Goggle-Eyes

1

Helen came into school today in the worst mood. She looked peculiar, and her eyes were red and puffy. She wouldn’t speak to anyone, and if anybody spoke to her, she simply shrugged and turned away. She buried her head in her arms on her desk lid, and waited for first bell.

‘Is anything wrong?’

A muffled, ‘No!’

‘What’s up, Helly?’

‘Nothing!’

She lifted her head and practically spat it out. We were a bit shocked. She has to be the gentlest person in our class, normally. There must have been something terribly wrong.

And you could tell that Mrs Lupey thought so, too, when she came in.

‘What’s up, Helen? Anything the matter?’

Another muffled, ‘No!’

She didn’t even raise her head, or try to sound the slightest bit polite.

Mrs Lupey looked round at all the rest of us. With Helen’s head safely buried on her desk, she let a look of: ‘Does anyone here have any idea what’s wrong with her?’ spread over her face, and we all shook our heads and shrugged.

Then first bell rang.

‘Seats, please,’ said Mrs Lupey. ‘Register.’

There was a note tucked in the register, sent down from the office. We waited while she pulled it out of the envelope, read it, and made a little face, glancing at Helen. Then she picked up her pen.

‘Number off!’

‘One,’ called out Anna Artree. ‘Two,’ shouted Leila Assim. That’s how we do our register. It’s one of Mrs Lupey’s Great Ideas to Save Time. Everyone’s numbered in alphabetical order, and then each day we rattle through the numbers from one to thirty-four. I’m twenty-two.

‘Eighteen.’ ‘Nineteen.’ ‘Twenty.’

Silence.

(Helen is twenty-one.)

Usually Mrs Lupey doesn’t fuss. If we get held up on a number because someone’s rushing through last night’s homework, or scrabbling on the floor for something they’ve dropped, she just glances up to check they’re there, and then she says the number herself, and we just carry on. This time she didn’t.

‘Twenty-one?’

Everyone looked towards Helen, who was still trying to bury herself in her desk lid.

‘Mission Control calling Twenty-one,’ said Mrs Lupey. She was watching Helen closely. ‘I know you’re out there, Twenty-one. Speak to me. Please.’

Silence. We were all watching now. When Helen Johnston acts as awkward as this, then something’s very wrong.

Mrs Lupey gave her a moment, then:

‘Please…? Pretty, pretty please…?’

‘Oh, shut up!’ Astonishingly, Helen leaped to her feet and scraped her chair legs back across the floor. She lifted her desk lid and slammed it down so hard her pens flew off in all directions. ‘Leave me alone, for heaven’s sake!’

And rushing across the room, she wrenched the classroom door open and banged out, leaving it swinging on its hinges.

Everyone stared.

‘Well!’ Mrs Lupey said ruefully after a moment. ‘I handled that really well, didn’t I?’

She looked quite shaken.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Alice assured her. ‘She wouldn’t speak to any of us, either. Not a word.’

Mrs Lupey glanced at the note lying on the pages of the register. Then she looked thoughtfully through the open doorway. Far off, more doors were banging, one by one.

‘I think I’d better send someone after her,’ she said. ‘Just to sit with her in the cloakroom, till she’s calmed down.’

She looked directly at me.

‘Kitty,’ she said.

She took me totally by surprise. ‘Why me?’ I squawked, and pointed across the room. ‘You ought to send Liz. Liz is her best friend.’

‘You,’ Mrs Lupey said. ‘You are the Chosen One. Go, now, before she rushes out of school and gets run over.’

Liz tried to back me up. You could tell she, too, thought Mrs Lupey had picked the wrong person.

‘Can’t I go too?’

‘No.’ Mrs Lupey put her fingertips together and looked over them, first at me, then at Liz.

‘No offence, Liz,’ she said. ‘But I think, this once, Kitty here might be just the right man for the job.’

(You can see why we’ve ended up calling her Loopy.)

I stood and started packing my books into my school bag.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Mrs Lupey. ‘Just get after her.’

‘But what about my classes?’

Mrs Lupey stepped out from behind her desk and held the classroom door open.

‘Go!’ she said.

Extraordinary. I shovelled my school bag under my desk, and hurried to the door.

As I went past her, she saluted me.

‘We’re counting on you, Twenty-two,’ she said. I think it was some sort of joke.

