Chapter 7
7
K ay leaned forward and glanced through the partially open door of the headteacher’s room. Nick was on his phone, all knees and elbows again like a suited-up stick insect. Even though everyone else had loosened ties and rolled up sleeves and generally begun that delicious slide into summer.
He’d invited her in to wait, but as Amanda Woods wasn’t due for another five minutes, Kay preferred to wait in the cool of the corridor . I just need to answer someone, she’d excused herself with, and settled into the small chairs lined up outside, like a naughty child.
A week before term finished and the best part of being a teacher unrolled itself out into the sun-lounger of a six-week summer break. Which wasn’t quite true. Because as equally as she loved the break, Kay loved the work. Or until very recently she’d loved it. The last week or so, it had felt that every move she made was being watched, everything she said recorded. It hadn’t escaped her attention that she was never on her own in the classroom any more, her teaching assistant didn’t seem to leave her side. And when she passed Zac in the corridors, or in the playground, all she detected was embarrassment and she didn’t know how to respond to that. With anger that she’d been placed in this position? Or pity for the boy who was so obviously uncomfortable?
She brought her hand to her face and fanned herself. God it was hot. The back of her neck was going mad with itchiness and she still hadn’t gotten anywhere near a doctor to talk about HRT. When this was over, which would hopefully be soon… the first thing she would do was make that appointment. And join that tap class. If there was anything spare that was, after the care home bills. The plan that her mother’s GP and the dementia team had configured was indeed that her mother should be admitted into a nursing home as soon as possible. But the costs! They were eye-wateringly high. And the weight of sorrow her father now bore was unbearable to witness. Remembering again the terrible resignation he seemed to be displaying toward life in general, Kay unknotted the scarlet sarong masquerading as a scarf, and let it slip from her neck to her lap. It made not a jot of difference. She was still sweltering.
‘Nice scarf.’
At the sound of the voice, she looked up. It was Emma, the school secretary. She had her cardigan on, and her bag in her hand.
‘Oh…’ Kay looked down at the snake of chiffon in her lap.
‘You should wear colour more often.’ Emma smiled. ‘It suits you.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes it does.’ She opened her bag and took out her car keys. ‘I’m sorry I can’t wait any longer. Nick will buzz Mrs Woods into school. I told him I couldn’t stay past six.’
‘No,’ Kay said. ‘Of course not.’
Emma crossed the small foyer and stopped at the front door, one hand on the handle. ‘It’ll be alright, Kay,’ she said. ‘Nick knows what a great teacher you are.’
Kay managed a nod. Or she thought she did. Emma’s words were like a quiver of tiny arrows; they punctured her paper-thin bravado without even trying.
‘Take care. See you tomorrow?’
‘See you tomorrow.’ And she watched as the door swung shut and Emma walked across the wide-open empty playground.
Mechanically her fingers twisted through the soft chiffon. Was it going to be alright? Yes, she was a good teacher, but in this last week of waiting she’d travelled long past the point of believing that would be enough. It didn’t seem to matter nowadays what reputation preceded you. The b word had been used and nowadays that was often all it took. What would she do if it stuck? If this allegation became her downfall? What would she do if she actually lost her job? And more than that, how would she face her colleagues? Or the kids, present and past, of whom she’d always been inordinately fond, and who seemed to respond in kind. How are you Mrs Burrell? You were always my favourite, Mrs Burrell, even though I hated maths! That’s how they greeted her in the supermarket, with wide-eyed kids of their own.
Swallowing hard, she leaned back against the wall, the curled-up corner of a piece of year seven artwork nestling into her hair. Emma had disappeared, the school corridors rang quiet and although Amanda Woods should be here in… she glanced at the clock… two minutes, there was no sign of her. So unless she was going to miraculously transport herself into the school, the woman was going to be late. Why didn’t that surprise Kay? More to distract herself than anything else, she reached into her bag and took out one of the thirty-odd maths books she’d be marking later on. Turning to the blank pages at the back, she drew vertical lines down the gridded paper, and then slashed across with several horizontal lines. Almost as an afterthought, she flipped the book over to see whose it was, and the name made her smile. Rosie Milford. Well, this was the last assignment of the school year. And Rosie wouldn’t be needing her year seven exercise book in year eight. And going by this year’s effort, Kay wasn’t convinced that Rosie would be filling many pages in year eight either. Anyway she’d rip out these few back pages she’d used. Rosie would never notice.
