The Learning Curve (3 page)

On the side of ‘No’ there were many solid, stout arguments. Seven years on she had far more reservations about him as partner material than she had had in her inexperienced early twenties. Back then his relentless sexual conquests made him appear lusty and passionate, now they just made him seem cynical and jaded. She also found his choice of lifestyle deeply unattractive. He had chosen almost a decade of empty one-night stands instead of a purposeful, loving life
with a woman he’d loved (if indeed he’d been telling the truth) and who had loved him. From the string of affairs he’d gone on to enjoy after her, and still energetically pursued, it was abundantly clear that their priorities in life were directly opposed to each other. She wondered now, looking back at the 23-year-old Rob, how he had even managed to stay faithful to her for six long months – if, in fact, he had.

But it wasn’t only that. She’d noticed over the years that what masqueraded as laddish behaviour was actually more akin to a cruel streak. He broke hearts with as little regret as other people broke eggs. He could tease someone till they cried. And he could freeze anyone out with a single look. He was perceptive, sharp-witted and clever, but sometimes he used these attractive qualities as weapons. Just because he hadn’t done it to Nicky (recently) didn’t make it less forgivable, just easier to defend.

Then there were his looks. She genuinely didn’t find him as devastatingly handsome as she used to. Yes, he was still good-looking, but somehow his looks had moved away from what had first drawn her to him. She had fallen for the skinny lope of a little-boy-lost and the uneven shoulders of his self-conscious, Jimmy Dean stance. Now that he had broadened out and held himself squarely towards the world he’d lost that boyish uncertainty that used to reduce her to tingling mush with a single glance.

So while the facts were that he had been the chucker and she the chuckee, the truth was that she genuinely sometimes thought that she had made a lucky escape. In fact, it was terrifying to contemplate what might have happened had they settled down together so young.

In her most lucid moments, she felt indebted to him for
making such a mature and prescient decision about their lives at a time when she’d been blinded by the promise of a happy-ever-after cloud-cuckoo-land ending. And thanks to the sharp focus of hindsight, after spending half a decade watching the post-happy-ever-after ending of friends – and of course, her sister, who had married young and started sprogging almost immediately – she knew that many were now unhappy with their lot. Yes, she may sometimes envy them their beautiful children, but she could never say that she envied them their lives. So thanks to his decision, here she was, a happy, fulfilled thirty-year-old who hadn’t wasted the best years of her life on the wrong man, who had a career that fulfilled her and promised her a future of satisfaction, and who had all the excitement of love and marriage still to come, instead of firmly behind her.

What, then, could be the arguments for her saying ‘Yes’ to him? She had two theories: One was that it just so happened that with all her other relationships, pre- and post-Rob, she had always been the one to end things. But because Rob had got in there first with her, she’d been robbed of ever
really
knowing what would have happened if he hadn’t. Would she have been the one to finish it, albeit three years later, or would they have four beautiful children, a golden retriever and two guinea pigs by now? She was stuck in the perennially inconclusive limbo of the chuckee, living for evermore with an emotional scar that would never be allowed to fully heal because someone else had done the stitches with half an eye on the exit.

And so, when she and Ally had sometimes shared more wine than was wise on a school night, she had been known to explain her wickedly wild revenge plan of manipulating
Rob to ask her out again, just to prove that she could say a final ‘No’ and was therefore Completely Over Him.

Ally always vehemently disagreed with this crackpot theory.

‘No!’ she would shout, shaking her head firmly and, depending on how much wine had been drunk, thumping her fist on the table. ‘You’d be proving
exactly
the opposite if you did that!’

‘How come?’

‘Because if you spend your life trying to get him interested just so you can reject him then you’re proving that you’re
not
over him, aren’t you?’

‘I’m not spending my life doing it!’ Nicky would shriek.

‘Seven years!’ Ally would explode.

‘I just want to
know
!’ Nicky would explode back.

‘But that’s the whole point! If you were completely over him, you wouldn’t
need
to, would you? You wouldn’t care!’

‘Yes I would!’ Nicky would shout. ‘I’m just like that.’

‘Like what? A glutton for punishment?’

‘No! An organised person. I need everything neat and orderly. I need to close the book. I need to shut the drawer. I need nothing unanswered. I need closure.’

