by Ruth Thomas
‘Anyway,’ my mother said, ‘she was certainly full of the joys of spring.’
It was like trying to fit into a place I was too big for. It was like being the freakishly large Alice in Alice in Wonderland, my limbs poking out through the doors and windows.
‘Was she?’ my father said, looking, suddenly, a little lost. Neither of my parents had mentioned my recent change of hair colour; not once, since I’d appeared in the kitchen, transformed, the previous evening. They’d just glanced at it, as if it might imply something more worrying. The beetroot slices, sitting in a bowl in front of me, were pretty much the same colour as my hair. ‘It’s a very odd thing / As odd as can be . . .’ I thought, remembering another poem from school – ‘That whatever Miss T eats turns into Miss T . . .’ – and then I speared a slice of beetroot with my fork and put it into my mouth.
‘So, all set for school tomorrow?’ my father asked as we progressed onto the fruit salad.
‘Yes,’ I said, levelly. ‘I’m reading with the Fantastic Foxes tomorrow. Then I’ll probably be helping out in the Home Corner.’
‘The Fantastic Foxes? What’s the Fantastic Foxes?’ asked my father, and my heart sank.
‘It’s a reading group,’ I explained. ‘We also have Excellent Elephants, Terrific Tigers and Cool Cats.’
‘Oh, have you? And which one’s top?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Which one’s the top reading group?’
‘That’s not the point, Dad. That’s why they’ve been given those names. So you can’t tell who’s top.’
‘Hah!’ my father said. ‘But surely it’s going to be obvious, isn’t it? Surely if one group’s reading War and Peace and another group’s reading Peter and Jane, everyone will know!’
I looked down at my plate.
‘Nobody’s reading War and Peace,’ I mumbled. ‘Or Peter and Jane,’ I added.
And when I looked up again at my father his expression was one of utter blankness. It often was, that summer. I suppose he’d presumed, like everyone else, that I would have flown the coop. That I would have stretched my wings and flown. But there I still was! – there I was, living at home with them when I should have been somewhere else!
‘And what’s a Home Corner again?’ he asked.
‘A Home Corner’, I replied, ‘is a corner of the room that’s like a little kind of . . . home. It’s got a cooker and a sink and a washing machine and an ironing board,’ I ploughed on, feeling suddenly upset for some reason. ‘And a table. A little table and chairs. And crockery. I mean, it’s basically a Wendy house,’ I concluded, ‘like the one I used to have when I was little.’
‘You never had a Wendy house,’ my mother said.
‘Didn’t I?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
I gazed across at the Dundee cake.
‘What was that thing I used to play in, then?’ I said. ‘I remember I used to play in some kind of . . .’
‘That was the clothes airer. That’s probably what you’re thinking of. That nice old wooden one we had, with the canvas straps. I used to turn it on its side for you and hang the travel rug over it.’
‘Oh yes,’ I replied, embarrassed. And I thought of the laundry room Ed McRae had taken me to in his house – I couldn’t help it – and then I did remember it, our old clothes airer, I remembered it with a sudden, sharp nostalgia. I was transported back to that place that had been just mine, and the scent of the heavy, tartan wool, and my bears lined up in a row: Clive, Catface and Red Bear.
‘Anyway,’ my mother went on, ‘it’s nice, the things they have in schools now. Schools are so much better equipped these days, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I put a half-strawberry into my mouth and swallowed it. Then I sliced a piece of cake in half and swallowed that. From the living room, the clock on the mantelpiece began its tinselly rendition of the Westminster chimes.
‘So: coffee?’ my mother suggested. ‘Why don’t you go and sit in the living room,’ she added to my father, ‘and I’ll bring coffee through in a minute.’
‘Can’t help with the washing-up?’ he replied, already getting up and legging it towards the door. It was a kind of routine they had.
‘No,’ my mother said, ‘you go and sit down.’
‘Alright, love.’
And he went to sit in the living room and gaze at the swifts swooping past the window – the swifts being, in my opinion, the only creatures leading productive lives on our street that summer.
