The Home Corner (2 page)

‘Sorry?’

He pointed to the picture he’d been allocated beneath his coat peg: a cartoonish pale-green creature beneath a shell, with two timidly bulging eyes.

‘Most other people have got bears and lions and elephants,’ he said. He was taller than the other children, a bit older perhaps, and lankier-limbed. His hair was very straight across his forehead. He was wearing glasses, and to help keep them on he had a Band-Aid over the bridge of his nose.

‘Why am I a tortoise?’ he said.

‘Well . . .’ I replied. My mind was a blank. I was not used to speaking to six-year-olds; to crouching at a helpful eye level and being the one with all the answers.

‘Maybe,’ John said, ‘it’s because my mum has a tortoise. She’s got a Russian tortoise called Tolstoy.’

‘Ha!’ I said.
A six-year-old who knew about Tolstoy!

‘Maybe Mrs Baxter knows about my mum’s tortoise.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Maybe that’s why.’

Although having a tortoise as a pet is frowned on nowadays, isn’t it?
I felt like adding.
I wouldn’t tell Mrs Crieff about Tolstoy if I were you: she might confiscate him.

I remember that John Singer had sighed then, and looked again at the tortoise picture. Perhaps he was thinking about his mother, happy at home, gazing into some fern-filled tortoise tank.

‘I don’t really mind being a tortoise,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I replied.

But I couldn’t help wondering if such things, such arbitrary decisions – a picture above a name – might sometimes have a kind of resonance in a person’s life. Maybe John Singer would grow up guarded and introspective, just because someone had once stuck a picture of a tortoise above his coat peg.

‘How are we getting on, Miss McKenzie?’ a voice asked suddenly, making me jump, and I looked up. It was Mrs Crieff, precipitating herself through the doorway of the Portakabin. She never knocked on doors.

‘Yes,’ I said, still kneeling, paralysed for a second at the shock of her appearance, ‘we’re getting on fine, thanks, Mrs Crieff.’

And I remember feeling, even on that very first morning, that I’d said the wrong thing. That I
was
, in some way, wrong.

Mrs Crieff gazed at me. She had silvery hair, cut in an origami-sharp bob. Her blouse was olive green. Her eyes were the palest grey.

‘Great,’ she said. 

‘John and I were –’

‘I see,’ Mrs Crieff ploughed on. ‘So. Getting to know everyone’s name OK.’

‘Yes,’ I croaked. I wondered what else to say.

‘I was just thinking,’ I said finally, ‘that there’s a lot of gemstone names in this class, aren’t there?’

Because, actually, there were. There were several gems amongst the girls that year, including a Ruby, a Jade, two Ambers and a Topaz.

‘Gemstone names?’ said Mrs Crieff. Mrs Crieff was known, amongst the parents, to be
one of the best Heads in Edinburgh.
It was just a fact. It used to make me think of the French Revolution, and all those heads tumbling into baskets. ‘Gemstones?’ she mused.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice strangely high and upbeat suddenly; it did not seem to belong to me.

Mrs Crieff considered for a moment, her expression a little pained. She sometimes looked as if she couldn’t imagine ever having a real reason to speak to you. Maybe only if you were someone offering her something, like a shop assistant or an air hostess: maybe she’d ask you for a box of matches in a corner shop, or a packet of peanuts on a flight to Bruges.

‘Yes, I suppose we
have
got quite a few gems this year,’ she conceded after a short pause. ‘Quite a little jewellery box . . .’

Beside me, John Singer sighed wearily. Mrs Crieff ignored this.

‘Morning, Morag,’ she observed instead to Mrs Baxter, who was standing a few feet away, a box of Octons in her hands. And without waiting for her to reply, she swept back out of the Portakabin.

There were no Beryls in the class, of course, I thought, as I watched the door close behind her. No berylliums
.
Or even Agates. It was funny, how some gemstones could fall right out of favour.

I’d been sacked from the only other job I’d ever had, the previous spring: I’d been booted out of a gift shop called Moonchild. And along with various other things that had happened to me that past year or so, I’d found this a difficult thing to take on board. Moonchild had only been a
gift shop
, after all! It had only been a hippy gift shop located in a basement off the High Street and it was supposed to have been a doddle, working there – the kind of job girls like me were supposed to do with their eyes shut. I’d worked there Tuesday to Saturday, from two in the afternoon to six in the evening, and sometimes we only got seven or eight customers the whole afternoon; tourists, mainly, who would stroll in with their cameras and hats and rustling rain macs, look slightly baffled and stroll out again. I’d imagined, briefly, that I might have been happy there; that I might have found the place that was right for me. All day I would be submerged beneath a gently forgiving fog of patchouli and rose oil and joss sticks, and it would follow me, that scent, even after I’d locked up for the night; it would trail after me, like Pig-Pen’s little dust cloud. The shop had been filled with soothing, forgiving sounds, too: with the jangle of silvery wind-chimes and the clatter of bamboo ones; with the splashing of the little stone fountain my boss Sondrine switched on every morning; with 70s folk music on tape. I spent my time standing behind the counter listening to Joni Mitchell and Steeleye Span (‘All around my hat,’ Steeleye Span sang in their robust way, ‘I will wear the green wi-hi-llow . . .’), and occasionally selling a tie-dyed blouse or a mood ring or a sea urchin. The sea urchins stood in a display cabinet, behind a small handwritten sign: 

There was something ironic about that sign, but I didn’t like to think about it too much.

‘Hi there,’ I’d say to the people wandering in, and I’d let them browse. I was discreet, as shop assistants go. Un-pushy. The main problem was, I’d kept over-ringing the till: there was always a discrepancy at the end of the day between what was in the till and what it said on the receipt.

