Ceila5

Celia cried at having to go back to school, but the tears came from a soft place in her and were easily wiped away with Auntie Margaret’s apron making do as an auxiliary hanky.

Uncle George didn’t stir until he was handed a cup of tea and a bit of toast. He didn’t like to rush things during the cold winter mornings. Auntie Margaret was up first taking the damp Monday edge off Celia’s clothes by running over her shirt with an iron and putting her school jumper in front of the fire. It was their quiet time before Celia filled their morning with the welcome noise of youth.

‘C’mon Cilly get up.’ Auntie Margaret banged through the girl’s bedroom door ready to do battle. But the girl was already sitting shivering on the edge of the bed, her white feet sticking out of her long nightgown like a duck’s.

Celia gave Auntie Margaret a wan smile, thin as English tea, which was enough to reassure her, or at least send her feet slippering and sliding up the hall and into the heat of the living room. Celia’s fingers found an old coat in the cupboard that she sometimes used to place on top of an old cardie, as an indoor overcoat; house clothes, layered as in Victorian times, as an antidote to the cold. It was now too small for her, but too good to fling away. The hall was sometime colder than her room and she could wear it whilst going the toilet. She’d need to take it off to wash, but only if there was hot water. Otherwise it was just a splash of the face and rushing through to the living room shrieking like an Indian, before plonking herself down in front of the of the one bar on the electric fire, which seemed to throw off more light than heat. Auntie Margaret would be waiting and would bring her through some toast with margarine. She thought maybe because it was a special day, her first back at school after she’d been suspended that there would have been orange marmalade, but there wasn’t. She took as long as she could eating the toast, picking at it with her tongue and not her teeth, to slow down time and perhaps make herself late, so that she wouldn’t have to go in at all. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece was indifferent to her temporal mastications and went around at a uniform pace. She pulled her school jumper off the rack of washing in front of the fire, its new washing powder warmth and smell, after she’d put it on, making her think that she too had been spin dried. Her shoes were sitting polished, two black exclamation marks against the carpet, waiting for the white stalks of her feet. She couldn’t put it off any longer. Her school bag was hanging around the door handle ready for her to pick up.

Celia was surprised to see Auntie Margaret standing in the kitchen with her long blue coat on and she wondered for a minute where she was going. But the way she flicked the scarf she was wearing around her neck and smiled let Celia know that she’d been waiting on her. She smiled back, suddenly glad that Auntie Margaret was coming with her and wanted to hold her hand and skip all the way to school with her in tow, but a scowl puckered her face. She could no longer rely on Auntie Margaret and had to fight her own battles.

‘It’s ok Auntie.’ Celia puckered her lips up and leaned forward to kiss her Auntie’s cheek, ‘I can go to school myself now.’ She tried to sound sure of herself and even smile, but the words felt as hollow as empty as gun casing falling from her lips.

‘I’m not going for you Celia. I’m going for me.’ Auntie Margaret continued winding her old black knitted scarf around her neck until she was satisfied it was attached to her body like a noose and not likely to separate this side of life.

Celia was glad because Jo, even on a rainy day with gale force winds, would usually have been waiting for Celia at the bottom of Mountblow Road. If she couldn’t wait any longer to tell her something that was so incredible and she really had to let her know she’d have walked half way up the hill and back down with her again, filling in all the amazing details on the way down. She wasn’t there now and neither was her sister Helen. Celia felt that she’d been initiated into some dark secret world and in the process jumped from childhood to becoming an adult. Nothing seemed predictable. She no longer knew how to behave. All the rules she had learnt as a little girl and all her expectations about herself and what she could do were overwhelmed.

‘Are you ok?’ Auntie Margaret touched her on the back of the neck, her warm hands more reassuring than her words. Other kids seemed not to see them, scurrying past them and away from them, like bumble-bees, with their bright little rucksacks and knapsacks, caught up in their own little groups, as they hurried to school.

‘Fine,’ said Celia, her hand finding Auntie Margaret’s.

The school bell rang. Instead of quickening the pace like everybody else, it brought a kind of lethargy, which only dissipated when they got to the main office entrance. Celia quickly climbed up the stairs in front of her Auntie, as if acting as pathfinder. Auntie Margaret kept her hand firmly on the rail, but her eyes didn’t miss any of the pencilled or ink marked scrawls and what looked like spittle hanging down like a spider’s web from the ceiling ready to snag on the unwary. The Artex walls were similarly pustule and pock marked yellow, when they should have been white. This was such a lovely school she thought, but t didn’t look as if it had been cleaned since the last time she’d been there. She was outraged and felt like bringing a mop and bucket and starting on the stairs right away.

