The Home Corner (14 page)

‘So, this is exciting, isn’t it?’

‘Hmm.’

‘John smells,’ some of the other children used to say sometimes, which was true: he often did have a smell of grubbiness about him, of unwashed clothes and infrequent baths. ‘He smells of squashed spiders’ webs,’ I’d heard a little girl shuddering once, which was one of the strangest and saddest insults I’d ever heard. Seeing the others teasing him was like watching a duckling being attacked by herring gulls on the canal. We intervened – of course we did – but there were always ways around intervention.

‘Have you –’ I began – but before I could say anything else Mrs Baxter’s voice suddenly rang out.

‘MISS MCKENZIE, CAN YOU SIT WITH JOHN?’ she bellowed, her words ricocheting down the length of the coach; and I saw John sigh again and blink his eyes behind his glasses. I cleared my throat.

‘Yes: I
am
sitting with John,’ I shouted back, and all the children in the seats around us turned and stared.

Poor John. Johnny No-Mates.
One day it will be OK
, I felt like saying to him. Although, actually, there was no guarantee of that either.

I stowed the emergency bag as well as I could beneath my feet. It was quite bulky. The sick bowl made it quite difficult to deal with.

‘Well,’ I said to John, ‘it’s nice to be out of school for the morning anyway, isn’t it? Going somewhere new.’

‘It’s not new to me. I’ve been before, with my mum,’ he replied, still staring through the window.

He didn’t help himself either sometimes, it had to be said.

We all had our particular parts to play that morning. Mrs Legg was stationed in front in the role of reassuring mother, Mrs Baxter was in the middle, her steady hand on the tiller; and I was at the back, above the wheel arch. I was always at the back of the coach on school trips. Once it had been because I was a rebel: it had been where Stella Muir and I had sat on our way to school, in the days when we’d peered out at the Mummy
Woman
standing on the pavement. We’d used to play a game, too, called Sweet and Sour: if you waved at people outside and they waved back, they were sweet; if they didn’t, they were sour. But that was then: that was where we’d been supposed to sit
then,
and what people had expected us to do. Now it felt as if I was in the wrong place. The whole bus felt like the wrong place. I was one of only five people on board who was above the height of three foot ten. And there was no Stella with me. There was no Stella and there was no Ed McRae – there wasn’t even Mary Wedderburn or Linda Daniels, and there was no sense of being where I should have been.

‘Miss McKenzie, can I eat my Babybel?’ John asked, just as we were swinging out onto the main road. I looked down to see that he had already pulled his sandwich box out onto his lap. It was a green plastic thing the size of a small attaché case and covered with muscle-bound superheroes. Inside, a foil-wrapped packet of sandwiches was partly opened, and the sandwiches were falling out and spilling their contents. ‘My dad packed my lunch today,’ he said.

‘Oh.’

There was a bruised apple covered in buttery crumbs and a pot of something called Yoplait, leaking a pinkish liquid.

‘You shouldn’t really eat your lunch before we get there, John,’ I said. ‘Or there’ll be nothing to look forward to. I think you should put the lid back on now.’

‘Ohhh!’ John complained, but he did as he was told. He put the Babybel back in the box and clipped the buckle shut.

‘Good boy,’ I said, as he folded his arms and peered out of the window again. Once, I would never have spoken like that in a million years. And it still surprised me, how obedient children could be when you told them something in clear, unambiguous terms. How resigned to their fate. It worried me too, a little. It made me think of the ways people can follow the wrong leader.

‘So,’ I said, sighing and leaning back, and the coach rumbled on, through the rainy summer day. The seats were orange and dark blue tartan.
Moquette.
And everything was slightly muffled – voices, conversations, thoughts. It was like falling down the back of a settee.

‘Grace, when we go over bumps my tummy goes blue,’ I heard one of the little girls saying in the seat in front.

‘Well, my head goes orange and yellow,’ Grace retorted. ‘Does
your
head go orange and yellow?’

Yes
, I thought.

We’d only driven a few hundred yards up Melville Drive when Mrs Baxter got to her feet again and came swaying down towards the back of the bus. She was wearing a green and blue cagoule which rustled every time she moved her arms. She always wore practical things on trips, whereas I often forgot to put anything sensible on apart from the clothes that had just occurred to me on getting out of bed. That day for instance I was wearing a long purple hobble skirt and an off-white blouse, both of which I’d bought two years earlier in Topshop. The blouse was the one I’d been wearing when I’d told Ed McRae the Bellamy’s veal pie anecdote. It was something I should have thrown away.

