Remember Me This Way (23 page)

Howard and I pick our way towards it on Monday morning, overtaken by a steady stream of kids in Wandle uniform on bikes and scooters. I’m in my own school uniform – boots and tights and a sensible skirt – but it was an effort to get ready in time, a struggle to leave the house. I feel distracted, reluctant to steer my mind back to the trivial necessities of work. I should have phoned in sick. If I hadn’t missed so much time over the last year I would have done.

The school doesn’t have a formal staffroom – it’s part of the ethos of its foundation, no barriers between ‘learners and educators’ – but there is a small kitchen downstairs, a corridor between the art room and the office, where the teachers tend to congregate. I am slipping past it, hoping to reach the stairs unnoticed, when Jane calls my name.

I pause briefly.

‘Quick coffee?’ she says.

‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘Come on.’ She pulls me into the kitchen where Sam Welham is leaning against the counter. We greet each other slightly awkwardly and he makes a fuss of Howard. Jane clicks on the kettle and washes out some mugs.

I ask after her weekend – she has been to Salford to visit her in-laws – and she recounts in some detail a film she went to see, a thriller about a corrupt airline pilot that was so good she can’t stop thinking about it. Sam stretches, drumming his fingers high up on his chest and says, ‘Sounds interesting.’ He yawns, or rather half yawns, and then says: ‘Do you fancy seeing it sometime?’

Jane is widening her eyes behind his back, silently ordering me to agree. It’s just a movie, for God’s sake, her eyes say, I’m not asking you to marry him. And yet I’m so full of panic I don’t know where to put myself. I can feel my face grow hot. The fridge gives an alarmed rattle.

‘I’m not sure,’ I mumble. ‘I’m not really one for the cinema.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Sam grins. ‘Another time.’ He is a nice man, I know. With his crumpled face, closely cropped hair and crinkled hazel eyes, there is an overall carelessness to his appearance that makes you think of men in 1970s sitcoms. There is nothing threatening or dangerous about him. If he’d asked me two weeks ago, I might have agreed. But now, the idea is inconceivable.

I have abandoned my coffee and am halfway up the stairs when I meet Sandra, the head teacher, click-clacking in high heels on her way down. ‘Lizzie! I was about to email, but as I’ve seen you . . . Ofsted are sending the inspectors in any day, so—’ she gestures to Howard ‘—keep the dog at home for a week or so, is that OK?’

‘Of course.’

Howard is wagging his tail and it has left a mark on the newly painted white wall.

‘Today is OK,’ she adds over her shoulder on her way down. ‘They won’t come before tomorrow. They have to give us a day’s notice.’

I carry on up the stairs, trying not to feel panicked. I could leave Howard at home, but it’s a long day. I know I’m lucky to have been able to bring him at all. It began with the occasional day, but I owe the blanket dispensation to a special needs assistant who noticed what a calming effect Howard had on kids with concentration or sensory-adjustment issues. I rack my brain. I could ask Peggy, I suppose. I’ll ring her as soon as I can.

Upstairs, the school feels quiet and clean without the students, though they’ll be here any minute, thronging the corridors, shouting across heads, the taller boys jumping up and thwacking the ceiling with their palms as they pretend not to run. I unlock the library door and walk into a dark room – it takes a moment to switch on the lights and flick up the blinds. Out of the window, the common stretches grey and empty – a blanket of churned mud fringed with large trees. I scan the dark hollows, the shadows under the bushes. There is no one there.

A large box of books is waiting by the desk to be stamped, sealed, security-labelled and catalogued. I sit down and gaze at them – work to be done, routine, a sequence of activities I can do with my mind half shut. Howard curls up in his basket in the corner. He has been a bit off colour this weekend, but he’d lie there quietly, even if he wasn’t.

I have time to ring Peggy and leave a message before the bell peals and students start arriving. I am swept up in my duties. I open the packages and sort through the new books. I’m in the middle of trying to introduce a pared-down catalogue system. (The Dewey classification used in most British libraries is complicated, particularly for children who might not have got to grips with decimal places yet.) I sort out the new books and then I work my way through my emails. A mother has complained because I recommended a picture book to her daughter, ‘
who may be 12 but has a reading age of 16.8
’. It was Patrick Ness’s
A Monster Calls
, a novel about illness and grief and loss; Jim Kay’s illustrations are a beautiful part of that. She’s probably too
young
for it. I begin to write a reply along those lines, but in the end I just say sorry and tell her to send her daughter in to choose something else. It’s always the middle-class parents who have issues and they usually just need to be appeased.

