Jo
‘Miss?’ says Hayley. ‘Is it true you used to be a rock star’s girlfriend?’
A Year 10 mixed-ability music class at Bexford Hill Comprehensive: twenty-eight faces looking at her without much hope of being excited by anything, but momentarily woken up by the chance of something juicy. Jo has no idea how they can have got hold of this rumour of her former life, unless it was brought into school via Marcus, but Marcus’s solution to the indignity of being the offspring of two teachers at his own school has always been a resolute pretence that she and Claude have got nothing to do with him from the moment he goes through the gates in the morning, head high, impervious, lips together in a clamping pout of irony. So it’s a puzzle.
‘Um …’ she begins.
‘Nah,’ says Tyrone, one of the cool kids in the back row, before she has settled on how she wants to deal with this. ‘Someone like that, they wouldn’t be here teaching us, would they? They’d be all, like, glamorous, wouldn’t they? No offence, miss.’
‘Oh, none taken, Tyrone,’ says Jo, milking the general laugh a bit. Tyrone grins. Jo, in her own estimation, looks pretty good at this point, weathered but still trim, dressed and hairdressed with knowledgeable guile about what suits her, and in possession of regular evidence that she’s still desirable, at least to Claude. But none of this adds up to attractiveness of a kind that computes for a fifteen-year-old boy. She’s not one of the women teachers in their twenties and thirties whose blouses’ top buttons are under constant teenage male monitoring. She’s invisible to Tyrone except as a mum; except, sometimes, when she can draw him out and hoodwink him into showing his intelligence, as a challenge, someone to cross swords with.
‘It doesn’t seem very likely, does it, Hayley?’ she says.
‘I suppose not, miss,’ says Hayley, crestfallen. She’s a lumpy, pale little thing, not in with the cool white girls, or the cool black girls, or the cool Asian girls. One of the nondescripts, the hangers-on; and seeing her face fall, Jo almost feels guilty. Who she’s been and what she’s done is none of Hayley’s business, but it’s clear that denying it (or letting it get denied) has extinguished one more little glint of possibility for the girl, has given her one more demonstration that the world is not, after all, exciting. Not likely to burst out into rock stars, diamonds, jacuzzis. At least, not anywhere near Hayley.
Impossible to tell her that, from Jo’s perspective at fifty-four, she shares a touching beauty with the cool kids; possesses it just as much as confident Tyrone, or Samantha and her hair-flick, or Jamila and her heavy-lidded Punjabi stare. These just-adult bodies are, all of them, so gallantly recent. Whether they’re one of the dewy-skinned lucky ones or are bursting out with zits, their flesh, all of it, is still soft, new, moulded onto their suddenly elongated bones like fresh marzipan. Whether they move gracefully or as gawkily as foals, whether they whack themselves against doorways like poor clumsy Simon over there or arc into pure curves like silent Hamid the football player, there’s a quality of surprise to all their steps, to all their occupations of space. This is me? their gestures keep asking, whatever else they may be meaning to mean – this tall thing, not quite under my control? Is it? Or am I just inside it somewhere, trying my best to pilot it? Sometimes the children they were yesterday can be seen looking out of their faces, amazed. And then a minute later they’re making first essays at strength or sexiness, approximate, amateurish, going all in on every bet like the naivest of gamblers.
It’s lovely to see; and also hilarious, and also from time to time terrifying, this last element in Jo’s response being supplied by her parent’s-eye view. Marcus isn’t quite there yet. He’s only twelve. But all this will happen to him, and while these boys and girls flower, the sellers of brown heroin roam about outside seeking whom they may devour, and all of the hungry adults who, seeing new legs new mouths new eyes, also see something to devour. But you can’t warn them, any more than you can tell them in terms that would make sense to them that their transformation is glorious. Youth isn’t visible to them, any more than air is. It’s the condition of their lives, but it isn’t a thing that they could imagine not having, and therefore could imagine as being desirable in itself. Jo remembers this – how the interest of male teachers, middle-aged men in the street and in the park, the gardener at the lido, registered only as an inexplicable creepiness.