Pen in mouth, she stared down at the table of lines she’d just constructed. What would happen if she did lose her job? She still had sixteen years until retirement. She scribbled a series of figures down one column. Income as it stood now. Income as it might stand, based upon the pension calculator she’d Googled at 2am. There wouldn’t be anything left from her parents, that was clear. Right now, because her father was still living in the house, they wouldn’t have to sell it to pay for the nursing home. But their savings would be used, and then when and if her father also went into care… well that would be the house sold too. She’d be on her own, with her truncated pension and Alex’s garden centre salary.
Teeth biting the sour plastic, she chomped down on the biro and made a monumental but easy decision. If this next half hour went badly, she’d quit before she could be pushed, and she'd move to Cyprus. Marianne was always sending her pictures over Facebook, and it always looked beautiful. Her pension would go a whole lot further over there than it would here, and she could always wait tables, or maybe teach privately.
A brush of fresh air fanned her face, cooling her Cyprus daydream, and as she turned she saw Nick standing in the doorway to his office. ‘That was Amanda Woods,’ he said, holding up his phone. ‘She’ll be here in two minutes.’
Kay nodded, the pen stuck like a forgotten cigarette. So maybe she did have a transporter?
‘Maths problem?’ Nick smiled, gesturing at her page of criss-crossed columns.
‘Nothing,’ she murmured, scrabbling to hide both the scribbled calculations and the fact that she was using a pupil’s exercise book.
‘I use this.’ Nick waved his phone. ‘Got everything on it nowadays. Calendars, calculators, alarms…’ He stopped. ‘What am I saying? Maths teacher like you doesn’t need a calculator.’ And his laugh was a little too loud and a little too forced.
The smile she gave back was more of a grimace. But bugger him! Nothing about this situation was funny. She looped the sarong back into its long roll and folded it around her neck. ‘No,’ she said as she stood up. ‘I certainly don’t.’ By God, if she was going to go down, she’d go down fighting! ‘I’ll wait in your office,’ she said, ‘if that’s OK.’ And heart hammering but head up, she walked in and took her seat.
A few minutes later (definitely more than two), the first thing Kay thought when Amanda Woods walked through the door of Nick’s office was how young she looked. Because investigating her nemesis on LinkedIn she’d been surprised to discover that Amanda was fifty-nine, which meant she would have had Zac at forty-four. At the time it had made Kay think of Caro, and for weeks after she’d had the strangest dreams. She was at a parents’ evening and all the parents were in wheelchairs, holding old-fashioned hearing aid trumpets. She’d had to lean over the desk and shout into them. Louder and louder; still they couldn’t hear.
But this older parent was nothing like that. No wheelchair… no trumpet… not a grey hair in sight and suspiciously few wrinkles. Amanda Woods was dressed in a pencil-slim shift dress, accessorised with a shiny black handbag the size and shape of a large clipboard. Her cheekbones were high, her earrings subtle and her hair drawn back into the kind of sleek obedient ponytail Kay had always envisioned for herself, on the very few occasions she had tried, and failed, to grow her own hair long.
‘Amanda,’ Amanda Woods said and stretched out her hand.
‘Kay,’ Kay said, offering her own hand, just as she had on the previous three parents’ evenings when they had met. Maybe this time it would stick? She flicked the tail of her scarlet sarong-scarf into place and thanked God that she hadn’t squeezed her sausage torso into her own shift dress. That she’d taken Caro’s advice: loose blouse, elasticated trousers, slash of colour.
‘Please… take a seat.’ On the other side of his desk, Nick pointed out the fairly obvious free chair.
Kay resumed her own seat and watched as Amanda reached into her handbag and took out her phone. The handbag retained its shape, becoming neither slimmer nor smaller. Was that the only thing she had in it?
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Amanda said as she laid her phone on the desk. ‘I thought I’d record the meeting.’
Smooth as silk Nick smiled. ‘Absolutely. No problem. That’s OK with you, Kay?’
As she leaned back in her chair, Kay nodded, folded one hand on top of the other and breathed in through her nostrils. For a fragment of a moment she thought she’d seen a conspiratorial light flare in Nick’s eyes, a moment in which their mutual shock at this opening salvo from Amanda had instantly transformed into mutual resolve. Perhaps he was wary about his own position? The thought hadn’t occurred to Kay, but already she sensed that Amanda Woods wasn’t the sort to take prisoners. They needed to be on the same team here, that much at least was obvious. She breathed out, two thin streams of air, mouth tight. She wouldn’t let him down.
Amanda pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. (So there was something else in it.) ‘If perhaps we can start with some background information,’ she said and whipped the paper through ninety degrees so it was facing Nick. ‘This is a copy of Zachery’s last maths paper.’
Squinting, Kay leaned forward.
