The Dinner Lady

Trigger warning: paedophilia

How can people not have faces? Of course, every single person has their own recognisable set of features that define their individuality, but Harry could never bring to mind a single one of the half dozen or so middle-aged ladies who cooked and served his daily school lunch. Of course, that was mainly because he never really looked at them. To him, they were just the fuzzily observed people behind the fat hand or the thin hand that doled out the chips.

Until Mrs Smith arrived. She seemed to think that being a dinner lady was a pro-active career. It mattered to her what the children chose to eat, and it mattered that having chosen, they should eat what they had been served. She was not quite bossy, perhaps she feared that the school governors would not tolerate a situation where the children hated her, but she aimed to be strongly influential, and was uncomfortably persuasive in her views.

And she was ugly, Harry thought. None of the other dinner ladies even qualified for a thought, and so could be compared either favourably or otherwise with Mrs Smith. But Mrs Smith intruded into Harry's private space, and he resented it. She wore far too much makeup, for a start. And her nose was too big. And she was too big. And she smelled of a perfume that made Harry's head ache.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he jumped. "You haven't eaten your carrots."

"I don't like carrots."

"Do you like chips?"

"Yeah."

"What colour chips do you like?"

"Don't matter. Any colour."

"So why not think of the carrots as just orange coloured chips, and eat them up?"

The hand remained on his shoulder for the whole of this exchange, but it was not still. The fingers seemed to be kneading his flesh, and the back of his neck crawled.

"They don't taste the same, and I don't want them."

"You could smother them in ketchup just like the chips, and you'd never know the difference."

"I just don't want them."

Harry couldn't bear the hand any more, and also felt that the dead weight of adult logic was getting the better of him. He jumped up, grabbed his jersey from the back of the chair and ran out to the playground.

The following day, he managed to resist being served any vegetables other than chips, and was spared Mrs Smith's attention until he started on the pudding. It was apple puree and custard, which he liked, but the cook had mistakenly added sultanas, an attractive ingredient to an adult, but a spoiler in Harry's opinion. He took each mouthful of puree and custard, and sucked the sultanas clean before taking them out of his mouth and neatly lining them up round the edge of his plate. Disaster. Mrs Smith spotted him. She obviously felt that the friendly approach was the key, and squatted down on the backs of her calves to bring her head level with his.

"What's your name, young man?"

"Harry"

"Well, Harry. What's this then?"

"I don't like sultanas. And don't say they're good for me."

"I wasn't going to. I was going to say that what you're doing is wasteful and therefore a sin."

"Course it isn't! I don't care about that anyway."

"Well we'll have to see about that."

Once again, Harry fled from a conversation he couldn't cope with.

 On the way home, he had quite forgotten all about Mrs Smith, until he ran into her at the bend halfway down the narrow passage between Parker Street and Green Road. She looked a bit different and he realised that he hadn't seen her in trousers before.

 "Well if it isn't my young sinner, who wastes sultanas."

Harry turned to run, but she grabbed his arm, and squatted down to make eye-level contact. Her voice was rougher, and he noticed that the grotesque makeup had gone.

"Now you don't run off this time. I want a word with you."

Harry squirmed but she was too strong for him.

"What do you want a word about?"

"Your sinfulness, young Harry."

"I'm not sinful"

"You're going to come with me and we're going to find out."

Taking Harry firmly by the hand, she led him to the other side of Green Road, to the small wood beside the library, where the shade of the trees turned the fading evening light to a deep gloom.

There was a patch clear of bushes and trees just a few yards from the road. It was well used in an unsavoury fashion, clumps of crumpled newspaper showed the clear need for a local public toilet, and pieces of broken furniture proclaimed the failure of the council's free rubbish collection service. "Don't dump it - just call us." Mrs Smith turned the boy's back towards her, and said, "Now you just tell me what you have been up to."

Harry's denial was quavery and frightened. "Don't give me that. I know you've been up to something. I'm going to see what you're hiding."

With one hand gripping a small shoulder, the other dived into the child's trouser pocket and groped around. The bits and pieces that she found just fell on the ground. Two coins, a pebble, a sweet wrapper. Still she continued to roll her hand around. "I'll try the other one. I know I’ll find something that you're ashamed of."

Harry squirmed with disgust at the feeling of her hand so close to his private parts, but he was worried about her accusation of sin. He did not really know what she meant, but he felt he was in trouble.

"If I find what I'm looking for, and you admit to what you've done, I might not tell your Mother."

The last thing Harry wanted was his Mother involved in this humiliation. As Mrs Smith loosened her hold on one shoulder, he plunged to the ground before her left hand was secure on his other shoulder. He was free of her grasp! He scrambled to his feet and ran.

Back home, his Mother asked him why he was late. He feigned casualness. "I was just talking to my friend Nick."

"Why are you so out of breath, then?"

"I suddenly realised that I would be late home, so then I rushed."

His Mother accepted the explanation, and with a sigh, he sat down to supper.

Harry was dreading seeing Mrs Smith the next day, but when he arrived at school, the atmosphere was tense. "Someone's been killed," Nick told him.

"Who?"

"Don't know. Some boy, I think."

The bell rang, but as they entered the school buildings, the teachers directed them to the assembly hall, instead of the classrooms as usual. 

When the whole school was gathered, the headmistress came onto the stage and addressed them all.

"I am afraid I have some bad news. Peter Barnes, in class 4, was attacked on the way home from school last night. He was seriously interfered with and left bleeding and unconscious. By very good luck, a man walking his dog found him, and he was taken to hospital, where we hope he will soon get better. However, the doctors say he will need to be away from school for some time.

"He was able to identify the person who did this dreadful thing, who obviously thought that he had killed Peter. It was a known child attacker called Anthony Graves. I am very sorry to tell you that he had been working in this school. We all knew him as Mrs Smith, the dinner lady."