Don’t hurry, she wants to tell Year 10. But they want to hurry. They long to hurry. Everything they are is oriented towards a future which they seem to themselves to be having to wait for forever, enduring the great teenage boredom in which first kiss, first party, first love, approach at maddening snail’s pace: but which if you’re old enough to count time in decades you know is going to be upon them in a flash, imminent, irresistible. In almost no time at all, possibility will be swapped for actuality. These bodies owned now like masks, envelopes, surprising vehicles, will become their everyday selves. This marzipan flesh will settle and start to collect scars, frown lines, stretch marks. Youth itself will stop being the common, invisible possession of the twenty-eight of them in this room. Bexford Hill is not a rough school by London standards, and contains a good fraction of middle-class kids of all ethnicities behind its 1950s plate glass. Those will thrive, unless they screw up badly enough to fall down one of the big snakes on the social game board. Those, and also the lucky ones, the energetic ones, the organised ones among the strivers, will go off into the long youthfulness of the prosperous, drinking wine and buying lampshades and able to treat turning thirty as a point in late adolescence. For the rest, though, this is it. This first flowering will be the only one. They’ll have their bloom, and that’s all. By the time they’re thirty, time will have stomped all over them. Sorry, Hayley.
‘Right,’ she says, ‘we’ve got forty-five minutes, and this week we’re spending it on voicework.’
Immediate chorus of groans. Singing is lame, singing is embarrassing, singing in front of your classmates and your teacher runs the appalling risk of exposing your raw green soul to the unfriendly world.
‘Can’t we do steel pan again, miss?’ asks Samantha, queen of the white girls. They had a class last week in which, though Jo does say so herself, they got something pretty good going, rhythmically speaking. ‘That was … all right.’
‘No,’ says Jo briskly. ‘Because (a) all the equipment is in the other music room down three flights of stairs and a hundred yards away, (b) the other stream are using it today, and (c) singing is good for you.’
Groans.
‘What are we going to sing?’ asks Hayley. For thirty confused seconds, despite their objections to the whole idea, Year 10 shout out their musical tastes, from Britpop to acid house, each of which is guaranteed to reduce its passionate advocates to despondent paralysis if it comes to actual, out-loud singing. The red National Songbook is decades gone.
‘No words at all,’ says Jo. Then, raising her voice to cut the hubbub: ‘No. Words. At. All. This week we’re just using voice as an instrument.’
‘My body … is my tool …’ croons clumsy Simon unexpectedly – being someone off the TV, judging by the comedy voice. He happens to hit one of the instants of hush and makes more of a splash than he meant to.
‘You’re a tool, bruv,’ says Tyrone into the disconcerted silence.
‘Tyrone!’ says Jo. ‘We have a volunteer! Up you come. Come on!’ She crooks her finger at him, wicked-witch-style, and draws him up from his lair at the back with her teacherly tractor beam. He saunters, tilting the tall cylinder of his hair from side to side, but he arrives. His version of school uniform naturally features a tie only three inches long.
‘Congratulations, Ty,’ says Jo, ‘you are today’s sample human being. Could you turn round sideways – yeah, facing me – and give us a noise? Just say “ah”, like at the dentist.”
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh; uh-huh uh-huh; aaaah,’ goes Tyrone. The thing about Tyrone, she happens to know by devious means, is that in the long-lost and long-ago days of about thre
e years ago, he used to sing in his mum’s church. He was apparently a ‘Cherub’ in a dear little uniform. And he now possesses a rather pleasant tenor, which he can’t quite help showing off.
‘Okay,’ she asks the class, ‘where’s the sound coming from?’
‘Er, his mouth?’ says Tyrone’s wingman Jerome.
‘His arse, more like,’ says Samantha. (There is some history here, possibly involving events as much as a month old.)
‘His mouth, yes, but not just his mouth,’ she says swiftly. ‘That’s where it comes out, but where does it start?’
‘Down here somewhere,’ says Tyrone, pointing to a spot at the top of his stomach or the bottom of his chest. ‘That’s what it feels like, anyway.’
‘His diaphragm,’ says Jamila, who will be a doctor some day if her family have anything to do with it.
Instant derision.
‘I think you’ll find that’s got something to do with birth control, yeah?’ says Jerome.
‘Words can mean two different things, duh,’ says Jamila, with scorn so complete she doesn’t even need to lift her eyes from the floor.
