ONE
It was Jess’s “settling in” time at school. She needed this to be, well, settling in. Whatever that was.
It had been just over half a school term since they’d returned from Nigeria, but Jess still hadn’t “settled.” Before and after her return to England, and school, Jess had been frenzied in her activity, and then she had been ill, and her father didn’t think that she was ready for school again. Her mother insisted that Jess had to go; nothing was wrong with her, she could use the first few days to “settle in” again. Then her father had asked Jess what she thought about it. Did she want to go to school tomorrow?
Jess had raised her eyebrows at him in surprise.
What a silly question. As if she ever wanted to go to school.
And now they were asking her, giving her a choice: School, yes or no? Yet she felt confused, because she somehow knew by the way that her father was looking at her, his eyes cautious behind his spectacles, that although he had been arguing with her mother about whether she should go to school or not, he would like her to be brave, to be completely recovered, to be a normal child who wanted to see her friends at school. And her mother wanted her to go, simply, Jess supposed, for the sake of going, and rules, and being there if the school was open and nothing was wrong with you.
They were offering her a choice, a chance to say “no,” when if she did, one would be angry and the other disappointed. Was it really, actually, a choice?
With a small, almost unnoticeable movement, her eyes flicked helplessly from one face to the other.
“Yeah,” she said finally, and was rewarded with smiles from both.
Ever since they had returned to England, Jess had been looking out of windows for extended periods of time, sailing eagerly towards the front door whenever there was a knock or the door-bell rang. She spent hours painstakingly braiding a special friendship bracelet for TillyTilly in the tiniest sections possible, then unpicked it and began again because the colours were all wrong. The atmosphere of tense, coiled-up waiting in her had confused her parents, whom she had caught several times gazing bemusedly at each other.
Then, after this period of absorption (with . . . what, exactly? friendship bracelets? expectancy? impossible to tell) came the inevitable fever, the whites of her eyes tinged pink, her head lolling dejectedly on her pillow, her fingers limp as if the bones in them had evaporated. She mumbled, made small sounds, like singing noises, broken songs, because when she was ill she could never speak properly.
Jess’s parents had, thankfully in her opinion, given up carrying Jess to the GP whenever she ran such a high temperature. Her GP, Dr. Collins, was as baffled as they were. Jess had already undergone extensive tests: for allergies and anaemia, of all things. They all proved inconclusive because nothing, he explained looking at this little girl who was pulling weakly at her clothes because she was hot, and trembling violently because she was cold, was physically wrong with her.
Jess invariably got over it. Her mother made her eat
pepe
soup with digestible specks of ground beef in it, and her English grandmother insisted she sup chicken soup with barley, and she began to sleep properly again and totter about to get things she wanted when her mother, absorbed at the computer in her study a few doors away, didn’t immediately answer her calls. She would sway when she got out of her bed, fizzing, coloured dots dancing before her eyes as she wobbled across the floor, zigagging like a baby learning to toddle.
Then she recovered (and still no TillyTilly!) only two days before school started again.
When she finally arrived in the classroom, the rest of Year Five was listening to Miss Patel reading a passage about Sir Francis Drake’s travels from a thin hardback book with a bright picture of his ship, the
Golden Hind
, on the front. Colleen McLain and Andrea Carney looked at her and whispered behind their hands to each other. Colleen McLain was very clever; she always finished her work faster than everyone else and would sit straight in her chair, her arm waving rhythmically in the air: “
Miiiiiiiiiiiiiss.
Miiiiiiiiiiiss
.”
She had reddish brown hair in a long bob, and often, when strands of her hair came loose from where she had tucked them behind her ears (she never wore her hair in a ponytail or braid), instead of pushing them back, she would chew the ends, leaving the strands darker, wet and coated with pale globules of saliva.
Jess thought it was disgusting.
Colleen thought Jess was disgusting, although it was never clear why. It was a different thing every day. Mostly, when Jess didn’t want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? Once you let people know anything about what you think, that’s it, you’re dead. Then they’ll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.
