The Learning Curve (11 page)

Nicky moaned and hung her head on her hands. ‘You told me not to,’ she wailed.

‘I didn’t say anything about
looking
,’ said Ally. ‘I just said don’t stop concentrating on your job at the same time.’

Nicky’s main responsibility of summarising every single teacher’s method of assessment for a future school template proceeded to swamp her ‘management time’ and spilt into her ‘planning and preparation time’ as, over the next seven weeks, she had to sit in on everyone’s class. Most marking was now nearly all done by the children themselves – she had long since learnt that the best way for kids to feel a sense of ownership over their work was to let them swap books with their neighbour and mark each other’s work. This had released precious weekend time which, up until now, she had spent on the Internet preparing wonderful classes, or back at school finishing displays so that the children could see their handiwork almost as soon as they’d finished it. She had never resented any free time being spent on her children. The way she saw it, the more you put into work the more the children got out of it. She only had five hours a day with them. She didn’t want to waste a moment.

But now, suddenly, she didn’t have any moments to waste. Her work list – every day started with a list of jobs to achieve – was now too long for her to even contemplate.

She knew she had pulled the short straw, seeing as Rob’s remit had seen him interview some of the kids in their lunch hour and then give a talk to Miss James and herself, with the help of an overhead projector. It had been an impassioned forty minutes – almost as impassioned as his original speech had been in Miss James’s office. Miss James loved every word of it. He’d been given two custard creams and a Bourbon.

It was after that meeting that Miss James had told them that they were now, of course, in charge of Parents’ Evening.

Yet again, Rob and she were to divide the responsibilities, which seemed fairly easy. The two main areas of responsibility were to oversee either timetables or book-marking. For Parents’ Evening – in fact two evenings – each teacher was responsible for their own timetable (so that each parent knew exactly when to turn up and how long they would have with their teacher) and they also had to ensure that every single piece of marking was up to date (so that parents could look through their child’s work, should they so desire). Rob chose timetables before Nicky had a chance to put the key in the ignition of her brain, and by the time she’d looked at the gear-stick, she realised she was overseeing teachers’ book-marking. It turned out that whereas teachers were only too glad to have someone chivvy them along – with the added thrill of some advice and top flirting – with their bit of timetabling, they did not care to be reminded to do anything as sensitive as their marking. Especially by someone who got her kids to do hers most of the time anyway.

It wasn’t long before Nicky’s extra workload started to affect her private life. Exhausted by a relentless week full of resentful teachers, she now needed to be in bed on a Saturday night sometimes as early as nine o’clock. Then she would use all of Sunday morning – starting as early as 8 a.m. – to finish off preparing for the week ahead, when she used to do all her cleaning, before a much-needed Sunday-afternoon rest, preferably spent horizontally watching an old
John Wayne film with the sound down (she found them more interesting that way). She had to do most of her cleaning on weekday mornings now instead of Sundays, which was just possible if she woke a quarter of an hour earlier, and then she squeezed in the vacuuming during John Wayne, which, intriguingly, didn’t seem to spoil her enjoyment of the film. She ironed in the evenings if she wasn’t too tired, and soon stopped buying clothes that needed ironing.

When the clocks went back and the days shrank, it made a bigger impact on her than it had ever done before. Maybe she was getting old, maybe she had more work to do than ever before. Either way, she now found that she was tired most of the time. She started saying yes to Claire’s offer of Sunday lunch because it was the only way she’d get to eat – there was certainly no time to cook for herself on a Sunday – and no to looking after Claire’s girls the rest of the day. She simply didn’t have the time or energy.

It did occur to her that maybe she wasn’t cut out for this level of work and that there was a reason more men made it to management level, namely that they had wives at home cooking their food, cleaning their homes, preparing their sandwiches and generally saying ‘Aah’ at the right moments.

On top of everything else, she had a host of new responsibilities now she was Management. Rob and she both had to sort out assemblies – a relentless task; daily timetables for the entire school – a hellish task; and the school council – a complete nightmare, as well as organising all the teaching assistants and dinner ladies’ rotas.

