Bad Little Girl

by Frances Vick

  ‘Oh, Lorna—’

  ‘Sharing’s good.’

  ‘Sharing is good. But you have to share your own things, not other people’s.’

  Lorna shrank into the seat. She still had dirt and dints on her knees from sitting, so proudly, on the tarmac of the playground only a few minutes before. Claire cast a look at the window, but there was no-one there now to witness the girl’s humiliation: the bell for the end of lunchtime had rung. Small mercies, she thought; but it’ll take a long time for people to forget this one. ‘Lorna, now, come on.’ Claire knelt down and raised the child’s head with her gentle fingers. ‘Now, you did something a bit silly, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Explain to Mr Clarke that you got a little bit muddled in your head and you didn’t mean to take them.’

  ‘They’ll all hate me now.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘I just wanted to share.’ She shuddered into sobs again.

  James strode back from lunch, hovered, gave Claire a dismissive glance, and ushered Lorna into his office. The girl’s back looked pitifully thin in her dirty shirt. Her ragged shoes dragged on the floor. She kept her head down, like an animal led to slaughter. The door closed firmly behind them.

  Claire hesitated. Her own class had PE next, led by her enthusiastic teaching assistant, and Claire usually used the time to catch up on paperwork, but she felt, somehow, that she had a responsibility towards the girl. What class was she in? Yes, Miss Brett’s. Newly qualified, utterly humourless, overly strict. Claire felt a wave of fatigue at the thought of talking to Miss Brett, who spoke like a passive-aggressive air stewardess and never met your eyes. But still. Children can get so confused – social norms, even right and wrong, are diffuse concepts to ones so young, and it can’t have been easy growing up with Carl, whose behaviour was still spoken about in hushed tones. And even if she had known it was wrong to take them, well, there was still time to put it right, if the situation was handled delicately. As of that very morning, Lorna was happy, popular, confident – it seemed desperately unfair to have all that altered by one mishap. It might even set her on the wrong path; if you tell a child they’re bad, well, they believe you and revert to type . . . Miss Brett’s class was split into their reading groups; maybe this would be the right time to talk to her.

  The corridor outside the classroom smelt of urine. The toilets were here, and the boys in particular weren’t known for their accuracy. A pile of blue paper towels had been put down on the floor to soak up some of the yellow puddles, but no-one had given them a proper scrub in a while. How could Miss Brett let things like that slide? In staff meetings she was a such a stickler for procedure, and washed up the coffee cups with fussy precision. Strange. But then, when Claire had suggested they ask the caretaker to put little sticky targets in each toilet bowl, so boys were less likely to have, well, messy accidents, Miss Brett had hated the idea, had been quite vitriolic about it, as far as Claire remembered. Something about boys taking responsibility for their own learning and development: It’s-not-my-job-to-teach-them-how-to-aim.

  Claire knew that she was looked on with amused contempt; she felt the gap between herself and the younger teachers widening day by day. Affection, praise, fun: these were medieval concepts for the younger teachers, who dressed like advertising executives and made brisk notes on their iPhones in staff meetings. And the children weren’t children, they were ‘students’, ‘active learners’ or ‘young people’. Claire, who sometimes made the appalling lapse of calling children ‘kiddies’, was put up with, as though she was an embarrassing throwback. But the children loved her, that was obvious. Flocks of them followed her around the playground, vying for her attention, for the chance to hold her hand. Nobody could take that away from her; her popularity with the pupils was the one weapon in her arsenal.

  ‘Miss Brett? I was wondering if I could have a very quick word?’ The remedial reading group had been sitting on the carpet, labouring over their ABCs. They noticed Claire and erupted into giggles and smiles. Miss Brett’s brow creased with annoyance.

  ‘Mrs Jenkins will take you through phonics time now, while I step outside with Miss Penny. And I want you all to put on your listening ears and behave nicely until I come back.’ As they left the classroom, a little girl with a squint gave Claire a cheerful wave, and Claire winked back.

  In the chill of the playground, Miss Brett leaned against the pebble-dashed wall and gave Claire’s knees a sceptical look. ‘What is it, Miss Penny?’

