by John Clanchy
I clap my hands and announce it’s time for a break. And then I ask:
‘After coffee, whose story do we hear today?’
They look around. Sorathy has her hand up, and there is none of the usual swell of approval and anticipation. Their dread is the same as mine, and they move towards the coffee table barely looking at one another.
‘Pam?’ I say, putting my head round the door of her office. I don’t go in, expecting her just to hand me a form or class-roll or something.
‘Come in,’ she says, and waves me to a chair. When she shuts the door I know something’s very wrong. Sorathy’s made a mistake, that must be it. The woman on the gate has reported her after all. But then why did they let her come to class?
‘I heard about the barbecue,’ Pam says. ‘From some of the students – they couldn’t stop talking about it this morning.’
‘I can explain,’ I start. And know how lame it sounds, and how often recently I’ve sat in this same room and said the same thing.
‘It seems as though everyone really enjoyed themselves,’ she says with a tight smile. ‘I wish I’d been there myself.’
Is that what this is about? I ask myself. That Pam feels piqued at not being invited? Inviting her had simply not occurred to me. After so much contact with students during the week, most staff simply want their weekends to themselves and their families.
‘But it’s not the barbecue I need to talk to you about,’ Pam says.
I note the need rather than want, and wait.
‘It’s something else more disturbing,’ she says.
Jesus, I think, is it about Sorathy, or isn’t it?
‘One of the students,’ she says, ‘tells me that part of the reason for the barbecue was to meet your mother –’
‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘They’ve made a roster, they’re sitting with her while I take my other classes – until I make some other arrangements. Aren’t they wonderful?’
Pam looks at me.
‘Miriam,’ she says, ‘have you lost your head?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Miriam, these are your students.’
‘So … ?’ But already I see a pit opening up.
‘Don’t you see how this might look?’
‘No,’ I say. But in fact I begin to. ‘Tell me,’ I say.
‘Are you, for instance, paying these women?’
‘No, I’m not. I tried to, but they wouldn’t accept any payment, they said it would be an insult. I’m trying to think of some other way of repaying them.’
‘And you don’t see that it’s a potential conflict of interest? That it’s unprofessional?’
My mouth is drying. Am I perhaps stupid? Just accepting things on the terms, in the spirit in which they were offered?
‘How do you mean, unprofessional?’ I say.
‘Well, think for Godsake. You’re their teacher, they’re doing unpaid domestic labour in your house –’
‘It’s not labour. They sit, they sit with my mother, they talk to her.’
‘Do they fetch things for her?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Do they get her lunch?’
‘Sometimes, but –’
‘Miriam, you are their teacher. They are doing unpaid “work”in your home, and at the end of term you must assess them.’ ‘But most of it’s an external test. It’s this multiple-choice rubbish for Christ’s sake, it’s even machine marked.’
‘But you still have a hand in the assessment. Don’t you see the conflict that could be there?’
And I do. But only in the abstract. This is not, I want to say, how it is. It is not like this at all.
‘Regardless of the reality,’ she says, reading my thoughts, ‘I’m formally counselling you – I must, if only to cover myself – to break this arrangement with your students as soon as you possibly can, and that means immediately. And I’m going to put it in writing, and I’m going to ask you to sign it, to show that you have been counselled –’
‘Warned,’ I say.
‘If you like. I’ll have it ready by the end of your class. Miriam, I’m sorry about this, but I have to …’
‘Cover your arse,’ I say. ‘I know.’
On the way back to the classroom, I feel not so much angry as just – dejected, I suppose. Disappointed in myself, in Pam, in the way things are, and I find I’m nearly in tears and make for the toilet instead.
It’s only when I emerge – face still hot and stinging but washed clean and, in the cracked glass of the washroom mirror, almost presentable if no one looks too hard – that the final blow falls into place, and I remember Sorathy and what we are about to hear, and that’s when I say ‘Fuckkk,’ imitating Philip, and enter the classroom. Smiling.
‘What is the matter?’ they say immediately, and I compound everything I’ve done wrong to date by drawing them into it, doing the very thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do. Acting unprofessionally. But I have to know.
‘Do you think … does anyone here think, that I’m exploiting you? That I’m doing the wrong thing by having you sit with my mother?’
‘No –’
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I must know the truth about this.’
‘Who says this?’ Maria is on her feet.
‘Maria,’ I say, ‘please sit down. I must know if anyone feels … I want to know.’
They deny it, of course. But then – if Pam is right – they would, since their own interests are at stake. In this sense, I begin to realize, I can’t win.
They ask for the story, and I sketch it as briefly, as impersonally as I can, and I find that – as I do – I simply cannot believe that the looks of incomprehension and then disgust on their faces are not genuine.
‘We will hold a protest,’ Maria says. ‘We will occupy her office.’
‘No, Maria,’ I say.
‘We will sit-down,’ someone says. ‘We will pocket.’
‘Picket,’ I say.
‘Picket?’ Njala says. ‘What is picket?’
