Lady and Dog
Olga McClure feeds the pencil into the sharpener, turns the handle. There’s the wood’s slight resistance until it yields to the blade and then the movement runs smooth. She repeats it with another pencil, and then another. It’ll need to be done thirty-two times. Olga knows who hovers at the door but she won’t look over. A pencil emerges with the lead broken. So do it again.
The bright voice: Olga! Olga, you haven’t forgotten our meeting?
I haven’t forgotten, she says, not lifting her head.
Well then, Olga, ready when you are. Just in the next ten minutes.
Ms Druggan sits not at her desk but on the comfortable orange seat in the corner. She wears running gear.
Take a seat, Olga, Ms Druggan says, indicating the comfortable green seat. Now, would you like a cup of tea?
No thank you.
Excuse my outfit, she says. I’m in training for a 10K race.
It’s for charity, says Ms Druggan.
For charity, says Olga. Very good.
So, Ms Druggan begins, I thought it was maybe a good time for the two of us to have a bit of a chat. You know? A chat about a few things here and there that need to be sorted out. Just a couple of things.
Right.
Yes, says Ms Druggan.
I see.
Ms Druggan sits up straighter. Uh huh, she says.
Tell me this, Olga, she says, when, and I want you to be completely honest, when did you last switch on your computer?
My computer?
Yeah.
Well, Olga says, let me see now. Hard to give a definitive answer. Maybe two weeks ago, possibly a little longer. I’m not sure.
Ms Druggan nods her head. More or less what I thought, she says. Do you feel, Olga, do you feel that you’ve been given adequate ICT training? Because obviously a computer that hasn’t been switched on in two weeks is really not ideal. You know what I mean? Now I absolutely realise that there’s a range of staff competence, particularly when it comes to some of the more senior members of staff. Well, senior members of staff in terms of age. I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be for some people to embrace new technology. So, maybe you feel you need further support in order to integrate ICT meaningfully.
No. I wouldn’t say I require further support.
Well that’s good, says Ms Druggan. I’m very glad to hear that. So, to recap, what we’re both in agreement on is that it is really really important that you start integrating ICT meaningfully into your teaching. For equality of experience.
Olga sighs. Equality of experience. What a ridiculous idea.
The children in your class, Ms Druggan continues, have not completed the LIN test, which should have been done at the beginning of last week. That’s when the children in the other classes completed the LIN test.
Oh. Well.
Yes, says Ms Druggan.
The LIN test is where the pupils have to give the monsters the different types of ice cream. I do know it.
It’s a computer-based, standardised cognitive ability assessment.
Well, I’ll perhaps pencil it in for next week.
It should have been done at the beginning of last week, if not earlier, says Ms Druggan.
Well, as I said, I will try to see if I can get it done next week.
Another thing, if you haven’t switched on your computer in two weeks, do you not feel you’ve missed a lot of communication?
Olga thinks. Not really, she says.
What do you mean not really?
This is a primary school with eight people working in eight rooms. It’s hardly a conglomerate. If anyone needs to speak to me, they know where to find me. And if I need to speak to someone the reverse holds true.
Olga picks up the handbag that has been resting at her feet.
Is that it? she says.
When Olga gets home, the dog is pleased to see her. It yaps as she puts out its food. The small brown thing is always busy, tussling with a rope or chasing a ball. Olga hadn’t cared what sort of dog she got. She’d just wanted a dog to take for walks because no one is loitering with a dog. Olga and the dog complete a familiar circuit most evenings so she knows well its favoured lamp posts and the clumps of weeds where it sniffs for whatever’s dank and compelling. On Tuesday and Thursday nights their walk extends further to the park, with its wrought iron gates and bandstand, miniature lake and shady paths. She lets the dog off the lead and it heads down the winding ways, always coming back when she calls Dog! She hasn’t given it a name. The park route takes Olga and the dog past the playground and the miniature lake but they keep going until they come to the pitches.
The others call Ms Druggan Angie. Angie displays her qualifications and certificates on the wall beside a montage of photos of her and her fiancé on various holidays. She’s keen that the staff go out for meals. At Christmas Olga made the concession to go to the dinner which was in an Indian restaurant. She ordered from the European section of the menu, the only one to do so. Old fashioned the others might consider her but there is order in her classroom. Over forty years teaching with well over a thousand children passing through her door. It’s the same pole that has been there for all that time, the one to open the high windows, the same cupboard, bleached by the sun, and filled with yellowing, spotted books. Children in the seventies and children in the eighties gazed out those windows longing for the deep blue air, only to be jolted to the here and now by Olga’s curt shout of their name. Her desk used to be wooden but the desks were all replaced a few years ago so now it’s a toughened laminate. More than a thousand children and she has secretly hated each one at least a bit. There was once a boy she could hardly stand to look at because his eyes were the same, the shape of them. He could have been Eddie’s son. The boy’s work was always marked too severely and she watched him, puzzled, when he opened the jotter. One day she needed a letter posting and she sent him out down the road in the heavy rain. But I’ve no jacket, Miss McClure, he said. I’ve got no jacket with me.