‘“Diaphragm” is right,’ Jo says. ‘It’s a muscle just under the V in the middle of your ribs, and you use it to control the air you sing with. If you take in a deep breath, you can feel it moving down to make space. Go on, try it. Everyone, please.’ Sounds of panting, heaving, exaggerated puffing and blowing, but also real experiment. ‘Got it? Good. And up above it, you’ve got a flexible tube that goes up to your larynx here, in the middle of your throat. Your lungs are joined onto it, and your diaphragm controls how much of the air from your lungs goes into it, and how hard the air is pushing. But the important thing to remember is the flexible tube. It’s got ridges in it, like a vacuum cleaner hose, and it bends like one, only it’s pink and sticky. And that’s your musical instrument, when you’re singing. Right, Tyrone: remember you’re a flexible tube—’
‘We keep telling him that, miss,’ says Jerome.
‘We’re all flexible tubes for these purposes, Jerome,’ she says.
‘I’m not,’ says Simon, ‘I’m—’
‘Yeah, thank you, Simon: no. Ty, do us your note again, and then bend about a bit, so the tube bends, okay?’
Tyrone gives them the aaaah again – it’s an E – and twists sideways, backwards, forwards while he does it. They all listen, and they hear the way the sound varies; the way it chokes and kinks and alters in volume.
‘You see?’ she says. ‘You want to get the full note, you have to keep the tube as straight as you can. Tyrone, now stand up really straight, please: pretend there’s a piece of string from the top of your head down to the floor: that sometimes helps. Good. And now push your shoulders back – not too far, like this – and look straight ahead, with your chin up, but not too far, and give us the note again. Bit louder. Bit louder. Yes, there.’
A pure, unkinked, full-throated E. In Jo’s head, a warm equally pure yellow.
‘Lovely,’ she says. ‘Can we get a hallelujah in there, Ty?’ she adds wickedly, in a lower voice.
‘Get stuffed, miss,’ says Tyrone, but he’s smiling.
Jamila’s hand has gone up, for a miracle.
‘Yes?’
‘What happens at the top of the tube, then? Up in your throat?’
‘Good question. Complicated stuff. The air that you’ve got under pressure in the tube makes your vocal cords vibrate, and then the sound gets altered by your tongue and the shape you’re holding your mouth in, and finally it gets amplified by bouncing around in all the hollow places in your face.’
‘So your head’s sort of like a speaker, then?’ says Simon, not doing a silly voice.
‘Yes, exactly. A speaker made out of skin and bone and muscles. But if you just concentrate for now on keeping the tube straight, you get an instant improvement, and that’s enough for today. So up you all get, come on, thanks Tyrone, and sort yourselves out, boys over on this side, girls over there, no it’s not sexism: and this is what we’re going to do.’
When she first came back to England, when she first taught anybody anything, the hardest thing was learning to isolate, from out of the mass of things she knew how to do with music, one thing at a time to pass on. One thing at a time, separated, is not how you yourself possess a skill you are sure of. Everything interconnects with everything else, and the natural impulse is to try to impart it like that, pouring it out in a useless torrent. Only bit by bit do you master the unnatural act of taking your own knowledge apart again, and being able to see what needs to come in what order, to build that knowledge in other minds. Every lesson you prepare is madly overspecified to begin with – madly overfilled with stuff the kids can’t possibly assimilate. It’s astonishing how little a good lesson should contain, if they’re really going to take it in. One thing, done thoroughly: that’s all you need. So long as it’s the right thing.
Not that she expected to teach, when she came home. Or even to stay, necessarily. She flew back to London in the spring of 1980 because Val was on trial, and she wanted to be there in court, no matter how little good it did. Looking around for something to do meanwhile – something that paid – she looked up old friends in the session world and, instead of studio work, found herself drafted along as a freelance extra professional voice for a choir project run by the Inner London Education Authority over in Mile End. It was led by an expatriated American draft dodger a few years younger than her named Claude Newton. He was really good at it, in an intense, glittering-eyed way, and really attractive too, when he turned the same focus on her. Later, it became clear that this was partly because he was at the top of the manic part of a cycle which also included periods of darkness on the scale of a Siberian winter. But everything has the defects of its qualities and the days in Mile End were wonderful. Wonderful enough to offset the ugliness of the city; wonderful enough to keep her going through the awfulness of the trial, with its gallery of baying skinheads, and Val in the dock looking like an emaciated goblin. And Val refusing to let Jo visit her. And the Evening Standard running a photo of Val on the Old Bailey steps captioned NAZI DEATH QUEEN. She would catch the Tube east, and emerge from carriages reeking with smoke and filthy with litter into a wasteland of tower blocks – and watch Claude coax marvels from children who, to begin with, would barely smile.