And, hearing that, a way out occurs to me – for at least one of my problems anyhow. I begin to write the word picket on the board. This is how my best classes always go – with the enquiries and the energy coming not from me but from the class. The hour before the coffee break – on the etiquette of hosting – was simply brilliant. And now, I think as I write, we shall explore the language of protest. And there’ll be no time for Sorathy’s story. We can put it off to another day. When we’re all feeling stronger. And then I pause and think again, and rub the word out. I’m already unprofessional, according to Pam, and I imagine her walking in the corridor outside my room in a half-hour from now and glancing in at my class to find them all role-playing a strike, seated cross-legged on the floor, and the board covered with strike and picket, sit-in and occupation, and all the inflammatory language of protest.
‘Let’s forget all that,’ I say then. ‘It’s only a small problem, after all.’ And it is, I think to myself, compared with what we are about to face. ‘Please,’ I say, ‘just leave it to me to sort out. We’ll just go on with our present arrangements until …’
And then I experience a crisis of courage, while they wait patiently for me to finish what I’d started to say. And looking at their faces, I find I just cannot bring myself to tell these women that I am thinking of sending my own mother away to a home. They’ve already, I rationalize to save myself, had enough incomprehension for one morning.
‘Until …’ I say finally, ‘I make some other arrangements.’ And they nod at this nonsense, and seem satisfied. ‘Now,’ I say, ‘it’s time to hear someone’s story, and today it is … you, Sorathy?’ I say. Hoping. But she says, ‘Yes,’ and stands and comes towards the front of the room. Normally I swap places with the speaker, sitting in the seat they’ve just vacated. Today I go to the back and sit behind the other students, where they cannot see my face and I cannot see theirs.
When Philip and I were first married, we spent a week – not in Greece, but
in Southern Thailand, around the small hills of Songkhla, its bays and islands. One day, we walked along the wharves down on the harbourside. The fishing fleet was in, and a Thai naval destroyer sat on the horizon, supposedly checking movements in and out of the harbour. The port itself was putrid. It stank after the greenery of the inland, and the clear air and water of the lakes. The water here shone with slick and black oil. Paper and plastics, fish heads and other garbage rotted on the grey swell.
We’d come to see the ‘new fishermen’, the men who fished for others, the pirates of the South China Sea who preyed on the boat people. It was the word pirate which drew us. The pictures in our heads were those of Sinbad and Captain Hook and Long John Silver and maybe Drake, and it seemed romantic to visit them, to walk safely in the sun on the wharves and stare at these nondescript wooden hulks and to see the villainous crews who sailed them. And then we saw the villainous crews, and were appalled. One man I’ll remember as long as I live. He visits me still sometimes at night, and each time I am terrified. He squatted this day on the wheelhouse of a fishing boat, body and face of a monkey, a tiny figure with bare torso and feet, and black, torn trousers. He was fixing a rope of some kind, and had a knife in his mouth to leave his hands free to work on the rope. As we came near, he looked across at us, dark startled eyes, then grinned, not at Philip whom he barely glanced at, but at me, and my blood chilled instantly. Philip even waved at him and said something to me, something like, ‘He looks as though he’s about twelve,’ but I knew he wasn’t, I knew he’d never been twelve, that he was what he was now – thirty, thirty-three, – four – at the moment of birth, an animal, a grinning killer without a gram of conscience or mercy. It was summer, I was wearing a loose blouse, and my hand went instinctively to the neck of it, to button it. While he looked and grinned and told me he knew what I was thinking, and that I was right. And I swear at that moment I felt the cold steel of his knife on my breast, and the hard, splintered boards of a boat deck against my back. I shivered all over, as if the sun itself had disappeared, though in fact it was only that we had moved within the shadow of the boat – and I ran. Past the boat, down off the end of the wharf into the heat and noise and life-giving stench of the fish market below. I looked back once, expecting to find that the whole thing was just a trick, an illusion of light and shadow that had distorted the man’s face, but he sat there still, his head turned to follow me, and his face was in the sun now, and still grinning, and evil. Philip was standing below him, looking one way and then the other to find where I’d gone. The man on the boat wasn’t looking at him at all but down the wharf and into the market where his eyes had picked me out immediately, had picked out my green eyes from the teeming crowd around me, my eyes, and my white skin.
‘Is it all right …’ Sorathy says, ‘if I show pictures?’
I nod, not speaking. In my mind I see the bodies of brothers, of uncles and fathers, their throats cut, protesting against what is happening to the women. I see their bodies cast aside, like so much meat, fed to the fish overboard, or just left to lie, negligently, against the sides of the boat. To clear a space on the deck for the women and girls.
The class, like me, is silent. Like me, it is holding its breath.
‘I am Sorathy,’ she says, ‘and I read you my story today.’
At the back of the class, I swallow and fix my eyes on her face, and swear to myself I will not look away until she has finished. I started this – as usual with what I thought was a good intention – but, like so much else, it has somehow got out of control. The least I can do is finish it.
