The Collected Short Fiction

Eye Of Childhood (1982)

The teacher gazed at Mary's painting, at the hair like a blue rag and the lopsided splotchy mouth, the right leg longer than the other. Behind her Donna had grown tired of being a model, and was making faces. At the back of the class Tommy was whining, "Please Miss, please Miss." Beyond the windows the tenements blazed like the seaside beneath floating ice-cream clouds.

"I'm disappointed in you, Mary," the teacher said.

Mary's legs drew up beneath her seat as though she had a stomach-ache. "We all know you've got plenty of imagination," the teacher said, "but I told you to paint Donna, not what's inside your head."

"But Miss—"

"Pardon?"

Mary flinched visibly. "But Mrs. Tweedle," she said, and the teacher glared at the class to suppress any outbursts of giggles like farting. She acted like an old woman sometimes, though she wasn't quite—probably no older than thirty. "Miss Dix said we shouldn't listen to what people said was right," Mary said, "only paint until we liked what we'd done."

"I'm not in the least interested. This is my classroom now, not hers." She returned to Mary's painting. "Just think about what you're doing. Can you imagine someone who looked like that actually walking about? How do you think they would look?"

"Like Mr. Waddicar."

Again the teacher glared about to head off giggles. "You aren't nearly as clever as you think you are, Mary. Just try to put your cleverness to some use."

She hardly glanced at Karen's picture. "Maybe your glasses need changing," she said sarcastically. When she moved on, Karen thought Mary was trembling. Mary had rather deserved to be told off, for thinking herself so superior—but it was partly the teacher's fault for making Mary her favorite. On the whole Karen felt sorrier for Mary than the others did. Someone had to sit next to her, after all.

"Oh no," the teacher said angrily behind her. Tommy, forgetting that she refused to answer to Miss, had concluded that she wouldn't let him leave the room. "Well, don't look at me, I can't do anything," she cried. "Go and clean yourself up and get a mop."

He was hobbling out when the bell rang. Donna jumped up with a loud sigh of relief. Mary was gazing wistfully at her picture. "Can't we put them up?"

"You can do whatever you like with them. Go out as soon as you've finished." The teacher hurried away to her lunch, leaving them to climb on chairs.

When they'd stuck up the paintings, which made the room less like a chalky concrete box, they ran downstairs. Mr. Waddicar the caretaker was hobbling across the landing, like an old lollipop man frustrating traffic. They tried not to giggle as they remembered Mary's remark.

The yard was full of interweaving independent games. A few panting children defended a narrow strip of shade beside the school. Cloud-shadows tried to creep the length of the street, but were swept away by the sun. The four-story tenements, layer on layer of them dwindling toward the horizon, had swallowed their own shadows and looked thirsty for more.

A man was pacing outside the bars, having helped Miss Floyd to chase away a gang of four-year-olds who had been throwing things into the yard. "That's Mr. Tweedle," Mary said.

Several of the others broke into a chorus of "Tweedle Tweedle" until giggling choked them. "Well, it isn't, see," Donna said. "He's just a man. My mam says she used to be married to someone, that's why she's a Mrs."

Just then the teacher emerged from the school, her large earrings glinting like thin bangles. They could smell her dry perfume from yards away. Mary ran over. "Mrs. Tweedle!"

The teacher pulled her hand away, frowning at a smear of paint. Though Mary's smile wavered, she blurted, "Is he your husband?"

"Don't you dare speak to me like that, child. Just remember who you're talking to." With that she stalked out of the yard.

Karen had to say "Sallright," for Mary was trembling again. Perhaps more than the rebuff had upset her: she seemed always to need to seize people's names at once, perhaps for reassurance, just as she'd grabbed the teacher's hand. But she didn't want Karen's reassurance now, for she turned her back, furious that anyone had seen her upset.

The teacher didn't help. All afternoon, as the chalk-dust grew steeped in perfume, Mary kept taking her stories up to her for praise. Miss Dix wouldn't have minded; she'd used to let anyone cling to her, as though she was their mother. The more impatient the teacher became, the more Mary pestered her. Karen didn't see what the teacher had to be impatient about, for she was only crunching peppermints to hide the smell of beer and looking at a big book of paintings, just splodges of color, no drawing at all.

Eventually she said, "Look, Mary, you aren't the only child here. In the time you waste bringing this to me you could be thinking up something new."

