Chapter 22
The following day, Joe got up before his 6.30 a.m. time slot to give himself enough time to sort out his outfit in his office. Now how exactly had Lynette suggested that he twisted those sheets?
‘Morning, Mr Balls,’ said a breathy voice.
Joe glanced at Di. Just the person he needed to talk to! ‘May I have a word?’
‘Certainly.’ She stood in front of him, her bottom lip quivering as she stared at his costume. Joe felt his old irritation rise to the surface and, remembering Lynette’s advice, tried to imagine how the Dalai Lama might have reacted when faced with a school secretary who might or might not be in the wrong.
‘Di, can you tell me if you’ve given out my address to anyone?’
Instantly, the woman went a deep shade of red. ‘Only to your wife, sir. She rang the other day.’
So Ed had called the school! His ex-wife’s effrontery was astounding, but it didn’t excuse a severe lapse of security on the part of the school. He took a deep breath. It would be so easy to lose his temper, but that wouldn’t help. ‘Didn’t it occur to you, Di, that if the caller had been my wife, she would have had my address anyway?’
Another deep flush. ‘It did, but it’s none of my business, sir, and she did say it was urgent.’
‘Exactly. It wasn’t your business. Especially as, whatever you were told, she isn’t my wife. Not any more.’ He gave her one of his famous fourteenth-floor stares. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Di, that after the recent security scare at the pre-school, it is imperative, absolutely imperative, that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. Do I make myself clear?’
Presumably the answer to that was yes, since the woman then scuttled back to her office, leaving Joe to go back to his classroom where Gemma and her helpers were already arriving for the Significant Figures joint assembly. Slightly disappointedly, he saw that she’d gone for the Mother Teresa look. Meanwhile, there was an assortment of loud, highly restless small Supermen, a couple of popes, John Lennon, Princess Diana, Henry VIII and, rather alarmingly, a miniature panda. Clearly, the parents had some imaginative interpretations of significant figures in history.
At his inner-city school, there had been no place for middle-class dressing up. Joe could hardly believe how much trouble parents had gone to here. There had clearly been a run on pillowcases and sheets, but there was also a fair smattering of quite professional-looking papier-maché hats and face paints. One mother could be heard confessing that she’d hired her child’s Winston Churchill costume, complete with mock cigar.
Inwardly, Joe groaned. As he’d tried telling Gemma on more than one occasion, it was maths that was really important in life. Anyone could dress up or play pretend games.
‘Mr Balls, could I have a word?’
Help. It was Eco Mum. Joe had heard one of the other mothers call her that, and it had been so apt that it had stuck in his head. ‘My daughter was in Puddleducks last year,’ she began, ‘and they did two recycling projects in the space of nine months. I had rather hoped that by now, Mr Balls, Jemima would have done something similar, but so far nothing has happened.’ Her forehead, gleaming with some ghastly and doubtless recycled moisturiser stuff, thrust itself forward in indignation. ‘Our children are our only hope in saving the world.’
Please! Of course recycling was important, although he had to admit that the ‘Recycled’ label on loo paper always made him recoil. But the woman was overstating her case.
‘So I thought,’ continued Eco Mum urgently, standing in what looked like home-knitted Yeti boots, ‘that we could enter an eco project for that bank award.’
‘I think you’ll find,’ began Joe carefully, ‘that we might need something more cutting-edge.’
Gemma touched his arm. ‘I agree,’ she said quietly. ‘In fact, one of my mums has just come up with an amazing idea. Mrs Carter Wright, would you like to tell Mr Balls about it?’
It was the quiet American woman with the short urchin haircut whose son was always kicking balls round the classroom, just as he was doing now. ‘Danny, stop it,’ ordered his mother in a resigned twang that suggested she’d said that more than once already. ‘I’ve just started doing a mosaics class, and the tutor said he could help us build a mural on the playground wall in Puddleducks. It would be a picture of the whole town, and we could get some of the businesses and shops and churches and other groups to help us.’
Gemma’s face was beaming. ‘Great idea, isn’t it?’
In principle, perhaps, but just think of the practicalities! ‘Who owns the playground wall?’
Gemma shrugged. ‘I presumed it belonged to school.’
‘Might be a party wall. How much is it going to cost?’
‘We’ve got to check, but …’
‘And how long will it take? We’ve only got until December.’
