“I didn’t say ‘no rent.’ I think he just meant that there was a greater need for the right person than for rental income, although he doesn’t look affluent at all. I am sure he could do with the money.”
“How are you going to find the right person, though?”
“That’s another question. I think I’ll know them when I see them. I just hope Noel agrees. He’s an odd man. I like him.”
“You won’t lack candidates. It’s a prime spot. That Christmas Steps area is becoming very sought after. I can see it going to a retailer flogging some pretty high-end stuff—a designer boutique? The London designers are starting to want representation in Bristol. Their own store. People like Versace, maybe? Emporio Armani?”
“He definitely won’t go for that,” said Daniel, with certainty. “Anyway, it’s too small.”
“Right, well, how are you going to do it? Some kind of auditiony search-for-a-star thing? Bush tucker trials? Sob stories about people’s lifelong ambitions and poorly grannies?”
“Nope.”
“What then?”
“Dunno,” admitted Daniel.
And then he had an idea.
15 Days ’til Christmas
“The other pressing issue,” said Pat, seeing Kate frantically scribbling plans for the bake-off in her notebook at break, “is what we are going to do about Jack.”
“It’s the meeting at the school today,” said Kate, looking stricken. She had been trying to forget. “They’re assessing him this morning, all the execution squad—sorry, I mean expert educationalists—and then I’m going in to be patronized and instructed on what’s going to happen next this afternoon.”
“You mustn’t worry,” said Pat, her head on one side. “I know you will . . . but the good news is I spoke to my sister, and she wants you to go and meet her on Friday. You knock off at two o’clock, don’t you?”
Kate nodded.
“Thought so. She said to be there at three and she’ll give you a tour and have a chat.”
“I’ll have to get Helen to look after Jack. She doesn’t usually do Fridays.”
“Take him.”
“I don’t want him to see . . . not yet. I don’t want him to want something he probably can’t have; and he’s not keen to change. If I need to persuade him then I need to do it my own way.”
“See what happens,” said Pat.
“You’re so kind,” said Kate, hurriedly and belatedly. “I can’t thank you enough. And your sister.” She took a gulp of her now-cold coffee. It was nearly time to go back outside. She shivered at the thought. “You’ve not mentioned her before.”
“No. Well . . .” Pat hesitated. “We haven’t always got on. No real reason. She’s very bossy, as you’ll see. She’s older. She took herself off to university—first in my family to go. She always wanted to be a teacher and now she is one,” said Pat, “so that’s good.”
Kate heard a hint of resentment in the last phrase, which was a shock—Pat was always so positive about everyone.
“Does she have a partner and children?”
“Nope. A career was all she wanted. I think she’s probably gay,” Pat confided, “and in my generation it isn’t so well accepted.”
“In your generation . . .” Kate teased. “You’re not a hundred years old, and nor is your sister, I imagine.”
“It wasn’t long ago! You youngsters forget too easily . . . She could have found a partner, of course she could, but it would have been hard for her in ways it’s difficult for people your age to imagine, and she didn’t. More than anything, it was that she was too busy doing all these amazing things . . . building up schools. She’s moved around a lot as one of those super-heads, you know, turning around failing schools. Greystone Manor is her first private school and it’s not the norm. As you’ll see.”
“And you’ve never been married?” Kate was ashamed of herself for never having asked the question. She had never gotten the impression from Pat that there was a partner, or even that there had been, but she had to admit, she had never properly inquired.
“Never married. Never engaged. Can’t say I’ve never been kissed but I can say I’ve never been swept off my feet. If anyone tried it now, they’d be in danger of doing their back in,” joked Pat, complacently. “It’s fine,” she added, seeing Kate’s look of uncertainty. “Our mother wasn’t impressed with us for not producing grandchildren, but me and Ursula are a pair of old spinsters for one reason or another, and that’s just how it is. The difference is, Ursula built an impressive career and I’ve stuck by my mum because one of us was always going to.”
