by Bowes, K T
“Yeah,” Pete turned to her with the key ring gripped between finger and thumb. An Audi emblem peeked out from beneath his fat finger, the old Toyota one littering his desk. “That’s what he does best after all. They don’t mess with him when he rounds up the boys...Hana...are you and he...you know?”
“What do you mean rounds up the boys? And mind your own business!”
Pete spun back to engross himself in his activity and gave Hana the silent treatment. Irritated, she stomped off to the staffroom, calling over her shoulder, “I hope it sticks to your fingers!”
Pete stuck his tongue out at Hana’s retreating back and then got the scissors out of his desk as her wish inevitably came true.
Logan parked his motorbike in the space marked ‘Principal’ and Angus put his Audi in the nondescript spot in the Chapel car park. Larry Collins, the head groundsman spent most of the day trying to locate the owner of the bike without success. He had neither clamping nor towing facilities, but had he gotten access to either, the vehicle would have been no more. “Look at that!” he exclaimed to everyone passing. “Look at the principal’s Audi parked in the Chapel, instead of its special parking space. Who’s got the list of vehicles? I’ll find them, whoever they are!” He waited vigilantly at the end of the day to see who removed the bike, but was momentarily distracted by a parent knocking down one of the wooden posts which prevented them from parking on the grass verges. When he looked up, the bike was gone.
In fact, the bike disappeared a number of times during the day without him noticing. Logan nipped out just before lunch break, during his free period. He visited the registrar in the plush city offices to book a time for his upcoming nuptials and fill in the statutory declaration. He made an interesting discovery at staff briefing that morning which aided his cause.
“It’s awesome,” Pete raved with excitement. “I love the V8 races. The cars race round town for three days starting on the Friday. The main race is always on Sunday. They’ve put the white lines on Mill Street already. I’m going down later with my ride to pretend I’m racing. I do it every year. You should come.”
“Er...no thanks,” Logan replied. “You rev that heap of crap and it’s more likely to drop its bumper on the track.”
“Yeah but school’s closed. If you don’t wanna come revving with me, you could come to the Friday heats. You might as well come. We go as a big crowd from here and get drunk in the beer tents and watch all the races. Best day of the year; better than Christmas.”
“Whatever.” Logan peered at Pete’s hand as Donald Watson cleared his throat to speak. “Why is your finger stuck to your thumb?”
A Friday off work seemed like a gift from God and Logan eagerly booked the wedding for ten o’clock on that date. He felt nervous and excited all rolled into one. He could hardly concentrate during the rest of his teaching periods and resorted to the dreadful tactic of watching a video with the restless Year 9 class so he could stand outside and make frantic calls on his cell phone, organising various related matters. At lunchtime he popped in to see Hana, shifting nervously from foot to foot next to her desk.
Hana eyed him with disappointment. “Did you not get out to the you-know-where?” she whispered.
Logan dragged Rory’s chair to sit close to her so they could whisper discreetly. “I already went last period. I had a free.” He pursed his lips and looked awkward. Hana’s eyes shone.
“You booked it?”
Logan nodded and looked shifty. “Yeah.”
Hana shot a look over her shoulder at Sheila who slammed her fingers into her keyboard with aggression. “I wish I knew what was up with her lately,” Hana whispered. “She’s being really odd.” Hana turned back to Logan, her face dropping at the unease in his eyes. “Was there a problem? Did I need to be there? I can try and get away later, but I keep leaving early so Watson will probably...”
“Listen to me.” Logan leaned closer to Hana so his fringe brushed her forehead and tickled. He stared hard at her lips and then kissed them roughly, making her inhale sharply. When she pulled back to object, darting another look at Sheila, he placed his finger over her lips. “I know I should have asked you, but I booked it for V8 day. School shuts and I...”
“That’s this Friday!” Hana hissed, her eyes wide with shock. “I didn’t think you really meant this weekend. I thought you were being dramatic.”
