Frankie couldn’t believe her mummy had left her in this terrible place. She would never forgive her.
She hadn’t noticed right away that it was terrible. In fact, it had seemed quite nice. There was a Wendy house and a sand pit and water trays, and other toys, but the best thing was the furniture. The chairs and tables were smaller than the ones at home, so that when she sat down her feet could reach the floor. Even the toilets and sinks were just the right size. At first, she had rather liked the place.
But that was before her mother had left her there on her own. Well, not on her own, exactly. There were plenty of people in the room but Frankie didn’t know any of them. At first she’d assumed her mummy had gone to the toilet, or to make a cup of tea like she did at home. She would be back in a minute. Frankie played with the pencils on her desk, and picked one up to write her name the way the lady with the cloud of white hair had asked her to. Her mummy still did not come back. She looked at the little girl sitting next to her, who had fascinating black hair, tied in braids that ran halfway down her back. Frankie had never seen hair so long, and she had never seen braids, so she was distracted for a few moments and stared. Then she remembered about her mummy coming back.
‘When do the mummies come back?’ she asked the girl.
‘They don’t come back,’ the girl said.
‘Not never?’ Frankie felt her face screw up, the way it did when tears were coming. But she remembered that her mummy had said something about crying. How she was to be brave and make sure she didn’t cry, that’s what mummy had said and Frankie had promised. But why had she been left here? Did mummy not need her anymore, now she had that new little boy who cried the whole time? Frankie didn’t know why the baby was so sad. It was one of the many mysteries surrounding the baby. Like how people came round and said to her mummy ‘isn’t he beautiful’ when the baby looked like a wrinkled ball of dirty sheet with currants for eyes.
Frankie held her breath as she waited for the girl to answer.
‘Not not never. They pick you up when school finishes,’ the little girl said. She was building with Lego and examined the bricks and structure of the tower she’d made carefully as she spoke. She looked like she knew everything in the Whole World and, if Frankie had been a little older, she might have said the girl had an air of authority about her. But Frankie didn’t know much about authority. Yet.
‘How long will that be? An hour?’ Frankie asked. She knew an hour was a long time. It was what her mother said when they were somewhere boring and Frankie wanted to go home. ‘In an hour or so,’ she would say. And it would seem like forever while everyone drank cup of tea after cup of tea and swapped cigarettes, though Frankie didn’t understand why because all the cigarettes were exactly the same.
‘Much longer than an hour. Not till the end of the day,’ the little girl said. Frankie bit her lip and remembered the promise she’d made about crying. She concentrated on writing her name instead of thinking about how long ‘much longer than an hour’ would be. She stared hard at the paper as she used the pencil to form each separate letter the way her mummy had taught her at home. An up stick and two sideways ones. A stick with a curl. A round with a tail. She held her pencil tight in her hand and each letter was an effort of will.
Frankie had finished writing her name. ‘Miss. Miiiiissss!’ she shouted.
A white cloud of hair turned. It was Miss Smith. She was called ‘the teacher’ or ‘Miss’ and Frankie suspected she was probably some kind of witch. The lady looked at her like Frankie thought the devil would look at you.
‘At St Mary’s school we put up our hands if we want to talk,’ she said.
Frankie wanted to put up her hand then, but her bones and muscles were frozen, and she stared at Miss Smith, then she stared somewhere else because the look on Miss Smith’s face was too frightening.
‘Put up your hand,’ the girl with braids whispered. She grabbed Frankie’s arm and raised it for her. Miss Smith turned away. Frankie could hear her own heartbeat. She let her arm drop.
‘Put your hand up,’ the braids girl hissed at her.
Frankie did as she was told.
Miss Smith spoke to other children first and, by the time she came back, Frankie’s arm was beginning to hurt, and she had to use her other hand to support it.
‘Yes, Frances?’ the teacher said.
‘I’ve done, Miss Smith,’ Frankie told her.
Miss Smith took the paper from Frankie. She stared at it for a moment, placing her half moon glasses on her nose, then letting them fall around her neck, where they hung from a chain.
‘That’s not your name,’ Miss Smith told Frankie, dropping the paper onto the desk.
Frankie looked at what she’d written. It was all the shapes her mummy had taught her and told her made her name. She looked back up at the teacher. Miss Smith was looking at her that way again, that horrible, nasty, devil way. If Frankie had heard the cliché, she would have said it was a look that could kill. But Frankie was young enough that clichés were new sentences to her. She saw Miss Smith’s hand go for the piece of paper with her name on it. She grabbed at it, but the teacher snatched first and pulled it away. Miss Smith tore up the paper and walked over to the bin, all her movements large and important, like she was acting on the stage. She marched back to Frankie and, just for an instant, Frankie cringed away, thinking she was going to get hit. Miss Smith threw a clean sheet of paper down on the table. It had lines on it. She wrote something on the paper, a flat shape, with parts that curled and parts that looped.
‘That,’ the teacher told Frankie with a flourish, ‘is your name.’ But Frankie didn’t recognise it at all. There wasn’t even the kicking k that she liked so much. She put her face right up to the paper and tried to find herself in the shapes there, but it was all wrong. She wanted her mummy to come back and tell Miss Smith her name was just like she’d written it, and that this squiggle on the paper had nothing to do with her. She wanted to cry, but she had promised.