“It’s never too late though. Brian could sweep you off your feet,” teased Kate. “He looks pretty burly.”
“Now, now,” admonished Pat, but she was smiling. “I’ll be doing you no more favors if you start stirring my perfectly nice life up for me, thank you very much.”
“It’s an interesting idea,” said Brian, as Daniel wriggled the key in the lock of the Olde Sweet Shoppe, “and it’s definitely nice to see you after all this time,” he added as Daniel finally succeeded in opening the door and waving him inside. “We’ve all been wondering where you’d got to.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” said Daniel, placing his hand on Brian’s meaty arm. “I’ve kept meaning to come.”
“It must be hard.”
“Yeah, memories,” Daniel agreed. “Zoe loved spending time at the Apple. I just can’t quite imagine—face—being with you guys and her not being there . . .”
“Beth misses her.”
“Yeah. Well, you knew they’ve been friends since they were tiny, didn’t you? Did they ever tell you? They were at this special needs playgroup together when they were two years old. Beth’s mum and our mum became friends, so they spent a lot of time together, growing up . . .”
“It’s hard for a young woman Beth’s age to lose a friend like that.”
“Hard for everyone,” Daniel agreed. “Will you say hi to her for me?”
“Come and say hi yourself,” Brian told him, not letting him off the hook. It would do Daniel good to come to the café.
The two men toured the little shop. It didn’t take long. Daniel briefly explained the need to find a tenant his client Noel could approve of, and his reason for thinking of the Apple Café.
Brian heard him out, nodding thoughtfully as he outlined the situation with the high rates but massive flexibility over rent, if the “right” tenant could be found.
“Yeah, the rates thing isn’t going to be an issue with charities,” said Brian. “As you know, we get a major discount on business rates.”
“You do, of course,” said Daniel.
“It’s just too small, though,” said Brian, regretfully. “It’s great of you to think of us. I love that you did . . . but I can’t teach our staff in that tiny space out the back and—realistically—this shop unit’s too small to be a financially viable café. There’s not enough room to fit in the punters. We couldn’t achieve the turnover. Although I could see it as a sandwich takeaway place, maybe . . . Coffees to take away, soup, possibly even a lunchtime sandwich delivery service . . .” he mused. “But it’s not for us,” he added briskly. “Plus, the café two doors up wouldn’t thank us for it. It would be a fight to the death between the two.”
“Of course,” said Daniel, hitting his forehead. “I wasn’t thinking. My client did say it was important to think about the balance of local businesses, all part of one organism, et cetera. I was just so hung up on my idea about giving the Apple Café a more central venue.”
“You’re not wrong, my friend, we do badly need a location with a bit more visibility,” admitted Brian. “Which reminds me, I was having just such a conversation yesterday with two lovely ladies from Portman Brothers . . . Now this might be our big break. Let me tell you all about it, because we might need to get you involved.”
“I can’t imagine any worthwhile project where you might urgently need the skills of a chartered surveyor.”
It was odd walking to the school gate without crowds of other mums around. It was still an hour until dismissal. An hour was a long time to be sitting listening to smug-faced professionals with letters after their names, telling her things she didn’t want to hear about her boy. Even the thought of it brought on a wave of outrage. It flooded through her as she pushed open the door into the school lobby, so she arrived at the reception desk, infuriatingly, with a brick-red face and hot tears suddenly flooding her eyes. She dabbed them away surreptitiously.
“I’m expected,” she said to the cod-faced woman—Kate couldn’t remember her name—who sat in the little cubicle with the hatch. This piece of architecture gave the impression that parents and other adults were dangerous creatures who must be cordoned off from school life behind a glass screen, allowed into the inner sanctum itself only once they had completed a series of challenges, such as the signing-in form.
