The Rye Man (3 page)

‘At break-time I always took Mr Reynolds a cup of tea and a biscuit. Would you like me to do that?'

‘That's very kind of you, Joan, but I thought I'd probably take my break in the staffroom each morning. Maybe some mornings, though. Thanks very much.'

She had been Reynolds' secretary for ten years. It would take them a while to get to know each other. By reputation she was efficient, reliable and didn't appear to have had any problem adapting to the word processor, or any of the other technology which had recently arrived. She was in her late forties, dressed a little austerely, but he was confident he could win her over.

‘And how do you like working here Joan? Not many quiet moments, I suppose?'

‘Busy all day, Mr Cameron. It never stops. Apart from the admin and the phone, it's like a shop. Children looking for
plasters
for scratched knees, dinner tickets, sorting out lost property. Never a dull moment.'

‘Sure isn't it keeping you young looking. Maybe later on in the week we'll have a chat about your job and any ideas you have about it. In the meantime I'd be grateful if you could keep on doing the excellent job you've been doing for the school, and if there's anything you want me to look after, give me a shout.'

She thanked him and started to edit a file on the processor. The green light of the screen filled with white lines of type. As he went out he could hear the soft click of her fingers on the keys.

*

Until break-time he dealt with a couple more phone calls – a student teacher asking if she could do her observation with them, a mother enquiring about music tuition – signed more forms, and finished the rest of his unpacking. He could still feel the presence of Reynolds in the room, but he knew it would fade as the days passed, and as he cleared the last assorted debris of his predecessor the bell rang for break.

Within a few seconds everywhere was alive with the rush of feet and childish voices. His office was beside the staffroom and soon he could hear the sound of the arriving teachers' voices, the water heater being switched on and cups being taken from cupboards. He had decided he wouldn't join them on this first morning, not intrude on their desire to discuss him and their estimation of the prospects for the coming year, and instead he put on his jacket and went into the corridor. Eric was ushering the final stragglers into the playground.

Outside the air felt clean and fresh after the dusty confines of the office. Strong bright sunlight gave everywhere a linger
ing
feel of summer and the shouts and squeals of the children sliced through the air like the wings of birds. He set off on a leisurely circuit of the building, pausing now and again to simply look around him. The front of the school was largely unchanged since that day he had first entered as a pupil, but as over the years numbers had grown, the school had been extended in a piecemeal manner. Three additional classrooms had evolved from the original two-roomed building, followed more recently by the addition of an assembly hall, two further classrooms, office facilities and two mobile classrooms. While it was not perhaps the best planned school building he had seen, it wasn't the worst and it had a solid homely character which he liked. It also had the benefit of an attractive open setting which city schools rarely had. At the rear, beyond the playgrounds, was a grass area which swept to a hawthorn hedge. Beyond that stretched open fields, hedgerows and on a clear day, the Mourne mountains.

It was on this grass area that most of the children were playing, the patterns of their movements changing constantly like light on water. Bright little knots glistened then unwound outwards into flight, while others pulled tight in huddled, animated discussions. Some boys pushed each other in pretend roughness while others played football with a tennis ball. As he walked through them, children careered across his path. He almost collided with a boy wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt proclaiming, ‘I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything.' A very small boy offered him a drink from his plastic water bottle and he patted him on the head in reply. Pairs of children sat on the grass playing their Nintendo Game Boys and a tiny circle of girls played some sort of card game. There was a familiarity about their play which reassured him as they flowed about him, some so engrossed
in
their play that they did not notice his presence, and he felt happy.

He paused to listen to the lilting chant of a cluster of skipping girls, and the syncopated swish and slap of the rope on the playground:

‘On the hillside stands a lady

Who she is I do not know

All she wants is gold and silver

All she wants is a nice young man.'

The rope slapped louder and faster, turning with the cadence of laughter as the skippers eluded its twists.

Gold and silver in their laughter – he didn't want any of it to end but he knew it was almost time. The tennis ball landed at his feet and he kicked it back. The sunlight was warm on his face, he didn't want to go back to Reynolds' office. It was the same hawthorn hedge which had bound his childhood play, the squat, spiky barrier into which they had pushed each other and then returned to class with a red tracery of scratches and occasionally a black-headed thorn prick, which the teacher had worked out with a needle sterilised in boiling water, while they stared down the great corsetted valley of her bosom.

There was a small girl sitting crouched at its base down at the farthest corner, almost part of it. Only the blonde colour of her hair made her perceptible. She squatted still and small and he looked for the other players of the game from whom she was hiding but could see none. Perhaps she had hidden too well. And then the bell rang and the flowing, divergent pattern of play coalesced and flooded back towards the school. When he looked back to the hedge, the girl had gone.

The
foyer depressed him. It wasn't a big space but it was the area which created the first impression of the school. The navy paint on the walls darkened it, and from ground to child shoulder height, it was pitted with tiny white indentations where the plaster's daily contact with schoolbags and lunch boxes had left it looking like a satellite picture of the moon's surface. There was a long black stripe where something had been trailed along it and apart from a sign which instructed all visitors to report to the office, the only objects decorating the walls were an ancient framed school saving certificate and a dog-eared Green Cross Code poster. With a little imagination it could be turned into a focal point for the school, somewhere which presented a better impression of its life and work. Somewhere which signalled the type of environment he intended to create. He wanted everything to be different, to look different – everywhere to carry his signature. But he had little time to give it further thought.

On the way back to his office he met some of the staff returning to their rooms and he smiled and nodded at them. Part of him envied the rest of their morning and he would have swopped with anyone who might have offered. His job still felt strange, like wearing a new suit you were not quite sure fitted properly, and had not really decided whether you liked it or not. He held a door open for a child carrying a tape recorder, encouraged another to tie his shoelace. Little wisps of grass could be seen on the tiled corridor where they had stuck in the grooves of trainers, then dropped out.

