by Alex Marwood
‘No!’ Helen leans in, fascinated. I suppose she can pump me for info, thinks Sarah. Just a shame I’m not allowed to do it the other way round, now my children are her clients.
‘Yes. And she wasn’t … ’ Some instinct makes her pull back from mentioning the injuries. ‘She wasn’t coping all that well. I thought I should. She was ill. I couldn’t not, really.’
‘Just mind you don’t turn into one of those people who collects rescue dogs.’
‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘it’s not like that. She had … flu. She was totally in a state of collapse. She’s much better now. She’s been in bed all weekend but she’s completely compos mentis.’
‘Good. And how long’s she staying?’
‘A few more days, I guess. It’s good having her. She’s only been properly with us since yesterday lunchtime, but she’s really brought Ilo out of himself already.’
‘And Eden?’
‘Not so much. But I think I’m starting to understand the dynamic now. Romy’s already told me a lot I didn’t know. Those two have spent much more time together. Eden is a … I suppose what you’d call an aristocrat. You know: Brahmin class, because of her father. I hadn’t really taken that on board. It does explain quite a lot. I think she’ll need more time, is all. It must be hard if you’ve been special, getting used to being ordinary.’
‘Yes,’ says Helen. ‘Well, it’ll be a while before either of them attains ordinary, I should think.’
Sarah spots Eden, on a bench with her back to the netball courts, reading a book. Reading a book: a surefire way to put a target on your chest in the world of school playgrounds. Ilo must not have emerged from the lunch hall yet, or he would be sitting with her.
‘They shouldn’t be covering their faces, though, should they?’ Sarah asks.
Helen looks at the protestors. ‘Pfft, better here than in Trafalgar Square. Besides, I can tell who they are at a glance, can’t you?’
A littlie trips on the skipping rope and falls to the ground. They both stand and watch, sip their coffee, wait to see if there will be wailing. There isn’t. She scrambles up, brushes down her hands and knees and goes to take her turn at turning. ‘Phew,’ says Helen. ‘Wouldn’t want to have to do anything on lunch duty, would we?’
Over by the art block, next to Year Eight’s chickenwire carthorse, Marie is sitting on a bench examining her fingernails. She does that a lot, though uniform rules prevent her from having more than a French manicure. Mika and Lindsay and Ben McArdle (there are some people whose surname just naturally falls from your mouth whenever you mention them) form an indie band around her, lounging and sprawling and emanating disdain for the whole world.
They’re looking at Eden. Mika nudges Ben and says something, and they both laugh. Sarah suppresses an ‘ugh’. ‘I wish that lot would just can it, though,’ she says, tipping her chin in their direction.
‘Oh, they’re just kids,’ says Helen. ‘They’re not exactly gangsters, are they?’
Sarah shrugs. No, she’s right. None of Marie’s crew is going to be bringing a gun into school or flogging crack or raping their classmates. They’re just ordinary overindulged brats of the provincial suburbs, sneering at their peers for lack of anything else to do. She shouldn’t mind them so much. Marie Spence dissing your trainers is hardly going to count in Eden’s world when you think about all the other things she’s seen.
Ilo comes out of the main doors, looks around. Looking for Eden, she thinks. But no. He sees his sister, nods, and sets out across the tarmac towards Marie.
Sarah feels herself tense. Ben gets up from his perch on the back of the bench and the three girls straighten up, watch him approach with their ankles pressed primly together.
He looks so small, she thinks. I will not go over there. It’s not my business.
Ilo stops in front of Marie. His stance is relaxed; his hands hang by his sides. He says something, points at what looks from this angle uncomfortably like her bosom. Marie sits back and fingers her necklace. Smirks and shakes her head.
He speaks again. Ben takes a step forward. Ilo looks at him calmly, then his hand strikes, like a cobra, on Marie’s collarbone, and he’s wrenching and she’s struggling and the two girls are shouting, and then whatever it is he’s pulling at snaps suddenly loose, and his hand flies sharply into the air and instantly Marie is screaming and blood is spouting from her nose.
