‘Tarlie tory.’
‘All right.’ Charlie drew in a tumbling curl of hair while she thought. ‘OK. Are you ready? Once upon a time, there was a little girl called – oh, what was her name now? Yes. Rosie. Rosie lived in a big house with her mummy and daddy and two cats called – Sooty and Sweep. Usually Rosie was very good and did as she was told, but one day she was naughty. Always stay by the house, her mummy had told her. Never go down to the big pond on your own. But Rosie wanted to feed the ducks, so she went to the kitchen and found a big loaf of stale bread. When her mummy wasn’t looking, she crept off down the garden and went down to the big pond.’
Rosie was looking at her, round-eyed, with a finger in her mouth.
‘Yes, it was naughty, wasn’t it? You see, Rosie, it was a very big pond, much bigger and much further away than yours is here. Much too far for a little girl to go on her own. The water was very black and deep and there were big fish in the depths. When Rosie got there, she broke up the bread into little pieces and threw it to the ducks, but no ducks came. Rosie began to feel frightened. She looked into the water and thought …’ Charlie paused, drawing Rosie’s small rounded nose.
‘Fall in,’ Rosie contributed.
‘Yes, that’s right. She might fall in, and there was no one to jump in and save her. She tried to remember what her mummy had told her. What did her mummy say?’
‘Don’t go to the tond. Stay by house.’
‘Very good. You see, you’re much better at remembering than the Rosie in the story. By now she really did want to go back home, but she’d walked round the pond and there were lots of different paths leading off, and she wasn’t sure which way was home.’
Rosie shook her head knowingly. ‘Lost.’
‘That’s right, she was lost. So she walked all the way round the pond trying to see if she could find the path home. There were thick, dark trees and bushes growing close to the edge, and as Rosie passed them she heard a voice calling to her—’
‘Mummy!’
‘No, it wasn’t her mummy. Nor her daddy. It was a voice she hadn’t heard before. It said, ”Come with me, Rosie. Come home with me. Come and live with me and my – my husband.” This poor lady had always wanted a little girl like Rosie, a little girl of her own to love, but she didn’t have one. ”Come with me, Rosie,” she called again. ”Come home to my cottage. There’s a lovely bedroom all ready for you with a soft, warm bed, and there’s plenty of food, there’s – oh – lots of chocolate and ice-cream and maple syrup pancakes and bananas, and there’s a big teddy bear with a red spotted bow-tie who’s just waiting to be cuddled. All this is waiting for you, Rosie, if you come with me.”’
Rosie’s eyes were fixed on Charlie’s face, her mouth slightly open.
‘No, Rosie shouldn’t go with her, should she? I think Rosie knew that. But you see, this lady was sad, not bad, because she really, really wanted Rosie to go and live with her. More than anything in the world, she wanted a little girl of her own—’
What am I doing? Charlie thought. She stopped drawing to sharpen her pencil. The strange freedom of story-telling was making her speak faster than she was thinking. Where was this taking her?
Rosie was waiting, rapt and attentive.
‘So what did Rosie do?’ Charlie asked. ‘Well, she was a good little girl really, and she remembered that her mummy had told her never, ever to go off with someone she didn’t know, so she ran very fast all the way home. Oh, no, she couldn’t have! She didn’t know which way to go, did she? But just as she was wondering, she heard Sooty and Sweep miaowing in the bushes. She called them, and they trotted out to meet her and showed her the way home. And Rosie’s mummy made her scrambled egg on toast for tea, and afterwards they had jam doughnuts and raspberry milkshake. And that’s the end of the story. What shall we call it?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I know. Rosie’s Walk,’ Charlie said, because Rosie had the picture book Rosie’s Walk. ‘This is Rosie’s Other Walk.’
‘Lady?’ Rosie said, in the very serious, deliberate way she had.
‘What about her? Did she ever get a little girl of her own?’ Charlie thought for a moment. ‘No. No, she didn’t.’
