All the metaforks in the road

Short story

All the metaforks in the road

‘I’m afraid Cameron and Carolyn have concerns,’ Elaine, our headteacher, tells me. ‘Nothing that can’t be fixed.’

A shaft of sunlight from the window behind her brightens abruptly, lighting up her hair and darkening her face. For moments I’m sitting before a graven, oracular image. I squint against the dazzle. The graven image gets up to pull down the blind and turns back into Elaine, who sits again, clasping smooth hands on the desk. My own entwined fingers look like newborn rats in a heap. I withdraw them to my lap.

Rats is what I remember most about last year, when I was assisting Annette in Year Three. Out of pure divilment, she chose rats for our ‘class pet’. I was the one who mainly looked after them. Maybe it was because of that that we got on so well. Or seemed to anyway.

Cameron and Carolyn each chose tankfuls of easier-to-manage fish.

Elaine starts on the concerns. My contribution during that last maths observation was minimal. I didn’t deal with Harvey’s bad behaviour during assembly. Despite instructions to simply initial children’s reading comments, I use up valuable time writing long responses. I stand around in Cameron’s class.

Stand around? That at least’s not true. That at least. Everyone knows I’m not lazy. Don’t I often stay late to finish things off – like those reading comments?

But the ‘concerns’ have piled up like sticks in a game of Spillikins. I’m not nimble enough to extract any single one and tackle it.

‘It might be helpful, Ruth, if you shadowed Janet for a day or two, watched how she does things in class,’ Elaine says. ‘We’d like you to do that.’

Shadow Janet? Who’s only been working here three years to my seven, and is about two decades younger than me?

As Elaine’s request sinks in, I feel a change that is almost chemical inside my head, turning its contents dense and dark.

Elaine closes the meeting. Mechanically, I thank her and head for the staff toilet. My face in the toilet mirror is unfamiliar, its shadows misplaced. My face upsets me. Both Cameron and Carolyn are younger even than Janet, and glaringly good-looking. At an age when I was serving tables and writing plays in verse nobody wanted, Cameron and Carolyn radiate enough authority to take charge of thirty children each, plus a stranded old bird like me.

I can’t remember which Year Four class I should be in. I enter Cameron’s. The children are out of their seats, collecting literacy books from their trays. I head for the only square metre of the room I can claim as mine, my desk, which I kitted out in September with a need for harmony and a weakness for stationery, but also with a vague desire to outshine every other desk in the school.

Halfway across, the writing on Cameron’s flipchart hooks my attention and I pause in the middle of the classroom, trying to make sense of it.

DESCRIBE THE CREATURE’S EYES USING YOUR LITERACY TOOLKIT

His eyes are as big as watermelons.

His eyes are watermelons.

His eyes are as green as emeralds

His pupils – entrancing black holes – are dropped into the depths of the emerald ocean.

This is how they’re teaching metaphors. You write a simile, then cross out the ‘as big as’ or ‘as green as’ and, hey presto, you’ve got yourself a metaphor.

The entrancing black holes do send me into a kind of trance, though. Can you drop a hole into a sea? Yes, you can. The Beatles did it in the only part of Yellow Submarine I remember – the Sea of Holes. John picked a hole up, held it vertically, disappeared his arm into it, pulled his arm out and dropped the hole back down. That part did entrance me. I must have been thirteen.

Cameron sees me staring. ‘Are you OK?’ Her tone is of cool surprise at seeing me there.

‘Fine.’ My tone is… withdrawn? Challenging? Anyway, it’s the wrong tone.

Hers sharpens. In response, I suppose. ‘You look teary.’ Really? My eyes feel hot, but I’m not crying. ‘It’s upsetting the children.’

‘Who’s upset?’ I look around, seeking evidence. Holly and Dora are twisted our way, heads almost touching. Hungry for intrigues I’ve no doubt, knowing them, not distressed.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be with Carolyn now anyway?’ Cameron asks.

