by cass green
She was dressed in a silky blouse and black trousers, her glossy red hair in a ponytail and a slash of bright red lipstick standing out against her pale, freckled skin. For about the millionth time I wondered what on earth I did right to end up with someone like her.
It was only after she had gone that I remembered my broken bike. I’d intended to leave with her and get her to drop me at school. I didn’t know anything about buses here. It took a good half an hour to walk and I was meant to be in early today for the weekly staff meeting.
I was sweating profusely by the time I got to school.
The meeting was almost over as I came into the staffroom and I caught Zoe’s eye. She pulled a doomy face and sliced a finger across her neck.
‘Elliott,’ said Jackie Dawson, our head teacher. ‘So glad you could join us.’
I smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry. I had an accident on my bike.’
I knew it was a mistake the second the words left my lips because I saw Jackie’s eyes sweep over my sweaty, but clean, light blue shirt and grey trousers. I didn’t look remotely like a man who had just taken a tumble onto a road.
‘I mean,’ I added quickly, ‘I came off it last night and, er, it took me longer to get to school this morning.’ I found myself holding up my scratched palms as proof.
Jackie liked me, but for some reason this morning her expression was cooler than I would have expected. She nodded after a moment and said, ‘Okay, well I’m sorry to hear that. But can we have a quick word before you go off to your class?’
‘Sure,’ I said and something uneasy twitched inside me.
Meeting over now, staff scattered to collect belongings and down the dregs of drinks.
I followed Jackie to her office, which was down a corridor in a part of the school. She gestured for me to close the door and my worry increased.
Jackie had been the head here for ever, as far as I could tell. Late fifties with curly brown hair, she had a mumsy softness about her appearance that belied how tough she really was.
‘I won’t keep you, Elliott,’ she said. ‘But I have to tell you that a parent has made a complaint against you.’
I let out a heavy sigh.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I bet I can guess who. Tyler Bennett’s dad, by any chance?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Look,’ I went on, leaning forward in my seat. ‘It really was nothing. This guy just took against me, I think.’ I paused. ‘Didn’t like the cut of my jib.’
Jackie was blank-faced. ‘He said you pushed Tyler and then you were rude to him.’
A hot blast of outrage. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I said. ‘I didn’t even touch Tyler.’
As I said it, I remembered this wasn’t strictly true. But it was such a gentle push to his shoulder, so it hardly counted.
‘Are you sure?’ said Jackie, her expression now softer. She wasn’t enjoying this any more than I was.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. It’s something and nothing.’ Part of me wanted to tell her about the bike incident and the brick. But that just made Bennett’s allegation sound as though it had more merit, so I kept quiet.
She looked relieved. ‘I knew it would be, Elliott, but unfortunately we have to follow procedures, as you know, when this happens. I’ll get you to write up exactly what occurred and I’m going to have to inform LADO too.’ She was referring the Local Authority Designated Officer, appointed to look into any issues to do with safeguarding.
This was such bullshit. What a waste of time for everyone concerned.
Trying to quash the weariness I was feeling from my voice, I said, ‘Of course. I’ll get onto it.’
I had a strong desire to slink out of the office and go straight home but I forced myself to head down to my classroom. My hands were throbbing and my back hurt. Today was not shaping up well so far.
Halfway down the corridor I saw Zoe, who made that face again.
‘You okay?’ she said.
‘Yeah. Tell you about it later.’
I got my class started on their English project, which this term was all tied up with a Viking theme, hence the visit to the museum. They were writing letters to their families at home as Viking settlers.
Ryan Reece, the class wag, shouted out, ‘Sir? Do Vikings rape and pillinge?’ to which I gently put him right on the word ‘pillage’ and got round any tricky issues by telling them that some historians felt their bad boy reputation had been exaggerated a little.
It was hard to focus though, that morning. I kept thinking about the complaint that Lee Bennett had made. Writing it all out was just going to be a drain on my time. And what for? It was such a pointless sort of disagreement, over nothing. I was angry with myself too. I knew that if I hadn’t been sarcastic with him, he wouldn’t have taken such grave offence.
It was something that used to occasionally get me in trouble at school, this need to make the smart comeback, both with teachers and other pupils. I knew that I did it, yet somehow I still never managed to rein it in. This was the first time I’d had a complaint like this though.
While the class had a rare five minutes of quietly getting on with their work, I opened a document and started to make a note of what had happened yesterday morning. I felt uneasy when I remembered what I said to Jackie, that I hadn’t physically touched Tyler at all. Was it too late to say so now? I made a decision. I’d include it in the report and deal with the fact that I remembered differently when I gave it to her.
The other thing I intended to do was find out what sort of car Lee Bennett drove. Because if he was in such a strop that he was prepared to knock me off my bike for it, I might have an even greater problem than I first realized.
At the end of the day I lurked in the playground on the guise of checking an outdoor display of bamboo fencing that last year’s upper school had made. Tyler was late coming out and I wondered if he had been given a telling-off as he crossed the playground, all slouch and sad-sack trousers. His thick, pale ankles with pooled off-white socks ended in a pair of non-regulation trainers. He held his trendy but impractical messenger bag so low that it scuffed along the surface of the playground.