Rosie looked so disappointed that Charlie added, ‘But soon she met a very nice hamster. In fact, two hamsters, called Herbert and Hilary. They were looking for a home, and the lady had plenty of room. So Herbert and Hilary moved in, and the lady and her husband were very happy. And now, shall we go and feed the ducks? We’ll go and see Jon and get some bread. Because you’re allowed to go down to the pond when you’re with me, and I won’t forget the way home.’
She would finish the drawing later. It wasn’t really working; too much had gone into the story. She collected her things together and piled the toys back into the bag.
Later that evening, after Kathy had gone to bed, Charlie sat at the kitchen table and took out the sketch. She looked at it for some while before picking up her pencil, loath to spoil it. Then, as soon as she began, she worked intently. She never knew how it would be: sometimes she just fiddled, really starting. At other times – now – energy flowed down her arm and into the tip of the pencil.
There was no Charlie in the story, she thought. I left out Charlie.
She began to think of a new version.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Rose.
Rose had a mother and a father and a sister, and they all wanted her more than anything in the world. Rose was the precious gift they hoped for and waited for. They made plans for her, they bought her presents, they prepared a room.
They waited and waited, they wanted and wanted, but Rose didn’t come. They hoped so much that they frightened her away. She wouldn’t be trapped in the warm, comfortable cage they’d built for her. Just as the cage door opened to entice her inside, she skittered away and flew free. She went where they could never find her, no matter how hard they searched. She left no trail for them to follow. When she heard them weeping, she felt sorry, so she took with her a little piece cut out from her mother’s heart, and a little piece of her father’s, and a little piece of her sister’s. She carried those pieces of heart as far as she could, but when they became too heavy she flung them away and they floated out into the sky, beyond the stars, where they froze into solid ice …
The child’s face in the drawing was rapt, intent on the model tortoise she was gripping in both hands. A hat shaded her face, with stray curls escaping. Her eyelids were lowered, her mouth slightly open.
It wasn’t Rosie’s face. It was someone else’s.
Misinterpretation
They were to be treated as sixth form from today. No uniform, and they were allowed to use the sixth-form common room.
‘Wow! A sink and a kettle!’ Angus said. ‘Now I know why the year twelves look so smug.’ He put on a pompous swagger. ‘Hey! I’m in the sixth form and I can make my own coffee. Get out of my way, you insignificant little year-eleven squit.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Angus,’ said Ms Winterbourne, the Head of Sixth Form. ‘It’s time to move off to your subject areas.’
Each of them had been given an individual timetable. Charlie’s programme showed English and History for the morning, with Art in the afternoon. In each of the first two sessions the teacher outlined the course and handed out a list for suggested summer reading. On Thursday and Friday, there would be sample lessons.
The art session in the afternoon was different. There were two groups of students, and two teachers – Ms Pearson, the Head of Art, and Oliver Locke. All available space in the art rooms was given over at present to the exhibition of work by the year thirteen students, those who’d just finished their course. The new pupils were encouraged to look at the work in detail – not just the framed and mounted pieces, but the sketchbooks, folders and critical studies.
‘To do well in this course, you’ve got to regard yourself as an artist,’ Ms Pearson said. ‘Don’t think of it as lessons and homewor
k. Just as your work. Draw every day. Look. Notice. Experiment.’
Charlie thought: I already do think of myself as an artist, if that’s what it means. It had become a habit to draw something every day. If she had to miss a day, she felt feel itchy and restless. She rarely went out without putting her sketchbook and pencils into her rucksack. Comparing herself with some of the others, like Lisa Skillett, who was doing Art because she didn’t fancy anything else, Charlie felt a surge of confidence. She could do this.
‘Oh God, look,’ Lisa was saying, leafing through a critical study on Fauvism, with page after page of elegant italic writing. ‘All this work. I’ll never do it. I’ll have to choose something really easy.’
‘I’ve never yet known anyone choose Philip Wilson, Charlie.’
She jumped. She hadn’t known Mr Locke was standing behind them.
‘Steer by Steer,’ he said. ‘How about it?’
‘I don’t know yet. If I chose him, I’d do John Singer Sargent and Gwen John as well.’
He looked pleased. ‘You’ve been reading the book?’
