‘Hey!’ I exclaim and throw my arms around my brother. Thank goodness he could come.
‘It’s not that big a deal,’ my brother tells me.
He doesn’t realise how much of a big deal it is.
‘You know I can’t do this sort of thing. I get too wound up; I hear even the smallest criticism as an attack and I go into defence mode. It would not be good for Betina if I was arrested.’
Logan smiles, his expression comfortingly patronising as he dismisses my concerns. ‘That won’t happen, silly,’ he says. He slings his arm around my shoulders. ‘You’re so hard on yourself.’
‘I’m not, you know,’ I state. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there what it feels like in these situations. No matter how long ago it is, these situations bring out the prisoner in me.
‘Let’s see what they have to say before you try to get yourself locked up again, all right? It might be nothing.’
‘It might be,’ I mumble as we go towards the silver intercom box that will allow us to enter the school. Logan is not a parent, he does not know that you’re never called in for ‘nothing’. It’s always something and it’s almost always your fault. Not your child’s, yours. Or at least that’s how it feels. Whenever I get a line or two about behaviour in her reports or on the reading record, whenever a teacher calls me over for a ‘chat’ at the end of the day, whenever she comes out brandishing a yellow (warning) or red (unacceptable) behaviour card, I see me in her. I see that my worries before she was born were absolutely justified: I am going to mess her up, damage her, in ways that will be impossible to undo.
Sitting here with those two women on the other side of the desk unnerves me.
They look so comfortable and secure in their roles. I’ve always thought that about them. The one in charge wears a black suit with a blue shirt, the other one, the form tutor, has on a furry pink jumper and brown suede skirt with knee-high boots. They wear twin expressions of concerned condescension and it’s this that will be my undoing. Whether they realise it or not, they are looking down on me and it’s that sort of thing that sets me off.
I am not the teenager who was driven into prison thirty years ago.
I am not the woman who walked out of prison ten years ago.
I am so much more than that. Sure, they’re a part of me, but I am better than that. No, ‘better’ sounds like I think there was something wrong with me before. I have moved on to the next stage of who I’m supposed to be. I have a job running the cleaning company that I worked for when I first came out of prison – Raymond found his dislike of me waned the more I worked for him and eventually, when he wanted to take a step back, asked me if I would step in for him. I did that. I became enough to take over someone’s business. I became enough to become someone’s mother. I don’t need to feel small, to think I’m going to drown in unworthiness.
‘Your partner couldn’t join us today, Miss Carlisle?’ the head teacher asks.
I resist the urge to say ‘obviously not’ and smile instead. Not every question needs answering. I found this out a long, long time ago.
‘You’ll have to put up with me instead,’ Logan says, charm itself. ‘I’m Logan Carlisle, Betina’s uncle.’
The pair on the powerful side of the desk are in confusion. Is he my brother or my ex-husband? Family friend or sperm donor? ‘Uncle’ has become such a vague, nebulous term that neither of them knows how to react to this.
‘I’m Poppy’s brother,’ Logan helpfully supplies. ‘Alain is away on business and Poppy thought she might need a little support.’
‘Oh, not at all,’ the head teacher, Mrs Long, states. ‘We just wanted to touch base about Betina and how you think she is getting on.’
‘Isn’t it more about how you think she’s getting on?’ Logan says for me. I was going to say that, but I know how it would have come out. Aggressive. Angry. Defensive. I remember Tina, friend Tina, would say all the time that no matter how she said things, people would take it the wrong way. They would paint her as aggressive, and dismiss everything that came out of her mouth because of it. I didn’t get what she meant until I had been out of prison for a while and realised that prison face, convict voice got you nowhere. Tina said this happened to her before she went to prison, simply because she was speaking up while black, and the thought of that, how just being normal was criminalised, made me depressed.
Mrs Long doesn’t like being challenged, even in the mildest way, so blatantly ignores Logan, and focuses on me. ‘Miss Carlisle, are things difficult at home for Betina at the moment?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean by “difficult”,’ I say, careful to modulate my tone, to suppress Prison Poppy.
‘Betina often talks about her father,’ says Miss Glasbern, Betina’s form teacher. ‘She says he doesn’t live at home any more? Whenever we have discussions or do work about families, Betina brings up how her father isn’t at home.’
‘And that’s a problem?’ Logan asks.
‘Only because we think it might be contributing to her “acting out”.’
‘I don’t know what “acting out” means,’ I state. Euphemisms irritate me. Just say what you mean or don’t say it at all. Stop dressing it up and sending it out there – how is a person expected to understand when you won’t be clear in what you mean.
‘Betina is disruptive in class,’ Miss Glasbern says. ‘She calls out rather than waiting her turn, she won’t sit still, she’s often talking when she should be getting on with her work. She has progressed to fighting the other children who she perceives have crossed her.’
I bet my prison reports said that about me. I did call out, speak up. I frequently wouldn’t sit still if something was happening. I was often talking when I should have been working. And yeah, when other people crossed me I would absolutely fight them if I had to. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t a fool. If someone came for me, I always made sure they didn’t do it again. All of this is fine in prison, but unacceptable in school when you’re seven.
‘This is all news to me,’ I offer. ‘No one has said anything before.’
‘We only really call the parents in when the problem becomes unmanageable and we’re starting to look at our options.’
They’re going to ghost my daughter. They’re going to get rid of her, make her some other institution’s problem.
‘Have you thought about changing her class?’ Logan interjects before I can say any more.
‘Miss Glasbern is an excellent teacher; if Betina struggles in this environment, I’m not sure what moving to the other class will do.’
‘I’m sure Miss Glasbern is brilliant, and she clearly cares about my niece, but I’m talking about moving her up a year. I’m assuming, since you haven’t mentioned it, this situation isn’t a result of frustration that she can’t keep up with her classmates. I’m thinking it’s frustration that everything is too easy for her and she’s bored out of her mind.’
Both teachers stare at Logan as though he’s simultaneously spoken a different language and solved the hardest equation in the world while insulting their authority.