Everlasting Lane (38 page)

‘Well, well, well,’ she said, her throat billowing like a snake’s,
‘it seems that Master Lambert has deigned to join us. How good of him. But perhaps he would like to furnish us with a justification for his late arrival.’

What could I say to that? Should I tell her? Should I tell her all about Norman Kirrin and Mr Merridew? All about the fairy?

She adjusted her glasses. ‘Any sort of explanation …’

What about the Lodge and my grandmother? What about Kat and Alice and the secret room?

‘Don’t stare at me like a landed fish, boy. Answer the question or see me later. I believe you know now how this school deals with such … impertinence.’

All I could think of was, ‘Anna-Marie,’ but it was like she couldn’t hear me. It was like no sound would come out.

Mrs Carpenter growled with disgust. ‘Sit down!’ she snapped. ‘No, no, not there, you stupid boy: next to Miss Pevensie.’

As she didn’t really have a class of her own, Miss Pevensie was sat a little apart from the other teachers on the chair closest to where I’d come in. She hushed me with a finger to her lips and waved me over to sit at her feet. I skidded across the smooth, shiny floor and took my place, reluctantly crossing my legs and folding my arms across my beating chest as I searched for Anna-Marie. Miss Pevensie looked down at me as if to say something but then I think that when she looked at me she realised it was already too late. I already knew all the secrets. She looked sad and gently touched my hair. I think she thought that sometimes it was better not to know. I thought she would be a very, very good teacher anyway and maybe, maybe she was right. I hadn’t really had time to think about that yet.

‘Well, moving on from that … reprehensible interruption,’ said Mrs Carpenter.

I was relieved. At least she wasn’t cross.

She read the story of Lazarus. You know, about the man who gets a second chance. That was one of her favourites which was kind of pretty funny, once you thought about it. As she spoke she toyed with the crucifix that hung about her old reptile’s throat. Her hair looked newly curled and gleamed like metal. And when she’d finished everybody closed their eyes and put their hands together whilst she hallowed God’s name and asked him to forgive us our trespasses. But my eyes didn’t close at all. They squinted through my armpit trying to catch Anna-Marie’s.

I thought I’d seen her sat towards the far end of the back row but I couldn’t be sure. It was like she was only half there, pale and see-through like a ghost, her eyes all red. It was like when you look at the sun but you know you shouldn’t because it’ll burn your eyeballs out and so you kind of look at it but look away at the same time. And when you wake up from a dream and the dream itself is in your head but as soon as you start thinking about it you can’t quite find it: you look to the left but it’s on the right; and then you look to the right and it’s slipped behind you and in the end you’re spinning round and around but it’s too late because it’s already gone and it’s just you sitting up in bed in the darkness with your dad’s breathing and your mum’s crying and the moon through the curtains.

‘Anna-Marie!’

But it was like shouting at the sky or down a long tunnel with the echoes bouncing back at me like rubber balls. Why couldn’t she hear me? I imagined this picture of myself in the ground in a box—I suppose I mean like a coffin—and I was kicking and screaming and punching at the wooden lid trying to escape, trying to make myself heard over the silence which had been buried with me, stuffed in and flattened, packed good and tight with shovels. I hammered my fists and called and cried but Mrs Carpenter just kept on talking and the children
kept on staring and the teachers just kept on winking to each other and smirking when they thought no one was looking.

I looked around the hall. The curtains were pulled back and the sunlight stuck to the windows like the sticky-backed plastic on the cover of my geography folder. It was hot and stuffy. Only the stupid children were still wearing their jumpers. Many of the teachers were waving sheets of paper in front of their faces to cool the air. The hymn books had all been stacked neatly for the end of term and all the children’s work that usually plastered the walls had been removed leaving only big pale squares and pin-holes on the sugar paper that remained. All the P.E. equipment, like the big box that only the sporty children could really leap over and the thin mattresses that always twisted your ankle when you jumped funny, had been pushed to the side. The climbing ropes had been tied up and hung there like half a dozen nooses.

‘Anna-Marie!’

This time some of the children nearest to me turned and stared. A couple of them exchanged glances and giggled into the palms of their hands.

‘Peter!’

Mr Gale’s eyes were bulging. His big stubby finger pointed at me and then at the empty space on the floor beside
his
chair.

‘But …’

At me. Then the empty space.

I slid across the floor towards Mr Gale, my backside polishing the floor as I went.

Mrs Carpenter had begun to ask the school leavers about what they wanted to be when they grew up. They used to do that at my old school too.

