The Home Corner (17 page)

Someone spoke to me as I was heading for home across the playground that afternoon. Someone hailed me. ‘Spring has sprung,’ someone proclaimed, and I turned and saw that it was the lollipop man.

‘Spring has sprung,’ he said again, striding across the tarmac in his peaked hat and his rustling fluorescent jacket, ‘da grass is riz, I wonder where da boidies is . . .’ 

Even though spring had actually sprung weeks ago; months ago – we were already past the summer solstice and into the second half of the year! ‘Good evening,’ he added, doffing his cap – he was off his head, sometimes, the lollipop man – he was like the Mad March Hare, and he always talked to you as if he didn’t have a care in the world. ‘Had a good day? Heading off anywhere nice this fine afternoon?’ he queried.

‘Not particularly, no,’ I said, because I’d had a pretty terrible day, and I was going nowhere except home.

The lollipop man was not deterred, though.

‘. . . da boid is on da wing . . .’ he carried on as I headed towards the gates. ‘. . . but dat’s absoid . . . I
always
taawt da wing was on da boid . . .’

And he suddenly closed his eyes against the bright sunshine and held his arms out wide. They were performances, his conversations; they were speeches to anyone who would listen.

‘See you tomorrow, Ron,’ I called. In a different life, he would have been a saxophonist in a nightclub or a comedian in New York. I don’t think he would ever have chosen to be a retired accountant from Buckstone. The thing about some people, I thought, as I set off along the pavement, was that they could get away with pretending to be someone else. They could lie without even thinking they were lying. I didn’t have that ability, though; or, if I did, it was a daily struggle to maintain it. I knew, for instance, that I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about what I had seen in the woods. I wouldn’t be able to lie. It was nothing to do with morality or niceness because I wasn’t moral or nice; it was just that my thoughts were beginning to feel almost tangible somehow, almost visible, the way I’d imagined them when I was little. They were like speech bubbles above my head, and there was no guarantee I could keep them a secret indefinitely.
‘Do you like jelly fruits, Luisa?’
I could still recall my Great-Aunt Ina asking me once when I was about five, advancing towards me with a great, battered box of York’s Fruit Jellies.
And despite nodding and prising a pretend orange segment from the crinkly black case, I’d been convinced she would see a big ‘NO I DON’T LIKE JELLY FRUITS’ sitting there above my head. That was the way I felt now. I thought about what Mrs Crieff had said to me at the start of the week:
If there’s anything you want to come and talk to me about, Luisa, relating to your work here –
anything at all
–
then do come and tell me.

And I knew I would have to.  

The doorbell rang that evening, just as I was on the point of leaving to walk up to Mrs Crieff’s house. I felt the bones of my ears move. I felt them twitch, like a rabbit’s ears turning at the sound of a potential predator. Just this wee, primitive instinct. I’d mentioned that to Stella once, when we were sitting in the dinner hall, assailed by the sound of scraping chair legs and crashing plates. ‘Stella,’ I’d said, ‘do you ever feel your ears moving just the tiniest of fractions when you hear a sudden noise?’ And she’d looked at me and said, ‘You’re weird, Luisa, do you know that?’

‘I’ll get it,’ I called out to my parents now, who were both sitting in the living room watching the six o’clock news. ‘Unemployment’, I heard the newscaster announce in a solemn, almost reverential voice, ‘has been reported today to have risen to two and a quarter million . . .’ I stood up, whacking my thigh as I did so against the corner of the kitchen table, and headed out into the hallway. I half hoped that it might be Mr Ellis at the door. Because if
I’d
been Mr Ellis, I would have tried to explain myself, I thought, as I hurried down the hallway; if it had been
me
, caught in the woods with some girl who was not my pregnant wife, well, I would at least want to try.

It wasn’t him, though, I saw as soon as I opened the door: it was a man selling fish.

‘Fresh fish?’ he asked in rather a merry way.

I looked at him.

‘Fish?’ I repeated, as if the word were some necessary part of an English sentence.

‘Fish. Fresh. From Newcastle,’ he said.

Which was where he was from, he went on: he was from Newcastle, and he’d driven up that afternoon with a van full of fish.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘No need to look so pleased,’ he replied. He seemed quite hurt, as if he really cared what I might think. I suppose the expression on my face can’t have been that welcoming.

