The Following Girls Read online

  The Mandies had an easy-to-master deaf-and-dumb system for relaying multiple choice answers round an exam room, so the papers were finished even more quickly than the Maths mistress had anticipated, once Queenie got into her stride. More martyrs surrendered to the flames.

  ‘Be sure and check through your answers.’

  Chapter 13

  The Upper Shells were officially unexcited by a rubbishy boys’ school dance that coming Saturday, but had still talked of almost nothing else for a fortnight. In the cloakroom next morning, Brian and the lads were all fretting about what to wear, which was complicated to the power of six and then some because they insisted on buying identical clothes. Not that they necessarily minded dressing the same (‘Are you two sisters?’ always broke a lot of ice), but more than three of you and you risked looking like the Nolans. They were still at the French-length-skirt-or-trousers stage and trying to decide whether they should all wear their bowling shirts.

  Bunty meanwhile was offering the usual prizes for the worst chat-up line.

  ‘Oh God, remember last year?’ groaned Queenie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some twerp comes over and actually says, “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me” – must have been doing it for a bet.’

  ‘And you said?’ Bunty had heard it before but Bunty didn’t mind, never minded – Wise to her Morecambe.

  ‘And I take a drag on my Black Russian, puff a whiff in his face and say, “If I said piss off would you piss off?”’

  Funny how it was funny the first time.

  Queenie liked being asked, liked telling you about being asked but actual dates frightened her. What were you supposed to talk about? What did they expect you to do? Where did you draw the line? The other big turn-off was Mr McQueen, who insisted that boys collect Amanda from the house so that he could take a good look at them and could then spend the next fortnight pouring scorn on their shoes and referring to them as ‘the son-in-law’ until Queenie eventually brought home the glad tidings that she’d given whoever-it-was the push while Dad said he wasn’t good enough for his princess and Ma revealed she’d never liked him anyway. This was why people left home: mental cruelty.

  Brian and Tash had the right idea really, reckoned Baker, because getting dolled up was the only seriously good bit: all mustering at Samantha’s house, crowding round her light-up make-up mirror, lips glossed like glacé cherries, smearing concealer on their spots, dabbing scent onto ‘pressure points’. Downhill after that. Shuffling rhythmically around a school assembly hall or a pub function room in near darkness, fending off approaches until you’d effected some kind of compromise between Dream Boy and Available Boy who would then join you in a pointless conversation that was the preliminary to a gropy slow dance. Which school did they go to? Did they like Lou Reed? Like talking to the Germans on the Baden Baden trip. Haben sie Brüdern oder Schwestern? Only you had to shout hard in their ears to be heard over Harold Melvin and his Bluenotes. Deaf Germans.

  And then lover boy might buy you a paper cup of warm cola and tell you of his passion for canoeing or carpentry or Cream.

  ‘D’you really think there’s a single, solitary girl in the world who likes Cream?’ said Bunty. ‘Or Hank Zappa? Or Erich Von Daniken? Or motor racing?’

  ‘Davina Booth goes motor racing.’

  ‘Yeah, but only for pulling porpoises. Davina Booth is an evil cock-sucking whore. Well-known fact.’

  Bunty wasn’t going to the dance. Bunty was busy.

  ‘Stottie, swee-tee?’ Bunty on the scrounge.

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘I’m staying at your house Saturday, OK?’

  ‘I’ll air the west wing, milady.’

  ‘Where you off to, Bunts?’ asked Queenie.

  ‘Ma and Pa have to go to a wedding in Shwop-sha somewhere, and I’m supposed to sleep over with a chum.’ A dirty cackle. ‘All will be revealed.’

  Only it wouldn’t, would it? thought Baker. More secrets, more half-arsed fibs and apologies.

  When the Mandies filed back in for Registration they found the beta Maths group in a huddle and Hilary Osgood in a frenzy of mental arithmetic.

  Miss Revie, much to the disgust of the rest of the staff room, refused to list her results in order of merit, or to go to the bother of calculating a mean mark. For Hilary Osgood, who had twice won the class prize for Effort and whose reports were a master class in faint praise (‘Works steadily’, ‘Has done everything that could be expected of her’), that red Biro line drawn across the marks list was as good as a winning tape and she was lost without it. She was frantically making a list of all of the percentages on the noticeboard, trying (and failing) to divide 1352 by 26.

