Sally Kelly’s father was now in full view. From behind their venetian blinds, Miss Kinsey and Miss Ewart stared at a tall man in jeans and denim jacket. He stood among the school’s prematurely aged parents: mothers with twin pushchairs, bleached hair, chapped red hands and faces, all of them about seventeen. The older mothers were dressed to look young, bridging the gap out of what might appear to be courtesy. They were in their mid-thirties, squashed into tight jeans, arses like obscene blue peaches. In their midst, so still he might have been inconspicuous but for the space left around him, Mark Kelly was holding Sally’s lunch box and Sally’s hand. Sally stood quietly, unbothered by the other children.
You could see from here, Miss Kinsey thought, her intelligence. She held the other children away from her. She would have problems with that. They’d turn on her. At the moment they were too scared to, scared of her father. Heavens, who wouldn’t be? Soon, though, their parents would teach them that they needn’t be frightened of Mr Kelly at all. But he wasn’t a nice man. The should just laugh at him, as though he were deformed. As though those were scars on his face.
“I spoke to him last summer,” Miss Kinsey said thoughtfully. “At Sports Day. That is, when I had a free moment during Sports Day.” Doris Ewart had been found in the staff room at the end of the day with a half-empty sherry bottle and the school caretaker. The headmistress had been forced to begin each race herself. “And he proved to be an exceptionally articulate young man.”
“You would never think it,” Doris muttered, nursing the school bell, which she had just fetched from the cupboard.
“Perhaps you had better avoid rash judgements?” suggested Miss Kinsey with a hint of kindness. “After all, he only looks like a thug to most people’s eyes. Think of it as a cultural thing. If he was a foreigner we could probably regard him as ethnic. Charming, even. They are quite…tribal, aren’t they?”
In the morning’s pale wash of light Mark’s tattoos were pricked out neatly in thick stripes of green and blue. His natural flesh glared out between chinks in the design. From this distance he might have been wearing a Norman helmet. Bold slats crossed his cheekbones, accentuating the thrust of his jawline. The pattern continued down his throat, feathering the neck of his t-shirt. The hands that held Sally’s lunch box and Sally’s hand were similarly darkened. It was largely assumed that his whole body had been done.
“It must have cost a fortune,” said Doris Ewart. “I’ll ring the bell.”
The headmistress nodded absently and watched how the predominantly female gathering kept away from the Kellys. Those sidelong glances. Fear? Ridicule? Miss Kinsey wondered, Was he really covered from head to toe?
On the doorstop of the main entrance Doris Ewart summoned her already sapped strength and rang the bell with both hands. The crowd broke up and began to file into the school. The Kellys mingled, but remained quiet.
“Such a shame,” said Miss Kinsey again, and closed the blinds.
EACH MORNING THE YOUNG MISS FRANCIS WOULD STAND BY THE TINK-ling terrapin pool in the centre of her classroom and welcome her children in. They clustered about her, checking the class pets were still there, crowding her with news. Their parents clutched coats, shuffled about, said a few words to one another, pressed kisses on their children’s faces and snuck away.
Mark liked Miss Francis. She beamed at everyone; she wore Laura Ashley frocks, different-coloured flowers all the time. Sally regarded her father diffidently. Mark was embarrassed by this coolness. The teacher was in turn embarrassed by Mark’s attempts at friendliness. He’s trying so hard not to seem frightening to the children, she thought.
“How are the terrapins?” he asked.
“All still alive,” she said brightly. “Thank God,” and shuddered.
This was Miss Francis’s first infant class. In a rush of enthusiasm at the beginning of the school year she had bought thirty-two terrapins, one for each child in her care, and named them all accordingly. The children’s names were printed in nail varnish on the tiny creatures’ murky-coloured shells.
Miss Francis bent to point to the sludgy base of the clump of fern. “There’s Sally Kelly,” she said. Mark and Sally watched it basking on the shore, poking in the mud with one flipper. Sally went to sit at her desk, unimpressed by her namesake. Miss Francis looked at Mark.
“Would you mind me asking…?”
His smile was shy, creasing the tidy blocks of colour on his face. “About?”
“Why did you give her a name that rhymed?”
Mark frowned. “It’s not rhyme. It’s assonance.”
“Oh.”
“She’s named after Sally Bowles. You know, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.”
“I see.”
“As in, ‘Life is a cabaret, old…’”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Well, it comes from a novel, really, Goodbye to—”
“I think we’d better push her back in. By the looks of things, she’s been out of it all weekend.” Miss Francis cupped one careful hand and gave Sally’s terrapin a nudge into the viscous green water, where the other thirty-one were having a lovely time, in the laborious, determined way that terrapins have. “There we are.” She wiped her hands on her print dress.
When Mark left the classroom, he heard Miss Francis clap her hands together and announce that Andrea Fisher had spent the weekend laying Martin Rodgers’ eggs on the artificial bank. There was a stunned silence, then uncertain applause.
PEGGY, SAMANTHA’S MOTHER, SPOTTED HIM ACROSS THE PARK. HE LOOKED up to see her wading across the soggy grass, cursing as she splattered her tights. “Mark!” she called feebly. “Over here!”
He was waiting for the bus into town. He was early yet, sitting on a swing in the park by the stop, scraping the soles of his boots on the slimy asphalt. Without kids the park was desolate. Sea birds hurled themselves at each other above the grotesque iron spider that formed the ground’s centrepiece. Peggy leaned against
