The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

by Jonathan Harvey

  And guess what? It actually worked.

  So what did I learn from this little experience?

  Lying works. Kids will believe anything.

  I lie in the bath, contemplating my navel. Literally. The water has gone cold, but it’s OK, as miraculously the central heating appears to have come on. Maybe Mum has the magic touch. Or maybe she threatened to bring Cheeky out of retirement unless the boiler sorted itself, so it did.

  Thinking about this lying-to-kids thing, and how easy it is, I wonder if I ever do it now I am a fully grown-up grown-up. And lying there in the bath, I think (and I must be feeling bitter now) that yes, I do. I stand up in front of them every day, at school, and lie to them. I say, ‘Work hard and you can achieve. Settle down and listen to your teachers and the world’s your oyster. You can do anything with your lives. Why, you could even be a future prime minister, or . . . or . . . president of the United States!’

  Whereas really maybe I should in fact be saying, ‘You’re screwed. Really screwed. You live on a shit estate. You have zero prospects. Half your parents don’t care, and if they don’t, why is it my responsibility to improve your life? I wish you well, but, you know, maybe you should go out with the local dealer and have kids at sixteen. There’s far more likelihood of that than you becoming the next Barack Obama.’

  Then I hate myself for even thinking that, because someone might have said that to me once upon a time, but they didn’t. And I’ve done all right for myself.

  Or have I?

  Thirty-six years of age, abandoned by my boyfriend and having to have my mum move back in with me to make sure I’m OK. Over bloody Christmas.

  Oh yeah, Karen Carpenter, you’ve done really well for yourself.

  I dry and change into my nightie and dressing gown, then decide to choose an outfit for tomorrow, to save time in the morning. I open my bedroom wardrobe and two things sadden me, just when I’m trying to feel positive about tomorrow’s fresh start.

  The first is Michael’s side of the wardrobe. His clothes hang there neatly, untouched. For the millionth time I wonder why he didn’t take them with him. Has he gone and joined a naturist commune? The thought, ridiculous as it is, stings me. He never particularly enjoyed being naked in my presence. Why has he changed so much, hmm? Is he having some sort of mid-life crisis? And if he is not at a nudey commune, then what on earth is he wearing? Is he just wearing the uniforms he keeps in his locker at work? Has he, in fact, been squirrelling away outfits without my knowledge over the last few months, readying for the day he’d leave, so that he would be spared the effort of carrying a case with him? Rather than letting my mind boggle with these useless, fruitless worries, I slam his side of the wardrobe shut and open mine.

  Which is when I see the second thing.

  What looks like a thin ivory satin shift hanging from the rail. My wedding dress. Michael and I were planning on getting married in the summer. June, to be precise. But that dress didn’t just represent a future full of hope and opportunities; it also represented the tantalizing prospect of the day when I wouldn’t be Karen Carpenter anymore. I would be Karen Fletcher. No more anorexia jokes. No more ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ gags. Normality. Mundaneness. Banality. Bring it on.

  But not anymore.

  I run my fingers over the thin, delicate material, thinking of what might have been, thinking of the day I would have worn it. How I might have felt. The person I was going to become.

  I sigh and close the wardrobe door, and decide I can choose my outfit tomorrow.

  Just then I hear Mum calling me down for my tea.

  THREE

  I want to live in suburbia. I want to live in a nice street of nice houses and nice neighbours. I want to have a car in the drive with pink fluffy dice that announce me as girly. I want to get in said car every morning and drive to school listening to Chris Evans. As well as the dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, I would also have an air freshener hanging there too. Each time I’d get into the car, I’d sniff and sigh contentedly, secure in the knowledge that my car smelt nice. Nice. Such an underrated word. Why can’t my world be nice?

  Sadly I don’t live in Suburbia. I live in East Ham. Also, it’s so impractical having a car in London. Driving to school would take approximately three and a half weeks. On a good day. The Tube is the most practical way of getting from A to B, where A is my house and B is my workplace. Speed is of the essence, of course, but the downside is that when you travel by train, you don’t have the luxury of a boot or a messy back seat, just the inconvenience of having to carry everything. So each day I look like Fatima Whitbread as I juggle scores of exercise books, lesson plans, pencil cases, etc., on public transport. (NBI don’t really look like Fatima Whitbread. I was just trying to give the impression of a muscly-lady-type person lifting large, clunky items.)