Both the American and Gemma looked deflated, as well they might.
‘I suggest you do a bit of forward planning before we decide.’ He tried to move away but his foot slipped on his sheet. To his horror, he found himself on his bottom, splayed on the floor and – even worse – with his underpants showing! He knew he should have worn trousers under that bloody sheet. That wretched Bella girl, who was dressed up as Princess Kate, was openly sniggering, and some of the children were laughing too.
‘Mr Balls!’ A tall, pretty blonde woman, whose husband had left her six weeks ago and had already been in twice to tell him about it in great detail, was at his side immediately. ‘Mr Balls, are you all right?’ His right ankle was throbbing mercilessly where he’d caught it on the table leg, but he wasn’t going to say so. ‘Fine, thank you.’ Picking himself up with as much dignity as possible, he limped towards his desk. ‘Right. Let’s begin, shall we?’
After the Significant Figures assembly, during which each one gave a brief account of his or her life and why they had been important in history, Joe and his throbbing ankle had spent the rest of the week submerging his class in arithmetic. Of course, under the National Curriculum, he had to make sure that other subjects were covered too, but since it was maths that they were woefully weak in, he considered himself justified in pinching some lesson time from wishy-washy areas like story-writing.
It was such a relief to zoom back to Notting Hill on the Friday night and park his bike outside his own flat, where he didn’t have to worry about getting up early for his bathroom slot.
It was also a relief to find that there weren’t the usual messages from Ed, either on his mobile or the home answerphone. Nor , as it turned out, did she appear unannounced at the flat over the weekend. Ed was so unpredictable! You never knew what she was going to do next.
The following week, the office was in a fever of excitement about the imminent Parents’ Social on Thursday. The parents were just as bad, chattering about what they were going to wear and did anyone fancy going out to the new pizza place afterwards?
Meanwhile, he’d managed to avoid his fellow lodger by getting up early, and putting in extra hours in classroom preparation so that he came back late. At some point he’d need to make time to see a doctor about this wretched ankle, which was still puffed up. ‘Everything all right?’ trilled Joyce when he’d left his monthly rent on the kitchen table. ‘Sorry I haven’t been around much, but my daughter had a baby. My first grandchild, you know!’
No. He didn’t know and frankly he didn’t want to. Not where babies were concerned. And he couldn’t wait for tonight’s event to be over with so he could get on with his real job of drumming facts into heads, and also trying to think of a stand-out entry for the bank’s competition.
Joe groaned inwardly as the parents began trooping in, headed by the blonde newly single mum who was making a beeline straight for him. Even Di gave him a sympathetic look, handing him a glass of cheap wine.
Despite his earlier intentions to avoid the stuff, Joe took a swig. Disgusting. But it numbed the pain. A bit.
‘So I told him that if he was going to talk like that …’
‘It’s not right for children to hear their father say such things, don’t you think?’
‘The trouble is that there aren’t many places where single people like us can go, are there?’
‘I say like us, Joe – I can call you that, can’t I? – because I can see from your left hand that you don’t wear a wedding ring …’
The room was getting slightly blurry.
‘Joe,’ said a familiar voice. No. It sounded like Gemma’s, but softer somehow. ‘You look a bit pale. Are you all right?’
At the same time, Joe realised that the throbbing in his head was being overtaken by the throbbing in his right ankle.
‘I do feel a bit odd,’ he began and then stopped. Things must be really bad if he could imagine that Ed was striding across the room towards him in an impossibly tall pair of black heels and one of her beautifully tailored business suits.
‘Joe, darling!’ The image that pretended to be Ed flashed a smile at Single Mum, who was now looking decidedly put out. ‘So sorry I’m late.’
Late?
‘Your landlady told me I’d find you here.’ Ed flashed another smile at Single Mum. ‘We live in London, you see, so my poor husband has to live out here during the week.’
We? Husband?
Gemma and Single Mum both seemed to take a backward step, as though they didn’t want anything more to do with him. Too late, Joe wished he hadn’t drunk that cheap wine. It had made his head go horribly fuzzy. Maybe he shouldn’t have taken a double dose of painkillers before leaving the bedsit, either.
‘This woman,’ he managed to gasp out before collapsing on a chair, his ankle now throbbing in white pain, ‘is not my wife. She’s …’
And then it all went black.