Fiction

Putting Two and Two Together

Mathew Friday

‘He’s a paedophile, it’s obvious,’ says the first mother, a thin teenager, her face aged ten years by drugs. She’s smoking and tapping the ash into the air, where it breaks and drifts away.

‘Fuck off he is!’ says the second, her friend, who is three times her weight and dressed in a dirty track suite. She’s also smoking, but she does so quickly and with a shaking hand.

Ahead of the two mothers walk their young children, one each. They are all going to their school in South Norwood. It is late January, the second warmest January on record. This should be a day of scarves and gloves, of snow and biting cold. The weather is elsewhere; winter is indifferent. It is grey, mild and dull. No birds sing. There are few trees, few living flowers; you can’t blame winter for that.

‘You explain what he’s doing then?’

‘Teaching. I reckon.’

‘Teaching ma fucking arse. Ain’t no man teaching little ones, you get me?’

The boy and the girl have both been hurriedly dressed: the boy keeps pulling up his trousers as he speaks. The girl’s shoelaces flap like the wings of an abandoned bird. Both children look pale and have spots. The boy is testing the girl’s adding up skills because she is the best in their class. Both are oblivious to their mothers’ conversation, either because they can’t hear it or are too used to it.

‘Two plus two.’

The girl pauses for a second and then answers with delight, ‘Four. Easy.’

The boy nods, thinks and says, ‘Four plus four.’

The girl screws up her face and then counts on her fingers. ‘Eight’ she says triumphantly.

The boy takes a deep breath. ‘OK. Eight plus eight, then.’

The girl thinks about this. She tries counting on her hand but runs out of fingers. The boy starts to laugh. The girl scowls and then her face lights up. ‘Sixteen!’ she shouts. The girl doesn’t talk much in class and shouts when she gets excited or upset.

The boy, who never stops talking in class even when his exasperated Special Needs assistant shouts at him, grunts and scratches his oversized head. When he speaks he leans slightly to the left. He has a hearing problem that won’t be discovered for another year. ‘OK then. Sixteen plus sixteen.’

‘That’s not easy,’ says the girl, who has bruises on her arms and legs. The teacher will find these later and start a process with Social Services. This will result in the girl’s drunken father beating him one day after school. He will spend a week in hospital, be off work with depression for three months and then take a sabbatical from teaching.

‘You can’t do it?’ asks the boy.

‘I can.’

‘Go on then. Do it.’

‘Fine. I will.’

The girl starts work, combining her fingers and her thoughts. Meanwhile, the mothers continue their gossip.

‘You got proof, like?’

‘Don’t need it. Adds up, right?’

‘How so?’

‘You doubting me?’

‘Nah, course not. Just reckon you need to know for sure. Big thing en all.’

The mothers finish their cigarettes and start new ones. They pass squashed terrace houses with litter strewn gardens. Overhead an aeroplane swings round to get in line for Heathrow. There is a Neighbourhood Watch sticker on the lamppost, but no one is noticing the neglect.

With much concentrated squinting of her eyes, the girl says, rather tentatively. ‘Thirty two.’

‘Is it?’ says the boy.

‘Yes,’ she says, more confident this time.

‘Do thirty-two plus thirty-two.’

‘No way!’ says the girl shaking her head.

They stop their adding up game and fall silent.

‘Look at the facts, right. He’s the only man teaching little ones, right? He’s with kids all day, right? Bet he ain’t been checked out or anything. You hear about it all the time.’

‘Have you complained?’

‘Yeah, course. All on his side, ‘ain’t they. They’re always clever, fuckin’ peados. All the children like em.’

‘That figures.’

The girl trips up over her shoelaces and crashes to the floor. She erupts into tears. It is more than the shock of the fall and the pain of hitting the broken pavement.

‘Fuck sake, Melanie!’

‘I need pooh,’ says the boy.

‘Wait till you get to the school, Tiger.’

‘I can’t, Mummy.’

‘Shut up,’ she says pushing her son forward. Today the boy will exhaust his Special Needs assistant, so many times does he push other children and refuse to sit still. She will not come back to work. Nor will Tiger, as his father will return without warning and take him away.

The four of them stumble on, all tears and bruises and misery.