*
I helped my mother to wash up. I folded the damp tea towel (Robert Burns bordered by thistles) and hung it over the radiator. I wiped down the table. Then I went back upstairs, lay on my bed and looked up through the thick, slanting window, up and up at the sky. A plane, 35,000 feet up, appeared at one corner of the frame and began to draw a pure white line through the blue, from left to right. And that was all: just this rectangle of pure blue with a line through it, like a ticked box. I flopped off my bed after a while and went over to the window to look down. If I stood on tiptoe and craned my neck, I could just make out Mrs Crieff’s house at number 25. I could see the concrete birdbath on her patio, and the lopsided, busby-shaped cypress hedge at the end of her lawn, and beyond that, the view of the Pentland Hills. Once, two summers earlier, I’d gone on a trip to those hills with my art class. We’d all wandered around with our A3 sketch pads and our tins of pencils and putty rubbers, trying to work out perspectives, and watching as dozens of small grey rabbits lolloped around us in the grass. They’d been funny, those rabbits. They had been more interesting, in a lot of ways, than the lesson on perspective.
‘I thought you were out in the garden, love!’ my mother said, coming upstairs after a while to get something from the airing cupboard outside my room. ‘You ought to be out getting some sun! What are you doing up here?’
‘Nothing much,’ I replied, peering down at the bright summer green of our lawn.
‘Why don’t you ever go outside and draw like you used to?’ she continued. ‘You never do any more, Luisa, and it’s a real shame.’
‘What is?’
‘That you don’t draw! What wouldn’t I give’, she carried on, ‘to go and sit in the garden and draw! To just go down and . . .’
‘So why don’t you then, Mum?’ I snapped. ‘What’s stopping you?’
And her face turned a little pink. Once, when I was younger, she’d attended drawing classes at our local community centre. She’d kept the pictures, stored away in one of my father’s old briefcases: charcoal drawings of plastic anemones and earthenware jugs and stuffed Victorian pheasants. I think she’d planned to do something with them. Frame them, maybe, or sell them in a cafe.
‘All I’m saying, Luisa,’ she said as she stood in the doorway, ‘is there’s plenty things you could be doing this evening instead of moping about up here! I mean, what about that card, for one thing, that you were going to make for Kirsty?’
‘What card?’
‘That congratulations card.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Kirsty was a cousin of mine. She and her husband lived in a brand-new house in Dalgety Bay and had recently had their first baby, a girl they’d named Aimee Dorothy: Aimee because she was loved and Dorothy after her grandmother. And I’d told my mother that I’d make them a card: a ‘Well Done’ card to celebrate Aimee Dorothy’s arrival. I couldn’t think why I’d said that, now, though. I just said things sometimes, and they were complete lies.
‘It might be a nice thing to do,’ my mother continued, ‘don’t you think? If you’ve got time on your hands . . .’
‘Why?’
‘Because you like drawing.’
‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘And I’ll probably not even meet the baby till she’s eighteen or something.’
I stopped talking and looked down at my feet, bare and white against the pale-green carpet. I thought of my cousin. Mrs Kirsty Robinson. The last time I’d seen her was at her wedding, a year
earlier. I’d sat at an octagonal table with all her old university friends – a group of people in their late twenties I’d never met in my life before. I remembered that I’d drunk a lot of wine and had proclaimed, during a lull in the conversation, that I’d once floated 2,000 feet above that very building in a hot-air balloon. And all Kirsty’s old university friends had just stared at me, their little nests of sugared almonds on the table in front of them.
‘The thing is, Mum,’ I said, ‘I’m not eight any more, am I? I don’t need to do things any more like make congratulations cards. I mean, I hardly even know Kirsty, really. We only ever meet at weddings and funerals. And she’s already going to be swamped with baby cards.’
My mother’s expression had changed, subtly, from something like sorrow to something more like irritation.
‘All I’m saying’, she said, ‘is there’s plenty of things you could be doing.’
Which was true: there were plenty of things. So far, though, I wasn’t doing any of them.
5
I was late in to St Luke’s on Monday morning. The playground was already three-quarters empty by the time I made it through the gates. Only a few of the older children were still left outside, standing around in uneven lines, and some mothers, hanging about in their groups of threes and fours, arms folded or weighed down by babies and shoulder bags.