Shouts ring out as Helen and Sarah start to run – ‘You hit me! You hit me! Oh, my God, you’ve broken my nose!’ – and Ilo is stepping back with the necklace clutched in his fist and Ben is jumping onto his back. And then Ben is flying through the air like a marionette and everyone within twenty feet has started screaming.
Ilo looks as calm now as he did a minute ago. He turns and walks across the playground to where Eden sits, and holds out his fist. Drops the necklace into her outstretched palm.
She smiles at him and puts it in her pocket.
‘This is outrageous!’
Sarah’s voice is high-pitched and wobbling. Not the powerful voice it needs to be: it’s the voice of the professional victim. Shit, she thinks. I never did learn to assert myself, did I? ‘It was her who started it. It was her fault. She’s been bullying my kids, she and her … ’ she looks around them all, hates them all ‘ … little friends. Why aren’t you disciplining them?’
The principal’s office is crowded. Marie and Ben sit in two chairs in front of the desk, Eden and Ilo in two more, separated by three feet as though to put them closer would be to invite another outbreak of violence. Lindsay and Mika stand over by the window, all aggrieved expressions and tearful sniffs, though nothing has happened to them at all. Helen has been called in with her counsellor hat on and the three heads of year have been fetched from their classrooms. And Ray Spence and Sarah make thirteen.
Ray Spence has been shouting since he arrived eight minutes ago. ‘Look at her!’ He points to his daughter. She is, it’s true, a sorry sight. Her nose is swollen, one eye is black, and a chip has come off a front tooth where her face hit the bench when Ilo judo-flipped Ben. They’re veneers anyway, thinks Sarah spitefully. It’s not like it’ll have hurt.
‘I asked,’ replies Ilo. He seems to be treating the whole thing as though it were an intellectual exercise. Does he even realise how much trouble he’s in? ‘But she refused to give it back. It’s Eden’s medallion. It’s important.’
‘Of course I was going to give it back,’ sniffs Marie. ‘You just didn’t give me a chance.’
‘How many times should I have asked, Marie?’ he asks, and Sarah cringes. Stop being so calm, she thinks. You’re coming across like a psychopath, Ilo, and I know you’re not one.
‘Bullshit!’ shouts Ray Spence, and, although several adults cringe slightly at the word, no one reprimands him. Spence advances on Ilo, and the form teachers rush to get between them. ‘Never. Ever. Hit. A. Woman!’ he bellows over their shoulders, jabbing his finger repeatedly through the air in time with his words.
‘I didn’t hit anyone,’ replies Ilo, still calm. ‘My hand slipped when the medallion came loose, and I employed some basic self-defence techniques when Ben came at me. Anybody would have done it. If Marie had just given it back to me when I asked, none of—’
‘Well, you’re paying for the reconstructive surgery,’ bellows Spence, and his face turns a shade of puce that perfectly matches the shirt beneath his shiny grey suit. Oh, great, Sarah thinks. Marie gets the nose job she’s probably been agitating for since she was twelve, and we get to foot the bill. That man is everything I hate about the world of now: people who think that never backing down is a virtue.
‘Well, I think it’s unlikely to come to that,’ says the principal. The school nurse has pronounced her bruised but whole, no need for A&E, except that she’s definitely in need of a dentist.
Sarah clears her throat and speaks up, concentrates on dropping her voice, sounding authoritative. ‘None of this would have happened if your daughter hadn’t stolen my niece’s n
ecklace,’ she says. ‘And it’s hardly the first thing she’s done. She’s a bloody menace. She got what was coming to her, frankly.’
Oh, God, that came out wrong. She needs to remember that this is her workplace.
‘I don’t think that’s very helpful, Mrs Byrne,’ says the principal. No Sarahs now, not while the other parents are in the room.
‘Well, he hit me,’ Ben McArdle pipes up.
‘I pushed you, Ben,’ says Ilo. ‘You were running at me and I stepped aside and just gave you a helping hand.’
‘Are you hurt?’ asks the principal.
Ben holds up his right hand, on which a large piece of gauze has been affixed to what looks like a small graze. ‘I think it’s sprained,’ he says.
