The Home Corner

by Ruth Thomas

  John Singer had been sitting on the outside of the Home Corner for most of the morning. It was where he often sat: it was his place, and sometimes the sight of him there made me feel sorry. So before Tidy-Up Time began in earnest, while the girls in the Home Corner were finishing their waterless washing-up, I went over to him, to help him put together a jigsaw puzzle he was doing – a picture of a rocket with an insanely happy astronaut waving through the porthole.

  ‘Hi John,’ I said, kneeling down beside the little table.

  John ignored me. He was concentrating hard, breathing through his mouth.

  ‘Hi there,’ I tried again.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘How’s the puzzle going?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He clicked a piece into place.

  ‘He looks very . . .’ – I couldn’t think how to describe the mad spaceman – ‘. . . cheery.’

  John sighed and connected two sections of puzzle together, giving the moon a face. The moon was smiling too. Everything was smiling, even the stars.

  ‘Miss McKenzie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, John?’

  ‘There was something I wanted to talk about in Circle Time. But I didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said, and I hesitated. When John Singer said something like this you never really knew what tangent you might go off at. ‘Well,’ I said in as wise a tone as I could manage, ‘why don’t you tell me now? About what you wanted to—’

  ‘I was going to say’, he interrupted, ‘about a bit of Fool’s Gold I’ve got.’

  ‘Oh. Have you got a piece of Fool’s Gold?’

  And he looked at me. I don’t know why I spoke like that sometimes, in that stupid, echoing way, like some bat in a cave.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, patiently. ‘My mum got it for me from the museum. Do you know why it’s called Fool’s Gold?’

  ‘No? Why is it called that?’ I asked, hoping I sounded intrigued, instead of merely stupid.

  ‘Because fools think it’s gold.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Only it’s not. It’s just a bit of rock.’

  He spoke the truth, John Singer – he was faithful and true – and sometimes it could be a bit devastating. We returned to the puzzle in silence.

  ‘Miss McKenzie?’ he asked again after a moment; and a kind of apprehension flickered back into my heart, like a relit gas flame.

  ‘If something gets between you and gravity,’ he said, ‘guess what happens?’

  ‘Hmm. If something gets between you and gravity? Well,’ I replied, ‘I really don’t know.’ Because I didn’t: I really didn’t know what happened to you if you got on the wrong side of gravity.

  John sighed and looked out through the window. He stared out across the tarmac at the waving leaves on the silver birch tree.

  ‘You float up into space,’ he said. ‘And sometimes you never come back down.’

  I waited for him to continue, but it seemed he had said everything he wanted to say.

  ‘Well,’ I said after a moment – sensible, unflappable Miss McKenzie – ‘I never knew that. It’s time to tidy up, now though. Shall we slide the puzzle into the box and you can come back to it after lunch?’

  ‘No, let’s just scribble and scrabble it all up,’ he replied, pouncing on the puzzle with his fingers and breaking the picture up.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s more fun.’

  ‘OK.’

  He could do unexpected things, John. He had been going through a difficult time over the past few months, Mrs Baxter had confided to me one lunchtime. ‘He’s not had an easy time of it, poor wee sausage, what with all the changes at home,’ she’d said, delicately poking a stray strand of coleslaw into her mouth. And I suspected his parents were getting divorced, because he was always talking about them in different contexts – his mother taking him out to the zoo or for hot chocolate in a cafe, his father forgetting to put his lunch box into his schoolbag – things like that. Quite a lot of the St Luke’s parents seemed to get divorced. It seemed to be an occupational hazard. And Mrs Baxter had been on the point of telling me more about the Singer family’s situation when Mr Temple from class P6 had suddenly bounced into the staffroom with some charity raffle tickets to sell – ‘I’ll buy five, Mark,’ Mrs Baxter had said in her flat, unperturbed way – and when we’d resumed our conversation she’d spoken about something completely different: I think it was about someone’s time-share apartment in Mallorca. Or Maspalomas, maybe. And I hadn’t had the nerve after that to wheedle it out of her, about the difficult times John Singer was going through. Difficult times were best kept private, anyway, in my opinion. Everyone had difficult times, and they were best kept under lock and key.

