The handover note from Justine, the old Red Class teacher who’d left to follow her Australian boyfriend back to Sydney, wasn’t doing much to quell her fears either. She named and shamed the troublemakers, the cry-babies, the incontinent and the two kids ‘who’ve probably got Asperger’s or ADD but they both have doting yummy mummies who refuse to believe that their darlings might have been touched with the special stick’.
On the plus side, Hope read on, ‘As a class, they’ll sell their vital organs for a sticker. If you institute a sticker-reward system that culminates in a gold star and some crap plastic toy from the 99p shop you’ll be OK.
‘They’re also obsessed with Katy Perry, so if they’ve been really well-behaved, I let them sing “I Kissed a Girl” on Friday afternoons.’ It was no surprise Justine had decided to emigrate to Australia after a series of complaints about her unorthodox teaching methods.
By three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, Hope was done. The art corner was organised, even if its shelves, pots and brushes were still covered in decades’ worth of poster paint, glue and glitter. She’d assembled a little chill-out area at the back of the class, with its own desk and two easy chairs, where she and Andy, her new teaching assistant, could do some one-on-one coaching.
Along the big picture windows that took up the far wall Hope had arranged her nature section, where she hoped the grasshoppers and the goldfish would be very happy. Soon the windowsill would be full of Blue Class’s attempts to grow watercress on wet tissue paper.
Hope had even made a huge sticker wall chart cum calendar cum merit board, and there were two weeks’ worth of lesson plans all neatly collated in her filing cabinet. She’d filled in everybody’s names in her register in her best handwriting – though Hope still felt as if she wasn’t grown up enough to have ownership of a register – and had written her own name on the whiteboard in block capitals. There wasn’t much left to do now but panic.
‘You done, Hopey? Fancy a quick pint of Pinot Grigio?’
Panic or drink. Hope beamed at Elaine who was standing in the doorway. ‘Yes, please,’ she agreed eagerly, already picking up her handbag and denim jacket. ‘Actually, I fancy a huge glass of rosé, ’cause it’s not officially the end of summer until the hordes of ankle-biters descend upon us.’
‘Might join you in the pink drink,’ Elaine said, as they walked along the corridor, which even after six weeks without any pupils on the premises still smelt of TCP and cheap mince.
They didn’t even need to discuss their choice of hostelry but walked round the corner to the Midnight Bell, where most of the teaching staff were already firmly ensconced in the beer garden, the two tables they’d annexed covered in empty glasses and discarded crisp packets.
‘We should probably go and make sure Marta is all right.’ Hope looked over at the forlorn new recruit, as she and Elaine hovered at the edge of the garden, clutching an ice bucket with a bottle of rosé wedged in it, two glasses and also, in Hope’s case, a packet of pork scratchings. ‘She’s inherited Gurinder,’ she added cheerfully because Gurinder, her old classroom assistant, had been a long-suffering, constantly sighing thorn in Hope’s side for her first two years at the school. A veteran classroom assistant, Gurinder was always assigned to the newest teacher, and always made it plain that in all her long decades of classroom-assisting, she’d never come across anyone so singularly inept at imparting knowledge. Now she was Marta’s problem, but them were the breaks.
‘Oh, I’m sure she’s fine,’ Elaine said airily, marching over to an empty table in the furthest corner of the garden. As Elaine was carrying the bucket of wine, Hope had absolutely no choice but to follow her.
Hope swung her legs over the bench, grabbed the bottle out of the bucket and poured them both a glass. ‘So, hey you! How the hell have you been these last few weeks?’
Hope loved Elaine, just a little bit. Even though Elaine was twenty years older than her, they’d instantly clicked on Hope’s very first day at The Bull Pen, when she’d timidly walked into the staffroom clutching a Tupperware container full of home-made pecan and toffee tarts. Elaine had demanded the recipe, they’d both realised they shared a passion for home-baking and within ten minutes of talking, had also discovered a mutual love for Victoria Wood, John Hughes films and the odd spliff on a non-school night – after Hope had tried to enquire obliquely about the Council’s position on drug-testing teachers.