Oh, bugger off, thinks Sarah. Boo hoo. There’s no one like a bully for claiming victimhood. She feels a powerful urge to scream. FUCKSAKE, she howls inside her head. But sense steps in and reminds her to be the better person.
‘Mrs Byrne,’ says the principal, ‘the fact is that there was a violent incident between your wards and their schoolmates, and we can all see who has come to harm. We need to decide what action to take.’
‘Me?’ Eden comes out of her meditative trance and sits up. ‘What did I do?’
‘Come on, Eden. Your brother’s younger than you. No doubt he thought he was doing the noble thing and protecting you, but you need to own responsibility too.’
‘Own responsibility?’ Sarah is outraged once again. ‘I was watching the whole thing! She was reading a book! Literally on the other side of the playground! And what about Marie? None of this would have happened if she hadn’t stolen her necklace!’
Ray Spence points at Eden. ‘What, that? What would she want to nick that for? My daughter shops at Zara, not the Pound Shop.’
They crane to look. It does seem a tawdry thing: a strip of leather and a round of hammered iron. Hardly Marie’s Swarovski style. ‘It’s not the value,’ says Sarah. ‘It’s the principle.’
The principal, as if responding to her title, purses her lips. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘I think I should probably talk to Mrs Byrne alone now. Mr Spence, are you okay to get Marie home, or do you want us to call you a taxi?’
Ray Spence whirls a key fob around his index finger. ‘I’ve got the Jag,’ he says.
Of course you do.
He turns to Sarah. ‘Don’t think you’ve heard the last of this,’ he says.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she snaps.
36 | Sarah
A whole month. They’re excluding him for a whole month. Right up till Christmas. What’s she going to do? How will she watch him and work at the same time?
And some friend Helen is, sharing her reports on the kids with the principal, giving her the ammunition she needed to claim they weren’t fitting in.
‘But what were you thinking, Ilo?’ she says. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t. Force of habit.’
I don’t think he gets how serious this is. I don’t think either of them does. They wouldn’t be so calm otherwise. Look at me. Am I calm? Why won’t they take a cue from me? ‘Force of habit? Are you serious?’ What on earth did they get up to at Plas Golau? Were they really that violent?
‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ he says.
‘But he got me my medallion back,’ says Eden, as though this were the most important issue. Maybe it is, to her. She’d seemed so diminished without it. ‘I’m safe now,’ she says.
‘Safe?’
‘Nothing can touch me if I’ve got it on,’ she says, and beams disconcertingly.
They all sit side by side on the sofa, Romy like a Buddha with her bump resting on her crossed calves, Ilo with back straight as though sitting to attention, palms flat on his thighs, Eden with one knee crossed over the other. Sarah is too agitated to sit. She stalks up and down on the other side of the coffee table, straightens the contents of the mantelpiece, plucks imaginary fluff from the curtains. ‘You’re just lucky,’ she says, ‘that the school managed to talk the father down. You could be getting a criminal record if they hadn’t.’
Romy drops her feet to the floor. For someone with two black eyes, she looks remarkably surprised. ‘Really? Violence is illegal?’
‘No shit, Sherlock!’ she snaps. ‘Jesus.’ She squeezes her eyes closed. ‘So what other basic rules of a functioning society do you not know?’ she says between gritted teeth, and immediately feels bad, because, well, it’s hardly their fault. And then she opens her eyes and sees that Ilo’s are filled with tears, and she wonders, just for a moment before she dismisses the thought, if she’s being played.
She takes a deep breath.
‘Sorry. That was unfair. Yes, it’s illegal. I had no idea you didn’t know. I thought it would just be so obvious.’
‘But then how are we supposed to protect ourselves?’ asks Eden.
‘That’s the point. In a civilised society we don’t need to protect ourselves.’
They look sceptical.
I should’ve helped them, should never have let them get to this stage. I should’ve gone over their heads and reported it and followed the proper protocols. Why didn’t I? Because I kept hoping it would blow over and Marie would move on. Because nobody did a blind thing when Abi Knowles was doing the same things to me, poking me in the back with her compass from the desk behind, tripping me up in the corridors, pouring milk into my bag so it smelled of vomit for the whole of the rest of my time here, so more than a bit of me assumed that no one would do anything for them, either.
