by Ruth Thomas
‘I just noticed it, when I was looking over your CV. Oh, I thought: Miss McKenzie lives on my street! I’m just down the hill from you. You’re the house with all those rose bushes, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My mum . . . likes roses. Especially the scented ones.’
‘Indeed. So, I’ll be keeping an eye on you after school as well!’
‘Ha ha,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
I felt slightly sick. I lifted my shoulder bag from where it had been dangling on the back of my chair and walked across the room to Mrs Crieff’s big wooden door. I opened it and headed straight downstairs, down three flights, and progressed along a pale-grey corridor and into a room in the basement, marked Female Staff Toilets. Some woman I didn’t know, a short, stout woman who was, I supposed, a colleague, was standing there at the hand-dryers.
‘Wet day,’ she sighed, shaking water from her fingers.
‘Not dry.’
And I could see my new life at St Luke’s acquiring a sense of eternity, a great expanse of time billowing and spiralling like a sea haar into the future. I could see my life sliding along in a succession of terms and holidays, of work-time and lunch-time and home-time and observations about the weather. Already I envied my predecessor Susan Ford, and her decision to leave. But I couldn’t do that; I couldn’t just leave, because I’d already left a school once – and I knew that on the other side of leaving there was sometimes just a big gaping hole.
‘Ah, well,’ said the woman, ‘upwards and onwards. Or Golden Time won’t happen at all.’
And she walked out.
There was a smell of disinfectant in the toilets, a medicinal sort of smell that reassured and upset me at the same time. I went and stood for a while by the big white Twyford sink and the paper-towel dispensers and the sign that said Now Wash Your Hands. It was cold, the window wide open in the middle of November.
*
The funny thing is, I couldn’t remember much, that year, about my own days at primary school. I couldn’t recall the routines or the rooms, or even the teachers at Rose Hill Primary. Only a few recollections would surface sometimes, from the maelstrom of chalk-clouded blackboards and school lunches and Chinese burns and cheery songs played on the guitar. I did have two quite vivid memories, though: the first was of falling over once in the playground and watching, amazed, as two circles of blood bloomed like flowers through the knees of my red tights; and the second was a vision of a wooden painting easel. That easel, in particular, lingered in my mind. Someone had set it up for me one day and placed a row of plastic paint pots in the tray beneath it. And I remember that I’d just stood and looked at it. I must have been five; and I’d just looked and looked at it. The paints had been red, yellow and blue, and there’d been a thick paintbrush sticking through the lid of each pot. I recalled a kind of smock, too – blue, with rolled-up, elasticated sleeves – and somebody taller than me placing a paintbrush into my hand.
‘What are you going to paint, Luisa?’ a voice had asked me from some high, cloudy place.
‘I’m going to paint a rabbit,’ I’d replied.
I was very excited about that, I remembered: about the smock and the paintbrush, and the idea of a rabbit. About painting a rabbit into existence. The voice, I supposed, must have belonged to my very first teacher, a woman named Miss Gazall. Although Miss Gazall was actually a lot woollier in my memory than the easel and the paints. All I remembered about her was that she’d worn red a lot, and her hair had been as straight and black as an Egyptian pharaoh’s. And at the end of the year she’d pinned a metal badge on my cardigan that said ‘Well Done’.
I had stretched out my cardigan and tucked down my chin to peer at it.
It had seemed like a kind thing to say.
2
It was much later that school year – a Sunday afternoon, late June, when I was shopping at Safeways with my mother – that I bumped into someone I’d once known at school. A girl named Stella Muir. Stella had once been a friend of mine: we’d both attended St Catherine’s of Siena High, state school on a slope on the south side of town; and for a time we’d been oddly close. For a few months we’d been inseparable. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time by then, though, the day we bumped into each other in Safeways. Not for almost a year.
‘Lulu!’ I heard someone say, and I turned from where I was standing (pretty vacantly, it has to be said, beside the cheese counter), and there she was.
‘Hi!’ Stella continued, in the bright, strangely accusatory way she had, ‘How are you? What have you done to your hair?’
