2. Helsa
HELSA
“ D amn pencils.”
They were right there. I could see them. Blue case, top shelf of the supply cupboard, approximately four inches beyond the tips of my outstretched fingers. Four inches. It might as well have been four miles.
I shifted my weight onto my toes and tried again.
My fingertips grazed the corner of the case. It rocked forward — Come on, come on — considered the situation, and rocked back.
Oh, you absolute bas ? —
I cut myself off. I’d long since learned to control my expletives when in a school of kids. But I could make a sailor blush when I had a mind to.
“Let’s try this again.”
I flattened my free hand against the table edge for leverage and pushed another half-inch skyward. My calves were already burning. I had been standing on the tips of my shoes for what felt like a significant portion of my adult life.
Portia, Clarence, and Gerald watched me from the fish tank on the corner of the table. Three pairs of blank golden eyes. Three small mouths working in that slow, rhythmic way goldfish had, as if they were perpetually commenting on something they found mildly disappointing.
You could get a chair , the sensible part of my brain offered.
I ignored it. The pencils were right there.
I got two fingers on the case and pulled. The case tipped. There was a brief, optimistic moment where I thought I had it. Then came the minor avalanche — a cheerful cascade of colored pencils rattling off the shelf and heading, with some purpose, directly toward the fish tank.
I lunged. I caught the case itself and what I estimated was sixty percent of its contents before the damage was done. The rest hit the floor in a scattered radius around my feet.
I landed slightly winded, the case pressed to my chest, one single pencil rattling around inside it.
Burnt sienna.
"Do you need a hand?"
I turned. Greta was standing in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the frame, arms folded loosely at her waist. She had the look of a woman who had arrived just in time to watch the most predictable thing happen.
I held up the pencil case. The lone pencil knocked against the plastic sides.
"Success," I said. "Also, that's my favorite color."
Greta's gaze tracked from the pencils on the floor to the pencil case to my face. Something shifted in her expression — not quite amusement, not quite exasperation. It was the expression she always reserved for me.
She pushed off from the doorframe and came over, but I was already crouching down, gathering pencils off the floor. She picked up a pencil near the leg of a chair and held it out. I took it without looking up, and neither of us commented on the choreography.
"End of term," Greta said.
"End of term," I agreed.
"You've got a lot of boxes."
"I always have a lot of boxes." I straightened, dropped the last handful of pencils into the case, and looked around the room.
Four boxes, one bag, two rolled posters, and what appeared to be a plant I had genuinely forgotten I owned.
"Every single year it surprises me. How is that possible? Where did any of this come from?"
Greta picked up the plant and set it on the table.
She didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say.
For Greta, the end of term was an administrative event, not a revelation.
Greta had been methodically carrying things home in a small bag for two weeks.
Standing in a cleared-out classroom on the last afternoon of term, Greta had nothing more stressful to collect than a tiny plastic bag.
I respected that enormously. I also found it completely alien to my nature.
I'd tucked the pencil case under my arm and was reaching for the first box when Greta said, "You've missed some."
She was looking at the fish tank.
I looked at the fish tank.
Three colored pencils rested on the gravel at the bottom, settled between the small plastic castle and the decorative driftwood.
Portia, Clarence, and Gerald were nosing at them with a focused academic interest. Clarence — I was fairly certain it was Clarence — was investigating what appeared to be a cerulean blue.
Something cool settled in my stomach. Not panic. Not exactly dread. Something in between, with an unpleasant undercurrent. I kept my face neutral.
"The graphite affects the water quality," Greta said, already rolling up her sleeve. "It's not good for them."
"You don't have to?—"
But Greta had slid her hand into the tank with the calm efficiency of someone who had long since accepted that small disasters followed me like weather.
I turned to look at the wall. There was a poster about the water cycle I'd put up in September.
Rain falling into a lake. I studied it with great attention.
I listened to the soft sound of water, the faint clink of pencils shifting against gravel. I found a water stain on the ceiling above the window and decided it looked slightly like a corgi.
"Here," Greta said.