Kate knew the drill. She took the clipboard with the signing-in register—tied to the counter for fear it might be stolen by a ruthless clipboard thief—and angled it expertly so it was within reach of the solitary pen. Inexplicably, the pen was attached, via an unattractive wad of tape, to a piece of string that was slightly too short.
The old fish-faced woman appeared satisfied, albeit reluctantly—even though Kate had signed herself as “Wonder Woman” in a moment of childish irritation. The woman knew exactly who she was. There was no need. She gave Kate a sideways look and pressed the buzzer to open the door.
The reaction from the principal was slightly more cordial.
“Mrs. Thompson,” she said. “Thank you so much for taking the trouble to come in. Here we all are.”
The seat intended for her was obvious. A small, plastic chair, lower than the others, facing a rank of four women, each with notebooks, pens, and professional smiles.
“Allow me,” said Jack’s teacher, Mrs. Chandler, who looked like Theresa May and flushed with delight when people pointed it out. She had taken to wearing two-piece suits in bright colors with draped bits on them to encourage further positive comparisons. Kate quite liked her. She also liked the principal despite it all, because when she and Jack arrived—gray and bedraggled from the traumatic few months following Tom’s death and knowing nothing and nobody in the area—Mrs. Marshall had defied the local education authority to put Jack into the school even though there wasn’t a place. And now she wanted him out.
“Mrs. Thompson,” she said, smiling warmly, once she had peremptorily introduced the team, announcing names Kate tried hard to remember, but they were mainly a blur of noise. They sat in a crescent around her low chair like hyenas crowding around their prey. “I want to say how much we have all enjoyed working with Jack today, and how cooperative he has been too. You should be proud of him.”
“I am,” said Kate, raising her chin and trying hard to contain the slight wobble Mrs. Marshall’s kind words elicited. “I am very proud of Jack.”
“And we all want the best for him, of course,” Mrs. Chandler went on.
“Of course.”
“So, I thought it would be helpful to ask you your own impressions of Jack and his learning over the last two years, also perhaps his interactions with his peers and the teaching staff.”
“He’s had his moments,” admitted Kate, meeting Mrs. Chandler’s eye as they both silently recalled a couple of the more exciting ones. There was the occasion where he climbed onto the roof of the cafeteria and sat, feet dangling over the edge, refusing to come down because he could see a hot-air balloon in the distance and wanted to see where it landed. Kate had pointed out he would never have been able to do it if the school caretaker hadn’t left the ladder there after clearing out the gutters, but it was a memorable occasion for the wrong reasons . . . And then there was the time when—as Kate frequently reminded people—Jack had not thrown a chair at a teacher. He absolutely hadn’t. Although he had threatened to do it—she didn’t deny that—it was because he was furious that the teacher had wrongly accused him of another child’s crime in dropping a cheese sandwich into the class fish tank. It was difficult to determine whether his huge rage was triggered more by the injustice of the false accusation or the distress that anyone would think him capable of harming the fish, of whom he had grown inordinately fond.
“So . . .” Kate ventured, “yeah . . . he’s had his moments . . .”
The assembled company bowed their heads briefly in acknowledgment.
“And then there is Jack’s learning,” said Mrs. Marshall, briskly. “What is your impression of that Mrs. Thompson?”
“I—” Kate was flummoxed, she was not the one to judge, surely. “He seems to make some progress. It’s tough, and I don’t have other children to compare with, so . . . He’s not that keen on reading and writing. We do stuff at home . . .”
Mrs. Chandler intervened. “We have been carrying out some observations today, Mrs. Thompson, and—as I am sure you have gathered yourself—we all think Jack is a lovely boy and bright in many ways. He does seem to lack”—she paused momentarily—“to lack ‘application,’ shall I call it?” She looked for ratification from the stern woman who had been introduced as an educational psychologist. “And so it has been exceedingly helpful to have the input of our experts today, to try to understand more about Jack’s special needs.”
“‘Special needs’?” echoed Kate, blankly. “Jack has ‘special needs’?”
