Broken things

His name is Jake.

Things I know about Jake: He wears a diamond earring in one ear. The girls love him. And he was trouble from the minute he walked in.

These groups are always tough. Today is tougher.

Eoin kicks the football in his face, Jake says.

The card says there are two friends, Shane and Eoin. At their first day in their new school, another boy asks Shane to play football with him. Eoin says not to. He says the other boy is weird. Why does Eoin say that? the card asks. What should Shane do?

Eoin kicks it in his face, he says again.

We're sitting a little apart from the rest of the group, at a table with some clover and wild daisies in a jamjar.

At your first day of school? Why would you hit him? I ask.

Because then everyone knows your name, he says.

And you get expelled.

Been expelled. Twice. Suspended three times. Broke someone here.
He points to just under his eye.
Eyesocket. Fractured it on him.

Why did you do that?
He started it.
What did he do?
He was asking for it.
What did he do?
He was slagging me.
So you hit him?
Yeah.

Is there no other way?
He snorts. My two older brothers, they kickbox, see? Wouldn't let me not.

Maybe in where you were. In the next school they won't take you back. I knew people that happened to. They don't come back.

He looks away, shrugs.

What does your older brother do now?
Probation, he's on probation. Been on for eight years.

Does he have a job?
No.
Shakes his head. Won't look at me now.

Okay, I said.
Okay.
Let's go back to the rest.

We let them out for lunch. I stay behind, looking at the jumbled chairs and forgotten coats and bags.

What are we doing here again? I ask my partner.
Today I'm not sure, she says.

It's something I do a few times a month. We take groups from schools, to run programmes with them in an old barracks in the mountains. I get on the train at the end of the day drained. The sort of drained that leaves you not sure if you can put one foot in front of the other.

Today I have heels and a dress in my bag. When the train reaches town I change into them, shake out my hair, and go to dinner.

Champagne flutes. Goat's cheese tartlets. The couple next to me are telling the table about their annual trips to Kenya.

I get up from the table and find a door to an outer corridor. It is glass-paned along one side, so that when I sit on an upholstered seat I look out onto the vast length of the gardens. It's raining outside, in sweeping sheets, and in irregular musical drips from the eaves.

Is there anything so beautiful as rain?

Glass pearls falling, shattering silently, lying glittering in the grass.

I put my hands over my eyes and start to cry. For Jake. And for me, because I can't stop thinking about how my make-up might run, or how oddly romantic it would be for someone to find me like this. It doesn't seem fair on anyone that I should keep thinking these things.

Jake. Who is twelve years old.

Just before the bus had arrived to take them away, I tried talking to him again. I reached a hand out across the table. Not to touch him, just to reach out. There were so many things that wanted saying.

I said, Jake don't. Don't get suspended, okay?

And the minute I said it I knew it was the wrong thing to say. And then he was gone.

I wish I had told him he was brilliant. It only occurred to me now that maybe no-one has ever told him that.

Why do I feel the need to fix things? It's not something I know how to do.
There is no beauty here.
Just the rain and somebody crying.