Lorna Bell was such a happy little girl with a wide smile. That was the first thing anyone noticed about her if they noticed her at all. She charged around the playground on her stick-thin limbs, and, like all the other children, swarmed into the sudden eddies and drifted out into the hasty tides that lapped into the classrooms when the bell rang. Her classmates hadn’t yet noticed there was anything different about her, nothing unusual; she was just a normal, sweet little girl – friendly, open, confident.
It’s strange how things can change so quickly, and how, once they change, they so rarely go back to the way they were before.
It was Friday Golden Time, the one period in the week when Claire felt able to leave her class in the hands of her enthusiastic but hapless teaching assistant; they couldn’t get into too much of a muddle playing with Lego, and Claire needed a bit of a break, a bit of fresh air. She positioned herself just outside the door, so she could keep an eye on the head teacher’s office. Lorna would be coming out of there soon, and Claire hoped it wouldn’t coincide with hometime – surely the girl had been humiliated enough for one day. To endure the stares and breathless tattle-tale of the playground, to walk, shamefaced and tearful, past sorrowful parents, it was too much, too hard. And she’d started school so well! It had seemed that she would be able to come out from under the shadow of her notorious family. That she would be accepted.
The leaves were just beginning to fall from the plane trees in the housing estate next door. Soon the caretaker would be pushing them into heaped, rotting piles in the corners of the school yard, but now they were crisp, beautiful, and they drifted into swathes of colour, delighting the children. Just last week Claire’s class had made a collage from them – it had pride of place next to the white board. Autumn was her favourite time of year. New possibilities and fresh starts; the soft, contented hum of the children in her class, the odd squeal of delight and excitement. These things calmed her, reassured her that nothing was for ever, and everything could be overcome. And then she heard the office door open, a yelp and a clatter, saw Lorna being dragged across the playground by her mother. Lorna’s cheeks were mottled with cold and tears and her feet in those thin-soled shoes stuttered on the cracked tarmac. She dropped her book bag, and tried to go back for it, but her mother, all Puffa jacket and rage, kept pulling her by the wrist.
‘. . . doing? Fucking hell Lorna?’
‘. . . didn’t know . . .’
‘Course you fucking knew! Knew they weren’t yours, course you did!’ And Claire watched as Lorna made a sudden brave effort to wrench her arm free, and shrieked when the grip was not only maintained, but tightened. Claire’s heart shuddered.
‘I just wanted to share,’ the little girl was saying, ‘I just wanted to share them out.’
‘It’s good to share!’ She raised a hopeful face to her mother. ‘Isn’t it?’
And then the woman’s red, raw hand connected with Lorna’s sallow, curved cheek. Claire heard the sharp slap, saw the palm print appear in a blaze on the child’s face.
‘Claire, I know that you thought you did the right thing, and, I mean, you did do the right thing. But. Pick your moments, you know?’ James Clarke, the Head, was harried. He’d arrived three years ago with the expressed intention of energetically ‘turning the school round’, but so far the only changes had been to the website. He stuffed his tie into his pocket, and stayed standing. Claire didn’t feel that she could sit down, although her feet were killing her.
After the slap, Claire had come forward.
‘Mrs Bell! Miss Bell? What – we can’t have this – you can’t do that!’
The girl/woman turned, her dazed eyes brown and dull as pennies. ‘What?’
‘Hit her, hit a child. You can’t do that!’
‘. . . my kid . . .’ the woman muttered, but her eyes found only the ground now. Lorna stared at Claire, the cheek red as a cherry, mouth open, eyes wide.
‘I have to ask you to come back inside, talk to Mr Clarke.’
‘I’ve talked with him already—’
Claire had stayed silent, pointed at the door with all the teacher sternness she could muster, and the woman slunk back inside, trailing Lorna behind her like a broken kite.
The meeting had not gone well. James Clarke, already exhausted by spending most of the day explaining that stealing was wrong to this stupid girl and her dough-faced mother, cut his eyes tiredly at Claire. The mother whined and fumed: ‘. . . My kid, after all . . .’ and Claire, left standing because there weren’t enough chairs, tried to interject, but was shouted down and ignored until she gave up.
