The Home Corner

by Ruth Thomas

  S’time-terstarter-brannnew-day,

  Brannew-day,

  Brannew-day,

  ‘S’time-terstarter-brannew-day

  Wivall-our-frens!

  – and to visit the toilets before everyone would have to traipse outside yet again and get onto the minibus. Life, really, being a succession of songs and little journeys.

  ‘Miss McKenzie, can you oversee toilet trip?’ Mrs Baxter asked in a slightly airless voice as she stood beside our shelf of papier mâché owls. I looked across at her. One of her eyes was bloodshot, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration across her nose.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘OK, everyone: toilet time,’ I said, raising my voice, and I went and stood at the doorway to the toilets, the girls’ cubicles on the left, the boys’ on the right. I had to make sure there was no queue-barging, and to remind each child to wash their hands.

  ‘And don’t forget to use soap!’ I warned doomily, peering down at my own fingernails which, I realised, were pretty grimy themselves: I hadn’t scrubbed them for a while, I reflected. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d used our little wooden scrubbing brush at home. My standards had slipped since the days when I’d painted my fingernails and perfected French manicures with Stella Muir.

  ‘You always say that about the soap, Miss McKenzie,’ said Eve Russell, one of the little girls standing at the basin. ‘You always say that,’ she said, turning a sliver of green soap dutifully around in her small hands, ‘but I never do forget the soap.’

  ‘Well, the reason I tell you’, I replied bossily, ‘is because it’s important.’

  ‘Germs!’ agreed a couple of the other little girls.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Do you know, Miss McKenzie,’ observed John Singer, who was peering at himself in the low mirror in the boys’ half of the toilets, ‘I could only see my eyes in the mirror last week, but now I can see my nose too.’

  Which somehow seemed a more significant observation than anything anyone had to say about soap.

  ‘Now, I want everyone to be as quick as they can, walking out,’ Mrs Baxter was shouting as my little group clattered back to go and stand with the other children in the corridor. ‘It’s like an oven in here today,’ she added, to no one in particular. Which was true. The corridor was the hottest part of the Portakabin, and it was not where you’d choose to be for any length of time. A lot of things in it appeared to have finally given up the ghost that week. The sunflower seedlings the children and I had planted were all flopping hopelessly against the window in their empty yogurt pots (‘What was the result of your experiment? There was too much sunlight’), and the lentils and pasta shapes were falling off their collages.

  ‘Less chat and more moving,’ said Mrs Baxter; because there was an increasing volume of little voices now – almost the sense of a slightly out-of-hand party – and she was trapped there in the middle of it. She was leaning against the Welcome to Our Classroom board with a slightly martyrish expression on her face. Our colour this week is: Yellow, said the board. If she’d been a saint, she’d have been Sebastian.

  *

  The minibus was not, in fact, a minibus at all. It was a huge bus, bright white, with the words ‘Jimmy Steels Coaches’ emblazoned across its side. ‘For goodness’ sakes,’ Mrs Baxter sighed, emerging into the daylight at the top of the Portakabin ramp. The bus was waiting for us by the kerbside, the engine on and the door open. The driver, a small, grey-haired man sitting on the little round driving seat and staring straight ahead, looked irritated already. And I had to resist a sudden urge to sneak down the ramp, sleekit as a seven-year-old, and just run away. Just run and run. It was ten past ten on a Tuesday morning in June and a slight, splashy summer rain had begun to fall, and I would rather have been anywhere, almost anywhere else.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Innes,’ Mrs Baxter called cheerily to the driver, across the playground.

  ‘Mor’.’

  He looked crumpled and worn-out, as if life was a huge washing machine and he had been the washing inside it.

  ‘JI-MM-IE STEA-LS COA-CHES,’ John Singer observed, coming to stand beside me.

  ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘Well done.’

  Mrs Baxter smiled, breathed in and briefly closed her eyes. Then she looked down at the little group of children pushing and shoving their way down the ramp.

  ‘I don’t see a nice neat crocodile,’ she said, her voice booming up and down the morning streets. ‘Where is our crocodile?’

