The Following Girls Page 19

  Her voice took on that chant-y tone she used for Bible readings. The school, she purred, had a dilemma. While they undeniably had a duty of care to any student in difficulties, they also had a duty to students who weren’t – and to their parents. It was a matter of balance – her fingers parted and did a stupid hand-jivey thing like a pair of wonky scales. They wanted to help, she said, but yesterday’s incident was a very serious matter, a matter which, in the opinion of many colleagues, ought to be taken further. Strictly speaking it was a criminal offence, after all.

  Baker heard her father catch his breath and then the whimper of his chair as he sighed deeper into it.

  ‘And?’ It was Spam who spoke. O’Brien gave her The Look over her glasses, but Baker saw her stepmother stare right back. She had assumed a no-nonsense, professional, further-to-my-letter demeanour that Baker had never seen, that Bob Baker had never seen (not much call for it at home).

  ‘And?’ frowned O’Brien.

  ‘Have you decided to involve the police? If it’s your duty and all that.’

  ‘The police?’ O’Brien smoothed her tweeds. When she spoke again it was like an invisible conductor had stopped the proceedings and started again from the top in an entirely different time signature.

  ‘Cigarette smoking is something we take very seriously at Fawcett.’

  At no point had she referred to the content of Baker’s roll-up and her manner now was strange and she spoke in a peculiar, very deliberate way as if she had just winked at them or as if the room were wired for sound.

  ‘Have the police been called?’ persisted Spam, craning her neck and giving a theatrical look over her shoulder like she was wondering when the rozzers would arrive. ‘If that’s what your staff room want . . .’

  O’Brien began to back-pedal and admitted that no, the SCR had opted to deal with the matter in-house – up to a point. The teaching body had long been of the opinion that Amanda was – a tiny pause – disturbed. Dad’s breathing made it plain how badly he took this: disturbed. Out of the corner of her eye Baker could see Spam shrivelling in sympathy for her husband as the headmistress pressed on with her proposal. Dr O’Brien explained that she had only had time for one, relatively brief meeting with senior colleagues, but it had been decided that, whatever the eventual verdict, professional help and advice should be sought without delay – for Amanda’s sake.

  Her plan, designed to keep the staff room sweet without involving the authorities, was that Baker would be assessed by Delia Carson. Miss Carson had a great deal of relevant experience and was always a huge help in cases of this kind. Always? Bob Baker had recovered enough to ask just how Dr O’Brien came to be so clued up on all this exactly: did the school get a lot of this sort of thing?

  Dr O’Brien didn’t actually say ‘Don’t take that tone with me’ but her voice grew steelier as she spelled out the terms of the deal.

  ‘Remind me, what is it you do, Mr Baker?’

  She didn’t really need reminding. The file was on her blotter and she had the speech ready before he’d uttered his reply.

  ‘So you’ll understand that we need to get the professionals to take a few measurements before we blunder in.’

  She was speaking far more quickly than usual – as if to imply that valuable time was being wasted and to render further interruption almost impossible. She delivered her ultimatum in a series of tetchy telegrams. Extremely serious matter. Very important not to act precipitately, but there was no time to be lost. These things could easily drag on for weeks, even months, but, given the seriousness of the case, Miss Carson had persuaded Gerald Sexton – she’d paused here the way she did in assembly when she expected laughter or applause, as if the name must surely be known to all fathers of delinquent teenagers – Doctor Gerald Sexton, to squeeze Amanda in for a preliminary assessment that very afternoon, then Delia would take over the reins on Friday morning. She did the tweaky thing with the desk furniture again, then looked up in a ‘You still here?’ sort of way.

  ‘Six sessions ought to give some indication of how the land lies.’

  Bob Baker’s unhappiness was now complete and he sat crumpled in his chair, mentally kicking himself for not switching schools while he still had the chance.

  ‘Couldn’t you . . . ? Is it really . . . ?’ He could barely speak for shame. ‘I mean . . . psychiatrists?’

  Dr O’Brien was quick to correct him: Miss Carson was a psychologist. Baker’s daily sessions were to start the very next morning at 8.30. Probably best if she didn’t return to school for the rest of the week and she should be denied all use of the telephone.

