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Eight blank looks.
‘Mick Jagger,’ Reggie says, a split second before the silence becomes painful. She wants to kiss his bald pate and saycheers mate.
‘Very good, Reggie.’ She writesMick Jaggeron the whiteboard. ‘So, can anyone think of a line that rhymes with Jagger?’
‘Walked with a swagger?’ Reggie suggests.
‘Brilliant, Reggie.’ Her heart fills. Of course. Reggie is a musician. He will have a good ear. She writes it up, hoping the others will have the confidence to join in now. ‘So, the third line can be any length at all and it doesn’t have to rhyme with the first two. Anyone?’
Nothing. Her heart shrivels.
‘How about,’ she says, ‘“But sometimes when he did a dance.”’ Without waiting, she writes it on the board and turns again to face the class. Some of them are almost smiling, though it could, as her mother would say, be wind. ‘Can anyone think of a last line to rhyme with dance?’
‘“A million girls were in the mood for romance”?’ It is Aisha, her face eager. She is very pretty, Samantha notices. Huge brown eyes like a doll’s.
‘Aisha, thank you, that’s perfect.’ She completes the poem on the whiteboard and reads it aloud:
‘Mick Jagger
Walked with a swagger.
But sometimes when he did a dance,
A million girls were in the mood for romance.’
‘That’s great! And did you see how easy it was?’ She wonders if the class can hear her heart beating. ‘Once you’ve it written down, of course, you can play with it. You can change one of the words, or a whole sentence … You can say “All the girls in the world”, or “a sexy dance”, whatever, because there’s no limit on line length or the number or syllables like there is in other forms. If you stick to those simple rules, you will nail it, trust me.’
The students bend their heads and write.
Samantha’s shoulders straighten. Her chest swells. Even the muscles in her jaw relax. After that, the class passes quickly. She talks to them about rhyme schemes, about comic timing. They attempt a clerihew and seem lost in concentration.
‘Thank you so much for a lovely first class,’ she says as the lesson draws to a close, realising that she’s completely forgotten about Emily, about Peter. She’s even forgotten to be nervous. ‘If you can pass your poems along to this end, I’ll take them home and mark them. For homework, I’d like you to have a go at writing something you’ll all know from school: a limerick. Don’t worry if you find it difficult, but have a go, for fun, as we’ll be pulling them apart next week in class. See you then.’
They file out. All except Lana, who hands her the stack of collected poems with a solemn expression.
‘What is limerick?’ she asks.
Bugger. Her first week and already she’s infringed the guidelines of equality and diversity.
‘I’m sorry, Lana, I should have explained that better. Tell you what, just look it up on Google and have a go, but don’t worry about it if you can’t.’ She scribbles her email address on a scrap of paper. ‘If you’re really stuck, drop me an email,’ she says, handing it to Lana – she shouldn’t really, but she can’t see the harm.
Lana gives a grave nod and makes her way out.
Samantha leaves the college buoyed up with pride. She has lost so much confidence since the pregnancy, so much energy too. But today, she’s managed a class on her own! No one has corrected her, no one has run screaming from the room and no one has pointed at her and yelled, ‘Fraud!’
It is only when she is on the bus that she takes out her folder to read through the clerihews.
There were eight students.
There are nine poems.
Ten
Samantha can hear Emily crying before she puts her key in the lock, a sound that amplifies as she pushes the door open. The hallway is dark, even though it’s only quarter to three in the afternoon. The soft tinkle of classical music drifts under the closed door of the living room.
Peter is on the sofa, listening to Debussy, one hand across his eyes.
‘Peter?’ she says. ‘Can’t you hear the baby?’