‘At St Mary’s school we join up our letters. We don’t print. Printing isn’t real writing,’ Miss Smith said. She said ‘print’ the way Frankie’s daddy said ‘protestant’, like it was a word she hated being in her mouth and had to be spat out as quick as it could be. ‘Practise,’ she said. Frankie didn’t know what she meant, but she was too scared to ask.
‘What does practise mean?’ she asked the braided hair girl once Miss Smith had walked away.
‘It means copy it over and over till you get it right,’ the other girl said, her braids shaking as she moved her head. Frankie wanted to touch the plaits but didn’t dare.
Frankie tried to copy what her teacher had told her was her name, though the more she looked at the scribble on the paper, the more alien it appeared. She recognised nothing except the first letter; an upward stick with two sideways ones. Frankie tried to imitate the rest of the squiggle. The further she got down the page, the bigger and more squiggled she made it. Printing must be the name for making her name like her mummy had taught her, but it wasn’t real writing. Frankie wondered if her mummy knew that and, if she did, why she’d taught Frankie to do it at all. Frankie hadn’t even known it was called printing before Miss Smith had told her. Her mummy had always called it writing. Frankie thought about it. Mummy was never wrong, not about anything. So Miss Smith must be wrong. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t want to see that look again. It made Frankie think of bad dreams. So she tried again and again to copy the shape her teacher said was her name. When she thought it was finally squiggled enough, she looked up from the page. She was about to shout out for the teacher when she remembered about putting up her hand, so she did that instead. Miss Smith came over to her desk and looked at what Frankie had done.
Miss Smith’s face turned to what Frankie imagined thunder would look like, if it had a face, and her cloud of hair shook. ‘She can’t even form proper letters,’ she said, as if Frankie wasn’t there at all. She gave a look of disgust to the cold air in front of her face.
When Miss Smith had calmed down, she showed Frankie how to write joined up a’s and b’s and c’s and told her to practise these until she could do them neatly. Frankie picked up the pencil and did as she was told. Wrote rows and rows of the letters, trying her hardest to keep them between the lines like the teacher witch had told her to and mostly managing it. She liked the c’s the best, the way they made a shape like waves across the paper. She was enjoying herself at last, but her hand got tired. She swapped the pencil over to the other hand, which worked just as well. A noise made Frankie jump. Miss Smith’s fist on the table.
‘Your right hand is for righting with,’ the teacher witch said, as if Frankie’s rows of letters could make things better, so long as she wrote them with the correct hand. Frankie didn’t understand, but she swapped the pencil back over as fast as she could.
At eleven o’clock it was time for milk. Miss Smith held up a clock made of cardboard, and asked Frankie if she knew where the hands needed to be for eleven o’clock but she didn’t, and Miss Smith rolled her eyes.
‘Little hand on the eleven, and big hand on the twelve,’ she said. ‘Repeat after me.’
And everyone said it. Little hand on the eleven and big hand on the twelve. Frankie joined in. She had learnt something. The something was that the teacher witch lady was very scary and it was best to do as she said, even if it made no sense at all.
After milk, the whole class did drawing pictures. Frankie didn’t know what to draw and when she asked the girl with the braids (whose name was Zoë) she’d said she could draw anything she liked. This didn’t help at all. She watched what Zoë was drawing. It was a cute little house with tie back curtains, with lots of pretty colours and no smudges. Miss Smith came over and looked at it.
‘That’s lovely,’ she told Zoë. She looked at Frankie’s paper. ‘You haven’t started yet?’ There was a hint of the storm clouds in her voice. Frankie shuddered but didn’t say anything. Miss Smith walked away and Frankie started drawing as fast as she could, thinking she’d draw a house like Zoë’s.
‘You mustn’t copy,’ Zoë said, curving her arm round her own work.
Frankie tried to draw the right shapes without looking at Zoë’s picture but she wasn’t sure how they should look. She tried to colour, but the crayons she had were all dark. She hated what she’d drawn, and didn’t want Miss Smith to see it. She scribbled right through everything with the black crayon.
‘Aaaah! Telling!’ Zoë said. ‘Miss Smith’s really going to shout at you.’ Zoë dashed off towards the teacher. Frankie was terrified, and screwed up her paper. She took Zoë’s drawing. It really was very pretty. She folded it up, and put it in the pocket at the front of her pinafore. Zoë was tugging on Miss Smith’s skirt, but got an especially witchy look from the teacher and ran straight back to her place without saying a word. When she sat down, she noticed straight away that her picture had gone.
‘Did you screw up my drawing?’ Zoë said, looking at the paper in front of Frankie. She opened it out and saw it wasn’t hers. She searched around her desk and under it, her plaits bobbing as she ducked. ‘Did you see somebody take my picture?’ Zoë said. Frankie shook her head. Zoë sat down neat as a pin and put her hand up. Frankie watched her hand in the air, the way she shook it and bobbed a bit in her chair, like she was trying to make the teacher’s legs move faster by moving her own. After about half a minute Miss Smith came over and made a question mark with her face.