I pretended I was looking around but kept one eye on the gate for any signs of Lee. And there he was. Standing just outside and smoking a fag, which he extinguished and chucked onto the pavement. His expression didn’t change when he saw his son, but he rubbed his knuckles on the boy’s head in a way that looked mildly uncomfortable.
They began to walk off towards a side road and I was willing to bet that was where, like many of the local parents, he parked his car. I hurried across the playground to follow them, ignoring another parent’s attempt to catch my attention. I caught sight of Milly, a reception teacher, who was watching me for some reason, but I ignored her too and hurried out of the gate before I lost sight of them.
I was about to dash across the road when a white Range Rover, driving far too quickly, screeched to a halt by the yellow zigzags outside the school gates, about two feet from me.
A woman with oversized sunglasses and even bigger hair was glowering at me over the steering wheel, as if I was the unreasonable person in this scenario.
‘Hey,’ I called. ‘This is a school! You don’t drive like that on this road. You could kill a child!’
She made a ‘wanker’ gesture at me. I crossed the road and I find myself calling, ‘Yeah? Well you too,’ as she drove away.
A couple of parents clucked sympathetically at me, but I was too distracted to respond. I hurried into Caversham Road and cursed when I saw that I had missed them. Two cars were currently having a standoff, not wanting to give way, and there was a lot of angry honking and beeping. I swear half these families lived within a five-minute walking radius. We used to give out badges to reward children for walking to school but then we discovered that a small number were being encouraged to lie about it by their parents on the basis that they were otherwise ‘missing out’.
I quickened my pace just in case they
were on the next road up. The pavement was thick with parents, buggies, and children of various ages and so I said, ‘’Scuse me, ’scuse me,’ as I made my way through them.
It suddenly felt imperative that I found them, and I began to run as the pavement became emptier. I turned the corner into the road at the top and almost collided with a man who was leaning against the wall there and making a phone call.
Of course, it was him.
Tyler was standing next to him, kicking at a stone with a scrunched brow of concentration.
Lee Bennett’s eyes widened, and he moved away from the wall with a fluid push from his foot.
‘Call you back,’ he said, then, more aggressively, ‘You looking for someone?’
‘No, I, er …’ My brain went blank. I couldn’t think of a thing to say and my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. ‘I’m just …’ I waved my hand ineffectually as I fought for sensible words. ‘I needed to give a message to a … another parent.’
Bennett swept his arm around in an exaggerated gesture. ‘No one else here, mate,’ he said.
I decided I had nothing to lose. ‘No car today?’
He frowned and pulled his head back a little. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’
Face still burning, I turned away and could hear him say to Tyler, ‘You stay away from him. I don’t like him.’
ELLIOTT
Anya was late home that evening and I used the time to finish writing up a report for Jackie on what had happened with Bennett. I left out our uncomfortable exchange earlier that day because I had no idea how to explain what I had been doing.
I kept thinking about Tyler’s sad crumpled socks and pasty ankles. It made me wonder how I would have presented to the world at that age.
After the invitation to come in for cottage pie, Mrs Mack invited me in once or twice a week. She usually invented some sort of task that needed doing; replacing light bulbs or taking her rubbish down to the big bins at the back of the flats. But I didn’t mind.
She used to make me eat fruit when I went round there but there were usually plenty of biscuits too, or she’d made some sort of homemade cake. This was an entirely new experience for me and one I thoroughly approved of. One evening I brought back some scones for Mum but I got a bit of a strange reaction from her. At the time I concluded she was jealous of the time I spent next door. With my adult eye I can see that it was probably a lot more complicated than that. Maybe Mum felt that Mrs Mack was doing some of my mothering, whether she liked it or not.
Mrs Mack had her own son, a bloke called Douglas who lived in America and worked in a bank. She would show me pictures of him with his smiley, white-toothed wife and boast about how well he was doing. Douglas seemed fairly alien to me but even at that age I found it a bit sad that he never seemed to come and visit her.
One afternoon after school, she asked me to get something down from the top of her wardrobe. It was too high even for me, so I stood on a stool and reached over the tightly packed clothes that smelled flowery and old, just like she did. She was after a tin of photos.
‘Do you mean this one?’ I said and pulled out a wooden box about the size of a shoebox.
‘No!’ she said, sharply. ‘Put that one back right now!’
‘Why should I?’ I said, because I was stung, and it made me bolshie and mean.
‘Because I said so, young man.’ Mrs Mack’s voice was ice cold.
I, on the other hand, had flaming cheeks as I put it back and fumbled for the one next to it, a tartan tin with a picture of a Highland stag on it.
She must have seen my expression because her tone softened then. ‘Thank you, Elliott,’ she said, taking the tin from my hands. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. That one is just very private.’
I mumbled that it was okay, but it wasn’t really. You carry those sort of slights as bright, bitter humiliations at that age. You might be one and a half times the size of the other person, yet they still have the ability to cut you in two with their sharp words.