Did you hear what I said? Did you? Go right this minute and no more about it.
He came back shivering with his hair dripping. She could have wrapped her own coat around him. But she said, You’re not a sugar lump. You’ll live.
Ms Druggan has brought in initiatives which Olga has not embraced: children assessing their own work, children celebrating Chinese New Year, graduation ceremonies for pupils moving on to new key stages, Gaelic football training. Olga has never concealed her disapproval of these projects. She nibbled only the edge of a spring roll at Chinese New Year. When it came to Gaelic football she asked Ms Druggan if the parents had been informed about it because there would be plenty who would take a dim view. Ms Druggan said that yes, of course they’d been informed and not one had raised an objection. But that was probably because the letters from the school had turned to pulp at the bottom of the children’s bags, soggy with leaked juice and squashed fruit. Olga had taken it upon herself to bring the Gaelic issue to the attention of George Shields, a mass of muscle and tattoo taught by her when he was nine and skinny. A fortuitous meeting outside the chemist’s one day allowed her to ask if Mason, his son, was looking forward to the Gaelic football. George was pretty sanguine. Where was it happening? Only the school assembly hall? They weren’t going to be playing matches anywhere? He shrugged. Well whatever, he had said. At the Frampton-Martinez fight he had had his photo taken with Carl’s wife. She was lovely. And she was from the west of the city. It was only the school assembly hall, a bit of exercise. People needed to chill for Christ’s sake. It was 2018.
Olga’s evenings are usually segmented neatly into half hours: a half hour to read the paper, half hour to work on the pupils’ books, to walk the dog, half hour to clean the windows perhaps, half hour to watch a television programme. She sits on her usual seat to eat a slice of potato bread and butter, sprinkled with white sugar. That hand’s sweep is quick and smooth: not long until it’s half past six and time to go out. She forgot about
the bin this morning. The length of her street still had plenty of empty blue bins sitting out when she returned home from school. Bright blue bins in the last dregs of pale light. But she’d forgotten and she knew that she’d forgotten because she’d been thinking about this evening, the park walk. She woke up looking forward to it. She could leave the bin out next week. What did it really matter? It was only ever a quarter full anyway.
It’s developed into a reasonable evening. On a night like this plenty of girls will be out on the road, those same girls who five, six years ago sat at a desk in her room, calculating angles and who now are leaning against the windows of the takeaway or the off-licence. Mostly they don’t acknowledge her. She’s well used to the imperious blanking, finding it almost amusing in its own way. The strained denim of their hot pants, worn even at this time of the year. The legs burnished with fake tan. They look down at their breasts as if to check that they’re still there. And then the love bites, those badges proclaiming carnal success, she sees them, those badges worn with pride. Don’t they just consider themselves the first to discover it all? The pioneers. You think I don’t know, Olga wants to say. You think I don’t know about love bites and not on my neck. And the purple and green thumb prints on that fine skin on my hips. A strong, sunburnt, sapling body poured into a tight dress. Well strong becomes stocky as time goes by and a tight dress is passed over in favour of a comfort cut. How could they think she ever knew?
The books are marked already, each with a three line comment in an elegant hand. She did it after school in her room, before sharpening the pencils. Olga wonders about her forgotten password for the computer. She must have written it down somewhere. Olga had thought the dog would shed hairs everywhere but it doesn’t. The neighbours she thought might complain about the barking but they don’t.
The first time that the Gaelic fellow, Cormac, appeared, Olga deliberately overran her lesson. It was only when Ms Druggan appeared that they had to terminate what they were doing. Cormac the Gaelic fellow had shaken her hand hard when Ms Druggan introduced them. His arms were covered in freckles. He said, I was wondering where yous lads were, if yous were ever going to turn up.
Well, they’re here now, Ms Druggan said.
Hey why you not got your trainers on, you not giving it a go yourself?
The question was directed at Olga.
I don’t think so, she said without smiling.
Well you better have them next week, he said. Try and find your old school PE kit as well, see if you still fit into it. Probably still knocking about the house somewhere.
Olga had considered going to see Ms Druggan because that was absolute insolence and she did not appreciate it: only in the place five minutes and the Gaelic fellow was already taking liberties. Futile though, Ms Druggan would say it was nothing more than a joke. Olga noted how the pupils enjoyed their session with him, and did what he said without complaint. Balls went bouncing down the hall. Balls went bouncing up the hall. The estate crowd who she’d thought—hoped—might be trouble listened to every word he said. What very little allegiance they had to her was reassigned to the Gaelic fellow within five minutes of flying footballs and beanbags.
