Fiona Mozley: Elmet

The following day, Daddy was summoned to go in and speak with the headmistress. He had come back within two hours of Granny Morley’s call and sat me on his knee as we waited for Cathy. Granny Morley asked him if he was going to go out looking for her but he said that he had already seen her out on the beach. He said she was sitting on her own and would come home when she was ready.

Cathy was ready at around six o’clock in the evening. She had been out on the beach all night and all day. Her hands and forearms were covered in a thin layer of sand and there was a small amount of blood on her knuckles. The sand together with the blood looked like the thin lines of grimy oil that wash up on North Sea beaches and mark the high tide.

Daddy got up and took hold of one of her hands. He led Cathy to the seat next to his. He asked her what happened.

She looked at him and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. They were hardly there at all, having not yet pooled into salty droplets, but I could tell the difference. Like the difference between lit and unlit black or between a dead thing and an alive thing.

At first she did not respond. She sat in silence. We all did. Daddy did not ask her again and neither did Granny Morley nor I say anything.

After almost a minute her chest began to convulse. I thought that she was hiccoughing but the heaving became more rapid and then the tone changed and she let the tears come all at once. A deluge.

She sobbed. Her breathing was like waves building up then dropping suddenly over a sea wall. She exhaled as if through an harmonica.

As she cried she spoke: ‘I felt so helpless, Daddy. I felt as if there wandt owt I could do that would change them. Or hurt them. Not really hurt them like they were hurting me. I could hit them all I liked but it woundt change a thing. They were so nasty to me, Daddy. Not the pain, Daddy, I dindt mind that, but the way they made me feel inside. No matter what I do, I can never win.’

‘You did though. You fought them and beat them. You protected your little brother. What more could you do?’

Daddy ran his hands through his hair and then his beard as if searching for an answer there.

‘I mean it doendt matter, does it? I mean that things will always be as they are now. I mean that there will always be more fights and it will just get harder and harder. I feel like I’ll never just be left alone.’

Daddy continued to stroke his hair. He looked more concerned than I had ever seen him. ‘Did you think to tell the teacher?’ he asked. ‘Did you think to tell teacher what these boys were doing?’

‘I did,’ Cathy replied, ‘but she told me they were nice boys.’

It was because of this, I think, that Daddy took us all into the headmistress’s office together. He led Cathy and I by our hands through the narrow corridors of our school. The ceilings were low and lit by halogen strip bulbs that flickered and shone the same colour as the magnolia paint on the walls, making it appear as if the light were emanating from the plaster. The only windows were long and thin and tucked just beneath the ceiling, well above the heads of the children who walked up and down these corridors so that when they looked up and out into the world beyond all they could see was the sky. On that day the sky was a mesh of criss-crossed grey and white cords being ripped and tugged and frayed by colliding winds.

To get to Mrs Randell’s office we walked to the end of the corridor and up a flight of stairs. They were the only stairs in the single-storey school and opened onto a landing holding doors to her office, the staffroom and the administrative office where we collected our lunch tokens each week and handed in consent forms for us to go on school trips.

Daddy knocked. It was a heavy fire door painted dark blue with a small, square window made from thick glass with a network of thin, black wires running through it to hold the shards together in case of breakage. His fat knuckles made a dull thump against the wood, a sound that was echoed by Mrs Randell’s dampened voice from inside the room, instructing us to enter.

Her voice or the instructions she issued sharpened as Daddy opened the door and she told us to sit down. She sat in a high-backed chair behind a large pine veneer desk and there were three chairs set opposite her, made from moulded plastic with a thin, course cushion glued to each seat. I sat on the right, Cathy sat on the left and Daddy was in the middle.

Mrs Randell looked comfortable. She looked as if she led a comfortable life. She wore a peach linen suit and her hair was both blonde and brown. Or blonde overlaid onto brown. It descended just below her ears and flicked out to the sides.

She seemed good enough (as good as could be expected) but she had only known comfort. And she looked troubled by us. Perhaps she would have preferred it if Cathy had never beaten those boys or if Callum’s mother had not told her about it so she would not have to be sitting there on a Friday afternoon having a conversation about violence.

It was cool outside but her office was hot. The central heating was on and the windows shut. There were piles of heavily typed documents on her desk and the sideboard and walls bore the varied compositions of sundry children in oversized scrawls and motley hues. There was a row of rubber stamps stained with carmine ink. Each sported a slogan of adulation and acclaim.

‘I hope you know that your daughter’s behaviour was unacceptable. The attack was unprovoked. Those poor boys just wanted to play football on the beach and they asked Cathy if she and Daniel wanted to join in. I mean, I know Daniel and Cathy might not have had quite the same opportunities in life as Gregory, Adam and Callum but that’s no excuse for behaviour such as hers. Gregory had bruises all up his legs and Callum’s mother said the boys had even been kicked in their private parts. She must be told that it’s not acceptable to kick little boys there.’

Mrs Randell went on like this and Daddy said nothing much in response. Neither did Cathy. A viscous silence had settled on Daddy and Cathy and me and although Mrs Randell spoke in fluid phrases that rippled against and sporadically punctured the gummed ambience, drab quiet was the primary mood and her dry utterances did little to refine that mood. Later, Daddy told us that after he had heard the teacher’s comments on the conduct of the boys he saw that there would be no real use in responding with his true thoughts. Mrs Randell’s assessment was simply the way people saw things, he told us. It was the way the world was and we just had to find methods of our own to work against it and to strengthen ourselves however we could.

Outwardly, Daddy agreed with Mrs Randell’s recommendations and offered an apology on behalf of his daughter. He proffered assurances that it would not happen again. He insisted that discipline would be enforced at home and that Cathy would find a way to appease the boys.

Daddy walked us back home through the darkening suburbs to Granny Morley’s house. He told us that he would be staying for at least a month and that we should come home from school on time every day so that we could all spend time together. He told Cathy that she had done everything correctly. He only wished she had acted sooner.

Granny Morley died on a Tuesday afternoon. Cathy found her in her usual chair in the sitting room and closed all the curtains and all the doors and forbade my entrance. We had no way of contacting Daddy so we just kept that room shut and the curtains closed and lived upstairs in near-silent vigil. Cathy snuck down for food from the cupboards. We lived off biscuits and bananas and crisps until Daddy happened to come home a week and a half later and we ran to him and wept for the first time and he told us that he would never, not ever, leave us again.