I head for Carolyn’s class. I’ve barely reached my desk there – just as lovingly accoutred by me as my other desk – and am trying to decipher my note to myself from yesterday, when Carolyn turns round from the smartboard and says, ‘You’re supporting Shanice now, aren’t you?’

Startled, I check the laminated timetable they’ve recently decided I need. It does indeed say Shanice. ‘Yes.’ I rummage for my whiteboard pen.

‘Please support her.’ Carolyn says, as if I’m not on the very point of doing that.

I go to the front of the class and sit beside Shanice. She glances at me over her bare, brown, well-padded shoulder. She has a glitter star stencilled on her cheek, and sometimes gets Mars Bars for breakfast – at least that’s what she told me last year, when she used to like working with me. ‘I don’t need help.’ she says, not even whispering, and covers up what she’s written on her whiteboard.

‘Fine by me,’ I mutter back, then start breathing deeply because now I do feel tears pushing to come out. Shanice notices. She cannot listen to a word the teacher says, but she’s a genius when it comes to feelings.

‘Are you going to cry?’

‘Absolutely not, shhh,’ I hiss.

‘You’re going to cry.’

Carolyn turns around. ‘Why is it so noisy at that table?’

Normally I might flash Shanice a look of entreaty, but I’m busy with my breathing. Shanice starts doodling on her whiteboard, an activity absolutely forbidden. I could try to take the pen off her, but I’m afraid of her reaction, and don’t.

Carolyn has a picture of a sunset up on the smartboard, and she’s been writing her own description of it in front of the children.

High above the gentle waters of the ocean, there is a luscious garden of colours painted across the sky. Swimming gracefully amongst the heavens, which smile down at the remote land, are clouds as soft as candyfloss.

‘Have I used a simile?’ Carolyn asks. ‘Yes.’ She is underlining different sections of her passage. ‘Expanded noun phrase? Yes. Personification? Yes. Metaphor? Yes. Relative clause? Yes. In just two sentences I’ve followed all my success criteria.’

Haven’t you just.

Success criteria, though. A handy phrase I’ve never thought of calling upon. A handy way of managing that terrifying mirage of a word: success. What was my success criterion this morning? To get to school on time. Ergo: success! Thus is a word without edges or form cut down to size. If my criterion had been get through the day intact, I would of course have failed.

The half-lowered blinds glow with the force of the May sun outside. Thirty trapped eight and nine-year-olds, two adults, a tankful of fish, as well as those many smiling heavens and flippered clouds, have created a sweaty troposphere that’s just short of liquid. (Whatever troposphere actually means.)

Carolyn has written a ‘bad’ sentence on the board. He opened the door. It’s the best sentence I’ve seen up there all term. The children have to ‘improve’ it by sticking a metaphor in front. A metaphor? To open that sentence? Everyone on Shanice’s table is asking me for help and I can’t think what the hell sort of a metaphor could go there. I can’t think what a metaphor is anymore.

‘Let’s just give the door an adjective,’ I tell Shanice.

Shanice is still tilting her whiteboard away from me to stop me seeing. ‘Which one’s an adjective?’

A bitter smile creeps into my face. There, in those four words, rests my case. ‘What’s the door like? Like what colour?’ I’m hurrying her because any minute now Carolyn will order us to put down our pens, and we’ll have nothing to show. Shanice writes something, rubs it out with her finger, glances my way despite herself, then writes something else.

That meeting with Elaine. Have Carolyn and Cameron said anything to me about ‘concerns’. I don’t think so. I’ve been kept in the dark, right? Oh. Kept in the dark – isn’t that a metaphor? My brain isn’t up to this. It’s years since I threw my last literary effort into the bin.

But now my mind is hopping (metaphor?) with metaphors. There’s more here than meets the eye, above all, a distinct smell of rat. Goodness, even above all is a metaphor. The language is riddled (metaphor?) with the things. I see the chance for a message to Carolyn.

