‘Are you in touch with anyone else from your school,’ I say. ‘Who might . . . or who I should tell . . . I don’t know.’
‘No. No, I don’t think so.’
There is something final in his voice, something cold. I shiver. Mottled clouds chase across the sky. I wipe the heel of my palm across the table, scooping the rainwater on to the ground. Then I go back into the house. I tidy up the kitchen while Fred and I put some distance between us and the awkwardness, chat a bit more, agree not to let so much time go by, promise to be in touch, then I hang up.
Later, remorseful and timid, I tidy the house. I put the newspapers into a bag for recycling and close up my sewing basket. I wash the plates and empty out the fridge. I clean it carefully, right into the corners, checking for spilled milk. Zach hates the smell of sour milk – he used to say it infected the air, seeped into his pores. I replace the carrots in neat piles.
Zach
March 2011
She’s back late again tonight. I started drinking early.
Most days I follow her to school. I wait outside – on the common, under the trees. I watch her pulling up the blinds at the library window, taking kids on to the grass at break. I like to know exactly where she is, to keep her face, caught in a half-smile, printed on my memory.
I’ve got that feeling I used to get with Polly. I think she’s lying to me. I still don’t trust her relationship with NQT Angus. I’ve seen her, through the doorway, laughing with him, the silly fucker with his tufts of red hair, his clashing pink cheeks. ‘He’s just a kid,’ she says. She thinks she’s cleverer than me, that that will put me off. All those rooms in that school, all those closed doors. I can’t stop it – the thought of him pushing her up against the wall, her legs wrapped around his waist. I’ll kill him if I catch him. In the meantime, I stay alert. So far her stories have checked out. She did drive that boy home to Earlsfield yesterday, the one who wears slippers to school, and she did have a meeting in Waterloo with that pretty rep from Puffin. But one slip and she knows I won’t be responsible for the consequences. It’s a game we play. I think she likes it.
Tonight, she’s at Peggy’s helping with bedtime. Why would anyone need help with that? Don’t you just chuck them in their cots and throw a bottle at them? I stood behind their poncey ornamental bay trees, looked down into their basement kitchen. Peggy was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a magazine. Lizzie was reading to the infants on the sofa, an arm around each one. Her expression, eager, loving, when it caught the light almost stopped my breath. What she sees in the grubby little tykes I don’t know. As for Peggy, she’s really let herself go. Of course I tell her every time I see her she looks gorgeous, ‘a real yummy mummy’, giving her waist a squeeze (if I can find it).
At the weekend, I went for a drink with Rob at the Nightingale (or ‘the Gale’ as he so chummily calls it), ‘leaving the girls to it’. He’s such a creep. He wants Lizzie, I can tell. He’s working hard to win me over so I won’t notice his roving eye. Monogamy is beyond him. Over a pint of John Smith’s, he told me he’d found himself enjoying ‘a bit of slap and tickle’ at a class party with one of the other school mums. I congratulated him, ‘You dirty dog, you’, and he preened. Literally. Caught his own eye in the mirror above the bar and smoothed his eyebrows. He has no idea the contempt I hold him in. I’d feel sorry for Peggy if I didn’t know she’d married him for his money. Infidelity – it’s so naff. People’s lack of imagination never fails to amaze me, their crashing mediocrity.
I wonder how to share the news with Lizzie, when to hurl that bomb. Of course, she’d be straight on the phone to her sister. They tell each other everything, as Peggy is always saying. It’s a power game. Every private joke, every concerned hug, informs me that Lizzie would choose Peggy over me, just as each flirtatious comment, each casual-fingered brush of my body is a covert message – we all know I’d rather be with her if I could. She came first with their mother, has come first with every man since. It would never occur to Peggy that I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than trade Lizzie in. It amuses me to watch. She thinks she’s in control. How far from the truth, how very far, that is.
This thing from Rob – it’s a useful piece of information. No denying that. A million patronising little cuts; this would salve the tiny stings. It would destroy Peggy. Destroy Lizzie, too, of course. I shall store it up. Use it when I need it. Biding your time, patience: it’s what it’s about. Light the fuse too quickly and you’re too close to appreciate the glory of the firework.
