Missed the Prologue? Click here to read:
“I consider myself a practical person, in no sense a dreamer. No Hollywood schmaltzy film would be made about my inspirational teaching. No children would stand on their desks in unified protest at my sacking. But I had found my niche. I did what I could. Day to day, I dealt in scientific facts. Simplified for lower streams and younger children, but facts all the same. But every now and then, when I could see a child was becoming lost, I dealt in transformation. Today was one such day.”
In which we meet narrator Helen, a devoted but maverick teacher, on her mission to help her most troubling student Sindi, with life-changing results.
Chapter One
The day everything changed began just like a normal teaching day, with with me crossing the empty car park in front of the technical block to reach my rooms in the science block. At the grand age of forty-five I was unexpectedly pregnant for the second time, and felt like I was carrying my own ocean, the person formerly me bobbing about on its surface like a shipwreck. The technical block was a concrete box on stilts. It was early, and cold, so it wasn’t too busy. Just a few students getting in their first smoke of the day against the backdrop of graffiti.
Sindi gave me a nod over her shoulder as she contemplated a tiny patch of undefaced wall, spray can in one hand, cigarette in the other. Her bare thighs beneath the tucked up skirt gleamed like stalagmites. Dwayne roared so close to me on his skateboard I almost overbalanced. He swept between the pillars, then hopped off and flipped the board up into his arms before vanishing into a corner with his mates. In this dank cavern the loners, losers, graffiti artists and skateboarders collected to smoke, grope and fight.
I shuffled on.
Horizon Heights was not for everyone, but I’d found my niche. These kids were survivors and I felt drawn to them. I had trained as a biology teacher long ago in Preston, near Fleetwood, where I grew up, having a nerdy interest in the natural world that I longed to share with others. But after my father died, my mother wanted me to stay nearby, and I could see my life shrinking before it had even begun. I’d run away as far as I could, taking a sailing course in Lanzarote in order to escape further and the idea of teaching fell away. I met and fell in love with Frank so deeply that even when eventually a life with him meant coming back to land, a baby, adult responsibilities, it still felt like freedom, at first. We had, at least, come to London, one of the biggest cities in the world.
When I had to get a job five years ago, I returned to the idea of teaching, and was grateful that Horizon Heights liked the look of me. It was a rough school, like the one I had attended myself. We might be in the capital, but I recognised these kids. I was happy. I had come full circle. In the current parlance –I could bring my whole self to work.
Breathing heavily, I paused at the bins. I had to pace myself today. A full day of classes, followed by an Intervention. Frank kept urging me to take my maternity leave early, and I was starting to see his point. I was tired of lugging myself around. Looking down, I realised how much I missed my feet. I used to love shoes, and I had small, pretty feet that looked wonderful in anything, or naked. Now my belly charged ahead of me like some kind of ill designed hull pounding through the waves of life. I was only twenty-three weeks gone, but my body had gone into overdrive at the sheer impossibility of this pregnancy. It was throwing everything at it. As if expressing its own astonishment at being here again, it was creating the most marvellous grotesque out of my base material. I sallied on to the front door, and all my weariness was swept away by the joy I felt as I entered my own domain.
Sprayed in purple on the door of the classroom, new words:
FUCK U MISS AND
THE HORSE U RODE IN ON
The smell of paint was overwhelming. I covered my nose and mouth and observed the tag, the uneven lettering. A snort at the inclusion of ‘Miss’, leaked out from behind my fingers. This was Sindi’s work. I imagined her sneaking out early, breakfastless, yelled at by her foster father, Roman, the can stashed in her rucksack. And then, lifting off after ‘Fuck U’, where so many would have stopped in triumph, her tongue fat in her cheek.
The thing was, she was proud of her vandalism, and lately the incidents had been escalating. I saw in them spirit, rather than personal attack. Nevertheless, it couldn’t go on – her rude talents would never be appreciated by wider society. I braced myself to tell Sindi and the whole class that any more defacements of the classroom would have consequences. In addition, the fumes were bad for me now. Coughing I opened the door and went in. A moderate quiet fell across my science class.
I consider myself a practical person, in no sense a dreamer. No Hollywood schmaltzy film would be made about my inspirational teaching. No children would stand on their desks in unified protest at my sacking. But I had found my niche. I did what I could. Day to day, I dealt in scientific facts. Simplified for lower streams and younger children, but facts all the same. But every now and then, when I could see a child was becoming lost, I dealt in transformation. Today was one such day.
