The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

by Sarah May

  Robert even thought his hands looked ugly as he fastened the clasp on his bike saddlebag. He was sure he could smell sweat on himself as wellbad sweatand wanted to check, but was aware of Ellie standing there.

  He never used to sweat in class, but now he sweated like a novice. Or was it an age thingthe male menopause? He’d sweated through today because today was a bad day. He’d taught four minutes of a forty-minute Year 11 English class. The other thirty-six minutes had been spent fruitlessly trying to get Jerome’s mobile off him to the rhythmic banality of ‘gay wanker’. For some reason most of the students at Ellington felt that having a professional qualification was synonymous with being gayhe’d even heard two Year 9 boys referring to the rain that started when they left as gay. Strangely, the only member of the English department who didn’t get called ‘gay wanker’ was the only member who was, in fact, gayLes. Something that had always baffled Robert.

  ‘Mr Hunter? I got you this.’

  Robert looked up.

  Ellie was standing directly in front of the desk holding a brown A5 envelope out towards him. She looked ill, and her mouth must have been dry because he could hear her tongue in it as she spoke.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s for youbecause you look so tired all the time.’

  She looked as though she was about to run out of the room.

  ‘Waitstay.’

  She paused, unsure. ‘You want me to stay?’

  He nodded, smilingand opened the envelope.

  Turning it towards the light, he made out some joss sticks at the bottom, something that glittered, and a packet of white stuff. He pulled the packet out.

  ‘Bath salts,’ Ellie said. ‘They’re jasmine scentedthey help you unwind. They’re really good those ones.’

  He didn’t know what to say, so just nodded and hoped he was still smiling. All he could now picture, as he continued to stare without seeing into the envelope, was Ellie Palmer in a bath somewhere. To do himself credit, he was aware that he didn’t particularly want to picture this, but his mind was working on it anyway. He’d been teaching for over fifteen years and this was a road he’d never gone down before. He’d made himself think about itespecially when he first started teachingbut it never happened. The only time he ever came close was with a girl called Rachel, whom he’d taught the year Findlay was born. She came to every lesson, but he never heard her speak. She wasn’t disruptive and the other kids seemed to leave her alone in this strange silence that everybodyfor some reasonrespected. Even when he asked her a direct questionwhich he did a lot the first termshe’d just shake her head at him, until he moved on.

  He never did hear her speak and sometimes he’d catch himself looking at her in lessons and feel tears pricking uncontrollably at his eyes. He had no idea why. Rachel was the first time he’d ever felt helpless in a classroom.

  He never taught her again and afterwards was able to rationalise it as postnatal stress. Kate had depression, and he had an uncontrollable urge to cry every time he laid eyes on a student called Rachel.

  Aware now of Ellie’s eyes on him, he shook some of the glitter stars into his hands and realised, horrified, that he was about to start crying nowat the sight of the purple, green and gold glitter stars in the palm of his hand. He stared helplessly at Ellie and tried to choke back the first fast-rising sob, making a strange grunting noise instead.

  ‘Mr Hunter?’ Ellie looked frightened.

  ‘I’m finefine.’

  ‘D’you need to sit down or something?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He took three deep breaths and tried to empty his mind. ‘Thank you. That’s very thoughtful of you,’ he said, trying to level his voice.

  The gift showed a burgeoning sensuality, and had been chosen to express her womanlinessbut was essentially a child’s gift. Maybe it was this realisation that had moved him to tears. The glitter stars and the joss sticks were chosen with the openness of a child’s imagination and had moved him in the way Findlay’s gifts of old cereal boxes moved him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said again, calmly this time, tucking the envelope inside the saddlebag and getting into his fluorescent yellow cycle jacket.

  He waited for her to trail, uncertain, to the classroom door after him, then turned out the lights.

  The darkness was immediately soothing.

  ‘You shouldn’t have spent your money on me.’ He wasn’t sure why he’d said thathe hadn’t intended saying anything other than goodbye.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said, pleased, ‘I’ve got a job now.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Film Nite.’

