LAUGHTON REES SITS IN A high-ceilinged corridor outside the headmaster’s office of St. Mark’s C of E school in Holloway, feeling like she’s twelve and in trouble again. She taps her fingers on the sides of her chair in patterns of three and runs through what she wants to say for the thousandth time, her eyes darting around and taking in the details of the old building: cracked paint peeling from cast-iron radiators, tall windows designed to let in maximum light before electric lighting existed. It reminds her of the school she went to when her mother was still around, back when everything had been relatively normal.
“Mrs. Rees?” She looks up at Mr. Day, headmaster of St. Mark’s, standing framed in his office doorway. He is lean and tanned, with sandy, wavy hair brushed forward like a Roman emperor. “Sorry to keep you.” His bright blue eyes twinkle amid laughter lines deepened by an unseasonal tan. “Please, come in.”
Laughton follows him into a surprisingly large office and he gestures toward a row of soft seating arranged around a low coffee table covered with copies of the school manifesto, “Learning to Learn Differently.” There’s also a slim file folder with Gracie’s name on it, the same type old police files are kept in, and the sight of her daughter’s name on one makes Laughton’s heart race and her mouth go dry.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Day,” she says, sitting in one of the low chairs and sinking uncomfortably low in it.
“Jonathan,” he says, sitting opposite and smiling benevolently. “Call me Jonathan, we’re not big on formality here at St. Mark’s. So”—he leans forward and lowers his voice like he’s about to share a secret—“I understand you’re a crime writer?”
“No, I’m . . . not exactly.” Laughton shuffles forward in her seat to unsink herself and balances on the front edge. “I write about crime, but not fiction.”
Jonathan nods. “Still, I imagine you must see some pretty toe-curling sights in your line of work, crime scenes, murders, that kind of thing?”
“Er . . . sometimes, yes, but only in pictures. I’m an academic, so I study solved cases, not live ones. I don’t attend crime scenes.”
“Right.” He looks disappointed.
“So, Gracie,” Laughton says, anxious to steer the conversation back in a more rehearsed direction.
“Yes. How’s she getting on?”
“Well, not great, actually.”
“Right.” Jonathan sits back and folds his arms in a classic, defensive, closed-down display. Laughton looks away, breaking eye contact to make him feel more comfortable, instinctively using techniques she has studied and written about in relation to interviewing criminals. She focuses instead on the racing bike hanging on a special bracket on the far wall, surrounded by twenty or so student portraits of Mr. Day, which give her an idea.
“Mr. Day,” she says, looking him in the eye again but making sure her head is angled down and her eyeline below his.
“Jonathan,” he corrects.
“Yes, sorry—Jonathan. You have clearly done some amazing things at this school.”
He smiles and his arms relax a little. “Thank you.”
Laughton takes a copy of “Learning to Learn Differently” from the table. “You also wrote something in here that I thought was very wise.” She flicks through the pages of smiling children and inspirational quotes. “You wrote about the importance of failure as a learning tool.”
Jonathan unfolds his arms to receive the full force of her compliments, and in this one gesture Laughton realizes she wasted half the night worrying. Appealing to a man with pictures of himself all over his office walls is easy. All you have to do is flatter him.
“Here it is—‘At St. Mark’s we allow children to “fail” because we believe that through this “failure” they will gain a deeper and more sustained understanding of an idea.’”
Jonathan nods. “I firmly believe you learn more from your own mistakes than from someone else’s successes, so failing is essential.”
“Good. Well then, I think this meeting could prove to be a useful learning opportunity.”
“How so?”
“Because your current policy on bullying is failing.”
Jonathan shoots her a half-smiling, half-quizzical look. “Well, we don’t tolerate bullying in any form, so I’m not sure how that can be viewed as a failure.”
