there were only five minutes remaining until the end of the school day, Andrew and Fats set about stringing out the clearing up until they would be able to abandon it unfinished. While Fats garnered further laughs by bouncing hither and thither, stiff-armed, doing the Cubby walk, Sukhvinder wiped her eyes surreptitiously with her wool- covered hand and sank back into obscurity.
When the bell rang, Miss Harvey made no attempt to control or contain the thunderous clamour or rush for the door. Andrew and Fats kicked various bits of clock under the cupboards at the back of the room, and swung their school bags over their shoulders again.
‘Wallah! Wallah!’ called Kevin Cooper, hurrying to catch up with Andrew and Fats as they headed down the corridor. ‘Do you call Cubby “Father” at home? Seriously? Do you?’
He thought he had something on Fats; he thought he had got him.
‘You’re a dickhead, Cooper,’ said Fats wearily, and Andrew laughed.
IV
‘Dr Jawanda’s running about fifteen minutes late,’ the receptionist told Tessa.
‘Oh, that’s fine,’ said Tessa. ‘I’m in no hurry.’
It was early evening, and the waiting-room windows made patches of clear royal blue against the walls. There were only two other people there: a misshapen, wheezing old woman wearing carpet slippers, and a young mother who was reading a magazine while her toddler rummaged in the toy box in the corner. Tessa took a battered old
They had spoken, briefly, on the telephone this morning. Tessa had been full of contrition that she had not called at once to let Parminder know about Barry. Parminder had said it was fine, for Tessa not to be silly, that she was not upset at all; but Tessa, with her lengthy experience of the thin-skinned and fragile, could tell that Parminder, beneath her prickly carapace, was wounded. She had tried to explain that she had been utterly exhausted the last couple of days, and that she had had to deal with Mary, Colin, Fats, Krystal Weedon; that she had felt overwhelmed, lost and incapable of thinking of more than the immediate problems that had been thrown at her. But Parminder had cut her off in the middle of her rambling excuses and said calmly that she would see her later at the surgery.
Dr Crawford emerged, white-haired and bearlike, from his room, gave Tessa a cheery wave, and said, ‘Maisie Lawford?’ The young mother had some difficulty in persuading her daughter to abandon the old toy telephone on wheels that the latter had found in the toy box. While being pulled gently by the hand after Dr Crawford, the little girl gazed longingly over her shoulder at the telephone, whose secrets she would never now discover.
When the door closed on them, Tessa realized that she was smiling fatuously, and hastily rearranged her own features. She was going to become one of those awful old ladies who cooed indiscriminately over small children and frightened them. She would have loved a chubby little blonde daughter to go with her skinny, dark boy. How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.
Parminder’s door opened; Tessa looked up.
‘Mrs Weedon,’ said Parminder. Her eyes met Tessa’s, and she gave a smile that was no smile at all, but a mere tightening of the mouth. The little old lady in carpet slippers got up with difficulty and hobbled away around the partition wall after Parminder. Tessa heard Parminder’s surgery door snap shut.
She read the captions to a series of photographs showing a footballer’s wife in all the different outfits she had worn over the previous five days. Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different. Tessa’s legs were thick, shapeless and short; she would have hidden them perpetually in boots, only it was difficult to find many that would zip up over her calves. She remembered telling a sturdy little girl in guidance that looks did not matter, that personality was much more important.
An out-of-sight door opened with a bang. Somebody was shouting in a cracked voice.
‘You’re makin’ me bloody worse. This in’t right. I’ve come to you for help. It’s your job – it’s your—’
Tessa and the receptionist locked eyes, then turned towards the sound of the shouting. Tessa heard Parminder’s voice, its Brummie accent still discernible after all these years in Pagford.
‘Mrs Weedon, you’re still smoking, which affects the dose I have to prescribe you. If you’d give up your cigarettes – smokers metabolize Theophylline more quickly, so the cigarettes are not only worsening your emphysema, but actually affecting the ability of the drug to—’
‘Don’ you shout at me! I’ve ’ad enough of you! I’ll report you! You’ve gave me the wrong fuckin’ pills! I wanna see someone else! I wanna see Dr Crawford!’
The old lady appeared around the wall, wobbling, wheezing, her face scarlet.
‘She’ll be the death of me, that Paki cow! Don’ you go near ’er!’ she shouted at Tessa. ‘She’ll fuckin’ kill yer with her drugs, the Paki bitch!’
She tottered towards the exit, spindle-shanked, unsteady on her slippered feet, her breath rattling, swearing as loudly as her beleaguered lungs would permit. The door swung shut behind her. The receptionist exchanged another look with Tessa. They heard Parminder’s surgery door close again.
It was five minutes before Parminder reappeared. The receptionist stared ostentatiously at her screen.
‘Mrs Wall,’ said Parminder, with another tight non-smile.
‘What was that about?’ Tessa asked, when she had taken a seat at the end of Parminder’s desk.
‘Mrs Weedon’s new pills are upsetting her stomach,’ said Parminder calmly. ‘So we’re doing your bloods today, aren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Tessa, both intimidated and hurt by Parminder’s cold professional demeanour. ‘How are you doing, Minda?’
‘Me?’ said Parminder. ‘I’m fine. Why?’
‘Well… Barry… I know what he meant to you and what you meant to him.’
Tears welled in Parminder’s eyes and she tried to blink them away, but too late; Tessa had seen them.
‘Minda,’ she said, laying her plump hand on Parminder’s thin one, but Parminder whipped it away as if Tessa had stung her; then, betrayed by her own reflex, she began to cry in earnest, unable to hide in the tiny room, though she had turned her back as nearly as she could in her swivel chair.
‘I felt sick when I realized I hadn’t phoned you,’ Tessa said, over Parminder’s furious attempts to quell her own sobs. ‘I wanted to curl up and die. I meant to call,’ she lied, ‘but we hadn’t slept, we spent almost the whole night at the hospital, then we had to go straight out to work. Colin broke down at assembly when he announced it, then he caused a bloody awful scene with Krystal Weedon in front of everyone. And then Stuart decided to play truant. And Mary’s falling apart… but I’m so sorry, Minda, I should’ve called.’
‘…iculous,’ said Parminder thickly, her face hidden behind a tissue she had pulled out from her sleeve. ‘… Mary… most important…’
‘You would have been one of the very first people Barry called,’ said Tessa sadly, and, to her horror, she burst into tears too.
‘Minda, I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘but I was having to deal with Colin and all the rest of them.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Parminder, gulping as she dabbed at her thin face. ‘We’re being silly.’
But the doctor squared her thin shoulders, blew her nose and sat up straight again.
‘Did Vikram tell you?’ asked Tessa timidly, tweaking a handful of tissues from the box on Parminder’s desk.
