“Your dog bit my bloody hand,” I said to Mrs Douglas.
He died in front of us with no one moving, and then Precious stood on his chest and howled. After a few seconds there was another howl from Number 20. And then the sound was taken up by all the dogs of our neighbourhood – barking and howling into the empty night sky.
~
The family who have moved into the old Anderson place seem much more acceptable – he was in finance and we know a few of the same people. They have already started doing the place up. Mind you, they should be able to afford to do so; McFarlane says they got the place for a song because no one round here wanted it. And his wife has got to know my wife, I think. It’s hard to say, because Deborah is staying with McFarlane, until the papers come through and we can sell the house.
I wonder how long it’s been going on.
I could afford to buy her out and stay here, and indeed have been angrily telling people that I will. That this is my neighbourhood as much as hers. And people at the club, or in the street, or at the Rotary fete, say yes of course you must. And then they change the subject.
I don’t know why Deborah reacted like she did – who made her judge of everyone all of a sudden? And after all McFarlane and the others were there too. Why do they still get slaps on the back at the clubhouse? Why do they still get invites to dinner, and Angie’s inedible cakes, and compliments on their lawns?
Precious had to be put down of course. Technically there was no evidence that she contributed to his death (which is still officially “unexplained”) but my testimony that she bit me did for her. So I can understand why Mrs Douglas dislikes me so, but not everyone else.
I can’t say I’m upset about Precious. As I say, I’ve never really been a dog person.
And maybe the feeling is mutual, for when I go out for a walk in the evenings (it helps me to think through my feelings about the whole Deborah thing, if I am walking) I swear that they have all started barking at me.
Sick Leave
Emma entered the classroom and the children’s conversation died instantly – they knew they were supposed to wait quietly for their teachers and they sat still and acted like they had. Emma had never before been so aware of this routine deception at the start of each day. She guessed it was because she had been off sick; she’d become unfamiliar with how things were in her absence. In a few days it would all seem normal again. She was aware of the children watching her as she put down her bag, smoothed her skirt, and sat at her desk at the front of the class. She started to greet them but sneezed instead; she turned away from the children to blow her nose and heard one of them say something that caused an outbreak of suppressed giggles.
“Hello class,” she said eventually. “It’s nice to see you all again after such a long time away.”
“Hello, Miss Anderson,” the seven year olds chorused raggedly. They all seemed different somehow: a haircut here, a lost tooth there, different clothes and different groups of friends. Emma couldn’t help thinking that they’d all grown up in some significant yet subtle way.
“Are you better now, Miss?” Jo Webster asked out of the blue.
“Yes I’m fine, thank you for asking,” Emma said. It was something of a lie, for her throat and sinuses still hurt, and her head still felt tired and flushed out. But she was over the worst of it, she was on the mend. Maybe she’d come back to work slightly too early but this was her first ever class. Emma was only twenty-three, and having got a full-time teaching job with implausible speed after qualifying she was both excited about it and terrified of screwing the whole thing up. Late at night she was kept awake by imagined mistakes and how their consequences could affect entire lives.
“What did you have, Miss?” Michael Potts said. “What disease?” They had grown in confidence, hadn’t they? Michael Potts had used to be as quiet as a mouse in class. Emma shook her head, trying to shake off some of the tired fuzziness before answering.
“Just a touch of flu,” she said. That was partly untrue as well, because no one had been quite sure what she’d caught. Some kind of super-flu probably, one of those antibiotic resistant strains that would be quite worrying if she allowed herself to think of them. Whatever it had been it had certainly knocked her off her feet, and she hadn’t quite recovered yet. But lying in a sick bed remembering the past was not how Emma wanted to spend her time.
Michael didn’t acknowledge Emma’s reply but just stared at her. Leah, sitting next to him (when had those two become friends?) whispered something in his ear that made him smile. He didn’t giggle and clamp a hand over his mouth, he didn’t look at Leah and grin. He just sat there, smiling faintly, his bright eyes watching Emma.
She asked the children what they’d learnt from the supply teacher whilst she’d been off sick; their response was muted and unenthusiastic. Eventually Emma dragged it from them: the spellings they’d learnt, the sums they’d done, the Mother’s Day cards they had made. The children seemed sullen and wary, glancing at each other before answering – it was a far cry from the lively and friendly class she’d used to teach, and Emma couldn’t help but feel miserable. Her head throbbed painfully and she found it hard to smile.
“Anything else?” she said. “You must have learnt something else?”
Kevin Rhodes said something under his breath; somewhat more harshly than normal Emma asked him to repeat it.
“Black Death,” the boy said reluctantly.
“The plague,” another child said, with odd emphasis. The children looked at Emma with solemn starring eyes.
“O... oh?” Emma said, unsure what to make of this answer. Was the Black Death really on the curriculum for seven year olds? She would have to check; she didn’t like to think that the supply teacher might have been teaching her class something inappropriate. “So what did you learn about it?” she asked, expecting answers about rats, fleas, and the Middle Ages.