‘I didn’t feel I had a choice,’ Claire said now.
‘I just think that parents – well they shouldn’t hit, but you know, it’s their business. Their children. I think – don’t get too involved. There’s loads of kids like her – Laura.’
‘Lorna.’
‘Lorna. Loads of them. And they all need your support – the school’s support. Just, pick your battles. Emma Brett was telling me that you have some special interest in the girl—’
‘What?’
‘Said you had a word. Just . . . what did she say? Oh that’s it – you’re taking on her cause. Something like that. But at the end of the day—’
‘James, she didn’t deserve to be hit—’
‘At the end of the day, she stole from another student, and she knew full well what she was doing.’
‘I think she got a little confused. She’s very little . . .’ Claire mumbled.
‘Oh I don’t think so,’ James answered briskly. ‘She just doesn’t have morals yet. Probably never will, with that family. Remember Carl? He was feral. Statement or not. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Laura—’
‘Lorna.’
‘—went the same way. You can’t save them all, Claire. It’s a sure fire way to burn yourself out!’
Claire got into her little car, feeling, absurdly, like she was about to cry. She’d done the right thing, she was sure of it. The force of the slap – the way the girl had stumbled back, the look of animal pain on her face. No. No. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t warranted. And James could remonstrate all he wanted, Claire had been around for a long time, longer than him, and she wasn’t about to ignore something like that. It wasn’t in her nature.
She was the teacher children remembered even when they were in secondary school, and often even later, when they were fully grown adults leading staggering toddlers of their own. At the cafés she frequented with Mother, she would see a not-so-familiar face beaming at her: ‘Miss Penny!’ They always remembered her name. ‘Miss Penny, you haven’t changed a bit!’ and Claire would exclaim gently over their children, their job prospects, their small achievements. She was loved, because she cared. And she noticed things.
She’d noticed how well Lorna was fitting in at the beginning of term. She was invited to a lot of parties – the all-girl extravaganzas in church halls, but also the rough and tumble soft-play parties the boys tended to throw.
Claire would see her in the playground: shorter and thinner than most of her friends, happily chasing boys; digging in the sand; laughing at the centre of a knot of girls; laughing hysterically, in the way only small children do, unable or unwilling to explain just how something – how anything – could possibly be that funny.
She hadn’t got into trouble – not at the beginning. There were no frowny faces, red cards or trips to see the head teacher. It was a bit of a miracle, really, when you thought about it, coming from that family. She wasn’t teased either. But then, in infant school, the children were too young to perceive difference, and to ascribe that difference to a particular social class – that came later, in the sly, self-conscious years of three and four – and so, for now, none of Lorna’s peers had noticed or attached any importance to her greyish polo shirts, spotted with grease and ketchup, the way her hem came down from its cheap webbing, the lack of a warm coat, the cheap shoes. They hadn’t yet noticed that she didn’t bring presents to birthday parties, or have parties herself. But the parents, and teachers, had noticed, and come to their own conclusions.
Those few from the nearby well-to-do avenues felt sorry for the girl, proud that their own daughters played with her, and congratulated themselves on raising children who lived in the ‘real’ world, with ‘real’ people. The parents from the estates said that at least she wasn’t like her brother, Carl, but look at the state of her shoes! And you know the school gives them money for some nice ones from Clarks, but her mum keeps it and sends her in in those knock-offs from the market instead.
Recently though, there’d been incidents. Islands of concern. The fork thrown at lunchtime; the heart gouged into the craft table; the handful of gritty sand rubbed into a boy’s hair. And, now, this.
For the past year or so, the all-consuming fad in the school was for a special type of fragranced eraser: a marketing meme from the makers of a popular cartoon franchise. Each was shaped as a different character, each permeated with the smell of chocolate, apples, cherries, or roses. They were fiendishly expensive, and appalling at erasing, so parents couldn’t comfort themselves with the idea that they’d spent over the odds for something that was at least useful.
