The Following Girls Read online

  There was a special board for house notices outside the assembly hall and Eliza Warner’s name was already in place on the list.

  ‘What happened to whatshername?’

  ‘Stole an eye shadow from Woolworths or something, so my little friend Bryony tells me,’ murmured Queenie. ‘Suspended for the remainder of the term pending a governors’ meeting, so Eliza gets promoted.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Baker, ‘I found a use for that bogus badge.’

  Baker had been to a church jumble sale a few weekends earlier and while rootling in a box of dead men’s buttons had unearthed a whole blazer’s worth of random school badges, King’s Manor by the look of them (nowhere else offered lacrosse). Baker was wearing ‘Lacrosse’ herself but the treasured white ‘School’ badge deserved a better home and where better than the head girl’s lapel?

  ‘It’s still there. She’s got so many she hasn’t even noticed. Left her blazer on a bench yesterday and I seized my moment: there was just space under “Hockey”.’

  Chapter 4

  The rest of the form had charged out of the hall towards the rain-glazed exercise yard but Baker dawdled in the lobby, putting off the horror that was Tuesday morning games. Games. Games used to mean quoits and hoops and bean bags covered in brightly coloured burlap. Fun and games, proper games and Sports Day. Baker cuddled the memory. A whole field alive with chatty six-year-olds in vests (summer ones) and navy knickers, running up and down holding spoons with eggs in them. One mad, marvellous year lovely, clever Miss Gatsby who was new and wore flick-ups and lovely green glass beads and who always gave the winner a big, soft freesia-scented hug had combined the dressing-up and three-legged races so that the finishing line of small girls in outsize tea gowns and vast picture hats looked like a drunken vicarage garden party.

  Races over, it would be time to wriggle back into a dozen different red ginghams in a hundred different dress patterns and tidy all the different hairstyles: braids and bunches and tails – low ponytails, high ponytails, side ponytails – and those of the little coloured twins whose heads were ploughed and scattered with fuzzy-felted fields, a plaited scarecrow on duty in the centre of each square.

  Ribbons re-tied, buttons buttoned and they would all flock round the trestle tables spread with beakers of fluorescent orange squash and paper plates of unfamiliar biscuits (the kind that said on the top how nice they were). And pretty doll’s sandwiches – pink and white, yellow and white – the sliced bread so plump and soft that tiny fingers left dimples in the bright white dough, penny-sized munches missing from the discarded crusts.

  Even netball was a game in those days but it was mortal combat now – especially the way Bryony and her lot played it. It wasn’t a sport either, was it? Not really. You never saw netball on the telly, grown-ups didn’t play it, there weren’t clubs for it like golf or tennis. Nobody ever went on a netballing holiday – except possibly Miss Drumlin. Miss Drumlin was painfully keen on sport of all kinds and played lacrosse for Middlesex. At least the Mandies very much wanted it to be Middlesex (may actually have been Surrey but where was the fun in that?)

  On a normal Tuesday, Miss Drumlin would pick her pets to be the four team leaders who would then pick their pets plus the straightest shooter and the tallest girl in the class – not necessarily in that order – before finally divvying up the lumpy, butter-fingered leftovers who’d have to take whatever position remained (wing defence was usually the last to go). But not everyone could play. Give or take a flu outbreak, there should (in theory) be four girls left over from a class of thirty-two: a Mandy-shaped foursome who could loiter on the sidelines and pretend to practise passing.

  But first came PT. Ugly, jumpy, stretchy movements led by the ugly, jumpy, stretchy Miss Drumlin. The Drumlin had been delayed that morning by a prole with a nosebleed. There was no Fawcett matron. Instead the role was shared by Miss Drumlin and a scary ex-hockey international called Mrs Bremner who haunted the touchlines in a judo suit or (if wet) re-sorted the lost property cupboard armed with a gaily-striped Thermos traditionally believed to contain a fortifying blend of Horlicks and cherry brandy. Neither mistress had any patience whatever with any sort of ailment, be it headache, sore throat, growing pains or, in one nasty but mercifully not life-threatening case, scarlet fever (‘Don’t fuss, Melanie! It’s just a heat rash!’). And Mrs Bremner gave painful periods very short shrift and kept elaborate note of the menstrual cycle of all regular sufferers. Cry off too often and she would consult her precious chart – ‘Again? So soon?’ – and threaten letters home and internal examinations by the school doctor until the pain subsided and the poor hockeyphobe agreed that yes, do you know, yes, perhaps the aspirin had done the trick after all.