Which was a fair enough question, as my hair was quite a different colour from when Stella had last seen me. Generally it was mouse-brown, but I’d just dyed it. I’d dyed it the day before, in fact. Marron foncé, the dye was called: a lustrous auburn shade that will bring out the beauty of your natural colour.
‘Hi, Stella,’ I said. There were a lot of reasons why I was not pleased to bump into Stella.
‘So: Wow! I mean: God! Did you get it done professionally?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your hair.’ Stella’s eyes were greener than I remembered, and her jaw more angular. ‘Are you going for a kind of . . . punk look?’
‘Oh,’ I said, putting my hand up to my hair. It felt coarse, like something lacquered. It did not have the subtle quality I had been hoping for: it was really a lot more pink than that. I could feel myself blushing, chameleon-like, to match it.
‘Well, I just thought it was time for a change,’ I said. ‘It’s OK having . . . colourful hair if you work in a primary school. People don’t mind you looking . . . bright.’
Stella gazed at me. Her own hair was as naturally blonde as it always had been, I couldn’t help noticing, but now it seemed even smoother and more perfectly styled. Clipped prettily against the side of her forehead was a silvery hair slide; a hard, glittering rectangle of diamanté.
‘I thought you were working in a shop,’ she said.
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘I work in a school now.’
‘A school? How funny.’
‘Hmm,’ I replied, regretting the new territory I’d just dragged us both into.
‘So, what are you doing there? In the school?’
‘Being a classroom assistant,’ I replied, in a strangely breezy voice.
Stella didn’t say anything for a moment.
‘Well, that’s unexpected,’ she said finally.
‘Yes.’
‘Which school?’
‘St Luke’s.’
‘Really?’ Stella replied, in a remote sort of way. She seemed not to have an opinion about St Luke’s; maybe she hadn’t even heard of it. ‘So what’s it like there, then?’
I glanced across at my mother, who was standing a few feet away from us, deliberating over the yogurt display. My mother, over the past year, had shown a lot of forbearance about the peculiar, altered course of my life. A lot of tolerance and kindness. She was a kinder, better, wiser person than I would ever be; which suddenly irritated me more than I could articulate. She was wearing her Scholl sandals that day because it was June and hot outside, and her blue flowery blouse. Oh, Mum. And I wanted to run across and hug her, and at the same time criticise her for her fashion sense.
‘Well,’ I said to Stella in a low voice, feeling, somehow, the need to whisper, ‘it’s OK. It’s not too bad.’
‘Cool. So things have worked out OK then? After . . .’
‘Yeah. St Luke’s is a great place to work,’ I interrupted, a curious tightness in my throat. ‘As it turns out. I mean, if you’re a classroom assistant you get to spend most of the time playing with plasticine anyway, and chucking glitter around . . .’
I trailed off. This statement was not even true. I spend hardly any time, I thought, playing with plasticine or glitter. I spent a lot more time at St Luke’s filling in Mrs Crieff’s record sheets and answering strange questions about God and death and the colour of the sky. That was what little children asked you
, I’d discovered. ‘Miss McKenzie, when people die’, one little boy had said recently, ‘do they go to heaven in their minds?’ ‘In their minds?’ I’d replied, intrigued. Do they go to heaven in their minds? And I hadn’t been sure how to answer.
‘So,’ Stella said. She looked oddly irked: she had the sort of expression someone has when they’re querying the price on a till receipt. ‘Well, that’s cool, about your job: that you still get a chance to do arty stuff. Because you’ve always been arty, haven’t you?’ She glanced at my pink hair again. ‘You were always doing all those . . . wacky pictures. In Art.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I was’; and at the mention of Art – that lost thing in my life – I felt something strange happening in the space behind my ribcage. A sensation of vertigo. A kind of closing in. It was the same feeling I got if I stood at the edge of a tall building or a cliff, or sat in the swinging carriage of a Ferris wheel at the fairground. And I recalled a paragraph in a school textbook that I’d queried once during a history lesson: ‘Palaeolithic man was an accomplished artist’, it had begun, ‘who, for leisure and enjoyment, would paint pictures on the walls of his cave . . .’ ‘But excuse me’, I’d said, putting up my hand, ‘what about Palaeolithic woman?’ Because I’d had more confidence in those days; and because maybe it was Palaeolithic woman who’d painted pictures on the walls of the cave! Maybe it was the women who’d been the painters, while the men had just gone out and dug traps for animals to fall into! Had nobody thought of that?!