The house is in order – I’ve just checked. Upstairs and downstairs, all done. Surfaces are clear, sockets aligned. I’ve alphabetised all her books. A catastrophe a few months ago, when she arranged for the front door to be painted without telling me. Red. It’s changed now. She cried with disappointment. ‘I give up,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it. You choose. I have crappy taste.’
It’s not her taste that’s the problem. It’s red. I’ve started a thing about the colour red. It’s burning inside me, shifting and setting my nerves on edge. The battle with the kettle is ongoing. She likes it closer to the sink, but the steam crinkles the new paintwork. I move it. She moves it back. It’s a joke. I think. She couldn’t be that stupid. As long as I win in the end.
She’ll be home soon. We wait, the dog and I, his head on my foot. He knows I hate him. It’s creepy the affection I instil. He’s like a battered hound, his life weighed daily in my hands. I’ve done some research. Chicken bones seem the simplest solution. A splinter may become lodged in the animal’s throat, oesophagus or internal organs. A puncture of the intestine could lead to peritonitis and almost certain death. Otherwise drugs. Drugs, if I can personally spare them, are still an option.
I stroke the back of his neck. She loves him, and – loath as I am to admit it – at the moment that keeps him safe.
I’ve upped the Xanax, tried cutting it with a small dose of tramadol I bought online. I’m just looking for something to stop my nerves from jangling, my heart from racing. I’m not there yet.
I was first up this morning. I like to get to the post before Lizzie. Today: a thick white envelope, addressed to her. I ripped it open in the bathroom with the door locked. A wedding invitation. Mr Frederick Percival Laws and Miss Penelope Olivia de Beauvoir. Well, well, well. Who’d have thought he’d have found someone to share his bed? I put it in my bag and brought it with me to work. The very stiffness of the card and the self-importance of the raised Perpetua Italics set my teeth on edge. I poured boiling water over it in the studio kitchen and ground out the etched text with a scourer.
Chapter Thirteen
Lizzie
Wandle Academy hoves into view the other side of the railway bridge, a converted candle factory, large and flaxen-bricked and covered in scaffolding (a new sixth-form block is under construction). If the black edifice of Wandsworth Prison embodies villainy and corruption, the school’s facade, windows gleaming, seems like a physical manifestation of hope.
Howard and I pick our way towards it on Monday morning, overtaken by a steady stream of kids in Wandle uniform on bikes and scooters. I’m in my own school uniform – boots and tights and a sensible skirt – but it was an effort to get ready in time, a struggle to leave the house. I feel distracted, reluctant to steer my mind back to the trivial necessities of work. I should have phoned in sick. If I hadn’t missed so much time over the last year I would have done.
The school doesn’t have a formal staffroom – it’s part of the ethos of its foundation, no barriers between ‘learners and educators’ – but there is a small kitchen downstairs, a corridor between the art room and the office, where the teachers tend to congregate. I am slipping past it, hoping to reach the stairs unnoticed, when Jane calls my name.
I pause briefly.
‘Quick coffee?’ she says.
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘Come on.’ She pulls me into the kitchen where Sam Welham is leaning against the counter. We greet each other sl
ightly awkwardly and he makes a fuss of Howard. Jane clicks on the kettle and washes out some mugs.
I ask after her weekend – she has been to Salford to visit her in-laws – and she recounts in some detail a film she went to see, a thriller about a corrupt airline pilot that was so good she can’t stop thinking about it. Sam stretches, drumming his fingers high up on his chest and says, ‘Sounds interesting.’ He yawns, or rather half yawns, and then says: ‘Do you fancy seeing it sometime?’
Jane is widening her eyes behind his back, silently ordering me to agree. It’s just a movie, for God’s sake, her eyes say, I’m not asking you to marry him. And yet I’m so full of panic I don’t know where to put myself. I can feel my face grow hot. The fridge gives an alarmed rattle.
