by Daisy Waugh
‘Anyway,’ Fanny says brightly, ‘I was just passing, so I thought I’d come and say hi. And maybe see if I could lure you back to school Monday morning. We’re missing you.’
‘No, you ain’t,’ snarls Dane.
Fanny tilts her head, takes a peep at her watch. It’ll take five minutes to get back to the house, more if she meets someone on the way; five minutes to pack; it takes forty minutes to get to the station – if she remembers the way, which she almost certainly won’t…And if she misses the train she’ll be stuck in Fiddleford until tomorrow, at which point it’ll hardly be worth making the journey.
She smiles at Dane. ‘We do. Yes, we do miss you. I miss you a lot.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘OK. I don’t.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He looks confused. ‘You do or you don’t?’ he asks, voice rising, eyes brimming suddenly. ‘I’m not coming back if nobody’s even ruddy well noticed I ain’t there!’
She sighs. Sinks on to the end of the plastic-covered sofa. ‘Can I—’ She turns to Tracey. ‘I don’t suppose I could get a cup of tea?’
26
Ten-year-old Oliver Adams, small, pretty, with golden-blond hair, pink, plump lips, and a sprinkling of delightful freckles, is instinctively ambitious, just like his parents, and he owns all the gear which most impresses his peer group. He’s almost a year younger than Dane Guppy, one-time school supremo, and several inches smaller, but he slipped into the vacancy Dane left behind with the minimum of effort, as if he’d been born to the position.
When Dane stumbles into assembly the following Monday morning, filling the quiet hall with the squeak of his trainers, and the rhythmic chafing of his nylon-covered thighs – not quite his usual cocksure self, ill at ease, out of practice, with greasy hair laid flat and neat against his head, and eyes averted – Oliver Adams feels only a vague flutter of annoyance. In the month since Dane absented himself, Ollie has grown complacent.
His mother, on the other hand, is beside herself with excitement. Providing quality vocalising time to a bona-fide problem child is what she’s been wanting to do all along – it’s what she’s here for, what moved her to offer her mornings to the school in the first place – and until now she’s been frustrated by the stubborn levelheadedness of all the pupils.
That morning, when she’s meant to be helping the seven-year-olds (who have their SAT exams looming), Geraldine Adams draws Fanny aside.
‘The little ones are all focusing very nicely,’ she whispers. ‘And I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be more helpful elsewhere. Perhaps having a little chat with Dane. Help him to settle back in. Could I have a little moment with him, Fanny, do you think?’
Fanny glances across at Dane. He’s doing nothing very special. Staring at the window, picking his nose.
‘I feel I could help,’ Geraldine says. ‘I know he can be combative, but he seems like such a sweet kid—’
‘Sweet?’ Fanny raises an eyebrow.
‘Well – yes. You may be surprised by that,’ says Geraldine. ‘But I do feel, having a boy of my own in that age group, and being a mother—’
‘Oh, yes,’ says Fanny.
‘Oh, but Fanny. Please, don’t take that the wrong way.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’d love to try to reach him, Fanny. Could I try that? Would you allow me to try?’
‘Of course! The more time we spend with him the better. He can barely read, poor little sod. So please! Take him away.’
Geraldine inhales at the word ‘sod’, but manages not to comment. ‘Is he dyslexic, Fanny?’
‘No.’
‘He’s not?’ Geraldine sounds shocked. ‘How can you be so certain?’
‘He’s not dyslexic. He’s very lazy and he’s pretty thick and he hasn’t been taught properly—’
‘Fanny!’ Geraldine laughs nervously. ‘Really, I don’t think—’
Fanny shrugs. ‘So, you know, “reach him”, by all means. Whatever it takes.’
Geraldine calls him over at once. But her unbridled enthusiasm – to succeed where all others have failed – leads her to break the cardinal child-reaching rule: she ignores the bell for break.
‘’Scuse me, Mrs Adams,’ he says, ‘’scuse me…’ She’s leaning over the desk, her manicured hand only centimetres from his arm, her well-cut hair so close to his grey nose he can smell the shampoo. The reading book lies unopened between them, and he’s grinning self-consciously, showing all the gaps between his blackened teeth. He’s embarrassed. He’s not used to people sitting so close to him, but more than that, he’s desperate. The bell just went.
