by Ruth Thomas
*
The Visitor Centre, directly opposite on the other side of the road, was partly hidden behind evergreen trees. It was constructed from wood and glass, and looked very clean and Scandinavian. It was a nice design, built by people who cared about the world. Maybe Ed McRae would design buildings like that one day. He’d once given a talk at school about organic design – ‘this design evolved organically’ he’d said, casually flipping a transparency onto the screen of an overhead projector – and I hadn’t known what he was talking about. But maybe he’d been talking about something like this.
The sub-groups had all caught up with each other now. The sun came out from behind a cloud and shone benevolently down on our heads.
‘We are not stopping for ice creams,’ Mrs Baxter announced, leading her little entourage to the double doors, and the rest of us all rambled after her like sheep. Mrs Baxter was one of those people you followed. However much I try, I thought as I walked behind her, I will never be able to speak like that. I’ll never be able to say ‘We are not stopping for ice creams.’ I would never have those leadership skills, or that certainty about things.
Indoors, the slatted floor made an expensive wooden noise as we clonked across it in our four pairs of big shoes and twenty-nine pairs of little ones. And then we all came to a halt again.
‘One last head count!’ Mrs Baxter said, standing at the front of the procession; and for the third time since we’d left the playground she began to count in twos, pointing at the children as they gazed placidly up at her.
‘. . . and John: twenty-nine,’ she said in conclusion, and she turned and headed for another set of doors, this time leading into a room called the Interactive Zone. She’d already told me, a few days earlier, that her group would be the first to look around inside the gallery. We’d discussed it in the staffroom, over our mugs of coffee: ‘We’ll do the exhibition first,’ she’d said conspiratorially, ‘while you and Mrs Richards and Mrs Legg have a wee wander up the river. That way’, she’d added, ‘we won’t all go crashing into each other.’
‘OK,’ I’d replied seriously, unwrapping a Blue Riband biscuit. Sometimes, everything was serious.
‘So: we’ll reconvene at eleven fifteen right here, beside this,’ Mrs Baxter announced now in a loud voice, placing her hand on top of a large bin. It was blue and shaped like a dolphin, similar to the frog one we had at St Luke’s, its mouth wide open to receive empty drinks cartons and banana skins and cigarette packets. I always felt sorry for those bins. I suppose I had a bad habit of anthropomorphising things.
‘So, off you go, everyone,’ Mrs Baxter proclaimed. ‘And let’s all stick to the path and enjoy ourselves!’ Which sounded to me like a contradiction in terms. And, surrounded by her group of difficult ones, Mrs Baxter strode in through the automatic doors of the Interactive Zone. There was a momentary burst of birdsong and croaking frogs and a babbling stream, and then the doors swept shut again and the sound was cut off.
I felt suddenly, oddly, alone. Like someone about to lead some doomed expedition. Like Scott of the Antarctic, or the lookout on the Titanic.
‘OK, kids?’ I heard Topaz Legg’s mother urging a short distance away, and her little pink-anoraked group began to wander off too, out through the doors and towards the river.
‘So,’ I said to Mrs Richards, ‘are you going next or shall we?’
‘I think . . .’ she began. And then she trailed off. She looked down at the children in her group. Her group contained three children needing the toilet. They were probably going to be some time.
‘We’ll see you out there I expect, Luisa,’ she concluded doubtfully. And she herded her children towards a sign depicting one of those stick-people wearing an A-line skirt, opened the door and let it shut gently again behind them.
‘Any of you lot need the loo?’ I asked my group, reflecting that that was what I should ask on trips like this: it was one of the checklist things Mrs Crieff talked about. But they didn’t need the toilet: they all insisted on this, and I was certainly not going to boss them into it – because there was a fine line, I’d begun to realise, between pretending to be bossy and actually becoming so.
‘OK, then,’ I said, ‘if everyone’s sure . . .’ and we all headed off through the exit, in the wake of Mrs Legg’s party. I tried to encourage the crocodile mode of walking – three lots of two, holding hands – but nobody took any notice. The narrow, gravelly path was awkward, and I just couldn’t do commands the way Mrs Baxter did.
