Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,18

me at least – and when Max got down from the table, he seemed visibly relieved to have polished off a task that usually, I imagine, weighed on his shoulders for a full week.

‘You’re a star,’ Ailsa told me, coming back in from the garden.

There was no mention of money. Perhaps this was a trial session. For the moment, it didn’t matter. I’m not embarrassed to admit, I left with a spring in my step.

The following two Wednesdays, Melissa opened the door, calling for Max who gingerly made a cup of tea – they didn’t own a kettle but used a special narrow tap from which spluttered boiling water: quite perilous. Bea, I learnt, had drama club and was dropped back at the end of the session. There was a little bit of awkwardness with the woman, ‘Tricia’, who brought her home on the first week. I’d left Max at the kitchen table to open the door, but she called for him to come up and see her and then gave him quite an interrogation: ‘Do you actually know this woman?’ Apparently satisfied, she apologised for doubting me, flicking her blonde hair behind her ears with shiny white-tipped fingernails, but after I closed the door I could hear her on the phone – obviously to Ailsa – explaining how she had ‘felt uneasy’ and ‘needed to check it was “kosher” ’, that ‘she’ – i.e. me – was ‘genuinely allowed to be there’.

Still no sign of any money, which was a little concerning, though I told myself perhaps I was to be paid monthly, as in a proper salary. I should have raised it early on, but I was enjoying myself too much, really quite throwing myself into it.

I looked online for guidance, read up on kinaesthetic learning and memory tricks on dyslexic websites and school hubs. I got him to talk about World of Warcraft, ‘a land called Azeroth peopled by mighty heroes’, and taught him some card tricks I remembered from my own childhood. We discussed the knockout stages of the Champions League and I found a football which we kicked back and forth while we went over his spellings. On the third week, I texted Ailsa to ask if I could bring Maudie, and when Max had written a whole sentence on ‘Why World of Warcraft leads to limitless adventures’ he gave her a single stroke, double if there were no spelling mistakes, and when he had completed a paragraph, with the requisite number of adverbs or prepositions, he and she had a game of ball. Something about the irregular reward system, and the sensory feedback, as with dog training, seemed to help his concentration.

I tended not to think too much about my environment while I was teaching. We kept our heads down. The kitchen was always spotlessly tidy and a little cold; I do remember that. Once or twice, I wondered whether to light the wood-burning stove, but on closer inspection, it seemed to be as yet unused, the pretty basket of logs and kindling next to it solely for show.

It was on my fourth session that things changed. Bea had just got home – my cue to leave – and I was packing up my papers and pens, when my phone rang. It was Ailsa. She was coming in and out of signal, but I quickly gathered she wasn’t at her food bank but in town; she was at a job interview and they’d asked her to stay on. Melissa was at a play rehearsal, she said, and wouldn’t be back until 9 p.m. though Tom had promised to be home by 6 or 7 p.m. at the latest. Could I hold the fort for an hour, tops? Did I mind terribly?

Amazing. I was an absolute angel.

When I hung up, I was alone in the kitchen. I could hear gunfire and shouts from the basement; shrill voices and laughter from the TV in the front room. I glanced back at Max’s comprehension, unable to resist adding a full stop and altering a lower-case letter into a capital. It was early April and still light out, but the room was east-facing. I had taken my shoes off, and the limestone floor felt cool beneath my feet. I gazed out of the back doors into the garden. No one had said anything more to me about my overhanging bushes, but they’d had a go at them from this side – any greenery they could reach had been