‘I wonder,’ Amanda smiled, ‘if you could tell me if you understand it.’
Now Nick squinted.
As well he would, Kay thought. Nick came from humanities. He wouldn’t understand a year ten maths paper even if it set about explaining itself in an email with the subject line: Things to Focus on Going Forward. The kind of mail, Nick himself sent (always) on the last day of term.
‘Zachery got a C minus,’ Amanda said.
Kay glanced at her. He did. And she’d been generous with that. If she remembered rightly, he deserved a D.
‘Now,’ Amanda’s voice was unnaturally light. ‘I’m full of understanding for the fact that teachers can on occasion become… How shall I word this?’
Kay shrugged. There were plenty of words she could have supplied…
‘Less than motivated in setting homework assignments?’ Amanda finished.
Less than … Her fingernails dug into her palm, five pink crescents of frustration.
‘But frankly I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a poorly worded paper.’
‘It’s a series of division problems,’ Kay said and didn’t add, how many words are necessary?
Amanda turned. ‘I’m aware of that. I work in law.’
Kay stared, her lips twitched, and she almost wanted to laugh, so preposterous was the statement. Working in law had nothing to do with how a maths paper was set out. And thinking that it did was like Sarah Palin thinking she understood Russia because she lived in Alaska. Genuinely perplexed, she frowned. ‘There’s really only so many ways of wording the problem, Mrs Woods.’
Ignoring her, Amanda turned to Nick. ‘I would like it re-marked.’
‘What?’ Slack-jawed, Kay too turned to Nick. In thirty years of teaching, not once had this happened.
He was nodding seriously, his head wobbling.
‘Another thing,’ Amanda continued. ‘Since he has been in your class, Mrs Burrell, my son has missed three tennis lessons because of detentions.’
‘Zac—’ Nick started.
‘Zachery,’ Amanda snapped, cutting him off like a praying mantis with a fly. ‘His name is Zachery.’
Slightly stunned, Kay leaned back. In all the years of teaching Zac, she had never once heard him call himself anything other than Zac. And she’d never heard his friends or his teachers refer to him as anything other than Zac. Did his mother even know this? Or did she know it and not care? ‘His behaviour,’ she said carefully, ‘has been challenging.’
‘It’s not at home,’ Amanda retorted.
‘But it has been in the classroom,’ she fired back, sweetening the bullet with a smile. Because honestly, how many times had she heard this? Parents always had difficulty understanding that once out of their sight, their children behaved differently. Why would Amanda Woods be any different? And for the first time since she had entered the room, Kay felt a smidgeon of sympathy for her. For the idea that she obviously held sacred, the absurd notion that she could and would be able to predict every nuance and turn of her son’s character and behaviour.
‘The problem is,’ Amanda said, turning to address Kay directly, ‘we pay a lot of money for his extra-curricular activities, and we really don’t expect to see them disrupted because of petty disciplinary matters that could probably have been quite easily resolved with better classroom management.’
‘I wouldn’t call them petty,’ Kay said and stopped, her mind stalling as it caught up with Amanda’s last three words – better classroom management .
‘Well!’ Sensing a lull, Nick leaned forward. ‘No need right now to get into the ins and outs of…’ He trailed off, pulling a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Perhaps though, it might help to go back a few months. It might be useful to go though some of the umm… some of the incidents?—’
‘He comes in late,’ Kay interrupted, any sympathy she might have momentarily felt vanishing in a puff of exasperation. Better classroom management? This woman was making her classroom sound like a corporate board room. She didn’t need to go back anywhere! She didn’t need a printed list of incidents. Kids like Zac stood out. Incidents that disrupt a class and send a teacher’s blood pressure through the roof get remembered and what was more… There was nothing wrong with the way she managed her classroom. Nothing at all! ‘He chews gum,’ she continued, ‘which I have to ask him repeatedly to remove. He doesn’t have his textbook with him, so he has to share, which disrupts the kids around him. During class I’ve found him playing on his phone?—’
‘Why,’ Amanda tilted her head, ‘is his phone even accessible in the first place?’
The comment knocked Kay off balance, stuck a foot out and tripped her up. ‘It shouldn’t be!’ she blurted. ‘That's the point!’
Amanda Woods shrugged. ‘Well, exactly,’ she said. ‘Management.’
