by Ruth Thomas
We’d chosen Whitby because we were skint and there’d been a £16 return deal on at Thomas Cook. Also, you could buy jet jewellery dead cheap there, and Stella’s mother knew someone who had a holiday flat in the town. (Mrs Muir was one of those people who’d known people; my parents had never known people like that.) And so that was where we’d gone. The flat was huge, situated in a white Victorian villa on a hill leading down to the bay. The ceilings were so high that they’d almost roamed off out of focus.
‘It’s quite like Ed McRae’s house, isn’t it?’ Stella had remarked when we’d first walked in. And then she’d stopped talking.
It had been like the McRaes’ house, actually. It was the same kind of age and size, anyway, and there was a grand staircase and cornices in all the rooms, cornices and curlicues – although these ones had seen better days. Unlike the McRaes’ place, a lot of the features of this house had not been well-maintained. The big front door, for instance, had been painted bottle green circa 1978, and when we switched on the lobby light, the bulb had immediately extinguished itself. We’d walked around for a while, opening doors and looking in all the rooms, and I’d tried not to think of Dracula arriving on the cliffs, which we could see through the living-room window; of him turning up one winter’s night, malevolent, black cloak flapping, at Whitby Abbey. It was cold. Every room suffered from damp and there were odd bits of rubbish and a lingering smell of old cigarettes; and the holiday was already going wrong.
‘Oh my God,’ Stella said. ‘I had no idea Mum’s friend was so unhygienic.’
We pictured some dodgy old man staying there before us, chain-smoking Embassies all day long with the thin green curtains drawn and the television on. Pinned around the walls of the flat were a lot of notices handwritten by Stella’s mother’s friend. They all began with the word ‘Please’ –
Please switch off lights!
Please switch off immersion heater!
Please close front door quietly!
– but they were not friendly notes.
I’d wondered how many other people had read them, and what they’d done with their lives after leaving Whitby; how their lives had extended beyond the lights and the heater and the front door, like tendrilling plants seeking more light.
‘I mean, what a bloody rip-off,’ Stella said as we sat in the kitchen that evening, eating peanuts. ‘Greedy cow. I knew we should have gone to Scarborough.’
And she’d made a point, after that, of leaving all the lights on, and the heater, and slamming the front door when we went down to the beach in the mornings – which was small and greyish and didn’t live up to Stella’s expectations either. I suppose a lot of things did not live up to Stella’s expectations.
We did at least have a huge room each. Stella had a red futon in hers – quite new, in fact – although my bed was high and lumpy and covered with a torn peach candlewick bedspread. My room did have a compensatory balcony and a view, beyond the abbey, of the sea, although when I’d opened the thin little French windows on our first, breezy morning there and stepped out, I’d discovered another note. It was stuck to the railings with insulation tape:
Please do not stand on balcony. It may not hold your weight!!
So in the end, although Stella didn’t have a balcony or a view, she was the one who’d ended up with the best room. Mine was also the one with the worst wallpaper and which had smelt the most strongly of cigarettes, and its fixtures and fittings were the strangest jumble of oddities. For instance; attached to the cold tap of my little green hand basin, there’d been an orange rubber nozzle. And when I’d stood there at night brushing my teeth I’d wondered what it was for. What was its significance? What was the purpose of an orange rubber nozzle on the end of a tap?
‘What do you think this nozzle thing’s for?’ I asked Stella as she was walking down the hallway to the bathroom, a toothbrush in her mouth, a sponge bag swinging from her wrist.
‘How the hell should I know?’ she replied through a mouthful of toothpaste. A lot of the conversations we were having by then were like that.