‘Good morning!’ I called to them brightly, brightly, over the song I was listening to on my old Walkman. And I strode past and onwards across the tarmac, in my big black shoes. I am nineteen, I reminded myself, and I am wearing sensible shoes. I am saying ‘Good morning’ and wearing sensible shoes.
‘Hi, Miss McKenzie,’ one or two of the mothers said cautiously as I passed them – the sensible quality of my shoes already undermined that morning by the Walkman and the stupid colour of my hair. Some of them didn’t like me much: they had not liked me from the word go.
I continued on, the smile cheerful on my face, and looked down at my watch. It was already gone nine. It was already nearly ten past.
‘More than a little late this morning,’ uttered Mrs Crieff, appearing at the main doors as I was heading towards the steps. Because Mrs Crieff was always there, somehow, when I was being at my least impressive.
I paused on the bottom step, removed the headphones from my ears and switched off The Hissing of Summer Lawns.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Good morning,’ corrected Mrs Crieff. Our conversation was already back to front, somehow, and wrong. A sudden gust of wind whizzed around the corner of the school and blew my hair in front of my face. I was conscious of my thin cotton skirt wrapping itself around my legs, and of my big, sensible, classroom-assistant shoes which did not go with it; and also of my Indian bangles, which clattered together as I moved my arm.
Mrs Crieff was wearing one of her silk-effect, dry-clean-only blouses. Her hair remained stationary. Her jacket was so bright and well maintained it looked as if it might bounce if you touched it.
‘Overslept?’
‘It’s just, the traffic was really awful today,’ I said.
‘Not that I noticed,’ Mrs Crieff retorted, her gaze flicking disconcertingly to my left hand as I pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. She was carrying a yellow cardboard folder which had ‘Assessments’ written on it. ‘It seemed pretty normal to me. And anyway, I thought you came by bus. I thought you got the 8.32 from the bottom of the Drive.’
‘I do,’ I confirmed. ‘It was just, the bus had to go on all these . . . diversions today. And, you know, I suppose buses are not exempt from . . .’ – I hesitated – ‘. . . traffic jams.’
I stopped talking and glanced down at a wooden tub which stood at the top of the steps. It contained a display of yellow bedding plants. I’d once heard Mrs Crieff call them Black-Eyed Susans, though I’d always known them as Busy Lizzies. My mother called them that, and I was pretty sure they were Busy Lizzies.
‘Well, it’s nearly quarter past. You’ve pretty much missed assembly, anyway,’ Mrs Crieff said. ‘It was Reverend Johnston today’; and when I looked up again, she was frowning. In all honesty, Luisa, she’d said to me at our last meeting a couple of weeks earlier, you’re going to have to up your game, if I’m to tick all the boxes on your assessment form. ‘Up my game?’ I’d asked. Yes. In terms of your levels of commitment. I mean, we can hardly tick the punctuality box!
‘You’re not forgetting our meeting at eleven this morning, are you?’ she said now, in a flat voice.
‘No, I’m not,’ I replied. Although I had forgotten; up until that moment I’d forgotten completely. I’d been meaning to put it in my diary, this meeting where I’d declare all the ways in which I’d upped my game; and then I hadn’t.
‘See you at eleven, then,’ Mrs Crieff said, progressing down the steps. ‘In my office,’ she added, as if I might not have worked this out.
I watched her carry on across the playground with her yellow cardboard folder, past the silver birch tree and the frog-shaped rubbish bin, and disappear around a corner. She always left the scent of perfume in her wake: one of those acerbic ones with a scary name. It had top notes of something like petrol and blueberries.
I pushed the Walkman and headphones into my bag. And then I carried on, on my zigzag journey through the school, towards the Portakabin. I was late, I was late, and Mrs Crieff didn’t like me. Mrs Crieff had causes for concern. And what more was there to say? I tried not to imagine what she might have to tell me at our meeting – and also, more worryingly, on Friday, the last day of term, the day that marked the end of my trial period. Because you can try, and not succeed. You can try, and fail, despite your best intentions.
