A Silver Lining Page 5

‘And good morning to you too,’ Rose said drily.

  ‘I need a cigarette.’ Frankie continued as if Rose hadn’t spoken. ‘Can I smoke in your car?’ She rummaged in her shoulder bag for her cigarette case, solid silver and engraved, a birthday present from her doting father.

  ‘I’ve no problem with you smoking, but is there any particular reason that it has to be in my car?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Roger has decided in his infinite wisdom that members of staff are no longer allowed to smoke outside the building,’ said Frankie sarcastically. ‘Apparently it sets a bad example to the students.’ She placed a cigarette in her mouth and lit it from a lighter that produced a flame so big Rose was worried it would singe her fringe. The flame caught and Frankie took a deep pull on her cigarette. ‘So until my car comes back from the garage I have to either smoke outside the school gates with the students, or smoke in other peoples cars. The only other person I know well enough to ask is Emily, and you know how worked up she gets about the smell of smoke.’

  Rose did know. Emily Jenkins taught Irish and geography. By dint of being their side of fifty she occasionally sat with Frankie and Rose in the staff room, even though they didn’t really have all that much in common. She’d had a bad experience last year when a sixteen year old had sprayed a desk with deodorant and set fire to it. It hadn’t spread but there were still scorch marks on the ceiling and one wall of classroom 23.

  Frankie was originally Francesca Devereux. Her mother was Irish, her father was French, and both of them were loaded. She’d grown up in London, and attended one of those elite girls’ schools, the kind that have adverts in the back of Tatler alongside glossy pictures of hundred year old buildings, lacrosse sticks, and students in ridiculous wide brimmed hats. Money wasn’t everything though, and her relationship with her mother was so bad that, when she’d finished school, she’d immediately left London for Dublin and university. Her grandmother, Nana Anna, had taken her in, and she still lived with her in her large red brick house in the affluent suburb of Ranelagh. Her cousins all bitched heavily that she was only doing it for the inheritance.

  Frankie was one of those women that seemed to radiate cool. With her long slim limbs and clipped London accent, she seemed like she should be having her cigarette backstage before a runway show, instead of before a morning of teaching tearaways in a rundown west Dublin school. Her hair was a rich thick brown and was worn long with a heavy fringe. Her skin was a flawless cream and her eyes were the colour of chocolate.

  Coupled with that, she was extremely fashion-conscious. Not only was she always up to date with recent trends, she wore them with a twist that made the look completely her own. In the early days of their friendship Rose had tried to raise her game and put more effort into her appearance, getting up earlier to put some manners on her flyaway blonde hair and buying a multitude of scarves and accessories that she couldn’t quite pull off. But she’d always come up second, and had to sacrifice an extra forty minutes in bed into the bargain. She’d given it up after a week. Some people just had the knack of looking consistently stylish. It was a gift.

  Today Frankie was wearing a denim skirt with a pair of purple leggings tucked into worn black biker boots, a tight purple t-shirt with a baggy oversized black leather jacket on over it.

  Frankie took a deep pull on her cigarette. ‘So? Have you settled in to a life of domestic bliss yet?’

  ‘I only moved in last night!’

  Frankie turned around in her seat to face Rose. ‘It was all a bit quick though, wasn’t it? He asks you to move in with him and you do so a week later?’

  ‘Well, there was no sense in waiting, was there?’ said Rose reasonably. ‘Emmett had already moved out.’

  ‘So, that was the romantic New Year’s Eve proposition was it? Move in with me quick, I need someone to help pay the bills! And to think some people say that romance is dead,’ said Frankie, decidedly unimpressed.

  ‘Ah, shut up! You’d want to be nice to me’, Rose said as her and Frankie got out of her car. ‘Or you’ll lose your smoking haven. And have to smoke out there with the cool kids.’ Rose gestured towards the school gates with her head where a group of students were having a quick cigarette before classes started.

  ‘Oh, I was only joking. And you wouldn’t do that to me. I’m not nearly streetwise enough for them. They’d probably steal my cigarette case…and my cigarettes.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Rose agreed. ‘Come on, I need a caffeine kick before I tackle third year English.’

