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TWENTY-ONE

Suzie

There’s something very calming about a school when it’s empty and there’s not the noise and clamour of all the children.

The buildings feel large and spacious, like you’re walking through a museum or a grand hall when there’s no one about, and it’s nice to feel the scope of the place without someone chucking their lunch through the crowd.

I don’t know why I’ve gravitated here. I needed the space but I also just needed to do stuff, do something.

I’ve not been sleeping since we got back on Monday night; my thoughts are plagued by Charlie and what he thinks of me.

I got my phone fixed yesterday and I did text but he’s just left me on read, making me think he wants some space from the situation.

Either way, being in this strange limbo makes me feel incredibly lost. I had someone incredibly special and he’s just floated away from me.

I don’t know what the right thing to do is, and my heart can’t quite take the pain of it.

I’m trying to work but I can’t seem to sit still at my desk, so I get up to see who else may be around, meandering over to the staffroom.

I notice it’s empty bar one person who’s commandeered a table and is sorting and guillotining a range of handouts.

I recognise her as a maths teacher, the one the kids were talking about on the trip.

The one who may have copped off with another teacher by the bike sheds. She sees me and puts a hand to the air.

‘Ah, another sucker in over half term…’ she says, taking a sip from her coffee cup. ‘I’ve just boiled the kettle in case you need it.’

I smile and go over to her desk to admire her paperwork. ‘Well, it was this or sorting my sock drawer. I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced. I’m Suzie Callaghan by the way.’

‘Zoe Swift from Maths,’ she tells me. She seems nice, warm and I like her big earrings, the effortless way in which she carries herself.

‘Beth’s cousin? French Suzie?’ she suddenly says, excitedly.

‘You guess correctly…’

‘Then it’s a pleasure. I adore any Callaghan. My kids occasionally look after Beth’s boys.’ And just like that, I already am a big fan of Zoe Swift. ‘You’re the one who saved the Seville trip by all accounts,’ she adds.

‘Saves feels like too grand a term for it but, yes, I went on the trip,’ I add.

‘Don’t downplay your contribution. You saved it.’ She waits for a moment. ‘Oh…and you were the rockpool person.’

‘You saw the video?’ I say in horror.

‘My daughter did and she doesn’t even go to this school,’ she says, pulling a face. ‘There was a male teacher there too. Didn’t he fall as well?’

Who knows, Zoe? I have a feeling we both fell for each other in Seville. I know I did.

‘He did. But we didn’t get eaten by sharks, so it’s all good.’

She laughs. ‘That’s good to hear. Terrible when those school trips end in shark attacks, so much paperwork. ’

For ten in the morning that is quite funny so I clink my mug against hers.

‘If you’re that Mrs Swift from Maths, the kids had stories about you,’ I tell her cheekily.

‘Don’t believe any of them. I did not have sex in a cupboard.’

‘That’s not the story I heard,’ I tell her, laughing. ‘What’s your partner’s name?’

‘Jack,’ she says with a twinkle in her eye.

‘Does he still teach here?’ I ask.

‘No, he was cover for a while and then he moved abroad but we make it work. FaceTime is a marvellous thing. What about you? Is there a husband/boyfriend?’

I stop trying to work out how to define that situation. ‘No. There isn’t…There definitely isn’t a husband. But…I think…’

‘But there was a husband?’ she says, studying my face and putting down her papers. I nod, emotion quickly filling my face. I don’t know what to say. ‘Suzie, I believe I need to make you another cup of tea.’ She goes over to the kettle, taking my mug. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘Yes. One sugar please.’

I watch as she quietly makes my tea and glances over to check in.

She pushes the mug along the counter, getting out a packet of biscuits.

‘I found these on one of the science teacher’s desks.

I’ll replace them next week,’ she says cheekily.

She then beckons me over to a sofa in the corner of the room.

I’m quiet, pensive, almost grateful that it looks like I’m being given the space to talk.

‘So there’s definitely not a husband?’ she says. ‘You can tell me to mind my own business if you want.’

‘Oh, it’s a little ridiculous. I’m new here because I’m separated.

I caught my husband cheating with someone he met from the gym.

’ I don’t know why I’m saying this out loud to someone I hardly know but there is something peaceful about this woman, an energy about her which tells me she’s knowledgeable, there’s no judgement there.

