The Home Corner (21 page)

It was a song from a long time ago, one I’d sung myself once at primary school – one which my mother might have sung, too, it occurred to me – when we’d been sure of the world and our place in it. 

I turned left and headed down the corridor leading towards the staffroom. On either side of me I saw pictures that had not yet been taken down off the walls. Images of cats and birds and people; of cars and trees and houses and castles.
We Love Painting Pictures
, announced one by a girl called Chloe Davies, a pupil in Mr Temple’s class. It showed a tree, a zebra, a cloud, a trumpet, a cat and the Eiffel Tower, and it had been hanging there all the time I’d been at St Luke’s.  I had never really looked at it. But now, as I glanced up, I saw how lovely it was, what a beautiful collection of things it contained.

The staffroom was where I’d left my coat and bag. I ran on towards it past the kitchens and their smell of Milton’s and dank dishcloths, past a flash of steel pans and copper colanders and a row of hairnets hanging drably, dutifully, on pegs. I ran on, puffy-eyed, along the glazed walls of the library, past the gym hall and the space where Mrs Crieff’s newly funded gym horse was going to stand, past all the piled-up rubbery crash mats and the stilled climbing ropes and the varnished wooden frames that reached a kind of nonsensical impasse at the ceiling. I headed past Mrs Regan’s office with its permanent aura of Cona coffee and its filing cabinets and goggle-eyed pom-poms, past the janitor’s office with its mops and brooms and floor polishes, the medical room with its disturbing clown wallpaper and tins of plasters and its metal bed on wheels, past Mrs Crieff’s office, the sign on the door still declaring her to be
IN
despite the fact that I knew her to be out, at that very moment, standing on the stage and singing into the microphone. Then I reached the end of the corridor. I went to the staffroom doors and pulled them open – wrong one first so that they made a great clattering noise – and burst in.

The staffroom was empty. Almost silent. A radiator, unseasonably switched on beneath a window, made a ticking noise. A tap dripped slow drops of water into a sink. From the distance I heard the double doors opening in the assembly hall and the sound of a child’s footsteps making a flat pattering sound on the corridor floor. The patter of size-one feet. And for a moment I heard Mrs Crieff’s voice: she had gone up onto the stage at the end of the song to give a little talk. She was saying something about cooperation and hard work. About enterprise and team efforts and the school’s motto,
Veritas et Fidelis
.

‘. . . and what a testament to the Golden Rules  . . .’ I heard her saying in the terrible, Moses-on-the-mountain voice she adopted at times like that, and then the doors closed again.

I looked out at the playground. Heavy drops of rain had started to fall, like drips of paint falling from a brush. I saw mothers and children running across the tarmac to the shelter of the bike sheds, and the lollipop man crashing about with his
Stop! Children
sign, and one of the dinner ladies, running with long strides, the gracefulness of her run belying the terrible catering coat she wore. I thought of my mother, thirteen years earlier, walking towards my school on a Friday morning, her gloved hand holding an umbrella, her white hat on her head. Little puddles were already beginning to form in the playground’s dented tarmac and the rain was hitting the Busy Lizzies in their pots. They
were
Busy Lizzies, they weren’t Black-Eyed Susans. But their bright pink petals still bent in the rain. And the Portakabin still looked like a kind of ship, afloat on a hard grey sea. Bobbing in the distance, beside the school railings, I could see the frog-shaped rubbish bin, three abandoned scooters and, on the low brick wall, a pair of blue plastic sunglasses.

My bag was where I had left it earlier, hanging from one of the coat pegs. And as I walked across to unhook it, I saw something else there, half concealed beneath the hem of someone’s coat.

A large black box.

It had a handle at the top and reinforced metal strips at the sides, and I knew straight away what it was, because I’d seen Magic Bob lugging it up the school steps that morning. It was his box of magic tricks. And I suppose if I hadn’t had to retrieve my bag from the staffroom – or if I hadn’t had to run there in the first place because of what Mrs Ellis had told me – then what was in the box would have remained a mystery. But I did, of course: I did have to run and get my things, and move the box to one side. And when I did and glanced down into it, I saw that sitting inside it was the white rabbit.