My reading group charges in for the lesson before break. We’re doing
The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak. Conor isn’t wearing socks, I notice, and the pockets of his blazer have come unstitched again. I’ll try and get it off him later, take it home and mend it.

At lunchtime it begins to drizzle, a flat, dreary rain that keeps the students under arches and in doorways. A little gang of year sevens, all girls, arrives to see if there is anything they can do to help. Next year, it’ll be chewing gum stuck to the backs of books and secret texting in the Social Science section but for now they are willing helpers. Ellie and Grace Samuels, who are part of the gaggle, hover by the desk and Ellie holds out a square parcel wrapped in paper decorated with blue birds. ‘From my mum,’ she says.

I open it carefully. It’s a book,
The Flowering of Your Passing
, with a note paper-clipped to the front:
I saw this and I hoped it might be of some help. With very best wishes, Sue
.

I thank the girls and tell them I’ll write a letter to their mother that evening. ‘How kind you are,’ I say, thinking how often the job of the bereaved is to shore up the self-worth of the comforter.

I flick through the pages when I am alone and realise what a distance I have come since Peggy gave the same book to me last year. Every chapter filled me with rage when I first read it – how could the writer even
begin to know how I felt? The very typeface seemed pious.

Now I feel disengaged from its contents, as if it were a travel guide to a country that someone has made up, that doesn’t exist, that lives inside their head.

‘You’ve got time to come to the pub, haven’t you?’

Jane is waiting at the front door and catches me as I am leaving.

‘Not really.’ I open the carrier bag and show her. ‘I’ve got Conor Baker’s coat to mend.’

‘You can do that later,’ she says, taking Howard’s lead and slipping her arm through mine.

‘No. Actually, honestly, I don’t have time.’

‘You do. I’m sure you do. Come on. Pat’s been left by her husband. She needs cheering up. Staff solidarity.’

She looks at me expectantly and when I begin to protest, interrupts. ‘And you should have said yes to Sam. Really, Lizzie. It’s a year now – you can’t hide away for ever.’

I feel something inside shift and harden. She has no idea what I have discovered this week, or what I’m hiding, or
not
hiding, from. I haven’t told her about my trip to Brighton, or Onnie’s visit. It’s wrong of her to set me up with Sam. It’s an action from another world.

‘Ten minutes,’ she says, pulling at me. ‘What harm can it do?’

She’s my friend. My oldest friend. She loved Zach. I feel a tug of nostalgia for that time, for when things were simple, for when I knew who I was.

‘Ten minutes,’ I say.

The Bird and Bush, at the end of the road, is another unofficial staffroom – an old-fashioned pub the gentrification of the area has left behind, with wooden chairs and swirly carpets, the treacly smell of cooking oil and spilled beer. A crowd of Wandle teachers is to be found here most evenings, though it’s a long time since I’ve joined them.

Pat, a pint of beer jolting in her hands, is holding court at a large table in the back. She half stands. ‘Lizzie,’ she yells. ‘You think
you
had it bad? At least your husband didn’t leave you. At least he didn’t run off with a woman half your age.’

‘That’s true, Pat,’ I say. ‘At least he didn’t do that.’

I sit down unthinkingly in the first empty chair. The person next to me clears his throat, and I turn to see Sam. ‘Death or divorce,’ he says under his breath. ‘Tricky choice. Apparently you got the better deal.’

‘So it appears,’ I say.

Jane is fetching drinks and I rack my brain for things to say. Now I am here, I must make a fist of it. I remember that he lives the other side of Tooting Common and I mention my walk the day before. We talk with a determined friendliness, neither of us letting a silence settle, about Thursday night’s storm. A tree came down in Streatham High Road and all the buses were diverted. Tiles came off the roof of Sam’s building, but the new tenant in the building is, luckily, handy with a ladder. My garden, I tell him, is in quite a state.