‘Yes. It’s interesting. I love that painting of Walberswick. Not the girls running. The golden misty one, of the man and the woman looking out at the river and the mud flats and the boats.’
‘Mm, I know the one you mean,’ Oliver Locke said. ‘Come and look at this. Let me show you some stunningly good A-grade work.’ He touched her shoulder lightly, guiding her out of the room. Charlie wondered if he meant Lisa to come, too, but Lisa stayed where she was, pulling a sarky face at Charlie behind Oliver’s back.
The work he wanted to show her was by Francesca Abbott, a girl Charlie knew by sight. It had been given a prominent position, occupying a whole section of corridor. Folders and notebooks covered two tables. The mounted work was dominated by a large stylised landscape with cypress trees, in pointillist style. Alongside there were several studies of a female nude.
‘She’s already been accepted for a foundation course. And she’ll get an A for sure.’
For the first time, Charlie felt daunted. ‘It’s brilliant. Miles better than I can do.’
‘But not better than you will do. Remember she’s two years ahead of you.’
Charlie could see what marked out Francesca’s work as special: it had the confidence to be what it was. There was no fussing, no hesitancy. She tried to explain this to Oliver, who nodded and said, ‘And she understands light. Look at that, the tones of the grass as it recedes into the distance. The colours of the shadows. And here, and here.’
‘I’m going to have a really good look at her critical study, and her folder,’ Charlie said.
‘OK. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.’
Oliver left her, and a few moments later Lisa appeared. ‘Oooo oo!’ she jibed. ‘What are you, Locke’s special pet? Does he fancy you or something?’
Charlie ignored that. ‘Look at this work. Francesca Abbott. Doesn’t it make you want to give up now?’ she said, although it didn’t.
‘I’ll give up before you do,’ Lisa said. ‘Francesca Abbott – that’s the weird-looking tall girl who gets her clothes from the Oxfam shop?’
‘She looks good in them,’ Charlie said. ‘Different. Like a – well, like an art student, I suppose.’
‘She was always down here. I wonder she had time to do any other subjects. Hey, she was this year’s teacher’s pet,’ Lisa said. ‘You’re next.’ She frowned at the nude studies. ‘Are we going to do this? If I had thighs as big as those, and such a scrawny chest, I wouldn’t want to sprawl naked in front of a bunch of teenagers, would you?’
Charlie had asked Fay for Thursday night off, so that she could go to A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Rowan and Russell.
‘As long as it’s understood that the love interest takes place on the stage, not in the audience,’ Charlie specified to Rowan. ‘Maybe I’d better sit between you.’
‘You can come round after school and have something to eat,’ Rowan offered. ‘Then you needn’t go all the way home and back. My dad can take you home afterwards.’ Fortunately, Rowan’s dad never seemed to object to her casual way of using him as taxi-driver.
After the last lesson on Thursday, waiting near the front entrance for Rowan, Charlie saw Sean walking back from the athletics track with two of his PE colleagues. She hesitated, wanting to attract his attention without yelling his name in front of the dozens of pupils funnelling out of the side doors. She walked quickly towards the reception door, so that her path crossed his.
‘Oh, Charlie …’
To her surprise, his smile of greeting turned quickly to a look of edginess. The other two teachers, Mr Wade and Ms Grear, walked on towards the staffroom; Charlie heard Mr Wade complaining: ‘And I could have done without losing my one free period, with sports day coming up …’
Charlie said to Sean, ‘I just wanted to—’
‘Yes, we need to talk. But not here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘PE office, in five minutes? Oh – no, you’ve got to get your bus.’
‘No, it’s OK,’ Charlie said, mystified. ‘I’m not getting the bus.’
Sean nodded, and walked quickly after his colleagues. Charlie, glimpsing Rowan, went to tell her that she’d be a few minutes. She had no idea what Sean could possibly want to tell her. Thinking of Anne, Charlie now half-regretted approaching him. What had she meant to say? How delighted Kathy was with the lilies? With the note?
No. She shouldn’t interfere, as her mother had told her on countless occasions. She just wanted to talk to him, that was all.
