by Frances Vick
The girl’s face darkened. ‘It’s rubbish.’ But she stopped ripping it up.
‘Well, I think it’s lovely. Why destroy it?’
‘Don’t like it.’
‘I’d love you to draw another one? But I’m worried that it won’t be ready for when Christmas comes.’ The girl smiled again, but her eyes took on a dull sheen that Claire recognised all too well. ‘Lorna? Don’t cry, now.’
She knelt down, took one of the child’s hands, and a wave of unbearable empathy washed through her for this lonely girl, staggering towards her now, clutching at Claire’s cardigan, kneading it with her hands, crying, choking. Then her chest heaved and she began to cough. Claire knew that cough, and deftly steered her towards the toilets, just before the vomit came. There was nothing in the girl’s stomach, it seemed, except the milk she’d drunk at break time. When she stopped choking, Claire scooped the dangling ropes of spittle and snot away with a wet wipe. She carefully washed her hands and led Lorna to the Calm Down Corner.
‘Lorna, did you eat your lunch?’
‘No.’
‘Why not, poppet?’
‘Didn’t like it.’
Lunch had been pizza and chips. What were the odds Lorna hadn’t liked it? ‘Really? Lorna? Did you feel poorly then too?’
‘No.’
Claire tried to remember seeing Lorna at lunch. She was on first sitting. They sat on tables according to surname. Who else began with a B? ‘Do you sit next to Shane Briggs?’
‘No. Caitlyn Carr.’
Caitlyn Carr. Troublesome girl. Bit of a pincher. ‘Are you friends with Caitlyn?’
‘No.’
‘Did Caitlyn say anything a bit unkind to you today at lunch?’
‘Can’t remember.’ But Lorna shook suddenly and a few more tears leaked out.
‘You must tell the teacher, Lorna, if someone – anyone – is being unkind to you.’
‘None of them like me.’
‘Oh, Lorna, I’m sure that’s not true.’ Claire knew it was true. Poor little lamb. A year had done nothing to rehabilitate her.
‘I’m going to be sick again.’ Lorna got up and wandered towards the toilets.
‘When Mummy comes to pick you up, I’ll tell her that you’re feeling poorly,’ Claire called to her back.
The girl turned dull eyes on her. ‘No.’
‘Sweetheart, if you have a poorly tummy then Mum can make you feel better.’
Lorna closed her eyes and looked, suddenly, so weary: a much older child. She came back and sat down. And then Feras, over by the door started up his chatter, ‘Hometimehometimehometime!’ and Claire peered at her watch – four thirty.
‘I’ll go and get you some water, Lorna. You sit tight here, sweetheart.’ Fergus Coyle was bellowing something about a poison dart frog and Claire gently steered him away from the Calm Down Corner, and drew the jigsaw-printed curtains around it. ‘Lorna is feeling a little bit poorly, Fergus, can we keep it down? Miss Montgomery is opening the door now, look.’ When she came back with water, Lorna gazed up at her from the depths of a beanbag, tired eyes in worn sockets.
‘Mum will be here soon, Lorna. In the meantime have a sip of water and a few deep breaths.’ She felt the girl’s forehead. No fever. ‘Do you still feel sick?’ The girl shook her head. ‘Dizzy? Cold? Here, look, take my cardy while you’re waiting. It’s nice and warm.’ She put it around Lorna’s shoulders, wrapping the sleeves around her neck like a scarf. ‘There we go. Nice and cosy. Have another little sip? You have a bit more colour in your cheeks now. What was that?’ The girl had whispered something.
‘Can I go home with you?’ She said it all in a rush. She looked so desperate, panicked.
Claire tried to smile. ‘And what would your mum have to say about that? Taking her lovely daughter away? She’d have something to say about that, wouldn’t she?’
But Lorna just looked confused. ‘I want to come home with you.’
‘Lorna . . .’ Claire’s forehead wrinkled. ‘Why?’
The girl hesitated, and then turned her head away. ‘I don’t really. I don’t know.’
‘Is everything all right at home? Lorna? Please tell me if you’re worried . . . or, or scared?’
‘I’m OK.’ Her face was blank now. Her voice a monotone.
Outside, Miss Montgomery was failing to hold the fort at the door. Fergus Coyle wasn’t letting the subject of poison dart frogs lie, and Feras was punching him rhythmically on the back. It was beginning to unravel out there.