Now Hope rested her chin on her hands and giggled as Elaine described the ‘three weeks of utter bloody hell’ that had been her camping trip in the Dordogne with her husband Simon (who’d scored a top-forty hit in the late ’80s with his bowl-haircutted, leather-trousered, winkle-picker-wearing indie band but now ran his own recording studio from the bottom of their sprawling garden in Hackney) and her two teenage daughters, who’d spent the entire holiday either throwing monumental strops or sneaking off to smoke, drink and get off with disreputable French boys who drove mopeds at reckless speed.
‘And it pissed down with rain most of the time, but I still managed to get bitten by the local mosquito population,’ Elaine finished, holding out one tanned arm for Hope’s inspection. ‘I did buy you some amazing cheese, but it all got eaten by a Japanese poodle-rock band over the weekend.’
‘I hope Simon’s going to add that to their studio bill.’
‘Doubt it. They’re paying us in instalments as it is.’ Elaine pushed back her fine, Nordic blonde hair, which was just starting to grey at the temples. ‘Tell you what, next batch of honey has your name on it.’ As well as itinerant rock musicians, Elaine had beehives in her back garden and generally she was Hope’s honorary London mum. Much less uptight and judgemental than her Lancashire mum, who could only just about be persuaded to have a glass of wine, never mind a joint heavily laced with THC on a non-school night. And unlike Hope’s mother, who regarded teaching as an extension of the endless chore of child-rearing, Elaine, for all her bitching about Dorothy and the ‘fucking strait-jacket of the National Curriculum that wants us to turn out a generation of mindless automatons’, loved nothing more than taking charge of thirty captive minds and challenging them, nurturing them and making them see the world in a different way.
‘So, anyway, enough about me,’ Elaine said crisply. ‘We haven’t really had a chance to talk properly about you.’ She’d assumed a more serious expression than her usual mischievous smile and her pale blue eyes were all squinty, which meant she was in perceptive mode. Hope immediately squirmed on the hard wooden bench. Elaine in perceptive mode could be a real pain in the arse.
‘Nothing much to say,’ Hope demurred, still wriggling uncomfortably. ‘I went home for a week, because my dad had taken my baby brother camping, so I had loads of quality time with my mum.’
‘And how did that work out for you?’
‘Oh, it was just great,’ Hope said. ‘My mum tried to force me into having my hair combed out and trimmed because she said it was riddled with split ends, and then she spent the rest of the time dropping hints about how she’d like a grandchild before too long.’
‘She has grandchildren, doesn’t she?’
Hope nodded. ‘She has five of them.’ Two of her older brothers, Matthew and Luke (and their respective wives), had obliged, but as far as her mother was concerned, being the paternal grandma wasn’t a patch on that blissful day when Hope started birthing babies. ‘But she says it’s not the same when she’s only a mother-in-law and the other grandma has first dibs.’
Elaine held a limp hand to her forehead. ‘Dear God, I dread the day when one of mine comes home pregnant. Probably be the end of the week, the way those two carry on.’ She poured what was left of the bottle of rosé into their glasses. ‘So, am I going to have to beat it out of you? What’s really up with you? You look like you’ve had at least three root-canal treatments.’
Did she? Hope had thought that she’d handled the aftermath of the weekend’s events with considerable aplomb, and huge amounts of Touche Éclat to hide the effects o
f the intermittent crying jags and sleepless nights, but apparently her efforts had all been in vain.
‘Jack and I have been going through a bit of a rough patch,’ Hope said delicately, as if she was the kind of girl who kept her own counsel and didn’t blab her deepest, darkest secrets to all and sundry.
Unfortunately, Elaine knew her much better than that because she raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips as she processed that little nugget of information and then nudged Hope’s ankle with her toe. ‘Do tell.’
Hope told, and Elaine listened avidly, leaning forward so she didn’t miss a single word. Hope hadn’t planned to over-share to such an alarming degree, but the events of Saturday night had been weighing so heavily on her that it felt as if she couldn’t even breathe. Simply telling someone else lightened the load by a few kilograms.
