The Whip Hand

by Nadine Browne

  ***

  That Sunday I drive down to Richmond to see my mother and spend the day sitting in her garden drinking lemonade. I spend three hours in traffic on the way back. As I look for a space in the Tesco parking lot, I spot Lea Olvi on her mobile, her face twisted in distress. She’s standing by a parked car and I barely recognise her. At first, I take her for a student. I drive past her twice, wondering if I should say something, and then leave Tesco and go to my local corner shop instead.

  ***

  I get in early on Monday, and find Lea in the teachers’ lounge smoking out the window.

  ‘If Dexter sees you, she’ll go postal,’ I inform her.

  ‘Fuck Dexter.’

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  Lea doesn’t answer but tosses her cigarette butt out the window and marches past me.

  I am left alone to contemplate the infinite moods of the human female.

  A few hours later, the sun has yet again risen over Lea’s disposition and she’s laughing merrily while patrolling the yard with Mrs Patel.

  She finds me in the teachers’ lounge and takes a seat just a little bit too close.

  ‘Hey, sorry about earlier. I had a mad weekend,’ Lea takes a sip from my cup.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  We sit in silence for a while and I pretend to read the paper; I pretend to read, while staring blindly at the page and issuing warnings to myself.

  Stay away from the crazy straight girl.

  Don’t think about her warm thigh against yours; her vanilla scent, like a cupcake. Like those cupcakes my mother used to make when I was a kid, to store away, and give to me as a reward when I was a good girl. Bright pink icing that I used to eat off my fingers, until I was left with a naked sponge cup.

  My good-girl cupcakes that I had to earn, and I have been such a good girl.

  ***

  As the summer holidays approach, I find that I am bumping into Lea Olvi everywhere. I’m not sure if this is by happy coincidence or design, but everywhere I turn, there is she; in the yard, in the parking lot, by the shops, sitting in my classroom with her bare feet in my chair.

  ‘People will talk,’ I say, only half-joking, when I find her seated on my desk one morning. This time she is reading from a student’s notebook, and from the glittery cover I know exactly whose notebook it is.

  ‘You can’t just read my student’s work.’

  ‘Shut up, I’m reading.’

  I move her feet out of my chair and take a seat, waiting for her to finish Helen Lowie’s poems. When she finally lowers the notebook, Lea is frowning.

  ‘Who is this girl?’ she asks me.

  ‘Helen Lowie, my most committed pain in the arse,’ I say.

  ‘But she’s really good. I mean, this is, like, beautiful,’ Lea waves the notebook at me.

  ‘I’m sure it’s lovely.’

  ‘Have you even read it?’

  ‘Lea, this girl brings me a poem a week. And I have a job, which involves more paperwork than you can shake a rhyme at.’

  ‘So, what, you just tell her to fuck off?’

  And just like that, at eight seventeen on a Wednesday morning, I am having an argument with a hot woman about something other than what we’re having an argument about.

  ‘I can see that you are upset,’ I say, soothingly.

  ‘I’m not fucking upset,’ Lea jumps off my desk and starts pacing about the classroom, her hands on her hips, face flushed, and though I know it’s wrong, I can’t help but get a little turned on.

  ‘Why do you hate them?’ she demands.

  ‘I don’t hate them, I think they are kids, and kids are difficult.’

  ‘You hate them. You hate that they don’t like the things you like. Like, I don’t fucking know, Shakespeare and shit. You think they are scum. You can’t even be bothered to read this girl’s poems because you think they are all scum. People like you shouldn’t be teachers. You know you’re fucking up these kids, right?’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ I say, very slowly.

  I can feel rage rising hot inside me, and I am determined to keep myself under control. She doesn’t know anything about me. She’s not been a teacher for seven years; she’s not had to deal with all the bile.

