‘Odd School’

The taxi pulls up and she sits, staring ahead with a knot beginning to tighten in her stomach. They are parked outside a building which looks like a school, it is a school of some sort, but odd in some way. She can see another girl getting out of a car, waving back at the driver and walking in – smiling. That looks odd as well.

She is greeted in reception by a beaming woman who compliments her new haircut and asks what she did at the weekend. She signs in and is shown to a desk to meet her tutor, Jan, who asks her again about what she’s been doing and seems very interested in finding out about her life. All very odd.

Now the lesson. It’s down as English but, again, rather odd. Jan explains what she has planned but keeps asking her what she thinks, what she would like to do and where she thinks she wants to improve.

She looks around at the other tutors and students, they are chatting to each other and smiling. One rather scary-looking boy seems to be in a mood, staring determinedly at the floor – then his tutor says something, and he, too, starts to smile. Later she sees him playing table tennis, laughing loudly as he sends a shot past his tutor’s outstretched bat.

As she relaxes into the session, feeling the knot in her stomach begin to loosen, Jan nudges her along gently, making suggestions for improvements and taking time to explain a few things she has never fully understood.

‘Fancy a break?’ Jan asks and she is surprised to realise that they have been working for over an hour. Very odd.

And so, the time ebbs away in this school that isn’t a school. A bit later, she and Jan are challenged to a game of Scrabble by another student and his tutor and later still she finds herself making biscuits with a girl she realises she vaguely knows from infant school. They have a lovely chat.

Then it’s more English – this time some reading from a book which Jan has brought along. She even finds herself reading aloud for the first time in many years. The book is so good that she asks if she can borrow it to read at home.

Before she knows it, her taxi is back and she says her goodbyes to the smiling people around her.

As she sits back in the taxi, she has a strange feeling – a feeling she used to have when she was much younger. She is looking forward to coming back to this place again.

Very odd.