Stunned, Kay stared at her. Amanda Woods, she realised, had an answer to everything. And nothing, it was clear, was going to be either her, or her child’s responsibility. She was the very embodiment of what the younger teachers labelled uber parent: a scary new cross of life experience meets success meets money. She wasn’t the type to be fobbed off with the usual we will endeavour or we’re keeping an eye blandishments. This woman wanted proof. Expected her son’s education to run as tick-tock smoothly as she ran her life (and her hair). She’d invested and she expected a return, and again, Kay thought of Caro. Could this also be Caro? That it could, that she was so easily able to imagine Caro, in place of Amanda, demanding and expecting, physically upset her. She pushed back in her chair and looked across the small room. The expectations! Why? Why do people bother having kids, when all they’re looking for is a copy of themselves?
‘Anyway,’ Amanda shook her head, her pony tail swinging like a metronome.
Kay watched, her fingers twitching with the urge to reach out and yank it. HARD!
‘As you’re probably aware, my husband and I lead very busy lives. Sending Zachery home with extra assignments to make up for work that should be taking place in school is not helpful. We have neither the time nor the…’
And here Kay switched off. Pressed pause. Busy lives? Three nights ago, her mother had gotten up and fallen in the hallway. Her father had found her soaking wet, freezing cold, sound asleep. He’d thought she was dead. He couldn’t lift her and he couldn’t help her and he’d rung Kay at three in the morning because he thought he’d found his wife of sixty years dead in the hallway… Can you come? Shall I call an ambulance? Can you come … now. She looked up at Amanda. Time? She wanted to say. What the fuck is that?
‘And then,’ Amanda continued, ‘we come to this latest incident. Which I have to say really fuelled my suspicions and has led us to the unfortunate position we find ourselves in.’
Kay’s mouth flattened to a long flat line. Stick a moustache on her, and Amanda Woods could be Poirot. With Nick and she the suspects, awaiting the denouement. She should loosen up. Try a bit of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The thought had her suppressing a smile.
‘Indeed.’ Nick looked down at his papers.
‘I find it totally unacceptable,’ Amanda seethed, ‘the way Ms Burrell forced my son to participate in an exercise designed solely to embarrass him.’
Kay held her chin up and shook her head and in the moment that followed, no one spoke.
And then Nick nodded. ‘Kay, would you like to say something?’
Yes, she bloody well would! She sat up, tucked her sarong-scarf into place and said, ‘This latest incident as you call it. I asked Zac?—’
‘Zachery.’
Waiting a beat, she paused. ‘I invited Zachery to come up to the whiteboard, because he was asking questions about stuff we hadn’t covered.’
‘Zachery is gifted. He can’t help that.’
‘And he has private tuition.’
‘Your point is?’
That he’s privileged, not gifted. She didn’t say this. What she said was, ‘It can sometimes place him ahead, as it did on this occasion. I considered that it would be a good way to stop him getting bored, keep the class on track and keep him engaged.’
‘By dragging him up in front of the whole class?’
‘I didn’t need to drag him. It was meant to be a bit of fun. Switching roles.’
‘So you could then humiliate him? By asking questions he couldn’t answer?’
‘No!’ Kay snapped. But by God, she’d had enough! She was a teacher. She wasn’t Amanda Woods’ cleaner, or her au-pair, or her birthday-cake baker, or her secretary, or anyone else on her payroll. She was a teacher! ‘That wasn’t the point at all. And actually Zac… Zachery could answer some of them. Those that he couldn’t, I phrased the question so the answer was in it. So the whole class, including Zachery, could learn. And what’s more, as far as I could see, he enjoyed himself.’
‘He did not enjoy himself,’ Amanda said primly. ‘He was embarrassed and humiliated and he felt unsafe!’
‘Unsafe?’ Kay paused. Zachery Woods was taller than her. Unsafe? The word was used in such strange contexts these days. ‘No one,’ she said quietly, ‘was carrying a concealed weapon, Mrs Woods.’
The joke fell flat.
Nick cleared his throat. ‘Did Zachery use those words?’
‘He didn’t need to,’ Amanda answered.
And astonished, Kay turned to Nick as if she’d almost forgotten he was there. His face had frozen in panic. It was, she knew, that word: unsafe. Thrown as randomly and thoughtlessly as confetti. The corners of her mouth turned down, as clink by clink, muscle by sinew she felt an internal armour fastening into place. Nick might be cowed, but she wasn’t. Zac hadn’t felt unsafe in her class, and no one was going to strong-arm her into believing that he had, especially someone who’d never set foot in a classroom. She crossed her arms and looked at Amanda. How, she considered, would the woman react to her, Kay, striding into Amanda’s office and offering an unasked for, uneducated, irrelevant opinion? In a cool, composed voice she said, ‘Mrs Woods, the boy I saw in my classroom that day wasn’t humiliated or embarrassed. And there was nothing about the environment that I could, in any sane situation, describe as unsafe. In fact, in thirty years of teaching, I don’t think I could ever have used that word to describe either a student or a situation.’ She paused. ‘Although once we had an accident with a banana, left in someone’s rucksack so long it might possibly have fallen into that category. But Mr Hodges is pretty handy with Domestos and it was dealt with long before the lesson in question.’