‘I can’t bear to be inside my own head at the moment,’ she admitted to Elaine, when she got to the end of her confession. ‘I still can’t quite believe Jack when he swears it was just a drunken one-off. But if that is all it was, then I made a complete tit of myself in front of everyone over nothing, and I had a big, fat, ugly cry in front of Wilson who was really scathing and … and … and I just wish I wasn’t still so furious with Jack, but I am!’
‘You have every right to be furious with him and to threaten to cut off his willy with your bread knife,’ Elaine told her, without the usual twinkle in her eye and as if she was deadly serious about revenge castration. ‘Even if it was just a one-time deal, it was still prolonged kissing and groping. And as for that Wilson, he sounds like an utter prick. Anyone who wasn’t made of stone would have cried in those circumstances, so I don’t know why he had to be so rude to you.’
‘Well, I was rude to him too, Elaine. I do feel a bit guilty about that,’ Hope admitted.
Elaine sniffed. ‘As for Susie, didn’t she get the memo that your best friend’s boyfriend’s dick is completely off-limits? I always thought there was something off about her,’ she said darkly, which was a very similar riff to what Lauren and Allison had had to say about Susie, though they’d liked her well enough when the four of them had gone out all those times to drink the bars of central London dry. It had taken them twenty-four hours to get over the initial shock that Susie would violate the first and most important rule of the best-friend code, and now Susie was dead to them. ‘Don’t get me wrong, she was a real laugh, but strip away the designer clothes and the fake posh accent and all you’re left with is a girl with fake boobs who looks like she doesn’t wipe her minny after she pees,’ had been Allison’s savage character assassination of Hope’s former friend, while Lauren had announced that from now on she was going to stop secretly calling her ‘Shmoozie’ and call her ‘Floozie’ instead.
‘You only met her once,’ Hope reminded Elaine, and again she wondered why in all her rage at Jack, she still couldn’t manage more than annoyance at Susie’s actions. OK, she didn’t want to go down the same slut-shaming road as Lauren and Allison, but it took two people to drunkenly snog, so really Susie deserved just as much fury as Jack.
‘She has a very unfortunate manner,’ Elaine said, frowning like she was picturing the time that she’d bumped into Hope and Susie in Wagamama’s in Camden, and Susie hadn’t looked up from her BlackBerry but had just waved vaguely in Elaine’s direction. Then when she had finally finished tweeting, she’d told a very off-colour joke about the Japanese-style fish rolls. ‘Yes, she’s funny and glamorous and she has a way with her, but I got the impression that there wasn’t much to her. All surface, no depth.’
There hadn’t been so much as an apologetic text message from Susie, and though she knew that she shouldn’t, Hope missed her. Yes, despite the wickedness Susie had wrought, when you spoke to someone at least three times a day, constantly had texts and tweets winging back and forth, and shared pictures of animals in freaky outfits on Facebook, to have them suddenly gone from your life left a huge aching gap that felt as if it could never be filled. Talking of which …
‘I need to get over myself, don’t I?’ Hope asked tentatively, because even Lauren and Allison had told her that she only had a week’s cooling-off period before she had to let it go once and for all. ‘I mean, it was just one measly kiss. Jack swore on all his Beatles vinyl that it was nothing more than that.’
‘You’ve been going out since you were five, right?’
‘Well, since I was thirteen, but I’ve known him all my life.’
Elaine nodded. ‘And this is his first misdemeanour?’
‘Yeah, apart from the big fight in Barcelona about not getting engaged and the usual minor domestic squabbles. Like, he always yells at me for leaving the fridge door open for longer than ten seconds at a time, and he always breaks into my chocolate stash so that when I go to get an emergency bag of Maltesers, they’re all gone. Oh God, and there was this one time that he used an entire tub of my really expensive cleanser to get acrylic paint off his hands. I could have killed him.’ Even as she recited this list of Jack’s crimes, it occurred to Hope that it was a very short list, and that apart from his recent infidelity, Jack had always been an exemplary boyfriend. ‘And he has been really, really sweet the last couple of days,’ Hope added. ‘Or at least on his very best behaviour.’