  Claire smiled at her ‘Oh, Claire, please.’ But Miss Brett just shrugged and looked over Claire’s shoulder.

  ‘One of your students got into a bit of a pickle today. Lorna Bell?’ Miss Brett raised her sharp little chin a quarter of an inch but said nothing. ‘Well, I happened to see her just afterwards, and she’s really very, very upset. I’m not sure she really understands? And, she is so little, after all—’

  ‘Didn’t she steal another student’s property?’ Miss Brett frowned at her feet.

  ‘Yes, but the way she put it to me was that she just wanted to hold them – they were those rubbers all the girls are obsessed with at the moment, the scented ones? Well, it’s a really big thing for them. Fashion. And I think Lorna – I mean she doesn’t have any money, or rather her parents don’t, and so she doesn’t have any of these rubber things – I think she just wanted to sort of hold one and make believe it was hers for a moment . . .’ Miss Brett shifted her milky blue gaze to just above Claire’s hairline ‘. . . and then people thought they were hers and she got a little bit muddled. And then, she wanted to share them with her friends, which is actually rather sweet when you think about it?’

  Miss Brett’s raised eyebrows said that she didn’t think it was sweet at all. Her thin, mauve lips pulled themselves into a grimace. ‘Miss Penny, I have to follow the school policy on stealing.’

  ‘Well, yes, I know that. But what I mean is, can you not be too hard on her?’

  ‘It’s not in my nature to be too hard, actually. But I have to follow procedure and follow the direction of my immediate manager, who in this case is James.’

  ‘Look, Emma? Look, obviously this thing has to be dealt with properly, but she’s only five—’

  ‘She’s six actually.’

  ‘Well, six then. But that’s still very little. Perhaps the gossip in the school will be punishment enough? Isn’t Cara Parker’s mum a parent governor? And Cara herself is very popular. If she takes against the little girl, well, it could be very unfortunate. Damaging. I know how these things tend to go. I’ve been here a long time.’ She gave a self-deprecating chuckle.

  Miss Brett’s eyes briefly met Claire’s before her glance skittered away to the treetops, the clouds, her fingernails. ‘I take stealing seriously, Miss Penny.’

  ‘Well, so do I, but—’

  ‘Do you? Lorna Bell might be some kind of special case to you, but there’s dozens of children in this school who have the same background, the same barriers to learning. And I’d be doing them a disservice if I treated any one student differently from the others.’

  I bet you’d treat Cara Parker differently, if she were in your class, thought Claire. ‘Well, all right. I just wanted to say my piece. She’s so—’

  ‘Little. Yeah. You said.’ Miss Brett drew herself up from her insolent slump and strode back to her smelly little classroom, every inch the formidable teacher, and Claire felt, suddenly, immensely tired. They were tiring, these people. She thought of poor Lorna, still being grilled in the head teacher’s office, her small frame lost in the big swivel chair, her feet not even reaching the floor. Claire thought, I’ll be extra nice to her. They can’t stop me. It’s one, small good thing I could do.

  But now, sitting in her car at the end of the day, she thought dismally that talking to Miss Brett had been a huge mistake.

  * * *

  It had started to rain. The crisp leaves were pinned, sad and sodden to the ground and Claire, sitting in her car in the deserted car park, st
arted the engine but didn’t go anywhere. Miss Brett had asked for the parents to be brought in, and the whole school had seen Lorna’s passive, rabbit-like mother, only a girl herself – what would she be? twenty-four at most? – appearing at the office, bunching her stubby red fingers in the cold and yanking down the hem of her too-short jacket. Every noise made her jump, pull down her nervous, twitching top lip over her teeth, and smile painfully, waiting for the axe to drop. Claire, in and out of the library now with her own class, caught glimpses of her through the double doors. She struggled to see something of Lorna in her – this pinched face primed to absorb distress – but it was hard. Lorna smiled a lot. But then, maybe her mother had, once upon a time. No father with her. Of course not.

  Every now and then, when the office door opened to let someone in or out, Claire saw Lorna, hunched and wide-eyed, still in the swivel chair, clutching a long streamer of snotty toilet roll. Poor thing. And now it was Mum’s turn, they’d brought in a chair – impossibly tiny – for her to sit on. Why not get Lorna to sit in that and her mother to sit in the swivel chair? It was as if James wanted them both to be as uncomfortable as possible.

