The Home Corner Page 11

  ‘Sorry?’ I felt oddly alarmed: I didn’t know what to make of that wink at all.

  Mr Temple considered me for a moment. He smiled and stepped forward, and I stepped back.

  ‘Mrs Crieff moves in mysterious ways,’ he said again, ‘her wonders to perform.’

  Which did not enlighten me any further. Also, he did not wink at Mrs Baxter, I couldn’t help noticing, who was standing behind me, holding a Custard Cream someone had offered her. At fifty-eight, Mrs Baxter had entered that curious, invisible zone I’d heard my mother speak of. On a different occasion, in Mrs Richards’ absence, perhaps, Mr Temple might have begun to flirt with me. He might have tried out one of his one-liners on me. ‘I like the hair: very bold,’ he might have said, his voice a kind of foghorn across the staffroom. That afternoon, though, was evidently not the right moment. Besides, I was perhaps already looking a little too blotchy and a little too weird that week: not quite flirting material. I thought for a moment of Ed McRae, of his overnight switch from ardour to coldness, and about the way I’d behaved around men ever since. How they had scared me. And I wondered if I was already becoming a person who would be discussed by the staff next term. Maybe I was already becoming Luisa McKenzie, that funny girl we had last year. The girl who did not tick all the boxes.

  ‘Ignore Mr Temple, Luisa,’ Mrs Baxter said in a loud, flat voice, placing the Custard Cream into her mouth, and so I did; it seemed the easiest option. We breezed as a unit past Mr Temple towards the shelf beside the sink, grabbed our coffee mugs and carried on in a kind of arc towards the seats by the windows. Mrs Baxter and I always sat there to eat our lunch. The seats were turquoise – big and sighing and puffy – and people always made a beeline for them. It was a polite, insouciant beeline, but we all still wanted them, those seats.

  ‘So,’ said Mrs Baxter contentedly, lowering herself onto a seat so it made its usual sighing exhalation and then she opened up the lid of her lunch box.

  I felt jangled by the morning and so I didn’t say anything for a while. I just sat there. Sat and waited. Outside the window, on the low branches of a tree, a group of sparrows twittered. Someone hooted their car horn on the road. Mrs Regan, Mr Temple and some P4 teachers moved around conspiratorially on the far side of the room, clattering teaspoons against coffee mugs. I looked down at my lunch box but I wasn’t hungry, so I looked up again. On the staff bulletin board beside the door there was a sign for an end-of-term social that Mrs Regan was arranging. It would be taking place in a local tandoori restaurant at the beginning of the holidays. A chance for us all to let our hair down! Mrs Regan had written in biro at the bottom. I tried to picture myself in a fortnight’s time, sitting in a tandoori restaurant with other members of St Luke’s staff. I envisaged the little silver bowls full of steamed rice, the heated, fragrant hand wipes, the wine glasses sloshing with Chianti. There was a plan, P3’s Miss Leonard had said, to go clubbing afterwards in The Ritzy. I thought of cavemen with clubs; of those strange, low-hatted men in Wacky Races hitting each other over the head. I had signed up for the evening – Mrs Baxter had talked me into it – but it struck me now how I would much rather go up to the Meadows that evening and lie down on the grass beneath a tree.

  ‘D’you know, Luisa,’ Mrs Baxter said as she prised a sandwich from her lunch box, ‘this is my twenty-fifth year here. I’ve been eating my lunch in this room for twenty-five years.’

  ‘Wow: twenty-five years?’ I said.

  It seemed an impossible number of years to have worked anywhere. Even to have lived. How could that just happen? I wondered. How could that number of years just be allowed to flop and lollop along? You could probably make salt dough models in your sleep. You could probably teach Fun with Phonics with your eyes closed.

  ‘That must feel like quite an achievement,’ I said. ‘I mean, you must have taught hundreds of children.’

  ‘Generations,’ Mrs Baxter replied, opening up a little pot full of Ritz biscuits and sliding a couple in between the slices of her sandwich. ‘Did the children ask you about your hair this morning, by the way?’ she added insouciantly, changing the subject in one deft move.

  ‘My hair?’

  And I pictured myself – as I might appear at that moment – to the other teachers in the room: I was a peculiar, fretful flamingo, sitting there with my carton of juice and my sandwiches.