‘I’m not sure,’ I mumble. ‘I’m not really one for the cinema.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Sam grins. ‘Another time.’ He is a nice man, I know. With his crumpled face, closely cropped hair and crinkled hazel eyes, there is an overall carelessness to his appearance that makes you think of men in 1970s sitcoms. There is nothing threatening or dangerous about him. If he’d asked me two weeks ago, I might have agreed. But now, the idea is inconceivable.
I have abandoned my coffee and am halfway up the stairs when I meet Sandra, the head teacher, click-clacking in high heels on her way down. ‘Lizzie! I was about to email, but as I’ve seen you . . . Ofsted are sending the inspectors in any day, so—’ she gestures to Howard ‘—keep the dog at home for a week or so, is that OK?’
‘Of course.’
Howard is wagging his tail and it has left a mark on the newly painted white wall.
‘Today is OK,’ she adds over her shoulder on her way down. ‘They won’t come before tomorrow. They have to give us a day’s notice.’
I carry on up the stairs, trying not to feel panicked. I could leave Howard at home, but it’s a long day. I know I’m lucky to have been able to bring him at all. It began with the occasional day, but I owe the blanket dispensation to a special needs assistant who noticed what a calming effect Howard had on kids with concentration or sensory-adjustment issues. I rack my brain. I could ask Peggy, I suppose. I’ll ring her as soon as I can.
Upstairs, the school feels quiet and clean without the students, though they’ll be here any minute, thronging the corridors, shouting across heads, the taller boys jumping up and thwacking the ceiling with their palms as they pretend not to run. I unlock the library door and walk into a dark room – it takes a moment to switch on the lights and flick up the blinds. Out of the window, the common stretches grey and empty – a blanket of churned mud fringed with large trees. I scan the dark hollows, the shadows under the bushes. There is no one there.
A large box of books is waiting by the desk to be stamped, sealed, security-labelled and catalogued. I sit down and gaze at them – work to be done, routine, a sequence of activities I can do with my mind half shut. Howard curls up in his basket in the corner. He has been a bit off colour this weekend, but he’d lie there quietly, even if he wasn’t.
I have time to ring Peggy and leave a message before the bell peals and students start arriving. I am swept up in my duties. I open the packages and sort through the new books. I’m in the middle of trying to introduce a pared-down catalogue system. (The Dewey classification used in most British libraries is complicated, particularly for children who might not have got to grips with decimal places yet.) I sort out the new books and then I work my way through my emails. A mother has complained because I recommended a picture book to her daughter, ‘who may be 12 but has a reading age of 16.8’. It was Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, a novel about illness and grief and loss; Jim Kay’s illustrations are a beautiful part of that. She’s probably too young for it. I begin to write a reply along those lines, but in the end I just say sorry and tell her to send her daughter in to choose something else. It’s always the middle-class parents who have issues and they usually just need to be appeased.
My reading group charges in for the lesson before break. We’re doing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Conor isn’t wearing socks, I notice, and the pockets of his blazer have come unstitched again. I’ll try and get it off him later, take it home and mend it.
At lunchtime it begins to drizzle, a flat, dreary rain that keeps the students under arches and in doorways. A little gang of year sevens, all girls, arrives to see if there is anything they can do to help. Next year, it’ll be chewing gum stuck to the backs of books and secret texting in the Social Science section but for now they are willing helpers. Ellie and Grace Samuels, who are part of the gaggle, hover by the desk and Ellie holds out a square parcel wrapped in paper decorated with blue birds. ‘From my mum,’ she says.
I open it carefully. It’s a book, The Flowering of Your Passing, with a note paper-clipped to the front: I saw this and I hoped it might be of some help. With very best wishes, Sue.
I thank the girls and tell them I’ll write a letter to their mother that evening. ‘How kind you are,’ I say, thinking how often the job of the bereaved is to shore up the self-worth of the comforter.
I flick through the pages when I am alone and realise what a distance I have come since Peggy gave the same book to me last year. Every chapter filled me with rage when I first read it – how could the writer even begin to know how I felt? The very typeface seemed pious.
Now I feel disengaged from its contents, as if it were a travel guide to a country that someone has made up, that doesn’t exist, that lives inside their head.
‘You’ve got time to come to the pub, haven’t you?’
Jane is waiting at the front door and catches me as I am leaving.