  Julia Smith had been drafted in to deputise while the Drumlin dealt with the bleeding junior. She had hung her blazer on the chain-link fence and led them all in a round of star jumps, side bends and toe-touchings. Baker thumped a few jumps on the slippy tarmac, picturing all the bones of her feet – tarsals, metatarsals, malleus, incus, wossname – fanning out beneath her weight as she landed, then gathering themselves back together for the next spring. Clever old Bunty and Queenie had both pleaded asthma and Stottie was planning a painful period. All three had retreated to a spectators’ bench in the gulley that ran alongside the netball court behind the chain-link fence and Baker stopped bouncing and joined them, making a point of sitting at the far end next to Queenie.

  ‘My kid brother’s kinky for basketball,’ said Queenie. Kin-ky. Just the way she said it in her posh mummy’s voice made you smile. ‘We’ve even got a hoop in the garden. Right over the daffs. Car-nage.’

  ‘Basketball?’ marvelled Bunty. ‘He must have shot up.’

  ‘Naah. He’s no taller. Just jumps a lot.’

  Once her victims were red and sweaty enough, Julia let them get on with picking their teams while she retrieved her blazer and loped across to the shivering Mandies. She squatted down to be nearer their eye level and you could see the blue thread of her Tampax and a few stray pubes peeping out from the wash-faded six-year-old gusset of her regulation knickers: gross. Did she play games before she got the curse, or had ‘becoming a woman’ made her instantly fit for everything promised in the ads: disco dancing, fell walking, snorkelling?

  ‘What’s the story this time, you lot? It’s always the same four of you, isn’t it? Must be catching, whatever it is.’ She addressed the group but it was Baker she was looking at: doing the eyebrow thing; daring her to answer back. ‘You’ll feel heaps warmer if you get moving.’

  ‘Says you.’

  ‘You’re asking for trouble, Amanda Baker. I’ve got my eye on you.’

  The prefect bounced easily to her feet and strode off towards the sixth-form common room, nodding to Miss Drumlin who had finally staunched the flow and was ready for action once more. The Mandies got up from their bench and began half-heartedly passing their leaden leather ball back and forth.

  ‘Amanda!’ The games mistress didn’t bother to specify but Baker knew at once who she meant and turned to face her, cocking her right shoulder forward to show off the monogram, the tiniest smile fluttering across her face at having sidestepped another lecture but it seemed that Miss Drumlin was no longer concerned about embroidery.

  ‘Those are gym shoes.’

  Baker looked dumbly down at her black canvas feet.

  ‘The lace broke on my others and I couldn’t . . .’

  Miss Drumlin was not interested in Amanda’s feeble explanation and immediately launched into her usual moan about the vital importance of having the Right Kit. (Vital? It was only netball for Christ’s sake, not a bid for the South Pole.)

  The Drumlin droned on while Baker stood transfixed by the browning bloodstain on the front of the games mistress’s shirt. It had seeped into the open weave like a giant version of the mark left on that little square of gauze you got inside a sticking plaster. Some nosebleed. Could you have projectile nosebleeds? Baker hoped so.

 
Miss Drumlin had raised her voice.

  ‘Are you even listening to me? Anyone would think you actually liked getting into trouble.’

  Baker, roused from her trance, glared back at her and the shocked look on her face – ‘wooden insolence’ was how Mrs Mostyn usually described it – caused Miss Drumlin to cut the wigging short and issue a red card instead: Amanda would go straight to Dr O’Brien and jolly well explain herself.

  Baker heard someone else’s voice begin to stammer with panic.

  ‘Dr O’Brien? But I’ve got the right ones upstairs. I can run and get them.’

  Miss Drumlin did not want to hear Amanda’s pathetic excuses, Miss Drumlin was sick and tired of Amanda’s deliberate disobedience and Miss Drumlin was very surprised that Amanda was still taking this attitude after everything that had been said to Mr Baker yesterday. Very surprised.