  *

  I set off for Mrs Crieff’s office while the children were still having their snack. I slunk out of the Portakabin and hurried back across the playground beneath the lightly falling rain. Back indoors again I ascended the main staircase two at a time, aware of my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

  Mrs Crieff did not seem overjoyed to see me.

  ‘Luisa,’ she said, opening her door and giving me one of her on/off smiles.

  ‘Now, as you know, the reason we’re meeting today’, she continued as we both plodded across her office and sat down on either side of her enormous desk, ‘is so we can remind ourselves of your work over the past few months here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And so we can talk about your . . .’ – she paused – ‘ongoing role with us.’

  ‘Right.’ My voice stuck. I cleared my throat. ‘Right,’ I said again.

  Mrs Crieff picked a piece of paper up off the desk and pushed it towards me.

  ‘Now, these are all areas I’ve not been able to fully tick,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  Luisa McKenzie, it said on the piece of paper:

  End of Year Appraisal: targets to be consolidated

  Punctuality

  Referring to teacher’s plans

  Recording observations

  There were question marks in green pen beside each of these points. Beside Punctuality there was a question mark and an exclamation mark. I thought of the first meeting we’d had in that room the previous autumn, when I’d declared such enthusiasm for the job of classroom assistant. And for a moment Susan Ford floated into my mind again, poor ghostly Miss Ford, who had begun to symbolise all the ways in which I was also failing.

  ‘So,’ Mrs Crieff continued briskly, ‘as you can see, Luisa, there are still a few areas I’ve not been able to sign off. Which is certainly not ideal, at this late point in the school year. Though there’s nothing that can’t be fixed here,’ she added, doubtfully. ‘This is the last week of term, but we’re not dead in the water yet.’

  I thought of a duck, floating motionless on a pond. I never even told you about Moonchild, I thought. Moonchild had never even appeared on my CV. And most of the rest of it had been lies, in some form or another.

  ‘So how can I fix things?’ I heard myself asking. Because I didn’t want to work at St Luke’s: I didn’t want to work there, but I didn’t want to get sacked, either. It seemed to me, sometimes, that going to St Luke’s on the bus every morning was the only thing that had prevented me from floating away altogether, into outer space, like John Singer’s astronaut.

  Mrs Crieff gazed at me, as if trying to understand the gulf between us. On the wall behind her were two framed prints which had formed a sort of backdrop to our meetings over the past few months. One of them proclaimed the St Luke’s motto, Veritas et Fidelis, printed in rather beautiful copper-plate lettering. The other had the words of The Desiderata typed on it: Speak your truth quietly and clearly, it said, and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant: they too have their story . . . Mrs Crieff had told me once that The Desiderata was a sort of mantra for her, a kind of personal prayer, and it had made me want to scream.

  ‘What I mean is,’ I began, trying to sound intrigued about my
own place in the unfurling of life, and at St Luke’s in particular, ‘what’s the best way I can . . . improve things, before the end of . . . this week? In your opinion?’

  Mrs Crieff breathed in.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ she said quickly. ‘What I’ve got here, Luisa, is this form I have to fill in and fax to the council on Friday morning. It’s called a Probationary Year Assessment Form. And as long as the boxes I tick on it are either labelled “Achieved” or “Achieving”, you’re home and dry.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We just don’t want any of them, at the end of term, to say “Unachieved”.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not really up to me, ultimately – I should stress that. It’s just that the form’s going to the council. And they’re the ones who make decisions about probationary staff.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I can’t, in all honesty, say you’ve been 100 per cent committed this term, Luisa,’ she added, almost chirpily now, like a sprightly little bird, ‘or even 100 per cent focused on the curriculum. Can I?’

  ‘No.’