  ‘It’s just that it’s a little . . .’ Mrs Baxter continued, ‘. . . unexpected. And I wondered if any of the children wanted to know why you’d done it?’

  I pierced the carton with its little plastic straw.

  ‘Only Emily mentioned it, in fact,’ I said. ‘In Circle Time.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘She did also mention it’, I confessed, ‘while she was playing in the Home Corner with Jade and Lauren.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’ Mrs Baxter asked. She seemed oddly intrigued.

  ‘Well,’ I said, thinking back to the conversation Emily and I had had. ‘I just told her that some people dye their hair.’ I sucked some juice. ‘And I told them it was up to them if they wanted to dye it. And so I’d decided to dye mine pink. Only it was a mistake,’ I continued. ‘The pink colour. That turned out to be a mistake. And I told her I’m going to be washing it out over the next week or so.’

  I trailed off. I did not go on to mention the conversation Emily and I had proceeded to have about the words ‘dye’ and ‘die’. I did not say we’d touched on the subject of mortality: to die, as in to no longer exist. (‘Dye is another word for colour,’ I’d said. ‘It’s not “die” as in . . .’ ‘Yes, I know,’ Emily had chirped back. ‘My mummy dyes her hair, too, because she doesn’t like all the grey hairs. She thinks they make her look like an old lady.’) And a little picture came into my mind for some reason of Ed McRae and his T-shirt, that T-shirt I had loved because I’d thought it had said something about him: about his honesty and his alluring cynicism. Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die. And I thought about those pills I’d swallowed, the one in the clinic and the one in my room at home. And about what had happened after that. And I thought about people not being as clever as you might once have believed; that sometimes they just wore T-shirts with other people’s ideas on them.

  ‘Oh, so did you not mean for it to turn out that colour?’ Mrs Baxter asked lightly. ‘Was the pink a mistake? Oh well,’ she concluded, laughing, ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft awry!’

  I looked down at the foil-wrapped sandwiches on my knees. There was something about packed lunches that had always caused me to feel both pleased and gloomy. I don’t know, maybe it was a hope over experience thing.

  ‘Is it a problem then?’ I asked Mrs Baxter. ‘The colour of my hair? Is it’, I ploughed on indiscreetly, ‘something that’s going to be yet another question mark on Mrs Crieff’s form?’

  Mrs Baxter frowned and did not reply.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said.

  Along with the pineapple juice I had peanut-butter sandwiches that day, and one of my mum’s gingerbread men and an apple. Lunch for a six-year-old. The Golden Delicious apple was neither golden nor delicious. The gingerbread man smiled its raisiny smile and hurt my front teeth when I bit its head off.

  ‘Ooh: a gingerbread man!’ Mrs Baxter said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, will you be making biscuits for the big event on Thursday?’ she continued, settling back more comfortably with her lunch.

  And for a moment I didn’t know what she was talking about. Big event? Then I remembered: Mrs Crieff’s end-of-term jamboree. Her celebration of another school year successfully concluded, after which we could all relax. On the wall behind Mrs Baxter, to the right of her head, there was even a poster about it that one of the children had recently designed: a picture of an enormous fairy cake beneath crossed wooden spoons. It looked like something heraldic.

  Come too our jumberlee

  for old scool uniforms,

  tombowler, toys, food and madgic!


  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘my mum’s making a few things. She’s really the . . . biscuit-maker in our family.’

  Which was true: a week or so earlier, I’d made the mistake of showing my mother Mrs Crieff’s letter about the jamboree, the paragraph where she’d said how wonderful it would be if ‘. . . mums, dads, grandparents and carers could spare the time to grab a spoon, don an apron and rustle up a batch of fairy cakes or flapjacks . . .’ And my mother had obliged! My mother, who wasn’t remotely connected with St Luke’s, apart from the unfortunate fact that I worked there. She’d made twenty-four fairy cakes and eighteen slices of chocolate fridge cake. She’d already bagged them up and put them in the freezer, ready for me to take in.