  ‘What are you doing, Hills?’

  ‘Five twenty-sixes are one hundred and thirty-two carry three . . . Oh sugar’ (‘strewth’ was reserved for major emergencies), ‘I need to find the average. Dad’ll kill me if I’m below average. What’s 1352 divided by 26?’

  ‘44,’ said Bunty, trusting to luck that even Hilary Osgood would have scraped a higher mark than that.

  ‘Honestly?’ A disbelieving look from Hilary. Could anyone, anywhere compute that fast?

  ‘Bunty can do sums,’ Baker reminded her, ‘does gin rummy scores without a pencil, remember: Bunty knows best.’

  Bunty beamed. Friends again.

  ‘Wanna go shopping Saturday?’

  ‘Thought you were having your dirty weekend.’

  ‘Not completely filthy. It’s clean as a whistle till lunchtime. He plays five-a-side every Saturday morning. All weathers. Bee-zarre.’

  ‘Five-a-side what?’

  ‘Fuck knows.’

  Funny how they did that. Even the keenest goal attack never netted a ball again after leaving school (apart from nutters like the Drumlin, ob-viously), but men carried on running about in shorts well into middle age. Dad was the same, some old school thing. He’d drive off before breakfast every Saturday and do Old Boyish things at a special clubhouse place out beyond the ring road, wisteria hanging gladly from the red brick façade like crocheted purple bunting. Wives were welcome (after a fashion) but they were only allowed into the licensed lounge (tables only) between six and seven. Spam and Baker had been once: Spam in bar, Baker in car, while Bob and the other old boys played on in a steady drizzle, tapping the ball a few feet, barking and grunting about the relative positions of legs and wickets. He was clearly having the time of his life.

  He was much nicer that day. The other old boys were all peculiarly pleased to see him and he kept laughing and then making them laugh and then laughing again. A completely different man. Baker joined them in the bar and looked at Spam’s proud, puzzled smile at the man she married, back for the afternoon, like an access visit.

  ‘Nick goes to the pub with the lads afterwards, so chances are I won’t see him till gone three. Plenty of shopping time,’ urged Bunty.

  Whenever Spam went shopping she came home with whatever rubbish she had bought, poured herself a gin and sat in the front room surrounded by carrier bags, taking out the things and looking at them and putting them back. If by any horrible chance they hadn’t had her size or didn’t have the matching oven gloves and she came home empty-handed, then her outing would be deemed a failure but the Mandies didn’t shop that way. Once in a while one of them would actually shell out for a lip gloss or a paperback or make a note of possible birthday presents to hint for, but most of the time ‘shopping’ meant drooling over the empty album sleeves in the record shop, cadging squirts of scent from disbelieving cosmetic consultants (Diorella for Bunty; Rive Gauche for Baker), striping the backs of their hands with lipsticks, or choosing their top three posters in the trendy stationery boutique. Bunty had wanted a Toulouse Lautrec and Dustin Hoffman last time they looked.

  Then Bunty suddenly remembered that she couldn’t go shopping on Saturday after all.

  ‘Got to wash the car and mow the lawn.’ But those were Dominic’s jobs, weren’t they? More
secrets. But Bunty wasn’t the only one with secrets.

  The breaktime prefect patrol was considerably relaxed during exams, with most of the sixth form off revising the subjunctive or memorising Keats (or whatever bits of Keats had made it to Cole’s Notes – no sense knocking yourself out) and so Baker had no trouble sneaking up to the organ loft at lunchtime, leaving Bunty to a solitary fag behind the bike sheds – serve her jolly well right.

  Baker hadn’t contributed much to the picnic (two apples and some chocolate biscuits from the tuck shop) and she nibbled on a Golden Delicious while Julia scoffed a pork pie and a packet of chocolate Swiss rolls.

  ‘You free all afternoon? Me too. ‘Study periods,’ she giggled.

  Julia had trebled the available floor space in the tiny room by dragging two gigantic hardboard playing cards left over from a production of Alice in Wonderland all the way from the Drama cupboard so that both girls could stretch out in comfort. The new flat surface was a perfect place to lay out the papers and piece together a large, wonky joint.

