A Bit of Earth

by Rebecca Smith

  He hoped that, wherever Sharon Coleman was now, she was happy. Perhaps it had been the sort of syndrome that you went through, and that then sorted itself out. Perhaps it was just a matter of time. Guy also hoped that the Medical Experimenter in the Sky would forgive him the mean thoughts he’d once had about her. He realised now, watching Felix’s swimming lesson, that those mean thoughts had all started beside the school pool.

  Sharon Coleman’s mum had always come – even when swimming was in the middle of the day – to help her get changed. Her mum had waited by the pool with a special poncho/robe-type thing with elastic at the top. It was made from towels sewn together and looked like a giant, bottomless PE bag. He could still remember the pattern of seventies flowers in shades of avocado and olive against an orange background. There must, he supposed, have been armholes or sleeves because her mum also brought a flask of something hot, and Sharon had stood there drinking a plastic mug of it whilst she dried inside her towelling tent. They could all smell her drink, even from across the pool – hot Ribena, tomato soup, hot chocolate – how they all longed for that hot chocolate. He wondered whether Sharon had told her mum which one to bring, or whether her mum just planned to surprise her. Perhaps the decision depended on the weather. Sometimes it was hot Bovril, but Guy wouldn’t have cared much for that. (His own family sometimes drank cups of hot Marmite with squares of dry toast floating in it. He had never been sure whether he was meant to like this, or if it was a punishment for being ill.)

  Sharon Coleman must also be past forty now, unless premature death had been another part of the package. He downed the last of his coffee. The lesson was nearly over, and he headed back to the changing room to meet Felix.

  Felix appeared, freezing but happy, with cruel red weals under his arms where the floaty polystyrene pole had rubbed. Guy realised that they should have brought shampoo. Felix didn’t like showers much anyway. Guy noticed that some of the children were wearing latter-day versions of the towelling tent. They had special robes in either red and white or blue and white stripes. Other children were using special kids’ towels with funky designs of sharks or pirate flags. Felix was just using one of the towels that had arrived as a wedding present, getting on for ten years ago now. Susannah’s brother had once called them the ‘towels of the newly married’. Guy still thought of these towels as plush, luxurious and new. He saw now, in the harsh lights of the changing room, that they were showing their age, worn in some places and with long loose threads in others. He would bloody well get Felix one of those towels for kids in time for the next lesson.

  Chapter 22

  ‘Professor Lovage. Hi! I came a bit early to show you the Action Man.’

  ‘Max, how delightful! Did you really find one?’

  ‘Yup. Here he is.’

  Max pulled him feet first out of his rucksack. A tiny shower of sand fell onto Judy’s office floor. She smiled.

  ‘He looks a little pale,’ she said.

  ‘Well, he’s had a long journey. I’ll show you if you like.’

  Max took his laptop and a turquoise transparent folder out of his bag. It all looked, Judy thought, much better presented than his academic work. She didn’t mind. She loved to find out where her students’ hearts lay. Out came a blue and green map of the world.

  ‘The Action Men went overboard here, off the coast of China. Some of them are still at sea, maybe for ever. Plenty have washed up, all along this coast. I can show you how it all works.’

  He pressed the button to switch on his laptop. A cheery little tune rang out to indicate that it was ready. It startled Judy, who had yet to have need of a laptop.

  ‘Do you like or hate that little tune?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Max, ‘I’ve never really thought about it before.’

  With a few clicks, or really pokes, at what Judy surmised must be the mouse, the screen lit up in more blues and greens. She read ‘Surface Drifts and Currents of the Ocean’.

  She liked the idea that it was all just one ocean.

  ‘Warm currents are brown,’ said Max. ‘Cool ones are dark blue.’

  She put on her glasses and peered at it. How clever it would be if the lines started moving. Another click and they did.

  ‘There aren’t any in the Mediterranean,’ she said.

  ‘Well, there is a current past Gibraltar, but it pretty much just slooshes around in there. That’s why it’s so vulnerable to pollution, algal blooms and so on.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Judy nodded.