‘Not really.’ I open the carrier bag and show her. ‘I’ve got Conor Baker’s coat to mend.’
‘You can do that later,’ she says, taking Howard’s lead and slipping her arm through mine.
‘No. Actually, honestly, I don’t have time.’
‘You do. I’m sure you do. Come on. Pat’s been left by her husband. She needs cheering up. Staff solidarity.’
She looks at me expectantly and when I begin to protest, interrupts. ‘And you should have said yes to Sam. Really, Lizzie. It’s a year now – you can’t hide away for ever.’
I feel something inside shift and harden. She has no idea what I have discovered this week, or what I’m hiding, or not hiding, from. I haven’t told her about my trip to Brighton, or Onnie’s visit. It’s wrong of her to set me up with Sam. It’s an action from another world.
‘Ten minutes,’ she says, pulling at me. ‘What harm can it do?’
She’s my friend. My oldest friend. She loved Zach. I feel a tug of nostalgia for that time, for when things were simple, for when I knew who I was.
‘Ten minutes,’ I say.
The Bird and Bush, at the end of the road, is another unofficial staffroom – an old-fashioned pub the gentrification of the area has left behind, with wooden chairs and swirly carpets, the treacly smell of cooking oil and spilled beer. A crowd of Wandle teachers is to be found here most evenings, though it’s a long time since I’ve joined them.
Pat, a pint of beer jolting in her hands, is holding court at a large table in the back. She half stands. ‘Lizzie,’ she yells. ‘You think you had it bad? At least your husband didn’t leave you. At least he didn’t run off with a woman half your age.’
‘That’s true, Pat,’ I say. ‘At least he didn’t do that.’
I sit down unthinkingly in the first empty chair. The person next to me clears his throat, and I turn to see Sam. ‘Death or divorce,’ he says under his breath. ‘Tricky choice. Apparently you got the better deal.’
‘So it appears,’ I say.
Jane is fetching drinks and I rack my brain for things to say. Now I am here, I must make a fist of it. I remember that he lives the other side of Tooting Common and I mention my walk the day before. We talk with a determined friendliness, neither of us letting a silence settle, about Thursday night’s storm. A tree came down in Streatham High Road
and all the buses were diverted. Tiles came off the roof of Sam’s building, but the new tenant in the building is, luckily, handy with a ladder. My garden, I tell him, is in quite a state.
Jane joins us with a handful of glasses and a bottle of wine and sits down on the other side of me. While Pat is being comforted at the other end of the table, we start comparing half-terms. Jane leans forward to tell Sam and Penny, the English teacher, that I came across their bête noire Alan Murphy, and details are demanded. I tell them about Sand Martin and his creepily soft-shoed ‘right-hand man’, the pantomime friendliness of Murphy himself. Jane remembers a speech Murphy once gave on the importance in education of the ‘three Fs: facts, facts and facts’ and everybody splutters in indignation. ‘And Victoria Murphy, his wife!’ Penny adds. ‘Did you see her column in the Spectator? She was extolling the sanctity of marriage, unless you happen to be gay, in which case it’s an abomination. Children should be brought up in a safe environment with a role model of each sex. She’s a fascist.’
‘Just because I’m a mature woman with opinions he finds challenging.’ Pat’s voice cuts across our conversation. ‘He can’t cope with that, oh no.’
Sam’s arm is lying along the back of my chair, and Jane has refilled my glass. I can feel the wine warming my veins, slipping into the knots in my neck. The conversation swims and swells around me. I hear myself laugh; my voice joining theirs. We are at the back of the room, several feet from the window, at the furthest point from the door. The pub is filling up – people are waiting at the bar, standing. You wouldn’t be able to see me sitting here, tucked away, unless you were properly looking. You would have to push people aside to find me.
I lower my head. What harm will it do, just to slip out of life for a bit, not to have to think?
My phone rings in my back pocket. It’s Peggy. I rock back my chair to hear her. She has been frantic all day and, what a shame, but she can’t take Howard tomorrow. She’s got friends coming to lunch and is ‘110 per cent sure’ their little girl is allergic to dogs.
Remember Me This Way Page 18