  Baker lobbed the ball hard at Bunty and marched slowly round the edge of the court in the direction of the main building. She tried hard not to let the fear show, but the thought of the evening ahead was making her pipes freeze. There would be another icy plunge of the heart at half six as the parental key ground into the lock. Spam would hide upstairs again or find some reason to clear out the kitchen cupboards or pop to the corner for an evening paper or a block of ice cream and leave Dad to spell out his disappointment and contempt in that cold, speak-your-weight voice and dream up some more threats and promises: not allowed out; not allowed pocket money; not allowed television; not allowed to phone Bunty. Anything he could think of. All because of a snapped shoelace. As she bent her head into the breeze, she could see Spam’s exquisite satin stitch lettering upside down on her chest, the capitals given three dimensions by two shades of blue silk. Must have taken a lot more than a minute but it was all a waste of time. It was plimsolls today. Probably hair tomorrow or fingernails or tights or shoe polish. The happiest days of your life? Please God no.

  There was a traffic light thingy on the door jamb of Dr O’Brien’s study but no light at all came on when Baker knocked. It was never especially reliable. Queenie, who had quick fingers and long, sharp nails, had once tweaked out the three coloured filters and swapped red and green over in the hope that prospective parents would open the study door and find the head sneaking a crafty fag or picking her nose or adjusting her 18-hour girdle. A pleasing thought. Baker knocked again: still no answer. Where was she? Off teaching? Out cold? Baker took a seat on the bench in the lobby and stared at the wrong shoes: stupid fuss, honestly.

  The lobby was home to a dozen glazed notice cupboards. Not everyday bread-and-butter notices – teams, chess clubs, term dates, that kind of guff – but long-standing ones, yellowing typewritten things no one thought to look at any more. Which was a bit of a pity. Although each frame had a keyhole they were never actually locked. A compass point (or a Queenie fingernail) could open them easily and Baker’s lovely new typewriter had the same sort of lettering.

  School governors now included Dame Myra Hindley, Dr Harold Crippen, Sister Ruth Ellis (MA Cantab) and Magda Goebbels. Once in a while a visiting parent at a loose end, too early for their ghastly get-to-know-you with the head, might double-take and chuckle but none had blown the whistle so far.

  There was a copy of The Fawcett Code here too, but they had left this as it was – it was already a joke. In the next frame along, under ‘News’ were two cuttings from the local paper. One showed the cast of last year’s Importance of Being Earnest taking a bow. The other was of a row of assorted females holding a large shield, and there on the end, in her dinky little skating skirt, was a slightly younger Bunty. Like the school had taught her to skate.

  The main wall outside the head’s study was hung with portraits of Dr O’Brien and the six previous incumbents: shingled, four-eyed frights in gowns and collars and ties, all looking like Eleanor Roosevelt with toothache, with perfectly round black spectacle frames over their beady eyes – as though the pictures had been vandalised. You half expected a Hitler moustache or two and a few blackened teeth. Had they even needed those creepy little John Lennon glasses, or did they just bung them on to look intellectual? All six were at their desks, all desperately trying to cultivate an air of brainy benevolence – hence the book at the elbow. A pipe might have helped.

  Bunty always said that Miss Eileen Pinto MA Oxon (1928–1935) seemed the nicest. All the others looked as if they didn’t take sugar. This was one of Bunty’s yardsticks, the first question she’d asked about Spam – and one of the first points in Spam’s favour.

  Dr O’Brien’s picture was at the far end: not a huge success. The artist was in regular demand for his ability to do impressions of impressionism without sacrificing the all-important Good Likeness, but the lurid pink of the gown that came with a London PhD (Anglo Saxon Place Names in Pre-Conquest Charters for Kent) had somehow infected the whole painting. There were fashionable dabs of green about the face but, with so much Permanent Rose on the palette, some of it had, inevitably, got into the cheeks, giving the subject a faintly gin-soaked look not helped by the water glass on the desk top. The eyes, hard black buttons of eyes stuck in the paint like coals in a snowman, followed you round the room.

