The Following Girls Read online

  The grapefruit spoons were all part of her stepmother’s ‘dream kitchen’ – what kind of nutter dreamed about kitchens? – and lived in the pantry with the rest of her equipment: a special flowerpot contraption just for cooking chicken, stainless steel dishes just for avocados, toy bolts that held on to your sweetcorn and a mad gadget with a butter curler at one end and a melon baller at the other (what more did a girl need?).

  All of Mrs Baker’s cooking was seasoned with a very heavy hand thanks to the giant thirty-pot rack of herbs and spices nailed to the wall by the back door. Very few of her pet recipes actually called for turmeric or fenugreek or asafoetida but she had taken to adding them randomly to things to keep the levels even. Baker’s teatime scrambled egg tasted really weird and by the time she’d cut off the crusts and picked out the bigger bits of spice she’d gone off the whole thing.

  ‘Are you not going to eat that?’

  ‘I was going to ring Bunty.’

  ‘Surely it can wait till tomorrow, for heaven’s sake? You’ve only just seen her,’ protested Mrs Baker as Baker picked up the receiver.

  ‘No I haven’t. She wasn’t in school again today; she’s been away since Thursday.’

  ‘I expect she’s poorly. Lots of bugs about.’

  The twelve-year-old Bunty had missed the first two terms of the first year. Her dad had been transferred south from his firm’s Edinburgh office and Baker’s best friend-to-be had arrived at Mildred Fawcett out of the blue one Saturday on the morning of the inter-school tennis tournament. Baker had budged up to make room for the new girl on the spectators’ bench and together they had sat through a semi-final in which a second year called Julia Smith, Stephanie Stott’s pin-up girl, had made short work of a player from a rival school four years her senior.

  ‘Blimey,’ muttered the new Amanda as yet another backhand whistled across the court to a parrot house chorus of cheers.

  The precocious thirteen-year-old, her face and arms already freckled after a week of spring sunshine, tossed another ball and the two Amandas watched her easy stretch for the serve, watched the handful of fathers in the back row pretending not to see the sooty flash of gusset. ‘Good shot!’ Dad’s voice cutting through the girlish trebles. ‘Two-handed backhand,’ noted Spam who used to play but didn’t play any more.

  Julia won her match in straight sets but the crestfallen away supporters began to look more confident when everyone filed back to the court after squash and sandwiches.

  ‘Attagirl, Theresa!’ shouted somebody and a tall blonde girl of seventeen strolled to the baseline, her ducky white tennis dress and fancy aluminium racquet announcing how seriously she played. Miss Drumlin had called both girls to the net and as she stooped to retrieve Julia’s tossed wooden Junior Slazenger (rough), the two Amandas saw the smiling Julia lean across the net to the older girl and murmur something under her breath. Made Theresa blush, whatever it was, and made a complete mess of her ground strokes. She held her serve for the first game but Julia won the next five with ease.

  ‘Come on, Theresa!’ but there was a defeated note in the cries of the rival spectators and they were easily drowned out by the Fawcett fan club. Theresa kept pulling down the hem of her white frock and her serve had become so hit-and-miss that Miss Drumlin could barely contain her smiles as she logged each double fault. Julia Smith was smiling too as she swooped to grab yet another mis-hit and ping it neatly toward her opponent’s feet but there were tears in the losing player’s eyes and she fumbled the catch.

  It was Julia’s fourth match that day but, fuelled by lemon barley and custard creams, she was still playing full out and her game seemed to get faster and nastier with every point and her demoralised opponent was barely bothering to run for the shots by the end, concluding the final game with a sulky smash into the net. Bryony and friends, sitting cross-legged on the asphalt behind the baseline, all joined the mooing cry of Jool-ya Jool-ya as hands were shaken and the cup was presented, but Baker and the new girl didn’t join in the cheers.

  ‘Talk about gamesmanship. Could you hear what she was whispering to her?’

  Baker shook her head.

  ‘She’ll go far,’ said her new friend. ‘Good prefect material.’