‘I’ll dash out now, but I’ll be back in a minute. Do you want a book to look at?’
‘No.’
‘OK then.’ Claire hesitated, feeling that she’d missed some opportunity, and disappointed the child. Failed her. Lorna had already turned her pale, tear-stained face to the wall.
Inevitably Lorna’s mum was late to pick her up, and Lorna was the last child left in the cloakroom. The first time Claire had seen her, the time she’d seen her slap Lorna, she’d thought, That woman looks like a scared rabbit, and she was always Rabbit Girl in her mind now, with her too-short upper lip that didn’t quite cover her gums, and the tiny, almost imperceptible quiver that ran through her like a small electrical charge whenever she was in the presence of authority. She kept her distance from Lorna, who sat pale and still on the bench by the coat rack, clutching her school bag.
‘She looks all right,’ muttered Rabbit Girl.
Lorna looked at her mother, then suddenly pitched forward and let out a weak stream of grey vomit onto the floor.
‘Not to worry Lorna, not to worry. Is there any more in there? Do you need to go to the loo? No? OK, let’s wipe that face.’ Claire took her time fussing over her, prolonging the clean-up operation. Somehow she didn’t want the girl to go home. Things can’t be good there. They mustn’t be. She tried to make eye contact, but Lorna slid away from her attention, got to her feet and moved wordlessly towards the door, her mum trailing her.
‘Feel better soon, Lorna!’ Claire called, but the door closed before she finished the sentence.
6
Over the weeks and months that followed, Claire worried at the memory like a terrier. Odd, because it wasn’t so different from a thousand other incidents she’d witnessed: a child is sick; a child doesn’t fit in; they become attached to you with sudden, touching vehemence – how many times had she accidentally been called mum? And some of the parents were simply bad parents: uninterested, dull, closed. After all, she had spent years trying to accept that these parents will inevitably choke their child’s proud little flame of curiosity, empathy and pride. Lorna would be no different. Why then did Claire think she was? She had no answer for that.
And so she kept a discreet eye on the girl, as the months stretched into a year. She saw Lorna grow thinner, but not too much thinner; lonelier, but not completely ostracised. Lorna seemed to fall into that oh-so-familiar gap between normality and cause-for-concern, and Claire knew she couldn’t talk to Norma about her again, let alone James, without seeming, well, strange.
And so a whole year swung by. It was nearly Christmas before she encountered Lorna again.
* * *
Eight o’clock on a Monday morning, and Claire sat in the staffroom, feeling old and dim next to her hard, bright, recently graduated colleagues. They were all high flyers with their spreadsheets and strenuous sports. Why were they at this school anyway? Earning their inner-city stripes? Cynical, Claire. These girls didn’t hug or smile, and the DFE vernacular fell easily from their neat lips. They were efficiency itself, the new guard, ploughing over the fallen soldiers: old Mrs Hurst with her severe short back and sides and orthopaedic shoes, Miss Pickin with her liver spots and crucifix, and, she supposed, Claire herself. What did the younger teachers think of her? Bony Miss Penny with her greying bob and sensible shoes.
The recently refurbished staffroom was very white, and ringed with cupboards at head height full of inhalers, epi pens, policies and guidelines. The new windows, with toughened
glass and PVC frames, pushed open at the bottom about four inches, and Claire missed the old sash windows that you could pull right up and get a proper breeze in, maybe call out to a group of boys on the brink of fighting, or wave to a lonely girl in the playground.
Now the staffroom seemed so cut off from the rest of the school, and so quiet. There was no conversation – maybe tiny, polite confrontations about board markers, a brief communion over a smartphone screen, but that was all. Most of the teachers didn’t even eat there any more, preferring to squat, troll-like and alone, at the tiny tables in their respective classrooms. Once she’d seen Miss Brett eating her lunch in the back seat of her car.
Every month they had a morning meeting in addition to the weekly staff meetings after school on Wednesdays, because, James said, they needed to work together for the good of the school, consolidate the team. Become more of a unit. He tried to jazz it up with coffee and spongy little croissants from the corner shop. Each teacher was expected to briefly present on something. ‘Sharing best practice. Sharing our professional development’ was written on the white board.
