Falling Over (15 page)

~

The next morning, during break time, Emma went out into the playground again, not offering the other teachers a word of explanation. The fog was if anything thicker, semi-solid and twisting. The school children’s enthusiasm was undampened however; they played their games just as noisily and chaotically, as if the mist were only in Emma’s eyes. But she had no problem spotting her class, clumped together and sneaking off round a corner of the school building, thinking they weren’t being watched. The corner led to the back of the school kitchens, where the large dustbins stood. The children would be undisturbed there to... what? Emma tried to think, but her thoughts seemed lost in the fog and impossible to focus on... and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see anyway. She decided she wouldn’t go and confront the children yet. She would wait and try and speak to Lorraine alone (Lorraine was her favourite). And who knew – maybe there was a perfectly natural explanation and Emma’s fears were groundless.

She was sitting at her desk waiting for her class when they filed back in, and she tried to give them the same all-knowing look that Mr Hall or Mrs Bennett could manage so effortlessly. But the children just glanced at her and smiled; could they see the uncertainty in her eyes? In any case the effect was ruined when Emma started to cough and sneeze; tears filled her eyes and the children all merged in her eyes as she blinked them back. The class seemed to smile to itself as she stood up to teach, as if they were the adults and she the child, and they were just tolerating her infantile games.

They were still smiling in the same way when Emma noticed that there was an empty seat in the classroom. Lorraine had not returned from break time.

Emma felt nauseous; her throat felt dry and tasted of phlegm.

“Where’s Lorraine?” she managed to say.

No response save for twenty-six smiles.

“Where’s
Lorraine?
” she repeated. “I know you were all playing with her at break.”

“She wasn’t with us, Miss Anderson,” Jo Webster said. Emma turned and banged her hands on the desk in front of the girl, causing her momentarily to flinch.

“I
saw
her go with you!”

Jo glanced at her classmates before replying. Her words seemed tightly controlled.

“She wasn’t with us, Miss.”

Emma stared at her class, but couldn’t meet the gaze of any of them for more than a few seconds. She felt a sick feeling in her stomach and head that was more than just the lingering effects of her illness.

“Stay here all of you,” she said, and headed towards the classroom door.

“She was chosen. She was
it,
” a voice said behind her.

She wasn’t sure who had spoken or which direction the voice had come from, and when she turned all of the class wore identical expressions of innocence.

“Who said that?” she said. There was silence. “
Who said that?
” she said, her face flaming. She wasn’t used to such anger and she felt her hands trembling slightly as she walked slowly back towards the children. She wasn’t sure what the expression on her face was like, but finally they looked like they were frightened of her...

“Just what is going on in here?” Mr Hall said from the doorway, smirking.

~

Lorraine’s family couldn’t be contacted, but Mr Hall didn’t seem concerned. He had the caretaker search the school grounds but refused to phone the police until he’d spoken to her parents. He assured Emma that the girl would turn up soon, and treated the whole thing like an annoyance that was somehow her fault.

“What about the substitute teacher who took my class?” Emma said. “He might know something; shouldn’t we call him?”

“Mr Markham?” Mr Hall said, frowning. “What on earth would he know? He was just a substitute teacher, despite what he might have thought.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“He won’t be coming here again, sickness or no sickness, put it that way. I’d rather teach the children myself.” The headmaster seemed to shudder slightly as he spoke.

“But what...?” Emma started.

“Miss Anderson, he was a bad teacher, that’s all. We do get them you know.” He stared at her meaningfully. “If you must know he worked to undermine me. Harried some of the other teachers...”

“Harried how..?”

“
And
he wasted my time,” Mister Hall said. “Much as you are now. It is lunch time you know.” He got up and left Emma alone in his own office, ignoring her continued questions.