  *

  A volunteer mum was going with us on the trip that morning. There was always at least one volunteer mum. She had come to join us in the playground: she was Topaz’s mother and her name was Mrs Legg. It was the sort of name Stella and I would have had hysterics about, just as we would once have laughed at Mr Temple pensively stroking his beard. I couldn’t do things like that any more, though, not now that I was the sensible, grown-up Miss McKenzie.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Legg,’ I said in my classroom assistant voice as I reached the bottom of the ramp.

  Mrs Legg didn’t appear to hear me; and I knew straight away that she was going to be one of those mothers I could not relate to. Who did not relate to me. There were quite a few of them. Mrs Legg was a woman whose collection of zipped holdalls and wipe-clean lunch bags and Wet Wipes I knew I would never achieve if I ever became a mother; not in a million years. And even if she’d been my age she would still have been the sort of girl who had all her pencils sharpened and ready and had passed all her exams with positive, life-enhancing grades. The gulf between us was impossibly wide.

  ‘Have you been on trips with the school before?’ I asked as we advanced up the line for the coach.

  She finally turned and looked at me. ‘Sorry?’ she said.

  She had that look on her face: a kind of weary pragmatism that some of the mothers seemed to adopt. A grudging tolerance of oddballs and losers. She was there to deflect the incoming waves, and I was one of the waves.

  ‘Have you . . . been on trips with the school before?’ I repeated, hanging onto my smile.

  ‘Oh.’ Mrs Legg frowned, and gave a little shiver. Despite it being a June morning, she was wearing a jumper bearing a recurring pattern of woolly sheep. ‘I go on all the trips,’ she said. ‘I’ve got three older ones, further up the school. I’ve got a daughter in P6 and twin boys in P3.’

  She spoke as if I should already know the circumstances of her life. But I didn’t. And I couldn’t think, either, what to say to her about her many children. I couldn’t work out if it was a boast or a cry for help.

  ‘Come on, Toby, pick your feet up,’ she observed to Toby Cameron, and she moved away from me and further up the line.

  Mrs Baxter had the register with her, a big black folder pressed flat across her bust. She held it open while she counted everyone up the steps.

  ‘All present and correct,’ she confirmed, as the door closed behind us and Mr Innes put the coach into gear. And it suddenly struck me, as we swung out onto the road, how terrible it would be if we hadn’t all been present and correct and had actually left someone behind. Some child sitting beside the coats, or in the Home Corner, or wandering alone, across the vast grey playground. My heart tightened at the thought of it. What would we have done, when we’d noticed their absence? What would we have done, as responsible adults? It almost brought tears to my eyes just thinking about it. And I thought how I’d once pictured myself when I’d first got the job at St Luke’s: how I’d envisaged a sort of golden scene in which I was a caring, practical young woman pointing out the wonders of nature – a catkin branch, a ladybird, a leaf – to a group of enchanted children; or singing nursery rhymes to the accompaniment of my own guitar, my fingernails scrubbed and short, my long hair illuminated by some bright, benevolent light streaming in through a window. Well, my nails were short and my hair was long, but those were about the only things that fitted the picture.

/>   The inside of the coach smelt of rubber flooring and extinguished cigarettes and vanilla-scented Magic Tree.

  ‘Miss McKenzie, have you got the wherewithal for people being sick?’ Mrs Baxter asked as I was edging past her up the aisle. Which was a question that brought me to my senses.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I replied, ‘I’ve got it with me. I’ve got everything with me in the emergency bag.’

  Because I was in charge of the emergency bag that day, a blue denim holdall the size of a medium-sized suitcase. I had packed it the previous afternoon. Its contents included Wet Wipes, plasters, Calpol and a large cardboard container with a rim round it, known as the ‘sick bowl’. The sick bowl looked like an enormous grey trilby.

  ‘Good-oh,’ Mrs Baxter said.

  We were like pilots, going over procedures for the flight. I don’t know what we would have done in a real emergency, but it was OK because we had a cardboard bowl with us. It was all very procedural. If Mrs Crieff could see me now, I thought, she would have no cause for complaint. She would be able to tick that box on her appraisal form.