‘You need help,’ was Ally’s usual response. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love Rob, but he is not The One. You’d have children with him and then wonder why they look like every other child in North London. He’s probably sired fifty children already. He just doesn’t know about it.’

‘Bleagh,’ was Nicky’s only response to that. ‘What a lucky escape.’

‘Exactly,’ Ally would usually conclude. ‘Where’s the corkscrew?’

Nicky’s other theory as to why she might say ‘Yes’ (and
this was one she never admitted to anyone, not even Ally) was far more worrying, and tended to strike late at night when she was on her own. This theory was that all her stout, solid answers explaining why she’d say ‘No’ were mere subterfuge. She protested too much. She was a one-man woman and the man for her was Rob. And the only real reason she was happy being friends with him was because friendship was all he was offering. Should he ever ask her out, she’d drop like a fly; his easiest conquest yet. Whenever these terrifying thoughts occurred, spiralling her into doubt and confusion, she would force herself to imagine Ally’s response and slowly talk herself back to sanity.

Thank goodness for Ally. Ally kept Nicky sane – and that was saying something. Ally had the soul of an angel, the wit of a US sitcom writer and the patience of a saint. She was, after Nicky, the favourite teacher in the school. All the kids loved her. Unfortunately, all her wonderful qualities were packaged in a body a bull terrier would be proud of. Ally had shoulders Pete would die for. To say that her body was barrel-shaped would be to slight a barrel. It was only on closer inspection that one noticed the warmth in her eyes and the dimple in her smiling cheek, or heard her contagious laugh.

When Nicky had returned to the staffroom, the others were in the usual corner by the lockers. Rob was leaning against them, looking everything like the school stud. Pete and Ally were studying the new Reception teacher, Martha.

‘I’d say seven out of ten,’ commented Pete.

‘Hmm,’ replied Rob. ‘More a four.’

‘Yeah, well,’ tutted Pete, ‘not all of us can afford your standards.’

Ally frowned and gave them both a look. ‘Do you have any idea how offensive you’re being?’ she asked. ‘Reducing a woman to a number, based on your narrow little Western aesthetic ideal?’

‘Of course!’ replied Pete, without taking his eyes off the girl. ‘How else am I supposed to feel superior?’

Ally looked at him and shrugged. ‘Your Xbox score?’

He looked at her. ‘Hey. Don’t knock my second-favourite hobby.’

They continued to watch Martha for a while. This was Martha’s first full-time job. She was a bit nervous, very smiley and very young. She drank her instant coffee and listened to everyone’s jokes with a smiling sadness, as if all the fun in her life had ended. Meanwhile, everyone showed her the full extent of their dullness by being genuinely excited to have her there.

‘You’ll get used to us all soon,’ Ned, Year 3’s teacher, kept telling her, like a proud elder owl.

‘Oh yes,’ said Gwen, Year 2’s teacher, nodding firmly. ‘And all our silly little quirks. I suppose it’s a bit like your first day at school.’

They all laughed uproariously at this because, they explained, it
was
her first day at school, and then, when Gwen realised what she’d said, they all laughed again.

Nicky tried looking at them through Martha’s eyes and realised that the staff, as a whole, were very depressing. When had she stopped noticing this? She decided it was probably as long as a year ago, and felt suddenly despondent. Then she remembered
ER
was on tonight and cheered up. She caught Rob’s eye and they shared a small, private grin. As she flicked her eyes away, she caught Amanda’s eye,
on the other side of the staffroom. She chose to smile widely at her. It was a mistake because Amanda saw this as a green light and came to join them.

As she crossed the staffroom to approach the gang, Nicky tried to look away from Amanda’s glossy black mane but couldn’t. Long, straight, thick hair the colour of ebony framed Amanda’s face. As if that wasn’t enough, she was tall and willowy with a year-round tan and legs up to her armpits. All the men pretended they didn’t fancy Amanda because that would make them look obvious. But they did. And all the women pretended not to hate her because that would make them look pathetic. But they did.

