The Home Corner (15 page)

‘Life’s a beach and then you die,’ I replied.

And there was a moment’s silence.

Despite this, though – despite the carbon monoxide poisoning and the unravelling of our friendship – I’d always looked back on that weekend with a peculiar kind of fondness. I suppose it was one of the last few weekends when my life had appeared to resemble something normal; had still been heading in the direction people expected it to go. Though I already had a hunch that before long, it wouldn’t. That I’d be sitting in an exam room one afternoon, my head suddenly full of nothing.

It didn’t take long to get out of town now rush hour was over. After a while Mr Innes turned on the radio, loud, and we proceeded down the road listening to ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. Inspired by the drumbeats and the electric guitars, Mr Innes accelerated as we approached a wider, emptier stretch of road. He was a fast driver – reckless, even, I’d begun to feel – and we were flying down the hill now. The coach shot down the tenemented streets, past pleasant villas and delicatessens and cafes and gift shops, and hurtled on, back up another hill, around a corner and down. I put my hand up to the top of the seat in front of us and glanced through the window. The weather outside was beautiful now the rain had stopped: it was a perfect summer’s day we were bombing through. At the bottom of the next hill we hung a right (as my old geography teacher had used to say) and found ourselves in a slightly less aspirational part of town. The Victorian villas had made way now for 1930s bungalows like ours. Bungalows on hills. We whizzed past things – glimpses of things, blurs at the window. A man stood in his garden, nailing a wooden post into the ground. A toddler wheeled by on a low plastic trike. A woman was hanging washing up on a whirly line: pillow cases and towels and a blue flowery nightie. We turned up Bartholomew Road, past a car showroom and an empty swing park, and headed on in the direction of the dual carriageway. There were road signs now for the Scottish Waterways Visitor Centre: a picture of a round-headed man walking purposefully along a brown background; and it made me think of all the day trips I’d been on with my parents over the years; of all our visits to castles and stately homes with our thermos flasks and sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs. And I felt bad, that I had not absorbed more information about those places. That I had not benefited from being educated. That I had let my parents down.

‘Look,’ Mrs Baxter said, pointing through the window at something. But nobody did look.

Nearing Lockharton Hill we began a new descent that took us past more chalets and bungalows and maisonettes. Then we turned left and left again, the roads becoming narrower and narrower, until they were almost too tight for a coach to get through at all.
Shouldn’t we have chosen a different route?
I wondered, as we barged past residential pavements full of elderly people walking dogs and clipping their privet hedges or pulling golf trolleys along. But the driver didn’t seem to care. He was Tam O’Shanter on his grey mare. He
was
the common man the fanfare had been written for. The electric guitars
sang out as we swerved around a bend, the roof of the coach breaking some small branches off someone’s cherry tree.

I felt slightly sick.

‘Look at the people playing golf!’ I exclaimed to John as we turned right, past a golf course; and as if this was worth pointing out – the sight of a lot of middle-aged men wearing bright white shoes and swinging golf clubs on a hill.

John peered through the window. He didn’t say ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled,’ but he looked as if he was thinking it.

On the radio, ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ ended and was replaced by Supertramp singing ‘The Logical Song’
.
Supertramp was a band I felt Mr Innes would have eaten for breakfast. In a mirror angled above his head I watched him tut, lean forward in his seat and switch the music off. Then, one hand on the steering wheel and gazing intermittently through the windscreen, he clattered around in a little compartment on the dashboard, pulled out a cassette and put it into the tape player. There was a short silence, then the sound of more intermittent drumbeats. It was Meatloaf: it was ‘Bat Out of Hell’, and it seemed to inspire Mr Innes even further.
We’re probably doing 60
, I thought, as we began to head through a kind of woodland.
We’re doing 60 in a 30 mph area
. And I couldn’t quite dispel an image from my mind of our coach lying on its side in a ditch, its wheels spinning, the windows on one side buckled and smashed.

‘We’re going fast, aren’t we?’ I said, hanging onto John’s sleeve as we spun around another corner.

‘I like it,’ John said. ‘It’s fun!’

And at least the speed meant that we were, quite suddenly, there: almost miraculously we had arrived, uninjured, at the entrance to the Visitor Centre.