‘Robert Sawyer,’ she said, ‘have you decided what you would like to be?’

‘Yes, Miss. A Farmer, Miss.’

Mrs Carpenter chuckled. ‘No surprises there, then, Robert. Like father like son. And what about you, Lucy? Lucy Carr? Leave her hair alone, girl. I’m trying to … ascertain your ambitions for the future?’

‘Miss?’

‘What do you want to be when you grow up, dear?’

‘Oh, Miss. Sorry, Miss. Work in an office, Miss.’

Mrs Carpenter’s eyes widened. ‘Really? Quite the women’s libber, aren’t we, Lucy?’

Lucy smiled blankly.

‘Peter Lambert! Will you stop fidgeting, boy!’

But I couldn’t stop, could I? How could I stop? I felt like … Well, you know when people say they’ve got ants in their pants? Well, that’s just how I felt then. Big ants. Small pants. You know what I mean.

‘Anna-Marie,’ I hissed, hoping that nobody would hear me but her. Everybody turned round. This time everyone had heard me. Everyone except Anna-Marie. Her eyes were open but—

‘Goodness me!’ cried Mrs Carpenter. ‘Will somebody shut that boy up?’

Mr Gale put his big hand on my head and turned it to face him. ‘Peter, for God’s sake, what the … the … the hell has gotten in to you?’

‘It’s Anna-Marie,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to …’

Got to what? I didn’t know what to say, did I? My brain was full of thoughts flying this way and that, crashing into each other like jumbo jets and so noisy I could barely work out what any of them were trying to say. Was he right? Doctor Todd I mean. All that stuff about what was real and what wasn’t. I could see all the children right in front of me. They were real, weren’t they? And the school, that was real. But what about everything else? Anna-Marie was real, wasn’t she? And Tommie
must be real. There he was in the middle of our row, glasses peering at me. Why would I make up a Tommie? And after all Anna-Marie had taken me to see my grandmother so I couldn’t have attacked my grandmother if it hadn’t’ve been for Anna-Marie. But then I hadn’t attacked my grandmother, had I?

‘And you, Marilyn?’ said Mrs Carpenter.

My head was spinning like a tornado.

‘A housewife, Miss.’

I didn’t know what to think.

‘And don’t you let anyone tell you that isn’t jolly hard work, Marilyn.’

‘No, Miss.’

On and on she went, every job you could think of: a nurse, a drayman, a footballer, a mechanic until finally she was scouring the back row with lidded eyes. ‘Well, is that it? Have I missed anyone?’

Mr Gale cleared his throat and Mrs Carpenter’s head twitched towards him like a newspaper after a fly. ‘Anna-Marie,’ he said. ‘Anna-Marie Liddell hasn’t spoken yet.’

Well, I can tell you that that remark went down like the
Torrey Canyon
and Mrs Carpenter’s lips did the can-can whilst she considered whether or not to—

‘Very well,’ she said, and pointed at Anna-Marie. ‘You.’

The boy sat next to Anna-Marie nudged her. And then he nudged her again. She turned to look at him. She scowled. ‘What?’

Again a flurry of giggles amongst the children.

‘Miss Liddell, yes,’ said Mrs Carpenter, sounding like the Queen of Britain, ‘dearest Anna-Marie, if you would be so good as to grant us a moment of your
precious
attention, I am lead to believe by Mr Gale,’ and the look she gave my teacher right then seemed to make him shrivel all up until he was sat on his chair looking like an old apple, ‘that we should
enquire into your dreams and aspirations. For my part, I can’t imagine—’

‘I’m going to be a teacher.’

Anna-Marie’s announcement was greeted with surprised silence and then, among one or two of the teachers, by wide grins. Mrs Carpenter looked startled for a moment as if someone had unexpectedly driven a stake into her heart. And then she laughed, a hearty, throaty chuckle but chilling like cold rain sliding down the back of your shirt.

‘What a thought,’ stuttered the headmistress. ‘I should think that, thankfully, highly unlikely, dear. Standards have fallen, of course, in the modern world but thank the Lord they haven’t yet fallen to quite such … subterranean depths that anyone in their right mind would allow the likes of you within a country mile of impressionable children.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘After all, they let you.’

A murmur passed among the assembled children. For most of them this was beginning to look like the best assembly they’d ever had. A bit more of this and the hymns and the Bible stories wouldn’t seem so bad. Some of the teachers glanced at Mrs Carpenter eager for her reaction. They were enjoying it too.

