Some Rain Must Fall Read Free Page B

finished up there, we had almost the same argument’ – he smirked – ‘almost the same restaurant. And that time in Belfast—’
    ‘Spare me the details,’ she groaned, tossing her fork intothe mound of rice and taking a deep swig of wine. ‘Ask the proprietor if there are any rooms free for tonight. If so, book one.’
    He stood up, then hesitated.
    ‘For how many people?’
    ‘Two,’ she chided. ‘Bastard.’
    Next day, the children started breaking down at last, more or less as Frances had been anticipating, with one or two exceptions. Tommy Munro seemed to have sidestepped the process, behaving with unusual maturity and poise for a brain-damaged kid; maybe, because he was so used to being confused and mistaken all the time, he’d come to believe that the incident with his old teacher must have happened in one of his nightmares.
    Greg Barre, however, blew his crewcut top just after lunchtime, starting with a misunderstanding about which times table he was supposed to have learned, and climaxing with a shrieking fit. Mrs MacShane’s name was thrown up in the ensuing hysteria and several children were soon weeping and accusing each other of causing what had happened or failing to stop it when they should have. Martin Duffy wailed his innocence with fists clenched against his day-glo sports shorts; Jacqui Cox wailed her guilt with arms wrapped tightly around her head. The teacher of the adjacent class rushed to the doorway, trembling with fear, her face twitching with a ghastly nervous smile like the ones sometimes seen on people about to be executed.
    Frances gave her the hand-signal for ‘I’ll handle this’, and a nod of permission to shut the door.
    Then she moved forward and took control.
    By the end of the day, she had them all quiet again, entranced by her own soothing murmur and the gentle patter of rainon the windows. She sat in the midst of them on a high stool, keeping the stories coming and the airwaves humming, hypnotising herself to ignore the fact that her rear end was numb under the weight of Jacqui’s body in her lap. Jacqui was going to be a big girl, at least physically. Emotionally, she was too small for life outside the womb, and she clung to her teacher’s waist with marsupial tenacity, pressing her face hard into Frances’s bosom. She had been weeping for hours, an infinitely sustainable whimper: nothing that half a lifetime of reassurance couldn’t fix.
    Greg Barre was playing quoits with Harriet Fishlock and Katie Rusek, happy as a lamb, wearing the sackcloth trousers he’d worn as a shepherd in the Christmas play. His own were drying out on one of the radiators; he’d soiled them at the height of his frenzy. Frances had recognised she couldn’t afford to leave the group to attend to him alone, and had chosen Katie to bear him off to the toilets and help him get changed; a risky choice, given the rigid gender divisions in this little world of Rotherey, but Frances judged it was the right one: Katie was mature and self-assured, Greg was afraid of her and secretly infatuated too. Most importantly, Katie was smart enough to perceive that the situation – half the class weeping and throwing hysterics, a boy with shit in his pants – was beyond the control of just one adult, and she caught the devolution of responsibility as if it were a basketball. In her essay she had written:
    My name is Katie Rusek and I am in Grade 7 of Rotherey Village School Something very bad happened here last week. Our teacher Mrs MacShane was giving us a Maths lesson when her husband came in to the class room with a shot gun. He swore at Mrs MacShane and hit her until she was on the floor. She kept saying please not in front of the children but it didn’t make any difference. Then her husband told her to put the end of his gun in to her mouth and suck on it. She did that for a few seconds and then he blew her head to bits. We were all so, so scared but he went away and now the police are looking for