  ‘The video shop?’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t itpeople still call it that even though we don’t stock videos any more.’

  ‘Different generation,’ Robert said, defensively.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said quickly, ‘I meanI think of it as a video shop still and I’m, like, sixteen.’

  This took them abruptly to a dead end, and Robert was about to say his goodbyes and leave. In the darkened classroom, Ellie had become another child in uniform, one he was fonder of than others, but still a child in uniform passing through his life.

  ‘Only a week left.’

  That caught him out. ‘A week?’

  ‘Until exam leave starts.’ She paused, awkward.

  ‘You’re right. I’d completely forgotten.’

  She was blushingeven in the darkness he could see her blushesand looked hurt, but didn’t care that she looked hurt.

  Kate’s face used to look that naked, Robert thought, full of a sudden wonder at the memory of Kate’s face ever having been that naked.

  It was getting darker; the rain was going to get heavier.

  ‘I think you’re a brilliant teacher,’ Ellie gulped.

  Robert was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of possibility he hadn’t felt for a lot of years. A sense of possibility thatin his darker momentshe thought had gone forever. Whether that was to do with himor Katehe didn’t know.

  His hand strayed inadvertently from the light switch to the crown of Ellie’s head. ‘You’re magnificent,’ he mumbled without thinking. He wasn’t sure whether he meant Ellie in particular or all children in general.

  He moved his hand gently down her hair, aware of the lines of her skull, pronounced beneath the palm of his handand was about to kiss the crown of her head, where his hand had just been, when he caught sight of her face.

  What had he done?

  He jerked open the classroom door.

  The corridor outside felt cold.

  Ellie was staring at himhe could feel her entire being straining towards him, watching; waiting with the vulnerability of yearning.

  How easy it would be, he thought, to slip into this. Adults didn’t feel yearning like thatmaybe for things past, as they got older, but never for things they didn’t yet know.

  Ellie wanted the kiss because she thought it would mean everything to her when in fact it would cost her nothingand him everythingonly she wasn’t old enough to know this.

  He pulled away.

  He saw her realise that she wasn’t going to get her kissand couldn’t bear to look at her face.

  ‘Have a good weekend…’ He walked quickly away from her down the corridor towards the DT lab where he left his bike, and clipped the saddlebag to the pannierEllie’s face growing clearer instead of diminishing. It wasn’t until he started to wheel the bike towards the classroom door that he realised the tyres had been slashed and the front wheel completely buckled.

  He sat on the stool and contemplated the bike for a while. Jerome. The door opened then shuthe didn’t see who it was. He left the DT lab and tried looking for Les.

  In the main entrance hall, Simba the caretaker was up on some scaffolding with two of the groundsmen, trying to get a widescreen TV up onto the wall. How long was that going to stay up? Laptops walked out of the building on a daily basiseven a whiteboard had gone missing. The widescreen didn’t stand a chance.
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  ‘Have you seen Les?’ Robert called up.

  Simba didn’t respond. The TV was flickering on. After a few minutes the face of the Ellington Technology College’s principal, Sandra Durrant, appeared on the screen. There she was in a canary yellow dress, surrounded by Sudanese orphans from her recent trip to the Sudanthe victims of AIDS and civil war.

  Simba stood back, precariously near the edge of the scaffolding, pleased.

  ‘I’m looking for Les,’ Robert shouted up again. ‘My bike’s been vandalised.’

  ‘There she is,’ Simba cried ecstatically, ignoring Robert. ‘Our prophetess.’

  ‘Prophetess?’

  Simba’s love knew no bounds and now everyone was going to be exposed to Sandra Durrant’s Sudanese crusade every time they walked through the main school entrance.

  ‘Simba,’ Robert yelled. ‘My bike’s totally buggeredsome kidI need to see Lesor the head.’

  Simba smiled down warmly at him. ‘Mrs Durrant’s busy at the momentshe’s leading a prayer meeting. We’re all praying for you, Mr Hunter.’

  ‘My bike…’ Robert started to yell again.

