Living In Perhaps (4 page)

'How come I haven't ever seen you at school?' I said to Barbara
Hennessy, walking back from piano one day.

This had become a habit. Every Saturday she'd wait for me and
we'd walk home, slowly, together. I don't know what she did for
half an hour while I had my lesson, but she was always there when
I came out, jumping out from behind one hedge or another.
Sometimes she didn't appear for yards, and I'd worry that she had
finally got bored with me. But then, with a thump and a scattering
of leaves and flower heads, she'd be there in front of me.

Now she sounded very casual. 'We don't go to school that
much.'

She toed a pebble carefully along the line of kerb-stones. A
strategic kind of pause, only I didn't know it then.

'I've seen your school, I've seen them playing
netball
in the
playground.' Her voice made netball sound disagreeable. 'Anyway,
we don't go there.
We
go to the Wren.'

And that was how I discovered that St John's C of E Primary
School, run by the church and the county council, wasn't the only
place you could go.

'I've never heard of a school called the Wren.'

'I'll show you it, if you like,' Barbara offered. 'It's not far.'

It was far, but then that was Barbara, as I'd come to appreciate
in time, always bending the truth to her own ends. We made a
detour and eventually came to a long, leafy road full of old
houses. I was looking for something I recognized as a school,
peering as far as the end of the road, when Barbara stopped in
front of one of the houses and said: 'This is it.'

I stared at the ramshackle building. Enormous trees lined the
front fence, and a big flight of steps ran up to the front door. It
was like a distorted dream-version of the house I had imagined
my piano lessons would take place in. Above the door was a half-moon
window with 'Wren House' painted in curly script, but
there was nothing – no noticeboard, no signs, no tarmac playground
or netball posts – to indicate that this was a school. Except
maybe the row of paper chains hanging in one of the front
windows. I didn't know whether to believe her or not.

'You can come with me one day,' Barbara offered. 'They won't
notice.'

They
won't notice
? It seemed to me that schools were designed
to notice. They noticed whether you were there or not, whether
you were late, even whether you arrived too early. They noticed
if you were sitting up straight, if you weren't listening, if you were
on the wrong page, if your pencil wasn't sharp enough. And they
made it their business that everyone else noticed too. 'Now stop,
everyone. Look at Peter. Has Peter got his left foot in the air, or his
right foot? Which foot should he have in the air? That's right.
Now show us, Peter. Show us you know which is your left foot.' I
couldn't believe a school existed where they wouldn't notice me.

'I'll have to get the day off my school,' I said.

Barbara shrugged.

'It won't be easy,' I told her.

'Forge a letter from your mum, saying you're ill,' Barbara
suggested, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

We were never off school. We were never allowed to give in to
coughs and sniffs and tummy aches. My mother liked us out of
the house from eight thirty sharp until four o'clock, unless we
were actually contagious.

'My brother's good at doing grown-up handwriting,' she
added. 'And
your
brother can hand it in.'

We had established, in the course of our conversations, that we
both had brothers.

So that was what we did. I stole a piece of paper and an
envelope from the bureau drawer, and Barbara got her older
brother Tom to write the note. I tried to persuade Brian that
handing a fake sick-note to my teacher was a brave and cunning
act, something only a
boy
's daring could carry through. When this
didn't work I pulled rank.

'You've got to do what I say. I'm older than you.'

No dice.

'Then I'll tell Mum and Dad what you've been up to.'

This was a bluff. I knew of nothing wicked he'd done, I had no
interesting inside knowledge of Brian. Not at that stage. But there
must have been something he felt shifty about, even then, because
he gave in.

'All right,' he grumbled. 'But it'll cost you a sherbet fountain.'

I liked that feeling. I liked it that I had bent Brian to my will.

