Pilot holes: an origin story and a prequel

Johor Bahru, January 2004. Tan Su-Lin is twelve (the future Ms Tan, teacher of D&T at Shining Academy, Greencuttings, Midlands, England), at the wrong end of the country from a shop the law has just closed, admitted "on condition" to a school where everything (the lessons, the announcements, the jokes, the punishments) arrives in a language she cannot hold. On her first morning she cannot find her own name on the class lists. She used to be a person who knew the words for things.

At the end of a corridor, a storeroom is being emptied. Workbenches come in on a lorry from Muar. A subject with three names and no teacher gets a new padlock on its door; until, one Monday in March, a woman walks into assembly carrying a wooden toolbox with a rope handle.

In the room behind the frosted glass, Su-Lin can read the tools but not the labels. It turns out to be enough. What happens there takes one school year and no translation: and twenty years later, in a Midlands workshop with rain on the skylights, it is still going on.

Pilot holes is the origin story of Ms Tan: the small one you make first, so the rest can go in without splitting.