by Zoe Lea
Something needed to be done.
And then I came to Sam’s classroom – it was the first room at the top of that long corridor – and I went inside. Empty. The classroom led out directly onto the playground, it was the quickest way to get there, and as I walked through the piles of discarded uniforms I saw them.
I stopped for a moment at the door, looking out. It’s a large area, backing onto fields, and they were at the far side. It appeared they’d been doing some kind of obstacle course, Lisa and the teaching assistant had them tidying up. A group of children were gathered in a line, their backs to me, in front of Lisa. They were passing items to each other and then depositing them into various tubs. A few others darted about collecting bean bags and cones and passing them to the start of the line. I figured I could just about pull it off.
I ran quickly, my heels sinking into the grass, my skirt tight around my thighs. My eyes on the children and Lisa as I went. They were all involved in their task as I got over to where the gardening area was, a few trees and a small shed that I ducked behind, just as the bell started to ring.
I stayed half hidden as children poured into the playing field. They screamed and ran about like dogs set free. I recognised a girl from year six; she came running forward with a group of others who all got to a spot near me, then immediately sat down in a circle and began chanting, playing some game. I waited. Hidden behind the shed. Sam’s class would now all be frantically getting changed, they would all fly out with an unjust feeling. Half of their playtime missed because of a lesson.
And then I saw Sam, staying close to the building, alone, fearful and watching, and then, there he was. Toby with about four other boys. They immediately went over to Sam. I looked at the teaching assistant on duty, chatting to a group of year three girls, oblivious to what was going on, and cursed her. I saw Toby reach up and poke at Sam’s shoulder, push him a little, and I watched as Sam just put his head down and took it. He let them push at him and my heart nearly broke in my chest. Seeing that gave me the momentum to do it.
‘Hey,’ I called to one of the passing year six girls, and she jumped. I was obviously well hidden. ‘It’s Miss Clarkson.’ I came out slightly, so she could see me, and held up the pile of papers in my hands, as if to show her that I was on an errand. Her eyes flicked towards the teaching assistant. ‘Could you get Toby Morley-Fenn? Toby from year four? They’ve just had PE and I think he’s left some of his kit out here.’
She came closer to have a look.
‘It’s OK,’ I told her, putting my hand out, ‘you don’t need to see what it is, you just need to tell him to come over here to collect it. Alone.’
She stared at me a moment and then her eyes went wide. ‘Has he wet his pants?’
I stayed quiet.
‘Did Toby wet himself in PE?’ There was a gleeful note to her voice. ‘Has he left his underpants there and that’s why you need to see him on his own?’
I stared at her a moment and then began to nod, as if what she was saying were true. ‘Let’s not tell everyone,’ I said softly. ‘Just tell him to come over here, without anyone else seeing.’ I gave her the smile of a co-conspirator.
She nodded, puffed out her chest a little. Pleased and flattered to be my accomplice. ‘I’ll get him right away,’ she told me, not realising she’d just given me the perfect reason to see Toby alone, and sped off.
She was true to her word. Without any hassle, she got Toby by the arm and they were running across the playground towards me. She presented him with a beaming smile.
‘Good girl,’ I told her, ‘now remember –’ I put my finger to my lips and she nodded.
‘It’s all right, Toby,’ she told him before leaving. ‘I won’t tell anyone and it used to happen to me when I was younger. Everyone’s done it.’
He looked at her confused and she gave another smile at me. I smiled warmly back, nodded my approval once more, and she was gone.
‘Hello Toby,’ I said. He was small up close. Quite weedy in fact, skinny little arms and legs. A puff of red hair on top of his skull, skin so white I could see the blue of his veins beneath.
‘Miss … ?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘you left something out here from your PE lesson, just here behind the fence … ’
He came forward, unsure.
‘Quickly,’ I told him, ‘I don’t want you to get in trouble.’
He took a few more steps towards me, uncertainty etched on his face, and when he was close enough I gripped his arm and took him behind the shed, out of sight. He winced, his eyes large as I dragged him.
‘Stay quiet,’ I instructed, ‘I only want to talk to you.’ His mouth had formed a small ‘o’ and there was a bubble of spit caught at the side of it. It wobbled as he breathed hard.
‘You know who I am?’
He stared at me, didn’t say a word.
‘I’m Sam’s mother. Sam, the boy in your class, the one you call “big fat giant”.’
His eyes were saucers. I wasn’t sure he was listening.
‘You leave Sam alone,’ I warned him. ‘Bullying is not very nice, didn’t your parents ever tell you that? So don’t go calling him fat, or spitting in his food, or saying that you’ve got a knife, or tell him you’re going to “slash” him. This stops. It stops now, d’you hear me? You stay away from Sam, or you’ll be seeing me again.’
I went to let go, but then gave a final squeeze on his arm, just so he knew I was serious. It was a small twig of a thing, I felt I could snap it. I watched as he winced under my grip and then I let go. He didn’t move. He stared at me, his mouth and eyes still gaping, and then his hand went to his arm, to where I’d been gripping it.