*
The walls of the Portakabin were rattling slightly in the breeze as I approached. I clattered up the ramp past the collection of scooters and trikes, pressed the security code on the keypad, opened the door and plodded along the linoleum and plasticine-scented corridor to the classroom.
Mrs Baxter was alone. She was kneeling on the floor as if praying, and surrounded by a lot of empty egg boxes. Empty egg boxes – empty cardboard boxes in general – were a fact of life at St Luke’s.
‘Hi, Morag,’ I said in my breezy Monday voice.
‘The children are almost back from assembly,’ she replied balefully. ‘You really should try and get here earlier, Luisa.’
Then she looked up and did a quick kind of double take.
‘What in God’s name have you done to your hair?’ ‘Oh yes, my hair,’ I replied. ‘Well, it was just a bit of an experiment. I thought it was one of those wash-in, wash-out things, you see, only –’
‘– it didn’t wash out,’ Mrs Baxter concluded. Boom, boom. We were a bit of a double act, me and Mrs Baxter.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘no, it didn’t.’
I didn’t add that I’d tried to wash it out many times over the course of the weekend; that I’d given up after the seventh attempt, watching the pale-pink foam disappear down the plughole. And I couldn’t help thinking now that my peculiar hair might be something else that counted against me, on Mrs Crieff’s form.
‘Anyway, it’s good having a change sometimes, isn’t it?’ I said, ploughing on into the main arena of the classroom. The body of the kirk, as Mrs Baxter called it. Here, beyond the sand tray and the rocking horse, there was a large green cupboard with a label on it saying Mats. The mats were one of my tasks that morning; they had been, for the whole term. I opened the door of the cupboard and pulled out twenty-nine of them: twenty-nine foam-filled rectangles of red and yellow and blue. Then I carried them, stacked, in seven trips, back and forth to the centre of the room and began distributing them in a large, orderly circle on the floor. It was like setting up a fairy ring. I always placed them in the same recurrent order: red, yellow, blue; red, yellow, blue; red, yellow, blue. I sometimes liked to create order out of chaos.
‘So: nice weekend?’ Mrs Baxter asked, plodding through the circle in her flat shoes to pin the day’s snack menu on the
noticeboard. Mondays were breadsticks and raisins.
‘Pretty good, thanks,’ I lied. ‘How was yours?’
‘Fab. Doug and I spent nearly all of yesterday at the garden centre.’
‘Really?’ I said.
Sometimes the things Mrs Baxter told me she’d done at the weekend were so unlike anything I’d do that it left me almost speechless. She’d once told me she bought a Marks and Spencer’s ready-meal every Friday night – ‘come rain or shine’ – which she and her husband always ate while watching Bergerac. And somehow, when she’d said that, I couldn’t imagine her ever having experienced uncertainty about anything in her life. Uncertainty or regret. I’d pictured the last time I’d gone to a garden centre myself, the previous Christmas, with my parents. I’d thought of the sinister reindeer animatrons that had swayed their heads in time to ‘Jingle Bells’, and the rows and rows of bright red poinsettias.
‘We stayed for tea. Because they do teas and coffees there now. And soup. And we got some lovely begonias,’ Mrs Baxter said.
‘Did you?’ I didn’t even know what begonias looked like.
‘Some really super ones. All sorts of bright colours,’ she added, her eyes darting up to my hair again.
Mrs Baxter had recently become a grandmother: she’d brought in several photographs of a red-faced, angry-looking baby to show everyone in the staffroom. ‘Isn’t he a poppet?’ she’d said.
‘Yeah, he’s really cute,’ I’d replied dutifully, peering over her shoulder at the picture.
‘My daughter’s had his handprint cast in silver. This teeny wee handprint. She’s getting it put on a pendant.’
‘What a nice idea,’ I’d said. Because, really, what else was there to say? I didn’t want to think about babies. I wanted to be as far removed as I could possibly be from a life involving babies’ handprints cast in silver and strung onto pendants. I didn’t want to imagine what kind of emotion made you want to do things like that. ‘So, that’s the menu up,’ Mrs Baxter said now, stepping back from the noticeboard and smoothing her skirt flat with the palms of her hands.