‘I wonder if there’ll be any frogs,’ I said, as we were clattering across the wooden bridge over the river.
‘Oh, are there going to be frogs, Miss McKenzie?’ they all cried instantly. ‘Are there going to be frogs?’
‘Well,’ I said, taken aback by their enthusiasm, ‘there might be. You know: it’s a froggy kind of place here. And it’s the right time of year.’
And we carried on walking. The skirt I was wearing that day, the tight purple hobble skirt I’d bought when I was with Stella once in Topshop, was a particularly stupid choice of clothing. The hem of it had already got covered in mud and I was having to take smaller steps than you should on a walk like that. I just seemed doomed, that summer, to turn something that should have been easy into something complicated.
‘There might not be frogs, of course,’ I said to the children as I hopped along, worried that I might be setting them up for a big disappointment. ‘But, you know, there’ll be lots of other interesting things to . . .’
‘Owwhhh!’ they all cried. ‘No frogs!’
And I wondered how different my life would have been if, for instance, I hadn’t bought my hobble skirt from Topshop. Or become friends with Stella Muir. Or if I hadn’t got on that bus and gone to Ed McRae’s party. I wondered what I might have been doing that morning, instead of hopping along a muddy path and discussing frogs with five-year-olds.
The morning had become beautiful now. The shade under the trees was what a guidebook might have called dappled, and there were summer flowers – wood anemones and celandines and cow parsley and purple loosestrife – along the banks of the river. Little birds sang small, trilling songs in the trees. The river was brown but still clear, translucent: it was the kind of river my father had once told me you might see trout swimming in. An Asda supermarket trolley stood upside down, stricken mid-stream like a stranded cow, but apart from that it was pretty unspoilt. None of the children in my group seemed to be much of a walker: they were dawdlers, dreamers, stopping every few seconds to look at a tree or a flower, or to pick something up off the ground – twigs, leaves, flowers, pebbles. Emily seemed to be collecting pebbles; Ben and Solly were more interested in sticks.
‘Shall we catch up with the others?’ I said.
Because it was a little irksome, in fact, the waiting. The hanging around while everyone gathered things up from the path. Mrs Legg’s group were already way ahead, and behind us I could hear Mrs Richards’ group catching up. Feeling quite a sharp need, suddenly, to move, I saw an opportunity for diversion. I leaned over to the verge, where I’d seen some bright green cleavers growing, snapped off a stem, pulled a few of the sticky little side shoots off it and stuck them onto the sleeve of my shirt. My mother had shown me that when I was little; she’d shown me what a laugh you could have with cleavers.
‘Tah-dah,’ I said to the children, opening out my empty hands.
The children gazed at the cleavers stuck there on my arm like curious grasshoppers.
‘How did you do that?’ Emily asked.
‘Well, they just, you know, stick,’ I said. ‘They’re great, aren’t they? They’re called cleavers. They’re kind of like Velcro.’
‘What’s Velcro?’
‘Well . . .’ I said. There was a story at the back of my mind about someone inventing Velcro after they’d fallen into a patch of burrs. Someone who had triumphed through adversity.
‘You know your shoe straps?’ I said, suddenly inspired. ‘Well, Velcro is the bits of fab
ric that stick your shoe straps down. Like Solly’s shoes, look’ – they all turned and looked at Solly’s shoes – ‘or the fastenings on your coat, Ruby. You know: the bits that make that ripping sound. That keep things together. And that you can also. . . pull apart.’
The children weren’t really listening now, though: I had already lost them. They had begun to pull some cleavers from the bank, and were laughing, and sticking them onto each other’s clothes. I watched them for a moment, feeling old. Old and sad.
‘When I was a little girl,’ I said, ‘my friends and I used to play a game with these. We called it Arrows. We used to throw them at each other when we were walking home from school, and they’d stick.’
Linda Daniels and Mary Wedderburn, I thought. Mary and Linda. We’d played that game.
‘Arrows?’ asked Emily.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We just called them Arrows. It wasn’t dangerous, though. They weren’t like real arrows, of course. They wouldn’t have hurt you. But best not to throw too many,’ I added hastily, because, already, the children had begun flinging the cleavers into each other’s hair. And it would probably have contravened Mrs Crieff’s health-and-safety rules. But it was too late now, of course, to take back the idea; it was something I, Miss McKenzie, had just taught them all to do.
