5.
8.38 a.m.
Rafi said they were all going to play a game outside and they put on their coats, not one class at a time like normal, but all squashed together. Rafi got things out of the big cupboard and put them into black bin bags and Mr Lorrimer looked even crosser and said it was a fool’s errand, but Basi didn’t know what that meant.
Some of the Reception children and Year Ones were crying because Mr Lorrimer was cross and because some of the teachers looked really worried and they were missing circle time.
Rafi called out, ‘Who likes playing hide-and-seek in the snow?’ and he held Basi’s hand tightly as he said that, because he knew Basi was frightened of snow; and the little children stopped crying because everyone liked playing hide-and-seek and everyone liked playing in snow, apart from Basi.
‘Who’s the seekers?’ Mani asked, and Rafi said, ‘The sixth-formers!’ Everyone thought it super-cool the sixth-formers were playing with them. And then Rafi said, ‘We’re going to win because we’re going to the beach where they won’t be able to find us and we’re going to go quickly so we get a good head start.’
‘Which beach?’ Mani asked.
‘Fulmar beach,’ Rafi said and people were excited because no one had been there before, because it was out-of-bounds.
Basi and Rafi had played hide and seek lots of times on the Journey and they always hid together.
Some people started putting on their welly boots, but Rafi said they didn’t have time if they wanted to get hidden, so they went outside in the snow just wearing their indoor shoes, even Samantha in her Lelli Kellys. Rafi asked teachers and the older, stronger children to carry the big black bin bags and they all said yes, but Rafi didn’t ask Mr Lorrimer.
In the car park, there were just the teachers’ cars because all the parents had gone. On the other side of the car park was the gate at the top of the path that went down to the beach. They weren’t allowed through the gate. Mr Lorrimer had to unlock it. Some of the boys heard him swearing.
When they got through the gate, Rafi knelt down so Basi could get on his shoulders for a piggyback ride, which they also played a lot on the Journey, because he got tired and because his shoes had holes in the bottom. Rafi’s did too, but he said his feet were toughened up. It was still snowing but Basi was okay because Rafi was with him, holding tightly on to his legs, and he could bend down and put his face against Rafi’s hair.
‘How long till the seekers come?’ Sofia asked.
‘Not long,’ Rafi said. ‘But if we hurry we can get hidden.’
‘But where can we hide on a beach?’ Mani asked and Basi had been wondering that too.
‘We could bury ourselves in sand,’ Sofia said but Basi thought that was a silly idea, nobody had brought a spade or anything.
Rafi stopped walking and shouted out really loudly so everyone could hear, ‘The cliffs jut out so we’re going to hide in the overhang. It’s a great place because when the seekers come searching for us, they’ll look down at the beach from the top of the cliff and won’t be able to see any of us.’
‘What’s an overhang?’ Sofia asked and no one else knew either. The teachers probably did but they were all on their phones, trying to get a signal, but they couldn’t.
Rafi opened his mouth and stuck his front teeth right out over his bottom lip and chin and made everyone laugh, and then he pointed to under his sticking-out teeth and said ‘overhang’, which sounded funny because his teeth weren’t in the right place to talk. ‘We are going to hide on the chin.’
* * *
In Matthew’s office, Neil put down the phone to the police, wired with anxiety, his fingers tapping one after another on the desk. ‘A police car’s close, he’ll be here soon; just one officer though, their cars aren’t double-crewed any more, because I asked. She said it’s an initial response and he’ll report back, and if necessary try and contain what’s happening as much as possible.’
Tonya put down the phone to Gina Patterson, designated head of New School.
‘Camille Giraud isn’t in the art block. She told Gina she was taking the children to the pottery room, but we think she must have switched her phone off because she’s not picking up.’
The pottery room, in the middle of woodland, was accessible only by foot.
‘We could put the siren on,’ Tonya suggested. They’d installed a lockdown siren two years ago, a different sound to the fire alarm.
‘Too far away, they won’t hear it. I’ll go and let Camille know,’ Matthew said. ‘In the meantime, keep trying to call her.’
‘I’ll go,’ Neil said, fingers still drumming.
‘Your role is liaison with the emergency services,’ Matthew replied. ‘You need to stay here.’
‘Four children in that class are off sick,’ Tonya said, looking at the register. ‘So Camille has sixteen children with her.’
Matthew left his office, walking along the corridor towards the front door. Behind him the corridor used to end in a blank wall but now there were doors to a glass corridor leading to the theatre. He’d thought about evacuating everyone in Old School to the theatre but the glass corridor was too exposed to the woods and any possible threat there.
This had been the original school building, with just forty students when it was founded in the 1920s as part of the Progressive School Movement, but it had quickly expanded, so an existing building half a mile away had been converted into a junior school; and then New School had been built on the other side of the road to meet demand. In the last two decades a sports hall, music block and art block had been added on to New School. The doughty sisters who’d founded the school would be astonished.
He walked past the library, where sixth-formers were making a racket. He’d instigated a ‘no mobiles or laptops’ rule in the hope some of them might read a book but it clearly wasn’t working, nor were they in the least worried by the amber alert, which could well be the right reaction; and then on past Jacintha Kale’s English classroom, the usual hum of a lively discussion inside.
It was all so normal; even the feel of the floor under his shoes, the grooves in the wood worn smooth with running footsteps thumping down on to the floorboards. Don’t run! teachers would call and he’d wish it was a command that could apply to him. He felt the kids’ energy under his feet.
The dark-green walls had every year’s framed photo of those responsible for the worn floor; the numbers increasing over the years, their clothes and hairstyles changing from the 1920s to the present day, but the children’s faces all had a similar expression, smiling and open, not imagining danger. At the end of the corridor, near the front door, there were black-and-white photos of young soldiers, boys barely out of the sixth form, who’d gone off to fight and die in the Second World War. As Matthew got older those boys’ faces seemed to get younger. Had war seemed unimaginable to them as they’d raced with thudding footsteps along this corridor a year or so before? Don’t run!
He often thought about those boys as he walked along this corridor, thought they had fought and died for the next photo of school children, and the next and the next; that a school like this one, progressive, non-religious and open-minded, which had a bursary fund to take in refugees – Jewish children smuggled out of Poland, children from Sarajevo decades later, now Rafi and Basi – a school that was genuinely tolerant and liberal, was only possible because they had fought for it. That’s why their photos were the first you saw as you came into the school. Medals of three of them were displayed outside the library.