But first there was Parents’ Evening to organise.

And it was Parents’ Evening which next drew Oscar to Nicky’s attention. As the term progressed, she was growing fonder and fonder of her pupils. This year’s Class 6 were just as enthusiastic and as much fun as she’d expected. Usually by this stage of the year, there were a couple of children who stood out from the others. Sometimes it was nothing more
than Nicky feeling a special affection for them or, conversely, an awareness that it would take time and work for that to happen. But with Oscar it was something else. She felt a new sort of affinity with him; as if she could see right through the disguise of childhood to his essence: she could see all of him at once; the baby, the boy, the man.

Oscar seemed to possess in his eye the look of an adult. His face could express or hide everything, depending on his mood, and his mood was as changeable as the English weather. When he laughed his eyes watered, as if they might overflow. And the skin around them was so stretched it was almost translucent, allowing the finest of blue veins to peep through. His emotions seemed stretched too, taut as a tightrope which he might topple off at any moment.

A sign of the times was that most classes nowadays had at least one set of twins, sometimes a set of triplets, due to the unpredictability of late mothers’ ovulation or IVF treatment. There were also more than two languages spoken in the classroom. Also, by Year 6, almost half the class only saw their dads at weekends. Often, a teacher was able to tell the rest of the staff, within weeks of the new school year, which kids’ parents they believed would be divorced by Year 6. Some of the less scrupulous ones had been known to place bets on it. Usually the teacher was right. Sometimes the divorce happened speedily; sometimes it would be a long-drawn-out separation, during which younger siblings arrived. Some kids were fine with their parents’ divorce, others missed Dad, others felt responsible for the break-up. Nicky had been known to spend her lunch hour – when she needed to catch up on her other duties or do vital shopping – consoling a tearful child.

But it was rare to find a child living with Dad instead of Mum. And it was rare to find a child who wasn’t able to talk about it. And it didn’t take her long to find Oscar a rare child.

She discovered his background and figured out that maybe this was why she’d felt drawn to him. They’d both suffered the loss of a mother when they were too young. When Nicky was twelve, her mother had gone into hospital for the last time, and from that night onwards, when her big sister Claire came into her bed for a cuddle, she’d got a surrogate mother. The reality of her mother’s death hadn’t actually been too much of a shock. The truth was she’d been slowly vanishing from them all since long before then. It began years earlier when she couldn’t get up in the mornings, then she was too weak or ill to help with homework or to be there for bath-time. Eventually she was just a shadow on the sofa and then she simply wasn’t there any more. It was a natural, gradual fading of all the details, until eventually, like the Cheshire cat, all that was memorable of her was her smile.

Their father had always been a shadowy figure, but after his wife died he became spectral. Three years later, on Claire’s twenty-first birthday, when Nicky was fifteen, he moved away to the coast. They only found out that he’d moved in with another woman when she answered the phone the first time they called. It turned out they’d been together for two years. The sisters had not felt any great loss.

The evening after Nicky discovered that Oscar’s mother had died in a car crash when he was still in Reception, she tried to take her mind back to when her own mother had died. She lay in her bath, eyes on the tap at her feet, and
took herself back to her twelve-year-old self. How had she felt when the slow realisation had dawned that her mother really was never again going to open her arms for a gentle cuddle from the sofa? She realised that there had never been a sudden moment of realisation. It had just been a slow acclimatisation to never feeling cosy or safe again. Or young. Maybe they amounted to the same thing. The part of her life with a mummy was her childhood and that was now over. Maybe it would have actually been more painful if their father had sat them down and discussed it with them. But he never had, so as she grew up and discovered the rarity of having no mummy – through meeting friends who had one – she just hugged her isolated, distinct memories of her mother to her – summer holidays together, swimming in her mother’s arms when her mother could still swim, her mother’s soft sun-creamed skin smelling of sugar, her mother teaching her the alphabet with Smarties, planting seeds together in the garden, hiding under the duvet together and giggling, queueing in the local bank. She wished there were more memories, but there weren’t. Maybe it was easier that way.