This time Mary didn't begin shaking. She sat quietly and drew in her exercise book, though they weren't what Karen would have called drawings: spirals that wound tightly inward until they merged into lumps of black, jagged lines that came scratching outward. Wherever Mary was gazing, it wasn't at the page.

But she'd thought of something new. When they left the school she said, "Let's follow her."

The teacher was walking beside the tenements with the man who wasn't her husband. It might be fun to hear what they were saying. Karen ran after Mary into the nearest tenement entry, and upstairs.

Crushed beer-cans huddled in the corners of steps. The children raced past them, onto the balcony. Front doors gleamed like plastic, identical windows glared out over the concrete wall. Figures stood beneath gathered net curtains: glass animals, a wooden toreador. Graffiti made stairwells resemble bad porous skin, tattooed. Their running feet sounded like a downpour within the close walls, until Mary hushed her.

"Look at this place," the teacher was saying. "It's no wonder they don't want to learn. That has to be the reason, hasn't it? Ten years old—eleven, some of them— and already their heads are full of cotton wool and last night's telly."

Mary looked tempted to reply, but the teacher was chattering on. "Why do they build places like this? I thought they must all have been pulled down yonks ago. I just can't understand why the authority sent me here. My teaching practice was at a lovely school, with lovely kids and all the aids you could think of. I felt I was doing something. But here half of them can't do arithmetic, some of them can hardly read. I have to repeat things over and over, and I can't stand that. And even when—"

After a pause, perhaps amazed that he could get a word in, the man said, "What's the matter?"

"Don't start that again." She sounded as angry as Mary had been when she'd let her feelings show. "My nerves are perfectly all right now, I've told you."

"Perhaps working here doesn't agree with you."

"Perhaps you're right, but that's just tough tit. I'm going to do my year here, otherwise they'll say I wasn't able to keep the job." Irritably she said, "I'm all right. I just thought for a moment that we were being watched."

Karen froze, choking down a gasp. Mary didn't move, except for a smile that crept across her mouth. "Nothing excites them," the teacher was complaining, "not even art. I spent half yesterday showing them how to sketch and paint, and what do they give me today? The same old chimpanzee pictures. There's one girl, Mary, who really frustrated me. She wasn't trying, that's what I can't stand. None of them— Jesus!"

There came a rush of scampering. Karen risked a glance over the balcony wall. The gang of four-year-olds had pounced from an entry and were running away, yelling and making faces. Their faces already looked like masks, made up with dirt and paint and food.

"See what I mean," the teacher said tightly. "They're all the same. They'll grow up just like the class I have to teach."

When she moved out of earshot, Mary didn't follow. She was squatting in a corner of the balcony, knees drawn up to her chest, as though clutching to herself the things she'd heard the teacher say. Her smile grew wider, and less like a smile. "I know something we can do," she said.

Karen didn't like her smile, nor her eyes, which were blank as the eyes of a painting. Nevertheless she had to follow, ducking beneath washing like breathless sails, since Mary's was on her way home. Mary was silent. If she spoke, perhaps her smile would crack.

Like the rest of the flats, Mary's had a view like a mirror maze. Beyond the window, a screen whose net curtains looked poised to fall, Karen heard voices. Beyond the front door which blazed like a brake-light and the inevitable hall the size of a telephone kiosk, a bicycle bent almost double under the stairs.

When Mary saw the bicycle, her face pinched like an old woman's. Then she remembered what she planned to do, or that she mustn't let Karen see her feelings. Snubbing the bicycle, she crept to a cupboard beneath the stairs.

She had just opened the cupboard when her mother called, "Is that you, Mary? Uncle Ron's here."

"Oh, all right." Her face pinched again as she rummaged in the cupboard, which was full of library books whose labels had been torn out. She was struggling with a large black book which was the foundation of two stacks. As she dragged it free—its unhinged covers staggering, scattering loose pages which displayed lists like recipes and a picture of a woman in a pointed hat surrounded by small lumpy creatures—the living-room door was snatched open. "What are you hanging about here for?" a man said.

He must be Uncle Ron, for the cuffs of his overalls were still manacled by cycle-clips. Within a frame of stubble his lips were smeared with pink lipstick. "Who said you could read that?"

Before Mary could answer, he snarled, "What are you showing them to her for?" He'd noticed Karen. "You just forget you saw any books."

Mary was taking advantage of the diversion to sneak away toward her room. "You come back here with that," he said.

"Uncle Jack lets me read them."