It was such a shock that I gasped. All alone, in the empty staffroom, I gasped at Magic Bob’s abilities. He had managed, somehow, using a blue silk scarf and the words ‘Hey presto’, to transport a rabbit from a top hat in Room C to a box in the staffroom.

I put the box back down. I didn’t know what to do.

‘Hello, rabbit,’ I said, after a moment. Which I suppose would have sounded pretty stupid if a person had been standing in the room listening. But they weren’t.

The rabbit didn’t register my presence, anyway; it didn’t even seem to see me. It just sat there, its white whiskers stiff as nylon and quivering very slightly, its eyes an extraordinary pink, its nose a couple of centimetres away from the box’s inside wall. Its coat was the purest white I’d ever seen.

‘Hello, rabbit,’ I said again.

And then – I don’t know why – it was as if I’d been planning it for weeks – I suddenly
knew
what to do. I put my hands into the box, placed them gently around the rabbit’s middle and lifted her up. I’d never held a rabbit before, not once in my whole life, and I wondered if she might kick or wriggle or try to get away. But she – I was sure she was a she – hardly responded at all: she just scuttered her big white feet against the side of the box, her claws making a dry, scratching sound on the cardboard. Apart from that, she was very compliant. I supposed
Magic
Bob must have trained her to be like that.

And now I moved fast.

Quickly, carefully, lowering the rabbit into my bag, I quietly zipped it up, leaving a little breathing space at one end. There – done. Then, my heart hammering, I picked the bag up, hung the strap over my shoulder, lay my coat over my other arm and turned to leave.

But now there was someone standing in the doorway. A child. John Singer. It must have been his footsteps I’d heard in the corridor, and there he was now, hovering uncertainly in the doorway on his way back to the magic show.

‘Hi, there,’ I said. He ignored this social nicety.

‘Miss McKenzie, what are you
doing
?’ he whispered.

And what could I say? What on earth could I say?

‘Well . . .’ I replied; and I paused, the bag hanging heavy from my shoulder. I looked down into it and could just see the tips of the rabbit’s ears. ‘Well, what I’m
doing
, John –’

And I tried not to think of the picture that might already be fixing itself in his head: an image of the day Miss McKenzie, a young woman who’d once worked at his school, had lifted a rabbit out of a box, lowered it into her bag and run out of the staffroom with it. I tried not to imagine the conclusion he might reach one day: that grown-ups’ lives are not always the happy, ordinary things everyone had led him to believe – that they can flip sideways sometimes for a short time, or even a long one; that they can become something that fails to find its shape, its colours – a gyroscope spinning off-kilter, a picture pinned up too early, so the paint ran down the page.

‘What I’m doing, John,’ I said, hearing the teacher-ish note appearing in my voice for the first – and also the last – time, ‘is I’m rescuing this rabbit. Because she really needed to be rescued.’

John regarded me. He stood very still, his eyes as round as planets.

‘My mum used to read me about a rabbit,’ he said. ‘She used to read me about a rabbit called Peter. But she liked tortoises better.’

And that was when I worked it out, the difficult time John Singer had been having. I suppose I’d always known, in a way; I just hadn’t wanted to think about it. And then I remembered how, during the childcare course I’d gone on, I’d been taught that you should always be quite matter-of-fact when talking to children about death. That was what
children
were, after all: they were matter-of-fact. So I said, ‘I bet she was lovely, your mum. What was her name?’

His face went hot-looking.

‘Her name’s a secret,’ he said. ‘I don’t tell people her name. But it floats in the air, above my head. Her name, and all the things I think about her. It sort of floats, like a cloud. And I hold onto its string.’

Something like ice at the back of my neck, like a cold hand clasped there, made me shiver.

‘Not many people know about things like that, though,’ John added. ‘Clouds, with your thinking in them. So I don’t really tell people. Because at school you have to be normal.’

And he turned and walked away up the corridor, to face the next twelve years or so of being educated.

He would cope, though. I felt he would probably cope OK.

It had stopped raining by the time I made it through the front doors, but I still ran, fast, obliquely, across the playground, avoiding the assembly-hall windows and all the teachers and children and parents, the whole lot of them, the rabbit bag slung over my shoulder. I ran even after I’d cleared the school gates: I just carried on, through the puddles that had formed on the pavements, up the road, past all the flats and houses and to the bus stop and a bus that would stop for me and let me on. I took Beauty home on the bus. It was home-time, anyway.