  ‘We’ll pray for your bike as well. You’ll seeeverything will be better soon.’

  Robert stalked away, so disorientated by the past forty-five minutes that he was almost on the verge of believing Simbabelieving him enough to take a second look in the DT lab and make sure his bike hadn’t received a miraculous makeover.

  It hadn’t.

  He gave up and in the end found himself walking out of the school gates, past the Esso garage where a green Fiesta was parked, towards Elephant and Castle tube station where there was a cashpoint it was relatively safe to use. He’d have to get the bus homeand only hoped the incident with the bike meant Ellie had got a head start.

  He cut his way through the underpass, resurfacing into the backdraught of fumes from the Thai Snack Shack; fumes that were rapidly filling the entrance to the tube station as well.

  Feeling increasingly nauseous, he tried to withdraw twenty pounds from the tube station cashpoint, but the machine told him to refer to his bank. At first he thought he’d put the wrong PIN in, so he tried again. Then he checked the balance: £3,300 in debit. Christ, what was their overdraft? Realising he had no idea, he moved away from the cashpoint towards the Evening Standard seller and phoned 24-hour banking. After listening to nearly all of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, he spoke to a woman who told him that it was £3,000 and that they were £300 over their limit. They were going to incur bank charges. Would he be transferring funds into the account?

  Funds from where?

  ‘I thought the overdraft facility was around five hundred.’

  ‘It was extended to three thousand a month ago.’

  ‘A month ago?’ He hung up, went back to the cashpoint and withdrew ten pounds using his credit cardthen went to the kiosk and topped up his Oyster card.

  He got to the bus stop just as the heavy rain started, relieved at the absence of any Ellington uniformsespecially Ellie’s. It was coming on to four o’clock; he should have missed most of the after-school run. The shelter he stood huddled in had been designed to provide as few potential surfaces for vandalism as possible while still staying erect, which meant it had no capacity for providing shelter from the sort of storm that was breaking now over the roundabout at Elephant and Castle.

  He thought about phoning Kate, but four o’clock in the afternoon wasn’t the time to discuss their finances. Had she talked to him about increasing the overdraft and he just couldn’t remember? There was so much he couldn’t remember at the moment. Three buses pulled up and left. He hadn’t been on a bus for ages. Finks, who taught maths and ran after-school football, had been crippled at a bus stop three months ago in a reprisal stabbing by an ex-Year 11 student who had been sacked from the job Finks had organised for him at Evans Cycles.

  He eyed the only other people at the bus stoptrying not to do it nervouslya young white boy who was coughing nonstop over his pit-bull, and a middle-aged Jamaican woman in a Nationwide uniform. Distracted by the pit-bull next to him as it started to tenseits ears flattening and its head flicking nervously as it let out a low growlhe didn’t hear the car horn, or see the green Fiesta that had been parked at the Esso garage outside school pull up and become semi-submerged in the kerb-side flash floods.

  ‘I think that’s for you,’ the owner of the pit-bull said to him.

  Robert peered through the rain at the green Fiesta he didn’t recognise, and approached warily. The windows in the front were steamed up. Through the back windowpast a sticker that read FUR COATS ARE WORN BY BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS AND UGLY HUMANShe made out a child seat and the face of a young girl, maybe ten, staring at him, expressionless. She was wearing a pink anorak and had a McDonald’s shake in her drink holder.

  Then the Fiesta’s front window was cranked down and there was Jerome’s over-familiar face bouncing around in the open space where condensation and glass had been. Robert was aware of the little girl in the back staring at him still. He saw a pair of jeans and a ringed hand belonging to the driver, but not his face.

  Then Jerome was pointing a gun at him, laughing.

  Robert was staring at it, thinking the muzzle looked scratched.

  The child in the back started laughing as well, and winding her window down.

  The driver said, ‘There’s a bus comingyou done?’ sounding bored, jumped up, irritated.

  The gun disappeared from the window and Jerome fell back in his seat in hysterics, ‘Your face, manyou get it?’ he spluttered to the child in the back seat. The child had a mobile pointed at Robert. There were splats of dark pink on the front of her anorak where rain was falling on her through the open window.