"Never mind Uncle Jack. I'm your uncle now. I'll give you Uncle Jack if you don't bring that here." He banged on the living-room door. "Why do you let her read this muck? Witches and bloody magic. I don't know what you wanted with it anyway—you don't even read half of them. Why don't you give her something decent if she wants to read? Don't you care how she grows up?"

"She's always in some book or other," her mother's disembodied voice complained. "Thinks more of them than she does of me. Rather have fairy stories than her own mother."

"Give it here." Before Mary could move, he pulled the book out of her hands and hit her across the forehead with it. "And you just be on your way," he told Karen, jerking his thumb at the door.

"See you tomorrow, Mary." But Mary was neither listening nor registering pain. Her blank eyes were watching where he replaced the book.

Karen's home was in chaos. The baby was screaming, her little brother and sister were fighting in front of the television, her father was shouting over Tom and Jerry for his tea so that he could get ready for the darts tournament, her big sister was running about accusing everyone of having hidden her eyelashes, her mother was threatening to leave them all to it. Karen was glad to help her sort everything out, not least because it gave her no time to wonder what Mary was planning. Later, as she lay beside her little sister and waited for her big sister to come home so that she could go to sleep, she heard litter stumbling and hopping along the balcony outside. Remembering the lumpy creatures in the book, she hoped Mary had given up her plan.

Next morning she thought at first that Mary might have, for her eyes were puffy and dull. Things obviously hadn't improved at home. At these times Miss Dix had used to make a fuss of her, but Mrs. Tweedle only grew irritated with her dullness, then ignored her, then began picking on her for not concentrating, "Come on, child, this should be easy for you." Mary's eyes brightened secretly at that, and Karen knew that if she'd thought of giving up her plan, she didn't intend to do so now.

Perhaps she meant to carry it out by herself—but no, she kept glancing at Karen with a look that both promised a secret and warned her not to tell. An unpleasant smell seemed to waft from the airline bag Mary always carried to school. It smelled like something dead or dying.

At the end of the day the teacher was as eager to leave as the children. She only said "Well, hurry up" when, at the cloakrooms, Mary said, "Oh, I've left something." She gave Karen a skillfully meaningful glance. "You left yours too."

Mary closed the classroom door behind her. "We'll do it in here. This is her place."

Certainly the teacher's perfume was still in the air. Otherwise the room seemed empty, apart from the chalk-dust that hung everywhere as though the white walls were crumbling, and the pictures which were dancing a little, stiff two-dimensional puppets, in the draft from the closing door. The emptiness seemed to strengthen the dead stench.

"You don't have to do much," Mary said as she unzipped her bag. "Just say her name when I do. It won't take long." She brought out a rattling matchbox, which looked too small to smell so bad. From one end a hair, or the leg of an insect, or something else was protruding.

Mary stood behind the teacher's desk and closing her eyes, brought the matchbox close to her face. Now Karen knew she was unnervingly serious, for she didn't react to the stench at all, though the mixture of that smell with perfume and chalk-dust made Karen feel dry-mouthed and sick. Squeezing her eyes so tightly shut that they looked like senile lips, Mary began to gabble.

Was she making it up? It didn't sound like a language to Karen. If she'd learned it from the book in the cupboard she must have done so overnight. Surely there was a good chance that she'd got it wrong—yet she sounded fiercely convinced that it would work. Chalk-dust sank through the tainted air, the paintings became still on the walls, and in the midst of her gabbling Mary said, "Mrs. Tweedle."

Her puckered eyes opened and glared at Karen, who stammered "Mrs. Tweedle." In a few moments she had to say it again, her words stumbling after Mary's. It was almost like a nonsense song, but Karen wasn't at all inclined to giggle, for the stench was thickening, overpowering the perfume, while the room had grown oppressively still. The air tasted parched with chalk. She didn't like the way all the paintings seemed to be looking at her, particularly since in several of the paintings the eyes weren't the same size. Their colors seemed violent as neon. Those figures whose legs were unequal—which was most of them—looked caught in the act of moving.

Suddenly, over Mary's gabbling, Karen heard an ominous yet welcome sound. Mr. Waddicar was hobbling along the corridor. Now Mary would have to stop, or they would be found out. Whoever was crossing the yard toward the school might see her too. Karen glanced toward the window, and at once her tongue felt like a gag. How could Mr. Waddicar be limping doggedly along the corridor when she could see him outside in the yard?

