Chapter Four
Four
Slowly she made her way down the stairs through the middle of the dress circle. A few of the spotlights still worked and with these illuminating the stage, Harriet was obscured by darkness until she reached the top of the slope where the stalls began.
“You know, we have a theater at the school I’m sure we could arrange for you to use,” she said.
Five heads snapped round in her direction. Billy hastily dropped his cigarette into an empty bottle. Ricco and Carly—blinded by the spotlights—squinted in her direction while Isabel—her long black ponytail swinging wildly—had jumped up to standing in readiness to sprint, and Leo, shouting “Shit, it’s the feds!” had drop-rolled onto the floor and was peeping up over the folded seat.
Harriet couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “Relax, guys, it’s only me. And for the record, Leo, we don’t have feds in the UK.”
“Miss Smith?” Carly asked uncertainly, her hands shielding her eyes from the spotlights.
“The one and only,” Harriet replied dryly.
“Shit, miss, you nearly gave me a heart attack!” said Billy. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here? You’ve got some cheek. What are you doing here? Mr. Cornell is not impressed at your absence, again .”
“He’s never impressed,” said Carly, jumping off the stage and landing in a crouch like a cat. She was in the process of growing out a buzz cut, which she and Ricco had both done as a dare, and habitually ran her palms over her white-blond spikes.
The others murmured their agreement. Ricco—whose mum had cried when he’d first shaved his head and said he looked like a gangster—more wisely took the stairs off to the side and came to stand beside Leo, who had relinquished his bad hiding space. “Why does he even teach if he hates kids so much?”
This was a question Harriet had asked herself numerous times, but in the interest of maintaining her professionalism she replied, “Mr. Cornell has an appreciation for literature, which he wants to pass on to his students, and he becomes frustrated when he is unable to do his job properly. He can’t do his job at all if you’re not in school for him to teach you.”
“It’s all irrelevant to us, though, miss, isn’t it? All this oldy-worldy stuff. I’m not saying it isn’t a good story.” Carly waved her copy of the play. “A lot of them are, if you can get through the crusty way they’re written, but what actual use is all this stuff to us?”
“I think we can learn a lot from literature: social history, opinions of the time…” Harriet began.
“How is that going to help me get a job?” asked Isabel. Isabel’s family lived in a high-rise on the same infamous estate as Ricco. Her mum worked fiendishly long hours to make ends meet, and Isabel, the oldest, took on a lot of responsibility for her younger siblings.
“I’ll grant you that being able to recite passages from a Dickens novel won’t help you in an interview, but the qualification that you’ll gain from the course will. If you attend classes, that is.”
“It’s dumb that Foss makes English lit a compulsory A-level,” said Isabel. “No other school makes you do it. I don’t care about literature.”
“You must care about literature if you care about drama; they’re intrinsically linked.” Bored expressions all round. “Look at it this way—having an A-level in English literature certainly can’t do you any harm.”
This was met with a unified groan.
Harriet wasn’t fazed by this type of sulking; she’d heard it all before. Being on the pastoral team rather than the teaching staff meant that her relationship with the students was more relaxed. She had no agenda, and that meant students tended to be less guarded with her. Her role was often as mediator and always as guardian of their physical, emotional, and mental welfare. And when the need arose, she made sure they got their butts to class.
“Are you going to dob us in?” asked Billy.
“I won’t have to because you’re all going to come back to school.”
Carly had relaxed her stance and stood with one hand on her hip; she was looking at Harriet with a smirk. Of all of them she was the most indomitable—on the outside, at least—a tumultuous home life had ensured that her first response was always attack.
“Does Mr. Cornell know you’re here, miss?” she asked.
“No, he does not. I wanted to give you a chance to do the right thing.”
“Whoa!” shouted Ricco, grinning. “Nice one, miss. You’ve gone rogue.”
“Good on you!” added Leo, whose bravado had fully returned.
“How did you know we were here?” asked Billy.
“I followed Leo.”
Groans of “Leo!” and “Fuck’s sake, mate!” from his peers made Leo wince.
“What?” he retorted hotly. “How was I to know Miss Smith was a super spy?”
“That’s pretty badass, miss!” laughed Carly.
“Yes, well, this badass needs you to get back to school before you all get slapped with discipline points.”
Billy, the only one of them who had remained resolutely in his seat, sparked up another cigarette and asked, “What does it matter? What’s the point?”