  The summer term had started for real the following Monday and Baker managed to bag a double desk for the pair of them, forcing Stottie to chum up with Amanda McQueen. Baker and Bunty had been sitting together ever since (subjects permitting), spoke most evenings and spent Saturday afternoons at each other’s houses planning their future when they would leave home, get jobs and share a big beautiful white bedsit somewhere. They were going to be each other’s matrons of honour, godmother each other’s children, take turns as mystery guests on their This Is Your Lives then, finally, grow old and tipsy sipping Napoleon brandy in a fancy apartment on the Boulevard St Michel. Or Something. Bunty had it all worked out.

  Dad hated it whenever Bunty phoned Baker or Baker phoned Bunty and found things to do in the greenhouse whenever she came round but he was equally baffled by all Baker’s friendships. The way Dad looked at it, friends were people you told jokes to in pubs or played squash with at clubs or ‘had over’ to mix drinks and talk bollocks about mileage. That’s how his friends worked. Not to be holed up in an airless bedroom for hours at a time burning joss sticks and listening to some long-haired layabout with a guitar. And talking. What about, for heaven’s sake? A question he asked every time Baker put down the receiver. ‘You’re with her all day.’ He’d trained his wife to ask the same question but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

  Bunty’s mother took twelve rings to answer Baker’s call, then said she was very sorry, Amanda, but Amanda was unable to come to the telephone and actually Roy was expecting rather an important call and basically just get off the line. Baker hung up and went back to the kitchen.

  ‘She any better today?’

  Baker shrugged and after scraping her tea into the swing-top bin she picked up her book bag and nipped down the hall to the garage, closing the door silently behind her and switching on the light. She yanked the three darts from the centre of the board on the back of the door and, reaching up to the shelf that ran round the top of the room, pulled down an old snapshot of her father and tucked it under the wires by triple twenty so that it hung just over the bull’s eye.

  She was on her third round when she heard the crash of gears and brakes as Dad’s Rover grouched to a halt outside, heard booted footsteps stamp against the doormat, heard the usual growl of greeting muffled by the evening kiss on his wife’s cheek.

  Baker froze, the dart still poised, as she watched the handle turn on the connecting door. It was always very stiff in cold weather and he had to shove it with his shoulder and the sudden jolt dislodged her last throw from the board and jiggled the photo free of the wire that held it, causing it to float unseen behind a pile of old Cosmopolitans (What to do with an unemotional man).

  He stood on the threshhold, sheepskin coat over his three-piece suit. Older than his picture. As he turned from greeting his wife to confronting his daughter the rotation of his head seemed to wipe the smile away. Baker was still holding the dart up level with her ear and it was only the cross backward jerk of his head that reminded her that she was still taking aim at the deepening groove between his eyes.

  ‘Out of there, young lady. I want a word with you.’

  A hard, outdoorsy voice, a voice used to making itself heard above cement mixers and pneumatic drills, a voice too rudely big for the room. He didn’t look at her as he spoke. His sheepskin bulk turned back into the hall and along the passage to his study and the waiting stack of prospectuses. Envelopes were starting to arrive almost daily now, the glossy brochures promising judo and ski clubs and language laboratories and filled with pictures of cheery, normal schoolgirls throwing pots or gathering excitedly round microscopes or breasting tapes with aertex A-cups. He’d found the old Fawcett prospectus in one of his filing drawers a few days earlier: ‘Helping every girl to fulfi
l her potential’ it lied. Did Amanda even have one to fulfil? He often wondered. Her mother hadn’t.

  The first Mrs Baker, Patsy, had spent over a month in hospital before Baker was born and during those idle, bed-socked hours had written a letter to her unborn child to be read on its fourteenth birthday in the event of her death. The envelope had been bundled together with her things when baby Amanda finally came home and Dad had kept it, unopened, in one of his desk drawers where nosy little Baker (aged fourteen) had found it. ‘Dear Jeremy (or Amanda)’ it began, or Amanda.

  Patsy hadn’t died (although Baker usually told people she had). Anything rather than reveal that Mummy had made a bolt for it when her daughter was three and a half after reading a copy of The Second Sex. It said ‘This book will change your life’ on the flyleaf and so it had: lots of people’s lives.