‘My husband was having an affair with a family friend,’ she tells me, leaning forward and just like that, we look at each other and know that we’re connected, part of some club that no one ever really wants to join. I smile and she returns the gesture.

‘How long ago?’

‘Nearly two years now,’ she says, but there seems to be a serenity there, like she’s made some sort of peace with it.

‘We were married for an age and it was messy and there were kids involved but as clichéd as it sounds, time can be a great healer. You’re say you’re separated.

Is there a divorce pending? Where are you with the process? ’

‘Papers have been served. There’s no going back,’ I say resolutely. ‘He’s just being an arse, refusing to accept it. He hates that I ran away from our life, that I’ve started afresh somewhere else. I think he might finally have understood that it’s ended, though.’

She nods like she knows. ‘That’s male pride, ego, control…him claiming ownership, it’s very caveman,’ she tells me. I feel relieved that it’s not just Paul acting like this then.

‘Stay strong. I’ll assume you have Beth and all her wonderful sisters in your corner for support?’

‘I do.’

‘Hold on to those people,’ she says, studying the confusion and pain in my face. ‘There’s more to this though, isn’t there?’

‘The teacher who fell in the rockpool with me.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, do tell me more,’ she says, tucking her feet underneath her on the sofa and waiting to hear the story. The problem with our story is that it’s so ridiculous I don’t quite know where to start. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Charlie. He teaches Spanish.’

‘That’s kind of adorable,’ she says .

‘That we’re in the same department?’

‘No, just the way your eyes light up when you say his name.’ She urges me to take another biscuit.

I put my head in my hands to cradle my angst. ‘But it’s got messy.

I didn’t tell him about my ex, my marriage falling apart.

I kept it from him and now I suspect he thinks I was lying to him.

’ She listens intently. ‘It’s not that I didn’t want to tell him.

I just…it’s not something you lead with, you know.

Oh, by the way, I’m Suzie. My marriage was a complete failure and I like chicken wings. How about you?’

She giggles under her breath but I see her understanding that feeling completely. ‘Is that how you look at your divorce then? A failure?’

‘Sort of. We were only married two years. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s a label no one wants. I don’t see people going on Facebook and broadcasting these things,’ I tell her.

‘Oh, my sister threw me a divorce party. We had balloons and little cakes with his name on that we threw at a wall.’ I laugh.

Lucy would adore that. I might have to take notes.

‘Look, I feel you completely. But maybe turn that feeling around. Maybe staying in that marriage would have been the failure. Maybe what you did was actually very necessary, very brave.’ She reaches for my hand and I feel some level of emotion to have someone I hardly know praise me like this.

‘If this Charlie is a decent sort, he’ll understand.

He’ll know that people come with stories, both good and bad. ’

‘Perhaps. All his stories are good though.’

‘No such thing. There must be something wrong with him?’ she tells me.

I sigh deeply to bring him to mind again, to think of what I’ve potentially lost. ‘Maybe. But he really is just genuinely decent, authentic. That sort of old-school gentlemanly charm where he checks in with everyone in the room, like he can’t carry on unless he knows everyone is OK.

He’s very mature but not very organised, he does this thing where he makes a joke and then apologises for how bad it is, he has a really high-pitched scream and is endearingly scared of flying…

’ I look over at Zoe, biting her lip as she listens.

I realise as I say it that everything I’ve listed is really what I’ve started to love about him.

‘I just don’t trust myself anymore. I thought my ex was a good human being.

I guess I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. But look what happened there?’

‘That wasn’t anything to do with you though. That was him being duplicitous, having no respect for your marriage…’ she adds, and I laugh. ‘You’re a bit scared, aren’t you?’

I nod quietly. It’s the first time I’ve admitted it.

I am confident about some things – in the way that I’ve moved away from Paul, how I know I never want to go back there, but there is fear there too, some worry that it’s too soon, that Charlie could be another person who’d hurt me.

It all sits there fighting with that energy that draws me to him like a magnet.

‘I don’t quite know,’ I say, deep in my thoughts.

‘I’ve jumped in, if you know what I mean. ’

‘And how was the water?’ she asks, smirking.

‘Like the clearest bluest warmest ocean on a sunny day,’ I say, almost a little embarrassed to say that out loud.

‘Have you taken multiple dips?’

I nod, grinning.