I didn’t know what to do with the rabbit when I got back. I didn’t know where I was going to hide her.

‘Hi!’ I called cheerily, turning immediately for the stairs. I was pleased to be home, in the way that an escaped convict feels pleased, or maybe a prisoner on parole. And as I crept along the landing to my room it suddenly occurred to me that the rabbit I had stolen couldn’t possibly be the one that had been in Magic Bob’s hat. Of course it couldn’t! This one must have been a back-up, I realised, opening my bedroom door; a kind of understudy. This wasn’t Beauty! I had stolen the wrong rabbit! At least, I hadn’t stolen the right one.

My bedroom was quiet and stuffy that afternoon, the Velux window having been closed all day. It smelt slightly of the rows of half-empty coffee cups I’d left to accumulate on my windowsill, and of the sea urchin Sondrine had given me. And soon it would smell of rabbit. I put the bag gently down at the foot of my bed, walked across to the window and pushed it open a crack, averting my eyes from the sight of Mrs Crieff’s back garden at the bottom of the hill. Mrs Crieff was someone I would have to face another day. Mrs Crieff and her plastic garden ornaments. I sat down at the end of my bed, lifted the bag up from the floor again and put it on my lap. I felt almost scared, as if it might contain something else entirely – something that had been magicked there in the rabbit’s place, like a changeling. I unzipped the bag, looked down, and saw a broad, white rabbit’s back. She was as there as any creature could be, solid, breathing, her fur as white as whitewash.

‘Right,’ I said.

And I put both my hands into the bag, placed them around the rabbit’s sides – around her warm, rabbity girth – and lifted her out.

‘Hi, Rabbit.’

The rabbit glanced at me with a sidelong, knowing kind of look.

I lowered her onto my lap and pushed my hands into her thick white fur. There was an undeniable weight about her, a warmth and a forgiving solidity. It had seemed almost impossible to believe, on the bus home, that I had a rabbit with me – that I had stolen someone’s rabbit – but now that she was out of the bag she seemed to fill half the room. She was a problem, I supposed; a dilemma I had created for myself. Although, for the first time in months I felt something shift in the space behind my ribs, something realign itself. ‘Hello,’ I said, and the rabbit turned her head to look at me.

‘What’s this?’ my mother asked when she came upstairs a little later, to find me. The rabbit was lolloping around the carpet by this time, and I was just sitting on my bed watching her. She really was a big rabbit. Her fur was exceptionally white. Her back legs, I calculated, were getting on for a foot long.

‘Hi,’ I said, and I felt myself blushing. ‘This is the school’s rabbit’, I added. ‘This is Beryl.’

My mother stood in the doorway.

‘Beryl?’

‘Yes,’ I said, because I’d decided that if I was going to own a rabbit, I didn’t want to own one called Beauty. I didn’t want to burden her with a name like Beauty or Hope or Verity or Patience, which were far too challenging for anyone to live up to.

‘Beryl?’ my mother repeated. ‘What sort of name is that for a rabbit?’

‘It’s named after a gemstone,’ I said. ‘Gemstone names are popular at the moment.’

‘But for rabbits?’

‘Yeah. Anyway, Mrs Baxter asked if I’d look after her over the holidays,’ I said.

‘You’re looking after her?’

‘Yeah. I thought;
why not?
’

My mother frowned – she could obviously think of reasons why not – and then she sighed and cast her eyes around my room – all the mugs and the books and the clothes on the floor.

‘Doesn’t she have a hutch or something? I mean, how did you get her home?’

‘Oh, I just . . . you know . . . brought her back on the bus, in a kind of . . . pet-carrying thing. A sort of bag-type thing.’

‘On the bus? In a bag?’

‘Yes. It’s just, they . . . wanted the hutch to stay at school. Because the jannie’s going to clean them out over the holidays. All the hutches.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. All the hutches and cages. It’s a health-and-safety thing’

I was almost beginning to believe my own lie now. I suppose the thing is, once you begin to tell a story, it’s easy just to keep telling it. It’s easy, even, to believe it. And in some ways I suppose I was being more honest about that rabbit than I had been for months and months about anything.