She wasn’t hungry, and during the lunch break when she knew all the children and teachers were in the dining room, Emma went to the place where she guessed  her class had been sneaking off to at playtimes. It was a small quadrangle round the back of the kitchens, blocked off from sunlight on three sides by the school buildings, and it was full of tall bins. The shadows were so thick as to be like fog, even in the daytime, and the tight box-like dimensions of the place made Emma feel claustrophobic. The bins were higher than she was, and stank of decay. Black flies buzzed and jostled; some had fallen and lay on their backs, spinning occasionally with high cries, their legs feeble. Something larger had seemed to move behind one of the bins, and Emma’s first thought was that it was a rat, until she told herself that was ridiculous.

She didn’t know what she was looking for – she certainly didn’t expect to find Lorraine – and she actually found nothing at all. But she knew with an unshakable belief that her class of children had been here. There was room for all of them certainly, between the stinking bins.

There was even room for them to stand in a circle, if they wished.

~

He called her late at night after she’d drunk a whole bottle of wine on top of the medicine she was taking, and the whole thing seemed unreal the next morning, like a drunken memory so unlikely it didn’t form a link with events before or after. Nonetheless she was convinced it was real, that it had happened.

“How did you get my number?” was the first thing she said after he introduced himself, but Mr Markham just laughed.

“Don’t you want to talk to me? Aren’t there things you want to ask?”

“Wh... what?” she said groggily.

“Then let me help you. Have the disappearances started yet?”

Emma felt her head pound; felt like the background static hum of the phone was in her own ears. Everything seemed dulled and fuzzy like her flu was sheltering her from the world.

“Let me see,” he said, “who would it be first I wonder... Michael Potts? Lorraine Chambers?”

“How..?” Emma said. “Has Mister Hall...?”

Markham’s laughter cut her off; he seemed to be enjoying himself.

“No, no,” he said, sounding like an mocking actor who didn’t believe in his part. “I just suspected it would be her. She wasn’t as... receptive, shall we say, as some of the others. Already so grown up for her age! So I figured her for the first scapegoat.”

“Scapegoat?”

“Maybe sacrifice is a better word,” Markham said, as if good-naturedly conceding a point. “To appease a few gods perhaps. You won’t find her body you know.”

Emma closed her eyes and entered the darkness where her headache boomed. Eyes shut none of it seemed real, not possibly real at all, and she jumped when Markham spoke in the darkness.

“There’s nothing to find. Which is the only truth, or suggestive of it anyway. Just like all that medieval shite I taught them. And just like your Aunt Jess, cancer-thin and coming for you. For
you
.”

“How did you
know...?
”

Markham laughed. When he spoke next Emma was vaguely aware his voice had changed, as if he’d changed parts. He sounded like some fusty academic.

“Of course your ‘monster’, your ‘Aunt Jess’ was a very pure example of the archetype, undiluted one might say. Because all of childhood’s monsters represent one thing in the end...”

“Where’s Lorraine?” Emma interrupted, her head pounding, but Markham barely paused. Instead his voice changed again, became frantic, almost aggressive:

“... one thing only! And contrary to what you think now, all grown up and repressed Emma, it will get you, one day, the monster will
get
you and take you with it...”

“Be quiet!” Emma said, but her blocked nose made her anger sound feeble. She couldn’t think with this madman’s voice infecting her thought processes. Before she could gather her wits he was off again, with yet another voice. He didn’t just sound child-like, he sounded exactly like a child: high-pitched, mocking, malevolent:

“Ring around the rosie,

“A pocketful of posies,

“Ashes, atisho!

“Who falls down?”

Emma’s head span with the words; surely this man, who sounded insane, couldn’t be a teacher? But then as soon as she thought that his voice became adult again, stern, authoritative – exactly like a teacher’s.

“Of course you know what the posy was for?” he said. Emma answered automatically.

“To... they thought it would protect them...”

“Gold star Emma! Many prayed too of course, thinking God would protect
them
, if no one else. But He didn’t. But people still wanted protection, from anyone, anything. And some people remembered old songs, old even then... “

Emma sneezed thunderously, unexpectedly, and this seemed to interrupt the voice where her stammered words couldn’t, to throw him off his stride.

“I don’t care about any of that!” she said quickly whilst he was silent. “I don’t care about
history
, I care about what’s happening now. Where’s Lorraine?”

