Bad Little Girl(12)

The recently refurbished staffroom was very white, and ringed with cupboards at head height full of inhalers, epi pens, policies and guidelines. The new windows, with toughened glass and PVC frames, pushed open at the bottom about four inches, and Claire missed the old sash windows that you could pull right up and get a proper breeze in, maybe call out to a group of boys on the brink of fighting, or wave to a lonely girl in the playground.

Now the staffroom seemed so cut off from the rest of the school, and so quiet. There was no conversation – maybe tiny, polite confrontations about board markers, a brief communion over a smartphone screen, but that was all. Most of the teachers didn’t even eat there any more, preferring to squat, troll-like and alone, at the tiny tables in their respective classrooms. Once she’d seen Miss Brett eating her lunch in the back seat of her car.

Every month they had a morning meeting in addition to the weekly staff meetings after school on Wednesdays, because, James said, they needed to work together for the good of the school, consolidate the team. Become more of a unit. He tried to jazz it up with coffee and spongy little croissants from the corner shop. Each teacher was expected to briefly present on something. ‘Sharing best practice. Sharing our professional development’ was written on the white board.

There was an obvious and embarrassing split between the attitudes of the young and the old. Mrs Hurst flatly refused to take part, and Miss Pickin always got it wrong, using her presentations to share what she’d done at the weekend with her church group. Claire generally played it safe by bringing in a newspaper article. She learned quickly that anything in the Daily Mail would incense the younger teachers, and time flew while they eviscerated the education ministers, the Murdoch press and the general stupidity of the lay people while Claire nibbled at a croissant and eyed the clock.

This meeting had a particular purpose though. Lately, there had been increasingly severe acts of vandalism in the school. Someone had blocked the Year Two toilets with sand and Post-it notes filched from the stock cupboard. Thick, angry lines in black crayon ran around the sports hall. Library books were ripped and defaced. Someone had gouged out the eyes of most of the children on the school photo. Finally, sometime on Friday, after school hours, the nativity scene had been smashed, the baby Jesus dismembered. Half his face had been lodged in an ox’s mouth, while a wise man held a severed leg like a chicken drumstick. Mary’s doe eyes, horribly highlighted in yellow marker, gazed at Joseph, pinned to the straw-covered floor, impaled on the star. Unfortunately, it was Miss Pickin who had discovered the desecration first thing in the morning, and she still hadn’t recovered. She called Reverend Gary, who held the self-appointed title of Community Governor with Special Responsibility for Religious Values, and he demanded to attend this Monday meeting.

And so today there was an evident role reversal in the staffroom. The normally supine Mrs Hurst sat, sly-eyed but attentive. Miss Pickin blinked furiously behind bifocals, and made no mention of her weekend. Reverend Gary’s normal chubby bonhomie had deserted him. The young teachers, for once not in control, sat silently, waiting for James Clarke to begin. There was only one item on the agenda. And no croissants.

‘I think, ladies and gents, we all know what we’ll be talking about today.’ James Clarke sat down heavily. He looked tired. ‘The acts of vandalism that have taken place around the school have been . . . colourful. But, as Gary has pointed out, the, uh, violence of the crib desecration is particularly worrying.’

‘Horrible,’ quivered the Reverend Gary.

‘Horrible,’ echoed James Clarke. ‘So what I want to unpick, is, A, if the acts are by the same child, and B, who that child is likely to be, and C, how we get them to own up. Does anyone have any ideas?’

‘A Muslim,’ muttered Miss Pickin through quivering lips. ‘It’s bound to be.’ At this, the young teachers frowned as one, and pursed their lips.

‘Jane, I don’t think we have any, ah, reason to assume that there is a religious, uh, antipathy behind this . . . act,’ answered James.

‘The face-eating was a nice touch,’ put in Miss Peel, the youngest and prettiest of the up-and-comers, all perfectly waved hair and cheekbones.

Miss Pickin pursed her lips and shook her head sadly while Reverend Gary leaned forward menacingly. ‘There’s nothing nice about sacrilege.’

Mrs Hurst roused herself, and planted both ugly-shod feet onto the floor: ‘I say, round up the usual suspects: Idris King, the Alder boys, Feras from Year Two. Whatserface, the traveller girl, Candy. Get ’em in your office and grill ’em. If they haven’t done it, they’ll know who has. Won’t take long.’

There was a silence. ‘That might be an option, in, uh, more usual circumstances . . .’ James frowned.

‘In the seventies,’ murmured Miss Peel, examining one perfect nail and smirking.

‘But, in this case, we maybe need a different approach? This has been orchestrated, and it all seems to have taken place after the school day, perhaps during club time.’ James said.

‘Crayons are more – well, a younger kiddy would use crayons,’ said Claire. ‘I mean, wouldn’t an older child be more inclined to use one of the board markers or something? Or a biro? Something a bit more . . . grown-up?’

‘Nothing grown-up about this, Claire,’ said Gary, still smouldering.

‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying, it’s a younger child . . .’ Claire groped for her words. There was something infantile in the use of the crayons, in the book scribbles. An older boy would have gone for something crude – a swear word, or something lavatorial, that old stand-by of a cock and balls. An older girl would have written a boy’s name. And the whole thing was so risky – there was the business of the Post-it notes. Why not just block the toilet with toilet roll and be done with it? Why sneak into the stock cupboard to raid the teachers’ supplies? Why transport sand from the nursery section all the way to the other side of the school and risk getting caught? How many journeys would that have taken anyway? There was a lot of sand down each toilet – enough to block them all and affect the sinks too. The books that had been destroyed – they were all books for younger children: fairy tales, Christmas stories, simple rhyming fables. No Beast Quest, no Nightmare Academy, no Michael Morpurgo. Younger children were not merely risk-takers; younger children were mad. And there was madness in this, rage in this – the defaced photographs, the smashed-up family in the crib. Childish rage, not mischief.