It was true. He’d surprised her with breakfast in bed that morning, even though he’d had to get up before eight to present her with two pieces of toast and jam and the least brown banana from the fruit bowl. And he’d come home on Monday night with a huge bouquet of flowers and goodies purloined from the Skirt beauty cupboard – it didn’t erase the memory of him and Susie, but he was trying to make things all right again.
‘Sometimes relationships go through these patches when they’re more about tolerating someone and putting up with all their annoying habits,’ Elaine mused. ‘Other times, the magic and the romance comes back, even though you hadn’t even noticed they were missing. When Simon was in the band, he’d disappear off in a transit van for weeks on end, and he wore leather trousers, for God’s sake.’
‘You think he had groupies?’
‘I think that I wasn’t sitting at home twiddling my thumbs waiting for him to call me from the Newport Pagnell services. If he was out having a good time, then I was going to make bloody sure that I was too,’ Elaine said with a rueful smile. ‘Which didn’t mean I stopped loving him or he stopped loving me, but our relationship went through a phase. A phase when we shagged other people.’
‘But you’re all right now, though? ‘Cause you’ve talked it through and …’
‘… and he got dropped by his label and stopped touring,’ Elaine corrected. ‘We had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which worked for us then, but now, if he even thought of getting his leg over some other woman, he’d be walking funny for the rest of his life.’
‘I should probably give Jack a break,’ Hope decided, but she wished that she didn’t sound so uncertain. ‘I mean, I think we’ll be OK, and maybe we needed this to happen to show us that we both need to put a bit more time and effort into our relationship.’ Even as she said it, Hope wondered why relationships needed time and effort like lesson plans and redecorating the kitchen, which they’d been talking about ever since they’d bought the flat, but hadn’t got much further than picking up paint charts.
‘The course of true love never runs smooth, dearie,’ Elaine said, picking up the wine bottle and glaring at it as if its emptiness was a deliberate act of wilful behaviour. ‘Or love conquers all. Take your pick. I mean, you do love Jack, don’t you?’
‘Of course I love him. I don’t even want to think about what my life would be like without him,’ Hope said immediately, and there was no need for Elaine to be giving her the same funny look that she gave Dorothy when she was banging on about STPCDs, SIDPs, PPAs and the many other acronyms that littered her conversation, most of which Elaine and Hope didn’t understand. ‘So, that’s good, right?’
‘Of course it’s good. And it can’t do any harm to buy s
ome new underwear.’ Elaine paused delicately, then lowered her voice. ‘Nothing crotchless or nippleless though, you wouldn’t believe the chafing.’
‘Eeewww!’ Hope squealed, even as she made a mental note to pop into M&S on the way home. Mopey, self-pitying alone-time was one thing, but maybe they should be having more sexy together-time. Her mind made up, she hauled herself to her feet. ‘I need to get going.’
‘To the bar?’ Elaine asked hopefully, holding up the ice bucket. ‘Same again?’
‘No, I need to buy tasteful but sexy underwear and get something nice for Jack’s tea. Are Marks still doing those dine-in-for-a-tenner promotions?’
‘But it’s early! It’s not even five, and these are our last precious moments of freedom until half-term,’ Elaine protested. ‘Have one more for the road. One as in bottle, not glass, in case you were wondering.’
Hope wavered. If she glugged down half a bottle of rosé in record time, she could still get to Marks and be at home in her new fancy undies with the smell of something delicious wafting from the oven by the time Jack got back from work. ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much if I have a tiny little hangover tomorrow.’
‘Exactly! By the time they’ve written their names on their folders and told you what they did in the summer holidays, it’ll be time to go home,’ Elaine said, because she was a terrible enabler – almost as bad as Susie had been, but no, Hope wasn’t going to think about Susie any more.
‘I suppose another bottle wouldn’t hurt.’ Hope fished in her handbag for her polka-dot purse. ‘But we have to drink it really quickly and we have to ask Marta to join us. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears.’
‘Oh, she does. Poor little thing.’ Elaine sighed. ‘Bring her over on your way back from the bar, and I’ll also have a bag of salt and vinegar crisps if you’re buying.’