Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewycka

they were bullet-hard, because no one ever remembered to presoak them. Serge ducked to avoid a flying bean and toppled backwards on his chair on to the floor. Everybody ignored him apart from Doro.
    ‘Are you all right, Serge?’ she said. ‘You’re always tumbling. Anyone would think you were dyspraxic.’
    Clara banged her spoon again. ‘Why doesn’t anybody listen to
me
?’
    ‘Speak out, Clara,’ said Nick Holliday.
    ‘What were you saying, darling?’ asked Doro.
    ‘The teacher said we’re a singing parent family. So why don’t you ever sing?’
    ‘Arise ye starlings from your slumbers …!’ Fred the Red’s deep baritone rolled from the end of the table.
    ‘Arise ye criminals who won’t …!’ Marcus joined in.
    ‘It’s not singing parent, it’s single parent, Clara,’ Nick Holliday explained in his quiet teachery way. ‘It’s when children have just a mother or just a father …’
    She felt a small prick of loss at the dullness of it.
    ‘The reason in the vault of thunder …!’ thundered Fred, waving the ladle for attention and weighing into the discussion. ‘I would say a family means whatever you want it to mean. Historically, it has taken a number of different forms, including –’
    ‘Are we a single parent family?’ squeaked Serge.
    ‘Course not, pratt stick. We’ve got loads of parents.’
    ‘Don’t call me a pratt stick.’
    ‘Doro says you’re a pratt stick!’
    ‘Clara, Serge, please …’
    ‘She started it …’
    ‘Oh, shut up!’
    ‘Great dinner, Moira.’ Marcus grabbed the ladle from Fred and helped himself to more stew, which apart from the beans contained only chopped onions, tinned tomatoes and several of Moira’s long auburn hairs. ‘Shouldn’t one of you feminists explain to Clara that the family’s a patriarchal construct to facilitate the subordination of women and enslave them within the domestic sphere?’
    As he spoke, a light clicked on in Clara’s brain. She stirred the words around in her head like a magic potion. She committed them to memory. She practised saying them out loud when she was on her own. They tasted of power.
    Then, one day, she got her chance to use them.
    ‘Now, I’d like you all to write a page about your family,’ said the class teacher, Mrs Wiseman.
    It was her habit to set some work, then leave them to it while she sneaked off to the staffroom to smoke a fag. The kids could see her through the staffroom window, puffing away.
    Clara put her hand up. ‘Miss, the family’s a pastry ark construction to fascinate the sobbing nation of women in Domestos fear.’
    Everyone stared at her in amazement. The teacher fixed her with a stony look.
    ‘Those are very big words for a very little girl.’
    Clara just smirked and lowered her eyes, letting the words work their magic.
    There was a ripple of shuffles and whispers around the classroom. Sensing a rebellion, Mrs Wiseman ordered them to get their books out and disappeared into the staffroom for a fag and a sulk. She didn’t return until just before lunch, by which time a full-scale riot had broken out and kids were running around the room yelling, ‘Sodding nation!’ while others were banging their desk lids and chanting, ‘Pase-tree! Pase-tree!’
     
… how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? …
     
    From then on, the other kids, even the hamster girl, started to treat her with respect. They consulted her about spelling, sex, smoking and other essential information. She always answered their questions fully and freely, inventing the things she didn’t know. At home, in front of the mirror, she practised the Look.
    That’s how she discovered the joy of teaching.
    It was Nick Holliday who’d encouraged her to become a teacher, with his weird shouty partner Jen, Otto’s mother, before she decamped to another commune where all the kids were called Wild. Sometimes she misses all her weird co-parents. Chris Howe and Fred the Red, who’d chosen Oolie-Anna’s