There was no way that anyone was ever going to get into her mind. Not ever. Fine, she’d do the work, yes, fine. Fine, she’d sit with a straight back and crossed legs, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt:
Who can sit up the straightest? Me, me, me!
Yes, she could do all that, but after that, something in her said:
They should leave
me
alone and let
me
read my books, let
me
think my thoughts.
If they pushed her too far with their requests for her to open up, interact more, make friends, she would scream. They knew it. She’d done it before.
Despite the
(disgusting)
chewed hair, Colleen was friends with everyone in the class, even though some would quarrel with her when she got too bossy, which was often. She wouldn’t get bossy in an outright way, but she would force people to see things from her perspective through a simple tool: scorn.
“Oh my Lord,” she’d say, looking to heaven as if God was nodding in silent agreement with her, “you’re not
really
going to do that, are you?”
And Andrea Carney would titter disdainfully somewhere behind Colleen’s left shoulder, or maybe, for variety, her right.
If some hapless child organised the class at playtime for a game of Bulldog on the rare occasion the biggest playing space in the Juniors’ playground could be wrested from the Year Six basketball boys, they would look at her in alarm. If Colleen didn’t play, then Andrea wouldn’t play, and if Andrea didn’t play, then Sonia, who was Andrea’s cousin, wouldn’t play, and if Sonia wouldn’t play, then Alison Carr, the prettiest girl in the class, wouldn’t play . . . and so on. Tunde Coker and Samantha Robinson, two people who always tried to get the class together and make peace between warring factions, were the ones who most often fell victim to Colleen McLain’s sarcasm.
Sometimes they would rebel—Samantha had pulled Colleen’s hair after school one day and scratched Andrea when she had tried to come to her best friend’s defence—but mostly they would sigh and give in, because “Colleen’s all right really.”
Jess, who saw everything but participated in nothing, observed Colleen’s little attacks to secure her permanent leadership, and felt most sorry for Tunde Coker. He actually made an effort to talk to Jess whenever he saw her, bravely struggling to revive a conversation that died almost before it started. Jess would feel like turning away in despair, unable to explain that she just couldn’t say anything worthwhile when other people were talking to her, but also unable to say anything friendly to dispel the feeling Tunde jokingly expressed that she “didn’t like him much.”
Jess liked Tunde Coker quite a lot—the habit he had of digging his hands so deep into the pockets of his tracksuit trousers that it looked as if he had two hand-sized bumps growing out of the sides of his legs; the long, slow, lopsided smile that he smiled when someone said or did something funny. He rarely laughed, but he also never seemed to take conversation seriously, was constantly smiling as if words washed over him like an impure tide of meaning, searching instead the face of the person he was talking to with his eyes. Yes, she really did like him quite a lot, although she knew that he, much like any other boy in their class, would do anything the blond, dimpled Alison Carr asked.
Not that she disliked Alison Carr, either . . . Everyone in their class, except for Colleen McLain, was OK. Even Andrea Carney was OK—she had taken Jess to the school nurse once when Nam Hong had tripped her up in the playground and she had cut her knee badly. That was the problem—everyone was just OK.
Jess sat down, keeping her back straight, as if someone had attached a hook and string to her skull and was yanking the string taut so that her head went up, as she strove to ignore Colleen and Andrea’s glances prickling on her back.
I have a friend an amazing friend who’s coming to see me soon and she’s better than the two of you put together and she listens to me I talked about a poem with her and I don’t care if you don’t like me and and and . . .
“OK, Year Five, settle down, SETTLE DOWN! Get to the tables—we’re going to make some information booklets about Sir Francis Drake now—”
But Miss Patel didn’t get a chance to finish, because just at that moment, Jess bent double and, putting her hands over her eyes, began to scream and scream and scream.
TWO
“Jessamy?”
