Chapter Text
They would have to get the ballot out almost immediately, Mabel thought as she unlocked her heavy metal door. They would have to start the paperwork, the voting, the arguing, and the demanding of the bare minimum.
She let out a deep sigh, a sound that had begun to form as soon as she stepped on the 57 bus that took her from school every day.
Her home was how she had left it, golden evening light shining through the pretty coloured panels she had stuck on the ugly triple-glazed windows. Flecks of white light from her prized glitter ball reflected on the walls, and the collection of plants she had nurtured for years beckoned her in with open leaves.
With her shoes off but her coat still on, she slumped down on her beaten sofa, clutched a pillow to her chest, and felt the inexplicable compulsion to bite down on it and rip it to shreds.
She knew the higher-ups would do it; she knew how low they would stoop to save some money.
She knew they were going to try to cut the art department; they had hinted for years. It was what was happening to countless schools and universities across the country. The arts were not a priority for the government anymore; politicians said creative subjects were useless and a waste of money. Children didn’t draw anymore.
But still, she had hoped management would hold off. She had hoped they saw what she saw in the arts: a place where students were able to express their inner lives or simply relish the feeling of papier-mache under their fingertips.
After her classes had ended that day, the vice headmistress had asked her, the department’s union rep, to meet.
The woman had taken a long time to get to the point, but in short, the school had decided to make her and her three colleagues in the art department redundant.
Funding cuts, she had said. Focus on STEM subjects, she had said. Nothing we can do, she had said in an overly cloying voice that also promised “generous” severance packages.
Mabel knew the poor woman desperately wanted the department to disappear quietly; she did not want any more news reports written, she did not want any angry parents writing emails, not like last time.
Well, Mabel was not going to go quietly. No, she loved her job, her students, and her colleagues; she would not roll onto her belly and give up.
As the meeting progressed, Mabel had nodded, listened, questioned the legality of the redundancies calmly, and then left. Marching down the corridors of the school she had worked at for six years, she felt the anger she had concealed so well begin to bubble over into tears.
She had finished shedding them on the bus and then began to strategise as she walked across the expanse of park in the direction of her home. As she approached, she wondered how she would tell her art department colleagues. Annabel had just had a baby, Peter was going to have to put his elderly mother in a nursing home, and Anisah was only just qualified and saddled with debt. They were all hanging on, barely getting by as the price of pretty much everything soared without a sign of slowing.
And it had only been a year since their last strike at the school. Everyone was tired. Perhaps they would just want to settle, take the severance, and go elsewhere, she thought for a fleeting, defeated moment. But where? Secondary schools everywhere were disappearing art, music, drama, and even, in some places, literature from the curriculum. Their options were limited.
After finally taking off her coat, she stumbled into what once had been an industrial-style kitchen that was all stainless steel and warning stickers.
Her house was odd.
She lived in an old gamekeeper’s cottage, which had once been a community centre, in one of East London’s flattest, sparsest parks.
It was a decidedly rugged place to plonk a house down, with great expanses of grass and only the occasional tree shooting out at random. The house had been built directly in the park’s centre and was a guardianship property, a scheme devised so that the rich could keep squatters out of the homes they did not need but kept anyway.
Five years ago, wanting to escape the tyranny of housemates, she applied to live in the cottage and got the house. There were rules, because of course there were; she couldn’t leave for longer than a week and had to maintain the small garden outside. But broadly, she was able to do what she pleased with the house.
And she had. The house had become her sanctuary, which she had filled with proof of all she loved. Pictures she had collected from magazines, flea markets, and charity shops adorned the walls, and she sat on battered furniture that had been polished and painted by her own hands.
Her garden had been overgrown with brambles when she had moved in. Now it was orderly, sunflowers growing in straight lines and wind chimes tinkling in the breeze.
Mabel did not give herself much credit, but she knew she understood how to make ugly, broken things beautiful. She liked to coax the good out of discarded objects and put them in places where she knew they had been destined to belong. She liked bright colours and soft fabrics, and vintage dresses that she hung on the wall like tapestries.
After nervously munching on some instant noodles, she stared down at her phone. She needed to tell them, and she needed to do it as quickly as possible. Mabel wrote an almost fifty-word message and then deleted it all. As the evening progressed, she repeated the action once, twice, and three times before finally admitting defeat and trudging to her bed.
As always, she left the window open and her curtains flung apart. She liked to see the sky before she drifted off, to stare at it and feel small. The orangey light pollution that perpetually hung over the city usually obscured the stars, but that night, one was fighting admirably to be seen. She zoned in on it, her head on the pillows, squinting until it became just a speck of light in her vision. Tomorrow she would tell them. Tomorrow, she would meet her colleagues for coffee and rage at how much of a stuck-up arsehole Helen was. Tomorrow. That was her last thought before she fell into an uneasy sleep.
Perhaps she should have closed her window, she thought later. Of course, really, it would have made no difference. The thing that had been watching her for so many years could get through any window or locked door. The thing had decided to finally take her, and nothing in the universe could stand in its way.