Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

DOWNSTAIRS, SHE POURS A glass of wine and sits at the kitchen table. She thinks of Philip, in a restaurant somewhere, eating attractive food served by attractive waitresses with soft, glossy mouths. She shuts her eyes, but instead of disappearing, the waitresses come into clearer focus, a troupe of smiling, agreeable young women. And as the image sharpens it begins to morph, the women layered one on top of another, until they merge into one, a woman with red choppy hair, incongruously, for a restaurant, standing before a whiteboard. It is Ms. Matthews. Happy, unbroken Ms. Matthews, glowing with that singularly youthful emotion: hope. Oblivious Ms. Matthews, reaching back through the centuries to find herself a bit of trouble. And though Janice knows it is a trick of the mind, still it unsettles her.

There hasn’t been another woman, at least none of any significance, since Mandy Wilson’s mother six years ago; this she is reasonably sure of. There has, perhaps, been an occasional, discreet straying, evidenced by a temporary distancing when he gets home from a business trip, a restraint in the way he touches her. But nothing like that time when she feared she had lost him. Then, even the nights he was home, asleep beside her, she would get up and walk the house in the small hours, touching things, trailing her fingers along walls, the backs of chairs, as if trying to hold down whatever it was that was slipping away.

Other nights she had taken things out to the garden, things singled out for destruction during the day: ornaments, serving dishes, a shell brought back from holiday. She would go to the end of the property, where Philip wouldn’t hear, and she would smash them against the fence. One such night, glass littering the ground at her feet, she had looked back up the garden and had seen a light come on in the house next door, saw the blinds raised, the outline of Mrs. Harding’s face at the window.

But she had endured somehow, and her endurance had been rewarded. He had come to his senses, as she knew he would, and when Becky’s birthday came round, Janice had walked up to Mandy Wilson’s mother at the school gates and handed her an invitation. Mandy’s mother turned up at their house that Friday afternoon, her daughter shy beside her in a blue party dress. She accepted a glass of elderflower cordial, complimented the cut of the crystal. And then she and Janice and the other mothers had engaged in shrill, giddy conversation, had even laughed, if a little hysterically, while small girls ran up and down the stairs, or sat in circles on the floor, plaiting each other’s hair.

Go before dawn to the statue of the Tiny-Footed Maiden. There you must leave balls of rice mixed with wolfberry, and a pair of silk slippers, no bigger than a sparrow.

THE SCHOOL COMPRISES THREE two-story blocks of 1970s buildings and a glass and steel extension that houses the computer labs. The school insignia, MATER MISERACORDIA, is in steel lettering above the entrance. Ms. Matthews is waiting for her in an empty classroom, correcting assignments at a long rectangular desk. Her hair covers her face as she bends over a copybook. A pack of coloring pencils, neatly pared, lies beside a pink stapler and a dish of multicolored paper clips. “You must be Becky’s mum,” she says, standing up to shake hands. “Janice, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Janice says. She notices that Ms. Matthews doesn’t say what she is to call her.

“Please,” Ms. Matthews says, gesturing to a chair on the opposite side of the desk, and Janice sits down.

Ms. Matthews sits back in her own chair, and her hands erupt in a flurry of busyness. She moves the stapler an inch to the left, squares the edges of a sheaf of paper. Janice watches her run a finger along the inside collar of her blouse, adjusting it, though it already stands so rigid it may have been starched. “So,” Ms. Matthews says, bringing her hands to rest on the desk in front of her. “You got my note.”

“I wanted to see you anyway, as it happens.”

“Oh?” Ms. Matthews’s hand goes again to her collar, just a quick touch this time.

“Yes, it’s about the foot-binding. I don’t feel it’s”—she pauses to allow the word more resonance—“appropriate.”

Ms. Matthews’s head tilts slightly to one side. “It’s something I do with my girls every year. They usually find it interesting.”

Her girls? Janice thinks. What proprietary claim can this woman possibly make, she who is barely more than a girl herself? And every year? How many years could that be, exactly? Three? Four?

“It’s a bit medieval, isn’t it?” Janice says. “Literally.”

“Well, actually,” Ms. Matthews says, “and this is very interesting, it was practiced in certain remote parts of China up until the 1940s. But it’s not about the dates, is it? I prefer to take a broader sociological perspective.” She has picked up a ballpoint pen and is striking it against the desk, not unlike something Becky might do, and Janice has to fight an urge to tell her to stop.

“They’re fourteen,” Janice says. “Their feet are still growing, it could damage their bones.”

Ms. Matthews frowns. “Sorry?” she says. “I’m not following—”

“I’ve seen how tightly Becky winds those bandages. It could cut off circulation.”

Ms. Matthews edges her chair back, putting a fraction more distance between herself and Janice. “Obviously,” she says, “we don’t do any actual foot-binding. Basically, we discuss it, watch videos on YouTube, that sort of thing.”

The classroom feels suddenly hot and airless. Janice wants to open a window, but Ms. Matthews is speaking. “Perhaps,” she is saying, “this brings us, in a roundabout way, to why I wanted to see you. Have you noticed Becky seems unsettled lately, more withdrawn than usual?”

Than usual? And is Becky withdrawn? Quiet, certainly, but “withdrawn” is different, isn’t it? “Withdrawn” is something else. “She’s a teenager,” Janice says. “ ‘Withdrawn’ is the factory setting,” and she hates herself as soon as she’s said it.

“As you know,” Ms. Matthews says, “Becky finds school socially challenging. That’s always been a problem, but, basically, it’s becoming more pronounced. The teasing about her weight hasn’t helped, but I’ve tried to put a stop to that.”

“How come we’re only hearing about this now?” Janice says.

Ms. Matthews looks wistfully toward the window, out to the manicured green of the hockey pitch, where girls in yellow gym gear gambol like lambs, despite a biting November wind. “I did mention it to Becky’s dad,” she says, “at the parent-teacher meeting.” She rests her hand on the pack of coloring pencils as if it were a talisman. “I understand,” she says, “that there are problems at home?”

“What do you mean?”

“Becky mentioned there are tensions….”

There will most certainly be tensions, Janice thinks, when she gets home and speaks to Becky. She has an urge to find Becky’s classroom and drag her outside by the scruff of the neck, to ask what she thinks she is doing, discussing their business, their private business, with this stranger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

Ms. Matthews opens her mouth. This is where a little age might have saved her, where a year or two might have made all the difference, but she really is the girl Janice has taken her for, and so she says, “I meant between you and Becky’s father.” Her position shifts slightly toward the door, her body ahead of her mind, readying for flight.

Janice wants to grab her by the hair and slap her. She knows what Ms. Matthews is trying to say, knows also that she must not be allowed to say it. Ms. Matthews is speaking again, the thing that she must not say twisting on her tongue, emerging in hesitant darts of words and phrases.