‘Shanice!’ I tap her arm. She’s busy rubbing out gold, her third colour. ‘I’ve got a metaphor, write it down. Smelling a rat, she looked through the whatever-colour-or-size-you-want door.’

‘How’s that a metaphor? And it’s he not she.’

I write it on my whiteboard for her to copy. You don’t have to tell me it’s bad practice, I know it, but we’re in a hurry here. ‘It’s a metaphor because she doesn’t really smell a rat. It’s…’

‘She does smell a rat. Because it’s a rat door. Look.’ She has replaced gold with rat. I’ve always thought Shanice is not as dumb as the teachers think, but now, for a moment, I think she’s way too clever for either her good or mine. Because I like her addition. It’s even more apposite.

‘Pens down,’ Carolyn tells the class. The class obey at once. She’s good on control. She’s magnificent on control. ‘Eva, did you manage to add a metaphor to this sentence?’

Of course Eva did. She reads from her whiteboard. ‘The brave lion opened the door.’

‘Excellent.’

And on it goes. Two more children read out their ‘metaphorical’ sentences: The curious cat opened the door; The mischievous monkey, etc. Same method as Cameron’s: just take the as out of curious as a cat and there’s your instant, classroom-ready ‘metaphor’.

Carolyn turns to Shanice, as I knew she would. ‘Shanice, what did you write?’

I sit up straighter. Listen hard, Carolyn, this is for you. Shanice reads out our sentence in her strong, expressive voice. ‘Smelling a rat, she looked through the rat door.’

There’s an interesting pause.

‘Alright,’ says Carolyn. ‘Leaving aside the changes I didn’t ask for, how would you describe “Smelling a rat”?’

That question naturally does for Shanice. She gapes, then stares back down at her whiteboard, as if that will flash the answer. ‘Net-a-thor’ I hiss without moving my lips. Shanice, instinctive survivor, realises from the way Carolyn is questioning her that the right answer couldn’t possibly be ‘metaphor’, and asks, ‘Rat perfume?’ Someone on her table snickers, someone else mutters ‘a stink’, but rat perfume is Shanice’s delicate answer.

Carolyn glances at me coldly, and tells Shanice, ‘It’s a fronted adverbial.’

Fronted adverbial. That grammatical upstart.

‘In future…’ Carolyn’s talking to me now. ‘In future, can we please stick to the exercise? It’s confusing for the children otherwise.’ She turns away to scroll the smartboard image on.

‘It is also a metaphor,’ I say after a heartbeat, a heartbeat during which I should, of course, have clamped my tongue.

The class are wonderfully quiet as Carolyn twists round to take this in. I bet they’ve sensed for quite a while we don’t get on. ‘If you’re looking through a rat door,’ Carolyn says, ‘you’re smelling a rat literally.’

I can’t stop myself. ‘Not if the rat door itself is metaphorical.’

‘No one looks metaphorically through a rat door.’ She returns to her scrolling. ‘For our next exercise…’

‘I’m metaphorically looking through one right now,’ I hear myself say, eyes on her. I mean to say it with sadness. I think I mean it to be inaudible, but the class is so quiet my words feel their way all over the room.

Still with her finger on the scrolling button, still facing the smartboard, Carolyn says, ‘Please read with Shanice in the library. After that…’ She scrolls down further, leaving the after that cloud condensing in the air. We’re positively raining metaphors now.

When I grasp the door handle it starts a discreet accusatory rattle. Because I really am in the wrong now. Shanice hasn’t moved. She has her arms crossed and is scowling down at her whiteboard, not seeing me.