  ‘I appreciate that as you are both out at work,’ (weird the way full-time teachers – even married ones – always had it in for mothers who ‘went out to work’), ‘a traditional suspension would create difficulties.’

  Baker would be allowed back in to school after her Monday morning appointment, but only under strict supervision.

  ‘Miss Bonetti has kindly agreed that Amanda can spend the day doing private study at the back of her Mathematics class. If you could supply a packed lunch?’ She nodded bossily at Spam. ‘Breaks and mealtimes to be spent in the sick bay and no contact with classmates until further notice. A return to normal lessons is out of the question until Dr Sexton and Miss Carson have made their reports and the staff have had the chance to review the case. I suggest we all meet again on Friday afternoon next week? My secretary can arrange a convenient time.’

  Bob Baker had driven off to work, leaving his wife to chaperone Amanda to the clinic where the psychiatrist had his Thursday surgeries. Spam settled down in the waiting room with a lapful of Country Lives, but had hardly chosen her first dream house (paddocks, trout stream, all mod cons £32,000) before Amanda reappeared.

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘Famous for it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not much. Was I depressed and did I have any anxieties, and take this lot three times a day.’ Baker brandished her prescription. ‘Not even “call me in the morning”.’

  They went home via the chemist’s in the high street. Baker wandered around the aisles, painting random stripes of varnish on the stubs of her nails while Spam played at reading the contents on a box of cough lozenges and the man in the white coat wrote the dosage instructions on the three brown bottles. Spam was mortified: he must think she was mental, all those pills. ‘It’s not for me!’ she felt like screaming as he bagged up the drugs, but he would already know that because she had ticked the ‘Under 16’ box on the back of the prescription. ‘She’s my stepdaughter,’ she blurted. But that only made it worse. A broken home? Poor mite.

  Dad phoned to say that he was working late to make up for his wasted morning, so Spam made a lazy supper for herself and Baker.

  ‘Brown or white?’

  ‘Hovis?’

  ‘Can do.’

  When Bob Baker finally got home his solitary supper had been grilled sirloin and mashed potatoes and, as always, his wife had watched him slice the meat clean in two with his teak-handled steak knife before tilting a cut side into view, to check that it was done to his liking and complain (or demand further grilling) if it wasn’t. It was perfect (but he didn’t say so).

  The dining room table was slippery with prospectuses. Spam said they should wait and see how it went with the psychiatry lady, next week but Dad said they should have Plan B in place in case. Spam said Baker should maybe help choose and he harumphed so hard that he squirted whisky and soda out of his nose.

  Baker spent the rest of the night in her room crying, not even surfacing for Top of the Pops. She broke Spam’s sandwiches into bird food for her window sill and fed the beaker of chocolate milk to her spider plant. Spam stood over her while she swallowed her Mandrax, but after she’d gone back downstairs Baker went to her stepmother’s bedside drawer and sneaked another three sleeping tablets from the bottle at the back, next to a sunglasses case with foil packets of contraceptive pills hidden inside. Four Mandie
s.

  She fell asleep almost at once and immediately tuned in to eight hours of demented dreams, like an all-night Marx Brothers screening. Lady Henry had been made headmistress and was conducting a whole school pencil case inspection and suspending any girl who didn’t have a speculum. And there were to be new portraits of past headmistresses all done by Dora Hardcastle and showing them as Salome and Judith and St Agatha. Julia and Baker were discovered by Mrs Mostyn in the organ loft again, but this time Julia stepped away from Baker and Mrs Mostyn gave her a white pin and when Baker reached out for it she fell through the thin plaster floor, down into the assembly hall where Lady Henry was handing out chocolate biscuits dipped in golden syrup. Bob Baker had finally been asked to redecorate the school: William Morris, shag pile, white piano: the works. The fluffy new carpet caught on the crepe soles of the Upper Thirds’ indoor shoes and was already peppered with ink stains and pencil shavings. Then the dream camera dollied into the refectory kitchen where Spam was making hundreds and hundreds of butterfly cakes on the rotisserie and lots and lots and lots of plates of party sandwiches with flags telling you what was inside: palm fibre, bauxite, yam, Spam. And then Miss Gatsby put a winner’s medal round Baker’s neck and gave her a big fragrant hug.

