The Home Corner

by Ruth Thomas

  ‘What was going to be Monday?’ he snapped.

  ‘The trip.’

  ‘The trip?’

  ‘Daddy,’ Emily interjected.

  ‘Yes: wait, Emily!’ Mr Ellis barked, looking as if he wanted us all just to disperse into the surrounding air – me, the children, his lover, even his wee girl – to close his eyes and, when he opened them again, for none of us to be there.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said in a pained voice, ‘this is . . . we were . . .’

  But he didn’t seem able to say what he and Miss Ford had been doing.

  ‘Hi,’ Miss Ford said suddenly, apropos of nothing. Maybe it was in lieu of something more hysterical. She had a nice voice actually, clear and steady and low.

  ‘Hi,’ I replied, as if we had just been introduced at some wedding reception. And then we all stood, unmoving, like people turned to stone. Miss Ford was wearing a belted green coat, one I recognised as coming from the Clockhouse range at C&A; it was the same as one I’d tried on once during a shopping trip with Stella – who’d said it didn’t suit me. That kind of green, she’d said, just isn’t your colour. And then a few days later she’d gone back and bought one herself.

  So, what on earth do you see in Mr Ellis? I felt like asking Miss Ford. And did you know about his wife? I suppose you know he has a wife? And I suppose you know she’s pregnant?

  But I didn’t say this because Emily was standing right there, with her five schoolfriends and probably her one imaginary one, too. ‘Susan and I work together up at the university,’ Mr Ellis explained now in a tight, airless little voice. ‘In the tropical diseases unit. We’re here this morning to . . . research waterborne diseases.’

  To which nobody responded at all.

  ‘Well, we were just talking about cleavers,’ I said. Because any sentence seemed reasonable now, after his tropical diseases one. ‘I was just telling Emily’, I continued, ‘that when I was her age I used to play a game with some friends of mine . . .’

  ‘Yes, a really funny game!’ Emily interrupted. ‘Called Arrows.’

  And at this, the expression on Susan Ford’s face finally began to crumple, and I saw that she was actually close to tears. I felt my heart thud with a curious, unexpected kind of sympathy.

  ‘It’s called Arrows, Miss Ford,’ continued Emily, who was looking at her too, ‘because they look like arrows. And it’s a really funny game. They stick to your sleeves, these funny bits of grass. They’re like tiny sticky horses’ tails, Daddy. Or like little green sticky caterpillars –’

  Mr Ellis seemed unable to reply. He couldn’t even look Emily in the eye. I thought of his wife, wiping toothpaste off Emily’s face in the playground that morning; and of the way life can hurt you sometimes, from out of the blue.

  Maybe he’s a good lover, I conjectured, as the coach lurched and rumbled on. Or maybe Miss Ford was just bored. Maybe that was all you needed to be, to start an affair. Perhaps their eyes had met one day during some show about the Vikings or ancient Egypt, or at some parents’ consultation evening. Or maybe he’d brought Emily to school one morning, his wife at home and newly pregnant and suffering from morning sickness. (Chop, chop, Emily, get a move on…) And there she’d been: Miss Ford, young and lovely in the winter sunlight.

  ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she, Miss Ford?’ Emily said, sliding her finger along the black trim of the coach window.

  ‘She’s OK.’

  ‘She’s got nice hair.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘My dad never goes for walks with my mum. They don’t go for walks apart from when they’re walking down our path in the mornings. My mum used to be my dad’s girlfriend. But now she’s his wife.’

  ‘Ha ha ha!’ I laughed, in my big, classroom-assistant way. ‘Ha ha ha!’

  And then I stopped laughing in case I began to cry, because a kind of sorrow had sidled into the space behind my ribcage and had just stuck there, and I didn’t want to cry about two people I didn’t know conducting a love affair in a wood. Or about the fact that, just as we were all turning to leave, I’d seen big tears finally begin to run down Susan Ford’s face. She’d suddenly looked full of remorse. But really, I’d felt like snapping, it’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it, dear? The damage has already been done.