She managed to speak. "I'm going," she said, too loudly. Mary's furious stare couldn't make her stay. Perhaps the corridor might do so, for though it was sunlit and bare, its linoleum stained by chalky reflections of the walls, it was very long. As she ran down it, keeping to the far side from the classroom doors, were all of the footsteps her echoes, or were some of them hobbling? She ran past the classrooms, where a coat dangled its handless arms from a metal sketch of shoulders, and out.

Before she'd gone far, Mary emerged from the school, looking murderous. Karen had spoiled her game. Karen hoped that was the end of it, especially since she dreamed that night of a corridor whose ends were sealed. As she ran desperately along it, back and forth, she heard things in the classrooms, struggling to open the doors with their half-formed hands.

If possible, the following day was even hotter. The sky was blinding as steam, pierced by the sun. The tenements looked carved from chalk. In the distance, everything quivered; thin streams of water pretended to lie across the roads. Surely Karen was safe from her fears on a day like this—and yet something was wrong.

The teacher was nervous. Everything seemed to disturb her: muttering at the back of the class where she couldn't see who it was, confused echoes of running in the corridor, the sleepy flapping of the paintings on the walls. Was she unnerved by the way Mary kept staring at her, or by the faint dead stench? Was the stench coming from the airline bag, or clinging to the room?

Perhaps she was nervous of something else entirely, for when they returned to class that afternoon, a man was sitting at the back of the room.

Karen knew what he was. He was going to watch the teacher to see if she was any good. No wonder the teacher had been nervous, and she was growing worse. Standing stiffly in front of the blackboard and breaking pieces of chalk as she wrote, she addressed them as slowly and clearly as if they were deaf. Her smile dared them not to understand.

Of course she only made them nervous too. When she asked Karen a question, even though Karen knew the answer her mind immediately went blank. Her mouth gaped, her skin felt acrawl with chalk. The teacher was growing irritable; one of her fingers snapped, but it was a stick of chalk; she called the twins by each other's names, as though to get her own back for being called Miss. All at once her eyes gleamed rather desperately. "Mary," she said.

Mary must be her last hope—but Mary had been in an odd mood all day, virtually ignoring Karen and everyone else, pretending to work while she listened for something. Now she stared blankly at the teacher.

"Didn't you hear the question?"

"Yes." There was a further pause. "I don't know."

"Of course you do. It's simple. Don't tell me you of all people don't know." Her voice was threatening to shrill. "Just think, for heaven's sake," she said.

Couldn't she sense Mary's hatred? "I don't know," Mary said resentfully, and refused to say anything more.

The teacher was glaring as though Mary had deliberately betrayed her; she couldn't know how furious Mary was at having been shown up in front of the man.

After class Karen hurried away before Mary could detain her. When she saw Mary loitering near the cloakrooms, waiting to sneak back into the classroom, she knew she'd been right to do so.

At the gate of the yard she looked back. The man was talking to the teacher, who looked chastened, perhaps even ashamed. As Karen watched, they left the classroom. When she reached the tenement balcony she glanced back again and saw Mary standing alone by the teacher's desk, head bowed over an object in her hands. Karen couldn't see much at that distance; even the paintings on the walls looked like blank paper.

That night she couldn't sleep. The heat was so oppressive that it felt solid. Whenever she closed her eyes, part of it came hobbling toward her. At last, despite the muttering and turning of her sisters, she slept intermittently, but felt as though she hadn't.

Morning brought no relief from the heat. The sky was a whitish blur in which the sun was indistinguishable, perhaps because the entire sky was white-hot. People trudged to work or to school, fanning themselves and blowing. On the way to school she met Mary, who looked uneasy but determined—to face what? She made Karen reluctant to go into the classroom, not only because it felt like a greenhouse. The walls trapped the heat and reflected it back. They were bare. All the paintings were gone.

Had Mary torn them down last night, enraged that Karen wouldn't help her? Or had the teacher done so after she'd been told off by the man? Karen didn't think it could have been the teacher, for she seemed to have changed overnight for the better: she encouraged instead of demanding, she made a visible effort to get the twins' names right, when she repeated something and the children didn't understand she didn't grow irritable, only popped a capsule into her mouth and started again. Even though Karen realized she had to do what the man had told her, the teacher's behavior looked like an apology to the class.

She was especially gentle with Mary. "This afternoon," she said, and though she meant all of them she was looking at Mary, "I want you to paint what you like. Show me what you like." The girl stared resentfully at her, then looked away.

Karen thought Mary was being unreasonable. The teacher was trying to be kind—why couldn't she give her a chance? Besides, Mary's sullen muteness had begun to annoy Karen. As soon as they reached the schoolyard at lunchtime she demanded, "Did you pull down all the paintings?"