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of your mum,’ Mrs Baxter said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. It was. And also a little depressing. Mrs Crieff doesn’t deserve your gingerbread men, Mum! I’d felt like saying when my mother had taken them out of the oven, still smiling at 180 degrees. Save your biscuits for someone else! The whole event seemed to have become a slight obsession for Mrs Crieff. ‘We feel the jamboree would be an appropriate way for us to leap forward into the summer holidays!’ she’d written laboriously in her letter. Which was how she wrote her letters: they were always full of words like appropriate and leaping forward. The school library had already benefited earlier that year from the kind donation of one parent, she’d continued coyly, and the proceeds of this particular fund-raising event would be going towards new gym equipment for the school. She’d asked people to make a big end-of-term effort: to rifle through their children’s clothes drawers; to beg, borrow or steal bunting and balloons; to rustle up cakes and biscuits. They were full of rustling up, too, her letters, and rifling through and moving forward. Though I suspected she didn’t really condone begging or stealing.

  ‘I might make some rock buns if I get time,’ I said to Mrs Baxter, glancing up at another sign on the wall, just to the left of the jumberlee one. Besides rain and snow, it said, think of other ‘weather’ words for what falls from the sky.

  Mrs Baxter sighed and blinked. ‘I’m going to make some of my Melting Moments,’ she said. ‘I’m famed for my Melting Moments.’

  ‘Are you?’ I replied, and I started to laugh. The words Melting Moments just struck me as funny. That, and the weather that falls from the sky. But then I stopped because Mrs Baxter wasn’t laughing. ‘So,’ I said. I looked down, and then up, out of the high staffroom window, at the pale-grey summer air. There were more seagulls flying through it now, blown in from the coast. The weather felt . . . it was hard to know what it felt like. Something was changing, though. Something was beginning to change.

  ‘By the way,’ Mrs Baxter said after a while, with renewed dignity in her voice, ‘don’t forget you and I will be needing sandwiches tomorrow, too, Luisa. For the Waterways trip. It’s amazing how often the classroom assistants forget to bring lunch,’ she added ruefully, making me wonder again about the errant, enigmatic Miss Ford.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’d never forget my lunch!’ I blurted before I could stop myself. ‘Lunch is the best bit of the day!’ Which was true, as far as I was concerned.

  But Mrs Baxter was not in the mood. It was the last week of term and she still had her report cards to write and her appraisal forms to fill in, and she didn’t need sarcastic nineteen-year-old classroom assistants adding to her problems.

  ‘Just thought I’d mention it,’ she said, and she stood up, brushed the crumbs from her cardigan and left the room.

  *

  I got up too after a while; after everyone else had gone. I plodded quietly over to the sink in my sensible shoes. I tipped some coffee granules into the ‘I’m a Mug’ mug Stella Muir had once given me, shortly before we parted company, adding hot water from the urn and milk from the dregs of Mr Temple’s milk carton. Then I took my coffee back to the turquoise seats, sat down and watched the steam rising from beneath the lid of the urn. Someone had left a pile of homework sheets on the table beside my seat. I picked up the top one and read it while I sipped my coffee.

  Our trip to Holyrood Palace

  I liked our trip to Holyrood Palace. My favrite bit was playing hide and seak in the sentry boxes and also wen the guide put on a big hat and tol us how Rizzio was killed 56 times in front of pregant Mary.

  There was a picture beneath, of a man being stabbed. Being killed fifty-six times. There was a scarlet fountain of blood and Mary Queen of Scots looking on, huge-stomached, her mouth a felt-penned chasm of woe.

  ‘Right: upwards and onwards,’ I heard Mr Temple saying in the corridor, as a burst of bright white sunlight suddenly lit up the room and made the steam from the urn look briefly ethereal.

  I sat and thought about ghosts; the ghosts of things.

  7

  Mindy Moo seemed more real to me, sometimes, than the people I’d just spent the day with at St Luke’s. More there. I always liked it when Emily mentioned her, because her name sounded like one I’d been familiar with once, a long time ago. Mindy Moo sounded like someone I’d known and liked. Standing at the bus stop after school that afternoon, I thought about something I’d read once in a book at school – a tradition gypsies used to have, when naming their children. They gave them three, in total, the book had said: there was the baby’s official name, and then its family name and then the name whispered into its ear by its mother. That last name was something known only by the mother and – in some subliminal way, I supposed – the baby. There was something nice about that tradition, I’d thought. Names could be like that, though; they could be funny. Also, they could give people a character they didn’t actually have. Stella, for instance, had once sounded like a bright, uncomplicated name to me. Just as Ed had been a salt-of-the-earth name, an honourable name; manly and a good laugh.