‘I tell you today,’ Sorathy says, ‘about the temple dance we do in my district in Cambodia. I did this dance when I was a girl, before I became a woman. It is a sacred dance in honour of the Lord Buddha. It is the dance for the Festival of the Full Moon, when we celebrate the Buddha’s Birth and Enlightenment and Passing. Here is one picture of a girl doing the dance. I will tell you now about how important it is how you use your hands in this dance, and what all the movements mean …’
* *
‘I’ll sign it,’ I tell Pam. ‘But I’m not going to change this arrangement for the moment. It was made in good faith, on their side and on mine –’
‘I know it was, Mirry,’ Pam says. She’s softened in the intervening hour or so. Just as I’ve hardened. ‘I never doubted,’ she says, ‘that it was done in good faith. That’s not the issue, it’s how it looks. Can you imagine what would happen if a newspaper got hold of this? Teacher Uses Migrant Students as Domestic Maids, Marks for Hard Labour …’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I can see what you’re worried about.’
‘It’s the college, it’s you, it’s me –’
‘Look, Pam,’ I say. ‘My mother’s very ill, I’ve tried every possible avenue to get responsible sitters. The only alternative is to give up teaching here. And in five weeks, at the end of the term, I’m going to do just that.’
I look at her when I say this, waiting for a protest, waiting for her to say, But you’re our best teacher, Mirry, you know that. I’ve just struggled to get you made permanent … She doesn’t say any of this. She sits, and looks back. And this, I find, hurts.
‘In the meantime,’ I say, ‘Mother is to go into a home, but I need a little time – two weeks perhaps – to get that settled, and I just don’t have anybody else. Do you understand?’
‘And I don’t have any option,’ she says. ‘Do you understand that?’
‘Yes,’ I say, and sign the formal letter of counselling. She dates it, and holds it.
‘Mirry,’ she says. ‘The best I can do, is not to send this right now.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Normally I should put it straight on your file, and at some stage it would pass across the Principal’s desk.’
‘But –?’
‘But if it were to lie in my drawer – forgotten for a week or so – and things changed in the meantime … You did say two weeks?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it may not get on the file.’
‘Unless something happened?’
‘Yes. In which case, it will have been there all along.’
Grandma Vera
You fish to play?
‘What?’ I say.
Fish to play?
‘Emily …’
‘Em?’
‘Em, is it really you?’
Oh Em –! At last.
Philip
‘Dad,’ Katie says. ‘Do you have to go to the office?’
‘I’m afraid so, Kat,’ I say. We’re sitting over the remains of breakfast, I’m reading legal papers, Katie’s drawing what looks like … well, actually I have no idea what it looks like. It’s in black crayon, and it’s either a giant marrow with warts along the underside, or a hearse. ‘I don’t really want to go,’ I say to her, ‘but I’ve got a big case starting next week.’
‘But it’s Saturday.’
‘I know, and I’m as sorry as you are, believe me.’
‘But then I’ve got no one to play with. Laura just tells me to go away, she’s got homework to do, and Toni’ll be here later, and they’ll just shut the door and giggle all afternoon.’
‘Kat, if I could play with you, I would. You know that. Why don’t you go and play with Yogi?’
‘Yogi’s dumb.’
‘Or Grandma Vera. You could play cards.’
‘Grandma Vera hardly plays at all any more. I tried to play Snap with her the other day, and she can’t understand the cards even. And she kept stopping, so I had to put her cards on the pile as well as mine, and it gets boring.’
‘Well, I don’t know, Kat.’
‘And she doesn’t even want Yogi any more. I keep giving him to her, but she doesn’t want him.’
‘What does she say?’
‘Once I said, ‘‘Here’s Yogi, Grandma,’’ and she just said she didn’t like yoghurt.’
‘Maybe she misheard you.’
‘She won’t even pat or stro
ke him any more.’
‘Kat, I’m trying to concentrate on these papers.’
There’s silence for a whole minute apart from the scrape of crayon on paper, while the marrow acquires a black vine, or the hearse crepe streamers.
‘And anyway, why hasn’t Grandma Vera gone to the home yet, so the baby can fit in the flat?’
‘The baby won’t be needing her flat. The baby’ll live in the house with us. I think Miriam has other plans for the flat.’
‘What plans?’
‘You’ll have to ask her. And anyway Grandma Vera will be going soon enough. I thought you didn’t want her to go, you thought she’d be lonely?’
‘That was before. Now she doesn’t play or anything, she just sits or lies in bed, and mumbles to herself and rumbles her stomach and makes smells.’
‘You must try and be tolerant, Katie.’
‘I am. But she’s taking ages, and so’s the baby.’
‘It’s only two weeks since we had our meeting, remember? And we’ve had to find a home –’
‘And you have, and it’s nice and everything, and she still hasn’t gone.’
‘Well that’s up to Miriam,’ I say.
‘Why do you call her Miriam all the time?’
‘Who?’
‘Mum.’
‘Because that’s her name.’
‘Yes, but if you’re talking to me, you’re supposed to say Mum, because if she’s talking to me she doesn’t call you Philip –’
‘She does with Laura.’
‘Yes, but not with me, because you’re not Laura’s Dad, but you’re mine.’
‘Okay, okay, so you don’t like me calling her Miriam?’ I say. ‘Is that it?’
‘It means you’re always thinking about her about you, and not about her about me.’
‘You what?’ I say. Sometimes I have no idea what this child is blithering about.