  The St. Jude’s staff room, like the rest of the school, was dated and functional. It was painted in a sickly peach colour that had blistered and was starting to peel off the walls. The communal seating area was full of uncomfortable chairs, but despite this they were all occupied by the time the girls arrived. Every teacher had their hands wrapped around a steaming mug of coffee.

  ‘Why is everyone drinking the coffee?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘Because it’s so fecking cold,’ said Emily as she walked over to them. ‘The heating was turned off over the holidays.’

  The air inside the building was almost colder than it was outside, and now that Rose thought about it, it was hard to discern what whether the cloud in front of Emily’s face was steam from her coffee or her breath freezing on the air.

  Roger, the school principal, had given in to staff pressure at the end of the last school year and bought a coffee machine. Unfortunately, also due to staff pressure, it had broken down a mere three weeks after its arrival. It now sat gathering dust in the corner of the room, and members of staff had to rely on instant powder that Breda the tea lady stored in a large catering tin with the label ripped off. It was always horrible, and Frankie and Rose had whiled away many afternoons trying to work out what exactly Breda had added to it to give it that special aftertaste.

  Roger Clarke, the school principal stood up and cleared his throat. Oh God, thought Rose, not another start of start of term pep talk.

  Roger Clarke saw himself as a man of the people. Brimming with joie de vivre, he was always laughing and clapping his staff hard on the back in an effort to show camaraderie. He was nice enough, but his penchant for management speak, team-building and awful jokes made Rose tried to avoid him as much as possible. Mind you, she supposed, you’d probably need a strange sense of humour to be principal of this school.

  ‘Ladies, and gentlemen,’ he began grandly. ‘We find ourselves once again at the start of a new school term. I hope that you all had an excellent Christmas. As you are all aware, the Department of Education has cut our budgets yet again, meaning that in these recessionary times we will all have to find ways to provide the great education that has become the hallmark of St. Jude’s Community School, but on a tighter budget.’

  ‘Great education?’ Frankie whispered to Rose. ‘What is he on, crack?’

  ‘In order to achieve this, we need to be innovative! We. Need. To. Be. Creative!’ Roger emphasised each word by banging his hand on the tea trolley so hard that coffee slopped everywhere. ‘We need to be constructive!’

  ‘We need to stop reading management books,’ Emily murmured behind them.

  ‘What we have in our careers, ladies and gentleman, is power. The power to change lives. And as a great man once said, with great power comes great responsibility.’ Roger gave a proud grin around the room at the staff. ‘We must be our own superheroes! We must come to the rescue of the disadvantaged students that we teach. Yes, indeed. And though we may face setbacks, though we may have in our classes the occasional joker.’

  ‘Rose, slap me.’

  ‘I believe, I know, that we can achieve great things in this school. Are you all with me?’

  Stony faced teachers stared back at him.

  ‘We can’t be perfect. And that’s not what I’m asking you to be. Even Superman is susceptible to kryptonite.’

  ‘Talk about squeezing an analogy until it screams,’ Frankie muttered.

  ‘And lest we think that superheroing is a man�
��s business, I’d like to point out that we have a few oul’ Wonder Women in our midst.’ Roger twinkled.

  Rose looked at her watch. The bell was due to go any time now, and she willed the hands onwards.

  ‘So come on team!’

  Roger jumped into the centre of the room planted his legs apart and raised one hand in a fist above his head, resting the other on his ample hip in an approximation of a superhero pose. His suit trousers were wrinkled despite the fact that it wasn’t even nine o’clock, his bald spot was showing and the only vaguely superhero-like thing about him was the sense that he was about to burst out of his clothes. Although that probably had more to do with eating too many mince pies at Christmas than any sense of superhero machismo.

  The room was silent, as Roger grinned around the room, still holding his fist aloft. Then, mercifully, the bell rang and there was a stampede as everyone raced to get to get out of the staffroom

  ‘That was excruciating’, Frankie said as they eased their way out into the corridor, which was packed to bursting point with young teenagers.