  ‘One of my first ever finds was a sea-bean. You can see how they get here. Look. They come from the Amazonian rainforest, maybe go towards Africa, or straight up here and across from Mexico.’

  ‘So,’ she nodded and peered some more, ‘Chile is in a very different system to Brazil.’

  ‘Yeah. But I guess if you chucked something off the very tip of South America it might end up here. From Chile it would be more likely to go towards Australia or New Zealand or Japan.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Of course these currents are vulnerable to change. It hasn’t always been like this. And then there are factors such as El Niño.’

  ‘Does everything wash up eventually?’

  ‘Nah, that’s one of the problems. This patch here,’ (he pointed to a spot halfway between California and Japan) ‘that’s called the North Pacific Gyre. It’s like an ocean landfill site. Things get in there and the currents mean they can hardly get out. It’s like eternal plastic soup. Environmental nightmare. It’s huge. Seems impossible to clean up.’

  ‘If seven maids with seven mops …’ said Judy.

  ‘At least,’ said Max. ‘But who knows, things change. Like our own Gulf Stream. Might get switched off at any moment.’

  They nodded morosely. They had both seen enough Horizons to know that the polar bears would be arriving in Glasgow any day now.

  Chapter 23

  Now Felix had something to write in his News Book every Monday morning. Bulbs were coming up. Spring had sprung. Mrs Cowplain had begun to look forward to his entries. She was a ham-fisted gardener, a buyer of boxes of bargain bedding plants, chosen by their price and size, rather than their variety or even their colour. She would stick them in the ground in very neat rows, and just hope for the best. She was an avid watcher of gardening shows (but more for Monty Don than for any information she might glean), a buyer of ornaments and statuary rather than perennials, a non-propagator. But she loved seeing Felix’s little descriptions of what he had done.

  She was quite disappointed the week that he wrote about his birthday instead.

  My birthday was on Saturday. Dad and Erica and me [‘I, Felix, I!’ she wrote in red pen] went to the Blue Reef Aquarium where I have always wanted to go. I wanted to go in Erica’s car but Dad said we had to go in ours. What we saw:

  sharks

  rays that you could touch

  stingrays

  pipefish

  seahorses

  velvet swimming crab

  turtles

  pufferfish

  domino damselfish

  fox face which is also called badger fish and can turn

  completely black

  clownfish

  blue face angel

  convict fish

  We had lunch in the café. Chips but not fish and chips! Then we went to Judy’s house for tea and she had made my birthday cake. It was a fish tank with green icing seaweed and smaller than usual smarties for gravel and blue background icing and the fish were plastic toy ones to keep. One day I am going to work at the Blue Reef Aquarium.

  Mrs Cowplain wrote, ‘What a nice birthday, Felix. Well done!’ even though she suspected that he had made up some of the fish names.

  The next Monday was even worse. Felix wrote of how his dad had been digging up the whole of the garden. She was horrified. Did that mean all of his seeds? His raspberry canes? The three conker trees he had been growing?

  ‘Oh no,’ said Felix, ‘that’s just the garden at hom
e. My garden’s at the university. In the botanical.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know it was there. Imagine that. Lucky you.’

  ‘You can come and see it after school one day.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to ask your dad, won’t you?’

  ‘He won’t mind.’

  ‘Well, I’ll talk to him at home time.’

  ‘He never comes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I just go straight there. I don’t mind if you want to come too.’

  ‘Thank you, Felix. That would be very nice,’ she said, and gave him what was intended to be an extra kind smile.

  Felix often hated the way that grown-ups and, most of all, teachers talked. But when school finished, he hung back.

  ‘Is it tonight you’re coming, Miss?’

  She hadn’t actually meant it to be tonight, just at some unspecified time in the future. She had some steak in the fridge which she feared was dripping blood through its bag onto the coleslaw beneath. She had a feeling she had forgotten to put a plate under it. But why not?

  ‘Felix, you mustn’t go in other people’s cars without telling your dad.’

  ‘It’s all right, Miss. We can’t go in a car, we can only walk.’

  ‘Even so, I do think I should talk to your dad about it first. Shall I ring him up?’

  But the boy’s father proved to be uncontactable. It was all getting more and more complicated.

