London, now
London. The first week of my new life.
The headteacher’s office at Oakfield School.
I am trying to seem normal. It is an increasing challenge. The past is trying to burst through.
No.
It is already through. The past is always here. The room smells of instant coffee, disinfectant and acrylic carpet, but there is a poster of Shakespeare.
It is the portrait you always see of him. Receding hairline, pale skin, the blank eyes of a stoner. A picture that doesn’t really look like Shakespeare.
I return my focus to the headteacher, Daphne Bello. She is wearing orange hoop earrings. She has a few white hairs amid the black. She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.
‘I’ve been here a long while.’
‘Really?’ I say.
Outside a distant police siren fades into nothing.
‘Time,’ she says, ‘is a strange thing, isn’t it?’
She delicately holds the brim of her paper cup of coffee as she places it down next to her computer.
‘The strangest,’ I agree.
I like Daphne. I like this whole interview. I like being back here, in London, back in Tower Hamlets. And to be in an interview for an ordinary job. It is so wonderful to feel, well,ordinaryfor once.
‘I have been a teacher now for three decades. And here for two. What a depressing thought. All those years. I am so old.’ She sighs through her smile.
I have always found it funny when people say that.
‘You don’t look it,’ is the done thing to say, so I say it.
‘Charmer! Bonus points!’ She laughs a laugh that rises through an entire two octaves.
I imagine the laugh as an invisible bird, something exotic, from Saint Lucia (where her father was from), flying off into the grey sky beyond the window.
‘Oh, to be young, like you,’ she chuckles.
‘Forty-one isn’t young,’ I say, emphasising the ludicrous number.Forty-one. Forty-one. That is what I am.
‘You look very well.’
‘I’ve just come back from holiday. That might be it.’
‘Anywhere nice?’
‘Sri Lanka. Yes. It was nice. I fed turtles in the sea . . .’
‘Turtles?’
‘Yes.’
I look out of the window and see a woman with a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform head onto the playing field. She stops, turns to them, and I see her face as she speaks unheard words. She is wearing glasses and jeans and a long cardigan that flaps gently in the wind, and she pulls her hair behind her ear. She is laughing now, at something a pupil is saying. The laugh lights up her face, and I am momentarily mesmerised.
‘Ah,’ Daphne says, to my embarrassment when she sees where I am looking. ‘That’s Camille, our French teacher. There’s no one like her. The kids love her. She always gets them out and about . . . Al fresco French lessons. It’s that kind of school.’