‘Yes, Dane,’ she interrupts her own flow, ‘what is it?’
He gives a nervous giggle.
‘Why are you laughing, Dane?’ Geraldine gives him a flash of her porcelain-covered gnashers. A big, friendly smile to encourage him. She has perfect teeth. ‘Go on, Dane. You can tell me! Whatever it is you’ve got to say, I’m a mum! I’ll have heard worse and that’s a promise!’
‘It’s because I don’t think you heard the bell, Mrs—’
‘Geraldine. Call me Geraldine.’
‘Geraldine.’ Snigger. A globule of spit flies from the back of his throat, across the desk, over the unopened reading book and lands on the back of her hand.
She glances at her hand and determinedly, because the last thing she wants is for this young lad to feel that she finds him disgusting, does not pull it back. She doesn’t do anything. She leaves the spit exactly where it landed, glistening bravely above the age-defying moisturiser. ‘Dane,’ she says softly, ‘we were talking about—Can you remember what we were talking about?’
He shrugs. ‘Dunno.’
‘We were talking about intimacy, Dane.’
‘But the bell’s gone, Mrs Adams.’
‘Geraldine. We were talking about feeling safe with intimacy. And I asked you if you felt safe, getting to know me, and you said—What did you say, Dane? Can you remember what you said?’
He shrugs again, more irritably this time. ‘The bell’s gone for break, Mrs Adams. Geraldine.’
‘I’m in the middle of saying something, Dane,’ she says, gently cajoling. ‘We’re in the middle of a discussion. Chat. And I want to know, do you feel safe talking to an adult, talking to me, because you should, you know; or do you feel…’
Outside he can hear the children whose company he’s been starved of all these weeks. He can hear them running and shouting and fighting and laughing and he longs to be out there. He looks across at Geraldine, still jabbering away, weird blue eyes staring, and he racks his brain for something to say – anything – some password which will allow him to get out there in the sun.
‘…difficult time,’ she’s saying, ‘and I know family…confrontations…wanting love…concern for you…your future…confused…understanding and trust can feel isolating bewildering…so important…Tough decisions for adults as well…Lonely and vulnerable and lost. Even I feel unloved sometimes…’
He stretches over the table. ‘But you know what, Mrs Adams?’ he bursts out. She jumps, but not fast enough to prevent him from clasping her bony cheeks, one in each dirty hand, ruffling the hairdo, spraying her face with spit: ‘You don’t need to worry about that no more, because I love you!’
‘W-what’s that, dear?’
‘I LOVE YOU!’ he bawls. ‘So can I go now?’
She is confused, very confused; frightened, actually. He’s a big boy, behaving erratically. Worse than that, he might be laughing at her. Distantly, she hears the bell ringing again; break must be nearly over. Or nearly beginning. She’s not sure. ‘Of course, darling. Poppet. Dane,’ she says. ‘Of course…And I love you, too.’
He releases her, leaps up and scrams for the door, and Mrs Adams, trying to recover her composure, runs a hand over her expensive hair. ‘Well,’ she says out loud, willing herself to believe it. ‘That went very nicely, I think.’
27
‘And the fact is,’ says Geraldine, ‘I don’t suppose that poor boy’s uttered those three words together in his life before. “I LOVE YOU!” Not to anyone. So it was terribly, terribly touching…and it makes it all the more difficult to understand what happened afterwards…’
What happened, in a nutshell, was that later that day Dane, feeling overshadowed by Oliver Adams, nipped home to Uncle Russell’s place and brought back a penknife and a dead blackbird, which he then handed to Ollie, daring him to saw off the bird’s head. Ollie sawed, threw the decapitated head at Dane, and accidentally hit him with it on the edge of the mouth, which made nearby children scream in disgust. Fanny, glancing out of her office window, saw the knife blade glinting in Ollie’s hand, and ran downstairs to get it off him.
‘It’s not mine, it’s his,’ Ollie said.
‘It’s not mine,’ said Dane, wiping the blackbird’s innards from his chin.
