Bad Little Girl(9)

The following Monday, nobody mentioned the slap. James was just as distracted as ever, Miss Brett studiously ignored Claire, and Lorna was absent. She came back to school on Wednesday, kept to herself on the playground and, when Claire smiled at her, looked deliberately at the ground. Claire kept trying, though. She always had a smile ready for the girl, but it was nearly a year before they spoke again.



* * *



Every year, in the lead-up to Christmas, Claire put together her Christmas Cracker Craft group: a collection of children who could make their paper chains, their window snowflakes, and their polystyrene baubles after school, at a time when they were more likely to be able to concentrate. They were the odds and strays: children whose parents always arrived late to fetch them from school, who neglected to come to the plays, the special assemblies, the rare prize-givings.

Claire loved the Christmas Cracker group. They were sweethearts really. This year she had Feras, who liked to stick; little Rosa with the walker who was quite happy filling and refilling glue pots (you just had to keep an eye on her to make sure she didn’t eat any); Fergus Coyle with his allergies and boundless energy; and another ten misfits, Lorna amongst them. Claire had included her at the last minute. She’d seen so little of Lorna in the year since the eraser incident, but enough to know that her social standing hadn’t recovered. Claire would see her wandering around at playtime, cautious now, monosyllabic and friendless. Perhaps being part of the Christmas Crackers would give her a new peer group? A new start?

It was so lovely when the weather started to draw in – when children would come into the class behind little puffs of steamy breath, when mittens and unlabelled hats got mixed up. Claire would put on the little blower heater and the children would vie with each other to stand near it, turning themselves like meat on a spit, while Mr Potter, the class hamster, lapsed into torpor.

‘Miss, is he dead?’

‘No, no. When it’s a bit cold outside, he likes to sleep. Here, let’s move him nearer the heater, see if we can warm him up a bit.’

This was the time of year when friendship groups settled, when girls formed their perpetually uneasy trios, and boys their roaring, rolling packs, and so the Christmas Cracker children were thrown into pitiful relief, because they had no tribe. Only this artificial group could convincingly double as one. Despite Claire’s hopes, outside of her classroom, none of them seemed to associate with each other at all, but within the four walls they coalesced, grew together, briefly believed that they were like everybody else. They noticed cobwebs picked out in the frost, and spanning each bush and doorway, and brought their impressions of them to Claire. ‘All sparkled over and pretty-as-silk,’ said Rosa in the second week, and Claire’s heart filled with wonder, and, yes, pride, that this little girl had stored up this wonderful discovery and shared it with such odd, muddled beauty. This was the time of year when giddiness, mystery and the uncanny merged in little minds and the questions would come: ‘Are there really witches, Miss? Ghosts? How does Father Christmas know where you live? Was Jesus a good baby, or did he cry? Where do we go to when we die?’

The children favoured traditional tales: ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’. They always asked for a story from The Big Book of Fairy Tales, it was their favourite. Claire altered the stories slightly, skipped some of the gore, but she needn’t have done really. After all, children live with horror every moment: what’s in the cupboard? There’s something under your bed. Dead Grandma is watching over you. This is the night when the dead walk . . .

Claire, settling down on her Story Seat, was always sure to say, ‘Now, none of this is true,’ but she knew that the children disregarded that. As soon as the innocent ventured into the forest, as soon as the heroine was tricked, their little faces would darken with the inevitability of danger, and as soon as evil was vanquished, they were relieved and jubilant. And then, when it was time to leave, they would all be away, gripping their clumsy models, their mismatched gloves, bounding out to their indifferent parents, filled, briefly, with magic. But always, alone at the end of the day, would be Lorna Bell, waiting silent and stiff, the very last to leave.

While the others were earnestly making pipe-cleaner Christmas trees, up to their elbows in glitter, Lorna, her greasy hair pulled back in a scrunchy, tended to hover silently and unsmilingly near doors, getting in people’s way.

‘Let's see the colour of those eyes, Lorna,’ cheerful Miss Montgomery, the classroom assistant, would say. ‘Let’s see a smile!’ But the girl’s face would close like a flower at dusk, It had been a year since the rubber-stealing incident, but it had changed her, from a confident little thing to this frightened introvert. She needed the kind of subtle attention that could nip away at the shyness; help her slough it off ever so gradually. She needed to feel special without being different. But everyone in the Christmas Cracker group needed so much attention, and it was never possible to give Lorna as much time as Claire was convinced she needed.

Every day she’d arrive early standing solemnly at the door, a little silent bubble in the midst of the playground. She’d walk mechanically to the cloakroom, arrange her things neatly, pick up her name and put it in the welcome box, and sit cross-legged on the carpet, all without saying a word.

Only when they were alone did Claire have some success with her. ‘Lorna, I need to set up the craft table, could you help?’