There was an obvious and embarrassing split between the attitudes of the young and the old. Mrs Hurst flatly refused to take part, and Miss Pickin always got it wrong, using her presentations to share what she’d done at the weekend with her church group. Claire generally played it safe by bringing in a newspaper article. She learned quickly that anything in the Daily Mail would incense the younger teachers, and time flew while they eviscerated the education ministers, the Murdoch press and the general stupidity of the lay people while Claire nibbled at a croissant and eyed the clock.
This meeting had a particular purpose though. Lately, there had been increasingly severe acts of vandalism in the school. Someone had blocked the Year Two toilets with sand and Post-it notes filched from the stock cupboard. Thick, angry lines in black crayon ran around the sports hall. Library books were ripped and defaced. Someone had gouged out the eyes of most of the children on the school photo. Finally, sometime on Friday, after school hours, the nativity scene had been smashed, the baby Jesus dismembered. Half his face had been lodged in an ox’s mouth, while a wise man held a severed leg like a chicken drumstick. Mary’s doe eyes, horribly highlighted in yellow marker, gazed at Joseph, pinned to the straw-covered floor, impaled on the star. Unfortunately, it was Miss Pickin who had discovered the desecration first thing in the morning, and she still hadn’t recovered. She called Reverend Gary, who held the self-appointed title of Community Governor with Special Responsibility for Religious Values, and he demanded to attend this Monday meeting.
And so today there was an evident role reversal in the staffroom. The normally supine Mrs Hurst sat, sly-eyed but attentive. Miss Pickin blinked furiously behind bifocals, and made no mention of her weekend. Reverend Gary’s normal chubby bonhomie had deserted him. The young teachers, for once not in control, sat silently, waiting for James Clarke to begin. There was only one item on the agenda. And no croissants.
‘I think, ladies and gents, we all know what we’ll be talking about today.’ James Clarke sat down heavily. He looked tired. ‘The acts of vandalism that have taken place around the school have been . . . colourful. But, as Gary has pointed out, the, uh, violence of the crib desecration is particularly worrying.’
‘Horrible,’ quivered the Reverend Gary.
‘Horrible,’ echoed James Clarke. ‘So what I want to unpick, is, A, if the acts are by the same child, and B, who that child is likely to be, and C, how we get them to own up. Does anyone have any ideas?’
‘A Muslim,’ muttered Miss Pickin through quivering lips. ‘It’s bound to be.’ At this, the young teachers frowned as one, and pursed their lips.
‘Jane, I don’t think we have any, ah, reason to assume that there is a religious, uh, antipathy behind this . . . act,’ answered James.
‘The face-eating was a nice touch,’ put in Miss Peel, the youngest and prettiest of the up-and-comers, all perfectly waved hair and cheekbones.
Miss Pickin pursed her lips and shook her head sadly while Reverend Gary leaned forward menacingly. ‘There’s nothing nice about sacrilege.’
Mrs Hurst roused herself, and planted both ugly-shod feet onto the floor: ‘I say, round up the usual suspects: Idris King, the Alder boys, Feras from Year Two. Whatserface, the traveller girl, Candy. Get ’em in your office and grill ’em. If they haven’t done it, they’ll know who has. Won’t take long.’
There was a silence. ‘That might be an option, in, uh, more usual circumstances . . .’ James frowned.
‘In the seventies,’ murmured Miss Peel, examining one perfect nail and smirking.
‘But, in this case, we maybe need a different approach? This has been orchestrated, and it all seems to have taken place after the school day, perhaps during club time.’ James said.
‘Crayons are more – well, a younger kiddy would use crayons,’ said Claire. ‘I mean, wouldn’t an older child be more inclined to use one of the board markers or something? Or a biro? Something a bit more . . . grown-up?’
‘Nothing grown-up about this, Claire,’ said Gary, still smouldering.
