The chair is eleven inches off the floor. I have sat on a great many of them and I still go down too fast.
It is ten past one. I am early, because the last thing finished early, and that happens about twice a year. The woman behind the glass has asked who I am here for. I have told her, quietly, and she has written it down and not said it back to me. I liked her straight away for that.
Signing in
There is a screen on a stand. It wants my name, my organisation, my car registration and a photograph.
The photograph is taken from below, by a camera at the height of a child’s face. The sticker comes out of a slot with a picture of my chin on it and the word VISITOR. I put it on my cardigan. It will come off in the wash, in pieces, some time in the spring.
What is on the walls
The Tudors, this term. Henry the Eighth has been done in felt tip by somebody with strong feelings about his legs.
Next to him there is a board called OUR VALUES, with a laminated leaf for each one. RESPECT has come unstuck at one corner. Under it, where an adult would not see it unless the adult were sitting on a very low chair, somebody has written in pencil, in small letters, I like the dinner lady.
I read it twice. There is more on that board about the school than in its last inspection report, and it is at knee height.
Who comes through
A boy with a nosebleed, walking with his head back, led by a friend who is enjoying the job.
A delivery of paper towels.
A teaching assistant carrying a guinea pig in a washing-up bowl. She sees my badge, and the look crosses her face that people get when they work out what I do. It is quick. Then she smiles, because she is a nice woman, and says, “He’s going to the vet. He’s fine. It’s his teeth.”
I say I hope it goes well. I mean it. I have been thinking about his teeth ever since.
The bell
At twenty-five past, the bell goes and the corridor fills. It is a noise like the sea.
I stand up, which takes two attempts, and I put my bag in front of the badge. No child wants the corridor to see that the visitor is for them.
The woman behind the glass comes round with her keys. “They’ve put you in the library corner,” she says. “It’s nicer than the office. There’s a beanbag, but I wouldn’t.”
I follow her. Behind us the low chair is still warm, and Henry the Eighth watches the door.
What I will write down
That I arrived at ten past one and was seen at half past. That the school had found a room.
I will not write down the guinea pig, or the pencil under the leaf. There is nowhere on the form for them.
They are most of what I know about the place, all the same. A school where somebody likes the dinner lady, and says so where only the small ones will see, is a school where I would start by asking the dinner lady.
This is a scene, and it is made up, like the book. Nobody in it is a real person.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: The leaving do