  ‘Just because you failed doesn’t mean everyone else will …’

  I stand up, grab her by the arm and drag her out into the corridor. She doesn’t make a sound but her face is a mask of fury and disgust. She reaches up to claw at me, but I slap her hand aside and leave her sitting on the floor. I turn to leave, but then turn back. She is looking up at me from the floor and I bend down to her and take her beautiful, angry face in my hand.

  ‘You don’t know a fucking thing about me,’ I say again.

  ***

  That Thursday afternoon, Alice bursts into my classroom, looking more flustered than usual. I’m packing up my stuff, getting ready to leave.

  ‘Oh thank god, you’re still here,’ she says.

  I ask her what’s the matter and she asks if I finish early today. I tell her that I do, and Alice grabs hold of my sleeve with pure desperation. She tells me how she’s supposed to take 7b to the National Gallery today and Mrs Patel was supposed to be the second supervisor, but she’s off ill. And Mr Tomaki’s got another two classes.

  ‘I can’t possibly go by myself with just Lea. I mean, she’s great with the kids but it’s 7b, you know how they are. Could you please, please …?’ she trails off and looks like she may fall into a faint.

  After I have been to see Dexter and completed the four forms required of an off-premise supervisor, I join Alice, Lea and about half of the students from 7b. Lea smiles at me as we make our way to the tube stop.

  On the train, passengers move seats to avoid us. Alice takes up post at one end of the carriage, and I take a seat at the other. Colin Archer and Samir Ali start a fight before we even get to Baker Street, and Alice has to threaten to pull the emergency brake.

  Though she is like a little gazelle surrounded by a pack of lions, the kids seem to have respect for their art teacher. They don’t ridicule her fear, or threaten her; they listen when she asks them to stop screaming, and they even listen when she tells them about feelings and the impressionist movement. She tells them how the impressionists sought to paint not what we see but what we feel. They were mocked for using colour and light instead of form, but what they accomplished was beyond what any movement ever had.

  I begin to think that she is not as helpless as I have previously believed, and wonder at the source of her superpowers. Perhaps the kids respect the fact that she’s an actual artist.

  I share these thoughts with Lea, who is standing beside me.

  ‘I don’t think they give a shit that she’s an artist,’ Lea says, ‘they don’t get what she does. But, like, Alice loves art and loves making everyone else fall in love too. She actually gives a shit, and I guess they can tell.’

  The group is more subdued at the end of our visit. Everyone’s hungry and tired, and, after two hours of high art, I can’t wait to get home and watch some trashy TV.

  On the way down the marble steps leading from the gallery to Trafalgar Square, Colin Archer shouts out ‘Lessie the Lesbo’ and then pretends to look around for the culprit.

  I ignore him, as I always do.

  Lea, who is a few steps behind him, gives him a hard shove. The boy loses his balance and falls down the last few steps onto the pavement. I run down to make sure he’s okay, while hoping no one else saw what I saw. Alice joins us just as Colin gets to his feet. She asks me what happened and I give her a shrug.

  ‘She fucking pushed me,’ he screams, pointing at Lea.

  Tourists walk past and stare at us. It’s a beautiful day and people are having their photos taken on the backs of the lions.

  Alice tells Colin he must be mistaken.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lea says, ‘you better watch your step, right. And your mouth.’

  She’s standing above the
rest of us, fierce, ready for a fight. Colin looks like he wants to say something, but changes his mind and instead casts me a look of utter loathing.

  Alice speaks gently to him, and starts herding the group down the street. Lea and I lag behind.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I ask her.

  ‘You can’t just take that shit,’ Lea says.

  ‘Do you really think I care what a little brat has to say about me? You could have hurt him.’

  ‘You can’t just take that shit,’ she says again, but this time she’s smiling. With the sun full in her face, Lea is smiling like a little girl, and she takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.

  I wonder who this woman is; who this girl is. I wonder why she wears her hair so short, and if she often gets into fights. I think about her dimples. For a moment I feel the power of a will greater than mine, greater than reason, wiser than wisdom.