‘Well,’ I said now to Stella, ‘I suppose Art was not to be.’
And we both stopped talking and looked down at Stella’s wire basket, as if it might hold something more useful for us to talk about. But it just contained a circle of Coeur de Lion Camembert, some bottles of beer and a packet of John West prawns.
‘It’s funny,’ Stella said. ‘I never would have pictured you working in a school, Lulu. You’re the last person I’d have thought would end up teaching.’
‘Yes,’ I conceded. It was quite a ridiculous state of affairs. It would once have seemed about as likely to me as parachuting out of a plane.
‘I –’ I began.
‘Oh, there’s your mum!’ Stella interjected, looking over my shoulder. ‘Oh, that’s so sweet, Luisa, going on a shopping trip with your mum! I always liked your mum,’ she added rather wistfully. She seemed to have placed me into some kind of category now. Finished, perhaps it was called. Or History. And I realised how slight our friendship had been; how it had never really been a friendship at all. How it had probably been something else entirely.
‘I usually help with the shopping on Sunday,’ I heard myself saying. ‘My parents and I halve the bill,’ I added – a small, private fact I immediately regretted revealing. ‘Seeing as I’m still hanging around at home rent-free,’ I continued (shut up! shut up!), ‘it’s, you know, the least I . . .’
‘So the salary’s not bad then, at work?’ said Stella. She’d always had that ability: to cut to the chase.
‘Not bad, no. It could be worse. It’s an income. How about you anyway, Stella? How are things going at vet school?’
Because Stella’s career, unlike mine, had gone according to plan after we’d left school. It had gone neatly in the right direction. While I’d spent the past year or so of my life selling wind-chimes or sitting at low tables grappling with glue sticks, Stella had been studying veterinary science at university. It was what she’d always wanted to do. It was a profession she had been working towards since the age of twelve.
‘Yeah, it’s great,’ Stella said, smiling at me – or rather, not at me, but at some unseen, unknown thing that was better. ‘It’s fab,’ she said. ‘It’s brill.’
‘Great, that’s . . .’
‘I’m just here buying stuff for dinner tonight, actually,’ she added, ‘for my body buddies.’
I looked at her. ‘Your what?’
‘My body buddies. My dissecting team. That’s what we call each other.’
Stella’s voice had adopted the slightly combative tone I remembered from school.
‘There are six of us,’ she continued, tucking a strand of hair around her left ear, ‘and we’re all really close. Even the lecturers. When we first got together last year we all really hit it off, so we decided we’d make dinner for each other.’
‘I see,’ I said, even though I didn’t, at all. I didn’t understand how liking people meant you had to cook dinner for them.
‘One of us cooks for the others,’ Stella said, ‘every Sunday. Once every six weeks. That’s the way it works. It’s this kind of rota. It’s brilliant.’
‘Even the lecturers?’ I asked. It sounded complicated, having buddies; having friends in rotas. ‘Do the lecturers cook dinner, too?’
‘. . . and it’s my turn tonight,’ Stella said, ignoring this. And then she stopped talking.
‘Well,’ I ploughed on, ‘that makes sense, working in a team like that. And being friends. That sounds very . . .’ – I couldn’t think of the right word – ‘. . . organised.’
‘Yeah, it’s great,’ Stella confirmed. ‘I mean, five Sundays in a row, you don’t have to make dinner. Plus: your social life’s sorted.’
She smiled at me, and I wondered how else to respond. Why would you want to eat dinner with people you’d spent all day dissecting animals with? I considered saying. And why did we ever think we were friends, Stella?
‘So did you get your hair dyed recently?’ Stella asked.
‘Yep. Yesterday. I did it myself. From a packet.’
‘Really?’