There was a time last year she’d have jumped up if asked to read outside with me. When a volunteer was needed to help me with the rats, her hand (and everyone else’s too) would shoot up. Last year, Annette had me doing little spelling groups in the library. But the only child Carolyn gets me working with now is Shanice, and she’s come to feel the stigma of it. Now at playtime she’s never with the Year Fours. She’s in the ‘grotto’, getting married to oddball Oliver from Year Three. The marriage happens every day, with variations. Once, Shanice mislaid the bridal veil she keeps permanently in her bookbag, and her wails, heard as far as the staffroom, seemed to slice open the school afternoon. At least to me they did.

Carolyn’s curt ‘Now!’ gets Shanice up out of her chair. ‘Also, please return your library book. It’s not helpful to your reading, and months overdue.’ Scowl exponentially deepening, Shanice goes to her tray to retrieve the book. ‘Get her a Lime book, please.’ This last must be for me, though she’s not looking my way. ‘After that…’ Carolyn really can inject a frightening kind of ice into her voice ‘…see if Annette can find you something to do.’

As soon as we are out of the classroom and some metres beyond Carolyn’s domain, Shanice hunches her shoulders, hugs the library book tight to her chest and shortens her footsteps to an inch-at-a-time shuffle. Quite the performer, Shanice is.

‘That’s fine,’ I say. Though the only fine thing is the day outside, heedlessly beaming itself in through each of the four corridor windows. ‘I’m not in any hurry either,’ I say. Though I cannot wait to bury myself, possibly forever, in my single, studio-flat bed.

When we reach the door to the library, which is beside Annette’s classroom, even Shanice’s shuffle stops. Her delicate eyebrows are yanked together as by a cruel drawstring. She presses her back into the corner opposite, and bows deeper over her book. Maybe it’s not all performance.

I count silently to ten, all the while with an excellent view of the top of Shanice’s bowed head. Her black hair is neatly parted in the middle and drawn either side into short bushy bunches, tied with ribbons that match her pink, white and orange-striped dress, the straps of which are tied over her round shoulders in little bows. The line of her jaw against her neck is a single soft curve. Even though she’s big, too big perhaps, it hits me – had my subjection in the classroom made me forget? – she’s only eight years old.

I finish counting. ‘Come on Shanice, let’s go.’

Shanice does a sharp, pained grunt, and hugs the book tighter to her, shifting it in such a way that the title shows. Tarlina, the Rat Princess. Maybe it’s not me. Or not all me. ‘D’you want to read it?’ I ask.

‘She said I can’t.’

‘I think you can.’ I mean, why worry about burning the toast when the house is on fire?

She raises her head and stares at me. ‘Are you going to get the sack?’

How does Shanice know these things? ‘Let’s go,’ I say again.

Shanice lowers the book from her chest, with a dawning realisation, I imagine, that rules are degenerating into an unstable state. ‘Can we go see the rats?’

‘The rats?’

‘In there.’ Shanice points at the Year Three classroom.

‘Not right in the middle of…’ But I can see through the glass door-panels that the classroom’s empty.

‘They’re on a trip today.’

See how Shanice knows stuff that even Carolyn has forgotten?

Inside, we find the usual messy fallout from trying to get thirty children out on a trip: a reject pile of school-trip backpacks, the kitchen crates that had carried up their packed lunches, empty but for two oily-skinned Granny Smiths, some unwanted cheese and lettuce sandwiches, and broken, kitchen-made cookies spilling from a paper bag.

The rat cage fills a deep alcove in the furthest corner. It’s huge. The two rats are sleeping in their hammock tunnel near the top. The brown one’s nose is poking out.

‘That’s Nosy,’ Shanice cries. ‘Hey Nosy! Where’s Dozy?’

‘Shhh! She’s inside there. Dozing.’ The rats were aptly named by the children last year, with, as I recall, a little help from me. ‘Read them your story.’

‘They don’t understand stories.’

‘They’ll understand your voice.’ That, whatever it means, works on Shanice. I throw over two cushions from the book corner’s stack. Shanice plops herself emphatically down onto the largest and the book falls open on her lap. As I lower myself onto the other, I glimpse large, easy font and the sumptuous picture of a pretty, charmingly dressed rat in a forest of ancient trees and gold cage bars. I see why Shanice doesn’t want to part with this. ‘Read away.’ I lean back against the wall and close my eyes.