‘Be that as it may, my dear,’ said Mrs Carpenter, through a tight lizardy smile, ‘I at least have some mathematical ability. I think you’ll find it hard to make a career in teaching when there are horses in circuses with a better grip of basic arithmetic than you.’

‘So what?’ said Anna-Marie. ‘I’m going to be a teacher. I’d be a good teacher.’

‘When it comes to maths, Anna-Marie,’ said Mrs Carpenter, allowing each word to drip like hot wax, ‘you are barely sentient. It doesn’t matter, dear, how much you may kick and scream that the universe is unkind. You will never be a teacher.
As sure as I am standing here today. The sooner you adjust to reality the better for everyone.’

And then Mrs Carpenter smiled again and this smile made my skin turn all pimply like when I watch the Daleks or Cybermen or something on
Doctor Who
because I could tell that what she was saying was true. She wasn’t just upsetting Anna-Marie for the fun of it, not only that: she was telling the truth. And when I looked at Anna-Marie, I could tell that she knew it too.

‘Perhaps, my dear,’ said Mrs Carpenter with a chuckle, glancing at the teachers, ‘you should consider working in a shop. I am sure it could be a very rewarding career for someone so … dissolute. Or, perhaps, waitressing. Besides, they have tills, don’t they? I’m led to believe a monkey could operate one.

‘You are what you are, Anna-Marie,’ said Mrs Carpenter. ‘Do you imagine that life will be different at your next school? Do you imagine that you will be different? What you are now, Anna-Marie, is what you will always be: a rude, ignorant trouble-maker who thinks only of herself. It would be funny,’ she said, ‘were it not so … pathetic.’

Anna-Marie just stared at her, tears filling her eyes. I called out—‘Anna-Marie’—but it was like she was at the wrong end of a telescope, so far away that I could run all night and never get to her. And then she stood up and, ‘Excuse me,’ she said very politely to the boy next to her in the row. He shifted his legs and Anna-Marie walked to the end of the line, stepping carefully over everybody’s toes, and then towards the hall door towards the car park.

Mr Gale kind of raised his arm to try and stop her. ‘Mrs Carpenter,’ he said but Mrs Carpenter said, ‘Let her go,’ and, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

I tried to stand up—‘Anna-Marie!’—but Mr Gale’s strong hand held me in place.

And then she was on the car park. Anna-Marie I mean. Everybody was watching through those big windows and this time Mr Gale got up. ‘Mrs Carpenter, I—’ but Mrs Carpenter told him to sit down and, ‘Let her get on with it.’ Just like that.

I’d leapt to my feet too but I was already too slow and Mr Gale had grabbed me by the arm.

‘Mrs Carpenter,’ he stammered, ‘I really think this … this …’

I couldn’t see Anna-Marie now. She’d headed off towards the playground, out of view. I was trying to get away from Mr Gale but he’d locked both arms around me so I could barely move.

‘Anna-Marie!’ I called out.

‘ “A man that is a heretic after the first and second admonition reject!” ’ cried Mrs Carpenter, eyes blazing. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Potter?’

The vicar had been watching events with a look of amazement and was startled to be suddenly asked to contribute. ‘Well, Sybil, I’m not sure that I …’

Mr Gale was on his feet again, his big barrely chest heaving against my back, his arms still holding me tight. ‘Now, Mrs Carpenter,’ he said. ‘Heretic? Is this … this …’

‘This! This! This!’ screeched the headmistress, phlegm and fury spitting from her lips. ‘Get the words out, you ridiculous man! Yes, this
is
completely necessary. “For vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Leviticus, I believe vicar.’

The vicar sat rigid on his chair, his face bulging like a big, fat plum.

This was no good. I had to get free. I squirmed and wriggled against Mr Gale’s grip, twisting and turning, and as soon as I could I turned and kicked him in the shin. Do you remember when I kicked Anna-Marie that time? Well, it was just like that but about a thousand times harder. I was sorry to do it, though, because, in spite of everything, I kind of liked him. ‘You little shit-bag!’ he cried but he let go of me
and clutched his leg as he fell onto his chair so hard it neatly toppled backwards beneath him.

There was lots of noise now. Mrs Carpenter was screaming like a banshee but nobody was really listening. A lot of the children were laughing or shouting or clapping apart from the infants, of course, who were all crying and being comforted by their teachers who were on their knees mopping up tears and trying to explain that everything was all right and that there was nothing to be worried about and that, yes, there was a lot of noise but they were just being silly, really.