  I was never late, going home: punctuality was never a problem at the end of the day. I had to wait almost ten minutes before I saw the 42 bus heave itself mirage-like around a distant bend at the bottom of the hill. A maroon rectangle, advertising student bus passes. Just the ticket for your Uni days. It trundled past the chemist’s, moved on past The Gift of Time gift shop, with its faded fish mobile hanging motionless in the window, then stopped at the bus stop before mine. I waited while some silent figures plodded up and down its steps like people in a Lowry painting, before it launched itself back into the road.

  ‘Single, please,’ I declared, getting on board, and I dropped my change into the machine.

  The bus seemed to be full of old people that afternoon. People of my age had all been whisked away, like the children in The Pied Piper of Hamelin. I sat down beside an old woman in a green polyester turban who glared briefly at me before turning her gaze out of the window. In the seat in front sat a woman with a toddler. The child was standing on the woman’s knees. She was wearing big, jangling sandals, the kind Stella had used to call Jesus creepers. ‘I’m not a climbing frame, Crystal,’ the woman said mildly to the child, but it made no difference: the child was just clambering, her little fingers creasing her mother’s summer blouse. ‘Mummy, make your knees a lap, Mummy, make your knees a lap,’ she complained. They were on their way home, I supposed, from some crèche or playschool or toddler group. I’d heard some of the mothers at school talking about toddler groups. I pictured the noise and the thick-wheeled plastic trikes and the snacks. Halved grapes and chopped bananas. Nescafé and Bourbon biscuits.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ the child trumpeted, her sandals’ crêpe soles threatening to rip the fabric of her mother’s skirt. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’

  ‘Oh, Crystal!’ sighed the woman.

  She reminded me of someone Stella and I had once used to observe through the windows of our old school bus: a woman we’d used to call The Mummy Woman, because she’d always seemed such an epitome of saintly motherhood. She’d stood at the corner of Cumberland Road every day, surrounded by infants – and Stella and I, sitting high and superior on the bus, had always used to shriek when we saw her. ‘Look –
there she is! There’s the Mummy Woman!’ She had been shortish, this woman, late thirties, with a weary face and a practical padded jacket, and always with this huge entourage of small children. Who in their right mind would sacrifice themselves to a life like that? we used to think. We’d counted them once, the children: there were five of them, not including a baby strapped to the woman’s chest and a larger baby, often yelling its head off, in a buggy. What on earth was she doing? What was she doing with her life? She was like the old woman who lived in a shoe. And we were the girls who were not going to get trapped. ‘Excuse me, this is my stop,’ said the old woman beside me, as if it was her stop, in some way.

  ‘Sorry,’ I replied, standing up to let her past.

  ‘Mummy,’ the little girl was still complaining, ‘Mummy, make your knees a lap! Make your knees a lap, Mummy! Mummy –’

  ‘Boo,’ I said, as I sat down again: I couldn’t resist it. And the little girl stared at me, wide-eyed, like some sort of marsupial, then slunk down to hide beside her mother.

  This was, I felt, a small achievement. And now I considered just carrying on past my stop – because maybe you could do that; maybe you could sail straight past where you were supposed to be going, and by doing this, alter the course of your life.

  I never had so far, though. Sailed on. I’d always just hopped off and gone home. Our nearest stop was at a place people from my old school used to call God Squad Junction – a crossing where four square, greyish churches confronted each other, like people having an argument. There Is Hope, it said on a noticeboard stuck in the front garden outside one of the churches. And there was a picture of a rainbow, an arc of pure beauty. I remembered there’d been a poster just like that at my old school, too, stuck above the door of our exam hall.

  We lived only five minutes away from the bus stop. It was just an unfortunate fact that Mrs Crieff did, too. There was nothing to be done about this, of course – but, still, it was not a relaxing walk. I strode resolutely along the pavement that afternoon, speeding up as I neared her front gate. Fortunately, Mrs Crieff was never in. She was always still up at St Luke’s at that time of day, working hard. As I hurried past her front gate I pictured her perched in her office on her blue pneumatic chair. She had a very upright way of sitting which always seemed like a reprimand to people who slouched. There she was, I imagined, sitting upright and working out who to keep and who to fire; there she was, collating and ticking and assessing. And there I was, the assessed, the unpunctual, the unfocused Miss McKenzie, schlepping home. Three times during the course of a recent meeting Mrs Crieff had used the words ‘stepping stones’. But the stones she meant were not pretty resting points in a river, they were places from which you launched your next move.