It wasn’t hard to work out which way she’d gone. To bang that many doors one after another, you have to be running downstairs to the cloakroom. I pushed the last one open quietly.

‘Helly? Are you hiding?’

There was no answer. I’m not sure that I was expecting one, but I was pretty sure she was in there somewhere. The trouble is that the cloakroom’s enormous – rack after rack, bulging with thick winter coats and woolly scarves. You could spend hours searching the place for missing persons.

I’m not daft. I used the method my sister Jude perfected to catch the gerbils each time they make one of their spectacular cage-breaks. First I stepped in the room and called again: ‘Helen? Helen, are you in here?’ Then I sighed, slightly impatiently, and did a quick shoe-shuffle on the spot. Then I clicked the door shut firmly behind my back.

And then I waited.

It wasn’t long before I heard them, the first little gerbilly scrabblings for a tissue, some long sniffs and a huge fruity blow.

‘Gotcha!’

She sprang up like a scalded cat.

‘Just go away!’

She looked quite frightful, truly she did. If you’d have seen her, you’d have thought everyone in her family had just been swept away by tidal waves. Her face was swollen and her nose was running. She screamed at me:

‘Leave me alone!’

‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been sent. I’m to sit here and wait till you calm down. It’s my job to make sure you don’t get run over.’

‘Run over?’ On top of distraught, she now looked absolutely baffled. ‘Oh, run over.’

This information seemed to weaken her a bit. She stopped glowering at me quite so fiercely. I took advantage of her slight softening of attitude to sweep a pair of hockey boots off the bench opposite, and sit down between two very nasty damp coats. She didn’t seem to mind my being there any longer. She seemed to accept that it was my job to sit amongst all those dangling shoe bags and straying socks, and stop her getting run over. It is a generally accepted fact in our school that all of the teachers and most of the parents are obsessed with the fear that one day someone will charge out of the main door without looking, and end up squashed to pulp under the tyres of some delivery van. It comes from the building being smack in the middle of town. When we did block graphs in maths, we made one of every single thing we could think of, down to the last words everyone’s parents said as we left home in the mornings. That was a really odd looking block graph. Alice said her parents always told her: ‘Be good, little beansprout,’ and everyone else reported some version or another of: ‘Mind you be careful crossing all those roads!’

Helen was groping in her pockets for tissues now. The tears were rolling down her cheeks. Her mouth hung open and her lips looked blubbery. I think her nose was blocked. She couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t stand to watch. Jumping to my feet, I started rooting through everybody’s pockets, coat after coat, until I came across one of those little cellophane packets of five tissues.

‘Here. Take these.’

Helen’s so good. Even before she’d managed to prise one out to blow her nose, she’d peered up at the peg to read the number, and asked in a really shaky voice,

‘Whose are they?’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘They’re only tissues.’

I don’t know if it was my impatience showing through, but Helly crumpled visibly, and took to snivelling again. I felt a right brute, and cursed Mrs Lupey for not having had the sense to send Liz. Liz would have known what to do. She was Helen’s best friend. She would have put her arms around her shoulders and given her a comforting hug.

I slid my arm rather clumsily around her back and gave her a little tentative squeeze.

‘Get off!’ she snarled. ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Fine!’ I scuttled backwards to my place on the bench opposite. ‘Fine by me! I won’t come near you again. I’ll just sit here quietly and count the coats!’

I sat there quietly, counting the coats. But I couldn’t count anywhere in Helen’s direction because by now she was looking such a mess it would have been embarrassing for both of us. So I just ended up staring about, desperately wishing I’d had the sense to bring down my school bag. At least that way I’d have had something to read. I hate sitting anywhere without a book. I’m one of those people who get all nervous when the cereal packets are lifted off the breakfast table and there isn’t anything to read any more.

There wasn’t all that much to stare at, either. We all wear the same clothes, after all. Four hundred girls’ coats – just a sea of navy blue. This is a girls’ school, if you can believe it. And my mum sent me here. She got fed up with having a row every single morning about what I was going to wear and what I was going to put in my lunch-box, and another row every evening about all the tatty bits of paper I brought home.

‘Has this been marked?’ she’d ask, peering, suspiciously at anything she found. ‘Why hasn’t he said anything about your appalling spelling?’ And if I hid my work, what I got was this: ‘What did you do all day? Not much, I bet. You know what your trouble is, don’t you? You’re being encouraged to grow up pig-ignorant.’