  ‘It’s because he’ll be in the greenhouses, Miss.’

  Why was it that for the last hundred years children had called teachers ‘Miss’? She was a divorcee, but she still liked to use ‘Mrs’. Being called ‘Miss’ really got on her nerves. She could remember being told off for doing it herself.

  What was worse, she wondered, setting off with a child without his parent’s permission to make an out-of-school-hours, off-site visit, or letting the child wander off by himself to find an uncontactable parent in some vague and quite possibly lonely place. Blow the dripping steak, she was on thin ice either way. She might as well go with him.

  Mrs Cowplain stumbled a little on the pebbles.

  ‘Watch out, Miss, it gets slippery here.’ As they went down the cinder paths Felix held back brambles for her. Damp ferns were speckling her skirt and her tights with diamonds. Soon she could see the silhouette of a man in one of the greenhouses. She jolly well hoped that it was Mr Misselthwaite.

  ‘Is that your dad?’

  ‘No, that’s Erica. He’ll be somewhere, don’t worry. Then you can ask him if it’s all right for you to come. But it will be. I think anyone’s allowed to come here. It’s just nobody knows about it.’

  ‘And who is Erica?’

  But there was no time for him to answer. Erica came striding towards them, wiping her muddy hands on her jeans.

  ‘Hey, Felix! Brought a visitor?’

  ‘I am Mrs Cowplain. Felix’s teacher.’

  ‘Erica Grey,’ said Erica. She went to extend one of her muddy paws, but thought better of it. This was clearly a member of the clean and structured clothes brigade.

  ‘I was hoping to see Mr Misselthwaite. Felix was going to show me his garden, but I really need to talk to Mr Misselthwaite first.’ Erica saw Felix rolling his eyes.

  ‘Dad’ll be back in a minute. He always meets me here.’

  She could see that it was actually jolly convenient for the school. One dead-end road to cross. Just five minutes’ walk, or less if one were wearing more sensible shoes.

  ‘Do you want to see the garden then, Miss?’

  ‘Yes please, Felix.’

  The white cat, familiar from so many News Book entries, appeared and began to circle them, rubbing against Felix’s legs.

  ‘This is Snowy. He’s the university cat.’ Felix knelt down to stroke Snowy properly.

  The cat turned his attention to Mrs Cowplain, butting her with his hard and heavy head. She smiled and asked, ‘Do you think he likes me, Felix?’

  ‘Oh, Snowy’s a right flirt,’ said Erica. ‘He likes everybody.’ Mrs Cowplain decided to try not to take offence. Perhaps Erica was from Yorkshire, or another cultural group.

  Mrs Cowplain saw too that her tights were muddy and had been laddered somehow on the perilous journey. The cat had decided that he really liked her. He jumped up on his hind legs and dugs his claws into her right leg, adding injury to the insult.

  As if from nowhere, Mr Misselthwaite appeared. He was, she observed, not much taller than Erica, and similarly attired. Perhaps she had stumbled onto the set, if that was the word for radio locations, of Gardeners’ Question Time. He had the same weather-beaten skin as Monty Don, and was just as messy, although his eyes were very pale, and his hair much lighter. She could pretend to herself that he was a negative of Monty Don. He was equally lean and rangy.

  ‘Dad, this is my teacher, Miss Cowplain,’ said Felix. ‘She’s come to see my garden.’

  ‘Thought you were in trouble for a moment. What about Miss Block, you could have brought her. Would you like a cup of tea, Miss, er … Cowplain?’

  ‘Yes please, that would be lovely. And I must apologise for the state of my tights. They seem to be quite ruined. Miss Block teaches another class.’

  ‘Lovely’ turned out not to be quite the word for the tea. It was from a Thermos, and many hours old, with the unmistakeable smell and taste of flasks and plastic cups. She sipped it as they walked along more of the cinder paths and then across a bridge of planks and chicken wire. Then they were in a large open meadowy place. She could see ponds and terraces with crumbling paths and lots of plants with Latin names, as well as some she knew – bamboo, roses and azaleas. It really was paradise. She thought of the school’s mean little Environmental Area, and here was this, just five minutes’ walk away! And here was Felix’s garden, all just as he had described, Californian poppies, love-in-the-mist, big poppies, strawberries, raspberries, pumpkin plants, all coming up in neat little rows.