‘Hmm’
For some reason, I was suddenly very aware of the supermarket we were standing in. It seemed to have become rangier and whiter and more inane than usual. It was filled with a low kind of buzzing noise – a noise of boringly sensible human activity – and illuminated with a white, unreal glow. And the unreality of it all somehow suited the conversation Stella and I were having. It was as if we’d just encountered each other on some strange, nameless planet we’d both arrived at, and were no longer sure how to communicate with each other. On all the shelves and in all the display cabinets there were rows and rows of immaculate, attractive packages. Pristine, cellophane-wrapped packs of basmati rice and ramen noodles and polenta. Of Earl Grey tea and Lindt chocolate. And they were like Stella, those packages, I felt. They were well presented. They were going into people’s baskets and trolleys and making themselves useful. Whereas I was like the stubbornly unwrapped lumps of celeriac. I was the sticks of pink rhubarb poking garishly out from the fruit crates.
Above our heads, at the level of the sprinklers and the secret-eye cameras, a woman’s weary voice began, mantra-like, to drawl an instruction.
‘Colleague announcement: would Donald Crawford please go to the staff office,’ she sighed. ‘Would Donald Crawford please go to the staff office . . .’
‘Aren’t they funny, those announcements?’ I said. ‘I always wonder about those, do you? I always wonder if Donald Crawford’s maybe done something wrong.’
Stella regarded me.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I never wonder that, actually, Luisa. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about people like Donald Crawford.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
And now my mother, still in a kind of trance by the yogurts, looked up, noticed me standing there with my former friend, looked momentarily flustered, and smiled.
‘I’m going to say hello to your mum,’ Stella proclaimed. ‘Hi, Mrs McKenzie,’ she called out.
‘Hello, Stella!’ my mother called back, sounding delighted – maybe she is delighted, I thought – and she pushed a small tub of Ski yogurt back onto the shelf and wheeled her trolley over to us.
‘How are you, Stella?’ she asked, arriving slightly rosy-cheeked, as if at the end of some bracing walk.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Stella said, politely.
‘Long time no see.’
‘Yes.’ And she paused for a moment. We all did. Paused for thought
.
‘So I was just telling Luisa’, Stella said, ‘about this system I have with my body buddies.’
‘Oh yes?’ My mother looked a little worried.
‘Yes,’ I interrupted. ‘Stella has these people called body buddies, Mum, that she meets up with every five weeks. They have dinner together every Saturday. One of them makes dinner for the other four. Isn’t that a good idea?’
Stella shot me a look.
‘We meet every Sunday night, in fact,’ she said levelly. ‘Today’s Sunday, Luisa. And there are actually six of us. And we meet every day – we see each other every day, over our . . .’ – and she stopped. It would have been funny, I thought, if she’d said ‘over our dead bodies’, but she didn’t, quite. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘the point is, we’re all best pals. Your body buddies always are.’
And I’m not, I thought. I’m not your best pal. And I thought of two other friends I’d once had at school – of Mary Wedderburn and Linda Daniels – older, truer friends I’d abandoned without a backward glance – and felt guilty.
My mother was standing there looking at Stella, her smile polite and kindly and also a little scared. Stella was a lot taller than her now, it occurred to me. I could remember a time when she had been shorter. She’d come round on a Shrove Tuesday once, when we’d first got to know each other, and had eaten pancakes with us, and been shorter.
‘Well, it’s lovely to see you, Stella,’ my mother concluded. ‘You’re looking very well.’
‘Thank you.’
But mainly Stella just looked irked, as if she didn’t at all want to be standing in Safeways with a former schoolfriend and her homespun, Scholl-sandal-wearing mother. She was peering down into her basket again, as if some new item might magically have jumped into it since the last time she looked; or been spirited away.
‘So, Luisa was telling me all about St Luke’s,’ she said.
‘Was she?’ my mother asked, pleased. Because she was pleased about my job. It’s the sort of thing that will lead on to other things, she’d said when I’d first got it. Even though – as I’d pointed out – everything did lead on to other things. That was just what life was: a series of things leading on to other things.