by Ruth Thomas
‘Hi, Shonky,’ I said in the dream.
‘Hiya,’ Shonky replied.
‘What happened to you? Where did you go?’ I asked.
But Shonky didn’t reply. She’d just come round to my house with some little pots of paint, for some complicated, dream-like reason. She’d brought dozens of colours, with names like burnt umber and vermillion and cerulean blue. We were supposed to be painting some picture. But she’d forgotten to bring any paintbrushes.
‘So how are we supposed to paint anything?’ I asked. I was pretty annoyed with her. ‘How are we meant to paint our pictures now?’
8
I walked past Emily Ellis’s mother the next morning as I was heading through the school gates. She was leaning over Emily’s upturned face, wiping toothpaste marks from the corners of her mouth with a paper hanky.
‘Look at you!’ she was saying. ‘Honestly; look at you!’
‘But I can’t look at me, Mummy,’ Emily replied. ‘People can’t look at their own faces.’
Mrs Ellis paused.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said.
And her own face suddenly became rather blank, as if all the thoughts in it had momentarily gone AWOL.
Mrs Ellis was nothing at all like her husband. She was actually one of the few people at St Luke’s I ever felt any connection with. There was just something about her that seemed oddly familiar – probably because she looked as if she didn’t want to be there either, she just looked as if she’d wandered into the playground by mistake. She wore a white trench coat and a pair of high heels, and that was pretty much all I knew about her, apart from the fact that she owned a purple VW Beetle with a sticker on the windscreen that said Purple Bug. Also, there was the fact that she was pregnant. Probably about six months gone, I’d heard some of the other mothers say in their hushed little groups in the playground – which always made pregnancy sound like a kind of madness. As in Maud Gonne’s gone maud, a joke my old English teacher had once told us. We’d been reading Yeats – ‘. . . tread softly because you tread on my dreams . . .’ – and that was what he’d come up with.
Maud Gonne’s gone maud.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Anyway. Sometimes I’d see Mrs Ellis standing there in the playground, her stomach already this big fact in front of her, this gone-ness, and I would feel sorry for her. And I would try not to think of the day I’d put those little yellow pills into my mouth and swallowed them down.
‘Well, I hope you have a nice day, sweet girl,’ she said now to Emily. And she put the paper hanky back into her pocket.
‘Is it long or short?’ Emily asked.
‘Is what long or short?’
‘The day. Is it going to be long or short?’
Mrs Ellis hesitated.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think it’s probably going to be medium-sized. And then there’s the trip of course, isn’t there?’ she added. ‘To that Waterways place.’
I saw Emily frowning at this unsatisfactory explanation. She frowned across the grey playground, focusing her gaze on the set of monkey bars at the far end, which Mrs Crieff always referred to, excitingly, as ‘the adventure playground’. The only thing you could do with the monkey bars, really, though, was to revolve around them, like a cotton reel on a spindle, and sometimes fall off them altogether.
‘You always say things like that,’ Emily said to her mother.
‘What? Things like what?’
‘Things that are upside down and funny.’
‘Upside down and funny. Oh dear.’
‘You’re not thinking straight today, Mummy, are you?’ Emily tutted.
If I had been a different sort of classroom assistant, I might have intervened at this point. I might have swept in, as Miss Blythe from 1C would have done, or Mrs Richards from 1A. I might even have cracked a world-weary joke, as Mr Temple did. ‘Oh, Emily, I might have chuckled, ‘it’s like Twenty Questions sometimes, isn’t it, Mum?!’ Because, at St Luke’s it was OK to call the mothers Mum. You could call the mothers Mum but you couldn’t call the fathers Dad. It was just one of those things.
‘But how long are we going to be at the Waterways Visitor Centre? And why aren’t you coming? And how long is a medium-sized day?’ Emily was insisting as I edged mutely past. Then she began to twist one of her mother’s protruding coat buttons around, between her fingers. Mrs Ellis frowned and prised her daughter’s hand away. How the hell should I know? she looked as if she was thinking. How long is a piece of string?
