Because We Are Bad

by Lily Bailey

  A knock on my door.

  “Are you ready yet?”

  “Uh . . .” I cannot kill any more time. She will think I am a weirdo with something to hide. “Yeah . . . come in.”

  The room reeks suspiciously of too much Dove deodorant and Miss Dior Cherie, but Dr. Finch doesn’t say anything. The session begins and goes on as normal, though admittedly I’m less cooperative than usual because I’m trying to compile the terrible events of the morning so far into something resembling a list. Forty-five minutes later, Dr. Finch seems to decide she isn’t getting much out of me, and she goes as swiftly as she came.

  I am left sitting in bed in a cloud of routines. Then I find myself laughing, at first just a little, but it soon becomes uncontrollable, as if one minute I was a girl and the next I became a hyena. Because it seems so funny: I have spent so long dreaming of living with Dr. Finch, but I can’t even cope with her opening the curtains in the morning. Does the universe have a sense of humor?

  Laughing at a routine is like flicking a switch on. It’s not that everything suddenly changes, because brains don’t seem to work that way. It is more like waking up and feeling excited because a thin layer of snow has covered the city, and now you are wondering what you should do with the day.

  I am emboldened. I am going to make an effort. I am going to put myself in situations that involve talking to other people. I get up and go to the nursing station. Mary is sitting at her desk, updating the patient notes.

  “Mary?”

  She looks up.

  “It’s such a lovely day. Can you take us for a walk? Please?”

  Mary checks her watch and looks out the window.

  “Sure. In half an hour, okay? Ask the other ladies if they want to come.”

  An hour later, Elizabeth, Catherine, Sue, and I are walking through a park with Bob and Mary. We are enveloped in acres and acres of green hills, and about fifty yards away, a mob of silky-haired deer straddling a hilltop stare us down.

  “I’m going to see the deer!” I announce, running toward them.

  Behind me, Mary yells out to be careful, but I can hear that she is laughing.

  I get quite close and the deer still aren’t running, but I slow down anyway, making it clear I mean no harm. I edge closer, until I am about five yards away. I stand, panting softly as I admire their shiny coats and the way their breath comes out their nostrils in clouds. The stag in the group pads toward me before coming to a halt and looking me up and down with purpose. The brown colors in his irises are in a constant state of movement; they are like burning haystacks, and they make me feel alive.

  “Hey there,” I say.

  I hear Bob calling me. I take a deep breath before turning around and running back to the group.

  Mary is in a fit of giggles.

  “Girl, you are so brave! You . . . just . . . I can’t believe you just did that!”

  Bob pulls a nervous grin. I feel bad now. I don’t want to cause him stress.

  “Sorry. I just . . . wanted to say hello!” I say.

  “Okay. Just don’t do that again.” He chuckles. “You’ll give me a heart attack!”

  I add RUNNING TO DEER to my list in SELFISH as penance for causing him stress just so I could enjoy myself.

  But I don’t regret it.

  Back at the hospital, I make a decision.

  Exposing myself to the things I fear and learning to deal with them is the only way forward. It’s possible I needed to be an inpatient to protect me from myself, but now I need to go.

  I log on to my laptop and send an e-mail to my old employer at the nursery. I tell her that things didn’t work out for me at university, and that I’ve left.

  I say that I am available to work if they need anyone.

  An hour later, I have a reply.

  Sandra says she’s sorry to hear my news, but delighted from her point of view. She tells me the nursery group happens to urgently need someone to start working mornings, at a different nursery to the one I was at before. Am I interested? Can I start tomorrow?

  I stare at the e-mail, reading it over and over. My heart is racing. There’s a knock on the door. Dr. Finch comes in.

  “What’s up?” she asks.

  “Don’t get mad.”

  “Have I ever?”

  “No. But you might now. Here’s the thing. I need to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “I contacted the nursery. I asked if there was a job for me. I didn’t expect things to happen so suddenly, but they’ve got back and said there is a position. And I need to start tomorrow.”