At least the foyer to the main office was reasonably clean, with a potted plant in the corner to at least provide a bit of colour. One of the sliding glass windows was open. Celia stood before it, holding herself upright and trying not to look too scared. A phone rang and the secretary immediately answered it, shutting the window over so that Celia and her Aunt stood outside looking in like goldfish as she mouthed her conversation.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said, painting a smile on her face.

Auntie Margaret motioned for Celia to sit on one of the plush seats pushed up against one of the walls outside the headmaster’s office and pulled herself up to her full height of five-foot-five.

‘Maggie McCune,’ she said, to the secretary, drawing out her full name in a disapproving way, with her straight broad shoulder’s square as a Royal Fusilier, because she’d known her when she’d been a pig-tailed child with no notion of manners and little to eat in their house and she’d known her mother before that and she didn’t want her to forget that for all her airs and secretarial graces there were nothing between them but some fancy clothes and an ability to monkey on the phone. And Maggie McCune seemed to wilt under her gaze, with her hands moving in front of her like cat’s claws pushing bits of paper about and waiting for the phone to ring again. ‘Can you give this to the headmaster?’ Auntie Margaret slipped a brown envelope with the letter in it across the silver ball-bearings and the glass divide between them.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the secretary, fumbling the letter, and pressing a 1 on the phone, ‘I’ll just see if he’s in.’ She smiled a conspiratorial little girl smile, which Auntie Margaret returned, before sitting down beside Celia.

Mr Jordan the headmaster strode out of his office door with his arm’s swinging in a big man dance and stood before them with a beaming smile. He had on one his best two suits and felt the cut gave him extra inches, but when Auntie Margaret stood up she towered above his snooker bald head and even Celia was slightly bigger than him. He ushered them into his office, a copy of the letter that he’d sent out to them already in his hand.

‘I see. I see,’ he said adjusting his specs, ‘you have brought Celia to be re-instated. I won’t keep you there are just a few formalities we have to deal with.’ He looked from one to the other sitting in front of his desk as if they were one big comprehensive family. ‘Tut. Tut,’ he stood up and patted Celia on the head, ‘I think we’ll agree that there will be no more fighting and carrying on.’ He usually said that to cover all contingencies, because it was invariably one or the other.

Celia’s face flushed and she nodded. Mr Jordan handed her a pen. Her reinstatement was on the desk. He’d already signed and dated it.

Before Celia could lean forward and scrawl her name Auntie Margaret pulled her arm back, ‘Hang on a wee minute Cilly,’ she said, her pet name sounding all wrong outside their home and making her blush some more, ‘I just want a wee word with Mr Jordan first. Maybe you can wait outside for a wee minute pet.’

Ceila got up carefully lifting her school bag and trying not to catch Mr Jordan’s eye.

Auntie Margaret grabbed at her wrist. ‘No. Sit down. You need to hear this as well.

She turned to face him behind his desk. ‘I let you hammer my Finbar into the ground. I thought it was different because he was a boy and my George said it was the same in his day. But if you think I’m going to let you do the same to that wee lassie you are sadly mistaken. I’m telling you if you even say an unkind word to her I’ll be waiting in that car park for you.’ Auntie Margaret looked out of the window towards the headmaster’s jet-green Jaguar.

A red blush started at his neck and spread up his face and onto his baldhead so that he had the appearance of a tomato. He looked from one to the other before picking out his words, ‘in all my years at this school…’

Auntie Margaret’s hand flapped and her face became set in a way that Celia knew only too well.

‘…is that a threat…?’Mr Jordan blustered and rose from behind his chair.

Auntie Margaret’s chair scraped as she too stood up and leaned across the desk and in her best English elocution speaking voice she said, ‘it is not a threat. I’m just imparting some information that might benefit you. And if it doesn’t benefit you, at least it benefits me, because at least I’ve told you.’

‘This is outrageous,’ Mr Jordan pressed his buzzer, ‘send for Mr…send for Mr…’

Auntie Margaret was all coolness to his bluster. ‘Away you go to your class Cilly. I’m sorry you had to hear that. But there will be no more bullying and I think Mr Jordan can appreciate that now. Away you go hen. And remember nobody in this school is allowed to give you the belt for any reason without my permission. And I have no intention of giving that permission. I’ve just told the headmaster that.’ She looked up at Mr Jordan. ‘And he looks as if he understands. Don’t you?’

‘I will not be threatened.’ Mr Jordan’s Adam’s apple went up and down like a turkey’s thrapple after finding out it was Christmas.

Celia glanced back. She thought she was the only one to get a red face, but Mr Jordan’s face was as ripe to burst.

‘And another thing,’ Auntie Margaret said, ‘Finbar’s coming back.’ She turned her back and left him stewing as she left his office.