  Baker’s heart began a drum roll of panic, partly fear of getting caught but mostly fear of making a tit of herself. She watched Julia, noting how her fingers gripped the roach, how long she held the smoke, and then copied the older girl exactly, fighting to stay cool as the groovy gases seeped into her blood: a lovely, fuzzy-wuzzy tingly feeling. She drew the relevant diagram in her head (extra marks awarded for clear labelling): an alveolus and a passing capillary with little dots and arrows showing the dopey doings plunging into the bloodstream. She began mentally colouring it: blue for the oxygen, yellow for the dope.

  It occurred to Baker that she ought to say something about the joint. It was traditional – like Sunday lunch: this is delicious, darling. Did you bake these yourself?

  ‘Nice.’ (Seemed safe enough.) ‘Where did you get the stuff?’

  ‘Boyfriend got it for me.’

  Julia had a real boyfriend with a motorbike. Bunty had seen them at a pub on the river: helmets on the bench beside them, his ‘n’ hers leather jackets. It never featured in the Tampax ads, funnily enough, but it was what everyone truly wanted. You’d think market research could have told them that. Ask bloody anybody: blue-eyed bloke with bike. Sod snorkels.

  ‘Baz knows a guy.’

  Baker let out a tiny silent moan of envy. Baz. Trust Julia to have a Baz, or a Zak, or a Jed. Hairy, scary, heavy metal names. Fifth form boyfriends had wimpy names: Tim, Mark, Robert. Or Jeremy. Then she remembered Baz was short for Barry – or just possibly Basil – and felt better. Then she tried to picture herself on the back of a bike – not knowing where to put her hands and trying to put on a brave face for the view in the wing mirror – and felt worse again.

  Julia puffed away expertly, her other hand retrieving a (confiscated) mag from the bundle in her bag: For women who know where they’re going. She flicked through it and let the pages flutter to a halt between her fingers.

  ‘Got this one off a first former. She hasn’t dared do the quiz: “How to tell if you’re good in bed”. Good in bed?’ she scoffed. ‘Chance would be a fine thing, doesn’t even wear a bra.’

  Other girls had to answer their questions with the aid of a dream boyfriend: how you’d like him to respond. Or had to improvise – what would Donny Osmond do? Not Julia. Julia had Baz. And now Bunty had Nick.

  ‘“If your boyfriend asks you to try a new position do you a. agree reluctantly? b. suggest some of your own?”’

  ‘Or c: Archimedes screw,’ interrupted Baker, giggling uncontrollably. ‘Always godda have a silly answer.’ She pecked guiltily at one of the Jaffa Cakes. She had forgotten how nice they were. Gingham tablecloths again.

  Julia frisbee’d the mag across the room. It skimmed over Baker’s head, alighted briefly on a rank of pipes then slithered down the back while Julia moved on to the next title in the pile.

  ‘Do you think anyone over twenty-one actually reads this rubbish?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Baker thought of Spam and her code books. ‘But I know what you mean. You’d think they’d get over it. I mean if you want lipstick you can just go to the shops, see what there is, buy lipstick. Don’t need a map. Switch to New Statesman or Popular Mechanics or something.’

  ‘Popular Statesman,’ puffed Julia. Giggles.

  ‘Or, or, or,’ Baker rummaged tipsily in her own bag, ‘Spare Rib. Supposed to work like an antidote to women’s mags – still all about willies mind you.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’ve got to look at all the normal mags as well, got to know your enemy,’ said Julia. ‘It’s just like the whole Fawcett thing,’ another scorching puff on the tissue paper firework in her hand, ‘no good starting a fight about it. It’s just about looking the part. A bit of lipstick won’t hurt. Camouflage. Then once you’re inside you can do what you like.’

  ‘Yeah, but suppose the wind changes and you stay like it?’

  ‘Oh gawd. D’you reckon? Is that what happens? Get married, have babies, forget what it was you came in for? Oh gawd.’

  Both of them sad suddenly. Like the end of the tea party on the ceiling in Mary Poppins.

  Julia began sticking some more fag papers together, a toddler in craft corner, tongue between teeth.

  ‘My mother had a baby.’

  It was the first time Julia had mentioned parents. Baker had imagined her home alone like Pippi Longstocking, living on pancakes and peppermints.

  ‘Just now? How old is she?’

  ‘She’s forty-fucking-two. That’s dis-gust-ing. And it smells and makes a noisy noisy noise. I don’t smell and I hardly make any noise, but nobody decorates my bedroom or buys me a mobile with little sodding rabbits on it.’ The trace of a tear in the corner of those pretty blue eyes.