Ed would have had a better answer than that, I thought as I lay in my lumpy bed that night. Ed would have been the right person to have gone away with to Whitby. Because I still loved him, even then; I suppose reality had not yet caught up with my emotions. Perched above my head, there was a short, wood-effect bookshelf, and on it were four things: a mildewed thriller called All at Sea, a dead housefly on its back, a plastic pixie in a long green hat, and a small wooden boat. And I remember thinking that if I considered these objects for long enough – the dead fly and the book and the pixie and the toy boat – if I really thought about them, then their existence might make some kind of sense. Because there must surely be some plan, I thought, some method, some way of reaching the right answer about things. Surely everything had some reason for its existence. Or even for the lack of it. On the other side of the room, on a wooden chair, there was a patchwork cushion with some of its octagons missing; and I considered whether there might be some spiritual kind of connection between those missing octagons and the octagonal tiles that were absent from the little fireplace in the corner of the room. I didn’t mention it to Stella – my theory that all things must, in some way, be connected – because we had already moved too far away from each other by then – if we’d ever been close. And probably there was no connection, anyway, to be made between one stupid, arbitrary thing and another.
‘What a bloody dump this place was,’ Stella said on the afternoon we left. It was a bank holiday Monday, and we were sitting opposite each other in the kitchen, eating Marmite spread over the remaining slices of a Sunblest loaf.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Because it was, and there was nothing else to say. Stella had spent the whole weekend on the little grey beach, wearing a sarong and a new jet necklace she’d bought in one of the gift shops and turning a beautiful pale brown, while I’d suddenly been beset with hay fever for some reason – hay fever at the beach! – and had had to wear dark glasses all the time. There were now two faint circles around my eyes, making me look like a panda in reverse. I looked drained. Gothic, I suppose, in keeping with Whitby and its legends.
A couple of weeks after we returned home, Mrs Muir told Stella that the gas fire in our holiday flat had been condemned by a health-and-safety inspector. It was discovered to be leaking out carbon monoxide.The tenant after us had complained of nausea and confusion and terrible fatigue. Apparently, he’d been so tired one morning he’d got on the wrong train at Whitby station and had ended up at Robin Hood’s Bay instead of Newcastle. Someone had come round from the gas board, Mrs Muir said, and tied a sign to the heater that said, DANGER: DO NOT OPERATE. ‘So that’s why we were always too tired to get to the beach before midday!’ Stella told me on the phone.
‘Life’s a beach and then you die,’ I replied.
And there was a moment’s silence.
Despite this, though – despite the carbon monoxide poisoning and the unravelling of our friendship – I’d always looked back on that weekend with a peculiar kind of fondness. I suppose it was one of the last few weekends when my life had appeared to resemble something normal; had still been heading in the direction people expected it to go. Though I already had a hunch that before long, it wouldn’t. That I’d be sitting in an exam room one afternoon, my head suddenly full of nothing.
*
It didn’t take long to get out of town now rush hour was over. After a while Mr Innes turned on the radio, loud, and we proceeded down the road listening to ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. Inspired by the drumbeats and the electric guitars, Mr Innes accelerated as we approached a wider, emptier stretch of road. He was a fast driver – reckless, even, I’d begun to feel – and we were flying down the hill now. The coach shot down the tenemented streets, past pleasant villas and delicatessens and cafes and gift shops, and hurtled on, back up another hill, around a corner and down. I put my hand up to the top of the seat in front of us and glanced t
hrough the window. The weather outside was beautiful now the rain had stopped: it was a perfect summer’s day we were bombing through. At the bottom of the next hill we hung a right (as my old geography teacher had used to say) and found ourselves in a slightly less aspirational part of town. The Victorian villas had made way now for 1930s bungalows like ours. Bungalows on hills. We whizzed past things – glimpses of things, blurs at the window. A man stood in his garden, nailing a wooden post into the ground. A toddler wheeled by on a low plastic trike. A woman was hanging washing up on a whirly line: pillow cases and towels and a blue flowery nightie. We turned up Bartholomew Road, past a car showroom and an empty swing park, and headed on in the direction of the dual carriageway. There were road signs now for the Scottish Waterways Visitor Centre: a picture of a round-headed man walking purposefully along a brown background; and it made me think of all the day trips I’d been on with my parents over the years; of all our visits to castles and stately homes with our thermos flasks and sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs. And I felt bad, that I had not absorbed more information about those places. That I had not benefited from being educated. That I had let my parents down.