  ‘These are alliums, Miss,’ he told her. ‘I’m trying to grow them really big. And these are the conker trees. They’ll have to be moved when they get bigger.’

  ‘Felix,’ she said, ‘it’s beautiful. Your dad must be very proud. It’s much, much nicer than my garden.’

  She couldn’t wait to tell them about it in the staff room.

  Chapter 24

  There were six children in Felix’s group. They weren’t meant to know that they were sorted by ability, but of course they did. The Triangles knew that they got twice as long for everything, and always had an assistant hovering beside them. Some of the Circles and the Hexagons had to be kept apart or else they would ‘muck about’.

  Felix was, appropriately enough, a Square. There were six Squares. Being a Square wasn’t fair. As soon as you had finished the worksheets, you got given extra. The Squares weren’t always very nice to each other. There was Grace who was good at clarinet, ballet, rhythmic gym and practically everything; Chun who was always drawing funny pictures on her legs, and was good at everything else as well; Duncan who didn’t have a TV at home and was kind to everybody; Esther who never stopped talking, and Joe who could do any sum in the world in his head and hardly ever said anything to anyone.

  Nobody but Mrs Cowplain would have called them the Squares. She seemed to delight in it.

  ‘Squares!’ she would squawk. ‘Have you finished that yet?’ They usually had, as long as Esther hadn’t distracted them too much. One day Mrs Cowplain got very cross and threw a white-board pen right at her. It made a big green line across Esther’s picture, but Mrs Cowplain didn’t even say sorry. She said:

  ‘Esther, you are living proof that coming from a nice Christian family does not make for a well-behaved child. Now give me back my pen!’ as though Esther had been the one who took it. The Squares thought that was very unfair; after all, Esther’s mum was famous for being a vicar who came to do assemblies.

  The trouble was, you never quite knew what Mrs Cowplain was going to do next. Felix would always blame her for eve
rything that started to go wrong with the garden, even though it really wasn’t her fault.

  A few days after Mrs Cowplain had thrown the pen at Esther she came and sat down at the Squares’ table. Uh oh, thought everybody, we’re for it now. But Mrs Cowplain was smiling.

  ‘Squares,’ she said, showing her golden tooth, the one that Chun, whose dad was a dentist, said must mean that she was very rich and very old. ‘Squares, we are starting a very exciting project. A science project. The Head has been discussing it with the head of the university, where Felix’s daddy works.’

  ‘And my dad,’ said Joe, who hardly ever said anything, and for once Mrs Cowplain didn’t say, ‘Stop interrupting’, which was what she usually said to everybody.

  ‘Yes, and lots of mummies too, I expect. Anyway, we are going to have a garden there. Just for a while, near to the one that Felix has already. We have Felix to thank. It was his garden that gave me the idea.’

  ‘Can we grow anything we like?’ asked Duncan.

  ‘Within reason. Anyway, Squares, I want you to go QUIETLY into the library and find some books about plants and gardens. Then the whole class will have a go at drawing some plans.’

  ‘Why is it just for a while?’ asked Felix. ‘Gardens take years and years.’ Everybody knew that.

  ‘It’s just for a while because the garden will have to make way for some very big, new university buildings.’

  ‘That’s not true, Miss.’

  ‘Felix, I thought your daddy would have told you by now. I’m afraid your garden won’t always be there. The university is going to put a sports centre there instead.’

  ‘No, Miss, no.’ He shook his head wildly. Then he threw up all over the Squares’ literacy problems.

  Mrs Cowplain looked at the telephone numbers that the school had for Felix’s father. There was the home one, another that she recognised as a university office number, and a mobile. She could imagine Mr Misselthwaite’s mobile phone. It would just ring endlessly beside some pond, or be propped up with a flat battery in one of those cobwebby flowerpots in his greenhouse. She tried the office number. By some miracle Guy answered after the fifth ring.