Logan snorted, “I don’t do drama, babe. You’ll learn that. I was serious.” He sat back in his seat and observed her, his grey irises stormy and full of confusion. “I’ve stuffed up, haven’t I? I should have asked you. They didn’t have anything else for weeks...”
“It’s fine.” Hana’s eyes sparkled with an intoxicating depth. “Let’s do it. Friday at ten. I can’t wait.”
Logan bit his lip and his face relaxed. Hana touched his fingers, winding hers through them and feeling his rough skin against her softer pads. His eyes returned to their silvery tone and he smiled and kissed the back of her hand. “See ya later.” He flicked another look at Sheila’s profile through her office doorway, head bowed over her keyboard hammering something out. As he strode from the room, oozing confidence and bubbling elation, Hana watched his neat backside make its way through the common room. He was gorgeous. Her stomach did flips at the thought of being married to him, able to undress him at will and take a good look at the quality gift under the expensive wrapping.
Logan stuck his head around the door after lunch, on his way back to class, finding Hana alone. He bailed her up against the filing cabinet out of the way of the windows and kissed her while he had the chance. “So you haven’t changed your mind then,” he smirked as she slipped her hand underneath his jacket.
“No.” She tried to sound huffy but his kisses on her neck made her fail.
“I need to stay at the Gordonton house for the rest of the week,” Logan snuffed into her hair and Hana stalled, her body feeling rigid.
“I don’t want you to,” she said instantly. “Please don’t leave me there by myself?” She hated the pleading she heard in her own voice.
“I know it’s inconvenient,” Logan insisted, misunderstanding her fear for irritation. “But you’re going to drive down to Alder Dale each morning and get a lift into work with Angus.” He ran a hand through his dark hair and left it flicked enticingly back from his forehead. “Hopefully it will make you harder to trace. It’s clear you’ve left Achilles Rise and Alder Dale is close enough to River Road for it to be easily accessible without you going too far into Flagstaff and attracting the attention of anyone waiting for a sighting of you.”
“But I’m scared,” Hana argued.
“Oh, yeah, sorry. I know you are.” Logan switched to talking about work matters and stepped back as staff and boys wandered past the office door on route to their next class. He continued once it was clear. “The gates should be on by the time you get home so you won’t be vulnerable there. It’s just travelling. I’m honestly not sure how much more energy to put into this façade but Bodie consistently comes up with nothing. The cops don’t seem interested so I’ll take care of you myself.”
Hana had a miserable afternoon. Caroline Marsh sat in the office glaring holes in Hana’s back with stares of unveiled malice. She spoke loudly about her trips overseas to the head of geography and wound Hana up by speaking about Logan as though they were still an item. “Yes, she told him. My fiancé and I will be going to Fiji for our honeymoon.”
“Oh.” He looked surprised and glanced across at Hana’s rigid stance as she put brochures into the office rack. Hana deliberately kept her face impassive, not sure if he really knew anything or was just intercepting the painful lightning bolts Hana’s psyche sent Caroline’s way. He could have cut the atmosphere with a blunt knife and the tension finally drove him away. One curious moment came just before the final bell.
Chris Carter from the physical education department popped in. Ignoring Hana’s welcoming smile, he made a beeline for Caroline and they had a small disagreement in hushed tones. �
�I’m not discussing this now!” Caroline hissed, nastiness showing in her narrowed, dangerous eyes. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“But I...” he began and quailed at the look in Caroline’s eyes.
Hana’s huge sigh halted their bickering instantly. She put her head in her hands with all the drama of a stage actress and made it look as though they were disturbing her concentration. Caroline shoved her chair back and they left the room to continue their conversation elsewhere. The tension left with them. Hana pressed her forehead to her desk and looked up when her computer squeaked at her. A line of intelligible typing punctuated her letter to a university and she rubbed the outline of the keyboard from her forehead and deleted the nonsensical sentence. “What are you up to, Ms Marsh?” Hana commented out loud, knowing exactly what it looked like.
