by Jilly Cooper
He didn’t add that Janna had been disturbing his sleep recently: she was so brave but so vulnerable. He loved his wife; safer if he took himself out of harm’s way.
‘Anyway, Harry Fitzgerald will probably pull through and I’ll be back in a few weeks.’
‘I’m only cross because Skunk Illingworth will have to be promoted to head of science. He’ll be so up himself. When are you going?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Crispin Thomas from S and C Services rang later.
‘You’re providing a bloody sight more challenge than support, swiping my best teacher,’ stormed Janna.
Crispin laughed fatly. ‘We know, we know. We’re going to send Rod Hyde, the super head from St Jimmy’s, round to give you a hand next week.’
Outside, rain was still tipping down; the awful playground was filling up with puddles.
‘I don’t need Rod Hyde. I was hired to run this joint. Our playground needs a makeover for a start,’ and Janna hung up because of more screams and yells coming from the direction of the history block.
Running into the classroom, Nine E again, she found tin soldiers and a model battlefield scattered all over the floor. Next moment, a display of shrapnel and shell splinters, the collection of Lance, the newly qualified teacher, went flying. Lance and his teaching assistant were cringing in a corner and the appalling Monster Norman, no doubt feeling he had lost face after his fight with Feral yesterday, had taken centre stage as he menaced a terrified sobbing Asian girl.
‘Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet,’ he hissed. ‘Paki swot, Paki swot.’
His victim was Aysha Khan, who’d made such progress after two terms that Janna had singled her out in assembly.
The children, diverted by fights – this was their theatre – had formed a four-deep circle round the participants.
‘Black rubbish, black shit,’ taunted Monster, then spat in Aysha’s face.
‘Stop that,’ shouted Janna, pushing her way through the crowd, too enraged to be frightened.
Monster, who she noticed had a shadow of moustache on his sweating upper lip, had a lit cigarette in his hand.
‘Go home, fucking Paki bitch,’ he yelled and was about to burn her arm when Janna dragged his hand away, grabbing the cigarette, stamping on it and turning on him.
‘How dare you!’
‘Go on,’ mocked Monster, ‘touch me, hit me, you try it. I’ll get you fired, you’ll never work again, you sad bitch.’
‘You loathsome thug.’ Caution had deserted Janna once more. ‘Get out of here, you revolting bully.’
‘Go on, miss, ’it ’im,’ yelled Pearl.
‘My mum’s a governor.’ Monster’s evil, sallow, pasty face was disintegrating like goat’s cheese in liquid as he gathered saliva in his mouth.
‘I don’t care. Out, out!’
‘Well done, miss,’ cheered the children as Monster, already on his mobile to his mother, pummelled his way out of the classroom.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ asked Kylie Rose. ‘Shall I get you a cup of tea?’
In the doorway, Wally was shaking his head again. ‘When will you learn, Janna?’
A hovering Jason ‘Goldilocks’ Fenton was also highly amused.
‘Wherever you go, there’s a rumpus. So exciting. I might not hand in my notice after all.’
Janna turned on him furiously too. ‘Out,’ she yelled.
She was picking up toy soldiers and sorting out a mortified Lance – ‘I wanted to defend you, but I couldn’t somehow. Not sure I’m cut out to be a teacher’ – when there was a further rumpus in the corridor.
‘Where’s Miss Fucking Curtis?’ bellowed a voice and Monster Norman’s mother, predictably nicknamed ‘Stormin’’, square, massive and enraged, with a whiskery jaw thrust out, came barging in.
‘Why are you always picking on my Martin?’
She raised her fist. Janna got out her mobile.
‘If we can’t discuss this, Mrs Norman, I’m calling the police. Your Martin was sadistically bullying another pupil.’
Only Wally seizing Mrs Norman’s arm stopped her punching Janna in the face.
To Janna’s horror, the following day, two governors (Russell Lambert and Cara Sharpe), Crispin Thomas from S and C and Mike Pitts (as deputy head), overturned Monster’s exclusion, mostly on Cara’s testimony.
‘Martin’s a sweet, caring boy,’ she cooed, ‘I’ve never had any trouble with him.’
