Heartland by Anthony Cartwright Read Free Book Online

children in here) that let her look murkily across a library of unread books and new computer terminals.
    She wanted windows, light! She’d had enough of being shut away, buried. Sudden thoughts of the first Mrs Rochester came to mind, she’d read
Jane Eyre
over and over, hidden away as an unhappy adolescent, and then
Wide Sargasso Sea
as a happy student in London a few years later. She wanted light.
    The windows of her old classroom opened on to the spaces past Canary Wharf where the clouds broke up, as the river slowly became sea, over the new skyscrapers and crumbling dock buildings. Sitting here in her penitent’s cave, she smoothed the edges of the reclaimed posters and thought about those windows. She remembered her shock as a new teacher on looking from her classroom on an unseasonably warm, sunny September afternoon and seeing bodies, framed against the glinting skyscrapers, paused for a moment, arms raised, before leaping from the bridge over the dock into the water below.
    She’d walked down there after school that day. There was a scrap of shingle beach at the cambered end of the dock, and kids playing there, in and out of the water, shouts of, All right, miss? from a couple of those she’d started to teach, whole families down there as well, peopleholding ice creams and cans of lager, spilling over the dockside concrete. There was a sign warning people about the water, prohibiting swimming, and behind that a tattooed man teaching a girl in armbands to swim and a dog with a tennis ball in its mouth chopping the water with its paws.
    And in the background there were the jumpers, strange and beautiful, with that pause before falling, arms raised in a salute, a body tumbling with sunshine and skyscrapers beyond, planes descending for City Airport. Skyscrapers, planes, falling bodies.
    The next day there’d been an assembly about the dangers of swimming in the docks. The pupils were banned; there was a letter going home. Matt gave the assembly. He spoke to them quietly about how it was tempting, exciting, to go down to the water. How people older than them, even maybe mums and dads, uncles, cousins, might say there was no harm in it, and that there didn’t seem to be any harm in the sunshine, in the cool water, the ice cream van pulled up alongside the dock, but that it was more dangerous than they thought. Someone had died a couple of years before with the shock of the water after jumping in from the bridge. Some of the kids in that room knew the family. He knew the family. The boy had been a good boxer, had a part-time job on the market that helped his family out, he’d gone down there one summer afternoon, gone off the bridge and never came up. It was a couple of weeks before they found his body. Nobody told you about the rubbish and the rats that were there in the water, nobody told you how dangerous it was. But he was telling them now. They weren’t banned for the sake of it, to stop them having a good time. He was asking them to think. They sat there silently, a hundred and fifty Year Elevens, listening intently, some of them nodding slightly. She hadn’t seen them like this before, not quite so engaged when someone spoke to them. They were like it whenever he spoke to them.
    The weather changed the next day anyway, but Jasmine would watch them the following summer and the summer after that. No one paid any attention to letters or bans, no matter how hard they listened to Matt Johnson when he spoke to them, no matter how much they loved him. It was one of the things he worried about. One of the many. After they got together, it was one of the worries she tried to soothe for him.
    He was ten years older than her, divorced, two young girls with his ex-wife in Essex. It wasn’t easy. Her parents were wary, to say the least. This was the first time there’d been anyone serious. She’d had boyfriends through university, went out for nearly a year on and off with one