  Dr. Finch laughs. It’s not a mean laugh; it’s a free laugh with a life of its own. It lasts for ten seconds, and then she’s back to normal.

  “You never fail to surprise me. Ever.”

  “I know you’ll think this is crazy. And that it’s like when I went off to college and was insisting I would just get better. But this isn’t like that. I know it’s not going to happen overnight. I’m only going to work mornings. It’s going to be like proper exposure therapy. I’ll take my treatment seriously. I’ll have afternoons off, and I can come down from London for sessions with you. So you have to discharge me, please. Please.”

  Dr. Finch considers things for a few seconds. I feel sure she is going to say no.

  “Okay. Why not? If it’s what you want. You can come and see me two afternoons a week, and we can reevaluate things if it doesn’t work out. At least you’re not trying to leave the country.”

  I am ecstatic. I want to jump up and down and dance.

  “Thank you.” I grin. “Genuinely. Thank you so much.”

  Dr. Finch gives me a small smile and smooths her skirt.

  “If it’s what you want,” she repeats.

  Mum comes to get me in the Beetle. She’s brought a guest.

  “Ella!”

  My sister is standing in the doorway to my room.

  “Are you feeling better?” she asks shyly.

  “Yes, thank you,” I say. “Come in.”

  Ella helps me grab my suitcase and take it downstairs. Mum goes into the office to talk to the nurses about something. Outside on the driveway, Ella hoists the bag into the trunk, and we both get in the back.

  We are quiet for a while—there are no blueprints for little siblings who have to grow up five years in one day.

  “Best sister ever,” she whispers.

  · 26 ·

  Nursery

  “Mum!” I hiss. “Do you have to pull up so close to the nursery? Do you know how embarrassing it would be if anyone knew you were dropping me at work?”

  I reel from the comments I have just made. They came out of nowhere. It takes a lot of energy to be a good person all the time and never show a trace of annoyance, and there are times, like just now, when my mask slips.

  Mum looks surprised and hurt.

  “Oh, sorry, darling. I didn’t realize it was a problem. Of course, I can park around the corner. Sorry again.” She glances nervously at me, as if I am a newly discovered element that may react to things unpredictably.

  “No, no, don’t be. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”

  I allow her to kiss me good-bye on the cheek. My skin burns where she pecks. I automatically add

  CHEEK SMELL: Did my cheek smell?

  CHEEK TASTE: Did she taste my skin where she touched with her lips? If so did it taste horrible?

  to BODILY FUNCTIONS.

  “Bye, love you,” I call, getting out and shutting the car door, checking that I don’t leave any disgusting smudgy fingerprints on the paintwork.

  I cross the road and buzz on the blue church door to be let in. Miss Rebecca and Miss Bianca, who share me as their teaching assistant, are busy setting up. Unlike the last nursery I worked in, this one rents space in a church hall, so we have to set up and pack away every morning. The two of them are hauling in sandpits, easels, tables, and tiny chairs from the shed where they are stored.

  “Morning, Miss Lily!” they call.r />
  “Morning!” I chirrup back.

  This morning I am on Messy Tray, Role Play Area, and Snack.

  Messy Tray and Role Play Area are specific areas of the classroom that the fascist Ofsted inspectors get very excited about, so they have to be set up perfectly in order to score top points should an inspector drop by.

  I fill the Messy Tray with a jug of water mixed with blue food dye and glitter to make an ocean, before plopping in some plastic sea creatures (to enhance “knowledge and understanding of the world”), foam alphabet numbers and letters (to enhance “literary and numeracy”), and fishing rods (to improve “motor skills”). I write what I have done in a file so that if Ofsted don’t come today they can still look up the ways in which we helped the children develop intellectually and physically.