Each month, the manufacturers would bring out another batch, and instantly the old set became embarrassingly obsolete. Parents and teachers alike had hoped the fad would die over the summer holidays, but no such luck, and this month was even more trying, because the erasers were Halloween themed, limited edition, special. And even more expensive. Girls hunkered down on their heels in corners of the playground, holding earnest discussions. They carried their erasers around in clear plastic sandwich bags: it absolutely had to be a sandwich bag, no opaque carrier bags, and God forbid you kept them loose in your pocket or at the bottom of your book bag. The end of each month saw a series of impromptu bring-and-buy sales. Children would spread out their soon-to-be-outmoded erasers and barter them away for other goods – a long-cherished hair clip perhaps, or the chance to see someone’s new kitten. Sometimes, carried away by their own generosity, richer girls would give their old erasers away to younger, poorer kids. And Lorna, open-faced and charming, was always first in the queue.
As soon as Lorna had received her windfalls though, and the initial excitement had worn off, she seemed dissatisfied and withdrawn. An older girl, out of the kindness of her heart, had given Lorna a clear sandwich bag to keep the cast-off treasures in, and Claire saw her picking through it.
‘Don’t you think you should put these in your school bag, Lorna?’ Claire had asked her. ‘Just so you don’t lose them?’ And the girl had turned, smiling, and silently offered her an eraser – a high-kicking girl detective, smelling of lavender. ‘Oh, I couldn’t take one of your lovely rubbers. No, you keep them nice and safe. But thank you!’ Claire hustled her towards her classroom, and, at the door, felt a small, sticky hand worming into her own. There was the eraser, planted firmly in her palm. Lorna ran, laughing, into her class, collided with the teacher and was firmly told off.
Poor little mite, thought Claire. Poor little love.
Then, that day, the day of the slap, Lorna had come in with her own erasers, brand new in their packaging and still with the barcode on the back. Halloween themed. She was the first in her class to own any that week, one of the first in the whole school, and girls from all years made a special pilgrimage to the infants’ side of the school yard to seek her out and take a look: four limited-edition, double-sized character erasers! The crowd was so impressed that they were even willing to overlook the fact that Lorna drew them out of her coat pockets, and not from the sandwich bag she’d been given. They were passed from hand to hand, gingerly sniffed and reverently stroked.
‘Only came out yesterday,’ whispered a Year Two girl.
‘I’m getting some tomorrow,’ claimed her companion.
‘She’s got them now though.’
And there wasn’t much to say to that. Claire, dealing with a fracas and a cut knee by the sandbox, caught sight of Lorna, the centre of such jealousy and admiration, so pinkly excited. She sat cross-legged and bounced her bruised knees, fizzing with happiness. The erasers were passed slowly back.
A girl sighed, ‘I’d do anything for them. But my dad says to save up.’ There was a murmur of sad understanding.
‘My mum says it’s stupid,’ said another girl. ‘Where’d you get them, Lorna?’
‘Town.’
‘Yeah, but where? ’Cause Tesco doesn’t have them in till the first Monday of the month.’
Lorna smiled evasively. ‘Do you like them?’
‘Course.’
And the crowd gasped as one as Lorna’s chewed fingers dug into the biggest eraser, a kung-fu kitten, dressed as a witch and smelling of spice. She gouged it into smaller, crumbling pieces. ‘Here, you can all have a bit.’
‘LOOORRRRNNNNAA!’ wailed the Year Two girl. ‘MISS! Lorna’s BREAKING THEM!’ Her voice quivered with hysteria. The girls rose up as a group, backing away, as if from some horrible accident. Claire, still with her group of surly boys, hesitated. Someone needed to go over there, soon, and find out what exactly was going on. Where were the playground assistants?
‘No, look, now you can all have a bit, look.’ Lorna held out one grubby hand filled with fragranced rubble. ‘Now we can all share.’
