The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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few weeks after arriving, at the beginning of a lesson, as they were sitting down red-faced and busy after morning playtime, Miss Barker came into the classroom. The fourth years had been in the classroom before then, and on the board was an abandoned impatient tangle of x and y, the obscure and useless corners of the alphabet, mixed incredibly with numbers, some normal-sized, some shrunk and sent to the top of a letter like a scratch on the forehead, symbols poetically abstruse and, for the moment, as blank as the hieroglyphs of a kingdom disinterred from the sand; a frail language occasionally glimpsed about the school that it seemed impossible he, or any of them, should ever comprehend or, like French, converse in and, looking at it, he brought a measure of wilful ignorance even of those fragments he could have understood. Miss Barker sighed, sagged. ‘Francis,’ she said, her eyes not quite alighting where she spoke, ‘could you come and clean the blackboard before we start?’ She had not quite addressed him by name until then, not since she had introduced him to the class, but Francis was up quickly and taking the board rubber from her somewhat unwilling grasp. ‘Yes – all right then,’ she said oddly, with a half-smile to his side that he didn’t understand, and let him do the task, slowly and seriously. It was the first task he’d been asked to undertake in front of the whole class, by name; now they couldn’t go on calling him ‘new kid’. There was a sort of buzz in the room. When he had finished, he went back to his seat. The two girls behind him were scowling at him, and as he sat down, one of them – yes, her name was Frances, wasn’t it? – kicked his chair hard.
‘She di’n’t mean you,’ the girl said, not lowering her voice, and Miss Barker, before embarking on another of her unplanned and circuitous ‘lectures’, an improvised and loose chain of her morning’s happenstance thoughts, was pleased to say, ‘Well, Frances…’ she paused like a skilled comedian awaiting what indeed came, an appreciative laugh ‘…I’m sure you can do it next time. If our new friend from London will let you.’ As if he had no right to his own name, and she’d politely forgotten it out of good taste. The class laughed, and not at the old woman. Francis felt heat in his face.
‘He’s right tall, that new kid,’ the girl behind him said derisively to her glued-on friend at the end of the ‘lecture’, meaning him to hear. ‘It looks ridiculous, being as tall as that. Someone ought to say something to him, that new kid.’ And then it was time for the game again.
‘She’s horrible, that old Barker,’ Anthony said, as they were sitting on the steps, wrapped in coats and scarves, Anthony’s coat a broad yellow check, handed down from a brother, with orange mittens hanging from his wrists by sewed-on strips of elastic.
‘She’s mental,’ Susan said, a nice girl with an always blocked nose, the snot perpetually at the rim of her nostrils; she had hair like a dog’s. ‘She’s boring and mental, too,’ she said. ‘The way she goes on, one thing after another, it makes no sense. Are you supposed to be taking notes, or what?’
‘And mardy,’ one of the Pauls said – one of those words, Francis was working out what it meant, the limits of its meaning, and then he’d be using it too.
‘I say,’ Andrew said – he was addicted to this archaic opening style, odd in his Sheffield voice, or in any voice, these days, and had once asked Francis shyly if he had ever heard of a book called Jennings, ‘it was before you came, you know,’ a tactful way of saying the unmentionably rude, alluding to a time when your friend didn’t exist, ‘but our last teacher in Two CL, she was ill once a whole week and we had Barker, and she just came in and lectured like she does now, and we were meant to do maths and geography, all sorts. Well, she said then that once she were out on the moors driving with a friend, she said, and she sees a little boy by the side of the road and she, they stop and, and they say, “Can I give you a lift?” and the little boy says, “No, me mam says don’t take lifts off strangers.” And she said, “Well, isn’t that a shame, that you can’t offer a child a lift, when he’s on his own, out on the moors?”’
‘I wouldn’t get in a car with that Barker,’ Francis said boldly, and they all laughed.
‘That’s it,’ Andrew said, quite seriously. ‘I told m’dad, and he reckons that, you know the Moors murders, when they done them kids in, over Manchester, he reckons that after them, they were shut up, there were some more murders, and he reckons they didn’t get all the murderers. So m’dad, he says, do you think that old Barker, she’s one of the Moors murderers and she never got caught?’
He was so serious in his face, and it made Francis jump when Sally gave him a scoffing push. ‘Your dad never said that,’ she said. ‘Not your dad. You’re mental, you.’
‘No, though,’ Anthony joined in, quite crossly, ‘there were this kid, right—’
‘Oh, shut up,’ they all said, and went to play the game.
The girl who sat behind Francis was called Frances, and beside her, her best friend was called Tracy. They had been each other’s best friends since the very first day at infants’, when they’d been sat next to each other, and they’d always be best friends. They had each other, bossing and sniping, and Tracy thought Frances the loveliest name in the world. She wished she was called – well, not Frances, that wouldn’t make sense, but a name that was lovely just like Frances was a lovely name. She thought about it all the time, about not being called Tracy.
‘Why did you call me Tracy?’ she said to her busy mother in the hall of their Crosspool house. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked.
‘I just liked the name,’ her mother said. ‘Are you putting your coat on, or do I have to do it for you?’
‘I wish I was called something else,’ Tracy said.
‘You’ll be late for Sunday school,’ her mother said, ‘if you don’t get a move on.’ They were out of the house now, the door shutting tight behind them, her mother taking Tracy’s hand.
‘Why’s m’dad not coming to church?’ Tracy said.
‘He’s got to work today,’ her mother said.
‘I wish,’ Tracy said, but she stopped herself; she was about to say that she wished her dad didn’t work in a coal mine. ‘I wish I was called something else.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with “Tracy”. It’s a nice name,’ her mother said, not knowing what Tracy had been going to say.
I wish my dad didn’t work at the mines, she thought. It took all those explanations. What does your dad do? He works for the Coal Board – not down the mines, he’s not a miner, but he works at the mines, he works up at the top, he only goes down the mine sometimes, he doesn’t work down the mine. She wished he had another sort of job, a job like, for instance, the job Frances’s father had, managing a supermarket. What does your dad do? ‘Oh, he’s a bank manager,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I wish I was called Sara,’ she said out loud.
‘Sarah?’ her mother said. ‘Why the heck is being called Sarah better than being called Tracy?’
‘Not Sarah, Sara,’ Tracy said. ‘There’s no h, you say Saaara.’
‘The heavens preserve us,’ her mother said, ‘and what’s that on your face? My Lord—’ and outside the church, she whipped out a handkerchief, spat on it, and rubbed briskly at Tracy’s face. ‘How you manage to get a smut on your face ten seconds after leaving home, I’ll never understand.’
‘Frances doesn’t go to church,’ Tracy said. ‘She says they don’t believe it. They go to the garden centre usually.’
‘I dare say,’ Tracy’s mother said, not hearing this for the first time, ‘but in this family, we go to church.’
‘Is Frances going to go to hell?’ Tracy said.
‘I’ve had enough of your cheek for one morning,’ her mother said, hissing under her breath as they took their places in one of the back pews.
So on Monday morning Roy, Tracy’s father, set off for work with a feeling of rank injustice at having had no weekend.