  ‘You’ve got to admire his enthusiasm at the very least,’ Rose pointed out diplomatically as she weaved her way around the students in an effort to get to her first classroom. The school ostensibly had a ‘one way’ system to keep people moving in the narrow corridors, but no one played a blind bit of attention to it.

  Frankie shot her a withering look. ‘He’s been on too many of those motivational team-building weekends. Do you remember that staff meeting we had last year when he got us all to sit cross legged on the floor and pass around a talking stick?’

  ‘He was just trying to show us that everybody’s points were valid,’ said Rose.

  ‘But they weren’t! Some people talked utter shite…’

  ‘I suppose’, Rose conceded. ‘But…’

  ‘Four hours of my life WASTED!’

  ‘Hah! Miss Devereux got stoned!’ a sing song voice piped up from the stream of green uniforms. A clamour of enthusiastic voices greeted this statement.

  ‘Deadly. Was it grass or resin, miss?’ another student chipped in.

  ‘And then,’ Frankie continued as if no one had spoken. ‘Sally Richards’ hip locked, and it took us half an hour to get her off the floor.’

  ‘Miss, are you saying Mrs. Richards was stoned too?’ said another voice.

  ‘What were yiz doin’ on the floor, Miss?’

  ‘Miss, are you and Mrs. Richards lezzers?’ This pronouncement lead to a series of catcalls from the surrounding students.

  Rose rolled her eyes at Frankie ‘Well there you go, not even a minute and a half into the term and you’re already starting scandalous rumours about yourself’.

  Frankie looked at her friend wryly and raised an arm above her head. ‘Go Team!’

  *

  The first day of term passed by in a blur as it always did. The students weren’t exactly thrilled to be back in school after the break, but they hadn’t been back long enough to start causing any real trouble-probably because they weren’t being asked to participate in anything. The day flew by in a cloud of paper timetables, telling each class group exactly what was expected from now until the summer which for the most part went in one ear and straight out the other. In the staff room at lunch time, yet more paper was passed around with the times of staff meetings and departmental meetings printed on them. Rose hated that part of her job. Luckily, all her meetings were scheduled for the next week, so she was spared that headache for a few days at least.

  At the end of the school day, Frankie popped her head in the door of room 17. ‘Are you going straight home, or would you like to go somewhere?’

  Rose gathered up her things and walked towards the door. ‘A coffee sounds good. I think I’m in caffeine withdrawal; I just can’t bring myself to drink that stuff they have here. Where do you want to go for coffee?’

  Frankie sighed. ‘Anywhere, anywhere at all. I just want to put some distance between me and this school, and I’m not ready to go home to Nana yet.’

  Fifteen minutes later, the two women were ensconced in Shirley’s Tearooms, a single roomed establishment with plastic furniture, linoleum flooring and strip lighting. It served strong coffee which, along with the friendly staff, went some way to making up for the poor décor that made the bland functionality of the St. Jude’s staffroom look like it deserved a double page spread in an interiors magazine. There was a nicer coffee shop down the street which was chocolate box cute, with red gingham tablecloths and mouth watering homemade cakes, but a lot of their fellow teachers tended to congregate there after work. Rose and Frankie reckoned that they did enough small talk during their working day without continuing it after they clocked off. Shirley’s was much safer.

  ‘So why were you so desperate to get out of work?’ asked Rose as she emptied a sachet of sugar into her coffee. ‘Just the usual? Or was it something more particular today?’

  Frankie blew on the coffee in her cup and took a sip before answering. ‘Oh you know it’s just those godforsaken departmental meetings. All the German teachers have a free class last thing on a Thursday, so we had the joy of our first meeting of term on our first day back. Sally was on my back today, yet again.’