‘There once lived a beautiful rat princess in a golden cage…’

Shanice reads as if words are a delicious feast, even when she doesn’t fully get what she’s reading. She gets this story though.

‘Her bed was made of silk. Her meals were of the most exk… exk…’ A pause.

‘Exquisite?’

‘…exquisite cheeses and berries. But she never had anyone to… Guess what Mum put on my tray yesterday.’

‘What?’

‘Teenchy mini cheeses with cranberries inside. Like in the story! Mum always puts mini surprises on my tray.’

I remember about her tray. Mum gives Shanice her supper on a tray to eat alone in her room, because Mum has to go out to clean offices in the evening. There were questions about this last year, but it was deemed alright, because Mum’s invalid sister lives there too, in the third room. It’s just three bedrooms, a shower-room, and a kitchen that’s too small for eating in.

‘Nice. Carry on,’ I say.

‘Through the bars, Tarlina could see a long, shining path. “I wish, I wish,” she singed – sighed? – she sighed and…’

I don’t hear how Tarlina reaches the shining path because the sludge in my head and belly is slithering around too unpleasantly for listening. Have I ever said anything so rude as what I said in class just now? I’m not sure I want to see another day.

Shanice’s voice sharpens. ‘Metafork? Metafork!’

‘What?’

‘That word you said was a rat smell.’

‘It’s only a rat smell if…’ I let out a groan, exasperated with the whole ‘metaphor’ mullarkey. ‘Anyway, it’s unfair on rats. Rats aren’t bad.’

‘Why? Is it a bad smell?’

‘What?’

‘A metafork.’

‘Read the sentence again.’

‘After eating the tiny pie, Princess Tarlina walked on until she…’ Shanice’s voice drops like a pantomime dame’s ‘…metaforkt… in the road.’ A sly pause. ‘Was that a…? Did she… mega…?’ Shanice covers half her face with one hand and smothered giggles splutter out between her fingers.

Something like a malformed giggle escapes me too. ‘Show me the book.’ How is it Shanice hasn’t seen the spaces?

The spaces between met, a and fork are narrow. Shanice added the final t herself.

‘She met a fork, Shanice. A fork you eat with. Except… it’s not a fork you eat with, it’s when…’ But Shanice has stopped listening. Why would she listen to such obvious nonsense? ‘What’s next?’

‘There stood a post with two signs pointing two ways. The first said This Way…’ Shanice’s gaze hops to the facing page ‘…music, dancing and feasting. Everyone said Princess Tarlina was the loveliest bride in…’

‘Wait! What’s happened? You’ve skipped a pile. What did the sign say?’

Shanice thinks about this. ‘Maybe it said This way to the Wedding.’

‘But stories don’t work like that.’ I take the book off her. The page numbers jump from eight to seventeen. The final two facing pages are a single colour plate of the wedding. Tarlina’s dress looks as if it’s made of moonlight. Upright to the sky, between and behind the trees, between and behind the gorgeously dressed animal guests, stand the golden bars.

Shanice tells me the book had only those pages when she got it.

‘Know what I think, Shanice? This is a magic book, and you should keep it. Just don’t tell anyone.’

Shanice does a great performance of gasping and stretching her eyes at my wickedness, but interrupts herself. ‘There’s Dozy! They woke up!’

The two little rats, one brown, one grey, have climbed down from their hammock. They clutch at the bars with pink fingers, their anxiously tilted eyes watching us. What next? they seem to ask. What next have these noisy gods in store for us?

‘They know it’s us!’ Shanice cries.

‘Maybe.’

‘They’re hungry!’ Shanice heaves herself up onto her feet and charges over to the crate with the packed-lunch leftovers. She’s ripping the cellophane off a sandwich when I catch sight of the clock on the wall behind her. ‘Ten past one! Your lunchtime!’