  I couldn’t quite see the page Mrs Crieff was referring to. I wondered how many of the boxes on it said ‘Unachieved’. Maybe they all said that.

  ‘But, as I said, we’re not dead in the water. By no means, actually, you’ll be pleased to know. We really don’t want to lose you, Luisa,’ she added with a sudden, unnerving intensity.

  ‘OK,’ I whispered, my hands clenched into fists on my lap.

  ‘And it honestly doesn’t take much to turn “Unachieved” into “Achieving”. Just showing a bit more willing would be all it takes! Getting on an earlier bus! Sticking, for the coming week, with the topics the children are supposed to be learning. Maybe, even,’ she added, as if inspired, ‘you could demonstrate your ability to engage with the curriculum during the school trip tomorrow.’ I mean, it’s not rocket science, darling, she looked as if she was thinking.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mrs Crieff continued, changing tack; and she smiled again and leaned forward a little in her chair – ‘in more general terms, Luisa, how are you feeling, in yourself, about the job? How are things going?’

  I stared at her. She was like the good cop and the bad cop, rolled into one person.

  ‘How are things going?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Because we have a commitment to you, too, of course. A duty of care. I mean, are you enjoying it here? Is your job matching up to your expectations?’

  And she stopped talking. I felt a little stricken. Somebody had asked me the same question a few weeks earlier: Mary Wedderburn had phoned me up out of the blue for a chat – ‘Hi Luisa, how’re things going?’ she’d said – and, for some reason, as soon as I’d put the phone down, I’d started to cry.

  ‘Well, I suppose I didn’t have any particular expectations about the job,’ I heard myself saying, and a look of sheer incredulity passed across Mrs Crieff’s face.

  ‘Really? No . . . particular expectations . . .’ she repeated, and she picked up a pen and began to write something down. I waited for her to stop writing and wondered what I was going to say next. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what sentence might be about to come out of my mouth. And now there was this new sense, as I sat there – this realisation – that I did still want the job, just a little. I did actually want to work there a tiny bit. If only to stop myself becoming another Miss Ford.

  ‘I suppose’, I said, in an attempt to limit the damage I’d already done, ‘the thing that’s exceeded my expectations is all the art projects we’ve been doing . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Mrs Crieff, somewhat morosely.

  ‘And the children are great,’ I added. ‘And Mrs Baxter’s been . . .’

  ‘Supportive?’ Mrs Crieff asked, looking up, her pen poised.

  ‘Yes, she has,’ I said.

  ‘Super,’ Mrs Crieff said, ticking something on the form in front of her. ‘So the children and the rest of the staff have, in your opinion, been a positive aspect about working here?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, wouldn’t it be awful’, I said, ‘to work in a school and not like the children and the rest of the staff?’

  Mrs Crieff peered at me. I peered back. My brain whirred for something to add. As a child myself, I’d once used to worry that my thoughts might be visible in little clouds above my head, and now I could feel the same old idea bubbling up. What if my thoughts are there, as clear as day? What if she knows what I’m really thinking?

  ‘Anyway,’ I ploughed on, ‘I’ve really been enjoying some of the things we do in class. You know, some of our routines. Like Circle Time, and Show and Tell.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mrs Crieff.

  ‘Last Friday was great, for instance,’ I carried on, ‘because one of the girls brought in a haggis.’

  ‘A haggis?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied; because it was true: Ruby Simpson, whose father worked in a butcher’s shop, had brought a haggis in to Show and Tell, smooth and shiny as a large pebble.

  Mrs Crieff looked a little pained. ‘Hmm,’ she said. And my confidence began to ebb again – it just began slipping away as we sat there confronting each other.

  ‘So, perhaps on balance we can say you’re feeling settled in the post, then?’ she said after a moment. ‘Will I tick that box, Luisa? I would like to be able to tick that box.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, glancing down at the two framed photos that sat, side by side, on her desk. They were of Mrs Crieff’s grown-up sons. They were both clad in graduation attire with mortar boards on their heads, the tassles hanging studiously. They looked as if they now worked in insurance or banking. Neither of them looked like the kind of boy I would ever be interested in.