‘I can’t understand how you can be doing this, Luisa,’ Sondrine had mourned at the end of one afternoon, her wide, smooth brow furrowed with concern. ‘I don’t get how you can be so . . .’ – and she paused – ‘. . . unfocused about everything.’

‘I’ve not always been unfocused,’ I replied. Because I hadn’t. I’d once had a mind that operated with clarity and purpose. It was just that something, during my last few months at high school, had begun to unravel. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Luisa, I really am,’ Sondrine had continued, her frown deepening. ‘There were also’, she added regretfully, ‘those two . . . breakages the other week. Those sea urchins you broke . . .’ Which was quite true. In the three months I had worked at Moonchild, I was the only one who’d actually broken any of the sea urchins. None of the customers
had broken anything. ‘I mean,’ Sondrine continued sorrowfully, ‘I just can’t really overlook things like that any more.’

And then she’d sacked me. She was less of a hippy than her appearance suggested. And for a while after that, my downward spiral had gathered pace. I’d returned home that evening in my invisible cloak of patchouli and incense, gone up to my bedroom and just sat looking out through the Velux window at the sky. I don’t know how long I sat there. Hours, maybe. Days.
All around my hat
,
I thought,
I will wear the green
willow
. It was only when my mother, a few weeks later, suggested I do some sort of course – something
vocational
in nursery nursing, teacher training – ‘Something, sweetheart,’ she’d said heavily, ‘that might get you back on
track
’ – that things had begun to alter. Not necessarily, though, in the way she’d imagined.

I’d had to report to Mrs Crieff’s office mid-morning, I remember, on my first day in post. It was the same morning we’d had our discussion about gemstones; a Monday, November, and raining a cold grey rain.

‘Ah: Luisa,’ she’d said when I turned up at her door. And she seemed oddly pleased to see me, as if our earlier conversation had never happened; she’d already moved on from
that
conversation. ‘So: welcome!’ she proclaimed, somewhat hammily, and she stepped back and ushered me into her office.

‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling quite cowed, all over again, by the slightly military green of the blouse she was wearing, and also by that silvery-grey hair, cut with such precision and as coarse as a badger’s pelt.

We both headed across the room and sat down at either side of her desk. Mrs Crieff adjusted the angle of her chair and smiled across at me.

‘OK,’ she said.

And then she proceeded to go over what was expected of me in the job. The dos and the don’ts. It was like a sort of presentation, the kind you might use an overhead projector for. She used a lot of words like
positive,
upbeat, role model
,
happy, nurturing
.

‘Yes,’ I interjected occasionally, ‘I see . . .’

Although I didn’t, really. I didn’t think any of those words applied to me. And Mrs Crieff did not refer to my predecessor at all, not once, the whole time I was sitting there: Susan Ford appeared to be
persona non grata
. I supposed that I represented a clean slate.

‘Super,’ Mrs Crieff encouraged from time to time, after I had begun to speak about the many ways in which I was hoping to excel in the role of classroom assistant. ‘Smashing.’ But I couldn’t help thinking of all the ways in which I might not be super or smashing (or perhaps only in a sea-urchin sense); of all the ways I might, in the coming months, fail to impress. And I regretted the fact that I was not a girl who threw herself into things: I’d never been that sort of girl. I wasn’t going to be like the resilient Mrs Baxter with her songs and games; or the metropolitan Mr Temple in P6, whose merry innuendos I’d already encountered at my interview; or the lollipop man with his jokes and his mad yellow jacket. There were plenty of people like that at St Luke’s, I could see; people who knew the words to things; who cracked jokes and who knew who they were. But I was not going to be one of them.

‘Now. This’, Mrs Crieff said somewhere towards the end of our conversation, and handing me a green piece of paper, ‘is an information sheet Mrs Baxter and I have drawn up.’

‘Right’

‘It should hopefully give you some idea of what’s . . .’ – she paused, and looked briefly and regretfully at the blank rectangle where I suspected Miss Ford’s picture had been – ‘. . . expected of you, in the role.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the paper from her and looking down at it. The information it contained appeared in the form of a grid – a kind of spreadsheet involving a lot of elongated rectangles, with headings shaded in pale grey. Some of the words on the far right of the sheet had disappeared, or been chopped in half.

[this was, I already knew, a set of wooden barrels in the playground]

– and here the text ended abruptly, and was replaced by three columns of words

‘How does that look to you?’ Mrs Crieff asked, her head cocked to one side. And, briefly, she closed her eyes. She was one of those people who closed their eyes at crucial points in conversations.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it seems . . .’

It seemed to me like a cross between being a secret agent and an overbearing mother. I moved on to the next list. 

I was aware of Mrs Crieff opening her eyes again and looking at me. This list seemed a little more normal at least – I could
smile
, I could say
‘Well done’
– although the third and final column, entitled ‘Managing Behaviour’, was more worrying: 

‘Hmm,’ I said.

I couldn’t recall when I’d ever
intervened.
I’d certainly never removed anyone from a room! It was the sort of thing I could only imagine bouncers and police officers doing.

‘You see, one of the things Mrs Baxter and I thought would be important this year,’ Mrs Crieff said, smiling her curious smile, ‘– because we felt this would provide a better sense of the children’s own learning experience – is to give you your
own
set of tasks. Your
own
challenges. Your own
project
, if you like . . .’

‘Right,’ I said, a small wisp of apprehension flickering up my chest, like a tiny plume of smoke.

Mrs Crieff stopped talking and looked at me. I looked down at her desktop. It was the sort you might imagine a Newton’s Cradle perched upon, and an intercom for communicating with your secretary. It seemed to represent achievement, in some way.