Falling Over (14 page)

~

Emma anxiously ran her hands up and down her throat – in the mirror it looked like someone small was strangling her. The swelling in her neck had definitely abated. But she still remembered Carl Burke’s words (“the victim suffers fevers, swollen lymph glands...”), matter of fact and undramatic, as though describing his own reality. Emma shivered; her flat seemed cold despite the central heating.

When she left for work the world outside seemed as under the weather as she did, the air infected by murky fog, the day-old puddles rippled by an apathetic half-wind. Because she was so tired the mist seemed to follow Emma into the school, making everything seem fuzzy and ill-defined. In the staff room she heaped masses of coffee and sugar into a mug; the other teachers stared at her but didn’t comment, at least until Emma left the room. She resisted the urge to crouch and listen at the keyhole; she told herself she didn’t care what they thought of her. Unlike her class, suddenly so sullen and suspicious, the other teachers had
always
seemed to resent her somewhat. At least some things hadn’t changed. But part of Emma still wanted to be included in their warmth and forty-something chatter.

When she entered the classroom the children were all sitting in their proper places, their hands crossed in their laps; she couldn’t help but feel suspicious. Despite the rules no class ever waited completely still and silent. She knew she was being ridiculous and paranoid, yet the feeling remained. She greeted them, turned her back to wipe yesterday’s lesson from the board – someone whispered something but she couldn’t catch the words.

All morning she couldn’t shake the feeling that the children were
too
well behaved, and the smile on her face felt forced and sickly. Every time she had her back to them she was sure she heard voices whispering and giggling, but when she turned to see the children were just starring right back at her.

An hour before lunch she told them to get out their maths books; there were fewer petty insubordinations or requests for help than mathematics lessons normally provoked, and Emma took this as a bad sign. She walked up and down the rows of desks, as if stalking the whispering sound she could still hear, but her ears were ringing slightly and all her instincts seemed lost in the haze of her illness. And even though she knew the flu was going round every time one of the children coughed or sneezed she was irrationally sure it was faked and somehow mocking. But when she glared at them was their reaction innocence or just a good pretence?

She walked around the tables, observing each child’s large, unsteady numbers adding up to the wrong answer; she was looking over Carl Burke’s shoulder when behind her a girl screamed.

Emma turned round, so quickly that the room seemed to tilt around her. Lorraine Chambers had leapt from her chair, causing it to clatter over. The girl was cowering up against one wall, visibly shaking, on tip-toe as if to get as far away from the floor as possible. Her small hands were held up to her face, just beneath her eyes, which were starring at the floor.

“What is it? What’s wrong, Lorraine?” Emma asked, her voice slightly more shaken than the situation demanded (Lorraine was one of her favourites). The girl looked at her with large, nakedly afraid eyes.

“A rat!” she said. “I saw
a
rat
under the table!”

Emma felt her worst fears die – it was just something the girl had imagined. But the girl was obviously scared, she obviously
believed
, she’d seen a rat, so Emma walked towards her, mumbling maternally, and went to put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. Lorraine shrank back from her, her eyes wide.

“Keep away from me!” she said. “Don’t
touch
me!”

Emma recoiled from the seven year old’s harsh and terrified words, not knowing what to think or do. She was aware of all the other children watching the two of them, not gaping as she would have expected, but with narrow lips and eyes and adult expressions. Emma’s heart was pounding and for a dizzy second she had to steady herself against the wall. She couldn’t let the situation slide out of her influence.

“Lorraine,” she started, “Lorraine, listen to me. There wasn’t a rat, you just imagined...”

“There was!”

“There wasn’t,” Emma said firmly. “Listen, no one else saw a rat did they?” She appealed to the class: “None of you saw a rat did you?” But none of them answered, they just sat and stared and smiled. Emma ignored the way they were smiling, she had too much to deal with already. She closed her eyes, and tried to gather strength behind them.

“You see Lorraine, sometimes our imaginations can play tricks on us. It’s just like part of our dreams left over in daytime. But that doesn’t make them real...”