‘Sorry,’ I said. Because I was; and it wasn’t his fault that he was the fresh-fish man from Newcastle; it was just the way it was. He was quite young, it occurred to me. His face was pale and his eyes were roundish and greenish. There was a delicate curve to his jaw, and only the faintest suggestion of stubble. He looked as if he should be doing something more dynamic with his time than flogging fish from the back of a van. He was wearing a pale-brown coat a bit like an old-fashioned grocer’s coat and big yellow Wellington boots, and he told me he was selling that very morning’s catch. His uncle had caught them, he said, and they were very fresh. ‘Really?’ I said. Because some of the fish he was holding out now for my inspection appeared to be vacuum-packed kippers. They even had a flower-shaped blob of butter with them inside the packet.

‘Tell him we don’t want any fish, Luisa,’ I heard my father yelling rudely from the living room: he’d had a few run-ins before, I knew, with the fresh-fish man from Newcastle. And with his uncle. And he was right, I supposed: we probably didn’t need any vacuum-packed kippers. So I smiled, apologised, and closed the door.
I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermillion goldfish
,
I thought. I just thought it suddenly.
And then, after waiting half a minute – after I’d heard his van start up and drive away – I opened the door again. ‘Just going out for a sec,’ I called out to my parents, and I started to run. I ran down our path, out through the gate, onto the pavement and down the road towards Mrs Crieff’s house. I just ran, my heart thudding. I suppose it was something about the fish – or the lying about it – it was something about all the lies we tell each other – that had caused it to thud like that.

I’d never gone right up to Mrs Crieff’s before. To house number 25. And when I got there I felt quite unnerved, even by the shape of the
25
nailed onto her front gate. By the metallic edges of it. I hoped, as I pushed down the gate latch and stepped onto the path, that the Alsatian, the
I Live Here
dog, wasn’t lying in wait somewhere behind the trellis. It seemed to be the sort of trellis – bright orange and woven and splintery – behind which a belligerent dog might lurk. Mrs Crieff’s plastic grass looked even more unnatural on this side of the fence; and positioned near the front door there was, I could see now, a trough filled with very unbelievable-looking flowers.

I proceeded up the path, past the wheel-less wheelbarrow and the flowers and the fibreglass rabbit, and tried to imagine what I would say. Up close, the lawn had a blueish tinge to it, like a Polaroid photo left out too long in the sun. If I’d painted a picture of that in art class, I thought, Mr Carter might have suggested it was the wrong kind of green. Or maybe he’d have asked if I was going for something abstract.

The path was less ambiguous than the grass. It was a smooth length of pure concrete, ending at Mrs Crieff’s door. And now I was there, approaching the door, it seemed like the wrong place to be entirely. It struck me that it was a very ordinary evening, far too ordinary for revealing a scandal about one of the parents at the school. It was a Tuesday evening in late June and there was the sound of the ice-cream van now, playing ‘Greensleeves’ at the far end of the street,
and I shouldn’t be here
, I thought:
I should go home.
But I suppose even home had developed a strange kind of double edge.

There was no discernible ringing sound after I pushed the bell, but almost instantly, from somewhere inside the house, came the sound of barking. Then I heard Mrs Crieff’s voice.

‘Sultan!’ she shouted, and at a small upstairs window framed with hairspray cans and a Toilet Duck bottle the slats of a venetian blind were briefly parted.

I stood and waited, my heart tight and small, and regretted that I had rung the doorbell. I could hear Mrs Crieff plodding downstairs, followed, I presumed, by Sultan the Alsatian, and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t run away, like someone playing Knock Down Ginger, I’d never make it back to the gate in time. All I could do was prepare a sunny expression and wait, all my convictions – my reasons for being there – already evaporating and gliding upwards into the still, hot air.

‘Sultan!’ Mrs Crieff yelled in a high voice as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Through the wobbly glass of the front door, I could make out a dark red carpet and a pedestal table with some kind of pot plant on it. And now the wavering shapes of a middle-aged
woman
and a dog appeared alongside the table, meaning there was no possibility of flight now, only, potentially, fight. I felt a little faint, a little bloodless.
I should not have come. Why did I come?
Into my head flitted a kind of dream of other places I had been to in my life, other doors I’d stood on the wrong side of. That had been the wrong places and the wrong doors.