  Still no sign of the original. The bell rang for the next period and the stairs were filled with a thundering blue mass hurtling from room to room. They didn’t look at Baker (not cool to stare) but Baker was ready to be looked at just in case: slumped against the wall, bored look in place, chewing invisible gum, betraying no sign of the sick fear inside.

  Her father really really would kill her. Yeah yeah, it was only plimsolls, but he’d be sure to start anyway. Symptomatic, he’d say (a word he’d taken a fancy to lately), symptomatic of her whole Att-itude. She could already hear him saying it while he snipped her face out of photographs, could already see it typed in carbon on a nasty little solicitor’s letter. Just as she could vividly imagine the O’Brien bitch mooing on about Last Straws and Baker’s new ‘contract’ with the school, drawn up after the whole lawn fiasco.

  They still hadn’t got any proper proof that it was Baker who had smuggled in the squeezy bottle full of Domestos and doodled rude words across the headmistress’s hallowed turf, but yesterday’s little chat with Dad meant that everything would have to be just right from now on, shoes included, or she’d be expelled and then what? An awkward, career-wrecking glitch in her academic record, a nasty moment in job interviews (‘What happened here, Miss Baker?’) when they spotted the obvious step down from the glories of Fawcett Upper to one of the bottom-feeders of the educational stream. It was all very well Dad salivating over the glossy brochures, but none of the schools he lusted after would want her.

  There were places that specialised in hoovering up troublemakers (even bad girls had to go somewhere). Most of them probably just did it for the money, happy to overlook any number of unfortunate episodes if it meant plugging that embarrassing gap in their cash flow. Other places genuinely relished the challenge of a difficult pupil: new leaves in blotted copybooks. Schoolmistressing was nothing if not a means of showing how bad mistakes could be corrected: a practised blade down the stapled edge; a nifty dab of ink eradicator: good as new.

  Queenie was one of the last to trickle by, feet heavy in her trendy shoes, a soft rattle from the mass of lovebeads on her wrists. After checking that the coast was clear, she ambled across to the staff pigeon-holes and began pulling piles of prep from their slots and filing them randomly on different shelves, ending with a sheaf of fourth form geography homework (Explain the influence of climate on farming in either South West England or The Fens) which she posted wholesale down the back of the unit.

  ‘Any joy?’

  ‘Not a peep so far.’

  ‘Probbly asleep. Don’t worry. They can’t expel you just for plimsolls.’

  ‘They won’t need to. Dad’s dying to send me to another school. Keeps going on about fresh starts. Another bloody prospectus came this morning. I was down early and I saw it on the mat. Said “Elm Hill” on the
envelope, sounds like a loony bin.’

  ‘Elm Hill?’ A silent whistle from Queenie. ‘He’ll hate it: no uniform, lots of Aaaart. And besides, you can’t leave Fawcetts, Bunty would pine.’

  ‘Wanna bet?’

  Queenie’s questioning look went unanswered. Queenie would never understand.

  ‘They always get wound up after parents’ evenings. Mine were on about boarding school when they got back yesterday, but it never comes to anything. What did your stepmother have to say? Did she go as well?’

  ‘Spam? Don’t be daft. Just hides in the kitchen with the radio.’

  Not strictly true, admitted Baker to herself as Queenie zipped back up the stairs. She’d brought Baker a hot chocolate after she’d gone up to her room: ‘Cheer up, sausage. He really worries about you, you know.’ But then Spam hadn’t been in Dad’s study for the speeches, hadn’t seen the look on his face.

  Just when she thought the last straggler had passed, Baker heard the springy, scuffing tread of tennis-shod feet coming up from the ground floor towards the lobby: Julia Smith.

  ‘Down to see the Doc? You’ll have a long wait. She’s at a conference – at least that’s what it says on the staff noticeboard. Miss Drumlin won’t want you sitting here twiddling your thumbs. I’ll see if I can dig her out.’

  What business was it of hers? Interfering cow. Julia bounced off but, before she could return, the Snog Monster, Mrs Mostyn, emerged from the staff room. She didn’t spot Baker at first and carried on talking over her shoulder as the door closed slowly behind her.