Mrs Baxter moved up and up the bus and finally arrived at my seat.

‘Miss McKenzie, when we get there,’ she whispered theatrically above John’s head, ‘the plan is to split up into three groups. You can have six, Mrs Richards and Mrs Legg can have seven each and I’ll have the rest.’

‘OK,’ I whispered back, trying to inject a note of snappy enthusiasm into my voice.

‘It’s more manageable that way,’ Mrs Baxter added, her eyes round and slightly more bloodshot than before. ‘As you’ll remember from that trip to the zoo.’

‘Right. Sure.’

The zoo trip  had happened the second week I’d been at St Luke’s. We’d looked at some parakeets, a sea lion and a lemur and its child. Apart from that, the day was mainly a blur in my mind: just a woolly cave of temporarily missing children, an absent giraffe, a lot of penguins, a sarcastic shop assistant and a cafe with jungle murals on the walls.

‘So I suggest’, Mrs Baxter continued
sotto voce
, gripping onto the top of my seat as we rounded a corner, ‘that you and Mrs Legg have the . . .’ – she paused – ‘. . . easier ones. And I’ll have the more . . .’

‘Difficult ones,’ I said. Beside me, John sat as motionless as a rock.

Mrs Baxter looked at me.

‘I wasn’t going to put it like that,’ she said. ‘However.’

And she peered out through the window, to see what point of the journey we had reached.

‘There’s a lot to see and not much time to see it,’ she said, as if she was making a statement about life. ‘But I think one thing everyone will want to do’, she added, ‘is look at the ducks on the river.’

‘Have we brought bread?’ I asked, like some Russian agent meeting a colleague for the first time on a park bench. I felt this was a sensible enough question, though, if we were talking about ducks.

Mrs Baxter wrested her gaze from the view.

‘Bread?’ she said. ‘Oh, no! Bread would be asking for trouble.’

And she swayed back down to her seat.

Stella Muir and I had got on a big white coach once, and gone on a trip. The memory of it came back to me suddenly as I sat there. We’d gone down the A1 all the way to Whitby, a couple of weeks before beginning our Highers. It seemed incredible to me now: that my life had once encompassed going on a weekend’s holiday to Whitby with Stella Muir; that we’d ever been close enough, or ever thought we were. But we had been, I supposed, just as I had once been in love with Ed McRae. ‘It’ll be a pampering session,’ Stella had said, ‘a pre-Highers treat. We deserve it. You especially, Lulu,’ she’d added – which had been about as far as she’d ever got to acknowledging what had happened to me.

We’d chosen Whitby because we were skint and there’d been a £16 return deal on at Thomas Cook. Also, you could buy jet jewellery dead cheap there, and Stella’s mother knew someone who had a holiday flat in the town. (Mrs Muir was one of those people who’d
known
people; my parents had never known people like that.) And so that was where we’d gone. The flat was huge, situated in a white Victorian villa on a hill leading down to the bay. The ceilings were so high that they’d almost roamed off out of focus.

‘It’s quite like Ed McRae’s house, isn’t it?’ Stella had remarked when we’d first walked in. And then she’d stopped talking.

It
had
been like the McRaes’ house, actually. It was the same kind of age and size, anyway, and there was a grand staircase and  cornices in all the rooms, cornices and curlicues – although these ones had seen better days.
Unlike
the McRaes’ place, a lot of the features of this house had not been well-maintained. The big front door, for instance, had been painted bottle green circa 1978, and when we switched on the lobby light, the bulb had immediately extinguished itself. We’d walked around for a while, opening doors and looking in all the rooms, and I’d tried not to think of Dracula arriving on the cliffs, which we could see through the living-room window; of him turning up one winter’s night, malevolent, black cloak flapping, at Whitby Abbey. It was cold. Every room suffered from damp and there were odd bits of rubbish and a lingering smell of old cigarettes; and the holiday was already going wrong.

‘Oh my God,’ Stella said. ‘I had no idea Mum’s friend was so unhygienic.’