When Caroline returned, she remained blessedly quiet, flouncing out to teach last period. Hana continued with her correspondence, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she liaised with social services for one of the guidance counsellors. A livid stench began to seep through the closed office door from the student centre, making Hana feel sick. It smelled like a mixture of diarrhoea and drains. When she poked her head into the common room, she almost had to cut her way through the fog. Boys hung out of the large windows gagging and most of them pinched their noses and covered their mouths. The Year 12 dean, who had a stinking cold and could smell nothing, looked blearily up at her from under his tissues. “What’s that dreadful stench?” Hana asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Don’t look at me!” He was affronted and looked around him, instantly noticing the expiring students.
“Ok, who’s dropped the stink bomb?” Hana asked them, but instead of generating schoolboy laughter, Hana was met with silent, bemused faces and a look of general discomfort. She looked down at the red nosed teacher and shrugged. There should have been giggles and elbow nudging but there was nothing. The group of Year 13s seemed as baffled as the staff. Hana and the dean trawled around the room looking for evidence of a stink bomb, or something else that might cause such a sudden influx of smell. Nothing. Hana sniffed her way around the room and the dean snorted and sniffed and occasionally blew his nose.
A large boy from the back of the room got up slowly after what sounded like a clap of thunder and, grabbing the back of his shorts with both hands set off out of the room at a fair speed for such a large boy. As he barged through both of the double doors at once and hit the staircase sprinting, he wailed, “Oh no, not again!”
Usually so eager to be let out of the study class on some pretext, strangely none of the boys could be persuaded to check if the lad was ok. Eventually, the dean went down to the toilets but didn’t return for the rest of the period. When he still hadn’t put in an appearance by the end of school, Hana collected the dean’s abandoned laptop and put it safely on the table in the student centre.
Caroline Marsh returned to the office just before home time and the stink was still there. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. At the same time, Pete North appeared to collect something from under the crap on his desk. Fumbling around underneath the unfinished marking, he exclaimed delightedly as he found his Rubik’s Cube and turned to leave. Picking up the scent in the room, he tactlessly turned to Caroline and commented rudely, “You should see a doctor for that! You’re starting to stink on the outside like you do on the inside.” He exited, humming happily and spinning the lines on his cube.
Hana was stuck waiting for Angus to leave, fortified by the sight of him in the doorway just after three thirty, inclining with his head that he was ready to go. She knew he usually stayed until well after six and conceded he was going early for her benefit. Logan texted, ‘I’ll be round on my bike later. Take care on the way home.’
“What’s that smell?” he asked in the common room, puckering up his Scots nose in disgust.
“A bad biryani apparently,” Hana replied. Or the stink of someone’s rotten heart.
Angus drove her to Cilla’s to pick up the Honda which had been in her garage all day. It was with great relief that Hana turned right onto the Hakarimata Road, feeling the tension fall away with her proximity to the bush. Nobody was behind her on the entire road and she turned into her driveway feeling relieved and a little silly, beginning to wonder if the whole thing was in her head after all.
She forgot about the new gates until she almost ran over the electrician and gate installer, who were finishing with the connection of the power. The gate company had done a fantastic job. Sturdy metal pillars supported iron security gates, made impenetrable by the lack of footholds and the nasty, spiked fleur de lis, which decorated the top of each gate. Hana alighted from the Honda, happy to let the proud tradesmen show her their products, trying to understand how everything worked despite a headache and the niggling worry that had begun at the back of her consciousness.
Seeing Pete with his Rubik’s Cube reminded her of a conversation recently with someone who theorized that the cubes could be fixed by a magnet, which pulled the metal of the cube into alignment. It was not the cube itself, as at the time Hana remembered commenting that surely it was plastic, but something about the issue of magnetism pulled at a strand in Hana’s memory. Just not hard enough to dislodge the important ‘thing’ itself. Hana was perplexed. She realised she knew something crucial, but couldn’t remember what on earth it was.
