Loving Amélie (18 page)

It would have read like a
caution.

He showed Eileen somebody out;
knowing it would not be the last he heard from her or one of her other
‘jobsworth’ colleagues.

                                                                       
*
         

Sara phoned.

Since her last overnight stay,
he was in the habit of answering about one in four of her calls.

“Yes?”

“Hi, are you alright. Both of
you?”

“Yes. But the more you phone,
the less alright I feel.”

Amélie was frolicking on her
back on her play mat. She was wearing her sleep suit that was decorated all
over with tiny garden moles. He had Eileen’s tea cup in his hand, which he
dangled over her. She reached for it with interest: it couldn’t hurt to let her
play with it. Her mouth was too soft to bite through it and her grip still too
weak to crush it.

“I have to phone you: I hate it
that things are weird between us.”

“Did you think they wouldn’t
be?” Amélie made little swipes at the tea cup: it was a new sensation, cold
china. “Or is it that you didn’t think at all?”

“Does it have to be such a big
deal?” said Sara. She was at work: he could hear the other women in her office
on their telephones, conducting the business of the day; there was London traffic
somewhere in the background. She had perfected a low tone for discussing
private matters while giving the semblance of attending to her duties. She was
probably typing on her computer as she spoke. “We have been friends for years.
The best of friends.”

“But not lovers.”

“You’re acting like it’s the
end
of
something…”

“Well, it’s not the start of
anything!”

“I know, I know.” There was a
frenzied burst of tapping at her keyboard. “But it was just one of those
things…”

The tiny moles were the same shade
as her hair and eyes: it crossed his mind that she had the look of a little
woodland creature. He thought of
The Tales of the Riverbank
from his childhood,
with Mole and Ratty and the incorrigible Mr Toad.

“To you, maybe,” said Chris.
“What if you’re pregnant, for God’s sake?”

“I’m not,” she snapped. “I
mean, I won’t be.”

“I’m glad you’re so sure.”

“I would have thought you might
know what it felt like when you got someone up the duff…”

The teacup swung from the crook
of Chris’s hanging finger and skittered across the wooden floor. It completed a
couple of revolutions, like a street dancer spinning on his back, before
crashing into the skirting board: miraculously unbroken. Eileen’s vile pink
lipstick mark had made a smudge on his daughter’s costume; and the sudden
commotion caused her to burst into tears. He hung up.

Chapter Eighteen

At a time when children’s
welfare had been catapulted into the forefront of a society’s consciousness -
with the advent of a telephone line dedicated to their rescue from domestic
abuse; and an annual national charity event that raised both awareness of their
unique needs as well as millions of pounds to fund their aid - it was curious
for Chris to look back on the days of his own childhood and remember being
terrified to go to school.

Did kids live in fear of their
teachers nowadays?

He thought of his friend Ian,
and his wife Tash, who went about their duties as teachers with a genuine
desire to leave a positive mark on the lives of the youngsters who experienced
their tutelage: to them, teaching was a transaction that was based on a
foundation of mutual respect; and the desire to restock the world with
individuals whose lives they had improved, and whom they had prepared to be
good citizens.

What had been the motivating force
behind the likes of Mr Ravens and Mrs Allardyce?

He shuddered at the very memory
of their names.

Mrs Allardyce was possibly just
bitter and menopausal; having been overlooked for the role of head of Chris’s
secondary school and never afforded much respect as the deputy; but Mr Ravens
was something else entirely.

He could have been the
Dickensian schoolmaster that his name suggested. Chris was no great scholar of
Dickens, but he had experienced enough of the genre to imagine the Mr Ravens of
a Dickens drama appearing noiselessly behind a diminutive schoolboy, like a
great black bird alighting on the back of his chair to instil fear into him and
possibly peck him on the neck.

Mr Ravens of Larton Road School
was not like the black bird that was his namesake, however. He was a fairly
unremarkable looking character who only lived in Chris’s memory for the
whistling sound his nose often made when he breathed and for the whining,
high-pitched voice he had that should have belonged to a peevish old woman, or a
child pretending to be one. He treated the boys as inmates of a correctional
institution whom he expected to reoffend at any moment and he treated the girls
as irrelevant pedestrians he might need to sidestep on his way around school.
Although girls who were kept in detention by him would describe him as
‘creepy’, he did not have a predatory or indecent reputation: simply one of
cold indifference that could border, unexpectedly, on cruelty.

He was a maths teacher, who
would fill in for science teachers when they were absent. Because he was so
disliked, these occasions would be branded onto pupils’ memories as cropping up
more frequently than was the reality. Chris was competent at maths, which was a
great relief; because he had witnessed the humiliation of other students who
were not so quick on the uptake and who had to endure the repetition of a
learning exercise being spat into their faces or ear holes by that snide,
superior voice that seemed to come from a place beyond the grave.

His detentions were notorious
for being lengthy and uncompromising – with the blessing, it seemed, of
the less barbaric and yet unsympathetic headmaster – and any altercations
with him could result in a boy being cracked across the hands (and once, it was
reported, the
face
)
for his defiance.

What was less fortuitous,
however, was the fact that Chris followed in
Peter’s
footsteps, which was, as far as
Ravens was concerned, an indelible black mark against him from the offset.

Peter had been as similarly
capable at maths as Chris, but had been a disruptive element in Ravens’
classes, together with two of his friends who were regularly hauled in front of
the headmaster in assembly for their misdemeanours. These ranged from anything
as innocuous as passing notes, to throwing missiles that were intended to
narrowly miss Ravens’ head or devising strategies for either removing items
from his briefcase or planting new ones inside it. Once, the ‘new’ item had
been a girly magazine; well-thumbed by the three protagonists and ready to be sacrificed
for a different type of sport. The recollection of their temerity, given
Ravens’ gritty and humourless personality, still made Chris recoil with
vicarious unease.

