Miss Duff hated finger painting. She appreciated the need for children to try to express themselves – it cut into time they would otherwise have spent doing it verbally. The boffins in charge were of the opinion that what children created were self-portraits, but she wasn’t a psychiatrist. She was an educator, and sometimes a warden. She strolled around the art room, glancing with glazed eyes at each abstract masterpiece. All she was able to glean from them was that, at this age, children were about as profoundly expressive as blindfolded orang-utans.
One such orang-utan was Veronica Walsh, although Miss Duff would never have put her in the same category as the rest of them. To Miss Duff, she was polite, helpful, precocious, adored by her large circle of friends. What Miss Duff didn’t know was that they were all uniformly terrified of her. Veronica Walsh was what you might call a uniting force; anyone who didn’t side with her would soon be forced to.
‘Boys and girls,’ Miss Duff paused to allow the incessant chatter to stop, ‘I am going to see Miss Trilby for a moment. I will be in the very next room. If I hear any nonsense going on, the child who causes it will spend their lunch hour in here with me, is that understood?’
All of the children recited the obligatory pledge of obedience, despite the fact that it was clearly directed at one child in particular.
‘Wonderful,’ Miss Duff smiled. She had been gone approximately thirty seconds before Veronica, who today happened to be sitting next to Samantha Stone, seized her opportunity.
‘You’re a dummy, that’s why you can’t talk. My mummy says you shouldn’t be at this school. She says her jacksies are being mishandled,’(this innocent grammatical error went unnoticed by Veronica’s equally ignorant audience, but her words would prove rather prophetic when, at the age of twelve, she would come home early from school to find her mother being bent over the back of the couch by her father’s rather dashing accountant, looking for change).
Veronica poked Samantha in the back, hard.
‘See, she doesn’t even feel it. She is a dummy!’ She picked up a pot of black paint and emptied it onto Samantha’s painting, making a sludgy ruin of what had been a depiction of the cluster of trees that lined the street on which she lived. But Veronica’s smarmy smile vanished when Miss Duff’s flaming red hair appeared in the glass above the sliding door.
‘Thank you, children, for being nice and quiet while I was gone…’
A shrill, nasal wail arose from the back of the room.
‘What on Earth is it?’
‘Samantha wrecked my painting!’
Miss Duff marched over to Veronica’s desk, on top of which sat a piece of butcher’s paper so utterly sodden with black paint that it seemed to float on the surface. The fact that the strategically placed pencil jar sitting on the paper in front of Samantha didn’t quite cover the artist’s name, leaving the letter V plainly visible, escaped her notice. She took Samantha’s wrist and smacked her hand seven times. If she felt it, her face wasn’t giving it away.
ns 15.158.61.16da2