That’s not very nice, is it? I had to put up with a lot of that. Then one day I came home from school and made the very serious mistake of telling Mum I needed shampoo for my Science homework.

She stared.

‘What are you doing in Science?’

‘Care of the hair.’

‘Care of the hair?’

She went mad. You have never seen anything like it. She went berserk. Then she phoned up my dad in Berwick upon Tweed.

‘Washing her hair lessons!’ she screeched down the phone. (I had to hold the extension away from my ear.)

‘Don’t be so silly, Rosie,’ said my father. ‘She must be doing hair shafts, and follicles, and sebaceous glands and the like.’

Mum put her hand over the phone, and bellowed at me:

‘Are you doing hair shafts, and follicles, and sebaceous glands and the like?’

I put my hand over the extension, and bellowed back:

‘No. Just greasy hair, and normal hair, and dry, permed and damaged.’

Then she went mad all over again. From the way she was yelling, she didn’t even need the telephone. I should think everyone in Berwick upon Tweed could hear her without any trouble at all.

‘The child is growing up pig-ignorant,’ she told my dad. ‘It’s all tatty bits of paper, and sloppy projects, and “spelling doesn’t matter”. I’m going to find a proper school. Somewhere with real books and red ink and silence.’

‘But Kitty’s happy where she is,’ said my dad. ‘You might unsettle her.’

‘Better unsettled than illiterate,’ Mum snapped, and went on to talk about how a good education was an investment for life. You’d think, to hear her going on about it, that I was an index-linked pension or something.

Then Dad gave up his side of the battle.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Last time she came to stay with me I mentioned Mrs Pankhurst, and she thought I was talking about my cleaning lady.’

‘Well, there you are!’ crowed Mum. ‘What can you expect? She does no History at all, unless you count that project on the Black Death that she does, year after year.’

And that seemed to settle the matter for both of them. Mum went out and looked at every school she could find, and picked the one with the most real books and red ink and silence.

The only trouble was, it was a girls’ school.

‘I can’t go to a girls’ school,’ I howled.

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Call yourself a feminist? What’s wrong with girls?’

So here I am. And I quite like it now I’m used to it. When you get bored with teachers droning on at you, it’s better to have whole chapters of real books to read under the desk than tatty bits of paper. The silences aren’t too crushing – you can always whisper. And sometimes you find something really nice and encouraging written at the bottom of your work in red ink. Mum’s more contented, too, now I get up and put on the same drab miserable navy-blue jumble as everyone else every morning, and lunch-boxes are forbidden. And I’ve stopped noticing that there’s no boys.

‘Helen, it’s not a boy, is it?’

‘No!’

I didn’t think it was, somehow. Helen’s quite young for her age, if you see what I mean. Sometimes I see her on Saturday mornings in Safeways, tagging along behind her mum’s trolley. I saw her last week going past the washing powders with a man with grey hair that sticks out just like my father’s. The man was offering Helly something from a paper bag, while she stubbornly turned her face away. Maybe the two of them had just had a row.

‘Is it your dad? Have you been quarrelling with him?’

‘No, I haven’t!’

She glared at me as if I were her deadliest enemy on earth.

‘Oh, pardon me.’

‘Listen,’ she shouted. ‘I didn’t ask you to come down here. So leave me alone!’

Even a saint can only stand so much. I lost my temper.

‘You listen,’ I shouted back. ‘I didn’t ask to miss my favourite double art lesson to come down and sit in this smelly dank hole and be snarled at by you! So be polite.’

I’d never get in the Samaritans. Now tears were sheeting down her cheeks. She might have been standing under a cloud-burst.

‘Oh, Kitty,’ she said, her voice all wobbly. ‘I’m sorry.’

Just at that moment, through the wall, I heard the ring of second bell. I couldn’t let anyone see her in this state.

‘Quick,’ I said. ‘Before everyone tramps through to lessons. Get in the cupboard!’

I reached out and pulled her to her feet. Before she could pull back, she caught a glimpse of her. reflection in the mirror between the racks. She looked the most dreadful sight. Her face was blotchy where it wasn’t scarlet. Puffing around her eyes made them look piggy and bloodshot. Dried tears had stiffened all the hair round her face.

‘Oooh!’

‘Come on.’

