Текст книги "Fall From India Place"
Автор книги: Samantha Young
Соавторы: Samantha Young
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Fall from India Place
On Dublin Street – 4
Samantha Young
For Kate and Shanine.
And for Mr. Neil Innes.
You’re the best teachers I’ve ever known.
You inspire me. You inspired Hannah.
Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.
– ATTRIBUTED TO DANTE ALIGHIERI
CHAPTER 1
Edinburgh
October
I’d made a promise to myself when I stepped onto the cobbled streets of Edinburgh on the way to my first teaching job that I’d be the kind of teacher who would do whatever it took to reach my students. Never mind that now keeping that promise meant embarrassing myself and them with my fantastically awful drawing skills.
Removing my badly drawn illustrations from the projector, I replaced them with two sentences.
I glanced up at the small class of six adults, ranging in age from twenty-four to fifty-two, and gave them a wry smile. “Though I hate to deprive you of my artistic genius, I think I’d better get rid of those.”
Portia, my fifty-two-year-old student, who had enough good cheer to lighten the often nervous atmosphere in the small classroom, grinned at me, while Duncan, a thirty-three-year-old mechanic, snorted. My other four students continued to stare at me wide-eyed and slightly scared, as though everything I said and did was a test.
“Now that you’ve learned these sight words and hopefully connected to them through my terrible attempts at drawing, I want you to become familiar with how they fit in an everyday sentence. For the rest of our time this evening I want you to write these two sentences ten times each.” I watched Lorraine, my very, very anxious and prickly twenty-four-year-old student, gnaw at her lip, and winced at the thought of what she might do to said lip after my next instruction. I continued. “I’ve got two small booklets here for each of you. One is filled with sight words, the other with sentences made up entirely of sight words. I want you to choose ten sentences and write those sentences out ten times each and bring them with you next week.”
Lorraine blanched and I immediately felt my chest squeeze with empathy. Lorraine was a prime example of why I’d decided to volunteer to teach an adult literacy course at my local community center. Some people, like my friend Suzanne, thought I was absolutely nuts to take on a volunteer teaching job during my probationary year as a high school English teacher. And maybe I was. My workload for school was insane. However, I shared the literacy class with another volunteer, so it was only one night out of my week – and it was something that really made me feel like I was making a difference. Sometimes it was harder to see the impact I made in high school, and I knew that there would be an awful lot of days ahead of me when I wouldn’t feel like I was leaving much of an impression. However, volunteering gave me that sense of satisfaction every single time. The adults I was teaching were mostly unemployed, with the exception of Portia and Duncan. Duncan’s employer had asked him to improve his reading and writing skills. Portia had somehow managed to get through life on a very basic understanding of literacy and numeracy (until one day she decided she wanted more), but the others were struggling to maintain employment because of their lack of language and communication skills.
I knew illiteracy was still a big deal in this country, but since I came from an educated family, and was a massive bookworm, it was something I had never been touched by. Until last year.
There was one moment during my teacher training year that would always stand out: I was in contact with a student’s father who had been visibly shaken when asked to look at his child’s work. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he confessed in a halting voice that he couldn’t read it. Then, when I asked him to sign a permission slip that would allow us to take his daughter with us for the class trip to see Twelfth Night in the theater, his hand badly trembled as he made a squiggle on the signature line.
The utter fear and humiliation in his expression due to his illiteracy really hit me emotionally. I could feel the sting of tears in my eyes for him. A grown man made to feel weak and helpless by letters on a page? I didn’t like having to witness his struggle, and later that night I started looking into local literacy courses. I put out some inquiries and a month or so later St. Stephen’s Centre, my local community center, had contacted me because they had just lost one of their volunteer teachers.
Despite the fact that the small class seemed a bit dubious about having a woman younger than they were as a teacher, I really felt we were getting somewhere.
“Hannah, your head is blocking the word between ‘wash’ and ‘cold,’” Duncan said teasingly.
“Is that your polite way of telling me I’ve got a big head?” I said, moving off to the side so they could all see the board.
He grinned. “Nah, I’d say it’s just the right size. It’s a very nice head.”
“Why, thank you. I grew it myself,” I drawled cockily.
He groaned at the daft joke, but his eyes were filled with mirth as Portia hee-hawed behind him.