The children glanced at each other. A few whispered something to their neighbours but not in any way that suggested a joke. Emma felt a wave of dizziness and put her hand against her desk to steady herself. She closed her eyes for a second, and as she did so Carl Burke started speaking:
“The bubonic plague is caused by a bacteria with a inoc... inoculation period of two to ten days. After that the vic... victim suffers fevers, swollen glands particularly in the groin, pro... prostration and delirium. There’s a ninety percent chance of death.”
Emma opened her eyes and stared at the boy. He’d said the words blankly, as if learnt by rote. All the children were watching her and she knew she should say something, but she wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Had the supply teacher really taught her children such graphic details, or had Carl simply looked it up on the internet for some reason?
Before she could speak the classroom door opened and the head teacher, Mr Hall, entered. His smile looked painted onto his bald-egg face. Emma knew he didn’t like her, knew he felt he and his school had been lumbered with someone too young to teach. She didn’t feel she had done anything to deserve his dislike, but he always seemed to try and find fault with her.
“Ah, Miss Anderson,” he said (he called all the other women teachers ‘Ms.’). “Welcome back. I hope you’re feeling better after your absence. Ah, flu wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Emma said, looking away from Carl Burke. She was aware how petty and trivial ‘flu’ sounded when Mr Hall said it, as if she was a child who he’d caught skiving off., She was caught by surprise by another loud sneeze.
There was the low sound of the children starting to whisper again, and before Emma could react Mr Hall was yelling.
“Quiet! Miss Anderson and I are trying to talk!”
She felt angry, as she always did when someone else gave orders to her class. Mr Hall was always doing this, as if he thought she couldn’t cope. The children went dumb instantly, and Mr Hall’s next words seemed too loud in the new silence.
“Well, I was just checking you were, ah, better,” he said to her. “You ar
e sure you’re well enough again now?”
“Fine,” said Emma tightly, furious that he was daring question her in front of her class. For a moment she thought she was going to sneeze again, but she wrinkled her nose and fought it off.
“Ah,” Mr Hall said; then, as if this were some kind of farewell, he left.
Emma turned back to her class; their faces blurred and wavered in her tired vision. She would need to have some more coffee during the break, despite wanting to cut down. She wondered whether to speak to Carl again, to find out where he’d learnt such gruesome facts (“particularly in the groin” her mind whispered) – not in class surely? But she decided to let the matter drop. Emma was thankful when the bell rang for the morning break, and her children ran out enthusiastically to the playground. “Walk!” she shouted, as she always did, and they ignored her, as they always did. This return to something like normal behaviour made her feel slightly better as she walked toward the staff room. Still, something else was nagging at her about what Carl Burke has said, and it took her awhile to work out what it was: the boy had spoken in the present tense.
~
Emma’s heart sank as she entered the staff room and saw the rota – they had put her on playground duty. Outside it was a bleak, characterless day, not quite spring yet, but not really winter anymore either. It was just a cold, misty March day, the ground fog more substantial than the things it cloaked. Emma stood wrapped up in her coat and scarf, clutching a mug of coffee in both hands, its steam escaping into the quiet air. She thought of the other teachers in the warmth inside; they must have put her on the rota for today as soon as they’d known she was back, in revenge for having to cover for her whilst she’d been off sick.
The children screamed and scattered across a stretch of grey tarmac that was supposedly a playground. In one corner a steel spider’s leg climbing frame was roped off, because of rust. The children compensated by playing tig, or British Bulldog, or a game of their own devising simply called ‘War’.
Emma didn’t notice at first, but the children from her class weren’t running around or dying theatrical, bullet-ridden deaths. Instead they had ducked under the rope, and were stood in a clump under the corpse of the climbing frame at the far end of the playground. From what she could see all of her class were there, and no one else. Emma thought it odd – they all had friends in other classes, they all had antagonists in their own – so why were they suddenly such an exclusive group? They didn’t even appear to be playing, they just seemed to be discussing or deciding something, very serious and adult-like in their oversized sweaters and “you’ll grow into it” coats. Emma wanted to go and see what they were up to, but she had to deal with a boy from another class first, so far the only casualty of ‘War’. The boy had grazed his knee when an enemy grenade had landed at his feet, and his loud snivelling hurt Emma’s head. Using a tissue she wiped a slug-track of snot from his upper lip, and trembled in distaste.
When she’d dealt with the boy she was relieved to see her class were actually playing now. It seemed to soothe her slightly to see them, hand in hand in the mist, moving round in a circle, singing something childish and possibly rude. She waited for the circle to convulse with giggles as someone tripped or the naughty word was reached...
But nothing of the sort happened. Emma walked towards her class, and noticed how slowly and solemnly the children were playing. The look on their faces suggested they didn’t want to be doing what they were doing, but knew they had to, liked adults performing a distasteful but essential task. As Emma got closer she could hear what they were singing; she remembered singing similar words herself:
“Ring around the rosie,
“A pocketful of posies,
“Ashes, ashes,
“We all fall down.”
The words were being sung with no sense of pleasure, much like the children sang the dirge-like hymns Mr Hall selected for assembly. But this singing also seemed tense, fearful even, and Emma felt herself grew tense again too. The children didn’t even fall down when they reached the final words, which from a kid’s perspective was surely the best part?