Fanny confiscated the knife. ‘And you, Ollie,’ she said, ‘don’t you ever bring a knife into this school again.’ After lessons that day Dane and Ollie went for each other. It took Lenka, Geraldine’s au pair, Mrs Cooke from the pub, Mrs Norman, in her tight leather trousers, and Linda Tardy the teacher’s assistant to pull them apart, and Mrs Norman (Matthew’s mum) lost a gold hoop earring in the kerfuffle.
So that’s what happened (in a nutshell). Two days later, as Kitty is discovering to her cost, Geraldine is still a long way from closure. ‘I just can’t help feeling a teeny bit let down. Why didn’t Fanny speak to me first? I could have told her, Ollie doesn’t even possess a penknife any more. Not since they took it off him at the airport, coming back from St Barts.’
She and Kitty are grabbing a quick lunch at the Old Rectory, and have been for several hours now. They’ve nibbled their way through rocket salad and sear-grilled tuna, and Kitty’s nibbled her way through an entire camembert, and she’s well into the second bottle of wine. It’s a weekday. Clive is at the office, and Lenka the au pair has just set out to pick up the two children from school.
‘I feel for little Dane. I do. And I want to help him,’ Geraldine declares, not for the first time.
‘I say,’ interrupts Kitty, ‘have you got anything sweet in the house? I could really do with a taste of chocolate. Don’t you think?’ She hates it when Geraldine talks about her school work. She puts on a soppy, conceited voice, Kitty thinks, and drones on, as if simply because she’s doing something worthy, she has free rein to be as boring about it as she likes.
‘The thing about Dane Guppy,’ continues Geraldine, ‘which Fanny simply doesn’t pick up with all her mania about “reading”, with the literacy boot camp she’s got running up there, is that he’s actually a very sensitive little person.’
‘Which of us isn’t, sweetheart? Have you got any chocolate?’ Kitty glances, once again, at her mobile telephone. She doesn’t normally carry it around with her (chiefly because she’s never learnt how to work it) but today she has it, and she’s made a great fuss of putting it in the middle of the table. She’s asked Geraldine six times whether the Rectory kitchen has a signal.
‘By the way, you know I’m with Vodaphone, Geraldine, don’t you?’ she adds, forgetting about the chocolate for an instant. ‘Is that the same as Orange, do you think?’
‘Of course it isn’t.’
‘Well, so how do you know if Vodaphone gets a signal out here?’
‘I don’t,’ Geraldine snaps. ‘Just look on your telephone. There are meant to be bars on the display thing.’
‘I know, but how can you be sure—’
‘Kitty, I’m in the middle of saying something. Something quite important, as it happens. Because frankly, Kitty, I’m beginning to have very serious doubts about that head teacher of ours. I think she’s irresponsible, inconsistent, arrogant. She’s unsettling Ollie and Dane. And I’m seriously considering lodging some kind of complaint…So I would have thought you might be interested.’
Last night, after supper, Kitty came into her daughter’s bedroom to wish her goodnight. Scarlett couldn’t see her mother properly because she’d already folded her pebble glasses on to the bedside table, but she could smell her – a familiar musky scent, French tobacco, alcohol – and she could hear her – brittle, awkward, bored – obviously longing to get away. But nevertheless, Kitty sat on Scarlett’s bed. She said, ‘Things are going to get better for us now, Scarlett.’ She was slurring her words. But it didn’t matter. She’d never said ‘us’ like that before, as though they were actually on the same side.
‘You and me, darling girl,’ Kitty said, and she patted Scarlett’s knee through the blanket. ‘In spite of everything…we’re a fabulous team.’
She leant over and pecked Scarlett on the top of her head. It was so quick, so light, Scarlett barely felt it, but her eyes welled with tears, and as her mother stood up again and then paused at the bookshelf beside the door, and then slowly, excruciatingly slowly, opened the door and shuffled back out on to the landing, Scarlett lay in her bed, afraid to move, and the tears rolled down her cheeks, the snot rolled down her nostrils and on to her upper lip; and she could do nothing about either because she didn’t want her mother to know she was crying.