Sean came along the corridor and unlocked the office. Inside was a muddle of noticeboards and cluttered desks and odd bits of equipment, whistles and a wicket-keeper’s glove and a box of rounders bats. He gestured for Charlie to go in, then followed her, leaving the door to the corridor open. He stood facing her, fiddling with his bunch of keys. To fill the rather awkward silence, she said, choosing her words carefully, ‘Those lilies are gorgeous. Mum’s favourite. They came early on Saturday and she’s got them arranged in a vase. They’ll last ages.’
Sean gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Yes. Well. I must be incredibly thick-skinned, mustn’t I? To keep pestering her.’
‘Sean, no!’
‘That’s how she must see it. Anyway, I didn’t mean to talk about Kathy,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see you first, to warn you – just in case Mr Fletcher says anything. He hasn’t, has he?’
‘No, about what?’
Mr Fletcher was the head teacher, a remote dark-suited figure rarely seen in a classroom; Charlie had had no personal contact with him through her entire time at the school, and couldn’t imagine why he’d speak to her now.
‘He called me into his office this morning,’ Sean said.
Charlie looked at him, puzzled. He picked at the leather tab on his key-fob, then said, ‘Apparently – you know last Friday, when we went to the pub? Well, someone saw us. A parent. And got the wrong end of the stick. And thought the Head should be told.’
‘Got the wrong end of the—’ Charlie didn’t understand. ‘You’re entitled to go the pub at lunchtime if you want, surely? As long as you don’t come back drunk.’
‘No, it’s not about having a drink. What this parent saw was a teacher coming out of a pub with a sixteen-year-old student.’
Charlie flushed. She remembered coming out of The White Horse with Sean, giving him a hug and a kiss, without a thought that there was anything wrong in it. That was what the parent had seen.
‘What business is it of anyone’s? Of Mr Fletcher’s? What did he say, then? Accuse you of – of—’
‘He had to follow it up. If a parent makes an – an allegation like that, he has to at least ask me about it. I think he was a bit embarrassed, to be honest.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘Well, obviously, I told him it was you I was with, and that we’re practically family. This parent didn’t give your name. Just recognized you as a student of this school, I suppose, or else
just assumed. Of course the Head knows Kathy, so once I’d explained, he was quite OK about it. I mean it’s not up to him where I go and who I see outside school – he made that clear. But he also said …’ Sean stopped, frowned.
‘What?’
Sean looked at her. ‘That it’s open to misinterpretation.’
Charlie felt outrage welling up inside her. ‘So he is telling you where you can go and who you can see!’
‘Think about it, Charlie. I lived with you and Kathy for five years but now there’s no official relationship between us. What am I? Not your stepfather, not your mum’s husband or even partner, any more. I’m only your mum’s ex-boyfriend, and that’s not enough, really, if people start nosing around. I should have thought. It was an – indiscretion, I suppose. I wanted to tell you first, just in case he decides to warn you, too.’
Charlie thought of politicians caught out in sordid affairs. Indiscretion. That was the euphemism they used.
‘No! Don’t use that word, indiscretion! It makes it sound wrong, shameful!’ she burst out. ‘You bought me a sandwich and a Coke, we talked about Mum’s birthday, that was all – we even bumped into each other by accident! I hate the thought of people watching us, thinking horrible suspicious thoughts!’
‘I know—’
‘Mr Fletcher can warn me if he likes, but what am I supposed to do if I see you in town? Ignore you? Pretend I don’t know you?’ she flared. ‘He ought to get on the phone to that parent and say Yeah, so what? They know each other, they’re friends, and what business is it of yours?’
‘I expect he will, only a bit more politely. The point is,’ Sean said, ‘he’s had the chance to put the bloke right, this time, but what if the parent hadn’t phoned? What if he told other parents, spread rumours? Said I was unprofessional, taking advantage of my teacher role?’
‘So you’re agreeing with him? You’re telling me I can’t speak to you in public in case some nosy parent’s watching?’
She thought: this isn’t just to warn me about Mr Fletcher. It’s to tell me he’s going to treat me like any other student.
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