‘Look,’ Mrs Baxter said, pointing through the window at something. But nobody did look.
Nearing Lockharton Hill we began a new descent that took us past more chalets and bungalows and maisonettes. Then we turned left and left again, the roads becoming narrower and narrower, until they were almost too tight for a coach to get through at all. Shouldn’t we have chosen a different route? I wondered, as we barged past residential pavements full of elderly people walking dogs and clipping their privet hedges or pulling golf trolleys along. But the driver didn’t seem to care. He was Tam O’Shanter on his grey mare. He was the common man the fanfare had been written for. The electric guitars sang out as we swerved around a bend, the roof of the coach breaking some small branches off someone’s cherry tree.
I felt slightly sick.
‘Look at the people playing golf!’ I exclaimed to John as we turned right, past a golf course; and as if this was worth pointing out – the sight of a lot of middle-aged men wearing bright white shoes and swinging golf clubs on a hill.
John peered through the window. He didn’t say ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled,’ but he looked as if he was thinking it.
On the radio, ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ ended and was replaced by Supertramp singing ‘The Logical Song’. Supertramp was a band I felt Mr Innes would have eaten for breakfast. In a mirror angled above his head I watched him tut, lean forward in his seat and switch the music off. Then, one hand on the steering wheel and gazing intermittently through the windscreen, he clattered around in a little compartment on the dashboard, pulled out a cassette and put it into the tape player. There was a short silence, then the sound of more intermittent drumbeats. It was Meatloaf: it was ‘Bat Out of Hell’, and it seemed to inspire Mr Innes even further. We’re probably doing 60, I thought, as we began to head through a kind of woodland. We’re doing 60 in a 30 mph area. And I couldn’t quite dispel an image from my mind of our coach lying on its side in a ditch, its wheels spinning, the windows on one side buckled and smashed.
‘We’re going fast, aren’t we?’ I said, hanging onto John’s sleeve as we spun around another corner.
‘I like it,’ John said. ‘It’s fun!’
And at least the speed meant that we were, quite suddenly, there: almost miraculously we had arrived, uninjured, at the entrance to the Visitor Centre.
‘Don’t stand up until the coach has stopped moving,’ Mrs Baxter announced, standing up. Because that was what you could do when you were a teacher, you could do the opposite of what you said.
Mr Innes pulled the coach abruptly into a lay-by opposite the building, switched off the engine and just sat there, motionless as a stone. There was a sudden hush. Then the children stood up and peered into the coach aisle. They seemed quite neatly divided into the pale and traumatised and the raring-to-go.
‘Say thank you to Mr Innes,’ Mrs Baxter instructed as we squashed our way out of our seats into the aisle and began to plod towards the steps. ‘Thank you, Mr Innes,’ obeyed a child, glancing nervously at him as he sat there, vulpine in his leather jacket, his hair slicked back, a packet of Raffles sticking out of his top pocket. And this, unfortunately, opened the floodgates.
‘Thank you, Mr Innes,’ all the children repeated, one by one, as they filed past.
‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’
Until the stiffly magnanimous smile slid off Mr Innes’s face altogether.
*
Once we were all assembled on the tarmac, Mrs Baxter did another head count. There were still twenty-nine children. Then we all got into our preordained little sub-groups. Emily Ellis was in mine, because she was one of the easy ones. John Singer wasn’t, though. As soon as he’d got off the coach, Mrs Baxter swept over and grabbed his hand, as if executing some well-rehearsed piece of choreography. John silently accompanied her, like someone accepting the hand of fate.
‘See you later, John,’ I said, feeling oddly responsible for him.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘bye.’ And he was gone.
‘OK, you lot,’ I heard Mrs Legg announcing behind me.