‘MISS!’ bellowed the girl again.
And Lorna’s expression hovered between happiness and pain. She tried to shove some of the broken pieces at a classmate who moved aside, quickly, as if something nasty had touched her. Lorna stood up. A passing boy laughed at her and shoved her back down onto the cold tarmac. Now she began to cry.
Finally, Miss Parry, on playground duty, muscled her way over, managed to glean some sense from the excited shouts of the girls, and plucked Lorna up from the ground with one meaty hand, leaving a little pile of fragranced rubber in her place. A couple of girls furtively pocketed some pieces once her back was turned.
Lorna had stolen the erasers. Of course she had. She’d taken them from an older girl’s bag, a girl known for her bad temper and irritable, indulgent parents. Word spread through the school that Carl’s sister – you remember Carl? He kicked the caretaker in the balls that time and had to leave – had stolen from a big girl. And who knew what else she’d been stealing?
Claire, on her way to class, passed the little girl sitting on the bench outside James’ office, miserable and shell-shocked. Children crowded round the nearby window for a glimpse of her. She kept her head down, furiously wiping away tears with a grubby fist. Claire hesitated, and then went towards the window, and, wearing a grim face, waved the children away. They scattered like birds.
‘Are you waiting for Mr Clarke, Lorna?’ Claire stayed in the corner by the window, to shield the girl from view should anyone try to peer at her again.
‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’ She knew what had happened. She just wanted to see if Lorna understood what she’d done wrong.
‘Took Cara Parker’s erasers.’
‘Why?’ The girl shrugged helplessly and said nothing. ‘Why, Lorna?’
‘Wanted to.’
‘Yes, but why? Surely you must know that that’s wrong? That you’d get caught?’
‘I . . .’ Lorna’s face collapsed. She began to sob. ‘I wanted to hold them, that’s all. And then people saw, and it felt like they were mine, and then I wanted to share them so everyone would be happy.’
‘Oh, Lorna—’
‘Sharing’s good.’
‘Sharing is good. But you have to share your own things, not other people’s.’
Lorna shrank into the seat. She still had dirt and dints on her knees from sitting, so proudly, on the tarmac of the playground only a few minutes before. Claire cast a look at the window, but there was no-one there now to witness the girl’s humiliation: the bell for the end of lunchtime had rung. Small mercies, she thought; but it’ll take a long time for people to forget this one. ‘Lorna, now, come on.’ Claire knelt down and raised the child’s head with her gentle fingers. ‘Now, you did something a bit silly, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Explain to Mr Clarke that you got a little bit muddled in your head and you didn’t mean to take them.’
‘They’ll all hate me now.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘I just wanted to share.’ She shuddered into sobs again.
James strode back from lunch, hovered, gave Claire a dismissive glance, and ushered Lorna into his office. The girl’s back looked pitifully thin in her dirty shirt. Her ragged shoes dragged on the floor. She kept her head down, like an animal led to slaughter. The door closed firmly behind them.
Claire hesitated. Her own class had PE next, led by her enthusiastic teaching assistant, and Claire usually used the time to catch up on paperwork, but she felt, somehow, that she had a responsibility towards the girl. What class was she in? Yes, Miss Brett’s. Newly qualified, utterly humourless, overly strict. Claire felt a wave of fatigue at the thought of talking to Miss Brett, who spoke like a passive-aggressive air stewardess and never met your eyes. But still. Children can get so confused – social norms, even right and wrong, are diffuse concepts to ones so young, and it can’t have been easy growing up with Carl, whose behaviour was still spoken about in hushed tones. And even if she had known it was wrong to take them, well, there was still time to put it right, if the situation was handled delicately. As of that very morning, Lorna was happy, popular, confident – it seemed desperately unfair to have all that altered by one mishap. It might even set her on the wrong path; if you tell a child they’re bad, well, they believe you and revert to type . . . Miss Brett’s class was split into their reading groups; maybe this would be the right time to talk to her.