  ‘I don’t think my dad should go for walks with Miss Ford if he doesn’t go for walks with my mum,’ Emily said.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘I liked her hair grip, though,’ she added, pragmatically. ‘I’d like a silver hair grip like that. Do you ever wear hair grips, Miss McKenzie?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got some with rainbows on and some with cats’ faces and some just glittery ones.’

  And folding her hands together in her lap, like a very young and small old woman, she peered out of the coach window.

  We came to a halt at some roadworks. There was a man standing on the road holding a red sign that said STOP. Lying in the back of a van, parked up on the pavement, was a green one that said GO. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a lorry, Forsyth’s Fresh Fruits printed on its side, reversing out of a side road and holding up several cars. People began to beep their horns.

  ‘Miss McKenzie, Ben’s feeling sick,’ Mrs Baxter proclaimed, advancing up the aisle. ‘Have you got the wherewithal?’

  ‘Oh God,’ I replied, glancing up at her. Mrs Baxter looked a little woebegone herself, I couldn’t help thinking. A little frazzled by the circumstances of the day, even though I was pretty sure she hadn’t clocked her former colleague crashing through the ferns with Mr Ellis. Her left eye was even more bloodshot now, and her hair needed a good comb.

  I reached down, unzipped the emergency bag with all its supplies – all its Band-Aids and hankies and sprays – and dragged out the upturned cardboard trilby.

  ‘Here it is,’ I said, capably, getting to my feet.

  Mrs Baxter peered at the bowl.

  ‘That’s not what you should have brought,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s a sick bowl. That’s not supposed to leave school. We don’t use the bowls on buses. We use bags.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Mrs Baxter looked unimpressed.

  ‘A bowl’s too awkward to deal with on a bus.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ I said.

  ‘Well, off you go: the bowl will just have to do,’ Mrs Baxter sighed. ‘You’ll know next time.’

  ‘If there is a next time,’ I quipped.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  And I stopped talking and proceeded down the aisle towards Ben. He looked pretty green.

  10

  Someone spoke to me as I was heading for home across the playground that afternoon. Someone hailed me. ‘Spring has sprung,’ someone proclaimed, and I turned and saw that it was the lollipop man.

  ‘Spring has sprung,’ he said again, striding across the tarmac in his peaked hat and his rustling fluorescent jacket, ‘da grass is riz, I wonder where da boidies is . . .’

  Even though spring had actually sprung weeks ago; months ago – we were already past the summer solstice and into the second half of the year! ‘Good evening,’ he added, doffing his cap – he was off his head, sometimes, the lollipop man – he was like the Mad March Hare, and he always talked to you as if he didn’t have a care in the world. ‘Had a good day? Heading off anywhere nice this fine afternoon?’ he queried.

  ‘Not particularly, no,’ I said, because I’d had a pretty terrible day, and I was going nowhere except home.

  The lollipop man was not deterred, though.

  ‘. . . da boid is on da wing . . .’ he carried on as I headed towards the gates. ‘. . . but dat’s absoid . . . I always taawt da wing was on da boid . . .’

  And he suddenly closed his eyes against the bright sunshine and held his arms out wide. They were performances, his conversations; they were speeches to anyone who would listen.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Ron,’ I called. In a different life, he would have been a
saxophonist in a nightclub or a comedian in New York. I don’t think he would ever have chosen to be a retired accountant from Buckstone. The thing about some people, I thought, as I set off along the pavement, was that they could get away with pretending to be someone else. They could lie without even thinking they were lying. I didn’t have that ability, though; or, if I did, it was a daily struggle to maintain it. I knew, for instance, that I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about what I had seen in the woods. I wouldn’t be able to lie. It was nothing to do with morality or niceness because I wasn’t moral or nice; it was just that my thoughts were beginning to feel almost tangible somehow, almost visible, the way I’d imagined them when I was little. They were like speech bubbles above my head, and there was no guarantee I could keep them a secret indefinitely. ‘Do you like jelly fruits, Luisa?’ I could still recall my Great-Aunt Ina asking me once when I was about five, advancing towards me with a great, battered box of York’s Fruit Jellies. And despite nodding and prising a pretend orange segment from the crinkly black case, I’d been convinced she would see a big ‘NO I DON’T LIKE JELLY FRUITS’ sitting there above my head. That was the way I felt now. I thought about what Mrs Crieff had said to me at the start of the week: If there’s anything you want to come and talk to me about, Luisa, relating to your work here – anything at all – then do come and tell me.