After much persuasion Lorraine grew calmer and returned to her seat. She avoided the gaze of all the other children, who seemed angry with her, as if her behaviour reflected badly upon them all. They said nothing to her; Emma tried to imagine it was because they didn’t know what to say. The whole incident had left her even more tired and drained than before, and her head and sinuses were throbbing abominably. She tried not to think about the way Lorraine had recoiled from her; it seemed too confusing to think about right now. She was relieved when the bell rang for lunch and the children filed out, talking amongst themselves. Lorraine Chambers trailed after them, alone, looking down at her dragging feet. The girl glanced at her briefly, and her eyes still seemed afraid. It seemed to Emma that she and Lorraine were in a way united, although she had no idea how or against what. But she liked the idea. Lorraine was one of her
favourites.

~

“Miss Anderson? Are you... Miss Anderson?”

The voice roughly shook Emma awake, suddenly blinking bolt upright in her staff room chair. Slowly the shape of the face of one of the other teachers came into focus; Mrs Bennett had her hand on Emma’s shoulder and she was still shaking her even though Emma was now obviously awake. Emma felt the dream she had been having fall away, for a few seconds its dark images lingered in her mind, before real life swung fully back into focus.

“You were asleep,” Mrs Bennett said in the same voice she used to talk to the children.

“I... yes, I...”

“You may have been able to stay up all hours when you were a
student
,” Mrs Bennett said, as if the word were distasteful and she had never been one, “but now you have to be responsible. You’re lucky Mr Hall didn’t catch you. You’re lucky
I
won’t tell him.”

Emma bit back her instinctive response and instead muttered something humble. She felt the other teacher was crowding her, standing too close, and so she stood up, but too quickly and the blood seemed to drain from her head. Mrs Bennett still looked at her disapprovingly but turned ponderously around.

Acting  on instinct, Emma called her back.

“I just wondered,” she said quickly, “the substitute teacher who took my class while I was sick? What... what was he like?”

When she turned back around Mrs Bennett’s eyes were the only hard points in her flabby face. But they gradually defused and looked further away; her pinched mouth parted slightly.

“He was...” She paused, changed tack. “I’m sure they wouldn’t send anyone
inappropriate
. But...”

“But?” prompted Emma. A boy ran past the staff room window, screaming and laughing – “
Keep away!”
Mrs Bennett appeared not to notice.

“He was odd. Always dark clothes but very pale skin. I mean it is March but... Very slim, too slim surely? To be healthy...”

“
Urgghhh! Keep away!
” the boy outside screamed.

“He seemed to think he was better than everyone else,” Mrs Bennett continued tartly. “And spoke to us in put on voices....”

“Urggghhhh! You’ve got the lurgee!”

Mrs Bennett shuddered slightly (Emma wasn’t sure the other woman realised she was doing so) and returned to the present. Her eyes hardened again as they saw Emma.

“Why?” she said loudly, fat wobbling. “Is there a problem?” Her tone suggested it would be Emma’s fault if there was.

“Oh, no problem,” Emma said. And there wasn’t, was there? She sneezed suddenly and with no warning, and Mrs Bennett shuddered and walked away without a word. Emma sneezed a few more times (“Atishoo! Atishoo!” her mind chanted) and then sighed as she realised she’d slept through her break and didn’t have time to eat. She just took two painkillers, washing them down with cold coffee from the mug by her chair, where she had dreamt and then forgotten.

~

Emma shouldn’t have been on playground duty that afternoon but another teacher was off sick (“It’s this damn flu going around,” Mr Hall said, looking at Emma) so she’d volunteered. She had no desire to sit with the rest of the teachers anyway. Nevertheless she wondered if it had been a mistake as she stood in the cold and tried not to shiver. Maybe she was too sick to have come back to work so soon...

She looked around the concrete sweep of the playground, at the pale and poorly looking sun already sinking. She looked to see if her class were again playing on their own, singing that old song under the shadow of the climbing frame. But she was relieved to see they weren’t; her class must be playing with the other children again, mixed up in all the running and screaming...