  The Role Play Area changes once a week. We have had a farm, a shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a family home, and now we are setting up an accident and emergency department. I lay out mini stethoscopes, reflex hammers, bandages, and heart-rate monitors on a tiny consultation table, and then hang up doctors’ and nurses’ costumes under a sign that reads “Hospital” in Korean. Ofsted also get very excited about multicultural signage. The children don’t, as they can’t read. We are missing a waiting area, and I find myself wondering if I should line ten rows of chairs outside to prepare the children for a more realistic NHS experience.

  “Everything okay, Lily?” calls Miss Rebecca from the other side of the hall. I realize I have been standing looking at the Role Play Area for a couple of minutes.

  “Yep!” I call. I must prepare Snack.

  It’s my third day, and I haven’t done Snack here before, but I assume it won’t be any different from the last nursery. I go into the kitchen but can’t find any apples. Nursery protocol is that apples should be cut wearing protective plastic gloves and aprons to stop the spread of germs.

  I ask a senior teacher called Miss Louise where I can find apples, aprons, and gloves. She tells me the apples are in the shed, and that no one really bothers with the aprons or gloves.

  “But, but . . . the regulations say we have to wear them,” I say, stammering slightly and hating myself for being a health and safety geek, but knowing that I won’t let my bare hands touch, peel, and cut apples that will be eaten by actual children. I picture the 0.01 percent of germs that couldn’t be washed off by the antibacterial soap crawling from my naked fingers deep into an apple segment, ready to be delivered into the innocent mouth of an unsuspecting child with a weak immune system . . .

  “Well, you’re right, we probably should be wearing them,” says Miss Louise. “I think there’s some in the back of the far-right cupboard.”

  Protective clothing located, I open the shed door. The apples are lying in an open crate on the floor. There are animal droppings in the crate. I pick out some apples. They have teeth marks in them.

  I run back to Miss Louise to tell her about the unfolding disaster, but she is unfazed.

  “Oh . . . okay. . . . Well, why don’t you just give them an extra wash and keep peeling until you get through the bite marks?”

  This is Ratgate.

  “I’m not going to give the children apples that have been gnawed by rats. Those apples need to be thrown away. And from now on we need to keep apples inside, and not in the shed.”

  “The apples can’t stay inside,” says Miss Louise through gritted teeth. “You know that we don’t have the space. But okay, fine. We’ll buy tight-seal plastic containers for the shed. In the meantime, you can take some money from the petty cash and get some biscuits for Snack today.”

  The children arrive at nine. They swarm the classroom, destroying our meticulously arranged learning areas and reading corners in seconds, throwing the Plasticine, hiding in the bathroom, and painting the walls.

  I sit them down to make paper-chain snakes for Chinese New Year. Alongside the interaction with Miss Louise, which is marked as a very red item in RUDE, the daily minutiae of normal routines are streaming in. At the moment I am debating whether adding paper chains to make the snakes longer and passing them off to parents as the children’s work makes me a liar in breach of the Ofsted requirement for creativity to be child-led. I cannot disappear to the bathroom to write stuff down for the rest of the morning—we are understaffed as it is, and since I’m the shared assistant for two teachers, my leaving the room could result in chaos.

  The last nursery I worked in felt more contained. But here the children are a year younger, and it’s a jungle—every toddler for himself.

  “Miss Lily!” screeches Miss Bianca, who is Japanese and bull-like, both in shape and personality. “Stanley has done poo! Needs change!”

  Here, I change diapers up to ten times a morning, and each one is a dramatic exercise in doing absolutely nothing that could be construed as dodgy. Child-protection rules state we need to have two people present whenever a diaper is changed, but we don’t have enough staff for that to be possible. We fill in forms recording the exact details of the change, and for each change there’s a box where you need the signature of another staff member to prove they were there. Since “we all have each other’s backs here,” you’re expected to ask someone to pretend they were there and sign, and then they return the favor for you later. I queried it yesterday, trying to sound offhand, but there isn’t really a casual way to ask, “Will anyone be supervising me when the children are in a potentially vulnerable situation?” Miss Bianca gave me a look that said Only an actual pedophile asks that.

