Zara Stoneley - Summer with the Country Village Vet

He’d already sat down again, his head dipped to study the papers on his desk so that he could avoid her. She’d been dismissed.

Lucy stood up and was shocked to realise her legs were trembling. Her whole body was quaking. She fumbled with the door handle, tears bubbling up and blurring her vision, her stomach churning like the sea in a storm. This wasn’t her. She didn’t do wobbly and tears in public.

She felt sick.

***

Lucy put the surprisingly small box, which represented two years of tears, tantrums and triumphs (usually the pupils, occasionally hers) at Starbaston Primary School on the kitchen table. She could scream loudly and set next doors dog off barking, or she could make a cup of tea.

The bright, modern kitchen had, until now, given her only pleasure, but now she felt flat as she switched the fast-boil kettle on and dropped a tea bag into the ‘Best Teacher’ mug that Madison, a Year 2 pupil, had presented to her last Christmas.

She stared out at the small but immaculate patch of garden, her patch with not a weed in sight, and the hollow emptiness inside her grew.

Around the edges of the neat square of grass, the crocus shouted out a bright splash of colour, goading the pale nodding heads of the snowdrops. Soon the daffodils would appear, and she’d already bought sweet pea seeds to sow with her class (the only flowers many of them would see close up) so that she could bring a few of the seedlings home and brighten up the fence that separated her garden from her neighbours.

She’d had it all planned out. She’d had her whole life planned out.

Tea slopped out of her mug as she stirred it mindlessly, the events of the last year spiralling on fast-forward in her mind, and bringing a rush of tears to her eyes.

They brimmed over and she scrubbed away angrily at them with the heel of her hand. Tea and sympathy was one thing, tea and self-pity was altogether different. Pathetic. She needed to get a grip. This was just a blip, things like this made you stronger, more determined. The failures were what made you who you were; the only people who didn’t fail were the ones that never did anything.

The garden blurred as she wrapped her hands round the mug and took a deep breath, willing the lump in her throat to go away. If she hadn’t moved to Starbaston, if she’d just settled for her old, mundane job with no job prospects she wouldn’t be jobless. But she would never have been able to buy her home either.

Buying this house had been the biggest, best, scariest thing she’d ever done. She’d only been teaching at Starbaston for a year when they’d given her the promotion they’d hinted about at the interview. She’d got home from work, re-read the letter about twenty times, let out a whoop and started looking at the estate agents. Not that she didn’t already have a good idea of the houses for sale in the area.

She’d scrimped and saved ever since she’d graduated, well even as a student, rarely going out and only buying clothes that she really needed, determined to have enough money for a deposit on a small house in her bank account ready for the day that her income level meant she could take the plunge. And she knew exactly what she wanted, and had a pretty good idea of the size of salary she needed to afford it. It would be hers. Nobody would be able to take it away. She’d never again feel like she didn’t belong.

Her friends had laughed, but Lucy knew it was the right thing for her. She’d been eight years old when life as she knew it had been ripped into shreds. When her and Mum had moved from their comfortable village home into a scruffy rented terraced house with peeling paint and neighbours who peed on the fence. She’d lost everything: her dad, her dog, her lovely room, even her best friend. She was a nobody; nobody wanted her, and she didn’t belong anywhere.

She’d wanted her home back. She’d wanted her mother how she used to be – always there when she needed her, in the playground each day with a smile when she came out of school. She’d wanted her dog, Sandy, to play with. She’d wanted her room with all her books and toys, her garden with the swing she’d sit on for hours. She’d wanted her friend Amy to sit with her under the big tree in the school playground. She’d even wanted her dad back, even though he could be cross if she made a mess, and insisted she practise the piano every day.

Instead she’d been alone.

Her mother always out, working all hours in dead-end jobs trying to make ends meet, and never having time to tidy or clean the embarrassingly messy house. She’d kept her own room tidy, because Dad liked tidy, and maybe he’d come to see them if she kept it nice. She’d dreamed that one day he would, and he’d take them home and everything would go back to normal.

He never came. Gran told her to forget him; he’d remarried. Her lovely bedroom belonged to somebody else now, and there was no going back.

Amy never replied to her letters – her mother probably wouldn’t have let her visit their scruffy new home anyway. And the kids at her new school laughed at the way she spoke and wouldn’t let her join in with their games, turning their backs on her if she ever dared pluck up the courage to edge her way over to them. She gave up in the end.

Life got better when she moved to high school and found friends. In the big impersonal city school she felt less alone, there were more people like her – struggling to find a place to belong.

But she still lived on the roughest estate, in the scruffiest house. And she promised herself that one day she would have a decent job, and a house of her own. A clean tidy home, on a clean tidy estate where she felt in control, a home that nobody could take away from her.

And the sacrifices had seemed worth it. Until now.

How could this have happened to her? She’d done everything right, she’d worked hard, she’d had a plan – and had been discarded, thrown out because she was too qualified. Too expensive.

She wiped the fresh tears away angrily. Except this time it was different. She was in control, she wasn’t some kid who had no say in the matter, and she did belong here. She did.

She fished into the box that represented her time at Starbaston and pulled out a pen pot (empty), a packet of ‘star pupil’ stickers, a box of tissues, a spare pair of tights, an assortment of plasters, notepad and then spotted a slip of paper. Which had been placed so the eagle-eyes of the headmaster’s secretary didn’t spot it.

‘ Can’t believe they did this to you, don’t know how I’ll cope without you Miss Crackers. Love Sarah x ’

The lump in her throat caught her unawares and Lucy crumpled up the note in her fist and hung on to it. It had been one of their many jokes, she was Miss Cream Crackers after little Jack, he of the hand-me-down uniform and mother with four inch heels and a scary cleavage, had declared on her first day at the school that ‘he could only eat them Jacobs cracker things with a lot of butter spread on them or they made him cough’ and did she make them when she got home from school?

Jokes got them through the day.

She didn’t know how she was going to cope either. The feeling inside her wasn’t just upset, it was more like grief, as though a chunk of her hopes, her future, had been torn from her heart.

The cup of tea wasn’t making her feel better. Halfway through her drink the feeling of grief had subsided, but it had been replaced with something worse.

She thought that she’d left the waves of panic behind – along with the spots, teenage crushes and worries that she’d never have friends or sex – but now they started to claw at her chest. She closed her eyes.

She just had to breathe. Steadily. In, out, the world would stop rocking, her heart wouldn’t explode, she wasn’t going to die. Everything would be fine.