This morning, as she does every morning, Scarlett took coffee in to her mother before leaving for school. Kitty, as is often the way, only managed to mumble something sleepy, didn’t quite open her eyes, so they haven’t spoken yet. But today, of course, is the Big Day. Their big day. Scarlett hasn’t been able to think of anything else.
Right now she’s in the hall at school, hiding from Lenka the au pair, who is waiting with Ollie to take her back to the Old Rectory. She knows her mother is having lunch with Geraldine and that she’s expected to join them. But there’s only one thing Scarlett hates more than going to Ollie’s house on her own, and that’s going to Ollie’s house with her mother.
She’s spent her life watching out for Kitty’s mood swings, and she reckons she knows most of the triggers. Being At Home with Geraldine is definitely one of the worst. Kitty exhausts herself with her jovial not-being-jealous show, and it’s guaranteed to put her in a foul mood for several hours afterwards. Scarlett can’t remember the last time Kitty didn’t find something to yell at her about on the way home.
The minutes pass by, stubbornly slowly. It’s a quarter of an hour after lessons ended and everyone else has gone home, but she can still hear Ollie and Lenka out there squabbling.
‘Oh. Hello, there, Scarlett.’ Scarlett jumps at the sound of Fanny’s voice. ‘What are you doing still here? I thought you’d all gone home.’
‘I was just – resting my back,’ Scarlett says. ‘My back was hurting.’
‘Oh. Well, shouldn’t you be sitting down?’
‘I’m OK.’ She examines Fanny, standing there with a ramshackle pile of posters in her arms, and a staple gun. She looks shattered. ‘Are you all right, Miss Flynn?’
‘Me? I’m fine, Scarlett. Thanks for asking.’ Fanny grins, quite touched. ‘Spent the weekend in London. I think I’m still recovering.’ As it happens, Fanny’s weekend, when she and Brute finally made it up on the Saturday, hadn’t had quite the effect she’d been hoping for. Instead of revelling in the big-city crowd and bustle she’d persuaded herself she was missing, she found herself longing to get away from it all. She missed the sound of the sheep in the field behind her house, and the smell of the jasmine outside her window. She missed the church bells and her early-morning walks with Brute along the river. She missed stepping out of her front door and seeing people she knew, and knowing that if she went into the pub somebody there would probably offer to buy her a drink. In fact, for the first time in her adult life, Fanny was reminded of what it felt like to be homesick. Fanny was homesick.
‘Did you drink too much alcohol in London?’ asks Scarlett.
‘I’m afraid I did. By the way,’ Fanny says, changing tack, ‘I haven’t seen your big red book out recently. Whatever happened to that story you were writing?’
Scarlett blushes. ‘My novel?’
‘That’s right. I’d still love to read it.’
‘But you can’t!’
‘Oh…Ok.’
‘I mean, you can’t. You mustn’t even tell anyone you know about it.’
‘I mustn’t?…I mean, I won’t, of course. But—’
‘But seriously.’ Scarlett looks terrified.
‘OK. Well, never mind. Don’t worry, Scarlett. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’
‘Mentioned what? What red book? Miss Flynn, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’
‘It seems ridiculous, Kit, and you’ll probably laugh at me, but I don’t think Fanny really understands kids,’ Geraldine says, closing her lovely larder door and tossing some dark organic chocolate on to the table. ‘She certainly doesn’t understand Ollie.’
‘How can you tell,’ says Kitty, squinting once more at her telephone, ‘if this useless object’s battery is flat?’
‘What kids need these days is Nurture-to-Go. As I said to Fanny. Because every kid is special. Ollie, Dane, Scarlett. And by that I don’t mean—’
‘Geraldine, angel, I hate to be a bore but do you think if you just dialled my mobile number on your telephone…Only, then I could be absolutely sure it was working.’
‘I’m sorry, Scarlett,’ Fanny says again. ‘I swear I’ll never mention the book again. Ever. Which I can’t. Obviously. Because I understand now that it doesn’t exist – and never has.’
Scarlett glances at her through the thick glasses. ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’
‘By the way, I’ve got the car today. Got so much to carry back. If you don’t mind waiting I can give you a lift home.’