“No, I agree, a zero-tolerance policy on bullying is essential in any school. What I’m not really clear about is how you don’t tolerate bullying here. Take my daughter’s experience, for example. Gracie has, unfortunately, had a truly miserable time since moving to this school. From day one she has been systematically excluded, both in class and out, in person and through social media. When I first spoke to her teacher about it months ago she told me it was a particularly cliquey year group and advised me to give it time to sort itself out. Well, it’s been almost a year now, and far from getting better, it’s gotten progressively worse, to the point where she has now been threatened with a knife, all of which I have reported in detail to Gracie’s class rep, her teacher, and also to Mrs. Rowe, who I believe is head of overall pastoral care in the school, but nothing has been done, nothing has changed, and so the evidence suggests that bullying is not only being tolerated at this school, it is actually being allowed to thrive.”
Jonathan shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, firstly, I’m sure Lois—Mrs. Rowe, who indeed is in charge of pastoral care—will have looked into everything thoroughly. She sends her apologies, by the way, she’s on a training course this week, but everything will be here in your daughter’s file.”
He picks up Gracie’s file and opens it just as the door swings open behind him. He turns and smiles at the messy-haired eleven-year-old boy who shuffles into the office clutching a piece of paper.
“Morning, Carter. What’s that you got?”
The boy shyly hands him the piece of paper and shoots Laughton a cold look.
“Well, look at this.” Jonathan turns the page so Laughton can see the drawing of a man with scribbly reddish-brown hair and blue eyes. “Well, this is so good it will just have to go in the gallery, won’t it?”
He rises, takes a pinch of Blu-Tack from a lump clearly left on the wall for magic moments like these, and adds the picture to the others.
“Can we do reading now?” the boy says, shooting another unfriendly glance at Laughton.
Jonathan looks at her, his eyebrows raised in query as if expecting her to say, “Hey, you go right ahead.” When she does not, he turns back to the boy.
“I’m just in the middle of something right now, Carter,” he says, and the boy’s shoulders drop. “But when I’ve finished we’ll read for a bit, OK?”
The boy glances back at Laughton like she just stole his ice cream, then sulks out of the room.
“One of our SEN students,” Jonathan explains, sitting back down and picking up the file. “Special educational needs. We allow them to a be a bit free range so they don’t feel stressed, and my open-door policy means I tend to get little visits all day long.”
He holds the file at arm’s length and peers at it like he needs glasses but is too vain to use them. “You say your daughter has been threatened with physical violence.” He reads for a moment, then glances up. “Has she experienced any?”
Laughton feels annoyance flare inside her.
“Well, as I’m sure you’re aware,” she says, as calmly as she can, “physical violence is only one element of bullying behavior and is predominantly displayed by boys. Girls are much subtler in their bullying strategies, which doesn’t make them any less mean or the suffering they cause any less painful. Being excluded from your peer group is bullying, being targeted on social media is bullying, and being threatened with violence is a violent act in itself, so yes, she has experienced violence, and quite frankly I’m a little dismayed that, after all the things that have happened to my daughter, your first response is to try and shift the focus onto things that have not.”
“Mrs. Rees, I can assure you I’m simply trying to form a—”
“It’s Miss, and if I have to call you Jonathan please feel free to call me Laughton.”
“Laughton?” He frowns. “That’s an interesting name.”
“Yes, long story, can we stick to the subject, please? I know your time is precious, your secretary made that very clear on the numerous occasions I tried to schedule this meeting.”
Jonathan nods slowly and looks back down at the file. “Miss Laughton Rees. Gracie is your only child, I see, and”—he turns the page over—“there’s no father listed. Can I take this to mean you are a single parent?”
“Yes,” she says, forcing herself to remain calm, “I am a single parent, though I’m not sure how my marital status has any bearing on my daughter being bullied.”
“Well, if you don’t mind me talking frankly, in my twenty-plus years’ experience in education, the children of lone parents sometimes grow up with a—how can I put this?—a slightly unrealistic expectation of how much attention they are entitled to receive. As a result they often end up feeling left out or ignored, particularly in the school environment, when in fact they are simply having to adjust to a normal level of attention. It’s actually a very healthy adjustment in the long term, but in the short term we often see various attention-grabbing strategies playing out.”