I rattled the knob of the lost property cupboard until the door sprang open. It has one of those ball bearing catches, so stiff some people always think it’s locked. There is a proper light inside because it isn’t really a cupboard at all, but the tiniest room with a steep sloping ceiling that fits under the back fire stairs. You can’t stand up in there unless you’re a midget. You have to sit on piles of everyone’s lost property. It’s comfortable enough, unless the games staff have just done one of their massive clear-outs and left nothing but one old tennis racket with busted strings, and the odd welly boot.

We were in luck. It was quite full. I pushed Helen down on the softest-looking mound of stuff, and stood guard at the door till I heard the burblings of the first people going through to their classes. I waited through a couple more door bangs, and then, as I expected, saw Liz prowling between the racks, looking both ways in search of her best friend.

‘Helly’s in here,’ I said, pointing.

‘Is she better?’

‘No. Worse.’

Liz made a face. ‘Maybe she ought to be sent home.’

From inside the cupboard came a strangled, ‘No-oo!’

‘She doesn’t want to be sent home,’ I told Liz.

Liz glanced behind her anxiously.

‘I’m definitely not supposed to be down here,’ she told me. ‘Loopy insisted I was to stay right away. “This one is up to Kitty,” she kept saying. I think she’s mad.’

She looked at me as if I ought to be the first to leap up and agree that anyone who thought to send me on an errand of mercy rather than her had to be queuing up to sign on at the bin.

‘Maybe you’d better push off,’ I suggested.

‘Maybe.’

She peered over her shoulder again, as if she feared Mrs Lupey might materialize in the cloakroom doorway any moment. Then, leaning forward, she called over my outstretched arm into the dark of the cupboard: ‘See you later, Helly.’

She turned to me. ‘I’ll tell Loopy you two are hiding in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘In case she worries that you’ve both got run over.’

Then she hitched up her school bag and drifted off towards the cloakroom door. I caught the last few words that floated back.

‘I just can’t understand why she chose you…’

I didn’t bother to reply. To be quite honest, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t understand why I’d been chosen, either. So far as I’m aware, the name Kitty Killin is not a byword for sensitivity in our school staffroom. Especially not since Alice came in one morning really upset because her pet rabbit Morris had got too doddery to climb in and out of his hutch, and I suggested that she change his name to Morribund.

So why me? Why me? But Mrs Lupey must have had her reasons. Helen and I must have something in common, apart from mothers who shop at the same Safeways, and fathers with sticky-out grey hair…

But I’ve seen Helen’s father. He hasn’t any hair at all. He is completely bald. And her parents have been divorced longer than mine!

I wrenched the cupboard door wide open. She was still sitting, hunched and miserable.

‘I know!’ I cried. ‘I know why you’re so upset! I know why you’re crying your eyes out! I know why you don’t want to be sent home!’

She lifted two fierce, red-rimmed little eyes that burned through the gloom of the cupboard like live coals.

‘Your mum’s going to marry that man with grey hair!’

Her mouth fell open. I felt like Sherlock Holmes on a good day.

‘And you think he’s a proper creep! You’ve thought he was a creep all along, but, being the sweet Helly that you are, you’ve been too gentle and polite to say so. And now she’s talking about your happy future together, and it’s too late to explain that you don’t like him.’

She twisted her fingers so tightly I thought they would snap.

‘Don’t like him?’ she repeated in a cold, low voice. ‘I can’t stand him.’

And all the colour drained out of her face.

‘Helly?’

I flicked the cupboard light switch. Luckily for her, it was the dimmest light bulb ever seen. I slipped inside and dropped on a pile of old gym shorts and woollies. I pulled the door closed to shut us in.

‘Listen,’ I said, leaning towards her. ‘No need to tell me about this sort of thing. I am the World’s Great Expert, Helly Johnston. The stories I could tell you!’

She looked up.

‘Go on, then,’ she said, still ashen. ‘Tell me.’

‘Wait till you hear.’ I prised a rather sharp welly boot out from under my bum, and shifted till I was more comfortable. There was no hurry. We’d be left in peace. Good old Mrs Lupey must have known from the start that it would take me hours to get through even a half of it. Not for nothing has she been sloshing her red ink all over everything I’ve written this year – all my poems and free essays, my play in rhyming couplets, even my supposedly anonymous contributions to the school magazine. Oh yes, she knows all about what happened to me when my mum took up with Goggle-eyes.

And I knew why she’d sent me down, and not Liz.