Sunflowers

Sunflowers

The girl sat uncomfortable on a small plastic chair and fiddled with the bottom of her gingham dress. Too hot and nothing to see here. A bluebottle hit itself against the window, dumb and furious, its sick, fuzzing whine punctuated by thuds. Outside there was back door of the school’s kitchen, the bin bags ready for collection shining fat and slick with yesterday’s scrapings of rice pudding and carrot. She felt heavy and queasy in her stomach when she thought about the bins, the soft hot squish of thin plastic skin over disgusting soup, the wasps – horrid things - that twitched and swerved about them on magnetic currents. Somebody could get you and make you eat it. She shuddered. She was seven.

A spot of sun came in and lit up the scissors in their brightly-papered tins. They made special scissors for left-handed children. There were only two pairs and they sat in their own pot, the blades rusted and sticky with old glue.

There were five chairs around every table in the room but the other four places at the table where the girl sat were empty. The class whispered, frowning over their drawings. Some gawped at the wall, waiting their turn for the crayons; others scrubbed busily at the cheap sugar-paper with sticks of waxy green. Each table was given a fistful of crayons from the big tub on the teacher’s desk, so the girl was lucky. She didn’t need to fight over the dwindling stubs and could take her time, tracing the shape methodically over the folds.

- This is what I want you to do, the teacher had said.

There was a new picture on the wall. The picture was covered in thick, shining plastic which made it hard to look at. The fluorescent lights overhead made bent ripples all over the painting that you weren’t meant to see but did.

- It’s called Sunflowers, said Mrs. Rawson. By Vincent Van Gogh. He was a French artist.

- My cousin’s French, Philip shouted out. Miss. My cousin.

Mrs. Rawson was forty-five, a lizardy woman with skin sunbedded into cheap orange leather and a small head topped with canary frizz. Her sharp voice was streaked with brass. Sometimes when she spoke she hissed through her teeth like a goose, like the geese that rose up with their darning-needle tongues if you got too close to the pond. When they did poetry she jabbed her two fingers forward in a point to make them keep to the rhythm

- ALL along the BACKwater
THROUGH the rushes TALL,
DUCKS are a-DABbling UP tails ALL -

Her real name was Marianne but you couldn’t call her that.

Mrs. Rawson was vile, the girl thought. She was hot; her neck itched. She rolled a sock into a thick donut round her ankle and pulled it up again. She tucked her leg beneath her and sat on her foot until it fizzed and went numb.


The teacher came round the class and gave everyone a long rectangle of paper.

- This is what you do, she said. Fold the paper into four. Like this.

She held up her paper and folded the top piece down, then the next and the next, like a concertina.

- Even sizes.

- Miss, when do we –
- Wait.

The girl thought that the picture of the sunflowers was no good. They didn’t look like that. Last year in Mr Jones’s class they had grown sunflowers for a competition. Everybody got a seed, and you had to plant it in a little pot and take it home and look after it until it sprouted. The seed was wonderful. It was a narrow thing with fine zebra-stripes, like a barcode or a humbug. Michael Watson put his in his mouth and ate it, but Mr Jones gave him another one. The pots were decorated with each person’s name and stickers, golden dots, red stars.

She took the sunflower home and put it in the bathroom window where the sun could get to it. She watered the black soil every day.

The next week they were supposed to measure the seedling and draw it in their diaries. The others drew fat green circles, wrote the height in pencil (in centimetres please.) She waited. She watered it twice a day, cupping her hands under the tap. Next Monday it was the same. The sunflowers were five, seven, nine centimetres. This time she copied a picture from someone’s diary, wrote SIX AND A HALF CENTIMETRES underneath. She drew a smiling sun next to the plant pot. – Good, said the teacher.

At the end of the month they had to bring their sunflowers back in and Mr Jones would measure them. The pot of waterlogged soil sat on the bathroom windowsill, a secret, clenched shame.

She couldn’t sleep; when everyone had gone to bed she sat on the stairs in the dark, pulling her nightdress over her knees. She traced the raised patterns of the wallpaper with a finger, finding ways from one side to the other between glossy white grains. It was a map of the Arctic: an explorer was lost, wandering alone in the silent frozen wastes of the Pole. Above him danced the Northern lights, spectral rose, iridium green.

The next morning the others trumpeted their way into school. Strong fleshy stalks thick as a thumb; fat dark green buds peeling at the tips, flat leaves sprouting fine hairs. Some teetered from canes tied with strands of wool. Ranks of Roman centurions raising their shields to the ceiling.

- What a lot of green fingers, the teacher said.

That evening, she went to her little brother in his room.

- Did you touch my plant?
- No
- Did you stick your fingers into the soil, did you?
- No
- There was a seed in there. Did you touch it? It was for school. Did you do it?