She stared and stared, trying to peer through the mist and sleep-lack smudges that stained her vision – she couldn’t see
any
of the children from her class at all. Where were they all? She tried to think but everything conspired to make it difficult – she turned round slowly, as if the air were clinging, and when she started to run towards the school the bell rang and a hundred, a thousand, children rushed past her, as if she were moving in slow motion; a school of children tight together as fish, knocking her aside – but not hers, not Lorraine or any of the others.

She burst into Mr Hall’s office without knocking; he was on the phone and gestured angrily for her to leave but she refused.

“My class have disappeared!”

Mr Hall looked at her, his eyes dangerously bright.

“Ah, you’ll have to excuse me,” he said calmly into the receiver. “One of the children is playing up. Yes. Yes, goodbye.” He put the phone down, then said, “Please explain yourself, Miss Anderson.”

“In the playground...
none
of my children were there!” Emma said.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken about that,” Mr Hall said.

“We have to call...”

“We have to do no such thing. I’m sure your children were there, you just didn’t see them among all the others, what with the fog and your, ah, tiredness. After all you were sick for such a long time you must be tired. I’m sure your class is sitting in their classroom, waiting for their teacher.”

“But they weren’t...”

“Let’s just check the classroom before doing anything rash, shall we?”

They walked towards her classroom, and when they got there she saw all her children sitting there, starring.

“There you are, Miss Anderson,” Mr Hall said, enjoying himself. “All present and correct.”

But Emma wasn’t listening for she was starring at Lorraine Chambers, who was trying to avoid her gaze. But the girl had obviously been crying – was she
still
doing so? Emma saw the girl’s body shake. She went towards her, making soothing noises, careful not to touch her for she remembered how the girl had reacted previously. Lorraine just stared with miserable intensity at the desk in front of her.

She glared around the class. “Have any of you been bullying Lorraine? Picking on her?”

The class shook its head. “No, Miss Anderson,” it chorused.

“Where were you all during playtime?”

Mr Hall snorted, and left. Emma ignored him for her question seemed to have caught the children off guard; they glanced at each other before answering. Emma felt her paranoia deepening, and tried to struggle above it. Eventually a few kids answered reluctantly:

“The playground.”

“No you weren’t,” Emma said. “I was on playground duty this afternoon and I didn’t see any of you.”

There was a pause, then Michael Potts said,

“You weren’t supposed to be on playground duty today, Miss,” and she realised they had planned to do something, something somewhere, when they thought she wouldn’t realise. But what? They were seven year olds – surely her thoughts were ridiculous?

Emma decided they were, they must be. She shook her head, the outward reflection of her inner denial. She told the children to get out their spelling books, and she ignored (with a pang) the still snivelling Lorraine. Her head started to ache painfully again, setting the tone for what remained of the day.

~

She couldn’t sleep that night, her fever a suffocating thing keeping her awake in the darkness. She alternately kicked the duvet off because she felt hot and stifled, and drew it up to her neck shivering. There was a streetlight outside Emma’s room which was faulty, and its flickering light kept making the shadows change shape around her. The people in the flat above were having noisier sex than her parents had ever had, panting and screaming like it was their last night alive.

Emma turned, trying to get comfortable, trying to block out the noises from above. The light outside flickered and her eyes opened, and the shadows were like stick-thin arms reaching for her...

The Black Death killed one in five Europeans she thought – she had looked it up that evening on the internet. She wasn’t quite sure why she had, but thoughts about her children, about Lorraine, had tormented her and it had at least felt like she was doing something. One in five – that was about the same as cancer she supposed. She tried not to think that we had just exchanged one plague for others, ones that left us a little longer, but it was hard to push such thoughts aside in the darkness. She didn’t want to think of her own mortality; how could
she
die? Emotionally it held no truth for her – surely a cure-all would be found, the rules changed before death claimed her...

Aunt Jess, she thought, and then sneezed herself fully awake. She remembered how she had used to be scared that her dying aunt had been hiding in wardrobe, on sleepless nights very much like this one. She opened her eyes – because of the shadows it was impossible to tell if her wardrobe was open or not. It never shut properly anyway, so it wouldn’t signify anything if it was open. Wouldn’t mean it had been
pushed
open – you’re not a child anymore, Emma told herself angrily, and turned over and curled up before finally willing herself asleep.