from South Africa, was looking at a property investment magazine’s special Romania supplement, which was the only place in Europe on her salary where she could afford to buy.
After staring for another second, transfixed by a ripped corner of carpet tile the same helpless blue as the chairs, Robert hauled himself to his feet. Bettina looked up from the computer-generated image of a Romanian shepherd’s hut after modernisation, and stared—distracted—at Robert.
‘I’m meant to be teaching now,’ he said.
Bettina didn’t say anything to this; she just nodded and went back to the modernised shepherd’s hut.
The art teacher carried on muttering and Robert left the room, the smell of burnt coffee, frustration and despair replaced immediately by the smell of the next generation—whoever they were.
When he got to his classroom, the door was open and the kids were inside, unaccountably silent, until Robert realised that the squat man in the corridor outside, staring through the window opposite the door, was Les the deputy head. Despite bearing an uncanny resemblance to Goebbels, he was the only incorruptible thing in the school and, because of this, the children were terrified of him. Les was from the Rhondda Valley and used to get heavily involved in school musicals—when they used to have school musicals…when they used to have a music department.
Most people found Les aggressive; some of them even found him tyrannical, but Robert and Les shared a mutual, hard-earned respect for each other, and Robert always found him protective.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Les’s back, jerking his thumb at the classroom full of children and suddenly aware that he was out of breath even though he hadn’t been running. ‘I got caught up, and…sorry,’ he said again.
Les sighed, but didn’t turn round.
He carried on standing, motionless, as if he had finally come to the conclusion that while he didn’t have a life, he did have an existence and an existence, if nothing else, did at least provide respite from having to decide whether he was alive or in fact dead.
‘What are you doing with them?’ he said at last, still without turning round.
‘Seamus Heaney,’ Robert said, automatically.
‘I never did like Seamus Heaney—I think I tried to. Anyway, I unlocked the classroom and got them in for you.’
‘Thanks—thanks for that.’
‘I was passing and Keisha was banging Shanique’s head repetitively against the wall.’
‘Yeah, Keisha does that.’
‘Ellie Palmer’s in this class,’ Les said, suddenly changing the subject.
‘Ellie’s—’
‘A brilliant and messy girl,’ Les finished quietly for him. It was Les and Robert, jointly, who were behind getting Ellie to apply for the St Paul’s sixth-form scholarship. He turned round suddenly, staring at Robert. ‘Are her and Jerome Simmons still going out?’
Robert shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think so.’ He didn’t have the perverse interest in the students’ love lives that a lot of the staff had.
The two men watched each other, Robert fighting hard against his instinct to tell Les that, for the first time in his professional life, he was terrified of walking through that classroom door because of Jerome Simmons. That up until this moment he’d always felt that the job needed him as much as he needed the job, but now he was starting to believe he was in the wrong place and that somebody else should be doing this. He wasn’t sure he wanted Les knowing this because this would make him, Robert, just like every other teacher in Ellington and the kids already knew… were already onto him with the instinct of a pack, systematically rooting out weakness because children can’t abide weakness.
‘What’s he doing?’ he said instead to distract Les, pointing at Simba, the caretaker, who was out on the flat roof just below.
‘What’s that?’ Les turned slowly away from him to stare at Simba. ‘Oh—pigeons. He’s been trying to perfect some sort of acid glue he can paint on the roof to discourage them from landing.’ Les let out another sigh. ‘The acid in the glue burns their feet off if they do land—apparently.’
Robert didn’t comment on this.
The murmur from the classroom behind them was getting louder and interspersed with distinct screams, shrieks and rhythmically choreographed abusive exchanges. Robert recognised Jerome’s voice and knew his face had changed and knew that when Les turned round he wouldn’t be able to disguise the fear his face was full of.
So he turned quickly to the window again, staring out over Simba’s bent back and the edge of the roof to the only piece of green in sight; an inexplicable mound about the same shape as a small Iron-Age fort that was known among staff and students alike simply as ‘The Clump’. Beyond The Clump was the Esso garage the council had sold the school’s last playing field to and, beyond that, the Elephant and Castle.
Local press abounded with mythical promises of regeneration, but at the moment the panorama on offer was a four-lane super-roundabout with exits leading to some of London’s most destitute spinal cords—and a Soviet-era shopping centre, which was quite a feat of urban planning in a country that had never had its own Soviet era.
A couple of boys—possibly students—pushed a moped across the empty playground.
‘In the beginning,’ Les said suddenly, ‘somebody somewhere had a vision, that’s all.’ He sounded elegiac—as though he’d decided right then and there that he’d lived one life too many. He clapped Robert warmly, forcefully, on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right.’
Robert nodded.
Then, with Les’s footsteps still ringing down the corridor, he walked into the classroom and the crescendoing, unavoidable, ‘Yo, sir! Yo, sir!’ There in front of him was the mob.
His eyes hit Ellie because she was sitting at the front of the class to the right-hand side of his desk and was the first thing in his line of vision. He hadn’t meant to look at her in particular, and certainly never intended to look at Jerome after that. But he did—and saw that Jerome had seen him looking at Ellie.
He’d been caught off guard, but then it had been so long since anybody had looked at him in the way Ellie had when he walked into the room. When was the last time he’d caused anybody so much pleasure, simply by walking through a door?
Her eyes opened so wide he felt he could have just carried on walking straight into them.
He came to a halt behind the desk, pressing his fists down hard into the surface. This was wrong. The wrong way to think and the wrong direction to start walking in—no matter how wide her eyes opened.
At No. 22 Prendergast Road, Margery was on all fours crying with rage over Ivan’s bowl, which was full of corned beef. She’d seen it, smelt it and tasted it—and it was definitely corned beef.
When Ivan came creeping back into the kitchen, his shoulder blades rolling smoothly as he sniffed at the floor around his bowl, Margery screamed at him, still sobbing, ‘Bugger off, just bugger off.’ She elbowed the white cat away, anger replacing fear, but Ivan came back, nonplussed by the elbow in his flank—and gave the corned beef a few aggressive licks.
Margery staggered to her feet and kicked him across the kitchen.
After bouncing off the fridge, he landed with a whine, paused, licked at a back paw then padded quietly into the hallway where he sat and waited, letting his posture insinuate that his dignity, at least, was intact.
Panting, Margery slammed the kitchen door shut, decanted the corned beef from Ivan’s bowl into a plastic mixing bowl and, taking a pair