Chapter 47: Back of the Class

‘No!’ said the Teacher. ‘There has to be another way.’

‘I can’t think of one.’

‘You have two weeks, Mary Sue.’

‘Have you thought of anything better?’

‘It’s not,’ Miss Smallbone began primly, and then she stopped. The silence built, and she looked at me, her moon face considering what I had just said. Then she shook her head. ‘There must be something else, but I don’t know what it is. It’s not my place.’

I was still suffused with the strange new clarity I’d found in the courtroom earlier, and so, to Miss Smallbone, the super-competent leader of the forces of good, I said, ‘That sounds like evasion, Teacher.’ Her eyes snapped to mine, pale blue, glittering. I’d never seen her in anything other than complete control, and it was frightening, but not very. She wasn’t angry with me. She was unused to any feeling of doubt, and she was trying to understand my plan, which would involve an upheaval of all she had known for so long. ‘The prophecy says that I find a way to cut my father out of a metaphorical coiled snake, as if with a sword. That sounds like I do it by changing the rules, doesn’t it? By not accepting the snake’s terms? Isn’t that what this plan does? Can you think of another way to get David Tennant off this murder charge?’

‘But…’ began Miss Smallbone. She wanted to say something, but she stopped. ‘You will find the way.’

‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘You will find the way, Mary Sue, but in this case, I want you to think very hard about alternatives.’

‘Stop treating me like a child. Since this started, all you’ve told me is little bits of the story.’

‘It’s for your own safety.’

‘I’ve had enough of it.’

‘I dare say,’ said Miss Smallbone.

I was enraged. I’d been kidnapped, drugged and flown around the world. I’d nearly been killed, I’d killed and I’d been told I would save the world, and still the Teacher didn’t trust me. My calm deserted me, and I said, ‘You can’t send someone into battle without telling them everything.’

‘Of course you can. That is exactly what you do. You send people into battle knowing only the things they need to know.’

‘Get out of my house,’ I said, but I didn’t mean it.

‘I’m sorry, but you know that I’m right. Sit down, and let me make you some tea.’
***

Never underestimate the power of cliché. Tea made me feel better, as it always has. When I first graduated from tea-at-teatime and the odd hot chocolate onto regular-hot-drinks-through-the-day as a sixteen year old (I wasn’t very precocious), the drink I graduated to was instant coffee, because that was what my mother drank. Then, when I got to university, it seemed as if everyone drank coffee, with tea as the periodic other-option, usually to be drunk at teatime. And yet, by the time a graduated three years later, everyone was drinking tea. I don’t know why this was, since the period coincided with the Starbucks revolution. Oh, of course, I suddenly think, maybe that is precisely it: maybe Starbucks gave everyone certain expectations of coffee, which meant that instant coffee was no longer acceptable, while tea made at home was almost always decent? With insights like this I could write lazy columns for the national press. Whatever, the tea I had with friends at the time I was graduating was no more mystical than the coffee I had with them when I arrived, but it is the drink we still have whenever we meet up, and so tea means comfort, and periods of stillness and relaxation with people who are demanding nothing.

What I am groping ever so clumsily towards is that doing something which you almost always do when you are in a certain mood – such as wearing flip-flops and a sundress when you are on holiday for instance – can bring on that mood. So that, even if you are working on a grim Sunday in your flat and you turn up the heating high and put on flip-flops and a sundress, you can trick your body into feeling that it must be having fun, because all the physical signals are there that you are on holiday. Or maybe my body is just particularly suggestible. Whatever, if I started always having tea in moments of stress with murderers or something, or with deceptive supposed-leaders sending me to my death without telling me that it’s all part of some big plan, then I suppose tea would have different associations, and it would lose its power to induce calm, but that was not the case here. Instead, the action of drinking tea in my kitchen was so strongly associated with certain things that it brought on the usual calm, which was a mood I don’t think I’d felt properly since watching the decapitation. Just like Miss Smallbone knew it would.

‘I am sorry there are still secrets, Mary Sue. I really am.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You are not my comforter. I’ll call my mother.’

Miss Smallbone’s white face went white. ‘I’m afraid you can’t do that,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’