  There was loads more. Baker had meant to write it all down when she stirred briefly in the small hours, but told herself as the thought occurred that she would be sure to remember it all: so outrageous, so vivid. She had forgotten most of it by morning.

  Chapter 19

  There was a bus stop just round the corner from Delia Carson’s consulting room but it had been decided that Dad should drive Amanda to her early bird appointments (to make sure she kept them). She was then trusted to make her own way to school in time for the ten thirty bell.

  When they had left the house the next morning for Baker’s first appointment Dad had done what he always did, putting his hand inside the letterbox, pushing and pulling at the door even after he had double-locked it. Did he expect the hinges to give way? As he unlocked the passenger side of the Rover he spotted lumps of fresh bird shit on the windscreen and wouldn’t get in the car till he’d scraped them off with a tetchy twig.

  He even drove angrily, bullying the gear stick, pushing in front of other cars, hooting at pedestrians even when they weren’t trying to cross the road, constantly looking at his watch to remind Baker that the detour was wasting his valuable time.

  The car radio was on loud, making speech safely impossible, but the only station with a decent reception played pop music which made his mood even worse, like he suspected Baker of sending postcards personally requesting each record. Dad despised pop music and, as with anything that wasn’t to his taste – curry, flares, Campari, David Frost – assumed that other people only pretended to like it because it would make them seem ‘different’. All just one big hoax to annoy him. If Baker was listening to the kitchen radio when he came home from work he would walk into the room, still in his hat and coat, and push the ‘off’ button without a word. As if it had merely been left on by mistake, like a light.

  Unable to bear another pop song, he began micro-rotating the dial with the safe-breaker fingers of his left hand until he found the ghost of Radio 2. The disc jockey was giving the turntable a rest and cajoling his listeners through a keep-fit routine, like Miss Drumlin with an Irish accent. Baker mimed doing star jumps in her seat. Not a flicker.

  Miss Carson’s office was the front room of her flat in a four-storey modern block up beyond the Common. There were weeds growing in the gravel and through the street doormat which looked like a giant version of the thing Spam used to slice boiled eggs with. The voice on the entry phone told Baker to take the lift to the second floor where the door was opened by a middle-aged woman in a bobbly brown cardigan wearing a long string of wooden beads that looped even-handedly over each armour-plated D-cup in turn.

  The consulting room had the look of a very small school library, filled with yellow wooden bookshelves and uncomfortable modern armchairs made of stringy springs and slabs of foam rubber covered with hairy stripes. The tiled surround of the coal-effect electric fire provided a sort of makeshift mantelshelf on which were ranged a collection of china cats and kittens. It seemed a weirdly cutesy hobby for Miss Carson with her tweedy togs and Swede-y furniture, but it turned out that the first of these ornaments had been a present from a grateful patient (or its mother). A second patient had assumed she liked cats (which she didn’t) and bought another, and subsequent under-achieving, hyper-sexual, introverted, anti-social teenagers had all added to the herd.

  The few unshelved spots of wall bore framed maps of English counties and a few certificates proving that Delia Mary Carson had all the qualifications necessary to nod a lot and ask you why you felt what you felt.

  Not that there had been much of that in the first session. Her opening gambit was ‘Do you know why you’re here?’, followed by a spot of word association with Miss Carson firing the triggers at Baker with a sinister part-smile on her face as if every answer were giving the game away. Black: white, house: plant, fruit: five letters.

  Spam had produced grilled grapefruit for supper that Friday evening served in stainless steel hemispheres like the cups from a great big robot bra. The fruit was cruelly bitter, barely edible at all unless you shovelled sugar onto it, and the two tastes – Tate and Lyle and sulphuric acid – made Baker’s teeth scream in agony but she didn’t dare say as much in case Spam remembered how long it had been since her last check-up. The pain unlocked another fragment of Thursday night’s epic dream: trying to bite the chocolate off a Mars bar and leaving her front teeth behind in the caramel.