‘Who is it?’ Mrs Crieff’s shape called, moving closer to the glass in the front door.

‘It’s Luisa McKenzie,’ I croaked.

Mrs Crieff was fiddling with the door-chain now. Her form was becoming more distinct. ‘Be quiet!’ she called, making me wonder for a second if she was talking to me. Then the dog stopped barking, and she opened the door.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Crieff.

The dog was not an Alsatian at all; it was a Jack Russell. It was the canine equivalent of the wee man in
The Wizard of Oz
, pulling levers behind the curtain.

‘Sorry to interrupt your evening,’ I said.

Mrs Crieff looked at me as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was. I suppose she’d probably blanked me out after she’d got home that afternoon.

‘What brings
you
here?’ she asked incredulously, as if I’d just arrived from some long-distance journey and didn’t
really
live just seven doors away from her. The Jack Russell was looking at me, too. And now, with a synchronised turn of their heads, they both glanced up the path, as if expecting to see some sort of posse standing at the gate, some group of individuals waiting to whisk me away.

I could feel my heart jumping.

‘Well,’ I began – and my mind began to whirl through the sentences I’d imagined saying on my way down the hill. But now I couldn’t think why I’d been so determined to go there: it was almost as if I’d forgotten, suddenly, how to be anywhere at all.

Mrs Crieff waited, an expression of immense tolerance on her face. At her feet, Sultan sighed and flopped down onto the hall carpet, exposing a fat, pink, nippled belly.

‘I’m sorry to bother you out of school, Mrs Crieff,’ I said finally. ‘It’s just . . . there was something that happened today, when we were on our school trip, that I really felt I should mention. Just a worry, I suppose. Something that . . . occurred today . . . which . . . I thought . . .’

‘Oh?’interrupted Mrs Crieff.

‘. . . should be brought to your attention,’ I continued. ‘It’s just that it involves . . . somebody’s happiness. A child’s happiness at school. And I just . . . remembered that you said . . . I . . .’

 ‘Are you referring to Jonathan Singer?’ Mrs Crieff said, in slightly sepulchral tones.

And I stopped talking.

‘No,’ I said.

Mrs Crieff was peering at me, bug-eyed, and I didn’t know how to continue. I didn’t know what to say about John Singer. I worried about him; I worried, of course, on his behalf – but I didn’t know what to say about him to Mrs Crieff.

‘It’s actually about someone else,’ I resumed, feeling my face growing hotter, ‘it’s just something I felt I should maybe . . . but you know, actually,’ I heard myself rambling as Mrs Crieff stood there, silent as stone, ‘I probably shouldn’t have come. I mean, I suppose it’s . . . probably something that can wait till tomorrow.’

And I came to a halt and gazed down at Mrs Crieff’s lawn. It looked quite psychedelic in the early evening light. And I pictured my life drifting on like this: of standing in places I didn’t even want to be standing in, at the ends of conversations I didn’t even comprehend.

‘What an amazing lawn,’ I said; because I had to say something. ‘My mum and I . . . we’ve always thought, you know –
Wow! –
when we’ve walked past your garden. That would be a really . . . you know . . . low-maintenance lawn to have.’

Mrs Crieff remained silent for a moment. She looked at me. She seemed suddenly bigger and wider, like a bull standing at the gate of a field, breathing steam through its nostrils. Then she said

‘It’s called Permaturf.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s a great time-saver.’

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Well, we definitely thought . . . I mean, my mum and I . . .’

‘Now: I’m actually getting ready to go out this evening, Luisa,’ she interjected. ‘Me and Mr Crieff. And our taxi’s going to be here in about ten minutes. So what is it you actually came to say?’

I breathed in.
What would it feel like to walk on that lawn?
I wondered.
Would it be springy? Or tickly? Or tough? Maybe it would even be therapeutic, like one of those beds of nails
. . . And then I told her. I told her everything I’d seen that day; everything involving Emily Ellis’s dad and the affair he was having with my predecessor Susan Ford. I mentioned the unhappiness that I felt sure was heading in Mrs Ellis’s direction and, surely, by extension, Emily’s. And I reminded Mrs Crieff of the Golden Rules we were all supposed to stick to – to be honest, I said: to be kind and to tell the truth. Which was what I had decided to do.