I shuffled to the desk, as if we were not all suffocating in the stink of paint, and paused to gather myself. My biggest and gentlest loner, Chalmers, appeared before me and laid, solemnly on my desk, a tiny pottery fawn, curled up, the size of my palm. No box, just a square of toilet paper neatly folded for it to sit on.
‘Congratulations, Miss,’ he said, nodding at the bulge of my belly, with the shy smile that is the preserve of some boys in the presence of women who might be their mothers. I didn’t know why I was to be congratulated now, as everyone had known about the pregnancy for some time. I wasn’t prepared, and stood frozen, a teenage-intensity blush detonating slowly up my neck.
Chalmers had a marvellous squall of black greasy hair and was eternally reviled for having wet himself repeatedly in class between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. He’d sit on the high stools around the benches to the side, and suddenly the ransacked silence, the warm stench. He survived it, in part because of his sheer pale mass. He seemed to be made of an indestructible, yet benign substance, like a cow. And also, he said, that the Intervention had saved him. It was the first time I attempted this – seeing that if I did nothing he would be bullied to a place from where he would never be retrieved.
I held the fawn up to examine it. It wasn’t expensive, but these were kids who had no money. Without its box, and with this odd timing, I knew they had stolen it – but I didn’t care. I turned away and wrote on the board behind me:
Intervention, Technical Block, 5.30 pm — Sindi Jackson
and then had to exit to the staff toilets to collect myself. Chalmers gave me a thumbs up which I saw in the gloss of the door as I fled. I was so proud of him, as he was proud himself, of surviving and of becoming the natural orchestrator of a class activity, the theft of the fawn.
From time to time, throughout the day, I reached into my pocket and clutched the fawn in my hand. I felt its rough glazed underside, the hole in its belly for firing. It was my lucky charm and I would be so sorry when it was gone.
Chapter Two
Interventions took place in a corner of the block completely out of view, which I had decorated with candles and lights. Dwayne produced an oil drum and wood to burn as it was a December evening. No matter the cold, there was always an excellent turnout for Interventions. No truancy for such theatre. Today, Chalmers was master of ceremonies, stooped and half-smiling with the photocopied schedule in his hand. Over time the Interventions had become quite elaborate, though never exceeding the hour of a detention. I encouraged this sense of occasion. I grew excited myself as the day approached.
In the centre of the space, supported on some bricks, stood a coffin. This was lovingly made from plywood by Dwayne and Carol, whose woodwork skills were enthusiastic, and painted black with gorgeous silver curlicues by Petra, who was on track for an A at GCSE in art, but clinging by her fingernails in science. The coffin – a casket, really -- was lined with sheets in different colours. They had been lifted from different homes – including mine -- carefully pleated and upholstered with scraps of material pilfered from the Home Technology classroom. Dwayne and Carol had cleverly installed hinges, so that the coffin could be folded away and stored. It was really very beautiful. I laid flowers inside.
With twenty or so students gathered round, Sindi hopped into the casket with a kind of alacrity that I remembered in my own little boy, leaping into bed with me with not a tweak of shame at his need. Eagerly, she got into position, her uniform pulled modestly to the correct length, woolly tights on. her eyes closed, her hands crossed over her chest. I laid the lid over her, sending an obelisk of shadow over her pale skin, a wisp of frosty breath escaping from her lips. A barely discernible ripple of fear faded from her cheek as it closed.
Now, it was sealed shut, with a little vent for air. I leaned over the vent and said, ‘You okay in there, Sindi?’
A tiny yes Miss.
Sindi was fifteen, and I had been thinking about her Intervention for weeks now. I could not see that anything less radical could save her. An orphan, she strolled around inside in my conscience as if auditioning to be my daughter. She had the kind of charisma that was about force, not beauty, like certain men possessed. She was not vain in any way, wore no makeup, but if anything her lack of mask over her strong features only increased her magnetism.
Every day, when Sindi got off the bus, she would hitch up her skirt to micro length, and tie her blouse up, exposing as much midriff and leg as possible. Having done this, however, all she went on to do, the same every day, was to spray her tags beneath the Technical Block, or sit barelegged alone in a corner of the playing field and smoke her Embassy Regals. She wore no jewellery and her long hay-coloured hair hung around her in matted vines, less a deliberate attempt to cultivate dreadlocks than indifference.