‘They’re doing the same with the hamsters,’ I said. ‘People are taking them home in cardboard boxes.’

And we didn’t even
have
any hamsters at school. All we had, in fact, were Bobby and Billy and Bunty the goldfish, and I wasn’t sure what was happening to
them.
‘Quite a few of the teachers have gone home with hamsters,’ I said.

‘I see,’ said my mother.

Downstairs, filtering out of the living room, came the sound of the television. My father was watching the six o’clock news. It had just reached its halfway point, and an advert for Monster Munch had begun. ‘Even big brave monsters get scared sometimes . . .’ the voice-over was saying. And I imagined the advert, and my father watching it with his serious expression: a scene involving people in fluffy monster suits cavorting around a wood. It was one of those adverts, safe and homely and ridiculous, that I’d watched with my parents since I was small.

‘Well,’ my mother said, peering curiously at the rabbit as it lolloped across the carpet, ‘she’s quite cute, I suppose.’ And she stooped down and touched the top of its head. We’d never, as a family, owned a pet. Not so much as a mouse or a guinea pig. Not even a goldfish brought back from the fair in a plastic bag. It was just something that had never happened, like siblings and long-distance flights.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The pink eyes are kind of . . . funny. But’, I trailed off, ‘that’s not her fault.’

‘Where are you going to keep her then?’ my mother asked, straightening up again. ‘I mean, you can’t keep her in here, can you? In your room? Are we supposed to buy her a hutch or what?’

I didn’t reply. I suddenly felt a little lost. A part of me wanted to confess; to prepare my mother, at least, for the fact that I’d just stolen someone’s pet. That I’d taken something that wasn’t mine to take at all. And my heart flipped over at what I had done.

‘Isn’t she quiet?’ my mother said. ‘Totally silent.’

The police might come
,
I thought.
They might turn up in a panda car or a van and cart me off to the cells.

The rabbit had reached the far end of the room now and was sitting in a rectangle of sunlight coming in through the window. A few feet away, still pinned to my noticeboard, was Beate Groschler’s old letter, and nearby, John Singer’s mad paper figure of me.
missmckenze
. And something made me sniff. Maybe it was the sunlight or maybe it was the rabbit’s fur, but it made me put my hand up to my eyes.

‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’ my mother said. ‘You seem a bit . . .’

And she stopped. She just stood there in the doorway, with the rabbit at her feet.

‘It’s just you’ve been a bit funny all week, haven’t you?’ she continued, as I sat with my hand still up at my face. ‘Ever since Sunday. I’ve been wondering if it was maybe something to do with Stella Muir, after we bumped into her in Safeways. I thought maybe meeting her might have, I don’t know. . .’

And now I could feel it, this great rush of sadness hurtling up from somewhere – some dark expanse. And into my head tiptoed all the ways I’d gone wrong; all the things I hadn’t  done and the places I’d not been to and the people I’d never met. All the ways. I got up from the bed, stepped over the rabbit towards my mother and put my arms around her. I put my head against her shoulder and closed my eyes. ‘How close have I been, do you think,’ I said into the wool of her jumper, ‘in the past few months, to cracking up?’

I could feel my mother brush her hand across the top of my hair, my terrible pink hair, where the dye was already beginning to grow out. ‘I would say quite close,’ she said, after a moment. My heart was jumping. My eyelashes, when I blinked, caught against the angora fluff of her jersey. ‘I suppose I’ve just found it hard’, I said, ‘to know what’s right. You know – sometimes I think I’ve probably done all the wrong things. And sometimes I don’t even know what the wrong things are. Or even the real things. You know: like making a card for Kirsty’s baby. Maybe I should have made a card for Kirsty’s baby.’

My mother paused for a moment. We both did. Paused for thought. Then she said,

‘It’s all right. I’ve sent Kirsty a card.’

‘OK,’ I sniffed.

‘You never did anything wrong, sweetheart,’ she said.

‘OK.’

And, leaning my head in close, I felt some faint pull towards remembering – some memory, as slight but definite as a pencil line, of a woman who asked me something once, who put a paintbrush in my hand and asked me what I was going to paint.