Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

   People can change; their prospects can change but not often. In the first few days of a new school year a teacher with ten years’ experience can look at the neat rows of five-year-olds and see the outline of their futures from the way they act and interact.  Not what they are going to do - career, kids etc. -  but what they are going to be - optimists or pessimists, confident or shy, successful or unsuccessful.
      
   Katy’s parents, diligently inspecting all the schools in the area, were instantly enchanted by the timeless splendour of the old building, hot red bricks on the outside mellowing to the warm honey of old oak on the inside, where the neatly uniformed children sat sedately. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren before he had moved on to grander projects, it had been a boarding school founded by money from the East India Company.  (It was only in later years that Katy learned that this was a euphemism for slave trading.)  Now the enormous building was slightly dilapidated, the glass dome atop it had many smashed panes of glass, had become a graveyard of stray insects, which once inside had spun round and round never finding their way out.
      
    ‘But, Mummy, I don’t want to go!’  On the first morning of term Katy felt as if she was choking as her mother fastened her tie round her neck for her, walked her into the classroom and handed her over, slipping quickly out of the door as the teacher welcomed her. Katy turned to her Mum but she was gone, the door just closing out of the corner of her eye. Katy sat very straight in front of her desk, scrutinising its scarred surface, the grain of the wood long ago obliterated by carved initials, love hearts pierced with cartoon arrows, dates ranging back to the last century.
      
   At break time the children split off into small knots, became immediately absorbed in games.  She noticed a small tight circle of children in the centre of the field, all faces turned inward, intent. Curiosity got the better of her.  She joined the group, let herself be jostled into it, savouring the feel of hot small bodies pressing against her, a bony jumble of elbows and knees pinning her into place among them.  The boys at the centre of the circle were playing with craneflies.  They had collected six or seven in one of the boys’ lunch boxes.  One boy held a cranefly on his palm where it crouched miserably as he pulled its wings off; then its legs, one by one.  The circle moved in close to get a look at the twitching stick of brown body immobile on the boy’s palm.  The boy threw it into the crowd.  In a flutter of tossed hair and giggles the crowd dispersed leaving Katy standing in the middle of the field, stiff, awkward and uncomfortable in the unfamiliar uniform.
      
     Next break time the class lined up to receive a disposable plastic cup full of over-concentrated orange squash.  Standing up she felt like an exhibit on display, children pushing together around her like sediment compacting on a river bed.  It was the first time Katy had drunk squash. Her mother had given her real fruit juice, speaking sympathetically of children whose parents let them drink squash, packed as it was with artificial preservatives.  The syrupy drink left a strange coating in her mouth, her throat felt sticky and she realised this must be the dreaded preservatives beginning their work, vacuum- packing her into a perpetual schoolchild from the inside out.
      
    As she walked into the playground she saw the group of boys, lunchbox in hand, beating the grass with sticks, hunting for craneflies.  Something fluttered against her leg.  It was a cranefly.  She picked it up; looked over to the boys, about to go over to them, offer the insect as a token of friendship.   As if sensing this the insect battered itself against her palms, its wings crackling, whirring like clockwork.  Every now and then a thin, threadlike leg poked out of the gaps between her fingers.  She was obscurely frightened of it, its buzzing fury.  She walked away from the foraging group, around the playground wall, looking for an opening where she could put the insect outside the playground, safe.  The wall gave way to a hedge and she found she could worm her way through.
      
    On the other side of the hedge she found the ruinous remains of a brick outhouse, roof fallen in and undergrowth growing inside and out.   She went inside, it was hot from the trapped sun pouring in, quiet and still, a secret, abandoned place. She let the cranefly go, watched it flutter round, ugly and alarming until the sun caught its wings and then it was iridescent as a tiny, darting fairy. ‘Don’t worry’, she whispered.  ‘You’re safe here’.

    After that she spent the break times collecting craneflies from the playground, sometimes so many she had to roll her jumper up to make a pouch at her waist to carry them in.  Some she was too late to save. She would pick them up anyway, tattered shreds with a couple of twitching, broken-off legs.  Then, waiting until the dinner ladies were looking away, with all the care of an escaping prisoner, she would slip through the hedge and into the shed, where she shook them free with a flourish, a whirring, darting swarm of the leggy insects.
      
    The teachers consulted with Katy’s parents.  Katy wasn’t fitting in, wasn’t joining in with the other children. They all worried, watched her but Katy threw herself into her rescue mission and sat, awkward and stiff at her desk, sweating in her tight uniform, the sun streaming into the dusty classroom making the air thick, choking.  She daydreamed about clouds of craneflies rising up into the blue sky.
      
    The summer began to wane;  it took longer in the playground, more searching to find craneflies.  Katy realised that she had almost succeeded, saved them all.  The other children began to notice her, ask her what she was doing, but she would open her fingers, let a cranefly dart out at them and they’d run off.  The only girl who was not deterred was Emily, whose cheap, drab polyester uniform glittered in the sun, and thick NHS glasses made her eyes big and bulging.  Wanly she trailed around after Katy, peering in the grass for craneflies, but Katy guarded them jealously.  She would not let Emily follow her through the hedge, left her standing forlornly on the edge of the playground, eyes submerged in the huge tears welling up behind her glasses.  Katy was obscurely afraid of Emily.
      
    One break time Katy shook a handful of the insects off her jumper, but one remained stuck to her, hair-thin legs fluttering frantically against her stomach.  She shook the jumper again, but it was still there, whirring angrily.  Panicked she shook it, harder.  The insect tumbled away from her leaving a leg stuck in the knit, still flexing, kicking.  The insect dragged itself in circles at her feet on the floor, ruined.  She watched it for a while, then plucked the leg off her jumper, ground the injured insect under the sole of her shoe, and went back into the playground.

    The next break time she waited until Emily began trailing her. She ran up to the group who had gathered around the cranefly’s dismemberment.  ‘Help me, help me!’  she shrieked, throwing her arms out to them in mock horror,  ‘there’s a giant bug following me!’ and pointed at Emily who blinked with confusion.  The group clutched each other, shrieking, giggling, tossing silky pigtails and ran away from Emily in a flutter of giggles, bearing Katy along in their midst.
      
    They played the game until it became too cold to go outside at break, searching for Emily and running away chanting ‘Help, help, there’s a giant bug!’  Katy perfected monstrously exaggerated impressions of the girl.  Miming enormous glasses with her fingers, cross-eyed, tongue lolling out, she would imitate the girl’s hesitant, crouching gait to gusts of laughter.  A circle would form tight about her.  ‘Do it again!’ -  and again and again ....
      
    By parents’ evening the teachers had good news for Katy’s parents.  She’d fitted right in;  she was bright, popular, everybody’s favourite new kid on the block, quite the golden girl. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
      
   Her first, bright daydreams in which hundreds of craneflies rose up like bubbles, flying into the azure sky in shimmering clouds, soon tarnished.  Maybe a part of her had always known that few of them would find their way out of the ruined building, that they only have a lifespan of a single day.  In the years to come all she can remember of the friends she had made was bony bodies clustered into tight circles, centripetal force pinning her into place.  It is Emily’s face trapped in the centre of the ring which is indelible;  hurt eyes blinking rapidly, mouth open slightly as if she were drowning in the amber air.