Mrs Legg, of course, had been allocated her own child – the sweet, fairy-like Topaz – plus six of Topaz’s friends. They were all wearing glittery hairbands and flamingo-pink anoraks, and they were all overexcited. They set off hand in hand, in a wide, skipping line. Mrs Legg, in her sheep jumper and salmon-pink leggings, walked a staunch, responsible course in the middle.
‘Keep to the inside of the pavement,’ I heard her boom as they walked away – a sentence which, for a moment, didn’t even make sense to me.
My group was the last to get going: there was a lot of faffing, somehow, going on with my group. And I suppose I felt a little confounded, anyway. I’d only ever done one trip with the class, which had been the semi-disastrous one to the zoo. And despite being forty years younger than Mrs Baxter and at least twenty years younger than Mrs Legg, it seemed, that morning, that I wasn’t able to make such speedy decisions as them, or to use the right expressions or to move as quickly. I felt weighted down. Watched by someone, and found wanting. And I had the easy group! My group was the easiest one of the lot.
‘Has everyone got their lunch?’ I asked, in an effort to sound like a classroom assistant.
‘Yeeees!’ they replied, holding their sandwich boxes aloft.
‘Good. So, off we –’
‘But Mrs Baxter said we should leave them in the cafe, though, Miss McKenzie,’ interrupted Ruby Simpson, the girl who’d once brought a haggis in to Show and Tell. ‘So we don’t have to carry them around all morning.’
‘Ah. Good plan.’
‘That’s what Mrs Baxter said,’ Ruby confirmed, and she gave me a look of solemn appraisal. She was a composed child. Her hairband was bright red and had a yellow butterfly appliquéd on it. The only thing separating her from a useful, well-paid role in society, I felt – something in architecture, say, or medicine or geography – was an interlude of about sixteen years.
‘Mindy Moo’s here today, Miss McKenzie,’ Emily Ellis whispered, slipping her hand into mine as we set off, and I felt strangely heartened by this. I’d hoped Mindy Moo would come. Why would she not want to, if it meant getting out of school for a while?
‘So that means’, I said to Emily as all of us – real and imaginary – plodded on towards the pedestrian crossing, ‘that we’ve actually got eight people in our group today. If Mindy’s with us.’
Emily considered this.
‘No,’ she said after a moment. ‘You don’t count them if they’re invisible, Miss McKenzie. You don’t count invisible people.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, defeated by the logic of this, because I suppose I did, in a way. C
ount invisible people.
‘Mindy is here,’ Emily explained patiently, ‘but you don’t count her! That would just be silly, Miss McKenzie!’
And now, apropos of nothing, she started to sing. We were all standing at the pedestrian crossing waiting for the lights to change, and there she was, this little girl, singing a song –
I like the sunshine,
I like the raindrops,
I like the blue sky,
I like the buttercups . . .
– when suddenly, from straight out of the blue sky, something splatted onto the sleeve of her coat.
‘Oh, Emily, stop a minute,’ I said, rummaging in my pocket for a packet of Wet Wipes – because I actually had some with me that day; I had attained that level of professionalism! And maybe one day, I thought, as I held onto Emily’s arm and began to dab at her sleeve, I’ll go on car journeys with my own child, a tin of barley sugars and a damp flannel in a plastic bag. Just like my mum used to. And maybe pigs will fly.
‘Hold still, Emily,’ I said, the Wet Wipe shredding a little against the fabric. Emily wore expensive clothes, but the bird muck on her sleeve just fell into line now with the mud already splattered there, and some pen marks, and a couple of yogurt stains.
‘It’s supposed to be a sign of good luck, getting bird poo on you,’ I said, looking around for a bin to throw the wipe in.
‘Why?’ Emily asked, incredulous. ‘Why isn’t it bad luck?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose that would make more sense . . .’ I said, putting the wipe in my pocket and wondering if it would have been easier if I’d just told her the truth: that getting bird muck on your sleeve was not something to be pleased about; that bad events could not always be transformed, Pollyanna-ish, into good ones. That life was not like that at all.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s get going.’