‘What it is, sweetheart,’ she said after a moment, ‘is it’s a day you spend at school – well, some of it today at the Waterways place, actually; and then you come home. For tea.’
Emily’s frown deepened.
‘But why? Why because you have tea at home? That doesn’t make sense! And anyway, I always have tea at home. And why aren’t you coming to the Waterways place? Some of the other mums are coming!’
‘Oh, Emily.’
Mrs Ellis’s attempt at motherly serenity had completely unravelled now. She just looked upset. She was wearing her trench coat and high heels as if she was on some professional assignment, but her shoes needed a polish and her coat had a sticker of Dumbo on the pocket, and beneath it, there was this baby.
‘I’m going to be late if I don’t go,’ she said, mainly to herself. ‘I’m going to say goodbye now,’ she added, stooping to kiss Emily’s cheek. ‘Have a lovely time on the trip.’
‘Oh, but I wish I could go with you!’ Emily exclaimed, lunging forward and hanging onto her arm.
And for some reason, this sudden outburst sent a little shiver down my spine. I was just reminded, I suppose, of the days when I’d used to say goodbye to my own mother in the playground; of the way I’d missed her as soon as she’d walked away. How I’d wanted to go wherever she was going, in her white knitted hat and her camel coat and shoes!
‘I wish I could stay with you too,’ Mrs Ellis was saying, freeing her hand, finger by finger, from her daughter’s grasp. ‘But I’m sure school . . . will . . . be . . . great,’ she gasped. ‘Go and join your line now. Bye bye, sweet girl.’ And she turned and headed for the gates.
I watched her go. She half ran, despite being pregnant. She legged it so fast she almost stumbled over a scooter that had been locked to the school railings, causing about half a dozen concerned-looking men to come hurrying to her assistance. When she turned back to wave, though, Emily was already walking up the ramp into the Portakabin. Resigned. She was sandwiched between Zac, the plastic-cow boy, who looked white as a sheet and was probably going to be sick, and a girl called Skye, whose cardigan had rainbow buttons on it, secured two holes away from where they should have been.
‘Walk nicely up the ramp,’ boomed Mrs Baxter, standing at the door of the Portakabin, and I fell in, at the back of the line. It was like being at the end of the plank.
‘. . . well, you should come and see our bathroom: it’s got ivy growing through the actual window frame . . .’ I heard one of the mothers saying to another as I approached the ramp.
‘. . . and I found myself standing in the hallway this morning going “Shoes and teeth”,’ another woman was saying. ‘I was just standing there going “Shoes and teeth, shoes and teeth” like a bloody parrot! And nobody was even listening!’
Bolting the door behind me, top and bottom, I wondered where Mrs Ellis had been going in such a hurry, and what she was going to spend her medium-sized day doing; because mothers’ days, between drop-off and pick-up, were pretty short. I thought, too, of the contribution she was planning to make to Mrs Crieff’s jamboree on Thursday. Of the sausages on sticks, while everyone else would be turning up with their empire biscuits and their butterfly cakes. Maybe, in Mrs Ellis’s condition, the smell of baking made her feel sick. Or maybe sausages on sticks was just a good response to have; a good, two-fingered, two-sausage-fingered retort to Mrs Crieff’s heart-warming plans.
*
I had left my Walkman at home that morning
, but I was still not being impressive: I was still not the first one in. I should have been, considering the chat I’d had with Mrs Crieff the previous day. I should at least have been second. Certainly, I should not have been last in the line, behind all the children.
‘Punctual as ever, Miss McKenzie,’ Mrs Baxter said briskly when I appeared in the classroom doorway. She was sitting in her chair, the register open on her lap, and had already begun calling out names. Now she looked up at the enormous wooden teaching clock on the wall, as if it might inform us all of the actual time.
‘Sorry, Morag,’ I said, above the children’s heads. ‘It’s just the bus went this strange route again this morning. It was . . . just a bit all over the place, for some reason.’
‘You’re a bit all over the place, my love,’ Mrs Baxter retorted sotto voce, as I headed past her. We were, after all, supposed to be talking about respect that week: ‘respect’ was the Word, just as yellow was the Colour.