‘You can go now,’ I said, staring at him, and he still didn’t move. I went towards him again, my arm outstretched, this time to nudge him back to his friends, and he jumped away from me. Frightened of what I might do next. And then, to my horror, the front of his pants went dark. Toby Morley-Fenn had wet himself after all.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LEAVE NOW AND WE’LL LEAVE YOU ALONE.
We’ll.
It implied that there was more than one of them.
It arrived just as we were driving to my mother’s after school the next day. I heard the familiar notification as I was getting in the car.
‘Is that Nanna?’ Sam asked, and I shook my head. ‘Probably from a friend,’ I said, noticing how in a matter of weeks I was readily expecting threatening messages rather than texts from my mother about her hypochondria. And also noticing how it didn’t seem to unnerve me, it had become the norm.
I read it between getting Sam out of the car and us walking towards my mother’s house. I was feeling bad about the way I’d treated Toby. He was a bullying sadistic little kid, but he was a kid after all, and perhaps I went too far.
I scared him so much he’d literally wet himself. But then, he was a little shit that was making Sam’s life a misery. Fifty years ago, maybe even less than that, it was accepted that adults, other than the child’s parents, could and should keep them in line. My mother often told me about neighbours shouting at her if she’d been disobedient; it had been the norm. What’s the saying? It takes a village to raise a child. If you looked at it from that perspective then I was only doing what was right, what was needed. He’d run off back into school after I’d spoken to him. I’d tried to help, offered to get some paper towels, to go back into school with him, say I’d found him hiding and handle the whole business about him wetting himself, so none of his classmates would see, but he ran away from me and I’d not heard a word about it since.
But more importantly, it had worked.
Sam told me that, very suddenly, Toby stopped speaking to him. Stopped everything. Wouldn’t look at him. Didn’t go near him. I told Sam it was down to me talking to Mr Cartwright. I said that must have done the trick, that Toby had been told and was staying away. The result was, nothing had happened and, for the first time, Sam was tentatively starting to b
elieve that the bullying might be over. That’s the sad thing about the whole situation: what I was doing was having an effect. Lisa was now helping Sam; she had allowed him special privileges since I’d spoken to her. Sam could choose where he sat, and whom he sat next to, could eat his lunch in the classroom alone if he didn’t feel like going into the dining hall, and he was now getting gold stars. Lots of gold stars.
The thing with revenge, I found, is that it worked.
It also turned me into a bit of a stalker. I wasn’t proud of anything I’d had to do, but since phoning HMRC and the newspaper about Janine, since posting Ashley’s picture on the animal rights forum, I’d had to do some digging of my own to see if my actions had achieved anything, and to my delight they had started to yield results.
I’d set up a bogus Facebook account, easily done with a new Gmail address, and with some light stalking had learned that Janine’s business was in trouble – real trouble. The rumours were correct. I’d tried to join her Top Marks page and got a message about her not taking on any more people at the moment due to ‘admin issues’. A small triumph. I could only imagine the admin involved in an HMRC investigation, the invoices and receipts she would be frantically gathering, and it had obviously been enough to distract her from taking on any more clients. On top of that, I’d had two enquiries and one order for a two-tier anniversary cake. Her gossip was no longer working, my business was back on track while hers was stumbling.
And then there was Ashley. My post on the animal rights forum had quickly gathered momentum. It was taken down by the moderator after three hours, but three hours was enough. I’d read some of the responses, what they planned to do to her ‘kind’, and it was shocking. A bit sickening. I’d felt quite bad about putting the post up at all, but I’d had to remind myself what I was up against. What she was doing to me. Then the post came up from the police, informing that appropriate action would be taken against anyone who posted offensive content or threats.
She’d have been scared after all that. I know I would be. Ashley would’ve felt some of what I did. Some of the fear I felt every day. That’s why the police told me to stay away from her. She was scared of who wrote the post about her and what the consequences of such a post would be. It wasn’t much but it was enough, enough for me to feel slightly smug. And yet the texts kept coming.
We’ll leave you alone.
Who else was involved that I’d not taken care of yet? The person who spray-painted my car, who sent these messages, who posted defiled cupcakes back to me. Who else could be behind this? There was only Rob and Will that I could now think of. But would Rob really be so petty as to do this because I’d told his wife about his philandering? It didn’t seem believable, after his attitude when I’d confronted him, and then I had to check myself. I was being sexist. I could believe a woman capable of this, but not a man?
My mother was giving me a running commentary about how she was approaching people to fix the disused well, the upshot being that it was still dangerous, but now various people other than her were aware of it.
‘I’ve told Roger, the man at the post office, and he’s getting me a number of a man he knows, and I’ve telephoned someone from an advert in the paper,’ she said, as she poured hot water into the teapot, ‘so one of them must be able to help.’
When we’d arrived we’d all gone out to inspect it – my mother had cleared away the vegetation nearby and rotting planks – and we’d stared at the gaping hole.
‘How deep does it go?’ Sam asked. He was over by the wall, a fair distance away on our instruction.
‘Deep,’ I told him. ‘Stay where you are, you don’t need to come and look.’
I watched my mother, who was busy covering it with fresh planks of wood.
‘It’ll be blocked up properly soon,’ she told me, ‘don’t worry, this is just so no animals get trapped down there.’