  And I knew I would have to.

  *

  The doorbell rang that evening, just as I was on the point of leaving to walk up to Mrs Crieff’s house. I felt the bones of my ears move. I felt them twitch, like a rabbit’s ears turning at the sound of a potential predator. Just this wee, primitive instinct. I’d mentioned that to Stella once, when we were sitting in the dinner hall, assailed by the sound of scraping chair legs and crashing plates. ‘Stella,’ I’d said, ‘do you ever feel your ears moving just the tiniest of fractions when you hear a sudden noise?’ And she’d looked at me and said, ‘You’re weird, Luisa, do you know that?’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I called out to my parents now, who were both sitting in the living room watching the six o’clock news. ‘Unemployment’, I heard the newscaster announce in a solemn, almost reverential voice, ‘has been reported today to have risen to two and a quarter million . . .’ I stood up, whacking my thigh as I did so against the corner of the kitchen table, and headed out into the hallway. I half hoped that it might be Mr Ellis at the door. Because if I’d been Mr Ellis, I would have tried to explain myself, I thought, as I hurried down the hallway; if it had been me, caught in the woods with some girl who was not my pregnant wife, well, I would at least want to try.

  It wasn’t him, though, I saw as soon as I opened the door: it was a man selling fish.

  ‘Fresh fish?’ he asked in rather a merry way.

  I looked at him.

  ‘Fish?’ I repeated, as if the word were some necessary part of an English sentence.

  ‘Fish. Fresh. From Newcastle,’ he said.

  Which was where he was from, he went on: he was from Newcastle, and he’d driven up that afternoon with a van full of fish.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘No need to look so pleased,’ he replied. He seemed quite hurt, as if he really cared what I might think. I suppose the expression on my face can’t have been that welcoming.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. Because I was; and it wasn’t his fault that he was the fresh-fish man from Newcastle; it was just the way it was. He was quite young, it occurred to me. His face was pale and his eyes were roundish and greenish. There was a delicate curve to his jaw, and only the faintest suggestion of stubble. He looked as if he should be doing something more dynamic with his time than flogging fish from the back of a van. He was wearing a pale-brown coat a bit like an old-fashioned grocer’s coat and big yellow Wellington boots, and he told me he was selling that very morning’s catch. His uncle had caught them, he said, and they were very fresh. ‘Really?’ I said. Because some of the fish he was holding out now for my inspection appeared to be vacuum-packed kippers. They even had a flower-shaped blob of butter with them inside the packet.

  ‘Tell him we don’t want any fish, Luisa,’ I heard my father yelling rudely from the living room: he’d had a few run-ins before, I knew, with the fresh-fish man from Newcastle. And with his uncle. And he was right, I supposed: we probably didn’t need any vacuum-packed kippers. So I smiled, apologised, and closed the door. I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermillion goldfish, I thought. I just thought it suddenly. And then, after waiting half a minute – after I’d heard his van start up and drive away – I opened the door again. ‘Just going out for a sec,’ I called out to my parents, and I started to run. I ran down our path, out through the gate, onto the pavement and down the road towards Mrs Crieff’s house. I just ran, my heart thudding. I suppose it was something about the fish – or the lying about it – it was something about all the lies we tell each other – that had caused it to thud like that.

  *

  I’d never gone right up to Mrs Crieff’s before. To house number 25. And when I got there I felt quite unnerved, even by the shape of the 25 nailed onto her front gate. By the metallic edges of it. I hoped, as I pushed down the gate latch and stepped onto the path, that the Alsatian, the I Live Here dog, wasn’t lying in wait somewhere behind the trellis. It seemed to be the sort of trellis – bright orange and woven and splintery – behind which a belligerent dog might lurk. Mrs Crieff’s plastic grass looked even more unnatural on this side of the fence; and positioned near the front door there was, I could see now, a trough filled with very unbelievable-looking flowers.