We went back through to the living room and she sat down in her favourite armchair. She had been intending to show me some of the photos, but I didn’t feel like it now.
She opened the lid of the tin with an expression of intense concentration and then noticed I was hovering by the door.
‘Are you just going to stand there like a long streak of bacon?’ she said. I would have smiled at another of her weird expressions under normal circumstances. They were often Scottish and nonsensical, like ‘Hold your wheesht.’ But something made me want to punish her a bit today for shouting at me. So I just shrugged.
She frowned.
‘Look,’ she took off her glasses, sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her voice was tight when she spoke again. ‘Has your mother no’ got anything she likes to keep away from prying eyes?’
I thought about Mum’s photo albums of her childhood and baby pictures of me, neatly stacked on the shelf by the telly. Anyone could look at those if they wanted and Mum wouldn’t care.
And then I got an almost physical thump of understanding. Mrs Mack meant valuable things. Jewellery, or money. I pictured a pirate’s treasure box, filled with gleaming gold coins and thick chains like the ones rappers wore, even though I knew it was more likely old lady jewellery or bank notes in there. The answer then was obvious.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t got anything like that.’
Mrs Mack made a dubious face and began to take out the pictures, placing them in a pile next to her on the sofa.
‘Well, I doubt that,’ she said, ‘but if you’re staying, come and sit down here. You’re giving me neck ache up there looking at you.’
I hesitated and then sat down. It was the only time I’d ever experienced a bit of tension in this house and I was glad to be given a way out.
Plus, I thought, later as I went home, I was flattered.
I had been allowed into her confidence.
ELLIOTT
When Anya came in the front door, it was evident she’d been caught in the sudden rain shower that was flinging itself dramatically at the windows. Her hair was slicked to her head so her light brown eyes looked huge in her face, like a beautiful manga creation.
She grimaced and took off her thin jacket, which was wringing wet.
‘Hey!’ I laughed. ‘How come you got so wet when you only had to come out of the station and hop into the car?’
She grimaced and began to head upstairs. ‘Really hammering, though,’ she called down. ‘And I got to the car then couldn’t find my bloody keys for ages.’
I laughed and started browning the chicken in the hot fat. After a while she came into the kitchen and wrapped her arms around me from behind, placing her head against my back. I could feel her trembling.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘you’re freezing! Come here.’ I lowered the gas under the wok and turned around, wrapping her in my arms. She burrowed in and I kissed the top of her head, smelling her coconut shampoo mixed with rain and the unmistakable smoky smell of travelling on the Underground. ‘You really got soaked through, didn’t you?’
She nodded and clung onto me. I rubbed her arms until I felt the shivering subside.
‘Why don’t you have a quick shower to warm up before dinner?’ I said, and she drew back.
‘Nah, I’ll be alright,’ she said. ‘I think a drink should do it.’ She went to the wine rack and pulled out a bottle of Shiraz. I cocked an eyebrow at her. After a fairly drunken summer, we’d vaguely made a plan to cut out drinking Monday through to Thursday nights. But after the day I’d had, I could really do with one.
Alcohol and me had a complicated relationship. The ‘topic’ caused a mental chafing I tried to ignore. My father had been a nasty drunk, from all accounts. I liked a drink and so did Anya, but I would have two to her one. Sometimes I’d have three. I didn’t always know when to stop, as events at the festival had shown.
However, I really did want a glass of wine.
‘Ah, go on then.’
There was a heightened energy about her tonight, as if she had absorbed some of the storm outside and was carrying it in her skin.
Much later, we were watching a tacky reality show we liked on Netflix for a few minutes in companionable silence when Anya suddenly spoke.
‘Ell?’ she said, her voice low. ‘Do you ever think about running away?’
I turned to look at her. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, running away?’
She registered my expression and laughed, before hitting me on the arm. ‘Not away from you, you big ninny.’ It was pathetic how sweet the feeling of relief was at this. She went on. ‘I mean the two of us,’ she said. ‘Just leaving our jobs and going travelling or something.’
I took a mouthful of food, chewing while I thought, and then shrugged. ‘Not really, if I’m honest.’ I paused. ‘And anyway, haven’t you been there, done that, got the T-shirt?’
Anya went off for a year travelling after university. I often said things about how great it would be to do this together. But if I was honest, it was only in the way that I thought space travel might be interesting. I didn’t have much of an appetite for roughing it in some of the flea-bitten hostels Anya waxed lyrical about when she talked of that time. I didn’t know. Maybe when you have grown up having foreign holidays in luxury hotels, the idea of a bit of squalor has more appeal. Me, I liked to travel in comfort. There was no way we could afford to travel the way I would want to.
And what about our jobs?
She looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t read. Then she made a moue and took another swig of her wine. I realized I’d finished mine and I refilled both of our glasses. I’d somehow finished my plate of stir fry without even noticing but Anya had only had about a third of hers.
‘I don’t know,’ she said after a moment. ‘Weren’t you the one who was just talking about how shit your job is?’