‘We should sell up,’ I told her as we went back to the house. She stopped walking, shocked at my suggestion. ‘It’s the answer to everything,’ I told her. ‘We could leave, use the money, take Sam away from Will, start over somewhere, a fresh—’
‘Never,’ she whispered. ‘Your father died in this house.’ She told me as if I was unaware. ‘I’d never leave him.’
I opened my mouth to argue that just because he died in the house didn’t mean that he had taken up residence as some kind of ghost, but it was a waste of time. The house made my mother feel safe, it was her hideaway, filled with memories that comforted her, and I could understand that. It was an effort for me to leave my four walls, so how could I argue with her?
It had gone cold. In the past few days autumn had made its mark and it was crisp and biting. Wood smoke filled the air as tourists enjoyed the charm of a real fire, and my mother was the same, with the fire going constantly, and as I sat at her kitchen table I realised I was looking forward to the changing colour of the leaves and the other autumn activities that I did with Sam. Unlike summer, it’s usually acceptable to start hibernation in autumn. It’s almost expected to stay indoors and be cosy. It was one of my favourite seasons. And, to my surprise, it was the first time I’d thought about doing any of it with a man. Glen, it seemed, was appearing in a lot more of my daydreams. It could be because he’d dropped off a few magazines about fly fishing for Sam, or that I was seeing more of him in the school day, or that he texted me sweet messages, asking when he could next see me, but I often caught myself thinking about him.
I’d found myself idly imagining baking for him the other day. I had an image of me at the worktop, kneading bread while he watched. Such a domestic scene that when I woke up to myself I had a mini panic attack. That was not my life, I had to remind myself. My life was complicated and messy. It involved a malicious ex-husband and a pack of spiteful women. I’d threatened a small boy yesterday, caused him to wet himself, and although my motives were justified – everything I did was for Sam – I couldn’t invite a man into it. I was a long way off from any of that nonsense. But that little daydream told me otherwise. It was just one more thing I was being robbed of.
‘Just make sure Sam doesn’t go outside when he’s here,’ I told my mother, as I checked my bogus Facebook account once more for any updates on Janine, Ashley or Will. ‘And keep that dog away from it. How much are we looking at?’
She breathed in through her teeth, then winced and put a hand to her jaw. I didn’t even ask.
‘About a grand I think,’ she said, and I felt pain, physical pain, at her words. Where on earth were we going to find that kind of money? The respraying of my car and new tyres still needed paying for. I had some money due to come in from the cake business but not nearly enough for that, and then there was the holiday. Two weeks and I should be taking Sam somewhere, proving how ‘outdoorsy’ I was to Will. I closed my eyes.
‘We could leave it,’ she went on, ‘keep that bit of wood over it and keep Sam indoors. The dog never goes around there and it’s cold out now. Winter will be here before you know it, so we could take the time to save up? Get it sorted next spring?’
I nodded slowly. ‘We might have to,’ I said. ‘I’m going to need every penny I’ve got to fight Will.’
‘About that,’ my mother said slowly, and I looked up at her, while she kept her eyes down. ‘He was here the other day.’
‘Here?’ My voice was high. ‘Will was here? At this house?’
She flapped her hands. ‘Calm down, shh.’ She looked towards the lounge door where Sam was eating biscuits and watching television. ‘I didn’t tell you earlier because I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘Mother –’ my heart was knocking ‘– you should have told me immediately. What were you thinking?’
‘He just wanted to talk –’ she took a sip of tea, ‘– about Sam. Jean called me—’
‘Fucking Jean.’
‘Language!’ My mother shot me a look. ‘I was glad she called. This whole thing has got out of hand, getting solicitors involved and going to court. And al
l that with your car. The business with that woman at school. It’s not right, Ruth, you’ve got too much on your plate right now, and we had a good talk. Me and Jean both think it’s ridiculous it’s come to this, and more importantly, it’s no good for Sammy. What you two are doing to that poor boy.’
‘Mother, you can’t just … ’
‘Well I did,’ she said. ‘He’s my grandson and I agree with Jean.’
I stood up to leave.
‘And what’s more,’ she cut in, putting her hand on mine, ‘is that we think we can stop it.’
I paused.
‘Jean doesn’t want this ridiculous custody battle any more than we do. And she told me that Will doesn’t either.’
I opened my mouth to speak.
‘He’s scared, Ruth,’ she cut in, ‘scared he won’t see his son again.’
I leaned forward. ‘You know he put Sam in A & E?’ I reminded her. ‘Made him have the biggest panic attack he’s ever had? You know he forced him onto a rugby pitch?’
‘He explained all of that,’ she said, ‘and he’s mortified about what happened. Absolutely mortified. He thought he was doing the right thing. That’s why he came here, he knew he couldn’t apologise to you, so he came here.’
I gritted my teeth. Will always had the ability to charm my mother. Even when it’d been at its worst, with Will’s infidelity all but being published in the paper, one meeting with my mother and she’d go from calling him a bastard to telling me that he really was very sorry.
‘He was worried about Sam not being in school the other day, so he came here to find out why.’