She didn’t even have a pair of training shoes, never mind a kit. When the children did PE she stood at the side of the assembly hall in her neat, low-heel courts, calling out what they should do. A PE kit from school, the very daftness of it. There was little in the house from her younger days, apart from a few pieces of crockery that had belonged to her mother. On the mantelpiece she used to have that photo of where she grew up but not anymore. The newspaper clipping she had carried in her handbag, had been folded and unfolded so many times that it finally disintegrated into pieces. Snipped out forty-five years ago with the only scissors that were about at the time, the pinking shears with the zig-zag edges. She put the paper in the bin so no one would notice the hole, and query what she was doing. It wasn’t much of a photo, the way he stared out serious and startled, although the quality of the likeness was not the major concern at the time.
The day it happened was dull and hot. Olga wore the blue dress, the one he’d said he liked, although it was the kind of day, everything sticking to you, when you’d happily have taken off all your clothes. The hair at her nape was damp and dark. He had said where he was going to be, working in an outhouse, on the way towards the top brae. Going across the river would be easier and not that long way round, the whole distance up to the bridge. The racket of the crickets and all that spit on the long grass: her dress would be soaking with the stuff after going across the fields. Nobody would think anything of seeing her walking along the road, Olga thought, but Eddie had said to be careful even when you don’t think you need to be. That’s when you most need to be careful.
She had seen him just the once in the town with his wife when they were going into the shoe shop on the corner. The shoe shop. Olga would never have imagined him buying shoes. She couldn’t visualise him trying one on, then the other, walking up and down, saying they’re a bit tight, have you got a bigger size? But he hadn’t seen her in the town and she didn’t mention that she had seen him. She didn’t say that she waited behind a wall so she could see him and his wife come out of the shop again, with him carrying the bag. He was still wearing the same old boots the next time she saw him. His wife had hair folded up in into a pleat.
She had said to him one time when she was sitting on his lap, Why is it you like me?
Because you’re seventeen, he said.
No but why is it really?
Because you’re good looking and you’re seventeen. He stroked her head.
She punched his arm. Like you’re the old man. You’re not any more than about five years older. I can even remember when you were at the school.
The school, he groaned. I didn’t like the school and the school didn’t like me.
What is your new uniform going to look like? she asked. You’ll have seen the fellas wearing it.
Yeah, but what do you look like in it? What’s the hat like? Why even join? It’s not as if you don’t already have a job.
Money.
Do you not have enough money?
It wouldn’t seem so, he said.
Olga leaves her terraced street with its tidy gardens to head down the curving road, past the old mill converted into apartments. The dog trots along, pulling pleasantly on the lead. I know, Olga says, I know. We’ll be there soon. At the entrance to the park a group of kids sit on top of one of the picnic tables, pushing and shoving each other, sharing a bottle of something. Their shrieks and laughs echo in the silence of the evening. The tarmac of the path seems to gleam, the sky is pearly. Funny how she lived near the park for all these years without ever venturing into it. It was just something beyond the railings. She has a memory of someone, a politician, having an assignation in some shady corner there with another man. It was in the papers, she is sure. On some of the park benches people sit on their own.
The next time that Cormac the Gaelic fellow came, Olga ensured that she was there promptly in the assembly hall with the children.
Alright chief, he had said to her. You gonna be giving it a go today? We gonna see a bit of involvement from you today?
Olga said there were things that she needed to do back in the room. No point in getting too involved in case she had to leave.
He just nodded. Sure, he said. No probs. Next time though!
From the window she watched him leave after the session. He wore a top with the name of something on it. Those curving, tubby letters, that way of writing, she had never really liked it. Somebody had bought her a mug once that had ‘coffee’ written on it like that and she had put it in the back of the cupboard. Celtic Collection: that was the shop in the town with its sign written like that. She really wouldn’t wear anything green. Her least favourite sweet out of the pastilles was the green. Just the way it was. Ms Druggan had seen her in the corridor that afternoon and had asked if everything was going well with Cormac. Olga s
aid that well, there hadn’t been any complaints, there hadn’t been any complaints so far. Just the way it was. That way of writing though, she’s become accustomed to it. That mug it might still be there, right at the back.
There wasn’t a person she could tell when it happened. Her mother might well have suspected something or other, Olga had sometimes wondered if she did, but nothing was ever mentioned. If only one soul could just have said well there now, there, or put a quiet hand on her arm. A look from someone, a look even without a smile, a look even half in judgment, it would have been something. She saw his wife again in the town and she despised her and the way she was allowed to have her hair all hanging lank as she went around with the sad old face. The wife didn’t know who she was, even though what they felt must have been the equal. The whitewashed wall of the old toilet down in the scullery, it always felt damp to the touch even in the summer; she used to run her finger along it looking for even just a tiny fleck of blood suspended in the wet that would make her breathe the sigh of relief that everything was fine that month. But then, once he wasn’t there any more, she was desperate to see it clear, that the finger run on the wall ran clear, so that he would still be with her in a different way. But there it was, rust against the whitewash.
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