‘Don’t stand up until the coach has stopped moving,’ Mrs Baxter announced, standing up. Because that was what you could do when you were a teacher, you could do the opposite of what you said.

Mr Innes pulled the coach abruptly into a lay-by opposite the building, switched off the engine and just sat there, motionless as a stone. There was a sudden hush.  Then the children stood up and peered into the coach aisle. They seemed quite neatly divided into the pale and traumatised and the raring-to-go.

‘Say thank you to Mr Innes,’ Mrs Baxter instructed as we squashed our way out of our seats into the aisle and began to plod towards the steps. ‘Thank you, Mr Innes,’ obeyed a child, glancing nervously at him as he sat there, vulpine in his leather
jacket
, his hair slicked back, a packet of Raffles sticking out of his top pocket. And this, unfortunately, opened the floodgates.

‘Thank you, Mr Innes,’ all the children repeated, one by one, as they filed past.

‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’

‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’

‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’

‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’

‘Thank you, Mr Innes.’

Until the stiffly magnanimous smile slid off Mr Innes’s face altogether.

Once we were all assembled on the tarmac, Mrs Baxter did another head count. There were still twenty-nine children. Then we all got into our preordained little sub-groups. Emily Ellis was in mine, because she was one of the easy ones. John Singer wasn’t, though. As soon as he’d got off the coach, Mrs Baxter swept over and grabbed his hand, as if executing some well-rehearsed piece of choreography. John silently accompanied her, like someone accepting the hand of fate.

‘See you later, John,’ I said, feeling oddly responsible for him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘bye.’ And he was gone.

‘OK, you lot,’ I heard Mrs Legg announcing behind me.

Mrs Legg, of course, had been allocated her own child – the sweet, fairy-like Topaz – plus six of Topaz’s friends. They were all wearing glittery hairbands and flamingo-pink anoraks, and they were all overexcited. They set off hand in hand, in a wide, skipping line. Mrs Legg, in her sheep jumper and salmon-pink leggings, walked a staunch, responsible course in the middle.

‘Keep to the inside of the pavement,’ I heard her boom as they walked away – a sentence which, for a moment, didn’t even make sense to me.

My group was the last to get going: there was a lot of faffing, somehow, going on with my group. And I suppose I felt a little confounded, anyway. I’d only ever done one trip with the class, which had been the semi-disastrous one to the zoo. And despite being forty years younger than Mrs Baxter and at least twenty years younger than Mrs Legg, it seemed, that morning, that I wasn’t able to make such speedy decisions as them, or to use the right expressions or to move as quickly. I felt weighted down. Watched by someone, and found wanting. And I had the
easy
group! My group was the easiest one of the lot.

‘Has everyone got their lunch?’ I asked, in an effort to sound like a classroom assistant.

‘Yeeees!’ they replied, holding their sandwich boxes aloft.

‘Good. So, off we –’

‘But Mrs Baxter said we should leave them in the cafe, though, Miss McKenzie,’ interrupted Ruby Simpson, the girl who’d once brought a haggis in to Show and Tell. ‘So we don’t have to carry them around all morning.’

‘Ah. Good plan.’

‘That’s what Mrs Baxter said,’ Ruby confirmed, and she gave me a look of solemn appraisal. She was a composed child. Her hairband was bright red and had a yellow butterfly appliquéd on it. The only thing separating her from a useful, well-paid role in society, I felt – something in architecture, say, or medicine or geography – was an interlude of about sixteen years.

‘Mindy Moo’s here today, Miss McKenzie,’ Emily Ellis whispered, slipping her hand into mine as we set off, and I felt strangely heartened by this. I’d hoped Mindy Moo would come. Why would she not want to, if it meant getting out of school for a while?

‘So that means’, I said to Emily as all of us – real and imaginary – plodded on towards the pedestrian crossing, ‘that we’ve actually got eight people in our group today. If Mindy’s with us.’

Emily considered this.

‘No,’ she said after a moment. ‘You don’t count them if they’re invisible, Miss McKenzie. You don’t count invisible people.’

‘Oh,’ I replied, defeated by the logic of this, because I suppose I did, in a way.  Count invisible people.