“Put that out, please, Billy, it’s a fire hazard.”
“Your mum’s a fire hazard!” said Leo.
“That’s not even funny!” Isabel sniggered.
“Then why are you laughing?” he retorted.
“Billy, I’m serious.” Harriet gave him a challenging stare; she’d never lost a stare-off with a student yet. Sure enough, Billy looked away first, conceding defeat by angrily stubbing out the cigarette in one of the old metal ashtrays attached to the back of the chair in front.
On the outside, Billy was a tough nut. He’d had to be. Most people saw a kid with a bad attitude because that was the persona he projected. What they didn’t see was a boy who had spent the biggest part of his life yo-yoing between foster placements and care homes with his younger brother, Sid. Harriet saw through his projection because she’d lived that experience too.
“You didn’t answer the question, miss—what’s the point?” Ricco picked up Billy’s mantle.
“Yeah, what’s the point?” parroted Leo, who was always braver when riding on someone else’s coattails.
“Look. These exams are a stepping-stone, nothing more, but having the qualifications will make it infinitely easier for you to move on to the next stage of your lives, whether that’s an apprenticeship or the workplace or university.”
Billy snorted derisively at her mention of university, but she’d included it on purpose. Just because the likelihood of them going into higher education was small didn’t mean it was impossible. And sometimes, along with keeping it real you needed to offer nuggets of possibility. If you gave them nothing to aspire to at all, then you were confirming what they already saw as a foregone conclusion and sending them out into the world with no hope at all of charting new paths for themselves. Her job was a fine balance of facilitating positive change and managing reality.
“I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but you will regret not using this time to make life easier for yourselves down the line. Everything is going to be harder if you leave the school without taking advantage of what’s on offer there. Even if it’s just for the sake of making your CV look better, it’s a competitive job market and every little bit helps when you’re applying for jobs that a hundred other people are also going for.”
“I can’t imagine you young, miss,” said Ricco contemplatively. He clearly wasn’t listening to a word she was saying.
“Well, I can assure you that I was, and as someone who is now old I am offering you the benefit of my wisdom.”
“It’s weird how nothing ever shocks you,” Billy pondered. “Most teachers would have freaked out about us being here.”
“Maybe I’ve just seen it all before.”
“ Done it all before, more like,” Carly sneered, opening a bag of crisps.
Harriet didn’t argue. Instead, she made her way to the end of Billy’s row and, pushing down the seat pad and scraping off the dust bunnies, sat down.
“Why here?” she asked, waving an arm to encompass the decrepit theater.
“Why not?” Carly challenged.
“Where else are we supposed to go?” asked Ricco.
“You mean besides school?” Harriet asked dryly.
“There is nowhere else,” said Billy, snapping open a can of shop’s-own-brand soft drink. Harriet saw the truth in his words. There was a run-down mall in the center of the town, but she didn’t imagine the security guards would stand for gangs of kids hanging around. Or the park or the forest, not so much fun when it was barely two degrees outside. Not that it was much warmer in the theater.
“We don’t only muck about here.” Leo was uncharacteristically defensive. “Sometimes we do homework, discuss books we’ve read. Carly likes to sing on the stage.”
“Shut it, Leo,” Carly snapped.
“What?” Leo asked, hurt. “You do!”
“Stop trying to be such a tough bitch all the time,” Ricco admonished Carly.
“And we discuss stuff, important stuff.” There was a defiant note in Isabel’s voice. She was a shy girl until it came to the causes she felt passionate about. Harriet had watched her hold her own during debates around LGBTQ+ and other social issues during their tutorial sessions; it was a pity she didn’t channel some of that energy into her homework. In another era these kids would have been labeled beatniks.
Harriet nodded. “Couldn’t you do all these things in the common rooms at school?”
“I can’t sing in the common rooms,” said Carly.
“And you can’t smoke there,” added Billy.
Harriet pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t advise it here, either. Aside from you being underage and risking lung cancer, this place looks like it would go up like a tinderbox.”
“You would say that, wouldn’t you?”
It was pointless to answer.
“Didn’t you ever have a den when you were a kid, miss? You look like someone who read the Secret Seven books; this is our den, our place,” said Ricco, who did not in Harriet’s opinion look like someone who’d read the Secret Seven books, but who was she to judge?