‘Nor have I,’ agreed Mike, who was wearing a purple shirt to match his nose as he helped himself to another extra strong mint.
‘He abused Aysha in the most revolting and racist way,’ raged Janna. ‘He terrorizes half his classmates. We’ll never get a happy school with kids like him around.’
‘Don’t forget you incur a hefty five-thousand-pound fine every time you permanently exclude a pupil,’ snuffled fat Crispin, accepting a mint. ‘It’s not as though you’re oversubscribed or rolling in money. You really must be more restrained in your attitude. I’m getting complaints from all over and you’ve only been here three days. Calling Martin a “loathsome thug” is hardly the way to address challenging behaviour.’
Monster was suspended for three days.
The children were devastated when they heard of Phil Pierce’s defection. Their favourite teacher had become just another rat leaving a sinking ship.
9
On Saturday morning, Janna sneaked into Larks to tackle her towering in-tray unobserved by Rowan Merton. Following Stew’s maxim that if anything’s important, people will write a second time, she chucked ninety-five per cent of her ‘bin-tray’ into six black dustbin bags. Perhaps Mike Pitts had a ‘gin-tray’ – he’d locked his office, so she couldn’t check his watering can.
Yesterday afternoon, Miss Cambola had flung open the staffroom door and, rattling the teeth of the Dinosaurs and nearly bringing down the whole crumbling building, sang at the top of her voice: ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’
She had also written on the back of a postcard of Caruso: ‘Congratulations! You have survived a whole week and done well, Regards, Maria Cambola’, reducing Janna to tears of gratitude.
Having fired off thirty emails, mostly thanking people who’d sent her good-luck cards, Janna made the decision to hold a prospective-parents’ evening at the end of the month. This would give her the clout and everyone the incentive to smarten up the school, painting as many classrooms as possible and papering walls and corridors with some decent kids’ work, even if she had to write and draw it herself. Full of excitement, she first wrote copy for an ad in the Larkminster Gazette, inviting prospective parents to the event, then secondly, a glowing report of Larks’s progress and plans for the future. These she delivered to the Gazette on the way home.
Earlier in the week, she had rung Mr Blenchley, the care manager of Oaktree Court, Paris’s children’s home, who sounded bullying and humourless and who had a thick clogged voice like leftover lumpy porridge not going down the plughole.
Little Kata from Kosovo was adjusting to the regime, he said, and it was all right for Paris to come to tea with Graffi:
‘But as the lad pleases himself, I doubt he’ll show up.’
It was one of those mellow, hazy afternoons only September can produce. Midges jived idly with thistledown. The field at the end of the village was being ploughed up, two men in yellow tractors sailing back and forth over the Venetian-red earth and waving at Janna as she sat in the garden worrying about her first governors’ meeting on Monday. There was so much that needed tackling: permission to fire three-quarters of the staff for a start.
A flock of red admirals was guzzling sweetness from the long purple stems of a buddleia bush, but ignoring the honeysuckle next door – like pupils flocking to St Jimmy’s and Searston Abbey rather than Larks, she thought sadly. She was just wondering how to galvanize the staff at Monday’s morning briefing when the doorbell rang.
To her delight and amazement, it was Graffi, bringing both Paris and Feral. As t
hey swarmed in, laughing and larky as the players in Hamlet, Janna suspected they had been enjoying a spliff or two on the way.
‘How grand to see you. No Kylie and Pearl?’
‘Kylie’s minding baby Cameron,’ said Graffi, ‘giving her mum a day off. Pearl’s got a hairdressing job. Don’t think she’d have got here on those heels, anyway.’
‘Did you walk all the way?’ asked Janna, and then thought: How stupid, how else could they have afforded to come?
Taking Graffi by the arm, she led them down the hall into the kitchen, newly painted buttercup yellow and brightened by good-luck cards and framed children’s drawings.
‘Are you starving? I was planning to give you “high tea”, as we call it in Yorkshire, a bit later,’ she asked, getting out dark green mugs and a big bottle of Coke.