‘Mindy
is
here
,’ Emily explained patiently, ‘but you don’t
count
her! That would just be silly, Miss McKenzie!’

And now, apropos of nothing, she started to sing. We were all standing at the pedestrian crossing waiting for the lights to change, and there she was, this little girl, singing a song –

– when  suddenly, from straight out of the blue sky, something splatted onto the sleeve of her coat.

‘Oh, Emily, stop a minute,’ I said, rummaging in my pocket for a packet of Wet Wipes – because I actually had some with me that day; I had attained that level of professionalism!
And maybe one day
, I thought, as I held onto Emily’s arm and began to dab at her sleeve,
I’ll go on car journeys with my own child, a tin of barley sugars and a damp flannel in a plastic bag. Just like my mum used to
. And maybe pigs will fly.

‘Hold still, Emily,’ I said, the Wet Wipe shredding a little against the fabric. Emily wore expensive clothes, but the bird muck on her sleeve just fell into line now with the mud already splattered there, and some pen marks, and a couple of yogurt stains.

‘It’s supposed to be a sign of good luck, getting bird poo on you,’ I said, looking around for a bin to throw the wipe in.

‘Why?’ Emily asked, incredulous. ‘Why isn’t it bad luck?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose that would make more sense . . .’ I said, putting the wipe in my pocket and wondering if it would have been easier if I’d just told her the truth: that getting bird muck on your sleeve was not something to be pleased about; that bad events could not always be transformed, Pollyanna-ish, into good ones. That life was not like that at all.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s get going.’

The Visitor Centre, directly opposite on the other side of the road, was partly hidden behind evergreen trees. It was constructed from wood and glass, and looked very clean and Scandinavian. It was a nice design, built by people who cared about the world. Maybe Ed McRae would design buildings like that one day. He’d once given a talk at school about
organic design
– ‘this design evolved organically’ he’d said, casually flipping a transparency onto the screen of an overhead projector – and I hadn’t known what he was talking about. But maybe he’d been talking about something like this.

The sub-groups had all caught up with each other now. The sun came out from behind a cloud and shone benevolently down on our heads.

‘We are not stopping for ice creams,’ Mrs Baxter announced, leading her little entourage to the double doors, and the rest of us all rambled after her like sheep. Mrs Baxter was one of those people you followed.
However much I try
, I thought as I walked behind her,
I will never be able to speak like that. I’ll  never be able to say
‘We are not stopping for ice creams.’
I would never have those leadership skills, or that certainty about things.

Indoors, the slatted floor made an expensive wooden noise as we clonked across it in our four pairs of big shoes and twenty-nine pairs of little ones. And then we all came to a halt again.

‘One last head count!’ Mrs Baxter said, standing at the front of the procession; and for the third time since we’d left the playground she began to count in twos, pointing at the children as they gazed placidly up at her.

‘. . . and John: twenty-nine,’ she said in conclusion, and she turned and headed for another set of doors, this time leading into a room called the Interactive Zone. She’d already told me, a few days earlier, that her group would be the first to look around inside the gallery. We’d discussed it in the staffroom, over our mugs of coffee: ‘We’ll do the exhibition first,’ she’d said conspiratorially, ‘while you and Mrs Richards and Mrs Legg have a wee wander up the river. That way’, she’d added, ‘we won’t all go crashing into each other.’

‘OK,’ I’d replied seriously, unwrapping a Blue Riband biscuit. Sometimes, everything was serious.

‘So: we’ll reconvene at eleven fifteen right
here
, beside
this
,’ Mrs Baxter announced now in a loud voice, placing her hand on top of a large bin. It was blue and shaped like a dolphin, similar to the frog one we had at St Luke’s, its mouth wide open to receive empty drinks cartons and banana skins and cigarette packets. I always felt sorry for those bins. I suppose I had a bad habit of anthropomorphising things.

‘So, off you go, everyone,’ Mrs Baxter proclaimed. ‘And let’s all stick to the path and enjoy ourselves!’ Which sounded to me like a contradiction in terms. And, surrounded by her group of
difficult ones,
Mrs Baxter strode in through the automatic doors of the Interactive Zone. There was a momentary burst of birdsong and croaking frogs and a babbling stream, and then the doors swept shut again and the sound was cut off.