For some reason unknown to anyone, Rob, while thoroughly enjoying everything about Amanda’s charms and their happy effect on him, always stopped just short of doing anything about it. He would play the Rob game with her, flirting, teasing, working her up into a crescendo of expectation and then, nothing. Maybe it was because he was getting older. Maybe it was because he was saving that conquest for a special day. Maybe it was because she had the sense of humour of a stick. Or because she rarely opened her mouth without saying something unpleasant about someone. Or because the gang ripped the piss out of her so mercilessly that the peer pressure was too much, even for him. Amanda had tried gamely to penetrate the gang, but had always failed. Possibly because most of the gang knew that she was only after one thing.

‘Hello, everyone,’ said Amanda, looking at Rob.

‘Hello,’ said Rob, smiling.

‘What do we think of the new addition?’

‘Nice,’ said Pete. ‘I like her eyes.’

‘Nice arse.’ Rob nodded. ‘Something to sink your teeth into.’

Amanda turned, purportedly to watch Martha, exhibiting the long line of her hips and thighs in her new jeans. Then she yawned, which involved stretching up very slowly and exposing her flat, smooth, soft stomach. Both men looked at her long, taut, tanned flesh and then back up to her face, all thoughts of Martha’s eyes and arse gone.

At five to eight, the Headmistress entered, and the room found its focus. It was impossible not to respond to Miss James’s warmth. She managed to be effusively batty yet highly efficient and over the years had made this state school hugely popular with middle-class parents. Miss James was almost single-handedly responsible for transforming this humble postcode into a lottery winner’s number.

Her personal uniform of choice at school was long skirts, high-heeled boots and big necklaces with exotic-looking stones, which clinked against her bejewelled glasses chain. She carried an old satchel under her arms that was bursting with bits of paper and folders, and she had thick wavy shoulder-length hair that bounced round her friendly face. She had been Head for twenty years and was quite possibly mad.

‘Good morning, Team!’ she boomed, beaming from ear to ear in the doorway.

‘Good morning, Miss James,’ boomed back her staff.

‘Now!’ she began, pigeon-stepping over all the bags and coffee mugs on the floor to her spot by the kitchenette, ‘Are we all happy, happy, happy to be back?’ Her staff responded by laughing. ‘Excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent,
excellent
.’ She smiled, putting down her satchel, taking off her
coat and scarf, and resting her glasses on the tip of her nose. She gasped suddenly and whipped her glasses off again.

‘Good morning, Martha!’ she exclaimed, arms outstretched towards the girl. ‘Have you been made welcome?’

Martha said that she had.

‘Good, good, good, good, good,
good
.’ She then handed Martha her coat. ‘Here’s your first task as Heatheringdown Reception Teacher. Hanging up my coat! There’s a dear!’

There was an explosion of laughter. Miss James rested her glasses back on her nose and pulled an A4 notebook out of her satchel. On it were scrawled notes so illegible they could have been a picture drawn by one of the Reception children. She scrutinised it for a moment before looking up quickly, her big half-moon eyes fixing on their target with precision. Her glasses were taken off again.

‘Ned, would you?’ she said, picking up the whiteboard pen and holding it out for him. ‘Your handwriting’s so neat.’

Ned leapt up from his chair, almost causing an avalanche of tea and custard creams. He made his way, almost balletically, across his seated, folded colleagues, grabbed the pen from his esteemed leader, and proceeded to take her dictation of today’s timetable in perfect, rounded lettering. Nicky wondered if his beautiful lower-case alphabet would secure him the post of Deputy. She spotted Roberta and Gwen, Year 1 and 2 teachers respectively, eyeing each other. Roberta and Gwen were in a lifelong competition to be the biggest victim. Roberta was a large, lumpy woman with a face like a deflated balloon and a double chin that was enjoying a far more active life than her first one. All she had to do was blink and her double chin almost started a conga along her neck. Her husband had left her twenty years ago
and she was still smarting. Her son moved out on his eighteenth birthday. Gwen had cropped orange hair, red lipstick, multicoloured dangly earrings and a middle child with behavioural problems. Roberta’s eyebrows rose significantly and Gwen harrumphed in response. Nicky looked back to Ned.

Ned taught Year 3 because he was good at it, and because if he taught anyone older they’d bully him. Every day, his wife sent him off to school with a packed lunch, and every lunch-time he phoned her to thank her and discuss his sandwich fillings. Nicky was extremely fond of him, but had made a pact with Ally that if she ever grew to be like him she would do the decent thing and shoot her.