Smiling, I let my eyes roam over the heads bent low to their jotters, pencils moving at different speeds, from the painstakingly slow and deeply grooved print to the fairly fast and sweeping handwriting. The smile died on my lips at the sight of Lorraine. She kept looking around at the others, panic in her eyes as she saw them getting on with the work.
She caught me looking and glowered, then lowered her eyes to her jotter.
I was losing her. I felt it in my gut.
Once I called time up, I walked over to Lorraine before she could bolt. “Can you stay back for a few minutes?”
She narrowed her eyes and licked her lips nervously. “Eh, why?”
“Please?”
She didn’t reply, but she also didn’t leave.
“Thanks for tonight, Hannah!” Portia called over to me, her voice probably carrying all the way down into Reception. I always spoke a little more loudly than I had to in class because I had a feeling Portia had a slight hearing problem and was unwilling to admit to it. She was a glamorous woman who benefited either from great genes or fabulous anti-aging creams, and anyone could tell she took a lot of pride in her appearance. Admitting to illiteracy was one thing, but admitting to being hard of hearing would signify her age, and I doubted she wanted anyone to think she was older than she felt inside.
“You’re very welcome,” I called back fondly, smiling and waving good-bye to the others as they thanked me and left.
Turning back to Lorraine, I was completely prepared for it when she crossed her arms over her chest and snapped, “I dinnae see the point in me stickin’ aroond since am done wi’ this shite.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Aye, I bet ye did. Whitever.” She started to walk toward the door.
“You leave and you’ll be right back at square one. Unemployable.”
“No fer a fuckin’ cleanin’ jobe.”
“And is that what you want?”
Lorraine whirled around, her eyes spitting fire as she sneered, “Whit? Is that no gid enough fer ye? Aye? Too fuckin’ gid tae be a cleaner? Look at ye. Whit the hell dae ye ken aboot hard graft and huvin’ nae money? And am supposed tae learn fae ye? I dinnae think sae.”
Calmly, I took in her dark hair scraped back into a scraggly ponytail, her cheap makeup, her inexpensive and untidy shirt and trousers, and the thin waterproof jacket she wore over them. Finally, I saw the scuffed boots that had seen too many rough days on her feet.
Lorraine was only two years older than me, but there was a hardness in her eyes that made her appear much older. I didn’t know anything about her life, but I did know she was lashing out at me because she was scared.
Who knows? Maybe she was also lashing out at me because of the way I talked, looked, dressed, and held myself. I was educated. I was confident. Two things she was not. Sometimes that’s enough for someone to take a dislike to you. Was I the wrong person to teach Lorraine? Perhaps. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up.
“Working hard comes in all forms, Lorraine,” I told her quietly, careful to keep the kindness out of my voice in case she made the assumption I was being condescending. “The cleaners in the high school where I teach work their arses off tidying up after those kids.” I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t even want to think about what they find in the boys’ toilets.
“But I work my arse off teaching those very same kids – lesson plans, piles of marking that eat into my evenings and weekends, spending my own personal money on resources because the school never seems to have enough in the budget, and I work on the lesson plans for this class and I teach this class for free. I know what it’s like to work hard. It’s not as physically tiring as cleaning, but it’s mentally draining.” I took a step toward her. “You’re used to physical hard graft, Lorraine. This stuff” – I gestured to the board – “this is completely out of your comfort zone. I understand that. But that’s why I’m here. I’m here to teach you to read and write so you can apply for a job that you actually want, and you wouldn’t be here if you wanted to be a cleaner.
“Although, on a side note I’m guessing you’d still need reading and writing skills for that job. There are applications to fill out, client checklists to read through…” I saw her lips pinch and got back to the point. “You don’t like me, fine, I could give a shit. I don’t need you to like me. I need you to listen to me when I say I’m not here to embarrass you or make you feel bad about yourself. I’m here to teach you. You don’t need to like me to learn what I have to teach. You do need to like yourself enough to believe you deserve more out of life.”
Silence fell between us.
Slowly, the tension in her shoulders seemed to disappear as they slumped from the tips of her ears back into place.
“Can you do that?” I pushed her with the question.
Lorraine swallowed and gave me a jerky nod.
“I’ll see you next class, then?”
“Aye.”
I sighed inwardly, feeling my own tension melt. “If you need me to go over anything, or sit with you one-on-one, just say so. There is no one in this class that is rooting for you to fail. They’re all in the same boat. They get it, even if you think I don’t.”
“Aye, aye, okay.” She rolled her eyes and turned on her heel to walk out. “Calm the beans.”