I sat down and looked around. The room looked oddly blank, and after a moment I realised it was because most of the children’s pictures had been taken down off the walls; they had been spirited away overnight. I wondered if the janitor had done it, or perhaps Mrs Crieff, working late. There was now just a series of pale rectangular spaces on the walls, where the day before there had been paintings. The beady-eyed figures with enormous heads and sticks for limbs were gone. The ‘I Am Healthy’ series of florid-hued swimmers in bright turquoise squares of water. Even the animal prints and the posters about Golden Rules and Healthy Eating targets had been removed. There was a pile of them on Mrs Baxter’s desk, waiting to be placed into folders or, possibly, the bin. And the children, sitting in their circle on the floor, all seemed tired. They were all dragging themselves towards the shallows of Friday morning, and appeared to have little strength left. There’d been far too many fun things going on recently, Mrs Crieff had muttered during the staff meeting the previous week – there had been dozens of birthday parties, for instance, brought forward so they wouldn’t have to happen in the holidays; and the children had been arriving at school ashen-faced and with consumptive-looking dark rings around their eyes.
‘Now,’ Mrs Baxter said when she’d finished taking the register, ‘we’ve got a busy day ahead of us today, haven’t we, children?’
‘Yeeesss,’ droned the children.
‘And we’ve just got time now, before we head up to assembly, for our song. Are we all ready to sing our “good morning” song?’
‘Yeeesss.’
And she turned towards the large, clunky tape recorder she kept on her desk.
‘Here we go, then!’ she said, pushing a button and causing some merry electronic notes to bounce out of the machine. It was ‘Peter Rabbit Had a Fly Upon His Nose’, Mrs Baxter’s favourite. We always sang it to the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.
*
We reassembled, ten minutes later, in the hall, for Tuesday assembly. Mrs Crieff was already there by the time we rambled in. She was waiting by the stage microphone with that stiffly patient look she had. Often at assemblies there was a reverend or a rabbi or a humanist, but Mrs Crieff had had to step into the breach that day. The whole week was just going to be funny like that, she’d already told us; it was going to be funny and different. Ends of terms always were.
‘Good morning, children,’ she said now into the microphone after we’d all gathered a short distance from the stage, the children sitting on the cold parquet floor, the teachers on their bendy plastic chairs. And then she just stood for a second, hands clasped, and waited for hush. She was wearing her turquoise power suit again, I noticed, the one made from a kind of bouclé material. Her steel-grey hair looked newly trimmed.
‘Good morning, children,’ she said again as the noise of small voices abated, ‘on this lovely sunny morning, on this very last normal assembly, in fact, of . . .’
‘Yessss,’ growled some P7 boys, skulking like assassins in the shadows behind me. Mrs Crieff stopped, peered in their direction and gave one of her cheerful, magnanimous smiles. The boys grew quiet. Mrs Crieff stood still and smiled and smiled and waited for absolute calm. The boys were silent. And then she resumed. ‘Now, I thought that today, children,’ she said, ‘as it’s such a lovely, bright day, and as it’s our last normal assembly of term, we should all sing the “Golden Rules” song.’
Everyone regarded her a little blankly, some with their mouths hanging open. The smallest children had to tip their heads a long way back to regard her as she spoke because of where they were sitting, right at the foot of the stage. The angles didn’t really work.
‘But we’ve just been singing a song!’ I heard John Singer mutter, a few feet away from me.
‘Miss Almond?’ Mrs Crieff ploughed on, seamlessly, from the stage.
And Miss Almond, kind, cowed Miss Almond the librarian and thwarted musician, began some introductory chords on the piano in the corner of the hall, leaving no one any further space or time in which to complain. School hasn’t changed a bit, I thought, as I stood up and drew breath: it was still full of people singing happy songs about kindness and goodness. When I was at primary school it had usually involved God or the more mysterious Lord, but it was still all the same.
The ‘Golden Rules’ was a song Mrs Crieff often chose.
Gold is the colour of the summer sun,
Gold is the colour of the stars that peep,
Gold is the colour of the badges we earn,
Gold is the colour of the rules we keep.