She checked her phone. Half past ten; most lessons would be on morning break time. She could sneak them back in after. It wouldn’t hurt to stop here for another few minutes.
“Okay, what do you make of Charles Dickens’s Christmas ghost story, then?” she asked.
Isabel groaned dramatically. “Are you going to make us do lessons?”
“I’m not making you do anything. You were already reading the text when I arrived. And Leo said you discuss books here, so…” She saw Ricco roll his eyes. “I’m just asking what you think of it.”
Carly and Isabel pulled themselves up on to the edge of an old stage block and sat with legs swinging. Ricco and Leo perched a couple of rows down from Harriet and turned round to face her and Billy.
“Bleak,” said Ricco.
“Interesting,” Harriet mused. “Did you know Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to highlight the plight of child laborers and children living in poverty because he was frustrated by the upper classes’ lack of care for anyone below their social class?”
“Some things never change,” said Billy.
“Exactly! Britain was in the middle of an economic crisis; people couldn’t afford to buy food. Families were starving on the streets. Sound familiar? Maybe not the families starving on the actual streets, but the rest of it—”
“Cost-of-living crisis,” said Carly. The slashes at the knees of her faded jeans revealed black fishnet tights beneath.
“If you can call it living,” added Isabel, running her tongue back and forth across her lip ring.
“Got it in one. The modern focus is always on Scrooge learning his lesson and saving himself from eternal damnation—which is all well and good—but the backdrop to the story is a whole section of society that was invisible to the people who could actually help to make positive change. Dickens felt that people weren’t seeing what was going on right under their noses. The writing might be a bit old-English, but the text resonates down the decades.”
Harriet was enjoying herself. She’d been an English teacher for almost ten years before she switched to a pastoral role, but her love of the subject had never dwindled.
“Not much of a ghost story, though, is it, miss?” said Isabel.
“Oh, I dunno,” Leo butted in. “Maybe we’ve just become desensitized to it, you know? Once the Muppets had a go at it, it lost a bit of its horror, but in theory the idea of being alone in a big old house and having a ghost dragging chains and stuff about, well, that’s freaky.”
“I actually found The Muppet Christmas Carol quite frightening when I first watched it,” Carly admitted.
“Was that last year?” Isabel mocked.
“Like you’re so brave,” Billy challenged her.
“Yeah.” Carly joined in with a half laugh. “You hide behind cushions when we watch the Simpsons Halloween specials, Isabel.”
“They are well scary!” Isabel was defensive.
“If you’re five,” said Billy.
“I think Leo’s right,” Harriet joined in. “If you try to imagine you’ve never heard of Scrooge before and then read it with fresh eyes like the people did in 1843, it would have been frightening. I wonder how many people that Christmas felt a bit nervous after reading it, how many unquestioningly supported the idea of workhouses thinking it would never happen to them. I like to imagine it made a few people change their ideas.”
“That’s because you’re an optimist, miss,” said Ricco.
“Did you know Dickens was sent to work in a workhouse as a twelve-year-old boy?”
“You are really geeking out, aren’t you?” Carly said, but Harriet only grinned and continued.
“But doesn’t that make you admire him even more? His dad went to debtor’s prison, and Charles had to work ten hours a day to try and pay off the family’s debts. How old is Sid, Billy?”
“Ten,” Billy replied.
“Almost the same age as Dickens was. Can you imagine Sid working ten-hour days in a factory?” she asked.
Billy picked at a loose thread on his jeans. “Sid can barely put his own socks on. He’d be a liability.”
“Precisely. Because he’s a child, he has no business being forced to work in a dingy, overcrowded factory. Dickens wanted to shake people up, make them see the wrongness of what was going on right under their noses. He was an activist, and this book was his banner.”
Isabel had been playing with the badges showcasing various causes that were pinned to her jacket, but now she perked up.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Maybe if Cornell told us this stuff, we’d be more interested in going to his classes,” added Ricco.
“You could find this stuff out for yourselves; it’s called independent learning. It’s what you’re supposed to be doing for your Extended Project Qualification.”
This received groans.
“Why don’t you become a teacher if you like this stuff so much?” asked Billy.
“Because someone has to keep you lot on the straight and narrow.”