  It’s crowded on the tube and we have to wait for a train that’ll take us all. Finally on, we’re packed in tightly, and I’m pressed up right against the doors. When the train gets to Baker Street, I feel a grip tighten on my arm and just as the doors are about to close, I am pulled off the train, onto the platform. As the tube begins to pull away, I look at Lea who’s still holding my arm.

  ‘Let’s get coffee and then let’s get a bottle of wine, and then let’s go to yours.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ I ask her, knowing full well that it doesn’t matter.

  ***

  I leave Lea sleeping in my bed and get into school early the next day. I sit down at my desk and read Helen Lowie’s glittery notebook once, and then again.

  Then I sit very still for a long while and search for the part of me that went missing, I’m not sure when. I search and find it, lurking behind the walls I have raised to keep myself protected; walls that rose, disappointment by disappointment, while I was too scared, too lazy, to tear them down. I have spent most of myself clutching at the form, at the outline, of a life that never happened. I have preserved myself in amber, golden in my cage, numb but safe. And suddenly I feel a crack, and then another, and I see the flicker of possibilities beyond my imagination.

  ***

  After my first class, I ask Helen Lowie to stay behind. I wait until everyone else has left and close the door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to her, terrified that I’ll start crying. Helen gapes at me, her bag clenched to her chest.

  ‘I am sorry that I’ve not been more supportive,’ I say.

  ‘That’s alright, Miss,’ Helen says, her face bright red.

  ‘It is not alright. You are very talented, Helen. You really have a way with feelings, like … an impressionist.’

  Helen looks at me like I may be mad, possibly dangerous, and I realise that I’m sounding like Alice.

  ‘Look, I want to help you. I want to submit some of your work. See if we can get you published.’

  ‘Oh, Miss …’ Helen whispers, ‘thank you so very much. You really like them?’

  ‘I really do,’ I say, and I really do.

  I look for Lea at lunch but she’s nowhere to be found. Alice tells me she’s not been in, and that she had to clean up a pile of pink sick after Oliver Linberg dared Caz Allen to eat a tub of Carnelian oil paint.

  Dexter interrupts my last class, just as I’m entertaining 7a with stories about famous writers and their fucked-up personal lives. I’m in the middle of giving a dramatic reenactment of Virginia Woolf’s death when Dexter enters my class and immediately kills the laughter.

  ‘Read from your books,’ she instructs them as she motions for me to exit with her.

  We walk in silence through the hall and I get a bad feeling listening to her heels clip-clop ahead of me.

  As we pass Marie at her desk, she gives me a constipated look of half-concern, half-disbelief.

  ‘Lea Olvi,’ Dexter finally says, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  An image of her naked body, strong and so warm, drifts before me.

  ‘No,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think she was in today.’

  Dexter takes a deep breath and sits down. She urges me to do the same, and I obey, grateful to live to tell another lie. Now, she looks to me like a concerned mother, weary and searching.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.

  ‘Mr Francis Allenton called us. He is Principal of St Martins Academy in Oxfordshire. His daughter’s name is Julie Allenton.’

  ‘Right … I don’t understand.’

  ‘She ran away a few months ago. The police were called. I’ve spent two hours talking to a DC something or other. Good God, she’s just seventeen years old.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Who? Lea Olvi … Julie Allenton, that’s who. The girl stole her sister’s passport. How could we have lost her?’

  ‘Her sister? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘The older sister is a Leonora Olvi. Julie stole her passport. Someone recognised her at the National Gallery yesterday. They heard the name of the school and alerted the police. My God.’

  ‘She is seventeen?’

  ‘She is. Her father thought she was dead. He told me that.’

  ‘Why did she run away?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nina, I don’t care.’

  When I get home an hour later there is no trace of Lea, of Julie. I try to call her mobile twice, and am about to hang up when her voicemail kicks in, but then I don’t.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘If you need anything … you know.’ And I hang up.

  Then I take out Helen Lowie’s notebook and read it one more time.