I always suspected she’d written it herself. It was to do with the way ‘sun’ and ‘earn’ didn’t quite rhyme; also because half the words had to be squashed to fit. It had accompanying hand gestures, too: spread-out fingers to indicate the sunshine, and patting the chest to indicate a well-earned sticker.
‘Now. We sang that song this morning because I think there’s never any harm’, she said when the song came to an end, ‘in remembering the Golden Rules. Is there? Even when we are going into the holidays. Especially when we are going into the holidays!’
She looked down at the children sitting on the floor and at the staff in our positions of servitude on our bowing plastic chairs.
Golden Rules don’t work like that though, do they, Mrs Crieff! I felt like shouting out into the stillness that had suddenly overcome the room. I mean, we had rules at my old school and we had a motto, too – Per Ardua ad Astra – and look where that got me!
I didn’t, of course: I just sat there, my mouth shut.
‘Lovely,’ Mrs Crieff continued into the microphone, as people began to fidget again and rearrange their positions. ‘Because, you know, the Rules might be coming down off the walls this week, but they should stay in everyone’s hearts over the summer holidays, shouldn’t they? They should stay in our heads and our hearts the whole summer long.’
Outside the hall there were still quite a few mothers hanging around the playground, their conversations floating upwards and in, through the opened windows. Somebody was talking about head lice – about a comb you could get called the Nitty-Gritty; somebody else was talking about camping in France. A couple of women standing very close to the window were discussing the marriage breakdown of a friend, and another, larger group was laughing about their children’s manly swimming instructor, and how they wouldn’t mind being rescued from the water by him. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would be OK, they said, if it was him doing it. They were quite raucous, particularly now it was nearly the end of term. They were quite demob happy.
Mrs Crieff, standing at the microphone, suddenly paused at the noise and the subject matter, and rolled her eyes. She tried to look charmed – amusedly fond of those chatty mums disturbing the final assembly of term! – but she was evidently just irked. For God’s sake! I imagined her yelling. Haven’t you got homes to go to? And I pictured her striding across the hall to slam the windows shut.
‘Miss McKenzie, are Mrs Crieff’s rules the same as God’s rules?’ John Sin
ger asked me as we were all returning to the Portakabin again twenty minutes later. And he slipped his hand into mine. It was a warm, slightly damp hand, which a lot of the other children tended to reject. Mrs Baxter and I were really the only people who held his hand.
‘Well, I suppose, in a way, yes,’ I replied. ‘God’s rules are quite like Mrs Crieff’s. If you believe in God.’ And Mrs Crieff, I wanted to add.
‘But who is God?’ he asked.
‘Hmm,’ I said. I didn’t feel qualified to talk to anyone about God. God had been a big disappointment, as far as I was concerned. God was the person, if He existed, who’d picked me up out of the life I’d planned and plonked me back down in the wrong one.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘do you know about ghosts?’
‘Yes, I know about ghosts. Like the ghosts in Scooby Doo.’
‘Well: not exactly. I mean, God is a bit like a ghost, in a way. But a good ghost, not a Scooby Doo one. He’s like a cross between a ghost and a friendly sort of floating . . . presence. He’s like a cloud. And also a bit like Father Christmas,’ I concluded, fretfully. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’ And I stopped talking.
John Singer stared up at me.
‘So will God bring me presents?’ he asked.
‘Hmm,’ I said.
That was the trouble with working in a school. Sometimes you could say something useful, and sometimes you found that, within the space of two sentences, you were telling people a load of old rubbish. You were likening God to Father Christmas or a Hanna-Barbera character. You’d got yourself into some complicated piece of nonsense. And it was hard to get out of it again.
Circle Time was short that morning – a speeded-up version – because of the trip to the Scottish Waterways Visitor Centre. Mr Innes, the minibus driver, would be driving through the gates at ten o’clock sharp, Mrs Baxter told us, after we’d all briefly sat down again on our mats in the Portakabin. And so unfortunately there would be no time that day for Talking Ted to get passed around. We would just have to hear everyone’s news when we got back. There would only just be time, in fact, to sing one more tune – to sing, quickly, our own class song –