Jess raised her head from her knees and looked around blearily, her eyes still smarting from her tears. She stared at Mr. Heinz, the headmaster. She recognised him from assembly. His dark brown hair was sprinkled with grey, and his tie stood out from his sleek navy-blue suit because it was red with yellow smiley faces on it.
Mr. Heinz drew a chair out from beneath the clean white nurse’s desk, and sat down. He clasped his hands in his lap, then lifted them, linked them together, pushed the lattice made by his joined fingers outwards. Jess silently watched his hands, her own hands creeping to her face to rub at her eyes. It was quiet.
Say something.
He didn’t.
She lost patience.
“Yes, Mr. Heinz?” she asked, wanting him to say whatever it was that he was here to say, show his concern, his dismay, and then go away so that she could be by herself.
“Jessamy,” he began again. “I wanted to ask you—are you happy in your new class? I mean, obviously, I know that sometimes it all gets a little bit stressful and you, you know, erm, vent your feelings and so on, but in general, is it all right there?”
Jess had calculated one weekend that on average she had at least one serious tantrum in school per week. She had laughed with a kind of embarrassment, thinking
No wonder my class thinks
I’m weird
. Was it getting boring?
She remembered how, one day, Colleen McLain had said something pretty horrible. Colleen had been with Andrea and Andrea’s cousin Sonia, and she had said loudly, with several glances to make sure Jessamy was listening, “Maybe Jessamy has all these ‘attacks’ because she can’t make up her mind whether she’s black or white!”
Jess hadn’t known what to think about what Colleen had just said,
(I mean, is it true?)
but she knew that her mum would have gone mentalist.
So she hadn’t told her.
“Sir,” Jess said finally, in a small, polite voice, “I hate being in that class, but I have to go to school, so I might as well not complain.”
He did not seem surprised by what she said; if he had, she would have thought him an idiot—after all, he must have at least discussed her with Miss Patel, if not noticed all the times that she’d had to go home after a particularly bad tantrum when they couldn’t get her to settle.
Jess realised another thing.
She hated the word “settle.”
Mr. Heinz cleared his throat.
“You could always go back to Year Four,” he said.
Jess almost laughed at him outright, hysteria bubbling in her throat as she remembered his visit to her house to speak to her parents about moving her up to Year Five. Her mother had looked long at her, an assessing sort of look, as if she wasn’t sure whether to object or to be proud that her daughter was going to be advanced “a whole class,” as she put it—as if someone could be moved up by half a class. Offering the plate of biscuits to Mr. Heinz, she had said in a matter-of-fact, somewhat Nigerian manner, that she had no objection to Jessamy’s being moved up a year. After all, it wasn’t irrevocable, was it, and there would be a trial period first. Mr. Heinz had taken a biscuit. Yes, Jessamy would think later, laughing, that her mother had been very Nigerian about it, had hidden her pride. Give her any scenario, and that calm acceptance that Nigerian children might be singled out for anything would emerge:
What is that I hear you say? You
have randomly and spontaneously decided to elect my daughter as Prime
Minister? Well, all I can say is: good choice
.
But her father—Jess had watched him turn the lenses of his glasses towards him and stare at them as if they were another pair of eyes looking back. He looked around the living room before speaking, and Jess followed his gaze: he seemed to be taking in the dark-red sofa and chairs, the plum-coloured light filtering out from the lampshade. He fiddled with his glasses again and seemed to be hesitating.
“It’s, erm, not Jess keeping up that I worry about,” he had said, his usually buoyant voice sounding almost muffled. Jess, her mother and Mr. Heinz waited to see what exactly he
had
been worrying about.
“Erm, well, I just thought maybe she might not actually, you know, like it.”
Sarah Harrison laughed, and so did Mr. Heinz. Jessamy had heard and was glad to hear that her father worried about these things; she was starting to think that no one did. She took a small bite of her bourbon biscuit.
“Well, we did say that nothing’s definite until Jessamy’s tried it out,” Mr. Heinz said. Jess looked at him guardedly—he laughed with his mouth open too wide.