No one, not the boys, not the male teachers, let alone the world outside, was going to let Sindi smoke peacefully, half-naked, alone. It had started already, lads making that journey across the scrub to loiter beside her. Teachers lifted their heads as she made her sensational way down the drive. She was an inspiration to the younger girls, who tried to copy her. Classroom windows would fly open: ‘Sindi, pull your skirt down!’ and she would, absently, until out of range, when up it would go. I brought in wool tights because she looked so cold. It was a sign of the trust between us that she did, later, wear them if it was freezing in the class. Off they’d come for the technical block or the playing fields though. She resented covering herself, but had no coherent reason for why. She didn’t see any provocation in her actions, nor danger. She expressed no interest in her future.
Watching her in the hallucinogenic swirl of my hormones in the early days of pregnancy made me want to cry. In the end I could stand it no longer, waddled over the playing fields to sit with her, putting my arms around her and resting my swollen cheek on her cold shoulder. She turned that strong face to me, nose too big, eyes too close together, gap in the front teeth, the whole effect enough to make me give her everything to save her from all the things I didn’t understand, and all those I understood too well. She breathed Embassy Regal smoke into my face and said, good naturedly, ‘Miss if you’re going to do that, budge your chin.’ We’d sat there like that for the rest of the lunch hour, mostly in silence, with occasional flurries of chat about things that interested her. She was interested in money, how it worked, what it meant, how bits of paper, or numbers on a screen could mean anything. She’d asked me to explain the stock exchange which I couldn’t but I promised we’d look it up together. My back hurt and my legs went to sleep and I’d inhaled at least three cigarettes’ worth of second hand smoke, but I loved that hour. I had deterred the hyena approaches of the lads. But it wasn’t enough. Only transformation would be enough.
With a wave of his hand, Chalmers indicated that the ceremony was about to begin. The lid was lifted to reveal Sindi, eyes closed, wearing the Funeral Tie, velvet black, awarded to the corpse. The ceremony would stop if the corpse showed any sign of life. This was serious.
All the pupils were in full uniform, or as full as they could manage on their meagre budgets at home. The uniform was black and gold. Not yellow, although the school did turn a blind eye to yellow items, instantly marking out those who could not afford to go to Farrah and Sons for the correct colours. There was a lot of yellow in my lower stream classes. I kept an eye on the second hand sales of uniform, occasionally slipping a pupil a gold item. I believed in uniform; it was probably the only thing that prevented many of the girls from coming in a glittery boob tube. But gold? This was a battle I had decided against taking up with the Head, however. I was doing what I could. I had found my niche. And in return I knew the Head ignored my theatrical activities.
Chalmers said, with his shy smile from under the black mop, ‘We are here today to celebrate the short life of Sindi Jackson, who was hung for murder.’ His voice echoed round the shadowy pillars. Corpses were allowed to choose the manner of their untimely deaths. The only proviso was that they should be believable. I thought this was pretty good. I could see Sindi snapping after yet another worthless man abused her, whacking him in his sleep with one of his own spanners or stabbing him in the heart with a screwdriver. I could also see her as misunderstood in a time of witches, where she could never be sexy and unpunished. Anyway, a hush fell over the group. Chalmers went on, ‘Although Sindi’s neck was snapped so violently her head actually came off, miraculously her face was untouched.’ There was a pause as everyone digested this vivid scene.
Sindi remained as stony as if she was smoking out on the playing fields. ‘So,’ Chalmers continued. ‘I turn to her classmate Petra for what she would like to say about what she remembers of Sindi.’
‘Remember Sindi nicked that microphone thing from music? On my birthday?’ said Petra. Nods and soft laughter went round the coffin. ‘And we had that party down here and took turns singing. And she got out this red wig and sang Dancing Queen?’ Sindi remained like alabaster. It was very impressive.
‘Remember she got you to play it on your phone, Dwayne, the music? But I’d told her a bit before about how… depressed I was since my dad left and how I…had been cutting myself and I don’t know, it was just so funny.’ Petra stopped and bit her lip. Then added, ‘Also… she had a really nice voice.’