Barbara and I arranged to meet at the roundabout near the end
of our road. I set off for school at the usual time, and then hid in
the bushes. It was dark inside but I didn't want anyone else on
their way to school to see me. The undergrowth stank sharply of
urine. I wasn't sure if it was cat or human in origin. I was afraid
of getting my school clothes dirty. I was even more afraid of
spiders falling down my neck. It reminded me of my adventure,
climbing through the hedge the previous spring. That was
Barbara's garden I had peered into. And now here I was, waiting
to go on another adventure, with Barbara herself. As my aunt
Stella often said, wonders will never cease!

I waited a long time, crouching in the acrid semi-dark. It
occurred to me that perhaps Barbara wouldn't come, hadn't ever
meant it, that I'd be stuck there all day. Perhaps she was already in
school, sitting up keenly at her desk, reciting something off the
board. Perhaps she had tricked me. And Brian might get an attack
of nerves at the last minute and fail to hand in my note. Or my
teachers would spot the forgery. And then I'd be
expelled
! The
only people who ever got expelled were really wicked boys, boys
who were out of everyone's control. Maybe that's how they would
see me.

Then I heard voices, and saw Barbara, accompanied by two
smaller children, wandering along the pavement in a careless,
meandering way. I burst out of my hiding place, hysterical with
relief.

'Shouldn't you be there by now?' I asked.

Barbara only shrugged, and said, 'Not really.'

I stared at the little boys. Barbara didn't introduce them. They
both had curly hair and neither of them had bothered to comb it
that morning.

'I'm Sebastian. He's Mattie,' the dark-haired, slightly taller one
said, pointing at his brother. His voice was husky, which sounded
odd, coming from such a small boy.

Barbara was busy looking me up and down. Self-consciously, I
pulled some dead leaves out of my hair.

'Give us your woolly,' she instructed briskly.

I was in my brown-and-white-check school dress and brown
botany wool cardigan, with white socks and brown lace-ups. She
was wearing lime-green nylon shorts.

'Don't you have to wear school uniform?' I asked.

'No. They don't like uniforms at the Wren. They wouldn't want
to see us all looking the same.'

We exchanged cardigans. Hers was made up of left-over wools
crocheted into circles of different colours. Some of the colours
hadn't even lasted a whole circle, and were finished off with something
else. She pushed the sleeves of my school cardigan up to her
elbows and buttoned it unevenly at the front. I thought I'd got
much the better end of the bargain.

When we reached the Wren, Barbara marched straight up the
steps and pushed the front door open. Sebastian and Mattie ran
off towards the back of the house and Barbara went into the front
room. There were half a dozen children round a big table, painting
on leaves and pressing the leaves down on to sheets of sugar
paper.

'Oh, hello there,' said the woman in charge, looking up and
smiling in a vague, short-sighted way. She didn't seem annoyed at
Barbara's lateness.

We sat down at gaps round the table and joined in painting
leaves. No one took a register or even glanced at me. There were
two children who weren't doing anything much. One was poking
a ruler in the fish tank and the other just looked out of the
window for ages.

In the middle of the table was a big tray of leaves from the
garden, and we chose whichever we wanted, and painted them
however we wanted, and stuck them down on paper to make
patterns. I thought it was like something out of infant school, but
I didn't say so. Barbara got the giggles and was painting on her
hand and trying to stick it in other kids' faces. The boy next to me
took a dry horse-chestnut leaf and crumbled it to pieces all over
my sheet of paper, just to annoy me.

After a very long time we were sent out to a sun-porch at the
back of the house to wash the paint off our hands, and then we
went into the garden and ran about under the trees. There was no
playground, just worn-out grass covered with old beech mast. We
ran hard, and shouted and screamed, but only for the sake of it.
At my school, you rushed about and yelled at playtime for the
sheer relief of being out of the classroom, but here you didn't feel
the same need. I think I galloped around, bursting my lungs, to
try and make some kind of impact on someone, but it didn't
work.

After a while, the woman in charge of our classroom came to
the top of the steps and asked us to come in. Barbara took no
notice, so I copied her. She had to come back several times before
she succeeded in rounding all of us up. We stuck our mouths
under the cold tap in the sun-porch. The water was warm and
tasted green and metallic. Then we slouched back to our room.