‘Oh, look,’ I said, attempting now to distract them from the cleavers. ‘I can see Mrs Legg’s group. Can you?’ Because every so often, rounding a corner in the path, we would catch a glimpse of the party ahead of us. We could see the bright pinks and reds of their coats in the distance. They were getting further away, though. Mrs Legg was flanked by two of the children and was having a conversation with them, some practical, informative conversation. She was saying something sensible that an adult would say to children on a school trip. She was not suggesting they throw cleavers at each other; and they were not running around with sticks. Mrs Legg is better at this than I am, I thought, and she’s not even getting paid. And I was about to attempt that role once more – to dissemble professionalism, to say, ‘Look how far they’ve got! Who’s going to catch up first?’ – when Emily Ellis suddenly stopped short in her tracks and gave a little gasp of surprise.
‘Look!’ she said.
She pointed up, towards the slope on our right, and higher still, upwards, into a sort of sunlit glade.
I looked. There was a swathe of bracken and ferns and some spindly trunked birch trees.
‘What is it, Emily?’ I asked. ‘What can you see?’
‘There!’ Emily said. ‘Look! Up there.’
I squinted into the sunlight. The sun had become quite strong and it was hard to see anything at all.
‘Where? What are you pointing at? Is it Mindy Moo?’ I asked; because I thought, perhaps, it might be. ‘Is Mindy Moo up there?’
‘Of course not!’ Emily snorted in disbelief. ‘Of course it’s not Mindy Moo, Miss McKenzie. Mindy Moo’s invisible!’
‘Who is it then?’ I retorted, stung by her put-down.
‘There!’ Emily said, still pointing. ‘Up in the wood. Look.’
I looked. And there was someone there – I could see that – as the sun suddenly went in behind a cloud. There was a man up there. And he wasn’t on his own. He was there with a woman. The two of them were standing in the ferns and bracken, halfway up the bank. And they were stepping away from each other; they were breaking off from a kiss.
‘It’s my dad,’ Emily said.
My heart lurched.
‘What?’ I said.
‘It’s my dad.’
‘What?’ I said again.
They had begun to move now, the lovers – Mr Ellis and the woman. They were clattering and branch-snapping down the bank towards us, and there was nothing we could do. We all just stood absolutely still and watched them approach. They were blundering through the foliage now, struggling through the celandines and wood anemones, their clothes flecked with twigs and pieces of bark, their faces bright pink. Because they had seen us, and because they had nowhere else to go – where could they go? they couldn’t just evaporate into thin air! – and so they both had to plod laboriously back down to the path and stop there, in front of us.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Nobody said a word. Mr Ellis looked angry though, it occurred to me. That was the only way you could describe him. The woman was calmer-looking, more resigned. She was also – more accurately, really – a girl. She was blonde, pretty, and about the same age as me. ‘Hi,’ I said to Mr Ellis in a cheery voice, as if we’d all just bumped into each other in Tesco’s.
But he didn’t reply.
‘Hello, Dad,’ Emily interjected. ‘Hello, Miss Ford,’ she added.
Because that was who she was. It seemed that she was Susan Ford. She was the girl who had not quite cut the mustard.
9
I remember putting my hand beneath my seat on the coach back and feeling a hard, smooth lump of chewing gum. I imagined it, a pinkish-grey blob stuck there secretly, months earlier, by some schoolboy en route to some dreary educational establishment.
I didn’t want to think about Mr Ellis. I didn’t want to think about him and the affair he was conducting with Susan Ford. But the seat backs confronting Emily and me were scrawled over with graffitied statements about love and duplicity, and it was hard not to think about them. There were a lot of words in particular beginning with C and F and B, and I had to hang my cardigan over them, in case Emily worked them out. She was good at reading. And I can at least protect her from that, I remember thinking. I can protect her from that, if only for the length of a bus trip.
‘So, I didn’t know my dad goes to the Waterways Visitor Centre,’ Emily said after a while. And she frowned down at the bright pink picture of Barbie on her lunch box. ‘I didn’t know he knows it there.’