Neither Amanda nor Nick responded, and somewhere way back in a dusty corner of her mind, she could hear a voice calling, Stop with the jokes, Kay! But she was fifty and her mother was hitting her father, and Helen’s child was having a child and her own precious son was embarking on motorcycle races and on the verge of moving out and jokes were about the only thing left to hang on to, a reliable raft in this maelstrom… She looked at Nick’s fingers pale and hairless stretched out like beached starfish. Then, slowly she turned to look up at Amanda Woods.
Who was staring at her in disbelief.
So Kay stared back. She was beyond caring. In total kamikaze mode.
‘I want,’ Amanda said imperiously, ‘the paper re-marked, before the end of term.’ She turned to Nick. ‘It’s very clear to me that Mrs Burr?—’
‘Ms,’ Kay clipped.
‘I'm sorry?’
‘It’s Ms not Mrs.’ She smiled. ‘If we are aiming to get names right.’
Amanda scowled. She turned back to Nick. ‘ Ms Burrell has a bias against my son, in all probability because of the colour of his skin. He’s aiming for Oxbridge. He needs at least an A in his GCSE next year, and this… this is a question of fairness.’
‘A bias?’ Kay repeated.
‘That…’ Nick began, glancing at Kay. ‘That’s quite a serious allegation?—’
‘Which isn’t true.’ Blunt as a hammer, Kay cut him off because like a sudden shift in winds, Amanda Woods’ words had produced a sea change in the atmosphere of the room, charging it with tension, which to her surprise, only left her calm, as detached as if she were watching a storm from a very safe harbour. She had, she realised, been expecting this. Zac’s father was black, and from the moment Amanda Woods’ complaints had started, Kay had found herself on high alert with regard to her interactions with him. No, she didn’t like the boy, but these last few weeks she’d put that aside and concentrated on trying very hard to like him, testing herself, trying out the sobering possibility that there might be a truth in what she’d seen coming. How hard she had tried! Including him in discussion more often, laughing at his unfunny jokes, praising his successes. To which, surprisingly, he’d responded. So much so that, together, they had been bumping along much better, quite nicely in fact, which had left her feeling relieved and happy and ready. ‘It’s just not true,’ she repeated, with a pronounced confidence. ‘I?—’
But Amanda was reaching for her phone. ‘After the re-mark, I’m prepared to let the matter be closed… with one further suggestion…’
Kay’s eyes widened –
‘…that Ms Burrell undertakes to attend unconscious bias training…’
–and widened. She looked first at Amanda, then at the phone which was still recording.
‘Well…’ Nick looked from one to the other. ‘I think…’ He pulled Zac’s test paper towards him and picked it up. ‘I think a re-mark is… well it wouldn’t do any harm. Kay?’
Did she answer? Kay barely noticed. In fact she barely noticed anything about the rest of the meeting, how long it lasted, or what was conceded, agreed, disputed. She didn’t really come round until Amanda Woods had left the room and Nick had re-seated himself opposite her, an expression of shameful contrition slapped and stretched across his face like a wet flannel. As if he knew it was all bullshit. As if he knew that what he was selling wasn’t decent wool-pile carpet, but a threadbare doormat. And even then, it wasn’t enough. His obvious empathy wasn’t enough to help her wound. Thirty years she had given, in fair and dedicated practice, in the face of abuse from parents who couldn’t be arsed to put a clean t-shirt on for parents’ evening, parents who did their kids’ homework for them and said as much… And all of that was better than this. Having her integrity judged. Having to endure the humiliation of having someone else check her marking.
‘I’m sorry, Kay,’ Nick started. ‘For what it’s worth?—’
She held her hand up to stop him. She felt sorry for him but whatever he was going to say wasn’t worth anything – not under the shadow of such unfounded and dangerous allegations. ‘Ask Annie to re-mark it,’ she said flatly. ‘The paper’s on… It’s maths,’ she shrugged. ‘It's pretty black and white.’ And couldn’t help adding, ‘Although that’s probably not the best metaphor.’
Nick ran his thumb along the edge of the paper. ‘Would you go on a course? If this goes to the governors,’ he added softly, ‘it’s out of my hands.’
Kay looked at those pale, unlined hands, soft as sponge. Did she really want her professional future nested in them? ‘Of course,’ she said, because what other answer could she possibly give?