  She’d thought, I’ll say something. I’ll tell them how Lorna didn’t really know what she’d done wrong, that publicity was punishment enough. But then, as she did so often nowadays, she faltered in the face of those younger, more sure of themselves. She kept walking, didn’t turn round, even when she heard through the door the querulous voice of Lorna’s mother, inarticulate and tearful.

  4

  Claire led an ordered existence. She owned a monkish flat above a florist’s and spent every Friday evening and most of the weekends with Mother. There had been a friendship – ‘a close call’ as Mother called it – with a divinity student named Barry, who rode a scooter and was keen on hiking and Victorian follies. A widowed colleague of Mother’s had paid half-hearted court once. But really, there was nobody and nothing to take her away from the inevitability of teaching. Straight after college, she started working as a reception teacher in this neglected inner-city primary school, and had been there ever since. She was, largely, satisfied with that.

  In her rattling car Claire put on the radio, tuned to a classical music station. The theme was ‘Moments of Happiness’ – all Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. She took deep breaths, clenching and relaxing her hands on the steering wheel until ‘The Thieving Magpie’ put some strength into her bones and allowed her to drive off. She passed a few children lingering outside the corner shop at the bottom of the hill leading to town, and others trailing behind their grim-faced childminder. A row of previously handsome Victorian houses had had their windows smashed. They’d been empty, almost derelict, for a long time, but still. It was a shame; it was depressing. A moment of violent release, of drunken rage, and something beautiful is debased, the darkness advances. Claire remembered these houses from her childhood; the mMayor had lived in one of them, she remembered. Once this area had been desirable.

  She didn’t see Lorna on the street. She thought about her red cheek, her dumb, animal pain – her absolute lack of shock. But then, she probably got hit a lot at home. Claire shuddered.

  Perhaps the weekend would calm everyone down? It could go either way: Lorna could be tarred from that day forward as a thief, and nothing could shake it – or, maybe, there was an outside chance that, being so young, being reasonably popular, she would be forgiven? Oh, but Claire knew how unlikely that was. Being different was the main sin of childhood.

  Once, when she was six, or seven, Claire had pushed a boy over in the playground. She still remembered his face, shocked before the pain began, dismayed that Claire – Claire – hurt him. He’d gazed at her, his eyes shocked behind the smeary lenses of his glasses, and he’d said, ‘But we’re friends!’ Then he’d cried in big, hitching wails. They weren’t friends, of course. He was a new boy, but not so new that he was still a novelty – that sheen had worn off. Now he was just strange and annoying. Claire had been assigned as his Special Guide to help him settle in (that’s what they called it at her school, a virtuous shadow). But the trouble was that the boy – Oliver Boyce, that had been his name – didn’t seem to want to fit in. Even in the middle of winter, he wore shorts. He wheezed when he ran and didn’t play football. Tremulous, waxy blobs of snot hung down to his top lip, were licked, and then sniffed back upwards with a horrible, meaty snort, before making their inevitable progress again. After a few months of Oliver chained to her side, Claire began to panic that he’d somehow infect her, tar her with his horrible lack of social understanding. He didn’t fit in anywhere – he wouldn’t jostle and fight with the boys, and he followed the girls closely, asthmatically, making them uncomfortable, making them shun Claire too. He was a sissy. He was Claire’s sissy boyfriend, and she knew that she had to do something to throw him off. And so she’d pushed him, quite deliberately, into a muddy puddle in the middle of the playing field. And his expression of anguished betrayal had stayed with her ever since.

  Claire was congratulated by some of the older children for finally cutting herself loose, and she was, briefly, ushered into the higher social echelons of the Pony Set. She’d felt so terribly guilty, ashamed. But not ashamed enough to take up with Oliver again. And, yes it was a long time ago, but still. Children don’t change that much. Children can be animals. They’ll rip apart the powerless.