‘Somebody took my picture,’ Zoë said.
‘I’m sure they didn’t,’ Miss Smith said. She made all the children look for Zoë’s neat little house, under the little chairs, and the tables. Next to the sand pit and in the Wendy House. But they didn’t find it because it was in Frankie’s pocket and nobody looked there.
‘Stealing is a sin,’ Miss Smith said. ‘And sinners go to Hell.’ The folded up paper was burning through the pinafore and into Frankie’s chest by now, but she was too scared to say anything. Would Miss Smith take her to Hell straight away? Was it like being sent to your room? Frankie didn’t find out because, right then and there, the bell went. All the children ran over and lined up at the door, so Frankie copied them. Some children took boxes of sandwiches and flasks or beakers with them. Frankie remembered that her mummy had given her a drink of milk in a Tupperware beaker so she took that too.
Miss Smith eyed her in the queue. ‘You’re on dinners. You can’t take that with you,’ she said. She went to take it from her. But the milk was Frankie’s and something snapped inside her at the cheek of this woman trying to take it off her. She held onto the beaker as hard as she could. The teacher pulled and Frankie pulled. But Miss Smith had hold of the end of the beaker with the lid on. She made one last big effort to remove the cup from Frankie’s hand, tugging hard, but she only managed to remove its lid. Without a teacher pulling on the end of her beaker, Frankie was left off balance. She fell backwards but the milk, well, that shot forwards.
Miss Smith was drenched from the bottom of her skirt to the middle of her blouse.
*
Frankie sat outside a door on a normal-sized chair; her feet did not reach the ground. She could hear people talking the other side of the wall. She wondered if they knew about the picture, and if they were going to take her to Hell. On the door there was writing, lots of separate letters. Printing. She wondered what Miss Smith would say about that, if she saw. But Miss Smith hadn’t said much since the incident with the milk. She had taken Frankie by the hand and led her to this chair, deposited her there without saying a word, and not come back.
The door opened. Frankie saw the back of her mother’s head, and then another lady she didn’t know. Her mother looked flushed, and was apologising over and over to the lady. The lady was smiling, but she didn’t look happy. She came over to Frankie and stood above her, looking down through spectacles that had two different types of glass in them. She was very old, probably even more than thirty.
‘Are we going to have a better day tomorrow?’ she said, in a singsong voice. Frankie hoped so, so she nodded. She noticed this made both the adults smile.
‘You have to do what you’re told to at school,’ Frankie’s mummy said, and Frankie nodded even harder, making herself dizzy. ‘All right, come on trouble, let’s get you home,’ her mummy said then. They walked out into the playground.
‘I don’t want to ever go back there,’ Frankie said.
‘But you have too, darling. It’s school. You go to school everyday till you’re big and go to work like Daddy,’ her mummy said.
‘Everyday?’ Frankie said.
‘Except for weekends. Saturdays and Sundays and holidays when school is closed,’ her mummy said.
‘How long do I have to stay for?’ Frankie said.
‘All morning and all afternoon, until it’s time for tea,’ her mummy told her.
Frankie thought about it for a moment, listening to her feet crunch through leaves. ‘Is that longer than an hour?’ she said.
Mummy didn’t answer. She laughed, and shook her head as she walked. ‘You’re funny,’ she told Frankie. But Frankie wasn’t laughing. Then she remembered the picture she’d got in her pocket, the one Zoë had drawn. She took it out. She wanted to give it to her mummy, and ask about what Hell was, because Mummy would know.
‘This is beautiful. Did you do this?’ her mummy said, bending down over Frankie and smiling like she was happier than Christmas.
Frankie didn’t want to lie, because Mummy and Daddy both said that was naughty, but her mummy looked so happy she couldn’t help it. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You’re very clever,’ her mummy said, ruffling Frankie’s hair. And she smiled all the way home.
Frankie didn’t ask what Hell was.
When they got home, there were fish fingers for tea, and Frankie didn’t get sent to her room, or Hell, or anywhere else. She was allowed to watch the programmes she liked on TV until her daddy came back from work and wanted to watch the news. On the news there were some pictures of a lady with white hair who looked and sounded just like Miss Smith.
‘Who’s that?’ Frankie asked her daddy.
‘The Minister for Education,’ he told her.
Frankie looked at him, all blank.
‘The lady in charge of schools,’ he said, and then Frankie knew it must be her teacher, even if she looked a little bit different on television and was wearing really posh clothes. People were shouting at her as she walked through the street, calling her ‘Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’. They had heard what the horrible witch did at dinnertime, Frankie thought.
Frankie went into the kitchen, where her mummy was washing up.
‘When do I have to go back to school? How many hours?’ she asked.
‘Not till tomorrow.’
‘But how many hours?’ Frankie insisted.
Her mummy looked up at the ceiling, and her lips moved as she counted, though she didn’t say the numbers out loud. She smiled. ‘Fifteen hours,’ she said.
Frankie smiled. Fifteen hours. That was a very long time. It was almost forever.
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