  Then the car stalled.

  ‘Shit,’ the driver yelled as the bus started to plough through the roadside flood, bearing down on them.

  ‘Shit,’ Jerome echoed, leaning forward in his seat, the hand holding the gun resting on the dashboard. ‘Come on, manfuck this,’ he yelled, banging on the steering wheel.

  ‘You…’ the man yelled back as the car came to life and jerked away from the kerb, the girl filming the bus now on the mobile she was holding, until a hand pulled her back into the car.

  The only thing Robert was aware of was being covered in watersuddenly. It was running down over his hands, and his trousers were plastered along the fronts of his legs.

  The bus doors opened in front of him.

  The woman in the Nationwide uniform pushed past him and he saw the man with the pit-bull get on halfway up the bus so he wouldn’t have to pay his fare.

  Robert got onto the crowded bus and found a space near the bottom of the stairs where he was in everybody’s way. At the next stop the driver let on more wet people and he was shunted up the aisles of the bus by a woman panting, with water steaming off her hair over her face, until he yelled at her, suddenly, ‘What the fuck is your problem?’ A man’s voice, close by said, ‘Heyshe’s only trying to get home like everybody else.’

  A couple of people stared at him for a while then he was forgotten. Jerome had pulled a gun on him. Jerome had vandalised his bicycle and known he would have to get the bus home instead. Jerome had been watching him. He saw East Street Market packing up through windows running with rain, and Charlie Chaplin’s birthplace. The bus’s wheels slid on tarmac made greasy with rain as the driver swerved to avoid the rush-hour swell of people slopping into the road. Then they got stuck in traffic and somebody close by smelt so stale and helpless that Robert thought he was going to vomit, and the more he thought about how horrific it would be to vomit on a packed rush-hour bus, the more his insides lurched, until he shoved his way to the doors at the next stop, just as they were closing; got temporarily stuck then squeezed himself out, just about managing to keep his balance on the patch of pavement outside Bagel King, where an alcoholic dressed in a suit was swaying carelessly and waving. Was the man waving at him?

  He turned away, breathing heavily, his
eyes flickering everywhereon the alert for anything resembling a green Fiesta.

  The bus slid away and on the roof of a furniture shop on the other side of the road, he saw a sodden wet child hurling rocks at the bus he’d just got off as it pulled awayit was one of the Skinner twins from his tutor group. Without thinking, he started to walk.

  Up the rest of Walworth Road to Camberwell, past King’s, the Maudsley and the Salvation Army building to the top of Denmark Hill, where he watched the rain raining on the vale of SE22 spread out below. It took him fifty minutes, and every car that passed was a green Fiesta carrying Jerome and the child in the pink anorak. Every careven when it slid past and turned out to be a silver Mercedes or a white BT van.

  He stood in the rain, trying to work out if he’d knownas soon as the green Fiesta pulled up at the kerbthat it would be Jerome. And if that was the caseif he had known instinctively that Jerome would be inside the carwhy had he gone ahead and walked right up to it, with something strangely close to relief?

  He stood at the traffic lights as they changed three times. He was soaked, and the water running down onto his wrists and hands and face had grit in it from the road. Somewhere down there at the bottom of the hill was his house, his marriage, his children.

  A car pulled up beside him.

  ‘It’s Robert,’ Margery yelled suddenly, from the back of the car.

  ‘What?’ Jessica turned her head round as the lights changed to red.

  ‘Robertthere!’ Margery paused. ‘He’s soaked.’

  The traffic lights changed to green and Jessica made a right-hand turn she wasn’t meant to, pulling up on the kerb beside Robert Hunter, standing motionless in his fluorescent yellow cycle jacket, holding a saddlebag, the rain running off him.

  Margery wound her window down, panting with the effort. ‘Robert,’ she called out. ‘Robert?’

  Robert turned round slowly, looking scared, the water running over his eyes so that he couldn’t open them properly. He had to keep his mouth open in order to breath, his nostrils were so full of water.