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way she had, although maybe it had done him some good, if there hadn’t been the idea of some kind of return to Cinderheath, some kind of homecoming, at the back of her mind. That’s what she told herself now; anyway, it was too late and the damage was done.
    There was work to do here. She lifted a pile of folders from a box, but realized there was nowhere to store them and dropped them on a table. The tables were all rejects from other classrooms, engraved with the obsessions of generations of pupils, hearts and tag names. Jasmine was startled for a moment to see a bloom of swastikas tattooed into a desk in the shape of a flower. There was a lot to do here.
    At first, she thought Helena had invented the job for her. You’d be perfect, she’d said. Ethnic Minority Achievement and a reading recovery programme: a variety of clunky job titles they still hadn’t decided on.
    What do you think your job title should be? Helena asked.
    Teacher? she said, bemused.
    That’s why I think you’d be perfect.
    Helena had been Assistant Head at Riverway, the school in London where Jasmine had taught English. She’d moved to be Deputy at a school in Aston – she was from Birmingham originally – and she and Jasmine kept in touch. She’d phoned to say she’d got a Headship, at Cinderheath, and asked if Jasmine knew it. She’d paused for a long time before replying.
    It’s where I grew up.
    I knew it! I thought I’d heard you mention it before.
    Or rather, when I say I grew up there, my mum’s family are from there. We lived there for a couple of years when I was a little girl.
    Helena had offered her a job outright. Jasmine was in no condition to think about anything then, after the summer she’d gone through, betraying Matt, leaving him, then being left, betrayed, herself. It was September 11th, the day Adnan let her down, and for her it would always mean that: sitting blankly for hours in front of the television. If he’d done what he’d promised he wouldn’t even have been in New York. They’d have been together.
    It was at Christmas that it became clear what she was going to do, back at her parents’ for the holidays, curled up in the warmth, sleeping and eating finally, reading even, getting some kind of rest, not leaving the house except for a walk into Bridgnorth to pick up some presents, and then along the river with her parents on Christmas morning. It wasn’t that she knew what she should do, or even what she wanted or ought to do, but that she knew what she was going to do: the inevitability of it all.
    Which left her now, nearly six months on, trying to organize this bare annexe room off the library in Cinderheath High School into some kind of classroom, putting her life back together. In most jobs they’d have asked her to teach right from the start – before September and the new school year – whereas here all she had to do was make sure this space was ready, do pupil assessments, try to meet with parents and do some staff training. She was lucky, even if she didn’t feel it.
    Jasmine pulled a box towards her and took out some display work she’d saved from Riverway. It amazed her how she’d been aware enough last autumn to pack up these boxes and label them neatly, put them away in hibernation like they used to with the class tortoise whenshe was a girl, packed away and waiting for the spring, for a new start.
    There was a dubious wisdom in decorating this room with reminders of her old classroom – these masks made for the Capulets’ ball had hung on the wall next to the door, this
Oliver Twist
poster had filled the space between the two big windows that looked across the docks and down the river. It would have been nice to have some windows here. All she had was this partition of reinforced glass (someone had still managed to smash it into a cobweb of little breaks; they’d replace it before they got