  ‘So: I’ll go and sit up at the back, Mrs Baxter,’ I said.

  ‘That’s where you’re meant to be sitting.’

  ‘OK.’

  And I plodded on.

  The coach, with the door tightly shut, had altered its character. It had become grey and cavernous. And now that it had begun to move, it was filled with a low humming sound, like the noise from a ship’s engine. There was the potential, I felt, as I located a seat near the back, to develop a swift, significant headache, if not actual nausea. Most of the children had paired up before they’d even climbed aboard, their friendship unwavering, unassailable. A few had wavered and pushed and asserted their rights, while others had joined forces, creating little parties of four or five. And then there was John. There were twenty-nine children in the class, and John was the twenty-ninth. I watched him make his way towards me, like someone heading for the least-bad option.

  ‘Hi, John,’ I said, as he sat down in the seat beside me.

  ‘’Lo,’ he said, peering through the window. This always happens to me, he looked as if he was thinking.

  ‘So, this is exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘John smells,’ some of the other children used to say sometimes, which was true: he often did have a smell of grubbiness about him, of unwashed clothes and infrequent baths. ‘He smells of squashed spiders’ webs,’ I’d heard a little girl shuddering once, which was one of the strangest and saddest insults I’d ever heard. Seeing the others teasing him was like watching a duckling being attacked by herring gulls on the canal. We intervened – of course we did – but there were always ways around intervention.

  ‘Have you –’ I began – but before I could say anything else Mrs Baxter’s voice suddenly rang out.

  ‘MISS MCKENZIE, CAN YOU SIT WITH JOHN?’ she bellowed, her words ricocheting down the length of the coach; and I saw John sigh again and blink his eyes behind his glasses. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Yes: I am sitting with John,’ I shouted back, and all the children in the seats around us turned and stared.

  Poor John. Johnny No-Mates. One day it will be OK, I felt like saying to him. Although, actually, there was no guarantee of that either.

  I stowed the emergency bag as well as I could beneath my feet. It was quite bulky. The sick bowl made it quite difficult to deal with.

  ‘Well,’ I said to John, ‘it’s nice to be out of school for the morning anyway, isn’t it? Going somewhere new.’

  ‘It’s not new to me. I’ve been before, with my mum,’ he replied, still staring through the window.

  He didn’t help himself either sometimes, it had to be said.

  *

  We all had our particular parts to play that morning. Mrs Legg was stationed in front in the role of reassuring mother, Mrs Baxter was in the middle, her steady hand on the tiller; and I was at the back, above the wheel arch. I was always at the back of the coach on school trips. Once it had been because I was a rebel: it had been where Stella Muir and I had sat on our way to school, in the days when we’d peered out at the Mummy Woman standing on the pavement. We’d used to play a game, too, called Sweet and Sour: if you waved at people outside and they waved back, they were sweet; if they didn’t, they were sour. But that was then: that was where we’d been supposed to sit then, and what people had expected us to do. Now it felt as if I was in the wrong place. The whole bus felt like the wrong place. I was one of only five people on board who was above the height of three foot ten. And there was no Stella with me. There was no Stella and there was no Ed McRae – there wasn’t even Mary Wedderburn or Linda Daniels, and there was no sense of being where I should have been.

  ‘Miss McKenzie, can I eat my Babybel?’ John asked, just as we were swinging out onto the main road. I looked down to see that he had already pulled his sandwich box out onto his lap. It was a green plastic thing the size of a small attaché case and covered with muscle-bound superheroes. Inside, a foil-wrapped packet of sandwiches was partly opened, and the sandwiches were falling out and spilling their contents. ‘My dad packed my lunch today,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a bruised apple covered in buttery crumbs and a pot of something called Yoplait, leaking a pinkish liquid.

  ‘You shouldn’t really eat your lunch before we get there, John,’ I said. ‘Or there’ll be nothing to look forward to. I think you should put the lid back on now.’