  Strays

  The sun loomed above the cement blocks of the city, a bully in an empty playground, having now, at noon, chased away all shadows. It had not rained for four months and people, especially the old, had been dying for the past two weeks, most of them living in filthy homes on the outskirts of the capital. These were places where aged patients, turned out of hospital for being too well, went if they had nowhere else to go. During the siege of winter they had no heating for weeks at a time. Sometimes the one nurse begrudgingly assigned to each home forgot to bring the food allowance provided through a French charity. In one home, three inmates had been found dead, shrivelled like potpourri in the garden among the sage bushes they were tending. Apparently they had been caught out by the noonday heat and sat down for a moment’s rest. By the time the nurse patrolling the home had found them only one had sufficient breath left to grab onto her plump arm with a trembling hand and, gazing up at the pink stern face, whisper: ‘I want to go home …’ and ‘Damn me, you are one ugly dog of a woman.’

  It was just past noon, the traffic a slow drip through the artery leading from suburbia to the city centre. On the side of the road men in rough peasant’s trousers and women in heavy skirts were selling watermelons from the back of carts. Stray dogs lurked on every corner, still in the heat and diffused by the rising dust. Mina felt resentful at where she had been brought and for a silent moment of indistinct thoughtlessness resented Lili for dying in this place.

  Just that morning, she had been spread-eagled on the carpet of her living room, plucking at her bikini-line and watching Saturday morning TV.

  Now in the cab, flung from side to side, Mina could feel the unfamiliarity like sharp fingers digging in her ribs. Outside, the heat rising from the asphalt gave the impression of puddles on the road ahead.

  Mina could also feel something else; a sour guilt, making its way through her system like a bad meal. She had taken the earliest flight from London and had felt relieved to be leaving. A month away from work and Alice, even in this place, would be a good thing.

  Alice, whom she had left looking like an orphan in a High Street Kensington Starbucks. Mina had arranged the meeting and selected Starbucks, knowing it would be packed on a Saturday. She’ marched up and delivered her news with swift military efficiency. Alice had barely blinked; she had listened in silence, s
tirring her mug and watching people walking in and out. Mina had left her with a final ‘I wanted you to know’, then gone home and packed her bags. She had been annoyed at her friend’s gentle acceptance, her sad little face, like she had nothing to say, or even worse: like she had always known it would happen. Like Mina’s betrayal was barely a surprise.

  A few hours later she was on the plane and while in the air she had felt at ease, almost light-headed, but as soon as the plane started its descent Mina remembered why she was returning.

  At the airport she had jumped into the first cab that urged her in. She had replied in English when the driver asked whether she was here on holiday.

  ‘For a funeral,’ she’d told him, surprising herself.

  The driver had only nodded in silence, but Mina felt exposed, and she continued the conversation quietly, with herself, in preparation.

  ‘Am fost tare ocupată cu viaţa mea,’ she said, over and over, until she was sure she had it right.

  Her thighs were sticking to the plastic seat and she could see the driver looking at her through the rear-view mirror.

  ‘You Romanian?’ he asked, flicking a cigarette butt out the window.

  ‘English.’

  ‘No, no, English girls are pale and skinny.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘English come for summer. Americans too. They come for the sea; they come for cheap holiday and act like pigs, make a mess and go back to New York and London and call us dirty.’

  Mina took a deep breath and said nothing.

  ‘You live in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nice, nice … What do you do?’

  ‘I am a doctor.’

  Mina looked straight at the strip of face in the mirror. The driver’s eyes had widened.

  ‘Very good, very good.’

  Though she knew the driver had charged her the tourist rate for the short ride, she paid without argument. There was plenty of time before her train so Mina walked around the station, at first in search of food and then of the toilets.

  On her way to platform sixteen, a cluster of dirty children gathered around her with their palms turned up and their whines a simple, constant onslaught. They followed her, jogging by her side, one even trying to sneak a little paw in her pocket, until her awkwardness flipped to annoyance and she finally snapped, ‘Fuck the hell off.’