‘Thank you, Petra. Who’s next?’ Chalmers said. And so the ceremony went on, with each student coming forward to praise Sindi’s good nature, her sexy voice from the smoking, (this one was borderline as I insisted all praise had to be about what she had done, or had potential to do, or her character. Thinking of herself as sexy was the mess I was trying to save her from). One lad surprised us all by mumbling, ‘Sindi could always tell you how many cigs you’ll get for your money. In a flash. She could tell you how many twentys, or tens, or even singles.’ There was nodding round the group.
‘Had she lived,’ I asked them. ‘What might she have done with her life?’ Fortunately Interventions were planned. Everyone had two days to think up their answers. Without that time we would all have gawped, mesmerised, at Sindi in her casket, unable to visualise anything else.
Carol said, ‘I think Sindi would have made a great nurse, because she was so caring.’ We all stared fervently into the casket.
I said, ‘I think she’d have been a good artist. Her graffiti was brilliant! Any more from the boys?’
Dwayne raised his hand. He spoke off the cuff, clearly having only just thought of it. ‘I think she could have been anything she wanted to be,’ he said, and there was a silence while we pondered this blessing that so many luckier children had bestowed upon them from infancy. I had said it often to my own little boy.
Uttered over Sindi, it sounded like a curse. Her perfectly composed face suddenly crumpled, and a tear slid out of the corner of her eyes swiftly down into her hair. Her nail bitten hands covered her face and she began to sob inconsolably. I had never seen Sindi cry and I was horrified. The other children looked to me for guidance. Dwayne said, ‘Did I say something wrong?’
‘No Dwayne, that was a great thing to say.’
‘Put the lid down!’ Sindi cried.
‘But Sindi –’
‘Now!’
Reluctantly I lowered the lid and directed the other kids’ attention to the cake. There was always cake after the ceremony, which the kids usually guzzled with the solemn intensity of five year olds. ‘Sindi will be fine – eat up!’ I said cheerily. Sindi’s muffled sobbing drifted out in pauses across the hovering students. Chalmers got the music going, drowning out the sound, and slowly everyone began to relax. I stood beside the casket in the gloom, hand on the lid, a smile stuck on my face, frightened to open it. Had it been too much? I tapped gently and asked though the vent. ‘Won’t you come out Sindi? Have some cake?’
To my enormous relief, the lid slowly raised and Sindi clambered out. Her eyes were red, her face pale. She submitted to an embrace and accepted a cigarette from Dwayne. ‘That was intense Miss,’ she said.
‘Did you hear them?’ I asked. ‘All the wonderful things about you?’ There was a daisy crumpled in her hair. I picked it out and she stared at me. ‘I wish you were my mum,’ she said. With that, she wandered off into the group
An hour later, on the crowded Underground platform, all I wanted was to sink into a warm, comfortable place, drift on the soar of hormones like pleasureboat on a holiday sea, feel the turn of the baby like a porpoise in the waves. As I leant against the tube map on the wall, the day played back over my half-closed eyelids. It was one of those days where I worried that perhaps I had gone too far.
The train arrived, and gratefully I crumpled into a vacant seat. I would parse my relationship with Sindi endlessly over the next months looking for clues to explain what unfolded. Though I am a scientist by training, I believed as a teacher it was pointless to throw facts at minds that, in many cases, were too starved of affection, stimulation, and, sometimes, even food to take them in. The world we are all obliged to occupy is unremittingly one-dimensional. Sometimes the only defence is metaphor. Like being changed by a theatrical performance, a poem, a film, I believed my Interventions had some success in restoring meaning to an arid life. However, in Sindi’s case, I was left with a sense of unease.
How marvellous it would be never to disembark from this train, I thought, instead simply pound drowsily back and forth along the Northern Line forever. In that way I could remain the timeless orb of possibility I was now. I was suffused with love for this baby. It was a love more direct and simple than that for my son, conceived and experienced in a very different time. I could say this to myself, because I had not always been suffused with love for the baby. I was grateful for the baby, because I suspected Frank was planning to leave me, and the baby would likely change his mind. That’s how it began. But love can begin in all kinds of ways, can’t it, and evolve into something else? It can begin incomprehensibly, wrongly, and yet become something that defines an entire life.
I love my baby. I smiled to myself, leaning back in the seat, imagining the day this new life would be out in the world and safe in my arms.
