Caleb got up, laughing, and headed to the kitchen.
“How’s the start of your second week gone then?” She stretched out some. “Have any of the parents tried to tie you up in their bedrooms yet?”
I almost choked on a piece of steak.
Amelie laughed, the sound reminding me of bells at Christmas. “You’re the talk of the town. Three or four of the mums come in here for a coffee before they pick their kids up from school, and you were the headline topic this afternoon. There was a lot of speculation going on. One of them has a cousinshe thinks might know someone whose kids were at your old school, so she’s apparently going to get all the dirty details.”
I groaned. “Why?”
“Because you’re fresh meat. You’re single. You’re the new headteacher and you’re under forty – or so they’re guessing, and you’re not from the island, so you’re mysterious.” She toyed with the charm bracelet around her wrist. It was delicate and the charms were small, which made me suspect it was handmade rather than an expensive piece from a jewellers.
“I’ll only be mysterious if they stop trying to dig up dirt. Which they will find.” I didn’t have anything horrendous in my past, the breakdown of my marriage hadn’t been instigated by me, and there were a few interesting diversions before teaching in the form of some now embarrassing DJing and a brief modelling stint, where the photos now made me cringe.
“They’d find it if they dug back far enough with any of us. My suggestion is to come up with a girlfriend, a long distance one, then they’ll leave you alone and they won’t be able to find anything.”
I shook my head, carrying on eating. The other reason I’d been here probably far too much was because the food was good, and as much as I was into staying fit and all that jazz, I liked my food. Cooking for one seemed pointless, so I was left with the option of going shopping for convenience foods or eating out.
“I’m not making up stories.”
Her smile suggested she was planning something. “No reason I can’t. We can have some fun with this.”
“I feel like I should be scared.”
I was definitely scared when I saw the sweetness of her smile.
“Maybe just a little.”
I didn’t hang around the Puffin Inn for long after eating, having made plans with myself to sort out the gym equipment that’d been delivered, plans I probably wasn’t going to stick to because it was such a nice evening, too good to be spending it inside a garage, which was where the gym stuff was going to go.
In order to procrastinate, I took a longer walk home, along the beach and through the elder woods, along an overgrown pathway to an ancient stone monument from the Neolithic period that had an odd atmosphere to it that didn’t make me want to linger. The sky was full of yellows and soft pinks, a sunset that the holidaymakers would be gasping over. I had another six weeks of term before I could gasp over anything to do with holidays, which wasn’t fazing me like it would usually, because the freshness of the new role and place was keeping my adrenaline going.
The school was in an okay shape, but it was old fashioned in many ways. The previous head had retired at the age of sixty-six, having been at the same school for forty of those years, since he’d qualified as a teacher. Some of his ideas would’ve been what he’d been taught about in teacher training and most things had definitely moved on since then.
I thought about my work and the to do list that was growing infinitely, some of the HR issues I’d inherited and how we would cover the increase in wages for the next academic year if they weren’t fully funded by the government. I thought about my ex and my ex-best friend and how I hadn’t heard anything from them or about them in the last couple of weeks and how good that silence felt.
I thought about Mia and where her mother was.
I wasn’t naïve enough to think that bad things only happened in cities. Crime was rife in small towns too, just not as obvious, or maybe people subliminally chose not to notice it.
It was as if the universe conjured up Mia and Heidi at that point, ‘Mr Caddick’ ringing through the air above the cry of the gulls. I could already recognise Heidi’s voice after just a week and a day in the job. Mia’s voice I still wasn’t sure about yet.
“Mr Caddick have you come to see us? Do you want a drink? I have blackcurrant cordial and Mia has got orange and mango!” Heidi was way too enthusiastic about cordial. What it was to be nearly six.
The molecules in the air changed and I turned around. Romy McAllister stood there, hands on her hips and her chin tilted up like she was a warrior about to embark on a battle.
“Girls, I said to stay in the back garden.” There was too much calm in her tone for it to be true.
“But we wanted to - ”
“Heidi, I meant what I said.” It was a voice I recognised from tired teachers and exasperated parents alike.
Heidi looked irritated, her eyes flashing and I wondered if she’d argue with her mum. Mia looked upset and tugged at Heidi's sleeve to pull her towards the garden.
“If you’d like a drink, come through,” she said once the girls had gone through the gate, the chink of the clasp sounding as it banged shut. “They’ve offered you cordial. I’m offering you wine because if a day needs wine, it’s today.”
“That bad?”
She exhaled hard enough for me to see her shoulders relax. “Unexpectedly nasty.”
