Spring Term 2022

Early January – late February

High School Counselling Service(i.e., me, Jane, 41, in a very small, out-of-the-way third-floor room with a window looking out onto sky, in a big Scottish state school whose catchment covers several affluent areas and council housing estates)

Hazel (S4)

Age 14

Initial appointment

Teacher referral – Hazel disclosed eating disorder

No other pastoral involvement that I know of

Hazel Session 1

‘Hi Hazel, lovely to meet you. Come on in…’

Hazel looks around the room, shrugs off her schoolbag and sits down on the armchair. I fuss about, rifling through papers on the bookcase. I’m not actually doing anything; just giving her a moment to take in her surroundings.

In a room that’s only fractionally bigger than the stationery cupboard directly beneath it – I know because I’ve measured both – any scents carried in by teenage bodies, from the choke of celebrity perfumes to the vinegary hum of menstrual blood and the heady glandular funk of pits and groins awash with new and enthusiastic pubescent hormones, tend to find a captive audience in me. Hazel’s delivered a chemical kick of lemon fabric softener designed to evoke a sparkling morning on the Amalfi Coast or some such, which has immediately connected with the spore of a headache I hadn’t realised was there.

Hazel’s face is flushed. She’s late and probably ran across the quad to get to my room. If memory serves me, she’s come from Mandarin, which is in a shabby prefabricated outbuilding with a corrugated roof at the far end of the school.

As long as the window stays open, we are not required to wear masks for counselling. I’d worried she would feel cold, but clad in only her shirtsleeves she doesn’t seem to have registered how glacial it is in here. In my woollen wrist warmers and knee-length faux-fur coat, I’m still chilly.

‘Okay,’ I say, settling into my chair. You’ve come out of Mandarin, is that right?’

‘Yes,’ says Hazel and smiles, revealing attractive protruding canines in a set of otherwise perfectly straight white teeth. No doubt she hates them.

‘Is that a good thing then?’

‘I’m not very good at languages,’ she explains and nibbles at the edge of her finger – a hangnail perhaps.

‘Me neither. What’s your favourite subject?’

Hazel stops nibbling and considers the question, then says, ‘Probably DT.’

‘Ah, okay. What is it about Design and Technology that you like?’

‘I dunno. I like making things, I suppose. And I like the way the room smells, and that there’s always music on but it’s still really calm. Everyone just gets on with their own work – it’s pretty chill.’

She doesn’t mention the teacher, but this sense of calm, of industrious autonomy, where no one mucks about, is surely their doing. I imagine a room warm even in winter, swept-up drifts of sweet-smelling sawdust and a neat wall of numbered tools, each one accounted for at the end of every lesson.

‘It sounds lovely. I’ve never been in the department – I d