There’s a toilet at the back of the staff room, and although there’s a general one much closer to her office she tends to use this one, because a toilet used by adults is always going to be more fragrant than one accessed by several hundred children. She likes to use it in the middle of the second period in the morning and the first after lunch, when most of the staff are in classrooms or meetings and the coast is likely to be as clear as it ever will be. A strange inhibition left over from her upbringing: that the sound of other people sharing the space makes her bladder freeze. The relief when she’s out in public and finds a disabled toilet is always intense. As a child she would run home in lunch break simply to pee, and then – oh, the fear that she might be too late one day – to change the bulky towels with which her mother preserved her putative virginity. You don’t shed inhibitions like that overnight.
Ten a.m. and she’s sitting on the toilet when the sound of the outer door opening makes her muscles clench. She checks her watch. Another twenty minutes until the next changeover. She has time to sit it out.
‘... who it was?’ asks a voice as it passes through the door. A woman, with another. Not all the staff are teaching all the time, of course.
‘I should think someone on staff with kids in the school, don’t you?’
‘Careless talk costs lives.’
‘Little pitchers have big ears.’
‘True. Anyway, whatever. It took three weeks but the cat’s well and truly out of the bag now. Tricia says the phone’s been ringing all day.’
Tricia. The principal’s PA. Something wrong, clearly.
‘It’s ridiculous. It’s not like either of them was implicated. They’re hardly, you know, going to be poisoning the water supply.’
Oh, hell. This can only be about one thing.
‘Try telling that to the parents.’
‘I know, I know. It would help if they weren’t so weird, though, wouldn’t it? Have you got them in any of your classes?’
‘The girl.’
‘I’ve got both. Do they ever take their eyes off you for one second?’
A shiver-laugh. ‘No! It’s freaky! It makes me feel like I must have my skirt tucked into my knickers!’
‘Oh, I think Ben McArdle would let you know if that were the case!’
‘Or Marie Spence.’
‘God, I wish someone would poison her.’
‘Tell me about it.’
The doors either side of her cubicle close and lock. I could make a run for it now, she thinks, but toilet gossip – so unguarded – is the best chance for information that she’ll get.
‘Poor sods,’ says the voice to her left, ‘they don’t stand a chance, really. Even without everyone finding out. I mean, she’s a bit weird herself, isn’t she? Who’s going to show them how to be normal?’
‘Oh, I know. Scurrying around like a squirrel, apologising all the time.’
Sarah’s cheeks burn. It is never a privilege, hearing how other people see one. You don’t have the first idea! she screams inside her head. How brave I have to be every single day just to leave the house.
‘Isn’t she part of that Congregation lot on the High Street?’
‘Is she? Well, the apple doesn’t fall far.’
‘Imagine,’ says the voice to her right, ‘you get freed from one cult and they put you straight back into another.’
‘It does seem tough.’
‘What does Helen say?’
‘Oh, you know Helen. All “I daresay”s and “maybe”s. You’ll never get a judgement out of a therapist.’
‘And in the meantime we get to deal with the fallout.’
‘I don’t know, maybe we need another bullying assembly or something?’
‘Oh, please God, no. It was bad enough after the last one when half of Year Nine decided they were non-binary.’
‘Yes, but I do feel sorry for them. That Marie’s a stirring little minx.’
‘What’s she done?’
‘Says they smell, says the girl has a thing for her, keeps asking people if anything’s gone missing from their locker while staring at them. The usual.’
‘They don’t help themselves, though, do they? All that walking around together like he’s her bodyguard or something.’
‘And the clothes! What was she thinking?’
‘I know! The shoes!’
‘And those smiles! They’re like ... puppets or something.’
A flush on one side, a flush the other. The doors unlock.
‘Well, we shall see what we shall see.’
‘Yes, well, they’ll either carry on being freaks or they’ll learn to fit in.’
Footsteps cross the floor and the door slams shut behind them. Sarah finally urinates, and burns with rage. They talk about my children like that, she thinks, and they don’t even wash their hands when they’ve been to the loo, the dirty bitches.