‘Why don’t you stay?’ he said. And she did. Everything she cared to keep in LA, it turned out, fitted into three or four cartons, which she unpacked into Claude’s flat on Brixton Hill. ‘Why don’t you do teacher training?’ he said. ‘You’re good with the kids, you know.’ And she did, though it took longer than planned, what with her getting instantly and unexpectedly pregnant. ‘I suppose you want me to get rid of it?’ she said. ‘What?’ said Claude. ‘Why? It was obviously meant to be, babe.’ She stopped noticing ugliness. She noticed, instead, the way that the heights of South London greened, that pregnant summer. First as a dusting, a shading of the colour of life along the branches of the stubborn trees between the red-brick houses. Then as a canopy, a nodding roof of leaves over the broken steps and uncollected rubbish. She noticed the kicking in her belly. She noticed that something about being in the classroom took away the ominous awareness that had been coming on more and more in the studio, that she’d aged away from what the business of music wanted. The kids in the schools didn’t care about any of the stuff she had spent the last two decades doing – they’d barely heard of its biggest names – and she didn’t care that they didn’t care. It was if anything a relief, to be rid of all that. To replace it with the task of finding, every day, the one thing she needed to communicate.
And then Marcus was born. And looking at his crumpled little head, waxy with vernix, she felt love arrive in thunderclap form, unreasonable and total. It was love for the baby, yes, but it spread. It strewed light like a sunrise. It warmed like fine weather. It helped her persist through the discovery of Claude’s disadvantages. It kept her patient – mostly – through the slow, slow re
viving of her relations with Val. On the face of it, the existence of Marcus made things worse there, for Val, out of prison and hiding in halfway houses under a blanket of shame, was painfully envious. For two awful years, she tried to get pregnant herself, by the sound of it with all comers; and failed; and failed at not hating Jo for getting what she herself lacked; and was ashamed again for hating her, shame twice over. But with Marcus in the world, Jo had a kind of assurance to call on. Perhaps it was selfish of her to feel that everything was ultimately all right just because it was all right for her. But knowing she could count on a solid happiness made her kinder. It let her wait and hope, and try to help in the small ways that Val would allow her to. And there came a point when he was about four, and had recently been given a football, when Val was with them in Brockwell Park, chain-smoking more than Jo would have preferred she do. ‘Go on, pass it to your auntie,’ said Val; and after a surprised moment, Marcus did, and off they ran together towards the swings, kicking the ball backwards and forwards to each other as well as very short legs on one side, and wheezing middle age on the other, permitted. They came back, Marcus giggling, and Val looked at Jo as if to say, Am I allowed? And Jo sent back, Course you are.
After that she was assiduous, buying him presents that she couldn’t afford, living on benefits. When Claude was having one of his spells in hospital, it was Val that Jo could lean on to cover the differences between Marcus’s primary school day and her own teaching day. It was Val, at those times, who was standing behind Marcus when they opened the door with the stained-glass panel in it, as she came home, and Val who said, ‘Shall we show Mum what you’ve been doing?’ I recognise this, thought Jo, hanging up her scarf and her beret, and following them along the hall towards the smell of shepherd’s pie. I’m back in the house of women, with Mum and Auntie Kay. Except now there are bits of Action Man on the floor, instead of those cardboard dollies with paper clothes. It was Val, on evenings like that, who brought her a glass of wine as she played the piano after Marcus’s bedtime. It was Val sitting at the kitchen table one particular midnight during one of those times, when they had sunk most of the second bottle, who suddenly told her the story of what life with Mike had been like. Then wept. One thing at a time; one piece of happiness fitting on top of another; one day telling its story to the next.
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