  ‘OK,’ said Mrs Crieff, ‘consider that box ticked.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I replied.

  ‘So: on to the next question. What you have to tell me now is, what’s the best bit about being a classroom assistant?’ She leaned a little further forward across her desk. ‘And what career developments would you – ideally – like to see in the coming year?’

  ‘Hmm, the best bit . . .’ I mused. I didn’t like that word, ideally. ‘Well, I suppose the best bit is probably some of the things the children say.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I mean, they come up with such funny things sometimes, don’t they?’ I continued, sagely. ‘Like, today, Emily Ellis . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘. . . Emily Ellis, in my class . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes, Emily Ellis . . .’ Mrs Crieff reiterated, and she frowned very slightly and scribbled something down again on the notepad in front of her, as if Emily might have committed some kind of crime. I sat and watched her. I felt my mouth becoming dry. And I suddenly didn’t want to tell her my story about Emily – I didn’t really want to tell Mrs Crieff anything about anything – but now I’d started I would have to go on.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘Emily and I were reading a book the other day – it was this story about a car breaking down on the motorway –’

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ Mrs Crieff said, scribbling away.

  ‘– and she suddenly said, “Miss McKenzie, what happens when the break-down truck breaks down?”’

  Mrs Crieff looked up.

  ‘How funny,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a funny thing to say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And I felt quite cold. I felt like someone who has swum too far out to sea without realising it, too far to swim back –

  ‘Yes, it was quite funny,’ I said, ‘the way she just, you know, said it: “What happens when the break-down truck breaks down?” It was just . . .’

  But now Mrs Crieff seemed to have switched off altogether. She was looking past me and out of the window, at the trees on the other side of the playground. She looked as if she was listening to something – the wind in the branches, perhaps – or considering some holy set of instructions. And I wondered if, in some unfathom
able way, I had just failed my assessment. Maybe I had just said something very bad, and Mrs Crieff would not, now, be able to tick any more boxes. And I would lose my job. And then what would I do? How much further would I fall?

  But then, quite suddenly, she snapped out of her reverie. She sighed: it was a snorting kind of sigh that came through her nose, the same sound I’d heard horses make up at the Braid Hills Riding School, when I’d walked past it with my mother.

  ‘Well, children do say such funny things sometimes, don’t they?’ she said. ‘That’s what keeps us on our toes, isn’t it, Luisa? As teachers.’

  And now, without any warning, she was standing up. She was concluding our meeting and rising from her chair.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I grabbed my coat off the back of my chair, picked my bag up from the floor, and stood up, too.

  ‘Well, Luisa,’ Mrs Crieff said, striding across to the door. She looked down at her watch. ‘Eleven fifteen,’ she added, and then she reached out and put her hand on the door handle. ‘So, as long as we can turn those two “Unachieved” boxes into “Achieving” ones over the course of this week, I’m sure the council will be happy to approve a permanent . . .’

  ‘But which ones are they, Mrs Crieff?’ I blurted.

  And there was a moment’s silence. ‘Which ones are what?’ Mrs Crieff asked in a small voice.

  ‘Which are the boxes that still need ticked? The Unachieving ones? Because I’m still not quite . . .’

  ‘The Unachieving areas’, Mrs Crieff interrupted in a low, measured voice, ‘are the same as last time, Luisa. The ones about punctuality and focus. Those are still the areas you need to . . . focus on.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘However. I’ve no doubt you’ll be redoubling your efforts in those areas before the end of the week’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because we don’t want to lose another of our classroom assistants.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And soon the holidays will be upon us and we can all relax.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And if there’s anything you want to come and talk to me about, Luisa, over the next few days, relating to your work here – anything at all,’ she said, as she opened the door onto the vast, draughty corridor, ‘then do come and tell me. Even if it’s outwith school hours.’