The other children were already sitting on the floor in a circle.
Barbara and I flopped down with them. The woman – I couldn't
call her a teacher, she lacked that glint of suspicion in the eye that
marks a teacher out; in fact the only suspicious thing about the
glint in her eye was its innocence and joyfulness – read a story
aloud. There were cushions on the floor and you could lie back on
them and lounge about while you listened. Afterwards we acted
out parts of the story. Everyone joined in, except one boy who sat
in the bay window and picked his nose in a leisurely sort of way.

I looked at the woman in charge. Drilled my eyes into hers to
see if she would look back and
notice
me. She had untidy red hair
and big lips covered in peachy lipstick. Her upper lip was just like
the lower one, completely unindented. She wore a black dress
covered in swirly red roses, with a full skirt and a wide neckline
that kept slipping, always showing one set of petticoat and bra
straps or the other. Barbara said her name was Gail. Not Miss or
Mrs anything. Just Gail.

Needless to say, Gail didn't notice me.

At lunchtime we went into the sun-porch, where there were
two big wooden tables and assorted chairs. Barbara put her
carrier bag on the table and I put my satchel on it. Barbara took
out a plastic box and a thermos flask. I just sat there. 'Where's
your lunch?' she said.

'What lunch? We have school dinners.'

'School dinners? This
is
school dinner.' Everyone around us was
getting out paper bags and plastic boxes and greaseproof packages
of food. 'Here, you'd better have some of mine if you haven't got
anything.'

And that was when I found out that you could have such things
as grated cheese and lemon curd and sultanas in sandwiches.

Barbara offered me some of her drink. The shiny lip of her flask
was covered in slips of beige like tiny pieces of seaweed. I caught
a whiff of the drink and felt sick.

'It's only
coffee
. Don't you drink coffee?'

I shook my head, and saw a look in her eyes that showed me I
wasn't coming up to scratch. But afterwards she admitted that it
did taste a bit of thermos. I settled for another drink from the
cold-water tap.

The day was strangely long. There was no clock on the wall in
the front room, and I didn't have a watch. The sun came round
into the front garden, and the boy picking his nose turned and
faced the other way, so that it didn't shine in his eyes. Barbara
and I made some pastry, using a pair of scales and a bag of
flour and some rather hairy lard. Around the room, other
children were sorting coloured marbles into jars, building things
with bricks, and measuring the height of the bookcase. I thought
it must be counting and measuring that we were learning now,
but I didn't see why it had to be disguised as something else.

Barbara and I took our grey dough out to the kitchen to put it
in the oven. The kitchen was huge and old and smelly, and there
was a pile of dirty teacups in the sink. A clock hung over the boiler
in the defunct fireplace.

'Is that the right time?'

Barbara nodded. 'Think so.'

'It's only five to two!'

'So what?'

'I thought it must be nearly home time.'

Barbara found some matches in a drawer and lit the oven. It
made a booming sound as the gas caught and she leaped back. We
left our pastry resting straight on the oven shelf, as we couldn't
find a baking tray for it. We knew that no one was counting the
minutes until we came back, so we ran outside into the garden
again.

Barbara led the way to the end and we slipped behind some
bushes. From there we could see through the slats in the fence
into another garden beyond. There was a clothes line with underwear
swaying on it, enormous flesh-coloured knickers and
long-line brassieres with cups the size of balloons. We fell about
laughing.

I gulped for air. 'Have you ever seen the owner?'

Barbara nodded violently. 'I've seen her asleep in a deckchair,
wearing a swimming costume!' And she gestured eloquently
with her hands to describe the voluptuous sight. I felt weak with
laughter, and it was the happiest I had been all day.

We went back and retrieved our pastry, which was brown at the
edges but still grey in the middle. Gail said we could take it home.
It was nearly half past two and people were picking up their
jumpers and their lunch bags and drifting out.

'Bye-bye, everyone,' Gail said cheerily, waving both hands in the
air. 'See you all tomorrow.'