Another of the teacher’s
ungodly roles in their lives was the overseer of returned textbooks at the end
of the year. This should have been regarded merely as a necessary and
uncomplicated administrative function in the school calendar; but, because
Ravens was at the helm, it was anticipated with historic dismay: a tome that
was handed back damaged or defaced in any way placed the individual concerned
under immediate threat of detention or abuse or – if he was lucky –
just a fine. Chris had seen classmates queuing up for injections from the
school nurse with less trepidation than that seen when they were preparing to
hand back their books to Mr Ravens.

As the end of his second year
at Larton Road loomed, Chris realised he was about to find himself falling foul
of Ravens’ inspection with a beleaguered book. It was a history text book: he
could still picture the cover today, depicting courtiers at Elizabeth the
First’s funeral procession. The cover itself was in the same reasonable state
it had been in when he took charge of it at the beginning of the year, as it
had been protected by a plastic backing; but a wrestling match with either Ian
or Stuart during a homework assignment had resulted in a handful of pages being
ripped out from their roots, leaving what looked like a section of a field of
corn mown down by a zealous farmer. He tried flicking open the book in a
nonchalant manner to see if there was any way the gap might be overlooked; but
it was always there: a crop of hairy fibres which was a testimony to his guilt
and inherent evil. He hadn’t even kept the missing pages: at the time there had
been a scuffle with his schoolmate on the floor - probably the floor of his
bedroom - the aftermath of which would have been cleared up by his mum, who was
not disposed to differentiating between discarded sweet wrappers or essays on
the Industrial Revolution: it was all rubbish and would go in the bin. Ravens
would kill him.

Peter was always attuned to his
little brother’s moods and fears. It occurred to Chris later in life that he
didn’t possess this same instinct in return: maybe because Peter was older, and
always seemed so self- confident and in control of his own destiny that he
didn’t look like he would need the help of someone younger and less worldly
wise like him.

“Just don’t hand it in,” he had
said to Chris, when he had found out why his brother was so quiet and gloomy.
He was shovelling Sugar Puffs into his mouth like he was stoking a boiler.
“Ravens’ll forget about it if you keep putting it off.”

Chris weighed up this option without
conviction. It was no doubt what Peter would have done: but this was almost
irrelevant as Peter took Ravens’ punishments as an occupational hazard. For
Chris it would be an entirely new ordeal: his first blood; and predicting how
it would unfold made his throat close over and his stomach knot up like never
before.

“You’re joking,” he replied,
weakly. “Since when did Ravens
forget
you hadn’t handed a book in?”

Peter had shrugged and dumped
his cereal bowl in the sink: but he remained mindful of his brother’s plight.

“I know someone whose sister’s
off sick with her appendix,” he ventured after a couple of days. “She’s in your
year. And he doesn’t like her much. She’s got all her stuff at home with her: I
could get him to swop your book with hers.”

This solution to the problem
floated briefly between the brothers like a hopeful balloon. They had been
lamenting the lack of a proper pencil sharpener in their household: Peter
moaned at his dad that ‘everybody at school had a bloody pencil sharpener at
home, why didn’t they?’

Roy had placidly laid out a
piece of newspaper and showed them how to sharpen a pencil with a penknife: not
that they really needed showing; but they needed a wordless lesson in
resourcefulness.

“I couldn’t do that,” said
Chris, testing his own resolve with his words. “Could I? Who is she?”

“Gail Evans.”

Chris pictured Gail with her
milk white face and thin, mousey hair. In hospital. The imaginary balloon
popped.

“I
couldn’t
do that! She’d get caught.”

Peter thrust his chin in a
gesture of indifference. In truth, it was unlikely he would follow through with
this conspiracy, but he was presenting his little brother with an option.
 
Peter’s life was already a series of
options, actions and consequences that seemed to leave Chris standing idly by
as his own life unfolded like a piece of paper that had already been written on
and screwed up.

Option Two was telling Jean and
Roy; and getting the book replaced in time for Judgement Day. Looking back,
Chris could never really understand why this hadn’t been his earliest and
easiest course of action. But all those years ago, asking his parents to buy a
school book for them would have felt as indecent as asking them to borrow
money, or to move house. The brothers quickly discounted it.

Chris’s third and final option
presented itself as a rapid end to the proceedings on one Monday afternoon.
Peter waylaid him in the corridor at school:

“Have you got that book with
you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I’ve got to see Ravens. I’ll
take it with me.”

“What? He’ll know it’s mine and
not yours,” said Chris, nonetheless fumbling in his bag for his debilitated
copy of
History
Today
and handing it over like the hasty exchange of stolen goods.

“I know, dick head,” said his
brother, without restraint in the throes of his act of valour. “But I’ll tell
him
I
did
it.”

“You what?”

“I have to see him anyway, for
stuff I’ve done. Leave it to me.”

Chris spent the rest of the day
in a state of mixed emotion: colossal relief that the truth about his damaged
book would be out in the open and dealt with at last - cast upon Ravens’ mercy
like a hunk of meat thrown into the mouth of a dragon’s lair. But he also felt
fear about the revenge that might be meted out by the teacher on his brother: a
pupil whom he already despised; and a sense of shame that Peter was taking the
rap, for this particular transgression, on his behalf.