Bad Little Girl(7)

They stayed in the kitchen with their tea, Johnny snorting into his food, the pips of the six o’clock news just gone. Mother brought out the biscuits – she always had a high-end box of biscuits that had been given to her by one grateful parent or another.

‘Strange day?’

‘Sad.’ Claire took the plainest biscuit she could find. ‘A girl, not one of mine, took something from an older girl. I don’t think she really knew what she was doing. Anyway, it all got a little out of control – the parents were called in. Parent I should say. And I saw the mother hit her—’

‘Hit her? How?’

‘Slap. Across the face.’

Mother winced, shrugged, took a biscuit. ‘It happens.’

‘I took it to James. He said that I was overstepping the mark.’ She waited.

Norma furrowed her brow, picking through the biscuits. ‘Do they all have to be chocolate? Some people don’t like chocolate.’

‘You think so too,’ Claire said flatly.

‘No, no I don’t think that. But there’s that note in your voice again, the Guardian Reader Wobble—’

‘Hitting a child—’

‘Is not good. No. Not good at all.’ Norma picked fussy flakes of dark chocolate off a wafer. ‘But you know as well as I do that sometimes parents get it wrong, out of embarrassment, fatigue. They snap. It doesn’t make them bad people, it just means they did a bad thing.’

‘It’s the same mother – Carl Bell’s mother, you remember all the trouble we had with him.’

‘Well, in that case I have even more sympathy for the woman. Bad enough having one child like that, without having to worry about the other one being a kleptomaniac.’

‘She’s only six.’

‘Oh Claire. They know what they’re doing at that age.’

Claire slumped, looking at her bony hands lying in her lap. ‘But still, calling in the parent, the whole school involved—’

‘How was the whole school involved? Sit up straight.’

Claire straightened. ‘I mean the whole school knew about it. All the children were talking about it.’

‘Well, it sounds like it was quite a public crime. What were they meant to do?’ Norma was smiling now.

‘I know but . . . oh, I don’t know. It was all so – needless. Silly. She’s such a little girl, and I don’t believe for a moment that she meant to—’

‘Oh Claire, we’ve been here before. Remember Lisa Pike? The one who was putting the shoes down the toilets? You were convinced that she’d done it by accident. How can you put shoes down a toilet by accident? And Jamie – Dowes, was it? You were determined that he didn’t throw the football through that window on purpose. Until he told you that’s exactly what he’d done. Children are just people, you know. And some people aren’t very nice.’

‘But, hitting her. And in the school as well. It makes you think, if she’s willing to hit her child in a school, then Lord only knows what she’s willing to do behind closed doors. Jade Wood—’

‘Now, wait a minute, you weren’t to blame for Jade Wood,’ Norma said firmly. ‘Claire, you didn’t see anything of the girl. Remember? She wasn’t in your year group.’

‘No, but if I’d kept my eyes open . . .’

‘I’m absolutely sure that if you’d seen anything – let alone the girl going through the bins for food – you would have said something. But you didn’t see anything Claire. And it wasn’t your fault, it was your colleagues’ fault. And the parents that stopped feeding her in the first place. And social services did get involved eventually, didn’t they?’

‘Only after she’d been out of school for a month, being home-educated, or whatever her mother told us. But I’m positive some of the teaching staff would have noticed, even when she was still at school. All that weight loss . . .’

‘Claire, that was a terrible case, and they were terrible parents, but try as you might, you really can’t blame yourself. You really can’t.’

‘But if I notice things, and disregard them. And then when something terrible happens, well, I will be sort of to blame, won’t I? You can see that, can’t you?’

‘I can see that you’re trying as hard as you can to blame yourself for something that probably isn’t happening. You saw a girl being slapped. Not good, but not a hanging offence. And you know as well as I do that if you try to call that in to social services it will go precisely nowhere.’

‘But—’

‘No “but” about it. It’s true. Tea?’ That was Norma’s signal to end the conversation. She always used tea as punctuation.

Cheated and defeated, Claire slumped in her chair again, her fingers tracing the cracks and gnarls in the old oak table. She’d wanted to talk more about Lorna. She needed to. But Norma was leaning wearily against the countertop with her eyes closed. ‘Anyway, how was your day? You look tired.’

‘Ach—’ Norma swatted at the air in front of her dismissively. ‘The usual.’ Claire waited, but that seemed to be the end of it. It wasn’t like Norma not to talk about her day. She loved work, and was able to make even the most familiar things sound interesting, funny. ‘You’re well though? Feeling all right?’