  In my fantasy version of driving to school, I would arrive calm, centred and more fragrant than Pippa Middleton’s thong. In reality, after battling the rush-hour throng, I will usually arrive bedraggled, sweaty, runny of make-up and in a general state of fumingness that working in a school does little to alleviate.

  Today I am nervous as I swipe my Oyster card over the magic eye as I enter the Underground. As the partner of a Tube driver, I get free travel all year round, but this is the first time I have used the Underground since Michael went and I am worried he will have cancelled this and my card wont work. I am fearful that when I scan it, an alarm will go off and a big, flashing red sign will appear above the escalator screaming:

  DUMPED LADY TRYING TO GET FREE TRAVEL!

  DUMPED LADY TRYING TO GET FREE TRAVEL!

  I check the red sign. It says:

  NO REPORTED INCIDENTS

  Am I soon to be an incident?

  I swipe. I check the sign. Nothing. Still:

  NO REPORTED INCIDENTS

  The gates open and I am allowed through. My card still works. I sail through unhindered. Well, as unhindered as you can be with three bags and a clutch of hardbacks. As I descend the escalator, I worry. How long will it be before Michael remembers? How long will it be before he’s at work one day and his boss says, ‘Oi, Mike, you know you’ve still got your free partner pass?’ and Michael swears quietly and tells his boss to delete me from the system?

  Actually, that is what has happened to me: I have been deleted from Michaels system. I am no longer important to him. Whereas once upon a time I was the centre of his universe, now I am nothing.

  You’re nothing to me. That’s what they say in movies all the time, when the teen heroine ditches the hero at the prom or something after she’s caught him necking the class slut. You’re nothing to me. In fact, what she really means is: ‘You mean a great deal to me, which is why your slut-necking saddens me, but no way am I going to give you the satisfaction of showing you how much I care, so instead I will say, “You’re nothing to me.”’

  Whereas actually if Michael said that to me now, he would mean every word.

  As I sit on the Tube, I realize I am thinking about him and so my mind automatically darts off to different places to avoid the numbness or pain, to avoid the tears, to avoid the anxiety. I find myself pinballing between the latest Jessie J video I’ve seen, Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, the fact that I need to get Toilet Duck and wondering how many people on the planet are starving. I pinball so much I almost miss my stop.

  Depending on the weather, and how much I am carrying, it is either a fifteen-minute walk or a five-minute bus ride from the Tube station to Fountain Woods School. As it’s the first day back, it looks like rain, and I am armed with hardbacks, I plump for the bus. Sometimes the bus is a bad move, as I have to share it with students, but today I have got in nice and early, thus avoiding all contact with them just yet. I stare at the driver from my seat. The back of his head, the flash of his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

  Drivers. I’m not sure whether, as a breed, I like them anymore.

  I wonder if he left his girlfriend over Christmas,
and if so, why? I wonder if he left his clothes and his phone and reinvented himself somewhere else, with a whole new wardrobe. I wonder if his ex-girlfriend got on at the next stop, whether he would apologize, offer an explanation. I am almost tempted to go and ask him these hypothetical questions, but then it is time for me to get off.

  Oh well. Probably for the best.

  Fountain Woods School is ugly. There are no two ways about it. Whichever architect thought that breezeblocks and concrete slabs with porthole windows and carport-style covered walkways would make kids’ hearts sing as they came to school each day and therefore want to work harder as a result was very much mistaken. If this building was a human, it’d be a tattooed seventeen-year-old lad hanging around outside the off-licence giving you evils. Once you got to know him, he’d be a laugh. He’d have a heart of gold, in fact. He’d probably love his old nan, but the first impression would be pretty scary. I cross the near-empty car park and head inside.