  Bob Baker was happy growling over his idiot crossword and refused to join them when Spam suggested a family round of Scrabble. It was the only board game he could be made to tolerate – educational – but it was always a relief when he didn’t play. He huffed and puffed when they didn’t put their words down straight away but would then take ages over his own turn, flicking through the dictionary or consulting a dog-eared list of two-letter words he’d once cut out of the Daily Express and which he kept under the plastic insert in the Scrabble box.

  ‘Za? What in blazes is Za?’

  ‘It’s on the list.’

  But he never liked it when Baker played him at his own game.

  ‘That’s never a word.’

  ‘It’s in the dictionary at school.’ Baker had held her face in place perfectly (the way you always could when the lie really mattered) but Spam had tumbled immediately.

  ‘What the ’eck is ek?’

  ‘Ek?’ Not the ghost of a smile. ‘It’s a disease of sheep.’

  It was over a month until the cricket season got going, so mowing the lawn and stabbing it repeatedly with a garden fork took most of Dad’s Saturday. Spam thought it might be fun to go for a drive somewhere on Sunday. Hampton Court? Whipsnade? But there was a great deal to do in the greenhouse, apparently, and Bob Baker spent the whole of Sunday tickling his double fuchsias with a squirrel hair paintbrush, making Winston Churchill mate with Dollar Princesses in hopes of bigger blooms or longer stamens.

  Baker wasted the morning in an oily bath of Three Wishes (she hadn’t yet made any) and when she came downstairs she found Spam sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by a nest of straw and about half a dozen steel discs perforated with a swirl of sharp holes which, if correctly assembled, became a device for mincing meat and grating vegetables. Spam – who could replace the vacuum cleaner bag blindfold – had been completely unable to engage the wingnut as shown in diagram A and was left with just the base unit clamped uselessly to the Formica table top, waiting in vain for something to mince. The near-hysterical Spam was wheezing quite nastily and her cheeks were streaked with mascara. She held a finger to her lips, picked up one of the steel discs, aligned it with the flange (diagram B), and pointed, magician’s assistant-style, as it rattled straight through and clanged against its friends in the little heap on the table.

 
; Baker picked up the box which was decorated with a noughts and crosses layout of drawings of finely minced foods. She put her hand in and rummaged down the sides, lifted the flap in the base, assuming the missing component was hiding inside. Spam, still weeping with laughter, had now turned her attention to the recipe booklet.

  ‘What kind of person serves grated carrot as an hors d’oeuvre?’

  Dad returned to his half-hardies after lunch and stepmother and daughter stayed indoors with the Scrabble board. Spam sent Baker out with a cup of tea and a plate of butterfly cakes at three o’clock and she found her father cutting Lady Boothby into dozens of tiny pieces with a razor blade.

  He grunted and nodded his head at a space on the bench when he saw the tray, then carried on slitting each cutting down the middle before dipping the twigs into a jar of fungicide and poking them into one of the compartments in a vast egg-box-like tray. Forty-eight? Ninety-six?

  ‘What will you do with them all? You’ve only got four hanging baskets.’

  ‘What? Just put the tray down, can’t you?’

  And she went back inside to find Spam slotting ‘banjaxed’ across two triple word scores.

  ‘Did you cheat?’

  ‘Course I cheated. I hate this game,’ and with varnished finger and thumb she flicked hard at the edge of the board and sent the tiles flying across the shag pile (X and J were never seen again: bye-bye banjaxed).

  ‘Maybe there’s a film on?’

  And the pair of them took a sofa each and Spam poured two large amontillados and they watched Bette Davis playing identical twins (identical-looking anyway; their personalities weren’t a bit alike).

  Spam had poured the sherries without a word. On the rare Christmasy occasions when Dad included Amanda in a round of drinks the doling out of the stingy half glass would always be accompanied by a significant look and his idea of a joke (‘Don’t go getting drunk’) and his eyes would follow every sip, but Spam glugged out equal measures using white wine glasses rather than the skinny cranberry-coloured schooners that came with the decanter (a wedding present from the firm). Dr Sexton had said nothing about abstaining from alcohol or operating heavy machinery but both were contraindicated in the small print on the ‘dos and don’ts’ leaflet that came with Baker’s tablets. Didn’t say why. Just said don’t.