Opening a jumbo bag of crisps with her teeth, then bending down to pull out a blue bowl into which to decant them, she found all three boys staring at her. Barefoot, wearing tight jeans and a clinging blue-striped matelot jersey, with her wild russet curls escaping from a tartan toggle, she didn’t look remotely like a headmistress.
‘I don’t bother to dress up much at weekends,’ she stammered.
‘Nice Aga.’ Graffi patted its dark blue flanks. ‘My mum’s ambition’s to have one.’
‘It was already there when I moved in,’ said Janna hastily.
She loved the Aga, but felt, like the burglar alarm, it was rather too middle-class.
‘Why don’t you explore?’
As she put knives, forks and willow-patterned plates on a tray, the boys careered round the house, opening doors and cupboards, picking up and examining ornaments.
‘It’s fucking tiny,’ said Paris, who was accustomed to Oaktree Court, a great house once belonging to the very rich, now ironically inhabited by children who had nothing.
‘This bed’s fucking large,’ agreed Graffi and Feral, who were used to sharing with several brothers and sisters and sometimes a drunken father or fleeing mother, when they discovered Janna’s attic bedroom.
Hung with blue gingham curtains, the four-poster only left room for triangular shelves slotted into one corner, a television, fitted cupboards and a dressing table which Janna had to perch on the bottom of the bed to use.
‘Fink there’s a bloke in her life?’ asked Feral.
‘Hope not,’ said Graffi, breathing in scent bottles.
‘Wouldn’t mind giving her one,’ said Feral.
‘Oh, shut up, you’re incorrigible,’ snapped Paris, who was examining the books, mostly classics, on either side of the bed.
‘Whatever that means. This bed’s fucking comfortable,’ said a bouncing Feral. Then, glancing sideways at Stew’s photograph, which, after Monday’s flowers, was on show again: ‘That must be her father.’
Joyous as otters, they bounded downstairs (emptying the crisp bowl en route) out into the garden, fascinated by reddening apples, French beans hanging from wigwams, potatoes and carrots actually growing in the ground.
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘It’s a marrer,’ said Graffi. ‘My nan used to stuff them.’
Holding it against his groin, Feral indulged in a few pelvic thrusts. ‘Looks as though it orta do the stuffing.’
While Paris stopped to stroke Lily’s cat the General, who was tightroping along the fence, Graffi and Feral began kicking a football round the lawn. Watching their antics from the kitchen, Janna thought how perfectly they complemented each other. Paris, ghostly pale, seemed lit by moonlight, Feral by the sun. Feral was so arrogant, like George Eliot’s cock, who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. It wasn’t just the lift of his jaw, or the swing of his hips, or the lean elongated body that made a red T-shirt, cheap fake leather jacket and black jeans look a million dollars. He’d make a fortune as a model. The long brown eyes curling up at the corner, with thick lashes creating a natural eyeliner, were haughty too; even the huge white smile said, ‘I’m superior.’
But, despite this hauteur, like a feral cat he constantly glanced round checking for danger. Made edgy by the alien territory of the countryside, he shot inside when a dozy brown and white cow put her nose over the fence, and ran upstairs to watch football.
Physically, Graffi was a mixture of the two and, with his stocky build, olive skin and wicked dark eyes, needed only a black beret on his unruly dark curls, a smock and an easel to be having déjeuner sur l’herbe with naked beauties.
Janna took him into the low-beamed living room, which was painted cream with a pale coral sofa and chairs. Set into one wall was a stone fireplace filled with apple logs. The second wall was mostly a west-facing window overlooking fields and woods. Against the third was an upright piano and floor-to-ceiling shelves for Janna’s books, music and CDs. The empty fourth awaited Graffi’s genius.
Blown away that Janna trusted him, Graffi borrowed paper and pencil and started sketching. How would she like a view of the cathedral, houses in the Close, softened by lots of trees, a few cows paddling in the river to ‘scare Feral away’, people walking their dogs on the towpath?
‘That sounds champion, as long as you don’t graffiti the buildings.’
‘Make it look more lived in. Nice place this. My da’s a builder, does a lot of work for Randal Stancombe. If you want anything done, he could hide it.’ Then, going back to the wall: ‘It’ll take a few Saturdays.’
‘That’s fine. You could come Sundays as well.’
