly out-of-hand party – and she was trapped there in the middle of it. She was leaning against the
Welcome to Our Classroom
board with a slightly martyrish expression on her face.
Our colour this week is: Yellow
, said the board. If she’d been a saint, she’d have been Sebastian.

The minibus was not, in fact, a minibus at all. It was a huge bus, bright white, with the words ‘Jimmy Steels Coaches’ emblazoned across its side. ‘For goodness’ sakes,’ Mrs Baxter sighed, emerging into the daylight at the top of the Portakabin ramp. The bus was waiting for us by the kerbside, the engine on and the door open. The driver, a small, grey-haired man sitting on the little round driving seat and staring straight ahead, looked irritated already. And I had to resist a sudden urge to sneak down the ramp, sleekit as a seven-year-old, and just run away. Just run and run. It was ten past ten on a Tuesday morning in June and a slight, splashy summer rain had begun to fall, and I would rather have been anywhere, almost anywhere else.

‘Good morning, Mr Innes,’ Mrs Baxter called cheerily to the driver, across the playground.

‘Mor’.’

He looked crumpled and worn-out, as if life was a huge washing machine and he had been the washing inside it.

‘JI-MM-IE STEA-LS COA-CHES,’ John Singer observed, coming to stand beside me.

‘Very good,’ I said. ‘Well done.’

Mrs Baxter smiled, breathed in and briefly closed her eyes. Then she looked down at the little group of children pushing and shoving their way down the ramp.

‘I don’t see a nice neat crocodile,’ she said, her voice booming up and down the morning streets. ‘Where is our crocodile?’

A volunteer mum was going with us on the trip that morning. There was always at least one volunteer mum. She had come to join us in the playground: she was
Topaz
’s mother and her name was Mrs Legg. It was the sort of name Stella and I would have had hysterics about, just as we would once have laughed at Mr Temple pensively stroking his beard. I couldn’t do things like that any more, though, not now that I was the sensible, grown-up Miss McKenzie.

‘Hi, Mrs Legg,’ I said in my classroom assistant voice as I reached the bottom of the ramp.

Mrs Legg didn’t appear to hear me; and I knew straight away that she was going to be one of those mothers I could not relate to. Who did not relate to me. There were quite a few of them. Mrs Legg was a woman whose collection of zipped holdalls and wipe-clean lunch bags and Wet Wipes I knew I would never achieve if I ever became a mother; not in a million years. And even if she’d been my age she would still have been the sort of girl who had all her pencils sharpened and ready and had passed all her exams with positive, life-enhancing grades. The gulf between us was impossibly wide.

‘Have you been on trips with the school before?’ I asked as we advanced up the line for the coach.

She finally turned and looked at me. ‘Sorry?’ she said.

She had that look on her face: a kind of weary pragmatism that some of the mothers seemed to adopt. A grudging tolerance of oddballs and losers. She was there to deflect the incoming waves, and I was one of the waves.

‘Have you . . . been on trips with the school before?’ I repeated, hanging onto my smile.

‘Oh.’ Mrs Legg frowned, and gave a little shiver. Despite it being a June morning, she was wearing a jumper bearing a recurring pattern of woolly sheep. ‘I go on all the trips,’ she said. ‘I’ve got three older ones, further up the school. I’ve got a daughter in P6 and twin boys in P3.’

She spoke as if I should already know the circumstances of her life. But I didn’t. And I couldn’t think, either, what to say to her about her many children. I couldn’t work out if it was a boast or a cry for help.

‘Come on, Toby, pick your feet up,’ she observed to Toby Cameron, and she moved away from me and further up the line.

Mrs Baxter had the register with her, a big black folder pressed flat across her bust. She held it open while she counted everyone up the steps.

‘All present and correct,’ she confirmed, as the door closed behind us and Mr Innes put the coach into gear. And it suddenly struck me, as we swung out onto the road, how terrible it would be if we
hadn’t
all been present and correct and had actually left someone behind. Some child sitting beside the coats, or in the Home Corner, or wandering alone, across the vast grey playground. My heart tightened at the thought of it. What would we have done, when we’d noticed their absence? What would we have done, as responsible adults? It almost brought tears to my eyes just thinking about it. And I thought how I’d once pictured myself when I’d first got the job at St Luke’s: how I’d envisaged a sort of golden scene in which I was a caring, practical young woman pointing out the wonders of nature – a catkin branch, a ladybird, a leaf – to a group of enchanted children; or singing nursery rhymes to the accompaniment of my own guitar, my fingernails scrubbed and short, my long hair illuminated by some bright, benevolent light streaming in through a window. Well, my nails were short and my hair was long, but those were about the only things that fitted the picture.

The inside of the coach smelt of rubber flooring and extinguished cigarettes and vanilla-scented Magic Tree.

‘Miss McKenzie, have you got the wherewithal for people being sick?’ Mrs Baxter asked as I was edging past her up the aisle. Which was a question that brought me to my senses.

‘Yes, I have,’ I replied, ‘I’ve got it with me. I’ve got everything with me in the emergency bag.’

Because I was in charge of the emergency bag that day, a blue denim holdall the size of a medium-sized suitcase. I had packed it the previous afternoon. Its contents included Wet Wipes, plasters, Calpol and a large cardboard container with a rim round it, known as the ‘sick bowl’. The sick bowl looked like an enormous grey trilby.

‘Good-oh,’ Mrs Baxter said.

We were like pilots, going over procedures for the flight. I don’t know what we would have done in a real emergency, but it was OK because we had a cardboard bowl with us. It was all very
procedural
.
If Mrs Crieff could see me now
, I thought,
she would have no cause for complaint. She would be able to tick that box on her appraisal form
.

‘So: I’ll go and sit up at the back, Mrs Baxter,’ I said.

‘That’s where you’re meant to be sitting.’

‘OK.’

And I plodded on.

The coach, with the door tightly shut, had altered its character. It had become grey and cavernous. And now that it had begun to move, it was filled with a low humming sound, like the noise from a ship’s engine. There was the potential, I felt, as I located a seat near the back, to develop a swift, significant headache, if not actual nausea. Most of the children had paired up before they’d even climbed aboard, their friendship unwavering, unassailable. A few had wavered and pushed and asserted their rights, while others had joined forces, creating little parties of four or five. And then there was John. There were twenty-nine children in the class, and John was the twenty-ninth. I watched him make his way towards me, like someone heading for the least-bad option.

‘Hi, John,’ I said, as he sat down in the seat beside me.

‘’Lo,’ he said, peering through the window.
This always happens to me
, he looked as if he was thinking.