  Stanley plods over to me expectantly and stretches up his hand to be held as we walk to the baby-change station. The shit has leaked out the absorber pad and down his legs, and it takes a good ten minutes to clean it up and change him into new trousers. Ten minutes is a suspiciously long time to spend changing a diaper by yourself. I add this fact to PERVERT. Unfortunately, his willy is caked in the turd, and I have to wipe it a few times to get it off. And that’s when the unthinkable happens. Stanley gets an erection. It’s tiny, the size of a little party sausage, but it’s undeniably there. Oh, shit.

  Later I find myself looking in the window of a local pet shop, before entering on impulse. I walk over to a stack of glass boxes, all of which contain various forms of slumbering tiny creatures in plastic hideouts lined with cotton wool.

  In one, four or five white-and-ginger baby hamsters are huddled snoozing together. In the same container, a distinctly larger brown one crawls over to my finger at the glass.

  “Why is this one so much bigger than the others?” I ask the guy behind the desk, who has long greasy hair and a lopsided mouth.

  “Because we’ve sold all her siblings, but no one wanted her, because for some reason she was much bigger than the rest, so she’s not so cute, you see? Those other little ones in the cage with her are a few weeks younger than her. They’re selling well.”

  Why would you put a fat hamster that you’re struggling to sell in with a load of tiny cute ones? That’s like dumping a hippo on the catwalk.

  Bleakly, he adds, “To be honest, it’s looking like she might end up going to a lab . . .”

  I have no idea if that is a realistic fate for an unsold hamster with a weight problem or a sales tactic. Either way, I’m buying.

  I take Tubby into nursery every day in a travel box. The children love her.

  They sit in a circle and I put her in the middle and she runs from child to child. Then they roll onto their fronts, and I let her crawl across their backs. Sometimes I put her in the top pocket of my smock and wander around with her peeking her little head out with her paws gripping the edge of the fabric. The children clap their hands together and yell in delight.

  Tubby is not like the hamsters Ella had when she was little. Tubby is pretty much as tame as a dog. She remembers who you are and you can let her crawl around your room because she doesn’t try to escape. One time I fell asleep with her in my bed and when I woke up a few hours later she was still there, curled up in the nook of my neck.

>   I sit with her in my room, letting her walk over my hands and up my arms. She is the only living thing who doesn’t make me break into a sweat of routines. Is this what it’s like for normal humans when they interact with other humans?

  I put Tubby on a diet, but it doesn’t help. In fact, she gets bigger. I feel she may have some sort of glandular problem, but others form their own theories.

  “I sorry, but there is no way that is a hamster,” belly-laughs Miss Bianca every morning. “That is big ratty rat.”

  I get home from work and take Tubby out of her travel box and place her carefully back in her cage. Then I collapse onto my bed and reach for my notebook to write down the words from the afternoon.

  Dr. Finch and I have agreed that I will not write down things that are of low importance. Words are of low importance if I can rationally understand that my behavior wasn’t bad. The idea is to move up gradually—next I will stop writing down the things of medium importance—until I don’t write down anything at all.

  Today, a girl called Annie asked if she could hold Tubby, and I said no, because I’ve given her three chances before and she always squeezes so tight that Tubby’s little black eyes start bulging out of her head. Then I felt like a BITCH, but really, I’ve given her chances before, and what is so wrong with setting boundaries for a child and protecting an animal’s welfare? So this is something I will not write down. There are other things that have happened today that I’m also able to dismiss and not put on this list, so I feel pleased.

  Two-year-old Matteo has started simulating sex with a baby doll in the Role Play Area. It is witnessed by Miss Rebecca and me.

  Miss Rebecca asks me what we should do, which is concerning, as I’m used to taking my orders from her. I say we should tell Miss Louise and take whatever appropriate action the guidelines say we should.