  I proceeded up the path, past the wheel-less wheelbarrow and the flowers and the fibreglass rabbit, and tried to imagine what I would say. Up close, the lawn had a blueish tinge to it, like a Polaroid photo left out too long in the sun. If I’d painted a picture of that in art class, I thought, Mr Carter might have suggested it was the wrong kind of green. Or maybe he’d have asked if I was going for something abstract.

  The path was less ambiguous than the grass. It was a smooth length of pure concrete, ending at Mrs Crieff’s door. And now I was there, approaching the door, it seemed like the wrong place to be entirely. It struck me that it was a very ordinary evening, far too ordinary for revealing a scandal about one of the parents at the school. It was a Tuesday evening in late June and there was the sound of the ice-cream van now, playing ‘Greensleeves’ at the far end of the street, and I shouldn’t be here, I thought: I should go home. But I suppose even home had developed a strange kind of double edge.

  There was no discernible ringing sound after I pushed the bell, but almost instantly, from somewhere inside the house, came the sound of barking. Then I heard Mrs Crieff’s voice.

  ‘Sultan!’ she shouted, and at a small upstairs window framed with hairspray cans and a Toilet Duck bottle the slats of a venetian blind were briefly parted.

  I stood and waited, my heart tight and small, and regretted that I had rung the doorbell. I could hear Mrs Crieff plodding downstairs, followed, I presumed, by Sultan the Alsatian, and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t run away, like someone playing Knock Down Ginger, I’d never make it back to the gate in time. All I could do was prepare a sunny expression and wait, all my convictions – my reasons for being there – already evaporating and gliding upwards into the still, hot air.

  ‘Sultan!’ Mrs Crieff yelled in a high voice as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Through the wobbly glass of the front door, I could make out a dark red carpet and a pedestal table with some kind of pot plant on it. And now the wavering shapes of a middle-aged woman and a dog appeared alongside the table, meaning there was no possibility of flight now, only, potentially, fight. I felt a little faint, a little bloodless. I should not have come. Why did I come? Into my head flitted a kind of dream of other places I had been to in my life, other doors I’d stood on the wrong side of. That had been the wrong places and the wrong doors.

  ‘Who is it?’ Mrs Crieff’s shape called, moving closer to the glass in t
he front door.

  ‘It’s Luisa McKenzie,’ I croaked.

  Mrs Crieff was fiddling with the door-chain now. Her form was becoming more distinct. ‘Be quiet!’ she called, making me wonder for a second if she was talking to me. Then the dog stopped barking, and she opened the door.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Crieff.

  The dog was not an Alsatian at all; it was a Jack Russell. It was the canine equivalent of the wee man in The Wizard of Oz, pulling levers behind the curtain.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your evening,’ I said.

  Mrs Crieff looked at me as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was. I suppose she’d probably blanked me out after she’d got home that afternoon.

  ‘What brings you here?’ she asked incredulously, as if I’d just arrived from some long-distance journey and didn’t really live just seven doors away from her. The Jack Russell was looking at me, too. And now, with a synchronised turn of their heads, they both glanced up the path, as if expecting to see some sort of posse standing at the gate, some group of individuals waiting to whisk me away.

  I could feel my heart jumping.

  ‘Well,’ I began – and my mind began to whirl through the sentences I’d imagined saying on my way down the hill. But now I couldn’t think why I’d been so determined to go there: it was almost as if I’d forgotten, suddenly, how to be anywhere at all.

  Mrs Crieff waited, an expression of immense tolerance on her face. At her feet, Sultan sighed and flopped down onto the hall carpet, exposing a fat, pink, nippled belly.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you out of school, Mrs Crieff,’ I said finally. ‘It’s just . . . there was something that happened today, when we were on our school trip, that I really felt I should mention. Just a worry, I suppose. Something that . . . occurred today . . . which . . . I thought . . .’