When Emma was a few metres away from the circle it stopped turning, it stopped singing. The children all turned to stare at her, their breath obscuring their faces every other second. Emma couldn’t think of what to say, and then she sneezed, repeatedly again and again. The children all took a step backwards. Then they glanced at each other, and walked off wordlessly, splitting off in different directions. It was impossible for Emma to keep them all in view. The bell rang, muffled by the fog. She stood coughing and sniffing for a few seconds, wanting to call out to her class. But she couldn’t speak and she watched their forms fade and become indistinguishable in the mist.
~
The rest of the day was without real occurrence. The class continued to seem wary and unresponsive, but she wasn’t sure how much this was true and how much was just caused by her aching, fuzzy head.
The song the children had been singing seemed to stick with her and follow her home. She tried to ignore it when she got back to her flat, but the song seemed to hum in her head every time she coughed or sneezed or shivered uncontrollably. Unlike other memories, she couldn’t banish this from her mind. She remembered the version she’d sung at school:
“Ring a ring a rosie,
“A pocketful of posies,
“Atishoo! Atishoo!
“We all fall down.”
It seemed such a long time ago to her, but also still very clear, a perfect memory she hadn’t examined in years. Emma was very good at locking things up inside of herself and pretending they’d never happened. But hearing the song again had made her feel very young, as if the years in-between had all just been a game, a dressing up game... She shook her head to rid herself of this ridiculous feeling, and moaned softly as the pain flared up again. The tablets she’d taken didn’t seem to have had any noticeable effect.
Only twelve years, she thought, but so much has happened. Puberty, boys, men – who’d quickly become boys again. Big school, college, university, and then a job, a new city... And yet she could still remember, if she chose to, turning with the turning circle and singing the words that the circle sang...
She realised, without wanting to, that she must have been singing that song around the time her Aunt Jess had come to stay with them. After the doctor had said it was just a matter of time. Aunt Jess had had nowhere else to go, so she had come to stay with them, and Emma has been forced to kiss her goodnight; she’d kissed her on the forehead and each night it was as if the skin of it had pulled even tighter across her aunt’s skull. Some nights, waking semi-conscious into the darkness of her bedroom, Emma had been convinced that a shrivelled version of Aunt Jess was lurking in the blackness, ready to reach out with her reed-thin arms to clasp Emma tight to her breast. She had realised on those nights not that her aunt was going to die, but that she was. And realising this she had shoved it down out of her mind’s eye and successfully ignored it ever since – she wasn’t going to die...
She couldn’t remember her aunt’s death, just her dying.
Emma went and poured herself a glass of wine, trying not to think back to that time. She thought instead of her children singing that song, and what she could teach them about it: the first line referred to the first visible signs of the plague, the blotchy red and black sores of the afflicted. The second was about the flowering herbs people had hoped would ward off the disease. Which didn’t work of course, for then came the sneezing. And then they all fell down...
She sneezed herself, loud in the silent flat. Her nose felt raw as she blew it, and she couldn’t stop shivering, as if she had caught a chill outside. She sat down and tried to distract herself with television, but all the programmes seemed too bright and loud.
Before heading to bed she took twice the recommended dose of some flu remedy. Alongside the wine this didn’t so much help her sleep as knock her out – she felt just as ill the next day. But she was gla
d she had slept, and so quickly, for just before slipping away her mind had been full of the most sinister combination of fears, both grown up and childish.
~
Emma anxiously ran her hands up and down her throat – in the mirror it looked like someone small was strangling her. The swelling in her neck had definitely abated. But she still remembered Carl Burke’s words (“the victim suffers fevers, swollen lymph glands...”), matter of fact and undramatic, as though describing his own reality. Emma shivered; her flat seemed cold despite the central heating.
When she left for work the world outside seemed as under the weather as she did, the air infected by murky fog, the day-old puddles rippled by an apathetic half-wind. Because she was so tired the mist seemed to follow Emma into the school, making everything seem fuzzy and ill-defined. In the staff room she heaped masses of coffee and sugar into a mug; the other teachers stared at her but didn’t comment, at least until Emma left the room. She resisted the urge to crouch and listen at the keyhole; she told herself she didn’t care what they thought of her. Unlike her class, suddenly so sullen and suspicious, the other teachers had always seemed to resent her somewhat. At least some things hadn’t changed. But part of Emma still wanted to be included in their warmth and forty-something chatter.
When she entered the classroom the children were all sitting in their proper places, their hands crossed in their laps; she couldn’t help but feel suspicious. Despite the rules no class ever waited completely still and silent. She knew she was being ridiculous and paranoid, yet the feeling remained. She greeted them, turned her back to wipe yesterday’s lesson from the board – someone whispered something but she couldn’t catch the words.
All morning she couldn’t shake the feeling that the children were too well behaved, and the smile on her face felt forced and sickly. Every time she had her back to them she was sure she heard voices whispering and giggling, but when she turned to see the children were just starring right back at her.
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