Perhaps the weekend would calm everyone down? It could go either way: Lorna could be tarred from that day forward as a thief, and nothing could shake it – or, maybe, there was an outside chance that, being so young, being reasonably popular, she would be forgiven? Oh, but Claire knew how unlikely that was. Being different was the main sin of childhood.
Once, when she was six, or seven, Claire had pushed a boy over in the playground. She still remembered his face, shocked before the pain began, dismayed that Claire – Claire – hurt him. He’d gazed at her, his eyes shocked behind the smeary lenses of his glasses, and he’d said, ‘But we’re friends!’ Then he’d cried in big, hitching wails. They weren’t friends, of course. He was a new boy, but not so new that he was still a novelty – that sheen had worn off. Now he was just strange and annoying. Claire had been assigned as his Special Guide to help him settle in (that’s what they called it at her school, a virtuous shadow). But the trouble was that the boy – Oliver Boyce, that had been his name – didn’t seem to want to fit in. Even in the middle of winter, he wore shorts. He wheezed when he ran and didn’t play football. Tremulous, waxy blobs of snot hung down to his top lip, were licked, and then sniffed back upwards with a horrible, meaty snort, before making their inevitable progress again. After a few months of Oliver chained to her side, Claire began to panic that he’d somehow infect her, tar her with his horrible lack of social understanding. He didn’t fit in anywhere – he wouldn’t jostle and fight with the boys, and he followed the girls closely, asthmatically, making them uncomfortable, making them shun Claire too. He was a sissy. He was Claire’s sissy boyfriend, and she knew that she had to do something to throw him off. And so she’d pushed him, quite deliberately, into a muddy puddle in the middle of the playing field. And his expression of anguished betrayal had stayed with her ever since.
Claire was congratulated by some of the older children for finally cutting herself loose, and she was, briefly, ushered into the higher social echelons of the Pony Set. She’d felt so terribly guilty, ashamed. But not ashamed enough to take up with Oliver again. And, yes it was a long time ago, but still. Children don’t change that much. Children can be animals. They’ll rip apart the powerless.
She parked outside Mother’s large, detached house on a quiet avenue just a few minutes from the school, walked through the paved front garden, and gave the door two brisk raps. Claire always knocked briskly at the door, twice. Any more annoyed Mother – ‘I’m not deaf, Claire!’ She had her own key, but using it would seem wrong. Presumptuous. They amused themselves by watching game shows and over-hyped dramas. Mother called it ‘prole food’, and smiled a twisted smile.
Johnny, Norma’s aged Jack Russell, pattered to the door and barked, followed by Mother, looking old, at least until she stood up straighter. She placed that ironic smile on her face, and gently nudged Johnny back into the hall with one slipper.
‘Daughter! We meet again. Hard day at the coalface?’
‘Ye-es. A strange day. Sad.’
‘Come into the kitchen – Johnny’s agitating for food.’ She walked ahead, back straighter now. A little slow, but what do you expect? It’s Friday.
‘We’re all tired on Fridays,’ Claire said out loud.
‘Indeed. Tea?’
‘Please.’
Norma Penny was the formidable head of a respected girls’ secondary on the other side of the city. Claire had lost count of the number of times grown women had approached her with awe, and Norma was always the same in these situations – polite, distant. Each time the woman left, feeling like she’d just touched the hem of the monarch’s garment, Mother would roll her eyes drolly and say, ‘The price of fame . . .’
Most heads had been driven into early retirement by stress, heart murmurs, depression; but not Norma. She had the same square shoulders, the straight back and curveless figure as Claire, but there was something more solid about Norma, something more substantial. Whereas Claire sometimes seemed frail, willowy, Norma’s slimness was all wiry power. But Claire worried. Norma seemed indomitable, but she should start taking it a little easier. She would mention it – promised herself she would – soon. When the time was right.
Claire sat in the same straight-backed chair she always sat in in the kitchen. Radio 4 played softly on the countertop. Johnny’s claws tapped on the tiles. He let out little whines of impatience as Norma scraped the dog food carefully out of the tin and into his bowl. The kettle shuddered as it boiled. The fridge hummed. The same sounds of the kitchen Claire always remembered even from her teenage years, when there had been another dog, a different kettle, but still the same.
From the outside, a teacher’s life seemed all of a piece – you went in, you worked through your bag of tricks, you did your marking, you went home. But, Claire thought of it more as a montage, a series of disparate experiences linked by feeling: a pale face glimpsed before it collapsed into laughter, or tears; the tail end of a fight; a sudden shriek in the corridor; a crocodile of children carefully avoiding a puddle; a lone lunch box forgotten on the carpet. Claire absorbed each image, resonant with meaning, until, by the end of the week, she was filled to the brim with pathos. She’d never got used to it, never learned to compartmentalise. Coming to Mother’s was a way of having the experience validated and exorcised at the same time. Norma understood the work, but she also had a way of making things more manageable. That boy with the terrible eczema? Oh Lord, he’ll get over that. That girl who stuttered? Temporary. And her friends will return. Today, like a cat bringing an offering of a wounded mouse, Claire hoped to lay at Norma’s feet: Lorna. Lorna stealing the rubbers. Lorna’s cheek blooming. And Claire failing to help her.
They stayed in the kitchen with their tea, Johnny snorting into his food, the pips of the six o’clock news just gone. Mother brought out the biscuits – she always had a high-end box of biscuits that had been given to her by one grateful parent or another.