  ‘Ohhh!’ John complained, but he did as he was told. He put the Babybel back in the box and clipped the buckle shut.

  ‘Good boy,’ I said, as he folded his arms and peered out of the window again. Once, I would never have spoken like that in a million years. And it still surprised me, how obedient children could be when you told them something in clear, unambiguous terms. How resigned to their fate. It worried me too, a little. It made me think of the ways people can follow the wrong leader.

  ‘So,’ I said, sighing and leaning back, and the coach rumbled on, through the rainy summer day. The seats were orange and dark blue tartan. Moquette. And everything was slightly muffled – voices, conversations, thoughts. It was like falling down the back of a settee.

  ‘Grace, when we go over bumps my tummy goes blue,’ I heard one of the little girls saying in the seat in front.

  ‘Well, my head goes orange and yellow,’ Grace retorted. ‘Does your head go orange and yellow?’

  Yes, I thought.

  *

  We’d only driven a few hundred yards up Melville Drive when Mrs Baxter got to her feet again and came swaying down towards the back of the bus. She was wearing a green and blue cagoule which rustled every time she moved her arms. She always wore practical things on trips, whereas I often forgot to put anything sensible on apart from the clothes that had just occurred to me on getting out of bed. That day for instance I was wearing a long purple hobble skirt and an off-white blouse, both of which I’d bought two years earlier in Topshop. The blouse was the one I’d been wearing when I’d told Ed McRae the Bellamy’s veal pie anecdote. It was something I should have thrown away.

  Mrs Baxter moved up and up the bus and finally arrived at my seat.

  ‘Miss McKenzie, when we get there,’ she whispered theatrically above John’s head, ‘the plan is to split up into three groups. You can have six, Mrs Richards and Mrs Legg can have seven each and I’ll have the rest.’

  ‘OK,’ I whispered back, trying to inject a note of snappy enthusiasm into my voice.

  ‘It’s more manageable that way,’ Mrs Baxter added, her eyes round and slightly more bloodshot than before. ‘As you’ll remember from that trip to the zoo.’

  ‘Right. Sure.’

  The zoo trip had happened the second week I’d been at St Luke’s. We’d looked at some parakeets, a sea lion and a lemur and its child. Apart from that, the day was mainly a blur in my mind: just a woolly cave of temporarily missing children, an absent giraffe, a lot
of penguins, a sarcastic shop assistant and a cafe with jungle murals on the walls.

  ‘So I suggest’, Mrs Baxter continued sotto voce, gripping onto the top of my seat as we rounded a corner, ‘that you and Mrs Legg have the . . .’ – she paused – ‘. . . easier ones. And I’ll have the more . . .’

  ‘Difficult ones,’ I said. Beside me, John sat as motionless as a rock.

  Mrs Baxter looked at me.

  ‘I wasn’t going to put it like that,’ she said. ‘However.’

  And she peered out through the window, to see what point of the journey we had reached.

  ‘There’s a lot to see and not much time to see it,’ she said, as if she was making a statement about life. ‘But I think one thing everyone will want to do’, she added, ‘is look at the ducks on the river.’

  ‘Have we brought bread?’ I asked, like some Russian agent meeting a colleague for the first time on a park bench. I felt this was a sensible enough question, though, if we were talking about ducks.

  Mrs Baxter wrested her gaze from the view.

  ‘Bread?’ she said. ‘Oh, no! Bread would be asking for trouble.’

  And she swayed back down to her seat.

  *

  Stella Muir and I had got on a big white coach once, and gone on a trip. The memory of it came back to me suddenly as I sat there. We’d gone down the A1 all the way to Whitby, a couple of weeks before beginning our Highers. It seemed incredible to me now: that my life had once encompassed going on a weekend’s holiday to Whitby with Stella Muir; that we’d ever been close enough, or ever thought we were. But we had been, I supposed, just as I had once been in love with Ed McRae. ‘It’ll be a pampering session,’ Stella had said, ‘a pre-Highers treat. We deserve it. You especially, Lulu,’ she’d added – which had been about as far as she’d ever got to acknowledging what had happened to me.