But he had recovered, and his voice had changed again.

“Don’t you think, Emma, that in her last instant your Aunt Jess would have sacrificed anyone – absolutely anyone, including you – to save herself?”

Then there was blankness and then it was as if she had awoken some time after the conversation had ended, although that couldn’t be the case. Emma still had the phone pressed to her ear and her eyes closed. She swayed slightly with the wine and affects of her tablets, and she wasn’t sure which of them it was who had hung up or when.

~

Lorraine didn’t turn up; Emma spoke to the girl’s mother on the phone the next day, and the franticness in the other woman’s voice made Emma feel sick. She didn’t mention the conversation she’d had with Markham; the fact that he’d said the body wouldn’t be found. She hadn’t told anyone she’d spoken to Markham, not having anyone to tell, and not quite believing it had happened. When she put the phone down she looked out of the office windows – the fog seemed to be thinning, but revealing black clouds crowding the sky and beating it downwards.

Mr Hall had been listening to Emma’s call the whole time (he had refused to speak to the parents himself, although he’d have to speak to the police later) and now he impatiently gestured for her to leave his office. He didn’t seem to feel the deep lurking panic that Emma did. She went back to her classroom, and her children barely seemed to be hiding their whispered conversations now, their looks of smiling contempt at what she had to teach them. And it did seem to Emma something paltry; sums and spellings thrown in the face of death.

She couldn’t stop thinking that, despite being young, she knew a lot of people who had died. Not just her Aunt Jess, but also a girl from school (in a car crash at seventeen), three grandparents (two strokes, one cancer); a little boy before that, bald and with a tube in his nose at age seven which none of the kids had understood, and then he’d been gone from class one day. And a man at a factory where she had worked one summer, who had got pulled somehow into the roaring machinery while Emma’s back had been turned (and as the screaming panic had started behind her she’d kept her back turned, thinking that if she didn’t look then it couldn’t affect her). She couldn’t stop thinking about all these deaths, which perhaps made up for the small amount she had thought about them before. But it still didn’t all seem quite real to her. Death was something that happened to other people. She didn’t believe in it, not in any way that seriously threatened her...

But Lorraine. She could, just, imagine Lorraine being dead if she set her mind to it. Or rather, if her mind set itself to it, for she seemed to have little control over the images it projected into the spaces behind her eyes.  Lorraine had always been one of her favourites and she had failed to protect her...

The bell rang for the afternoon break, the final one of the week. The children got up, their eyes directly challenging hers. They seemed more sombre now, but still beyond her, out of her influence. There was a forced swagger in their gaits, like teenagers walking past a group of the opposite sex. They walked like this past Emma now; something in their manner convinced her that this was
it,
somehow, the last chance to alter anything or find out what was going on with them.

Emma got up and followed directly behind them, like she was a child too.

This seemed to surprise them but not concern them unduly. The children walked in a row outside – the fog was thinning visibly now, black shapes and shadows emerging from its tight grey sheeting. The tension of an impending storm fell from the massed clouds above, proceeding the raindrops themselves. The change in pressure seemed to clear Emma’s head, for her thoughts seemed faster and freer than they had all week, although she still felt a clot of wordless fear in the centre that she couldn’t articulate much less relieve.

The children ignored her, and proceeded round the side of the playground, to the quadrangle. No one talked.. Emma, at the back of the line, didn’t know how to assert her authority. She stood aimlessly beside one of the overflowing bins, the smell adding to her nausea. The secret quadrangle was darker and colder than everywhere else, washed over by shadows. The light seemed to be visibly fading as the children, watched helplessly by Emma, held hands and formed a circle. She expected them to start singing, the song Markham had no doubt taught them (“we all fall down”) – instead Michael Potts raised his left hand and pointed at the girl next to him. Without meeting anyone’s eyes he chanted a childish rhyme, which trembled with his voice:

“Ip, dip, dog, shit, you, trod, in, it, and, O, U, T, spells, out.”