Shanice stares at me, mouth opening. She bends forward, sending her arms backwards in a mystery-play depiction of horror, and shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to go to lunch. Please.’ One hand is all spread fingers. The other still holds the sandwich. ‘Please. Can I stay and feed the rats? I’ll eat a sandwich.’

‘But… and it’s nearly your playtime.’

She shakes her head faster. Of course. Her bridegroom, Oliver, is away on the Year Three trip.

I say no more about it.

Shanice feeds the rats sandwich-cheese flakes through the bars. They take them in their pink fingers and nibble. ‘I love their baby hands! I love how they eat! I wish, I wish…’ She’s quoting from the book. ‘I wish Dozy was pretty like Tarlina.’

‘She is pretty. She just hasn’t got those lovely clothes.’

‘She’s so pretty,’ Shanice cries, as if she thought it all along. ‘They got to get married.’

‘I think they’re sisters.’ Though I’m not clear whether they’re to be married to each other or to as yet unmaterialised rat-beaux.

Shanice is gazing at the rugs and cushions of the book corner opposite. The sun has moved to beam itself in through the window there. It used to make the corner uncomfortably hot, but Annette has draped silky pink stuff overhead to catch the rays. Now the drapes are heavy with pink light, the corner glows like a jewel, and a long strip of pinky brightness lies across the floor, heading for the cage.

‘There’s the shining path,’ I say. Unwisely.

Shanice straightens up, does a little galumph towards it, and cries, ‘It’s the wedding place!’

She turns to look at the cage, turns back towards the glowing book corner, turns again, then again, like an oscillating fan. ‘But they’re in the cage,’ she says dully.

Dullness.

A room drops into my mind, just like a hole into sludgy sea. Shanice alone on her bed of an evening, after she’s eaten all her mini surprises, staring at her own outstretched legs and toes, or at a screen. The room happens to have the dull, pin-striped wallpaper of the basement bedsit I wasted my youth in.

Old pangs that I thought had died of irrelevance jab at me. I open the cage door.

Shanice stares. ‘Are you opening the cage door?’

‘Are you asking me if I’m opening the cage door?’

She does the suspicious squint my question deserves, learnt from telly, I’m sure. ‘They’re not allowed out into the classroom.’

‘How else will they get married?’

She blinks at this, blinks again, then shouts, ‘ I’m making the sign!’ and canters to the art trolley to rootle. The two rats poke their cautious heads out the cage doorway, weighing up this new, untested option.

Shanice waves a spatula. ‘I couldn’t find a megafork. Only a megaspoon.’

She writes This Way To The Wedding, perfectly spelt, on a label. We stick it to the megaspoon, tape that to a paint bottle and place it strategically on the pink path.

Shanice spreads her arms wide and picks up the crate of left-behind edibles. ‘For the wedding party.’ Unable to see the floor, she trips on the edge of the book-corner rug, crashing with the crate onto the cushions, but gets up at once, too intent for fuss.

She makes a trail of cookie bits along the pink path to entice them to their wedding place – her idea (Annette, I now remember, forbade feeding the rats cookies), then orders me to do the same with bits of apple ‘so they can choose’. I hack off Granny Smith lumps with a plastic knife. Choice, the grand illusion. But maybe we’ve a word for it now: metafork.

The cage, we notice suddenly, has no rats in it. Shanice turns around and around. ‘Where are they?’

‘On their way,’ I say with unaccustomed, fear-driven firmness. I’ve no evidence for it.

Shanice settles herself among the rose-lit cushions, jabbing her finger at the nearby stool to make me sit. She has a sandwich in her hand. She has the book’s wedding-scene picture open on the floor. Her skin and eyes glow in the pink light. Her toes wriggle in their orange flipflops. The bunches stand out either side of her head like pricked-up ears.