We pictured some dodgy old man staying there before us, chain-smoking Embassies all day long with the thin green curtains drawn and the television on. Pinned around the walls of the flat were a lot of notices handwritten by Stella’s mother’s friend. They all began with the word ‘Please’ –

– but they were not friendly notes.

I’d wondered how many other people had read them, and what they’d done with their lives after leaving Whitby; how their lives had extended beyond the lights and the heater and the front door, like tendrilling plants seeking more light.

‘I mean, what a bloody rip-off,’ Stella said as we sat in the kitchen that evening, eating peanuts. ‘Greedy cow. I knew we should have gone to Scarborough.’

And she’d  made a point, after that, of leaving all the lights on, and the heater, and slamming the front door when we went down to the beach in the mornings – which was small and greyish and didn’t live up to Stella’s expectations either. I suppose a lot of things did not live up to Stella’s expectations.

We did at least have a huge room each. Stella had a red futon in hers – quite new, in fact – although my bed was high and lumpy and covered with a torn peach candlewick bedspread. My room
did
have a compensatory balcony and a view, beyond the abbey, of the sea, although when I’d opened the thin little French windows on our first, breezy morning there and stepped out, I’d discovered another note. It was stuck to the railings with insulation tape:

So in the end, although Stella didn’t have a balcony or a view, she was the one who’d ended up with the best room. Mine was also the one with the worst wallpaper and which had smelt the most strongly of cigarettes, and its fixtures and fittings were the strangest jumble of oddities. For instance; attached to the cold tap of my little green hand basin, there’d been an orange rubber nozzle. And
when I’d stood there at night brushing my teeth I’d wondered what it was for. What was its significance? What was the purpose of an orange rubber nozzle on the end of a tap?

‘What do you think this nozzle thing’s for?’ I asked Stella as she was walking down the hallway to the bathroom, a toothbrush in her mouth, a sponge bag swinging from her wrist.

‘How the hell should I know?’ she replied through a mouthful of toothpaste. A lot of the conversations we were having by then were like that.

Ed would have had a better answer than that
, I thought as I lay in my lumpy bed that night.
Ed would have been the right person to have gone away with to Whitby
. Because I still loved him, even then; I suppose reality had not yet caught up with my emotions. Perched above my head, there was a short, wood-effect bookshelf, and on it were four things: a mildewed thriller called
All at Sea
, a dead housefly on its back, a plastic pixie in a long green hat, and a small wooden boat. And I remember thinking that if I considered these objects for long enough – the dead fly and the book and the pixie and the toy boat – if I really thought about them, then their existence might make some kind of sense. Because there must surely be some plan, I thought, some method, some way of reaching the right answer about things. Surely everything had some reason for its existence. Or even for the lack of it. On the other side of the room, on  a wooden chair, there was a patchwork cushion with some of its octagons missing; and I considered whether there might be some spiritual kind of connection between those missing octagons and the octagonal tiles that were absent from the little fireplace in the corner of the room. I didn’t mention it to Stella – my theory that all things must, in some way, be connected – because we had already moved too far away from each other by then – if we’d ever been close. And probably there was no connection, anyway, to be made between one stupid, arbitrary thing and another.

‘What a bloody dump this place was,’ Stella said on the afternoon we left. It was a bank holiday Monday, and we were sitting opposite each other in the kitchen, eating Marmite spread over the remaining slices of a Sunblest loaf.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

Because it was, and there was nothing else to say. Stella had spent the whole weekend on the little grey beach, wearing a sarong and a new jet necklace she’d bought in one of the gift shops and turning a beautiful pale brown, while I’d suddenly been beset with hay fever for some reason – hay fever at the beach! – and had had to wear dark glasses all the time. There were now two faint circles around my eyes, making me look like a panda in reverse. I looked drained. Gothic, I suppose, in keeping with Whitby and its legends.

A couple of weeks after we returned home, Mrs Muir told Stella that the gas fire in our holiday flat had been condemned by a health-and-safety inspector. It was discovered to be leaking out carbon monoxide.The tenant after us had complained of nausea and confusion and terrible fatigue. Apparently, he’d been so tired one morning he’d got on the wrong train at Whitby station and had ended up at Robin Hood’s Bay instead of Newcastle. Someone had come round from the gas board, Mrs Muir said, and tied a sign to the heater that said,
DANGER: DO NOT OPERATE
. ‘So that’s why we were always too tired to get to the beach before midday!’ Stella told me on the phone.