Okay, so sometimes it was like teaching a high school English class.
I grinned, collected my things, and headed for the door. Switching off the lights, I nodded to myself. Every time I walked out of a classroom at the end of the day, I wanted to feel like I’d won something and that therefore so had the people I was teaching. Sometimes, unfortunately, I just felt exhausted and stressed.
Tonight I felt like Lorraine and I had won.
In a good mood, and determined to take some “me time,” I texted two of my friends from university, Suzanne and Michaela, and arranged for Friday night cocktails the next evening.
It was clear from the moment we met up that night that Suzanne was in the mood to party and pick up a stranger for a random hookup. She eyed the men as though she were searching for the best piece of meat at a buffet. Her eyes swung back to me as we sat at our table in a bar on George IV Bridge, and she grinned when I burst out laughing at her.
Michaela rolled her eyes at Suzanne and sipped quietly from her drink.
I’d met the girls at Edinburgh University after moving into Pollock Halls and then we’d gotten a flat together in second year. Michaela moved in with her boyfriend, Colin, in third year and I moved into a smaller flat with Suzanne. Then we’d gone our separate ways accommodations-wise after graduation. Suzanne was originally from Aberdeen, but after graduation she’d gotten a position at a large financial company in the city. She made pretty good money, so she could afford a one-bedroom flat in Marchmont. I, on the other hand, was extremely lucky. My big sister, Ellie, and her half brother, Braden, whom I thought of as a big brother, were well off, and for my graduation they’d bought me a chic two-bedroom flat on Clarence Street in Stockbridge. It did not escape my notice that this put me in the middle between my parents’ house on St. Bernard’s Crescent to my west, and Braden and his wife, Joss’s house and Ellie and her husband, Adam’s house, to my east on Dublin Street and Scotland Street. They were all just a short walking distance from me.
My family was overprotective. They always had been. Unfortunately, this meant I felt the need to dodge their protective instincts from time to time. However, the flat was a different matter altogether. It was the most amazing, outlandish graduation gift – a gift I could never have afforded on my teacher’s pay. I was overwhelmed and eternally grateful to them for it. And honestly I was happy it was so close to my family. I had a growing bunch of nieces and nephews that I loved just as much as I loved their parents.
“See anything you like?” I asked Suzanne as I surveyed the talent. There were a couple of good-looking guys standing by the bar.
“Of course she does,” Michaela teased. “She probably sees five.”
Suzanne huffed. “Well, some of us didn’t find our one true love when we were eighteen. Some of us have a lot of frogs to kiss before we find our prince. And some of us like it that way.”
Michaela and I laughed. It was true that Michaela accompanied us on our nights out only to keep in touch with us. She was happily engaged to Colin, a Scottish student she fell in love with in first year of university. She’d decided not to return to her hometown of Shropshire, England, in favor of attending Moray House teacher training in Edinburgh with me. Like me, she was working toward qualifying as an English teacher.
My two friends couldn’t have been more different. Suzanne was loud, flirtatious, and an assertive drama queen. Michaela was the quietest of the three of us. She was sweet and loyal, and she cared a great deal about her new students. If I wanted a good time and a distraction, I sought out Suzanne, but if I just wanted someone to talk to, I picked up the phone and called Michaela.
“How are the kids?” Michaela asked me, and I knew she was referring to family and not school.
“Really good.”
“And more to come.” She grinned.
“Ugh, I don’t know how they do it.” Suzanne shuddered. “You’d think they’d have learned their lesson with the one.”
“Well, it’s Jo’s first one, actually.” Not that that would change Suzanne’s opinion that children were unpleasant little creatures she wanted nothing to do with.
Johanna MacCabe was probably my closest girlfriend, despite our seven-year age difference. When Braden met his wife, Joss, she brought into our little family her good friend Jo Walker, and Jo soon met the love of her life, Cameron MacCabe. The two of them had been married for two years and Jo was pregnant with their first child.
She wasn’t the only one who was pregnant. My sister, Ellie, and her husband, Adam, were expecting their second child. They already had an adorable two-year-old son called William and were hoping to give me a niece this time around.
“She’s nuts.” Suzanne made a face. “But look at who I’m talking to. Teachers. Who on earth in their right mind would decide to become a teacher? Oh” – her eyes widened at something over my shoulder – “he’s yummy.”