"No. Don't be stupid." For a moment her feelings glared through. She wished Karen hadn't asked her that, hadn't reminded her of something she'd done that she regretted now. She started nervously at a glimpse of the four-year-olds dodging behind the school. That was who it must have been, for their faces were messily multicolored.

Heat-haze seemed to coat Karen's glasses. She felt too limp to join in any of the games. She was glad when lunchtime was over; at least she would have to do something in class. Mary was still nervous, for she drew back from the classroom door, staring at the hand with which she'd opened it. Someone who'd forgotten to wash their hands after painting must have touched the knob.

The teacher had brought them some special paints, in tubes which she took from her bag. Karen painted the sun in a white sky over green fields, and tried to make the trees luminous too, balls of fire instead of foliage. "That's very good, Karen," the teacher said, sounding surprised. Somewhere in the school Mr. Waddicar was hobbling.

Was someone hobbling alongside him, or were they echoes?

Mary painted someone running. Karen couldn't tell if the figure was meant to be chasing someone or running away; its face was a pink blob, as though Mary didn't want to fill it in. The teacher seemed puzzled too, but impressed. "That's very expressive, Mary." It couldn't be Mr. Waddicar in the corridors, for the footsteps were too numerous. It must be children, hobbling worse than him.

The sky was darkening. Unbroken clouds pressed heat into the room. When the teacher switched on the fluorescent lights, the paints glared, uncomfortably vivid. Karen felt trapped by colors. Without warning, Mary, who had begun to tremble, dug her brush into a well of black paint and blotted out her picture. What would the teacher say to her? Nothing: before she'd returned to the front of the class and Mary's desk, the bell rang.

"I'll see you all on Monday," the teacher said, hurrying away. Mary seemed about to run after her—to tell her something, or to walk along with her? Perhaps she was afraid to do either. Through the window Karen could just make out the gang of four-year-olds lying in wait beyond the railings. Distance and haze obscured their messy faces.

When she emerged from the school, they'd gone. The sky was withholding its rain. She watched the teacher hurrying alone beside the tenements, which looked harsh as lime. Karen felt irritable; she was growing as bad as Mary, glancing at the balconies and entries. Why should the glimpses of colors worry her? Her mother was always saying that the estate needed brightening up. It was only that the dark sky made them look ominous, and that Karen couldn't quite catch sight of them directly.

All at once it began to rain, drops large as gobs of spit. She would never reach the tenements without getting drenched. She sheltered in the school doorway, and wished she was standing with someone other than Mary.

The teacher had dodged into the tenements. For a moment Karen felt resentfully nervous: where did she think she was going? Of course, she was going to make her way across the estate under cover. A minute later she reappeared on a first-floor balcony. Only the top half of her body was visible, and she resembled a moving target on a shooting gallery.

Mary was watching with a kind of agonized fascination. Karen thought she knew what Mary was waiting for—she refused to believe it could be anything else—and she wished they'd get it over with. Oblivious, the teacher hurried along the chalky balconies beneath the leaden sky.

She'd crossed three balconies when they appeared from a dark stairway. Karen could just see their small heads, pouncing from the darkness. Yes, they were the gang of four-year-olds, for she could see how blotchily multicolored their faces were. It must be the rain on her glasses which made their movements look so jerky, and their faces appear to be running, spreading, dripping.

She had only just noticed how silent they were when the teacher screamed and all at once was gone. Then she could only stand in the school doorway, unable to think what to do until Mary began to trudge toward the tenements.

That was almost the end of the summer term, and the holidays gave Karen a chance to forget. The new motherly teacher, Mrs. Castell, was clearly anxious to help her. But she hadn't seen anything very horrible, only the teacher lying at the foot of the tenement stairs; it hadn't been apparent that her neck was broken. The walls had been covered with fresh paint, no doubt by vandals, and the teacher's face had been smeared with colors like messy kisses. They must have come from the tubes of paint in her bag.

Was Mary unable to forget? She was still very nervous, though Mrs. Castell knew to make a fuss of her. She was shivering at a noise in the corridor. "It's all right," Karen said. "It's only Mr. Waddicar."

Mrs. Castell looked dismayed, angry with herself for not having spoken sooner. "I'm sorry, Karen, Mr. Waddicar died during the holidays."

Now Mary was shivering in earnest, and Karen felt in danger of doing so too. The nights were growing darker, the corridor was very long, and far down its length something was hobbling, hobbling.