The corridor outside the classroom smelt of urine. The toilets were here, and the boys in particular weren’t known for their accuracy. A pile of blue paper towels had been put down on the floor to soak up some of the yellow puddles, but no-one had given them a proper scrub in a while. How could Miss Brett let things like that slide? In staff meetings she was a such a stickler for procedure, and washed up the coffee cups with fussy precision. Strange. But then, when Claire had suggested they ask the caretaker to put little sticky targets in each toilet bowl, so boys were less likely to have, well, messy accidents, Miss Brett had hated the idea, had been quite vitriolic about it, as far as Claire remembered. Something about boys taking responsibility for their own learning and development: It’s-not-my-job-to-teach-them-how-to-aim.
Claire knew that she was looked on with amused contempt; she felt the gap between herself and the younger teachers widening day by day. Affection, praise, fun: these were medieval concepts for the younger teachers, who dressed like advertising executives and made brisk notes on their iPhones in staff meetings. And the children weren’t children, they were ‘students’, ‘active learners’ or ‘young people’. Claire, who sometimes made the appalling lapse of calling children ‘kiddies’, was put up with, as though she was an embarrassing throwback. But the children loved her, that was obvious. Flocks of them followed her around the playground, vying for her attention, for the chance to hold her hand. Nobody could take that away from her; her popularity with the pupils was the one weapon in her arsenal.
‘Miss Brett? I was wondering if I could have a very quick word?’ The remedial reading group had been sitting on the carpet, labouring over their ABCs. They noticed Claire and erupted into giggles and smiles. Miss Brett’s brow creased with annoyance.
‘Mrs Jenkins will take you through phonics time now, while I step outside with Miss Penny. And I want you all to put on your listening ears and behave nicely until I come back.’ As they left the classroom, a little girl with a squint gave Claire a cheerful wave, and Claire winked back.
In the chill of the playground, Miss Brett leaned against the pebble-dashed wall and gave Claire’s knees a sceptical look. ‘What is it, Miss Penny?’
Claire smiled at her ‘Oh, Claire, please.’ But Miss Brett just shrugged and looked over Claire’s shoulder.
‘One of your students got into a bit of a pickle today. Lorna Bell?’ Miss Brett raised her sharp little chin a quarter of an inch but said nothing. ‘Well, I happened to see her just afterwards, and she’s really very, very upset. I’m not sure she really understands? And, she is so little, after all—’
‘Didn’t she steal another student’s property?’ Miss Brett frowned at her feet.
‘Yes, but the way she put it to me was that she just wanted to hold them – they were those rubbers all the girls are obsessed with at the moment, the scented ones? Well, it’s a really big thing for them. Fashion. And I think Lorna – I mean she doesn’t have any money, or rather her parents don’t, and so she doesn’t have any of these rubber things – I think she just wanted to sort of hold one and make believe it was hers for a moment . . .’ Miss Brett shifted her milky blue gaze to just above Claire’s hairline ‘. . . and then people thought they were hers and she got a little bit muddled. And then, she wanted to share them with her friends, which is actually rather sweet when you think about it?’
Miss Brett’s raised eyebrows said that she didn’t think it was sweet at all. Her thin, mauve lips pulled themselves into a grimace. ‘Miss Penny, I have to follow the school policy on stealing.’
‘Well, yes, I know that. But what I mean is, can you not be too hard on her?’
‘It’s not in my nature to be too hard, actually. But I have to follow procedure and follow the direction of my immediate manager, who in this case is James.’
‘Look, Emma? Look, obviously this thing has to be dealt with properly, but she’s only five—’
‘She’s six actually.’
‘Well, six then. But that’s still very little. Perhaps the gossip in the school will be punishment enough? Isn’t Cara Parker’s mum a parent governor? And Cara herself is very popular. If she takes against the little girl, well, it could be very unfortunate. Damaging. I know how these things tend to go. I’ve been here a long time.’ She gave a self-deprecating chuckle.
Miss Brett’s eyes briefly met Claire’s before her glance skittered away to the treetops, the clouds, her fingernails. ‘I take stealing seriously, Miss Penny.’