Michaela and I shared a knowing look and I turned to stare as inconspicuously as possible at whoever had caught Suzanne’s eye.
“And she’s off!” Michaela giggled, pulling my gaze away from the tall guy with the bulging biceps who was exactly Suzanne’s type, to watch her cross the bar with an exaggerated swing to her slim hips. “I don’t know how she can do this every other weekend. A different guy.”
Suzanne was way into the double digits when it came to the number of men she’d slept with. But I wasn’t there to judge. She could do what she pleased as long as she was safe about it. I, on the other hand, didn’t do the whole sleeping-around thing. Honestly, I didn’t do the whole sex thing. The last and only time it happened, I’d gotten burned. So I had no intention of falling into bed with a guy until I was absolutely positive there was a connection between us that we both felt.
At that moment I was content with my life as it was. I was too busy for anything more than a bar flirtation and I was completely okay with that. I was young. I had time. Suzanne seemed to be on a mission to try out every single freaking frog she could get her hands on until she finally found that elusive prince.
Suzanne strode back to our table with the guy and his two friends in tow. They sat down and introduced themselves. Unfortunately, the guy she was interested in, Seb, quickly turned his attention from her to me. Thankfully one of his friends seemed more than into Suzanne.
Seb was really nice. He asked me a lot of questions about myself and I reciprocated. We laughed and chatted about everyday nonsense, and the guys bought us another round of drinks.
After a few hours had passed, our new friends started talking about hitting a club. Michaela didn’t look too sure, and I wasn’t about to leave her behind, so Suzanne and I went to freshen up in the ladies’ toilets while Michaela mulled it over.
We were standing at the sinks, reapplying blusher and lipstick, when Suzanne mused, “So… Seb is delicious. Does he warrant a break from the longest dry spell in history or are you going to pull the Hannah Tease on this one as well?”
I grunted. “The Hannah Tease?”
She gave me a look that said, Like you don’t know. “The Hannah Tease. The gorgeous Hannah Nichols always snags the hottest of the hot, flirts her arse off with him for a few hours, but leaves him to go home with blue balls and no phone number.”
“I’m not teasing anyone,” I objected. “If I’m not interested I don’t put it out there that I am. It’s harmless light banter. That’s it.”
This time the look she gave me was one that she’d begun to give me on a regular basis. It was an impatient expression that said she didn’t understand me. Not one bit. “What the hell is wrong with you? And when are you going to get over the past and finally get under someone new?”
I shook my head, pretending I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Have you ever considered I might be happy? Isn’t that the whole point to all this? To be happy? And I am. I love my job, I love my family, and I love my friends. I have a good life, Suzanne.”
She snorted this time. “Yeah, keep telling yourself that.”
I felt my blood heat in indignation. “What is your problem tonight? Is it because of Seb? Because you’re welcome to him.”
This time Suzanne turned on me with narrowed eyes. “Oh, I could have him if I wanted to, don’t worry.”
“Then what’s the attitude about?”
“Ugh, don’t talk to me like I’m one of your kids. You know, you’ve gotten really boring lately.”
I laughed incredulously at the turn our conversation had taken. Suzanne wasn’t the most tactful person, and she had a tendency to snap impatiently at people, but tonight she was turning her reserve of nastiness on me, which she’d never done before. “In my defense, you are acting like a child.”
“Eh, whatever.” She threw her hands up in despair, like the consummate drama queen she was. “Let’s just see if Michaela wants to go clubbing…” I felt sure she was going to say something else, but in the end she just pinched her lips together and stormed out of the toilets.
I was leaving the toilets when I got a text from Lucy, a friend from teacher training, asking if I fancied joining her for a drink. She was around the corner at a pub on the Royal Mile with a few friends and knew I was out tonight. I texted her back, then casually made my way over to my friends.
“Michaela has decided to come with us,” Suzanne said cheerily, like she hadn’t just verbally bitch-slapped me in the toilets.
I squeezed Michaela’s shoulder and smiled at them all. “You guys have a good night. I have somewhere I need to be.”
Ignoring Suzanne’s sputtering, I sauntered out of there, away from the drama and the gorgeous boys, and spent the rest of the evening getting drunk with people who didn’t care if I was single or married, skinny or fat, ambitious or laid-back. They were just out to relax and de-stress from work, and that was all I was looking for too.
Life was good. I certainly didn’t need anyone trying to tell me it wasn’t because they themselves were discontented.