She was gracious and appreciative to the men who demonstrated the gate mechanism. They were keen to show her how the sliders had been accommodated into the difficult terrain by banging pilings deep into the ground on either side of the drive. The gate rolled between them, operated by remote control. A switch allowed exit from the property, but nobody without the remote could gain access. A buzzer about three metres out from the gates offered callers the opportunity to be buzzed in after speaking into an intercom.
“There’s also a key code access for getting in without the remote.” The gate installer obligingly looked away while Hana entered the pin number for it and then she retrieved the spare key from the tradesmen and went safely into her house, secure in the knowledge nobody could get in without her knowing. As an added precaution, Bodie paid for a bleep to be installed, attached to the new burglar alarm which indicated in the main house that a vehicle had entered the gateway and was on its way up. It gave Hana an opportunity to control who entered her safe place, but would also warn her if another car slipped in when the gates were legitimately opened.
Hana heated up a tin of soup she found in the pantry but then wasted it, realising too late she wasn’t hungry. She felt tired and in a peculiar way, lonely right through to the bone. She watched Tiger as he poked around in his water bowl, trying to retrieve a feather that had somehow found its way there and then she went to the main bedroom to get changed into some more comfortable track pants and a tee shirt. Stepping through the doorway, Hana was captivated by the difference in the room.
Dressing hurriedly in the early morning darkness, she failed to appreciate the prettiness of the cream walls and the cleanliness of the freshly painted ceiling. The roughness of the plaster walls either end of the bed, contrasted starkly with the freshness generated by the previous night’s labour. As Hana sat on the bed to take off her tights and blouse, she was cheered by a sense of transformation, in the house and in her life. Safely in her flopping-around clothes, with thick woolly socks on her feet, she opened up the bag containing the wallpaper and took out a roll. She couldn’t resist lining it up next to the painted wall and admiring it. “This is gonna look so good,” she mused to herself.
Down in the garage next to the new wheelie bins, Logan had left all the equipment for the wallpapering. Hana carried it upstairs and laid it out on the floorboards. She had wallpapered before in England once, using the old pine dining table to paste onto, much to Vik’s disgust, especially as she also used it to stand on to do the actual papering. Izzie was three at the time and bored, so Hana taught the bright little girl to read and write whilst papering. Hence the highl
y debatable areas around the light switch as she became distracted and the glue dried.
“What the hell did you think you were doing here?” Vik’s criticism stung sorely as his brown finger pressed on a particularly bad crease.
“Wallpapering!” Hana heard her spite and desperation reach down the years and cringed. “Someone’s got to. You’re never here!” She was fiercely independent in those early years. Their marriage was sorely blighted by her refusal to bend or accept the way Vik viewed life, with his unique Sikh background. He also caused his share of harm, not seeing how important a stable home was and that working until midnight and then leaving again at six in the morning was not helpful to his tired, career stunted wife. Vik Johal thrived on multi-million pound engineering problems involved in the retrieval of natural resources, but almost lost his family more than once when he repeatedly failed to notice the inexpensive, but terribly serious problems under his own roof. Although she chided herself not to compare Logan with her late husband, Hana couldn’t help noting the things she loved about him were the bits missing in Vik.
Grabbing a new tarpaulin from the garage, Hana laid it as flat as she could over the kitchen table and allowed history to repeat itself. There was no small Izzie, but there was a pleasant radio station pumping out music from Hana’s childhood and so, to the happy sounds of Cliff Richard, Hana measured, cut, pasted and stuck the first sheets of wallpaper in her new home.
The job was relatively easy. She and Logan had painted the window-wall, including the never ending wooden framework and stays on the French doors, which opened out onto the veranda. By chance, it left the easiest walls to paper. As she brushed the paper down securely to chase out the air bubbles, Hana was delighted with how beautiful it looked against the freshly painted skirting boards. It looked old fashioned, but in an acceptable way, not like something your granny would have in her house. With a cringe, she remembered she was a granny herself, so maybe it would be all right if it did.