  Sally Richards was the head of the German department at St. Jude’s. Teaching was so tough in the school that Roger had come up with a departmental structure, to give some of the senior members of staff incentive to stay by giving them a title. The illusion of progression. Which was all great in theory, but subject departmental meetings were a pain for all concerned. Frankie had it tougher than Rose, teaching French, German and English, whereas Rose taught history, English and Classical Studies. Theoretically, this meant that they should both have three meetings every fortnight, but as Rose was the only member of staff who taught classical studies, and therefore constituted the entire Classical Studies department, she’d long ago elected to chair her departmental meetings at home in the bath with a large glass of wine.

  Frankie was doubly cursed, as Frau Richards was known throughout the school as a cantankerous pain in the arse. She was disliked by the majority of the staff, mainly due to her tendency to comment on all aspects of their lives. Boyfriends, weight, dress sense or lack thereof – no subject was considered too personal for Sally to stick her oar in.

  For most people Sally was just a nuisance, but she really had it in for Frankie. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that Frankie was a popular teacher and liked by the majority of her students, whereas Sally just wasn’t. Frankie extended her up-to-the-minute style to her teaching methods, bringing in DVD’s of cult television shows dubbed in German to encourage her students to develop an ear for the language. Because many of them were familiar with the storylines, they managed to follow a good proportion of the dialogue. With the senior students she introduced German soap operas. Sally Richards disapproved of her methods, but as Frankie’s classes managed to get decent grades on average (meaning that a large proportion of them passed) there was little she could say or do. She made up for this, however, by managing to make Frankie’s life as difficult as possible.

  ‘What’s the old bat done now?’

  Frankie sighed. ‘She doesn’t think it’s appropriate that I allow third years to watch a sitcom with an age certificate of 15 because two of my students won’t be fifteen until the summer. It’s ridiculous!’

  ‘You’re joking? Sure, half of the class see worse when they’re drinking on the green! I mean, one of your students is pregnant. What does she think will happen? That their parents are going to call the schools in droves, complaining that their darlings are being corrupted?!’ asked Rose incredulously.

  ‘I don’t know, but she has a point. I don’t have a leg to stand on,’ said Frankie. ‘She said if the parents gave them written permission then they could watch it.’

  ‘Would you think about doing that?’ asked Rose.

  Frankie shook her head slowly. ‘No. It just wouldn’t work. The girls like the fact that
I treat them as adults, as much as I can. Asking them to get written permission to watch one episode of Gossip Girl in German per week would undermine that. You know yourself, if you gain their trust then break it they’ll make your classes hell. I’ll have to find something that cow can’t find fault with. God, there’s something about strip lighting and old linoleum flooring that make me long for a cigarette’.

  ‘There’s something about that last sentence that makes your life sound like a sequel to Trainspotting,’ said Rose.

  ‘Me? I’m as good as gold me. You’re the one who’s just moved in with an out of work actor boyfriend, that’s much more exciting. Nana Anna is great, but people don’t exactly envy me living with her.’

  Rose wasn’t so sure about that. Nana Anna was in her early seventies and, despite problems with her hip, refused point blank to go anywhere in shoes with less than a three inch heel. She smoked like a chimney, so her and Frankie had lived together in a companionable cloud of smoke with their two cats, Badger and Florence, for the past ten years. Nana Anna loved television, and claimed that anything made less than twenty years ago was ‘new-fangled rubbish.’ Luckily, she’d taped lots of shows over the past thirty years and watched them on her ancient VCR, or watched classic DVD box sets that she got from her grandkids for birthdays and Christmas. She’d recently discovered the joys of UKTV Gold. Rose hoped to be half as interesting when she was that age.

  ‘Are you going home to London anytime soon?’ Rose asked offhandedly.

  Frankie rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve lived here, for like, ten years. This is home now.’

  Rose waved a hand impatiently. ‘Yeah, whatever. Anyway, are you going over to visit your parents soon?’

  ‘I might go for the Easter break. They’ll actually be in Nice then, so I’ll visit them there. That way I can see them and Dad’s family at the same time.’

  ‘That’s sounds lovely,’ said Rose wistfully. ‘Can I come too?’

  ‘You’re more than welcome to. Except then you might have to meet my mother.’

  Rose ordered another coffee. ‘Come on Frankie, she can’t be that bad’