to stay standing – but when Calum Ian gets up and folds his arms, he sits. His big brother looks annoyed, or maybe sad, I can’t tell. He gives Elizabeth a look like she did a stupid thing for encouraging Duncan.
‘Know what I think?’ he says. ‘There’s just as much stuff we need to forget. So get on, Big Brains, answer that: how do we stop ourselves from remembering?’
We wait on Elizabeth.
‘Remembering is all we’ve got,’ she says.
It feels like the right time to change topic. Elizabeth writes down Duncan’s memories then gives them to him.
‘Let’s move on to sums,’ she tells us.
It’s my job to hand out the workbooks. We all know the pages, but I say them anyway because that’s what happens in a class. My lesson is counting money. I have to count picture-bundles of spending money in under a minute. I use the clock on the wall. It takes me two minutes, but only forty seconds if I cheat.
Alex, who’s young, has to read Kipper’s Birthday, which he’s done before but this time with feeling. Duncan’s the same age as me, yet he won’t be encouraged. He mostly lies head-down until it’s time to go. Calum Ian is one year below Elizabeth, so he copies her mostly.
I turn the pages and stare at the sums I know I did last year. The book is very good – giving examples, sums that are worked through, but even so, it’s not enough. I don’t want to tell the boys that I don’t know. The last time I did that they called me Gloic, which means brainless idiot, not even anything to do with the truth.
Then the sun starts to shine on my desk, and now I want to be outside. I think of the gardens we saw on the way here, with flowers I haven’t the name for, either in the Gaelic or English. I recognised some very big daisies, but the rest I didn’t know. Daffodils? Roses, maybe? There might be a book in one of the houses, or the library. For learning there can’t be a better place to start than there.
‘This is dumb,’ Calum Ian says.
I look up at Elizabeth, who pretends not to hear, at least not until he says it for a second time.
‘Why is it dumb?’
Calum Ian scratches his pen across the lid of his desk. ‘It’s the same page, over and over. Plus I never cared about sums in the before. How can they help us now?’
Elizabeth lines up her jotter and pencils. Then says, ‘Sums are needed for lots of things.’
‘Say some.’
She tries to think of examples. In the long run she says, ‘Sums can tell you what the date is.’
‘No they don’t. All you need for that is a calendar. And there’s plenty of those in the post office.’
Me: ‘People used to tell the time by the sun. True. There was a shortest day and a longest. The olden-times people used sums to work it out.’
Calum Ian: ‘We’ve got calendars.’
Elizabeth: ‘Which nobody can agree the date with.’
Calum Ian: ‘Because you got your count wrong.’
He takes out his can opener – twirls the head of it, squinting his eyes at Elizabeth.
‘Why’d you get to be teacher? It could just as easy be me, or Duncan. Or Alex sitting quiet there. Or her. But it’s forever you.’
Elizabeth puts her pencils back in her satchel.
‘It’s not even as if we learn anything. We’ve been at this same page for days. Weeks.’
Elizabeth leaves the teacher’s seat and goes to sit beside Alex. Then she takes out her things and looks patient.
I know Duncan will never get up to replace her: he’s too shy. Alex is both shy and too young: he’s only six.
We hear Calum Ian’s chair screeching. He scrumples his pages then goes to the teacher’s desk.
On the whiteboard he writes his name, then underneath:
I AM A BOY NOT A FUCKING TEACHER
‘There’s no point pretending to be a teacher, because I’m not,’ he says. ‘There’s no point in any of us pretending because none of us are. The – bloody – end.’
After this he draws an arse on the whiteboard, and I have to admit this is kind of funny.
But when we start to laugh he gets furious; he rubs off what he’s written then shouts: ‘Shut your traps! Sguir dheth sin! That means you as well, Ugly-face!’
He’s talking to his brother, Duncan.
Duncan hides as deep as he can in his jacket, to match the quietness of the rest of us.
Now Calum Ian looks worried to have said what he did. He goes back to his seat, rolls down his sleeves – but they’re clarty, so he rolls them back up again.
‘Duncan could teach us the fiddle,’ Elizabeth says in a quiet voice. ‘We could get them out of the music cupboard?’
‘I’m going home.’
Calum Ian begins to pack his bag. Duncan begins to collect his things, too.
Elizabeth: ‘We could do messages?’
‘Another crap idea. Who’s looking out for them, tell me that? We send and send but we never get any back.’
‘And never will if we don’t keep sending.’
‘Fine, you do it then. See if I care.’
‘But we have to stick together. Remember the saying: “What’s going to work?”’
This is Elizabeth’s saying. She always does it when we’re struggling, or disagreeing, or needing a boost up.
When nobody adds on the next bit, she has to add it herself: ‘Teamwork! That’s what’s going to work, right? We’re all going to be a team. Right?’
‘Do your stupid sums for the team, then.’
After this Calum Ian gets up, scraping his chair, and leaves, with Duncan hurrying behind.
I look across at the drawing Duncan left on his desk.
It’s the same drawing he always does: of a face with black scored-out holes for eyes.
Elizabeth goes into one of her quiet moods. She walks me and Alex to the swing park, then leaves us.
‘See you at home,’ she says, her voice sounding like we’ve not to follow too soon.
Sometimes if I’m not concentrating I still think we’re living in our last house. We’ve moved twice