She wondered if Oscar felt like that? Did he have key memories? Or did he have no memories at all? Sometimes he looked as if nothing had ever troubled him. Whenever he thought no one was watching him, he would swing an imaginary cricket bat, his loose limbs elegantly swooping through the air, or win an imaginary goal. Or make his friend Matthew laugh. Or pinch Daisy.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about him, and yet somehow, at the same time, nothing ordinary about him. She wondered whether his father could see what she saw.
And whether she would get a chance to meet him at Parents’ Evening and let him know.

She added some hot water to the bath and lay back again. Oh dear, Parents’ Evening, she thought. There were many things about a parents’ evening Nicky liked and many things she disliked. The thing she liked most was telling a tense mother, who was wracked with guilt that she had to work full-time, that her child was doing well. She disliked talking to an interpreter, or trying to tell two parents who could only speak Romanian that their child might have special needs. And she hated telling yet another single father that no, she didn’t think it was appropriate for them to discuss his child over dinner, while pretending she hadn’t noticed he’d just asked her out. But the thing that irked her most was a parent who simply didn’t respond to the school’s invitation. And to her increasing frustration, Oscar’s dad was one of those. With only a fortnight to go before the two evenings, he was the only one who had still to return the signed form. She hadn’t asked Oscar for the form every day because she didn’t want to upset him, and yet every time she did ask him, he either gave a non-committal answer or promised he would give it to his father that night. Each time she believed she’d finally got through to him, only to find him more frustratingly elusive the next day. She thought about phoning his house, or emailing his father. But she didn’t want to cause a problem out of nothing. In all honesty, Oscar’s work was consistent and good. If his father didn’t see the need to come, perhaps she shouldn’t push it.

Then, only ten days before Parents’ Evening, on Hallowe’en, after an afternoon spent making pumpkin candles and costumes for trick-or-treating, Nicky was
delighted when Oscar proffered the information that he was going trick-or-treating with his dad and Daisy’s mum that night. Nicky felt encouraged. Any dad who went trick-or-treating with his son was the kind of dad who would not miss his son’s Parents’ Evening. She told Oscar she was delighted and asked him to promise to make his dad sign the Parents’ Evening form before he went to bed. Oscar promised. Nicky wished she had a camera to capture the light in his eyes – brighter than any pumpkin candle – whenever he talked about doing things with his father. Possibly to show the man.

That night she decided to finish off her Deputy work at home. She needed to stop off on the way and buy lots of sweets for the night’s entertainment before she could settle in and make a start on her work. Some of her ex-pupils came specially to her place on Hallowe’en and she put a lit-up pumpkin face outside her door, poured all her sweets into a bowl and waited in for them. Rob had invited her to his Hallowe’en party, as usual, and she had said no, as usual. Hallowe’en was for children, not for adults trying to pretend they were children. Anyway, she didn’t particularly want to see Amanda dressed up as a witch. Although the thought of seeing Pete dressed as a goblin had been hard to resist.

By six o’clock that evening she was ensconced on the floor, her work spread out neatly on the coffee table in her lounge, the silent television as company in the background, all the warm lamps on, the little gas fire blazing, the night outside dark and cold. When her phone went, she picked it up without noticing. She only just remembered to say hello. It was Rob.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to come tonight?’

Nicky smiled. ‘Yes, thanks. I don’t want to miss my kids.’

‘Don’t do it!’ he cried. ‘It’ll only make you realise how old you are.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘Oh, come to the party. It’ll be fun.’

She sighed. ‘No, thanks. I might miss a fantastic fairy.’

‘I’ve got my Batman outfit on,’ coaxed Rob.

She let out a laugh. It was tempting.

‘Hey, don’t knock it,’ he said. ‘This Batman has extremely firm thighs.’ He was grinning.

She laughed. ‘I
want
to see my kids!’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’ She could hear him mixing drinks in his kitchen.