  Patsy had told Dad that she was off to ‘find herself’ and the initial search had been pretty bloody extensive to judge from the wide variety of postcards in Grandma’s old shoebox – Marrakesh, Marbella, Trondheim. She only returned for the purposes of the divorce (and after Dad had blocked her signature on his handy new Barclaycard). He’d had no trouble getting custody. The estranged Patsy had been based at a psychotherapeutic community in the Basingstoke area for the duration of the court proceedings and the judge didn’t hesitate.

  His honour hadn’t gone so far as to forbid access but he hadn’t really needed to. According to Grandma there had been fortnightly visits in the early days, during and just after the divorce, when Patsy would get the coach up from Hampshire and take little ‘Manda’ out for the day but the bi-monthly screaming match with her ex-husband and the rootless tedium of funfairs and zoos and cartoon cinemas soon wore her down.

  By the time Jeff appeared on the scene the visits were down to one a month. Patsy hadn’t told Jeff about little Manda in the ad she had placed (‘Aquarian, free spirit, having survived life’s shit, seeks Scorpio male for adventure – non-smoking vegetarian preferred’) and the longer their affair continued the more impossible the confession became. He hadn’t looked like the paternal type, Grandma said (didn’t exactly go with the territory for adventurous Scorpio males), and when he was offered a job in the Bahamas, Patsy tagged along – strictly no strings, she said (before he said it first). She could explain about Manda when they got there, she told Grandma, when they were ‘settled’, but she never did tell him in the end. Baker had found a long letter on airmail paper in Grandma’s box, telling how she had taken a copy of The Feminine Mystique to read on that long flight to Nassau and the relationship was on the rocks before the ten days it took her to finish it. But never mind, wrote Patsy. The sun shone every day, the bars were teeming with adventurous Scorpios and she thought she might as well stay. Nothing to come back for. Manda was much happier where she was (Bob was always saying so).

  Patsy Baker still sent the occasional postcard with a flamingo or a palm tree on it (just showing off, Spam said) and always remembered birthdays and Christmases with a series of bossy, butch ‘non-stereotypical’ toys all bought and posted by one of her pals back in Basingstoke: Meccano, a fishing rod, a soldering iron, a chemistry set. Was it feminism? Or were they all really for Jeremy?

  It got to a point where Baker had stopped even bothering to unwrap the presents, just re-tagged them on the way over to her male cousin’s every Boxing Day. This worked fine until two Christmases ago, when cousin David’s gifts turned out to be The Female Eunuch, a speculum, a pocket make-up mirror and a Roneoed leaflet on where to find your cervix (north at the gusset and you couldn’t miss it apparently).

  It had been Girl’s Own stuff from then on: a badge saying The Future is Female, a copy of The Bell Jar and, last Christmas, a subscription to Spare Rib. The most recent parcel had also contained a dog-eared copy of Matriarchy: Myths of Motherhood (‘when we learn to disengage from the children we care for . . . we will be going some way towards true liberation’ – thanks, Mum), and folded inside it was a leaflet from the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

  ‘They’ve got one of those in Wandsworth,’ Spam had said when Baker unwrapped it.

  ‘An international terrorist conspiracy?’

  ‘No-ooh. A women’s thing. I saw a fly poster: “The Wandsworth Liberation Workshop”.’

  ‘Might not be women.’ Baker was annoyed now; Spam was taking the piss. ‘Might be for everybody.’

  ‘Leave off. Who else gets liberated?’

  Funny bird, Spam. She worked in the office of a large building contractor and had first met Bob Baker at someone’s retirement do. He married her ten years ago, just as soon as his decree absolute came through. Baker thought she could just about recall a pre-Spam era: a half-remembered smell of pans burned dry and some very vivid black and white memories of the day she came back from an outing to the zoo with her grandmother to find ‘auntie’ Pam in the sitting room drinking wine in a new white trouser suit. There had been tea chests full of newspaper in the kitchen and a new pink toothbrush in the rack.

  Spam had grown up on the Falkland Islands wearing boots and something sheepish and waterproof and there was still an anorak-y aura about her even in her smartest clothes. It wasn’t for want of trying. Three magazines were delivered regularly, like smokeless coal or gold top, and they told her what to wear, what to bake and kept her up to speed with fashionable problems (Divorce: Is it ever the answer?), fashionable vegetables and winning ways with curtains, and Mrs Baker read every word of every one of them. It was like she was taking a crash course – Womanhood in 20 Lessons? – or using the mags to help her pass unnoticed among women who genuinely gave a damn.

