In the bathroom, the light and the extractor fan were both off and the small room was full of steam, lit by the glow of over a dozen candles, the old ones and the new ones I had been given last night, which he had taken out of their boxes. Some were scented, some not, some short and fat and others with tall thin flames. The old ones made tiny crackling noises as the puddles of melted wax around the wicks widened and consumed the dust that rimmed their surfaces. He had added a bath bomb and it had already dissolved – the water was milky and pink petals, still clenched tight, were floating on the surface. The room was in soft focus; the mirror misted. In the condensation, he had used a finger to draw a heart.

16

‘I’ll be at the hospital later,’ I said brightly to Matty, one morning.

‘Why?’ he asked.

It was the February half term. Everybody thought that the best thing about being a teacher was the long summer holidays but it wasn’t – they were great, of course, apart from the fact that I couldn’t afford to get a flight anywhere because it was peak travel time thanks to all those bastards with children – really, though, it wasn’t summer or Christmas or Easter: the great luxury was the half-term breaks, that one week of grace in the middle of a busy term. It wasn’t time off, of course: there was in-service training, shedloads of marking or preparation, all the administrative things that needed to be done – but for five whole working days, I would wake up and remember that I didn’t have to prepare myself psychologically to face the classroom.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like my job – I loved it, and thought of myself as quite good at something pretty difficult – but there was that feeling each morning as I rose and dressed, as if I was donning armour. Certain clothing was out of the question, anything too short, anything that showed even a hint of cleavage, unless you wanted to face death-by-mockery. Even the most ordinary of items: ‘Oh my God, did you see her earrings!’ I once heard a group of Year Ten girls scream as they came out of one of the biology labs. In the staff room, I checked out Mrs Carraway’s earrings – pewter circles the size of pennies clipped to her earlobes. They looked innocuous enough to me, rather good with her pixie haircut, in fact.