I turned back. She was holding three wet pencils. My mouth felt dry and I didn’t reach for them. Her expression shifted. It said she understood perfectly and wasn't going to mention it. She dried them on the cuff of her sleeve and held them out again.
I took them. Dropped them in the case. Snapped the lid shut.
"I had it under control," I said.
"Completely," Greta said.
I put the pencil case in the nearest box. It was, by any objective measure, a very full box. There was the usual end-of-term accumulation — marking folders, spare markers, three books I'd been meaning to return to the staffroom since October. And then there were the other things.
The large umbrella. The compact umbrella.
The third umbrella, which I had purchased in a moment of genuine conviction and never once used.
Two rolled waterproof jackets in their cylindrical cases.
The tall Wellington boots. The spare Wellington boots.
The waterproof socks. The waterproof gloves.
The small packet of boot spray, still sealed in its packaging.
Greta looked at the box. She'd seen its contents before. She said nothing.
"Everything's fine," I said. "No problem at all."
"Absolutely," Greta agreed. "Completely fine."
I put the lid on the box and stacked the second on top of it. I squared my stance, got my arms around the stack, and lifted.
Heavy. Very heavy. Something shifted inside and redistributed its weight in a way that was objectively worse in every direction. I widened my stance. Adjusted my grip. Breathed.
"I could take one of those," Greta said. It was the tone of someone who had made this offer before, knew the answer, but felt the offer should exist in the world as a matter of principle.
"I've got them," I said, slightly muffled by the box near my chin.
"Of course you do."
I got the stack through the door on the third attempt, mostly sideways. Greta held the door open without comment and fell into step beside me. We moved down the corridor in the kind of comfortable quiet that only exists between people who have run out of things to prove to each other.
At the main door I stopped, shifted the boxes, and looked at her. "You're not taking anything home?"
Greta reached into her coat and produced a small plastic bag. A mug. A phone charger. A paperback book.
I stared at it for a moment .
"That’s all?"
Greta beamed. It was an excellent beam — warm, self-satisfied, the beam of a woman who had executed a plan and was now living in its rewards while her colleague stood sweating under three large boxes and a personal waterproofing collection that could outfit a small expedition.
She shrugged. "It's the easiest way."
Sure. If you’re not a total disaster at planning, I thought.
We walked out.
The school car park was the ugliest place in Edinburgh, possibly the ugliest place in Europe, and I said so to Greta as we crossed it.
"The multi-story on Greenside is worse," she said.
"Nothing is worse than this."
"You've never been to the one by Waverley at eleven on a Friday night."
She had a point. I shifted the boxes in my arms and kept walking. The sky above the roofline had gone that shade of dark blue that isn't quite night yet, the color that appears for about twenty minutes in summer before the last of the light finally gives up and goes home.
The streetlamps along Morrison Street were already on, casting orange pools on the pavement, and somewhere ahead of us a bus was pulling away from a stop with that long pneumatic sigh they make, like they're exhausted by the whole enterprise.
"So," said Greta. "Summer."
"Summer," I agreed.
"What are you doing?"
"Sleeping, mostly. You? "
"Marta wants to go to Portugal."
"Are you going?"
"Probably. You should come."
"I'll think about it," I said, which meant no and we both knew it. Greta accepted this with her characteristic equanimity because she always did. Totally unflappable. One of her best qualities and also occasionally her most irritating one.
We turned south onto Dalry Road, heading for Haymarket.
It was a fifteen-minute walk, maybe twenty with the boxes, but the evening was warm and neither of us was in a hurry to go anywhere in particular.
The last day of term has a texture to it — loose, slightly formless, like a day that knows its job is done and has stopped trying.
"I forgot how much I like this," I said. "Just walking somewhere without a reason."
“We’re heading to the station.”
“Sure. But it’s not like we’re rushing there.”
Greta laughed. She had a good laugh, short and genuine. We walked past a kebab shop and a dry cleaner and a pub where someone had propped the door open. The sound of football commentary drifted out onto the street. I thought about Portugal and decided I might actually think about it.
That was when I felt it.
The back of my neck.