These were bright kids, but poverty—which in Harriet’s opinion was the tenth circle of hell—was like a boulder dropped into water from a great height, the ripples of which reached down through generations. Once you were in it, it was a near impossible cycle to break, and the world was smaller for them than it was for other kids their age.
She thought about Maisy and her extended exchange trip. How, before she’d gone out and got drunk last night, she’d called Pete and they’d pooled their money to send extra funds out to their daughter to see her through the holidays. Harriet had never been rich, and, on her salary, she wasn’t likely to be, but God willing, Maisy would never experience the kind of hardships faced by the famous five.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” said Carly, who was as self-sufficient as she was self-destructive. What that girl didn’t know about bad choices wasn’t worth knowing.
“No, you don’t. But I do have a duty of care toward you, making sure you are safe and helping you to get the most out of school. Neither of which are possible when you’re hiding out in an abandoned theater. And on that note, it’s time to come back to campus.”
The famous five mumbled and grumbled but began to retrieve their bags all the same.
The double doors at the back of the theater slammed open with a smack and everyone jumped and turned toward the noise. Two police officers stood in the doorway.
Oh, bugger!
“We’ve received a complaint that there are trespassers on this property. Can I ask you all to accompany my colleague and me down to the station, please,” said the taller of the two.
Harriet pushed her shoulders back and addressed the officer. “Hello, Officer, we were just leaving, as I think you can probably see. Is it really necessary to take us to the station? I promise we won’t come back.”
“I’m afraid that’s not up to me, Ms…. ?”
“Smith.”
“It’s out of our hands, Ms. Smith. There has been a complaint, and the owner of the building has asked that steps be taken.”
Harriet glanced back at the faces of her students. Their youthful bravado had evaporated, and they suddenly looked their ages. She made a decision.
“The children are here under my instruction. They had nothing to do with breaking in. I thought it would be good to show them the inside of a theater as part of their English literature and drama studies. It’s my fault they’re here.”
“Miss!” Billy protested.
She shot him a warning look.
“No, Billy, I appreciate that you’re concerned about me, but this is my fault, and I should face the consequences. You must all go back to school immediately—I absolutely mean it! Officers, please don’t make these students suffer because of my poor judgment.”
Both officers looked at her skeptically.
“So you’re the ringleader, are you?” said the shorter of the two, one eyebrow lifted so high it disappeared under the rim of his helmet.
Harriet nodded emphatically. “Yes, Officers, I am.”
He shook his head in resignation and glanced at his colleague, who shrugged.
“All right,” he said. “Ms. Smith, if you would like to come with us. The rest of you, make yourselves scarce and don’t let us catch you in here again. Do I make myself clear?”
The students mumbled their assent.
“Go on, then, off you go.” He gestured to the door and the famous five shuffled quickly along the aisle, murmuring “Sorry, miss” and “Thanks, miss” as they passed her. At the top of the stairs, the taller officer held the door open for them and then followed behind to be sure they left the building. Billy looked back once and bobbed his head at Harriet.
“Back to school!” Harriet shouted after them.
She fired off a quick message to Ali: Found the FF. I’m being escorted to the police station. The kids are on their way back to school, please find them and sign them all in. Don’t tell anyone I’ve been collared by the fuzz!! She smiled thinking of Ali’s face when he read her message, then slung her bag over her shoulder and climbed the steps to meet her fate.
“Okay, let’s get this over with. Am I under arrest?”
The officer smiled. “No, you’re just helping us with our inquiries.”
“What’s the difference? I’m new to this whole being-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-law thing. Are you going to handcuff me?”
“No, Ms. Smith.”
That was something at least.
“Will my place of work be informed?”
“That’s entirely down to you.”
“That’ll be a no, then. I’m not sure the school will look too kindly on their pastoral team leader being accused of trespassing.”
The other officer returned, and they walked single file—Harriet in the middle—back through the dim corridors and out into the alleyway.
“Can I ask, why did you do it?” asked the taller officer, helping her into the back of his car.
“Take them into the theater?”
The officer shook his head.
“Take the fall for them.”
Oh.
“Is this off the record?” she asked.
“For now,” he said, settling himself into the front seat.
“They don’t need a black mark on their records. They already feel like the world is out to get them, and I don’t want to prove them right.”
“I wish I’d had a teacher like you when I was at school.”
“Did you need one?”
He swiveled in his seat to face her.
“Can you see the color of my skin?”
She nodded. “Point taken.”