He was two; he loved her. He was gentle and soft. His hair was white feathers, his eyes were round and he dribbled when he spoke. He was sweet. He didn’t understand things. He clung to his toys, his cloth rabbit, his Fireman Sam. She slapped his face, hard. He sobbed and sobbed.

- When you’ve folded the paper, Mrs. Rawson said, I want you to draw a picture of the flower. JUST THE HEAD OF THE FLOWER. ON THE TOP FOLD. Do you understand?

They nodded, yes.

- And then, on the next fold, you draw the part of the stalk below the head of the flower. And the first leaves. Then, on the THIRD fold, you draw the bottom leaves, and on the LAST fold, the BOTTOM fold, you draw the pot. Now. Is that clear?

- Is that clear, everyone?
- Yes, Mrs. Rawson.
- And DON’T get any on the table.

She began to colour the picture. She rolled the crayons between her fingers; some of them still had the labels attached. She loved the names of the crayons, listed in order on the back of the big tin box:

Magenta
Burnt Sienna
Peach
Sunset Orange
Razzle Dazzle Rose
Teal
Violet
Ultramarine

The pots were to be done in red, like a Christmas tree. It was difficult to make the crayon go in a straight line all the way up and the stalk wavered and bent. The leaves were all one colour, fat lobes matching on either side. Careful to colour in properly over the joins.

On the table next door Jemma put her hand up.

- Miss

Jemma was a model pupil. She had a long plait that went halfway down her back, tied at the bottom with a blue scrunchie.

- I’m finished, Miss.
- Bring it here, then.

Jemma pushed back her chair. It knocked against the edge of the girl’s table, jogging her hand. She glared.

- Very good, Jemma. Very nice.

Mrs Rawson took Jemma’s drawing and put it on the right-hand side of her desk in the Display pile. The children nearest craned to look.

- No, no. Do your own, please.

Something hard and sudden stung her ear. A bit of rubber had bounced off the table and lay on the floor. She turned round to see a table of the older boys with their faces laughing, shut hard against her. She turned away. Their whispers sent tin-tacks of red pain into the back of her neck. She pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands, which she had been told not to do, and pushed her thumb through the hole in the cuff, making it bigger. She began to chew her pencil, the sour, nasty paint cracking into flakes that stuck to her teeth. She removed it from her mouth and studied the dents her teeth had made; began, methodically, to press the wood into her upper front teeth one side of the hexagon at a time, marking an indented bracelet around the base. She looked down at the picture. She sighed and rested her head on the table, flat on her palms. She blew a spit bubble gently, then another.

- Sarah!

She started up. There was a choke of sniggers. She pulled her fingers back through the proper cuff of her jumper.

- Have you finished?

She nodded.

- Well then, don’t sit there and go to sleep – bring it to me.

The table left a smudged feeling on her cheek, but when she rubbed at it there was nothing there. She clutched the drawing in her hand and set it down in front of the teacher. Mrs. Rawson was writing something. She put down her pen without looking at the girl and picked up the sunflower picture, letting it fall open.

- What’s this?

Out of nowhere, a blank section appeared in the paper. It had been folded into five pieces, not four. A handspan’s worth of nothing showed in the centre of the stalk.

- Oh now, look. That’s not good, is it?

Mrs Rawson spoke in her Monday voice, a spiked, trailing rasp. She pinched the drawing between the ends of her nails. She stood up from her desk and held it up to the class. The girl’s heart kicked like a sick frog. She looked down.

- Children stop drawing. Wait a moment please I want you to look and see what Sarah’s done.

The class stared, mute, bristling, a single animal.

- This picture is spoiled. I want you all to stop and check that you haven’t made the same mistake. That’s why you need to listen. You must always listen.

- OK, Miss.

The reptile released the paper from its claws. The amphibian, pinned to the spot, squinted through her eyelashes at the class; a trick she had learned to make them disappear. Smirks blurred into patches and smears of peach, burnt sienna, umber, aubergine. The sunflower picture was back in her hand; she clutched it, hot and careless, along with the chewed pencil. As she passed the boys’ table one of them stuck out his chair.

- Let me see
- No

Garry was a year older than her. His parents lived on the other side of the village. He had a lot of friends; even the year sixes let him play football. He snatched the paper from her.

- Ha. Good one, stupid.

A laugh burst out, brazen as trumpets. She took the bitten pencil and jabbed it as hard as she could at his arm. He jumped back with a scream, all jaunt evaporated.
There was a silence. The air in the room swelled, then cracked into a thousand pieces. Mrs Rawson snatched her arm, rough. Shook her. The pencil fell to the floor. The teacher turned to Garry and carefully pushed up the sleeve of his jumper. The lead point had gone through the wool and into his skin, a tiny dot of grey on white. Everybody gasped, in shock, in disgust. She stood alone, quivering, sorry sorry really sorry I didn’t mean it sorry

Mrs Rawson pulled her across the room to the doorway.