Nosy creeps out from under the table and sniffs around. She picks the first piece of apple up in her mouth, comes across the cookie lump and swaps the apple for it. She scurries back into the cage, leaves her booty in a corner and heads back out.

We put out too many pieces. It’s going to take forever.

Nosy goes straight to the next cookie piece, ignoring the apple.

‘There’s Dozy!’ Shanice whispers. ‘She went behind the paper drawers!’

I missed that.

‘Dozy!’ Shanice calls softly, waving her sandwich crust. ‘It’s your wedding day!’ She lays the crust beside a frill of lettuce on the nearest dictionary, and reaches for another sandwich. Nosy’s disappeared again.

Without warning or consideration, the sky darkens outside. Our pink path sinks into the blue of the floor like a fading maiden’s blush. ‘The path… it… is it melting?’ Shanice stutters. Drained of light, our pink canopy sags, while forgotten edges of the classroom regain their status, for example, the clock. I jump to my feet.

‘Jesus. It’s five past two.’

Had I imagined time could go on hold same as reality?

Playtime will be over. Carolyn will have taken the register and discovered Shanice not there. An urgent search will be underway. And the rats are lost. I take a step towards the door, then back, my shoes grinding cookie lumps into the floor.

‘Shanice. You have to go back to class. Right now. Shanice?’

She’s frowning at her arm. She wipes it with her hand then stares at her palm. Blood is streaked across it. ‘I’m bleeding.’ Tears lacquer her eyes. There’s a long, shallow scratch between elbow and wrist. The cracked plastic crate must have done that when she fell. I’m terrified her tears will turn into wails. I find tissues for her. She presses one to her arm, printing a jagged red line across it. Just once, humbly almost, she sobs, ‘I want my mum…’ I cannot grant even that. I feel the hole in the room that’s me. All I’m not and never knew how to be.

I sit on the stool to face her. I babble. About how the ointment in the First Aid Box (if I can just find it) will fix her cut. How if she leaves the book open under the cage, the rats will feel the magic. How she invented a word.

‘What word?’ Shanice asks sullenly, wiping her eyes with the blood-printed tissue.

‘Metafork.’

‘You said it was a fork. That you couldn’t eat with.’

‘No, that’s “fork”! Metafork is… like the rats always choosing cookies. Or the pages melting from your story.’

‘Pages don’t melt.’

‘OK, but remember how you said the path melted?’

‘It did melt.’ She’s getting her spark back. Keep arguing.

‘But not how ice-cream melts. Only like a metaphor…’ Oh why’ve I resurrected that word?

‘The bad smell word? Bad smells don’t melt either.’

‘Nobody’s asking them to!’

Shanice tears bits of tissue onto her lap, carefully, as if arranging cherries on a cake, then looks up, as at a wicked revelation. ‘They could melt if… if you made an ice cream out of…’ She bites her lips, eyes gone round. She lets her lips go. ‘If… you made it…’ She tries to bite her lips shut again, but they fight themselves free.

‘No! I don’t need to know!’

The rats, I notice, are back inside their cage – the only place they know to be – and are munching on their cookie loot as if on dark secrets they can only crack by eating.

‘An ice cream… out of…’ The laughter explodes from Shanice in light-filled hoots. Her nose tightens up, her fingers curl towards her wrists. It’s so ridiculous how the unmentionable gets her that I’m tittering too, then cackling like crazy. And all the day’s blows, and even this roomful of green, gnomish little chairs are hitting the funnybone behind my chest.

Elaine opens the door and stands there, taking us in. My head clears of everything but that. So this is happening. But how could it not be happening? How could it not? I have no way to ask this of Elaine but with my gaze, from which I cannot totally erase the smile.

Note: the characters and events in this story are completely invented by me, with the exception of one teacher’s description on her flipchart of a creature’s eyes, and the other teacher’s description on her smartboard of a sunset. These were witnessed and noted by me while I was working in a primary school.