‘Nah, I’m busy Sundays. Going to look at them cows.’ And he wandered off to kick a ball on the lawn with Feral.
Chests of books were lying round, so Paris took them out and put them on to the shelves, his face growing paler as he kept stopping to read. Janna helped him, pointing out favourites: Rebecca, Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights, giving him spare copies of Byron, Le Grand Meaulnes and The Catcher in the Rye.
Paris found the cottage blissfully quiet after Oaktree Court, where someone was always sobbing, screaming and fighting, and wardens or social workers were always asking questions or needling him: ‘Get your long nose out of that book. Come on, open up, open up.’
‘How long have you loved reading?’ asked Janna.
‘Since I was about nine. Head teacher of my school in Nottingham put me in charge of the library, so I could borrow all the books I wanted. I saved up to buy a torch and read under the bedclothes all night. That torch lit up my life.’
Children in care are usually attention-seekers, or, like Paris, internalize everything. Looking at the cool, deadpan face, its only colour the eyes bloodshot from reading, few people realized the raging emotional torrents beneath the layers of ice.
Paris had been two when his mother dumped him on the door of a children’s home in Alvaston, outside Derby. He had been clinging on to a glass ball containing the Eiffel Tower in a snow storm – still his most treasured possession. On his royal-blue knitted jumper was pinned a note: ‘Please look after my son. His name is Paris.’
No one had ever found his mother. Early adoption was delayed, hoping she’d come forward. Afterwards, there was no one to sign the papers.
Every so often, when the moon was full, longing for his mother overwhelmed him, and he went searching for her on trains round the country. When he was twelve, he had suffered the humiliation of putting his photograph in the local paper advertising for a family. The photograph, taken in the fluorescent light of the children’s home, made him look like a death’s head. Paris for once had dropped his guard and written the accompanying copy, which Nadine his social worker had rejigged: ‘Paris is a healthy twelve-year-old, who has been in care for a number of years. He has a few behaviour problems and needs firm handling,’ which, translated, meant trouble with a capital ‘T’.
Paris, affecting a total lack of interest, had hung around waiting for the post, expecting Cameron Diaz or Posh and Becks to roll up in a big car and whisk him off to love and luxury. But there had been no takers.
Feral and Graffi had carried him during th
is humiliation. He, in turn, had carried Feral when his older brother Joey dissed the head of a rival gang, who took him outside and shot him dead. Feral’s mother, Nancy, had emerged briefly from a drug-induced stupor to achieve fleeting fame bewailing the loss on television. But as it was only black killing black, the public and police soon forgot and moved on to another tragedy. Nancy turned back to her drugs.
Feral was dyslexic and, ashamed he wrote and read so poorly, truanted persistently. Paris, who was very clever, translated for him and explained questions.
‘He’s my one-to-one teaching assistant,’ boasted Feral.
Out of eighteen homes and eleven schools, Paris’s three years at Larks and Oaktree Court had been his longest placement. Terrified of being dragged away to a new care home in another part of the country, he tried not to complain or rock the boat.
‘I’ve got two copies of The Moonstone, so here’s one for you,’ said Janna, ‘and here’s Lily coming up the path.’
Lily was in high fettle. She had just won a hundred pounds on the three o’clock and been making elderflower wine. Feral and Graffi came scuttling down the stairs for new diversion.
‘Boys, this is my friend Lily Hamilton who lives next door, and Lily, these are my friends, Graffi, who’s painting me a mural, Paris, who’s sorting out my bookshelves, and Feral, who’s an ace footballer.’
‘Really?’ said Lily. ‘My nephew Dicky is besotted with Man U; I confess a fondness for Arsenal.’
‘That’s cool, man,’ said Feral approvingly.
‘I’m about to watch them on Sky,’ said Lily. ‘Would you like to come and have a look and test this summer’s elderflower wine?’
Needing no more encouragement, Feral and Graffi bounded after her.
10
Paris preferred to stay with the books and Janna. With her sweet face and rippling red hair, she was like those beautiful women in pre-Raphaelite paintings. He tried not to stare. As she handed her books and their hands touched occasionally, she told him about her parents’ evening.