  The first thing you see when you come into the foyer is a six-foot-high poster saying, ‘Welcome to Fountain Woods School.’ Embroidered on the left of the poster is a fountain and on the right some woods, despite there being neither in the local vicinity. Between the fountain and the woods is a string of people. All colours, heights, abilities. Two are in wheelchairs. One appears to be a drag queen. Our message is loud and clear: all are welcome here.

  I am distracted by what sounds like machine-gun fire to my left. I know what it will be even before I turn my head to look. Behind an oversized serving hatch sits our chief secretary, Rochelle. She has hair like a 1970s porn star, and a face like a boiled sweet. She’s one of those women who looks about seventeen from the back and seventy from the front. The machine-gun fire is the sound of her nails on the keyboard she is typing on right now. As she types at approximately three hundred words a minute, it’s quite a sound.

  She looks up at me and, without stopping her nails from clattering on her keyboard, asks, ‘Have a nice Christmas, Karen?’

  OK, so she is pretending nothing bad has happened. This I can deal with. This I prefer.

  ‘Yes, thanks, Rochelle. You?’ I smile.

  She nods. ‘Yeah. I went to Cornwall. It was lovely.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I say, and move on.

  Rochelle is odd. I know for a fact that her husband left her a few months ago, and I know for a fact that he left her for another woman. Another woman who lives in Cornwall. I know this because I was told by some of the dinner ladies. Basically, if you want to know anything about what’s going on in a school, ask the dinner ladies. They know everything. I could probably ask them where Michael is and they’d know.

  I’m relieved that Rochelle chose to pretend everything was OK in her world and mine too. It means I don’t have to go into any of the gory details or ‘what if’s? The only downside is that every time I see Rochelle, I am reminded of the thing I don’t like to think about: what if Michael left me for someone else?

  It is feasible. I mean, come on, it would make sense. Over the last few months he has become more and more distracted, more and more distant. There was a gradual removal of affection towards me, a gradual removal of intimacy. I would come in from school and put supper on, and he would get back from work and, rather than talk to me, go on the phone and chat endlessly to his mates, or his mum, or whoever, his supper on his knee, chomping away between sentences. I’d wait in vain for the calls to end, hoping we might talk, catch up, share anecdotes about our working days, but no. Phone down, he’d stretch his arms, yawn and say how knackered he was and how bed was calling. Other nights he’d be chatting with friends on Facebook, wrapped up in his online world, taking little notice of me.

  Maybe he was chatting with a new lover.

  Maybe I need to hack into his Facebook account and find out. I can pretty much guess what his password is. I could do it easily. I could do it tonight.

  Something stops me getting excited about this, though, and I know why.

  I am scared of what I might find out.

  I am walking towards the staffroom now, but part of me wants to turn round, to run back to Rochelle and say, ‘What is it like? What is it like to know your fella’s off with someone else? How does it feel? How do you reconcile that? Only I think my fella might have done the same, but I am too scared to confront those feelings, petrified of how it might make me feel. And so I am pretending that everything’s OK, but it’s not, Rochelle, it’s not.’

  I know what she would do, though. She’d just stare at me, then turn her back on me and start typing again, for Rochelle has been in denial ever since her husband left her. I only know she’s been through this heartache because of Claire who does the custard. Custard Claire lives in the same road as Rochelle, so has her finger on the pulse. Looking at Rochelle, you’d never guess she’s been dumped on from a great height by some bastard of a bloke. She just goes about her business with a big smile on her face, teeth gritted, and if you ask how she is, she just goes, ‘Fine!’

  Or if you ask after her husband, you’ll get a ‘Really well!’

  And it doesn’t make sense.

  Because Custard Claire reckons Rochelle’s fella’s been shagging anything in a skirt for years; it’s just that Miss Cornwall is the first one who’d have him.

  Poor Rochelle. It must be awful to be in denial.

  I go and hide in one of the cubicles in the ladies’ toilets. I am in no mood to be the recipient of pitying looks or gossipy ‘Oh my God, I hear Michael left you’s. I will wait in the toilet till a quarter past eight.