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying, it’s a younger child . . .’ Claire groped for her words. There was something infantile in the use of the crayons, in the book scribbles. An older boy would have gone for something crude – a swear word, or something lavatorial, that old stand-by of a cock and balls. An older girl would have written a boy’s name. And the whole thing was so risky – there was the business of the Post-it notes. Why not just block the toilet with toilet roll and be done with it? Why sneak into the stock cupboard to raid the teachers’ supplies? Why transport sand from the nursery section all the way to the other side of the school and risk getting caught? How many journeys would that have taken anyway? There was a lot of sand down each toilet – enough to block them all and affect the sinks too. The books that had been destroyed – they were all books for younger children: fairy tales, Christmas stories, simple rhyming fables. No Beast Quest, no Nightmare Academy, no Michael Morpurgo. Younger children were not merely risk-takers; younger children were mad. And there was madness in this, rage in this – the defaced photographs, the smashed-up family in the crib. Childish rage, not mischief.
‘Some of our younger tots’ – Miss Peel nudged Miss Brett, mouthed ‘tots’ and rolled her eyes. Miss Brett smirked at the window – ‘have some real, well, I don’t want to judge them, but have some issues with behaviour. With anger, I’d say. And. Well. I just think that we have to look at all the possibilities . . .’ As so often happened when she was speaking to adults, Claire trailed off into blushing confusion.
James cut in. ‘I’m thinking a stern assembly. Cancelling all Golden Time until someone turns themselves in, a letter home and something in the newsletter from Gary. And no clubs – not that there’s much uptake, but still.’
The Reverend Gary let out his pursed sigh. ‘My feeling, James, is that anything demonstrably going against the Christian ethos of the school has to be met head on. It’s not just adhering to the curriculum, it’s, it’s part of the fabric of our society – and yes, thanks, I think we’re all aware of some of the staff’s lack of faith by now, but still—’
‘Trying to wrangle up a race war, Gary?’ drawled Miss Peel.
‘This is still a Christian country . . .’ cried Miss Pickin, while Miss Peel slouched backwards, grinning, and a faint snore escaped from Mrs Hurst.
And so the meeting came to a close. A stern letter was sent home in the book bags to be ignored, crayons were confiscated, but the Golden Time withdrawal broke down within the week once Miss Peel refused to cooperate: ‘I have Planet Protectors on a Friday. Are you really going to tell all the fifth years that a month’s worth of recycling doesn’t get them squat? You tell them. And Idris King’s in the group. If you want Jacquie King down your throat, feel free.’
For the next few weeks, the dark crayon lines remained in the hall. They couldn’t be painted over, a
nd the budget wouldn’t stretch to the expensive wax solvent the caretaker found on the internet. Eventually he smeared the whole mess with lighter fluid. It rubbed off well, but took some of the paint with it; the hall stank and the windows had to stay open during lunchtime.
Claire had kept something to herself in the meeting. It would have been shot down anyway, she reasoned. James already thought she was a little over the top about Lorna, so much so that she didn’t want to mention her at all. Not after last time. And why get the girl into trouble again? With no real evidence?
The day before the crib had been smashed, Claire was on exit duty, standing by the side gate at hometime to make sure children weren’t haring out into the dark main road unattended. After school it was her habit to roam about the playgrounds picking up plastic balls, litter and the odd bits of lost property. It was a large area to cover – three tarmacked yards, not to mention the little caves and nooks in the scrubby trees at the end of the playing field, used by generations of children, each thinking it was their secret hiding place. While the other teachers frowned over their stats, or bolted for the car park, Claire was happily looking for litter, thinking her own thoughts and in no hurry to get home to her little, empty flat.
She often thought – guiltily – that teaching would be a much nicer job without colleagues. Perhaps, if she’d been born a hundred years earlier, she’d have been a governess and spent all her time with children, from breakfast to bedtime, with no real breaks in which she’d have to interact with adults. No long holidays, no empty time to fill. That would be nice.
Sometimes she felt that, somewhere along the line, everyone else had been given an alternative lexicon. They knew how to speak to each other as peers, equals. But Claire must have missed that meeting, missed out on how to be a proper adult, because they all seemed like failed children to her. Often, in mid-conversation, familiar colleagues and acquaintances would suddenly appear alien, petty and confusing. There she’d be, having a proper, grown-up discussion, when she’d suddenly become distracted by the very grown-upness of it all. She would hear words and phrases coming out of her mouth, and suddenly it would all seem foreign, faintly absurd and not at all interesting. Just posturing. Or maybe not. Maybe it was only Claire who felt like a child at the top of the stairs listening hungrily to her parents’ conversation, before realising, sadly, that there was nothing of interest, nothing really worth understanding, and it would be better just go to bed after all.