“So you’re saying my daughter isn’t really being bullied, she’s just . . . attention seeking?”
“Not at all, I’m just saying we need to look at the bigger picture before we start drawing any conclusions.” He holds up Gracie’s file. “Looking at your daughter’s grades she appears to be flying. That’s not normally the sign of an unhappy child.”
“Maybe not normally, but I know my own daughter and, believe me, her improved grades are not necessarily a good sign. She’s like me, when things get stressful she buries herself in work. It’s a control thing.”
“Well, that may be so, but I’m afraid most people are not going to view improved grades as evidence that she is suffering at this school—quite the opposite, in fact—and it’s very difficult for us to justify any kind of intervention without solid evidence. As far as I can see we only have your daughter’s word that any of this has happened, and she won’t even name the person who has allegedly threatened her. I’m sure in your books your detective characters have to collect hard evidence before they go around kicking in doors and arresting people.”
“Well, as I said, I don’t write crime novels, and the fact that you’ve already forgotten that is, I believe, evidence of the fundamental problem you have at your school.”
Jonathan flinched. “And what problem is that?”
“You don’t listen, or rather you only hear what you want to hear. I think you don’t want to admit you have a bullying problem here because if you did you’d have to actually do something about it. So rather than taking any steps to find out who’s bullying Grace, you doubt her instead, because it’s easier, which quite frankly is fucking outrageous.”
Jonathan stares at her, the shock evident on his face. Laughton hadn’t meant to swear, but emotion got the better of her and she’s actually glad. He needed to be verbally slapped for all the slippery shit he was saying. She actually feels good that it happened, like a proper mother for once, like how she imagines her own mother must have felt all the time. Then a small voice brings everything tumbling down.
“You said the F word.”
Laughton turns and sees the kid from earlier, standing by the door, eyes wide and staring right at her. The boy turns to Jonathan, already out of his seat and heading over to him. “Hey, Carter, we didn’t see you there. Why don’t you pop outside for just one second, then we’ll definitely do some reading, OK? Miss Rees was just leaving.”
“Was I?”
Jonathan shoots her a cold look. “Yes. I’ll talk to Lois about your daughter when she’s back and then we’ll come up with a plan of action.”
Laughton rises uncertainly from her seat. “How soon will that happen?”
“Next week, when she’s back from her course.”
Laughton shakes her head. “That’s not good enough. I’m not going to let Gracie go through another week of this, and if you’re not prepared to treat this with the urgency it deserves then I’m going to take it up with the governors.”
Jonathan nods. “Of course, you have every right to do that, though the governors are fully on board with current school policy and the way the school is run, so I imagine they’ll only reiterate what I’ve already said. Also, if you do choose to go above my head, I will obviously have to give my side of things and report what was said at this meeting, including your unfortunate outburst in front of a child, which may not make them warm to either you or your cause.”
Laughton stares up into his vaguely patronizing face. She’d so like to punch it right now or give him a full roundhouse kick to the side of the head.
“I’m sorry I used strong language,” she says. “Clearly this is a subject I feel passionately about and, in my defense, I did think it was just us two having an adult discussion and didn’t realize a child was present. Maybe if the door had been closed . . .”
Jonathan stiffens and Laughton lets the sentence trail off, deciding that taking a swipe at his open-door policy is probably not a wise move right now. She nods instead, then steps past him out of the office and into the corridor, where the boy is waiting.
“Come on in, Carter,” Jonathan says, all smiles and twinkly eyes again as he ushers the boy into the safety of the office before closing the door behind him with a solid thunk.
“Oh, so now you close your door,” Laughton mutters under her breath.
The bell rings suddenly, harsh and metallic, and the corridor instantly swarms with noise and children. Laughton—feeling suddenly conspicuous, and deflated, and angry, and definitely not in control—drifts away on the current of kids, tapping her thumbs against each finger in turn, in steady patterns of three.