  She parked outside Mother’s large, detached house on a quiet avenue just a few minutes from the school, walked through the paved front garden, and gave the door two brisk raps. Claire always knocked briskly at the door, twice. Any more annoyed Mother – ‘I’m not deaf, Claire!’ She had her own key, but using it would seem wrong. Presumptuous. They amused themselves by watching game shows and over-hyped dramas. Mother called it ‘prole food’, and smiled a twisted smile.

  Johnny, Norma’s aged Jack Russell, pattered to the door and barked, followed by Mother, looking old, at least until she stood up straighter. She placed that ironic smile on her face, and gently nudged Johnny back into the hall with one slipper.

  ‘Daughter! We meet again. Hard day at the coalface?’

  ‘Ye-es. A strange day. Sad.’

  ‘Come into the kitchen – Johnny’s agitating for food.’ She walked ahead, back straighter now. A little slow, but what do you expect? It’s Friday.

  ‘We’re all tired on Fridays,’ Claire said out loud.

  ‘Indeed. Tea?’

  ‘Please.’

  Norma Penny was the formidable head of a respected girls’ secondary on the other side of the city. Claire had lost count of the number of times grown women had approached her with awe, and Norma was always the same in these situations – polite, distant. Each time the woman left, feeling like she’d just touched the hem of the monarch’s garment, Mother would roll her eyes drolly and say, ‘The price of fame . . .’

  Most heads had been driven into early retirement by stress, heart murmurs, depression; but not Norma. She had the same square shoulders, the straight back and curveless figure as Claire, but there was something more solid about Norma, something more substantial. Whereas Claire sometimes seemed frail, willowy, Norma’s slimness was all wiry power. But Claire worried. Norma seemed indomitable, but she should start taking it a little easier. She would mention it – promised herself she would – soon. When the time was right.

  Claire sat in the same straight-backed chair she always sat in in the kitchen. Radio 4 played softly on the countertop. Johnny’s claws tapped on the tiles. He let out little whines of impatience as Norma scraped the dog food carefully out of the tin and into his bowl. The kettle shuddered as it boiled. The fridge hummed. The same sounds of the kitchen Claire always remembered even from her teenage years, when there had been another dog, a different kettle, but still the same.

  From the outside, a teacher’s life seemed all of a piece – you went in, you worked through your bag of tricks, you did your marking, you went home. But, Claire thought of it more as a montage, a series of disparate experienc
es linked by feeling: a pale face glimpsed before it collapsed into laughter, or tears; the tail end of a fight; a sudden shriek in the corridor; a crocodile of children carefully avoiding a puddle; a lone lunch box forgotten on the carpet. Claire absorbed each image, resonant with meaning, until, by the end of the week, she was filled to the brim with pathos. She’d never got used to it, never learned to compartmentalise. Coming to Mother’s was a way of having the experience validated and exorcised at the same time. Norma understood the work, but she also had a way of making things more manageable. That boy with the terrible eczema? Oh Lord, he’ll get over that. That girl who stuttered? Temporary. And her friends will return. Today, like a cat bringing an offering of a wounded mouse, Claire hoped to lay at Norma’s feet: Lorna. Lorna stealing the rubbers. Lorna’s cheek blooming. And Claire failing to help her.

  They stayed in the kitchen with their tea, Johnny snorting into his food, the pips of the six o’clock news just gone. Mother brought out the biscuits – she always had a high-end box of biscuits that had been given to her by one grateful parent or another.

  ‘Strange day?’

  ‘Sad.’ Claire took the plainest biscuit she could find. ‘A girl, not one of mine, took something from an older girl. I don’t think she really knew what she was doing. Anyway, it all got a little out of control – the parents were called in. Parent I should say. And I saw the mother hit her—’

  ‘Hit her? How?’

  ‘Slap. Across the face.’

  Mother winced, shrugged, took a biscuit. ‘It happens.’

  ‘I took it to James. He said that I was overstepping the mark.’ She waited.

  Norma furrowed her brow, picking through the biscuits. ‘Do they all have to be chocolate? Some people don’t like chocolate.’

  ‘You think so too,’ Claire said flatly.

  ‘No, no I don’t think that. But there’s that note in your voice again, the Guardian Reader Wobble—’