‘And when the Great Disaster happens?’ Eden asks. ‘What then? We have no idea when it’s going to start. It’s not scheduled. We can’t just not be prepared.’
Something in her snaps. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Stop it. Just stop it. There’s not going to be a Great Disaster. It’s nuts. It’s just stupid talk. Stop it!’
Their expressions change and she knows at once that she’s made a grave mistake. Their mouths snap shut and their chins jerk up, and she sees without question the bloodline that runs from them to her parents. Damn it, she thinks, oh, God damn it, I of all people should know better than to get into one with people about their dearly held convictions. It never changes anything, direct confrontation. If anything, it makes them worse, when they feel they’re under attack. Always that same look, doesn’t matter what the belief. Scientologists, communists, fascists, Jehovahs, Buddhists, Islamists, Justin Bieber fans. Always the same: that moment when their eyes go blank and they hang like a computer. In two seconds they’ll reboot and start firing out learned-by-rote challenges and unanswerable questions, gaslighting me till I’m too tired to argue any more. You can’t convert a true believer. All you do by trying is entrench their position for them. It’s Cult 101: cognitive dissonance strengthens loyalty, it doesn’t weaken it. I’ve just sabotaged weeks and weeks of being patient, of letting them work it out for themselves.
‘Why do you think that, Aunt Sarah?’ asks Eden.
‘It’s not as though the world hasn’t ended before,’ says Ilo. ‘It’s a living system in a living universe.’
‘We’re a long way from being the first dominant species,’ says Eden. ‘What makes you think we’d be the last?’
‘The world’s nearly ended a dozen times in the past century alone,’ says Romy. ‘Why would you think that’s over?’
Sarah is well practised in the arts of deflection and distraction. You don’t live through adolescence in an evangelical household without saying or doing something wrong at least once a day, even if you aren’t a rebel or a fighter. This recitation could go on all night if she doesn’t divert their attention, and she, with her lack of dedicated zeal, will get tired long before they do.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to discuss it with you any more tonight. You can go to bed, both of you. And understand that you’re in disgrace, okay?’
Their jaws snap shut. ‘Okay,’ says Eden.
�
�Sorry, Aunt Sarah,’ says Ilo.
A disastrous day. She’d thought she was getting a handle on this new life, but all she’s been doing is fooling herself.
She makes herself, despite her upset, give them a kiss and a hug goodnight. Tells them that it will all be okay, that they’ll find a solution, though she very much doubts that what she’s saying is true. Then she makes herself a gin and tonic, takes the blanket from the lounge sofa and goes out to sit at the garden table in the cold to smoke her evening cigarette. It might have to be two, tonight.
Now she’s calmed down a bit, she’s grateful to the principal for keeping it under wraps. But still, here Ilo is, out of the educational system for the time being, and no doubt there are bureaucrats about to open the case files and start asking how she plans to look after her disgraced minor ward while she’s at work.
They really believe it. How could I have been so stupid as to not understand that, just because the people in charge of their cult turned out to be spectacularly psychotic? You see it all the time: people moving the goalposts so their principles can remain intact. Well, the Border Wall was only ever metaphorical. Yes, I know Stalin killed twenty million people, but see, that wasn’t proper socialism. I’m not antisemitic: the Zionists have it in for Jeremy. Yes, Lucien Blake’s cult killed all its members, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong about the Apocalypse. She feels more alone, more at sea, than she has since the months after Liam left. She doesn’t even know where to start. Searches her memory for clues to how she broke her attachment to the Congregation. She knows it wasn’t a sudden thing. Vividly remembers thinking until she was at least Eden’s age that Alison had deserved her exile. She was at university before it occurred to her that the idea that Jesus would elect to live in Finbrough was frankly bonkers.
She hears the French doors open and looks over her shoulder. It’s Romy, still dressed, and wrapped in a shawl against the early winter cold.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘Can I join you?’