  ‘Bastards,’ said Baker, consolingly, patting her leg. No hairs on it. I look better in trousers: my legs are so rough and hairy moaned the woman in the ad.

  ‘Read me from your magazine,’ said Julia.

  ‘My friend Bunty hates me reading things out.’

  ‘Silly moo.’

  Baker grinned gratefully at Julia who began reading the ads from her own magazine – Over 21 – while Baker rummaged through her Spare Rib for the antidote.

  ‘“Be sure of total personal freshness with Fresh ’n’ Dainty feminine deodorant, available as spray, sachets or gelée,”’ said Julia. ‘Gel-lee? G-ross.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Says here: “Women are mobilising to overcome the ravages of thrush and allied vaginal disease.”’

  ‘Mobilising? Like tanks?’ More giggles bubbled up from beneath the cricket jersey. ‘Wonder what the uniform’s like? Expect it’s all in Miss Batty’s drawer: “Join the WIFFs”.’

  This turned out to be the funniest joke ever told but then each joke was more hilarious than the last.

  ‘“Dress up to the nines, even if you’re only going to the pub – a flash of pretty knicker won’t go astray.”’ Then on the next page: ‘“What your knickers say about you.”’

  Julia had her knees up, showing the usual glimpse of ageing blue gusset.

  ‘I’d pay mine hush money if I were you,’ said Baker.

  She flicked past the ‘Spotlight on Eating Disorders’ to the Spare Rib small ads.

  ‘“Neurotic ex institutional psychologist would very much like to contact fellow sufferers.” Woffor?’

  Julia was putting the finishing touches to the new, slightly smaller joint. ‘Netball. Or hockey if she gets enough replies. Where did you get that thing?’

  ‘My mum – my real mum – got me a subscription. It comes addressed to “Manda Baker”, that’s what she used to call me.’

  ‘Manda . . . mandibles,’ mused Julia. ‘D’you ever see her?’

  ‘Lives in the Bahamas now, but she gets a friend of hers in Basingstoke to send me stuff. Awful stuff. It’s like having a really-really-really terrible pen friend. Ran away when I was three. This was “not what she wanted her life to be like” apparently. What she told Dad, anyway.’

  ‘So you got
a stepmother?’

  ‘Yup. She’s over twenty-one but she still gets magazines and buys what they say. All sorts of rubbish. She likes scenting things: the insides of drawers; shoes; carpet. And she likes hiding things under other things. Even the toaster has a cosy; it’s shaped like a lickle thatched cottage. We make toast every single bloody day but we have to hide the doings for some reason. Or keep the dust off. Keep it safe from the toast monster.’

  Spam’s Valentine from Dad that year had been a large, brightly coloured, quilted chicken to put over the food processor. ‘Talk about the way to a woman’s heart.’

  ‘She sounds bored to me: bored, bored, bored. Does she have any friends?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Must have. Be miserable otherwise. Do you do stuff together? Shopping?’

  ‘She likes being on her own.’

  ‘Bet she bloody doesn’t. Ask her.’

  Baker wriggled guiltily and looked back at her magazine, desperate for a change of subject.

  ‘“Isolated Aberystwyth feminist would like to meet others.”’

  Julia winced. ‘Oooh, don’t hold your breath, Gwyneth love. Have you been to Aberystwyth? I have. On holiday.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ slurred Baker. ‘You can’t go on holiday to Aberystwyth. Be like going on holiday to Croydon.’

  ‘Except Croydon has better pubs. The actual holiday was in Llann something. In a caravan. Llancaravan.’

  A caravan? Baker frowned uncomfortably at the thought. The Bakers went on smart package holidays to hotels where you had your own stretch of beach with banks of tip-up deckchairs and stripy parasols and waiters bringing Spam another Cuba Libre. She tried to visualise Julia and the Smiths all eating, sleeping and farting in a blue and white box slightly smaller than Bob Baker’s garden shed. Sounded crap.

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Nice? It rained every bleeding day.’

  ‘Any feminists?’

  ‘Nah. Not a sniff. Not even for ready money.’

  Baker went back to her Spare Rib. ‘“Dear Holly of sw11. Re Semen Allergy. Please write to us again as several readers have written with the same complaint and would like to contact you.” Told you. All about willies. Wonder what Holly’s knickers say about her.’