Jane joins us with a handful of glasses and a bottle of wine and sits down on the other side of me. While Pat is being comforted at the other end of the table, we start comparing half-terms. Jane leans forward to tell Sam and Penny, the English teacher, that I came across their bête noire Alan Murphy, and details are demanded. I tell them about Sand Martin and his creepily soft-shoed ‘right-hand man’, the pantomime friendliness of Murphy himself. Jane remembers a speech Murphy once gave on the importance in education of the ‘three Fs: facts, facts and facts’ and everybody splutters in indignation. ‘And Victoria Murphy, his wife!’ Penny adds. ‘Did you see her column in the
Spectator
? She was extolling the sanctity of marriage, unless you happen to be gay, in which case it’s an abomination. Children should be brought up in a safe environment with a role model of each sex. She’s a fascist.’

‘Just because I’m a mature woman with opinions he finds challenging.’ Pat’s voice cuts across our conversation. ‘He can’t cope with that, oh no.’

Sam’s arm is lying along the back of my chair, and Jane has refilled my glass. I can feel the wine warming my veins, slipping into the knots in my neck. The conversation swims and swells around me. I hear myself laugh; my voice joining theirs. We are at the back of the room, several feet from the window, at the furthest point from the door. The pub is filling up – people are waiting at the bar, standing. You wouldn’t be able to see me sitting here, tucked away, unless you were properly looking. You would have to push people aside to find me.

I lower my head. What harm will it do, just to slip out of life for a bit, not to have to think?

My phone rings in my back pocket. It’s Peggy. I rock back my chair to hear her. She has been frantic all day and, what a shame, but she can’t take Howard tomorrow. She’s got friends coming to lunch and is ‘110 per cent sure’ their little girl is allergic to dogs.

‘That’s fine, don’t worry,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter at all. Thanks for ringing back.’

‘Your selfish sister. You’d think she would be able to put herself out for once.’
My chair is tipped and I can hear Zach so loudly it’s as if he is crouching next to me.
‘After everything you do for her.’
He stood up for me, he always did. He had,
has
, my best interests at heart. What am I doing, allowing myself to feel relief in his absence, allowing myself to forget that?

I down my drink and grab Howard and my stuff.

I think about Zach waiting outside this pub the last time I came here. ‘I thought I’d surprise you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been ages. What have you been doing?’

‘Just drinking.’

‘How much?’

His voice was full of concern, edged with panic. He couldn’t bear other people drinking. I knew that. The memory of what it did to his father tortured him.

‘Not much. You should have come in. Joined us.’

‘I didn’t want to ruin your evening.’

I kissed his face. ‘You wouldn’t have done. Next time we go to the pub, come!’

‘Or next time,’ he said, when he had kissed me back, ‘don’t go.’

I say goodbye to everyone at the table. When I kiss Pat, she throws her arms around me, tries to make me stay; I wriggle to disentangle. I’m in a hurry now, desperate to get outside. I have an ache in my stomach, like flu or the first quiver of food poisoning. I’ve been sitting here as if nothing is happening and the disloyalty is unbearable. He might think I’ve forgotten, that I don’t care.

Outside, it’s still raining – that steady flat stream of wetness that seems peculiar to London suburbs. The pub awning drips. Once, on a different night like this, Zach came up behind me on Bolingbroke Grove and forced me against a lamp post. He thrust his hands under my jumper, tore at my bra. I tried to push him away, his fingers twisting my nipples, his mouth biting my neck. But the shock I had felt, the fury, darkened and twisted, plummeted and turned to something else. I kissed him back, yanked my own hands into his hair, felt the rain on my exposed skin.

That’s the thing I find hard to admit. I liked his obsession. I thrilled to his need for possession. I willed it on. His jealousy – it made me feel loved and needed.

‘Nasty night,’ says a voice at my shoulder. ‘You’re going to get soaked.’

I turn. It’s Sam. I feel a flood of fury. He must have followed me out. He lets out a small laugh that has embarrassment built in. I breathe in sharply. He’s standing so close, I catch soap and pencil shavings and hops.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I say crisply. ‘I don’t mind getting wet.’

‘Come on. Share my umbrella. Let me help you – you’ve got a lot of clobber.’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it? Dry-cleaning?’

‘Oh . . .’ I’m flustered. ‘It’s Conor Baker’s blazer – needs a mend.’