- What did you do? Why? Why?

The teacher pushes her face into the girl’s, shouting. She stares at the lizardy lines around the teacher’s mouth. She triumphs inwardly over her yellow teeth. She is caught in the stink of her hairspray, the dishwater roughness of her hands. She watches the goose’s tongue flick back and forth.

- You will stay in this lunchtime, in the hall, and you will write this out fifty times - I am a naughty spiteful girl - in your best handwriting. And you will write a letter apologising to Garry for what you did. You will bring these to me.

She shakes her again.

Garry stands in the other corner, rubbing his arm, tearful. He is surrounded by fussing. Sam pats his hand. Molly gives him the chocolate out of her lunchbox. They stare at the girl, righteous, little priests. They are all good children in the love of God.

- Do you understand?

Her head buzzed with shame. She stared down at the pattern of blue and brown tiles on the floor. In the Infants they played a game where the blue was the sea and the brown was the land and there were sharks in the sea. If you were standing on the blue tile and somebody yelled shark you would drown.



After lunch is over she sits in the hall. The dinner ladies are clearing the tables away, and they try to make her go outside.

- Miss said –

- Oh, you have lines, do you? Well, then. Well.
- What did you do? said another.
- Nothing

When they have gone she clambers up on the display set up for the Harvest Festival. It is really just the blocks they use for gym and for the Christmas play stacked up in a pyramid and covered with astroturf. Spacegrass, star-grass. Piled all over are melons and corn-on-the-cob and tins of kidney beans. She feels sick again, thinking of the kidney beans. She makes her way to the top, knocking over a can of best-before pineapple chunks, and spreads the blank paper in front of her.

I am a naughty spiteful girl

She wishes she had a book to lean on. The heavy curtains are drawn cool against the afternoon. Syrupy sun glows through the cracks.

She lay on her front on the top row of the pyramid feeling the bristles scratch and prickle her stomach. She dangled her scuffed shoes over the side, foolishly high; she could fall and break open her head. She let the pencil drift along the page, pretending it was only a picture she was drawing, swirled piggy-tails on the m and h and n. I, am a naughty, spiteful, girl. She had drawn it ten times now.

She felt someone watching her. She glanced around the empty hall. At the window, she saw Jemma and two other girls from the class looking through a chink in the curtains. They jostled each other, laughing and peering. A Hydra of pretty cardigans and pointing fingers. Three sweet little girls and one naughty spiteful one.

She pretended she hadn’t seen. She picked up her pencil and began to tap it deliberately against the nearest can. Tap, tap. Again. She began to whistle, moved her head from side to side, tapping away. She was aware that the girls were watching. She began to sing a tune with no words and bounced her feet up and down. She kicked her legs in time. Tap tap. The faces were there, still staring, but uncertain now, confused. The letters, T H A N K G O D F O R G O O D H A R V E S T shone out in brilliant blue over her head.

She began to sing louder, bobbing her head, twirling the pencil. A song her mother played sometimes in the car

- Once had love, and into the gas
Summertime now, and a heart of glass

Oh and she’s having a good time, up there on the Harvest Festival display. She picks up an apple, and rolls it along the ledge. It knocks over somebody’s paper mache bun.

- Strike!

She clambers down a level and sits on a pumpkin. It’s a space hopper, she’s Cinderella magicking to the ball. She gathers some cans and stacks them up. Tinned tomatoes and Ambrosia custard. Five at the bottom, then three, then one. An orange on top for luck. She bowls the apple again but they don’t fall. She throws hard and they tumble, a cascade of shiny thumps. She sings louder. She begins to dance, twirling, jumping. The gang of girls press against the window. They want to get in. She turns and looks at them, victorious. She stands amidst the harvest, queen of unwanted kitchen-cupboard produce. She looks and they see her looking, and then they are pretending to sing, gasping like fish, copying her, jerking their heads stupidly like puppets at a song they don’t even know. They mop and gurn and laugh and laugh. They are holding hands and singing and laughing and falling down.

At the end of the day, she waited in the toilets until they had all gone. She breathed into the mirror and pressed her fingers onto it, drawing fat, squiggling shapes in the mist. The cleaning lady arrives. Sometimes she saves her a bottle of milk if it there’s one left over from the little infants.

- Come on now. Home.

She pushed open the door and walked alone through the empty playground to the road beyond. In the fields out over by the church the sun was a fat gold bee smiling above the children that chased and jumped and ran, treading seeds into the earth for ever and ever and ever.