We squealed into London Bridge and the carriage doors opened. I pushed myself upright and shuffled towards the exit to cross to the Jubilee line still in my reverie. But my way was blocked by people pouring in. How rude, I thought, wishing for once I had one of those badges saying Baby on Board so that some small consideration might be shown me. Why did no one remind these people that you’re supposed to let passengers get off first?
Then I realised the people were screaming. And when I say pouring, I mean they were an undifferentiated slam of torsos and smoking hair. There was no room for any more people, but still they came, screaming. A book in flames, entitled Strategies for Winning banged against the window beside me. A briefcase fired coins over our heads. Smoke began to fill the carriage and someone pushed me so roughly I hit my head on the central pole. My arms swept around myself, because that’s a primal action. Protect the baby. I was falling, though in the crush it seemed impossible to fall, bodies were pressed against every inch of me. Light shrivelled, like that final moment of birth, when you know you’re going to die and you accept it.
For a second I fell back to my childhood; the times my trawlerman father let me come on the boat with him, with the crew he knew far better than he knew us. I loved to be among them, their oilskins drenched in scales, as they hauled the creatures from the sea. Numberless shoals creaked in the net, and crashed like treasure upon the deck. Now my own cheek slammed, unwanted, on the floor, and a body, a woman, was squashing me, the buckle of her mac digging into my cheek, how? And a heel, a spike, like a needle in a microscope against the edge of a cell. That cell being my belly, her heel digging in.
The baby fluttered in my belly, like the first time I felt it. Quickening, they call it, but now it felt like a struggle. I pushed vainly against the floor, against the woman slumped upon me, as if we were in a Flanders trench and she was a dead comrade toppled onto me. I knew she was dead; she had the weight of the dead. She was a mess of broken parts all in the wrong orientation. Her ribs were crushing the last of the oxygen out of my throat; her heel was puncturing me; her metal belt was branding my cheek. Maybe she was in fact many people; I could not be sure, but outrage gripped me, that my baby was kicking and turning, that my baby was wriggling to reach me, and I was doing nothing, pinioned like a dissected frog.
In the stories I would hear from other survivors, many were certain they were going to die, and their only regret in that moment was that they would be so badly burned they would not be recognisable to their families. I was prevented from that kind of equanimity by the fact of my baby, which was fiercely alive in the tiny crushed space of my body. The smoke was affecting the foetus; it thrashed like a panicky heart; like a fish hauled over the gunnels. All I could see, writhing on the screen of my eyelids, were my baby’s eyes, similarly closed, sealed for the ta-da moment of birth when the world would be revealed. The two of us, blind and gasping for oxygen. The grimy floor of the carriage was our slab, and a body our lid.
I screamed, but there was no sound. The heel poked into my abdomen and the air turned to ash.
Something hooked my arm and hauled me along the floor to the open door. Blindly I kicked, giving everything to return to my element. Fingers clutched at my body, like sinners in a crater of hell.
Mind the gap! – an almost laugh gnashed through my jaws because air, a tiny trickle of air, like water, was whistling down the tracks alongside the train. It was bulky with diesel, brittle with the abandoned atoms of old electrics, but it was not smoke and I drank it, I sucked it like an infant. Then I was pulled slithering onto the platform. No no no I cried because the smoke came down like a burning cannonball onto my face. Somehow I got onto my knees. The hand turned into an arm around my waist, a man’s voice in my ear. Hold onto me.
The arm I was clutching was hot and torn. I did not know then if I was clinging to fabric or burned off skin. The air was a furnace: I dared not open my eyes, fearing my eyeballs would melt, or perhaps they had already melted and this was afterwards, the world of blindness. Everything hurt, especially my belly, where my baby lay still. This must be because – and this I knew, I knew for certain -- I had taken up the load. I was saving us, fortified with my life- giving gulp of track air, and so my baby could rest, while I dragged us to safety.
At the end of the platform, the arms lifted me down onto the track. The chaos of shouting and screaming faded as we stumbled away from the scene , leaving a wall of heat and smoke behind us. Gravel prickled the soles of my bare feet as I felt along the sooty warmth of the tunnel wall. We walked for a long time.
‘Here, step into my hands,’ said the voice, at last, and I found myself being pushed up into a space in the wall. It was damp and lightless. I crawled into the space, dark as a grave.
Coming up in Episode Two … who is the stranger? Click here to go to Episode Two.
If you missed the Prologue, you can read it here:
ALL Episodes appear in sequence in the Ocean: the Podcast part of the homepage.
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