‘Well, so do I, but—’
‘Do you? Lorna Bell might be some kind of special case to you, but there’s dozens of children in this school who have the same background, the same barriers to learning. And I’d be doing them a disservice if I treated any one student differently from the others.’
I bet you’d treat Cara Parker differently, if she were in your class, thought Claire. ‘Well, all right. I just wanted to say my piece. She’s so—’
‘Little. Yeah. You said.’ Miss Brett drew herself up from her insolent slump and strode back to her smelly little classroom, every inch the formidable teacher, and Claire felt, suddenly, immensely tired. They were tiring, these people. She thought of poor Lorna, still being grilled in the head teacher’s office, her small frame lost in the big swivel chair, her feet not even reaching the floor. Claire thought, I’ll be extra nice to her. They can’t stop me. It’s one, small good thing I could do.
But now, sitting in her car at the end of the day, she thought dismally that talking to Miss Brett had been a huge mistake.
It had started to rain. The crisp leaves were pinned, sad and sodden to the ground and Claire, sitting in her car in the deserted car park, started the engine but didn’t go anywhere. Miss Brett had asked for the parents to be brought in, and the whole school had seen Lorna’s passive, rabbit-like mother, only a girl herself – what would she be? twenty-four at most? – appearing at the office, bunching her stubby red fingers in the cold and yanking down the hem of her too-short jacket. Every noise made her jump, pull down her nervous, twitching top lip over her teeth, and smile painfully, waiting for the axe to drop. Claire, in and out of the library now with her own class, caught glimpses of her through the double doors. She struggled to see something of Lorna in her – this pinched face primed to absorb distress – but it was hard. Lorna smiled a lot. But then, maybe her mother had, once upon a time. No father with her. Of course not.
Every now and then, when the office door opened to let someone in or out, Claire saw Lorna, hunched and wide-eyed, still in the swivel chair, clutching a long streamer of snotty toilet roll. Poor thing. And now it was Mum’s turn, they’d brought in a chair – impossibly tiny – for her to sit on. Why not get Lorna to sit in that and her mother to sit in the swivel chair? It was as if James wanted them both to be as uncomfortable as possible.
She’d thought, I’ll say something. I’ll tell them how Lorna didn’t really know what she’d done wrong, that publicity was punishment enough. But then, as she did so often nowadays, she faltered in the face of those younger, more sure of themselves. She kept walking, didn’t turn round, even when she heard through the door the querulous voice of Lorna’s mother, inarticulate and tearful.
Claire led an ordered existence. She owned a monkish flat above a florist’s and spent every Friday evening and most of the weekends with Mother. There had been a friendship – ‘a close call’ as Mother called it – with a divinity student named Barry, who rode a scooter and was keen on hiking and Victorian follies. A widowed colleague of Mother’s had paid half-hearted court once. But really, there was nobody and nothing to take her away from the inevitability of teaching. Straight after college, she started working as a reception teacher in this neglected inner-city primary school, and had been there ever since. She was, largely, satisfied with that.
In her rattling car Claire put on the radio, tuned to a classical music station. The theme was ‘Moments of Happiness’ – all Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. She took deep breaths, clenching and relaxing her hands on the steering wheel until ‘The Thieving Magpie’ put some strength into her bones and allowed her to drive off. She passed a few children lingering outside the corner shop at the bottom of the hill leading to town, and others trailing behind their grim-faced childminder. A row of previously handsome Victorian houses had had their windows smashed. They’d been empty, almost derelict, for a long time, but still. It was a shame; it was depressing. A moment of violent release, of drunken rage, and something beautiful is debased, the darkness advances. Claire remembered these houses from her childhood; the mayor had lived in one of them, she remembered. Once this area had been desirable.
She didn’t see Lorna on the street. She thought about her red cheek, her dumb, animal pain – her absolute lack of shock. But then, she probably got hit a lot at home. Claire shuddered.
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 . . .
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