It was time to meet the troops. It had been his intention to visit some of the classrooms briefly, show his face, start off that relationship of encouragement and support which he hoped would be one of his main characteristics. Now the moment had arrived, he felt a little nervous, unsure of where to start or how to carry it off. It was important his arrival did
not
carry any heavy overtones, or appear like some kind of early inspection.

He studied the timetable on the notice-board to the side of his desk and looked at the names of his staff. He had already formed impressions of them from the Baker day and the discreet enquiries he had made. There were obvious pluses and minuses, and in some cases he hoped his first impressions had been wrong. A school staff was not like managing a football club. There were no free transfers or big name signings to bolster up a struggling team. You were stuck with what you inherited.

He tried to be positive, optimistic about the people with whom he was about to work. Perhaps for the reason that he had already taken a liking to Fiona Craig, he decided to start with her infant class. The door, decorated with butterfly transfers, was partly open, but he knocked before he entered. She was engrossed with a group of children playing in water and did not notice his entry until her classroom assistant pointed him out. She dried her hands on her apron as she approached, and he was pleased to see that she was smiling. The whole room was awash with colour – reds, yellows, blues – with stencilled numbers, letters of the alphabet, clowns' faces, posters of animals and cartoon characters. There seemed to be children everywhere, sitting and drawing at the scaled-down tables, playing in sand with buckets and spades, hammering pegs into blocks with wooden mallets, dressing up in costumes. Most were too busy to notice his entrance. A few looked up at him with curiosity.

‘Just called in Mrs Craig, to see how things were going. Everybody seems to be having a good time. I wouldn't mind having a go myself at some of these things.'

‘Well,' she laughed, ‘I think you're probably a bit too tall for the Wendy house, but you could join in the Mad Hatter's
tea
party if you like. Sarah, pour Mr Cameron a nice cup of tea.'

With her tongue peeping out of the corner of her mouth the child carefully lifted the yellow plastic teapot and poured a cupful of blue water. He bent down and, lifting it up, pretended to sip it.

‘A very nice cup of tea, Sarah. Just what I really needed.'

Other children offered him cups. A small boy came and handed him his hammer for inspection. Soon he began to feel like a distraction, an interloper into their play, and already he could see Mrs Craig's gaze sweeping the room, anxious to see where her presence was needed. Two children had started to squabble over a spade in the corner of the sand area, so he complimented her on the attractiveness of the room and sought to excuse himself.

‘I'll not get in your way any longer, Mrs Craig, it looks like world war three's about to break out in the sand pit. Good luck to you.'

As he was about to leave she called after him. ‘Mr Cameron, there was talk at the end of last year of my classroom assistant having her hours cut, and I'd like to think there's been a change of mind. I can't see how I'd be expected to function here on my own.'

He tried to assure her that he'd no knowledge of it and it seemed an unlikely and undesirable possibility, but she seemed unconvinced.

‘And, Mr Cameron, as you can see it's very cramped in here, we really need some sort of cloakroom space for the children to leave their outdoor coats and shoes. At the very least, pegs or a portable hanger. Oh, and Mr Reynolds promised me that he'd see that the leak in the roof was fixed. I had rain coming in like Niagara Falls all last winter and it doesn't
create
a very good impression for parents to see water dripping into a bucket.'

He stopped himself making a joke about water play and instead promised her that he would see it was fixed as soon as possible. The two children were now having an all-out tug-of-war over the spade.

‘Oh, Mr Cameron.'

He turned again. She seemed determined to have her money's worth.

‘Good luck!'

He thanked her and smiled. Over her shoulder he could see the victor of the tug-of-war using the spade to smack his adversary. When he closed the door the butterflies seemed to hold a vibrant delicacy, almost as if at any second they might fly away.

A few yards further down the corridor he called on Laura Fulton, the probationary teacher. He paused outside the door for a few seconds, listening to her voice, and when he entered she made a movement that was alarmingly close to a curtsey and then coloured with embarrassment. It was the first day of her first teaching job and when he looked at her he was unsettled momentarily by how young she looked – a slip of a girl with brown eyes and thick black wiry hair pulled into a ponytail, standing in front of a room full of children. She wore a red top with black silhouettes jogging across it and matching red cords, and she looked so fresh that he smiled longer than he meant to. Behind her the class stared at him, wide-eyed, and the children grouped round circular tables who had their backs to him swivelled on their chairs.

‘Well, Laura, how's it been going? Ready to jack it in yet? They say the first ten years are the worst.'

She laughed and lightly flicked her ponytail out of her collar.

‘
It's going quite well. I've been reading to them and they've been very good. It'll be easier when I learn all their names.'

He was glad he had a probationary teacher. If she possessed any aptitude at all for the job he would help her become a good teacher, help her understand what it was all about and in return he would gain her loyalty. It was a pity she would never realise that he had saved her from Reynolds. The children had started to talk, some chairs scraped and she was glancing anxiously at the class, worried that the rising current of noise was a reflection on her control. Turning her head sideways she gave them a loud shush.

‘Noise isn't such a terrible thing. It just means they're still alive.' He told her his joke about the cross-eyed teacher who couldn't control his pupils and then she asked if she was to show him her lesson plans each week.

‘I sincerely hope not. I'll look at them if you want, but I'm happy for you to get on with the job and we'll talk at regular intervals about how things are going. I see, too, there's a probationers' induction course during the year, but a fat lot of use it'll do you, and I know because I've taken two of them. They always end up as a bitching session where everyone swops their horror stories, compares the size of their classes and number of free periods, then either goes away feeling hard done by or counting themselves lucky. But nobody really learns anything.'