  To do her justice, Spam didn’t really seem to care all that much but she had a job in an office and had realised quite soon after arriving from Planet Pam that other people, other women anyway, cared a surprising amount. And you really did have to memorise all the ridiculous codes because they’d know you for an outsider straight away if you didn’t, like a Nazi spy not knowing the Cup Final from the Test Match. Make the mistake of thinking that an outfit could last years – the way a man’s suits did – and some cat from Dispatch would say how she’d ‘always liked you in it’.

  The magazines made sure that her trousers were all the right width, that her shirt collar was tucked out (or in, or out), that her page boy (dyed a slightly brighter brown) was the right length and that her make-up was all as it should be, which just at the minute meant khaki eye shadow and rust lip gloss. Just before heading out she would spray herself with perfume like Dad attacking greenfly. The scent was the one that advertised itself as ‘a fragrance as individual as you are’ – everyone was wearing it.

  ‘Three squirts behind each ear,’ complained Baker to Bunty.

  ‘Blimey. You wouldn’t need dogs if she went missing.’

  ‘I bloody would. Big snappy ones who haven’t had any dinner.’

  Spam had not been able to have children of her own – which was a great pity (as Bob’s mother, Granny Baker, was so very fond of saying) but Bob Baker never reproached her with the fact that there was no Jeremy to take to test matches and cup finals, no Jeremy to unpack the train set fussily folded in flannel on that high shelf in the garage where his childless wife ought never, in theory, to have found it.

  Baker was never going to be getting that train set. When she was a child her father’s gifts had seemed designed as a corrective to all the Patsy propaganda: doll’s pram, toy sewing machine, even a toy washing machine – but the teenage kit was bossier still. Last Christmas it had been a set of heated rollers (as good as telling you your hair didn’t look very nice).

  Spam usually played safe with a new dressing gown or a book token (all the Mandies hated book tokens – like your family didn’t trust you with the cash) but this year a big brown box had appeared under the tree a week before Christmas. Oh joy, Baker had thought, what delights would that contain? A facial sauna? A light-up make-up mirror? But it was such a wonderful present that she was almost disa
ppointed: a typewriter. Just what she had always wanted (only you couldn’t actually say that: sounded phoney). ‘That’ll be useful,’ said Dad, spoiling it. Dad had given her a travel iron. His presents for his wife were bossy too – he gave her a set of bathroom scales one year, bloody rude (she took them back and swapped them for the cookery kind).

  The magazines had made her a keen mushroom-stuffer. She served them once when Bunty came over, and when Bunty got all South Ken and smart with her Spam said that life was too short not to cook the food you liked to eat which had rather impressed Bunty.

  ‘She’s almost groovy in her own funny, body-snatchy little way: dull but not daft.’

  ‘Hates me,’ scowled Baker.

  She never actually said as much, obviously, but Baker could tell. She sometimes glimpsed the sharp fall of her stepmother’s face on a Saturday night if Baker said she wasn’t going out or caught her looking at her via the mirror over the fireplace, her back-to-front features unfamiliar, unreadable.

  But she did have her moments. Baker almost suspected her of a sense of humour. Every few weeks or so she would bustle back from her Saturday shopping expeditions with a present for Baker, clothes mostly. Her father, clocking the price tag before he’d even registered the colour, would flash a brief smile of pleasure at his wife’s generosity, give her waist a squeeze, then pat himself on the back for picking the perfect stepmother but the actual clothes were always hideous: a red tartan mohair cape? A patchwork denim trouser suit? Spam never minded taking things back but Baker was always made to try them on first, do a twirl. ‘Well I think it looks nice,’ Dad would invariably say. ‘Nice to see you in something smart for a change.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Spam would say. ‘I’ve got the receipt.’

  The replacement things were always perfectly fine – like the whole trying-on nonsense was just an elaborate wind-up. Still, Baker had to admit that the typewriter was inspired. Spam had shown her which fingers went where and with constant practice (‘Haven’t you got any homework, Amanda?’) she was up to 30 words per minute – ‘w.p.m’. All she needed now was the speedwriting course and she cd bcm a scrtry & gt a gd jb (or so the ads promised).