  The start of our Monday-morning briefing is heralded by the arrival of Rochelle clapping like a demented seal to get our attention. Three steps behind her is our fragrant headmistress in a powder-pink Chanel suit and big hair. As the buzz of the staffroom dies down and Ethleen goes about welcoming us back to another important term, I look around the crowded staffroom – it’s standing room only – and see a few people staring at me. One is Gina from science, who – I have no idea why – is wearing a neck brace. She winks at me and nods, then winces. She has obviously done something to her neck, though in her case it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d done nothing to her neck but just wanted to give the impression she had for sympathy or attention. I also see Mungo, my ginger-bearded head of department, who mouths to me, ‘Are you OK?’

  I mouth back, ‘I’m fine.’

  And he smiles and gives me a thumbs-up, which makes me feel a bit nauseous as he is double-jointed and his thumb bends right back. Having said that, most things Mungo does make me slightly nauseous. Like his habit of licking his moustache when he’s thinking. Or the way he wears his watch the wrong way round so he has to do an elaborate gesture with his bony arms in order to check the time. Or the way (and this is unforgivable) he wears open-toed sandals with grey socks underneath. When people ask what is the most surprising thing about teaching, I am often tempted to reply, ‘The fact that my HOD doesn’t get his head kicked in by the kids on a daily basis.’

  Ethleen is welcoming a new member of staff and I strain to see her standing beaming by the coffee machine. She is wearing John Lennon glasses, a sensible bob and a rabbit-in-headlights smile.

  ‘I give her five minutes,’ says Meredith, the PE teacher, under her breath, leaning in to me. I can’t help but chuckle. Meredith has a habit of invading your personal space. It gets on some people’s nerves, but personally it doesn’t bother me. It’s not like she means anything by it. I think it’s just because she’s from New Zealand.

  The new teacher looks over, as if my laughter was directed at her. The smile freezes on her face and I worry that she thinks I’m being bitchy and laughing at her, so I wink at her, to show I am her comrade in arms – all for one and one for all – but instead of garnering the grateful wink back I expected, she turns and looks quickly away.

  Why? Why did she do that? I look to Meredith, who is red-faced with mirth.

  ‘She thinks you fancy her,’ she whispers, barely able to contain her glee.

&
nbsp; I roll my eyes. OK, so a great start to the new term this is turning out to be. Not only has my boyfriend left me, but now the new teacher thinks I’m a lesbian who’s after her. Oh, joy of joys.

  Just as I am contemplating scrawling a sign on the back of one of my books saying, ‘Relax. Me Not Lesbian,’ and holding it up to show her, I realize that Ethleen is saying something about me. I’ve missed the beginning of it because I was doing my lesbo mortification routine in my head. And then I miss the middle of it because Mungo is sneezing loudly into what looks like a Starbucks serviette, then checking the contents of said serviette. I turn back to smile at Ethleen, who has cocked her head on one side and is looking at me sympathetically.

  Mortified.

  I am mortified. There is no other word in the English language for it.

  Since when did splitting up with your partner merit being brought up in the Monday-morning briefing? So what if he didn’t give me any warning? So what if he stuck a letter to the kettle and didn’t take his phone or clothes? (He did take his laptop, bizarrely) So what if my Christmas was probably a bit/lot more crappy than yours was? So what if I am so inept at dealing with stuff like this that my mother has to come and stay to make sure I don’t do anything daft? It doesn’t need bringing up now. It has no bearing on my performance in school or the education of our learners. Why, oh why, do I have to work in a school where the head likes to see herself as touchy-feely? I feel a thousand eyes on me and can tell I’m going the colour of some scarlet scanties. Just as I’m hoping the ground will open up and swallow me, five pips sound over the tannoy, announcing it’s time to head on up to registration.

  I am a special needs teacher. Fountain Woods is a mainstream comprehensive school, so my job usually involves sitting at the back of other people’s classrooms, helping the slower kids with the task the main teacher has set. Sometimes I withdraw small groups of kids to work in another classroom. Sometimes I have groups of ten or so, say in GCSE year, where I give them extra help with their coursework on other subjects. (Let’s face it, you can’t learn special needs, I don’t think.) The only times I really have full-sized classes are when I’m teaching media studies (about which I know nothing, but it was in the curriculum and no one else was free that period) and when I’m with my own tutor group.