“That’s right,” said the woman. Kate now remembered she had been introduced as Maura, or it could have been Flora . . . although she looked pretty fierce, not much like a Flora. Kate belatedly realized she was watching the woman’s violently red-lipsticked mouth but not processing any of the words that were coming out of it. Instead the words “special needs” were echoing in her head like a football chant. It was hypnotic. With effort, she tuned in to what the woman was saying.
“. . . So Jack’s scores were coming out at the very top end for verbal intelligence but much lower in other areas such as semantics and written comprehension . . . His scores for concentration and focus were . . .” she rifled through her paperwork, “ah yes, well, they were first centile.”
“First centile?”
“Concerning,” said Maura, baldly. “It essentially means that, if there were one hundred children of Jack’s age in the room, taking the test with him then, on average, his score would be—well—the lowest.”
“Crikey,” muttered Kate.
“But then there are these much higher scores,” Maura waved her hand at the page. “I’ll send you and everyone involved a proper, written report, but Jack has got what we colloquially refer to as a spiky learning profile. It means his low scores in some areas are down to specific difficulty rather than to an overall low attainment potential.”
“In other words, he’s not thick.”
“That’s not an expression we use.”
Kate’s heart sank further. “He can’t really read yet. Not yet,” she said through frozen lips. “He will read though. Won’t he?”
“Yes, Mrs. Thompson,” intervened the principal again. “Jack will certainly read. And he will write. He should do well. But is it not useful to pick up on these issues now and ensure he gets the help he needs?” She put her head on one side, like a budgie.
Kate’s stomach roiled. She got a whiff of her own nervous sweat. She must stink. She wanted to go back to the flat and curl up in a ball.
“Mrs. Thompson,” Mrs. Marshall said, in a low, calm voice, the sort of tone you might take with a dangerous lunatic who was threatening to do something horrendous, “when Jack first joined the school he was a very disturbed and distressed little boy . . .”
“I know,” sobbed Kate. Tears sprang hotly and she pressed her fingers to her eyes to push them back in. “He lost his father. It was awful. I know—” She looked unseeing at the display board behind th
e women’s heads. “I know he was angry, wild, unpredictable . . . and naughty,” she admitted, meeting Mrs. Marshall’s eye again. “He was naughty, but he’s better than that now, isn’t he?”
“He is, he is,” she said, making a downward patting movement with her hands that was clearly meant to soothe but just looked like she was trying to get someone to turn down the volume. “We knew we needed to let Jack find his feet, and of course we know how difficult it has been for you both, what with the terrible loss you both faced, but—while we are rightly reluctant to label children when they first join the school in Reception, it is really important that we pick up on the children who are struggling for one reason or another by the time they get to Year Two. And Jack is in Year Two now”—she held out her hands in justification—“so . . .”
Kate jumped in. “So . . . what? It was wrong to label him when he came here but now it’s right?”
“In the real world,” counseled Mrs. Marshall, “while we absolutely see each child as an individual, a ‘label’—as you call it—can be a means to an end, providing resources, attention, access to funding . . .”
“Actually, you said ‘label’ first,” said Kate, sulkily, before realizing how childish she sounded. “Okay, fine,” she went on. “You want Jack to leave the school. You want him to get help. I get that. Where, exactly do you want him to go? Where is this amazing additional resource that he needs? It had better be close by, because I’ve got a flat I can just about afford and it’s only down the road. If he’s going to have to go miles away then that’s going to be a problem because I have to go to work too, you know . . .”
“As it happens, there is an excellent facility just ten minutes from here,” beamed Mrs. Marshall. “One of just two PRUs for the entire LEA is just around the corner.” She seemed thrilled with herself for announcing this, which made Kate’s spirits rise a millimeter.
“LEAs? PRUs?”
“Local Education Authority,” clarified Mrs. Marshall. “And PRU is”—she cleared her throat and looked out of the window—“PRU stands for Pupil Referral Unit.”
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