‘Didn’t you?’
I couldn’t think how else to reply. I didn’t know what to say at all, about the way we’d all stood there on that woodland path, speechless and hot with embarrassment, everyone covered in cleavers and bark, like some twisted version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
‘And I definitely didn’t know my daddy is friends with Miss Ford,’ Emily continued.
‘Ah,’ I said, feeling slightly sick again. I thought about Emily’s mother, and about the space on Mrs Crieff’s wall of fame where Susan Ford’s picture had been, and I didn’t know what to do with the knowledge I had just acquired.
‘Miss Ford used to teach the Fantastic Foxes,’ Emily said. ‘She was nice. I was in her reading group.’
‘Were you?’
‘Miss Ford used to sing songs with us sometimes, too. She played the guitar. She played it better than Mrs Baxter.’
‘Did she?’
We had been allocated a different driver for the journey home. He was calmer than Mr Innes. But there were still packets of crisps left to be opened, and drinks cartons that needed piercing with straws. ‘Miss Mc-Kennn-zie,’ the children began to call, ‘Miss Mc-Kennn-zie . . .’ and I had to step into role again, the role of a person who knew what she was doing.
‘Do you have a boyfriend, Miss McKenzie?’ Emily asked, as the coach began barging up a hill. ‘I mean, do you have a special friend who’s a boy?’
I paused in the middle of opening a packet of Mini Cheddars for Jade and looked at her. She was sharp, Emily, even though she was still so small that her knees didn’t coincide with the bend of the seat.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I used to have a . . . sort-of boyfriend, I suppose, for a little while. A . . . sort-of boyfriend.’ (He was the father of my child, I could have added. He was, for a few weeks, the father of the tiniest, tiniest child.) ‘But’, I concluded, ‘I don’t any more.’
Handing the opened packet across to her, I felt suddenly exhausted. Worn out. My head had begun to hurt: quite a distinct, sharp pain on one side. They’ve left the wood now, I thought. Mr Ellis and Miss Ford. And I couldn’t help picturing them as they got into his shiny estate car and whizzed, quiet and chastened, back i
nto town. Back up to the library or museum or park, perhaps, where they might have first arranged to meet. Or maybe they would be heading off somewhere else, like a hotel or a guest house. Or to a little pub to discuss a plan of action: a story to tell Mrs Ellis. Because there would have to be one now.
‘I think Miss Ford looks a bit like Mindy Moo,’ Emily said, dropping a Mini Cheddar on the floor.
‘Really? Is that what Mindy Moo looks like? But doesn’t she have dark hair?’
Because I don’t know why, but I’d always thought Mindy Moo was a brunette. It was just one of those things, like thinking Monday is red, and Friday is green.
Emily shook her head.
‘She’s blonde,’ she said simply.
‘Oh,’ I replied, and I felt quite sad, because it appeared that even Mindy Moo was not the person I’d thought she was.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose Miss Ford’s like Mindy Moo in a way, because she’s a bit of a secret, isn’t she? A bit . . . invisible.’
And I stopped talking and looked out of the bus window. It had begun to rain. Cheerily, we were passing a funeral parlour.
*
Mr Ellis had been the one who’d spoken first.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he’d said, as we’d all stood there on the path.
What are we doing here? I’d thought.
‘Well,’ I’d said, ‘what we’re doing, Mr Ellis, is we’re on our end-of-term trip.’
And he had looked quite stricken for a moment, as if he’d just remembered something he’d promised himself not to forget. As if he was thinking, Damn! I watched as the colour rose up his neck, across his cheeks and up to his forehead, until he resembled someone who’s stayed out too long in the sun. He glanced quickly across at Susan Ford, who did not return the glance. Then he gazed down at his brogues. Close up they were a maroonish brown. The holes in them reminded me of the pattern on my mother’s tea strainer.
‘It was a change of schedule, you see,’ I continued. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at Susan Ford, who had, after all, once had the job I now had and who should, I felt, in an obscure way, have been on my side. ‘It was originally going to be Monday,’ I added. ‘A long time ago, it was going to be Monday.’
