Page 5 of Summer at Harbour View House
‘I didn’t really have time to.’
‘She was probably smashed.
‘Or high.’
‘Both!’
‘You set a good example to the school,’ Mr. Andrews said, shaking his free hand to request the megaphone back. As Natasha handed it over, he turned to the pupils. ‘That’s how we expect you to behave. Not pushing each other into the toilets, or slamming doors in other people’s faces.’
The kids looked keen to get back to class. Mr. Andrews kept them for a few more lingering seconds, before calling an end to the fire drill and ordering everyone back inside. As the pupils filed off the playground, he turned to Natasha.
‘I have to say, your dedication to your job in the face of such terrible circumstances is exemplary. It will definitely be considered when your performance review comes up in November.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You might want to take the tags off your clothing and wash the vodka out of your hair.’
Aware vodka had no noticeable smell, Natasha looked up at Mr. Andrews and frowned. ‘How did you—’
‘Tina told me you were out drowning your sorrows last night. She happened to be walking home from the station and noticed you in a bar.’
‘I wasn’t drunk enough to pour vodka over my head.’
‘She said you looked … how did she describe it? “Wrecked”.’ Mr. Andrews watched her with a smug look.
Natasha glared back for a moment, before deciding to drop it. Getting into an argument with the headmaster would achieve nothing. Plus, she would need her rage good and ready for when she next bumped into Tina, whom she very well knew lived on the outskirts of Brentwell, drove to work, and had no reason whatsoever to be wandering around near the station late on a Monday night.
She didn’t see Tina until after school had finished, when she found the older woman sobbing into a tissue at her desk in the staffroom. Pretty much at the end of her increasingly frayed tether, Natasha had been planning to give the old bag a piece of her mind, but the sight of Tina in obvious distress diffused the fire that had been stoking nicely in her belly all afternoon.
‘Are you alright?’
Tina, the blotches on her face matching the faded carnations on her floral blouse, blew her nose dramatically, then looked up and wiped a tear out of the side of one overly mascaraed eye, the makeup smearing into a point which gave her a lopsided, elderly Cleopatra look.
‘I can’t believe she’s dead.’
‘Someone died? Who?’
‘Lindsay Dean Hagfield. She was the voice of my childhood. I can’t believe it.’
‘Who?’
Tina held out a magazine spread which had a large colour picture of an extremely old woman sitting in a rocking chair, holding a children’s book in arthritic, liver-spotted hands, a warm smile on her ancient face as she looked with an expression of nostalgic vacancy out of a window at a quaint, flowery garden. The headline read: Beloved radio personality dies aged 98.
‘My parents were always too busy to read to me as a child,’ Tina whined. ‘They used to put the radio in my room and play “Bedtime with Lindsay Dean” to get me to sleep. She used to read all the classics. Enid Blyton, things like that.’ Then, with a sudden dramatic wail that caused a teacher standing by the coffee machine to spill his drink down his shirt, she howled, ‘My childhood is dead!’
Natasha, wondering if she was getting trolled, couldn’t help but get in a little dig. ‘Is that why you’re so notoriously mean to your classes? Because your own childhood was so bad?’
Tina sniffed. ‘Never underestimate the importance of a bedtime story,’ she said. ‘Lindsay Dean was like the grandmother I never had. And now she’s … dead.’
‘Like your actual grandmother?’
‘No, one of them is actually still alive. She’s a hundred and three, and lives in a care home in Bristol. She ran a laundry service, and I had to go round there after school to wait until my parents finished work. She was a dragon and a half. My sister and I had to fold sheets for her, and heaven forbid if the creases didn’t line up.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Oh, Lindsay….’
As Tina’s forehead thumped down on her desk, Natasha took the opportunity to retreat. It was nearly five o’clock, and she began to run dinner scenarios through her mind. Another night on the sauce was out of the question, the hotel didn’t have a restaurant, and she couldn’t afford to splurge on any kind of takeaway. It looked like another microwave dinner from Tesco, which she could ask the hotel staff to heat up so she could eat it in her room.
