The Following Girls Page 8

  ‘OK guys and gals, mums and dads,’ yodelled Queenie, a yellowish cube pronged on her fork. ‘Time to Name That Fruit.’

  ‘Yam,’ said Bunty. ‘Yaaaam. Has many uses: ceiling tiles (obviously); animal fodder; the hollowed-out rind can be used as a primitive drinking vessel, and any leftover fibre can be used to thatch a rude hut.’

  ‘Talking of which . . .’ whispered Baker, ‘have you clocked the Barnet?’

  A second year called Nina, who until last Friday had worn her hair in two mousey bell ropes, was sporting a new brown bob.

  ‘Shame,’ said Stottie.

  ‘Typical home in Malawi. Maybe it’s her Geography project.’

  ‘Lot of trouble to go to.’

  ‘Do you think her mum cut it?’

  ‘Naaah.’ Baker timed the world-weary sip from her water beaker like a mummy downing gin. ‘Very tidy woman our Nina’s mother. Irons jeans.’

  ‘They keep their car in a cosy,’ said Stottie, who lived on the same road. ‘If it really is a car. Never seen them actually drive it anywhere . . . Might be a dirty great car-shaped thing made from cornflakes packets and Fairy Liquid bottles for all I know.’

  The room rang with the sound of two hundred sets of cutlery scraping two hundred cheap green and pink and yellow plates, two hundred ravenous chatterboxes all talking with their mouths full. The Nina person stood uncertainly with her tray in the middle of the dining hall, engulfed by the hellish din, a look like headache on her face. Baker turned to watch the girl walk across to the corner where packed lunches were eaten and sit down opposite a smiling Julia Smith. Her again. Were there two of her?

  Baker let her head nod forward and watched the corner of the room from behind a safety curtain of fringe. Julia had taken a foil triangle of processed cheese from her plastic box. You were supposed to peel those by pulling the dinky red tag but Julia just ripped away the corner with her thumbnail and squeezed cheese into her mouth. G-ross. Nothing about that in The Sensuous Female.

  ‘Would you say she was pretty? Attractive?’

  Queenie looked at Baker in surprise.

  ‘Don’t you start. You’ll be awarding points out of ten next.’

  ‘You lose points for ginger. Brian’s very firm about that.’

  ‘Don’t see why. Strawberry blonde’s all right.’

  ‘I wouldn’t eat a strawberry that colour. Apricots possibly . . .’

  ‘Apricot blonde? Sounds like a shampoo.’

  But it was too nice a name for shampoo, argued Baker. Shampoo was dry or greasy or damaged or difficult: flyaway, unmanageable, problem, lifeless. Terrifying the amount of self-loathing you could pack into just washing your bloody hair.

  ‘Spam only buys Normal.’

  ‘I warm to Spam,’ smiled Bunty.

  ‘Is it my imagination or does she keep looking at me?’

  ‘Spam? Spam’s here?’ Bunty stared about her in mock panic.

  ‘No, stupid, Julia Smith.’

  The others were now staring over towards the corner.

  ‘Cornflower-coloured eyes. You’d get points for those,’ conceded Queenie.

  ‘Cornflowers come in pink too, I’ll have you know. Daddy has them in his mixed bedding.’

  And everyone laughed. The way they always did laugh when Bunty did her funny look. Hard to know exactly what triggered it. ‘Bedding’ would probably do the trick on its own but ‘mixed’ and Bunty’s fruity voice clinched it. ‘Mixed bathing’ and they’d be splitting their sides. Even ‘mixed doubles’ got a chuckle. And ‘ladies doubles’, ‘ladies’ anything come to that.

  Baker’s gaze turned to the other side of the refectory.

  ‘I think our Brian should grow a moustache over Easter. Like that bloke in If. Save a packet on cream bleach.’

  ‘Miaow.’

  They’d all laughed but Queenie crossed her legs (not a safe moment to go to the bog with Baker in this mood).

  ‘Hello, you lot.’

  The Mandies looked up to see Beverly Snell, the English monitor.

  ‘How are your novels coming along?’

  Beverly was having a fairly easy term of it as Miss Gleet had said they could, if they wished, wait until after the Easter break before handing in their novels, although she would be permanently on call to stick her oar in, change the ending and rewrite the whole thing in a style she preferred – ‘consulting’ as she liked to call it.

  ‘So much more fun than essay writing,’ gushed Beverly. She squeezed herself, unasked, on to the very end of their bench. ‘Mine’s called The Hope Chest.’ No one was listening. ‘It’s set in the wild west and it’s about a young schoolteacher. All her family die of scarlet fever and she’s making a quilt out of all their old clothes.’ No response. ‘Memories of when they were in the covered wagon.’ Still nothing. ‘Mummy’s idea. Miss Gleet says it’s very evocative.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘I’ve written twenty thousand words.’

  ‘Wossat in pages?’ Queenie called after her as Beverly headed for the cloakroom. ‘Twenty thousand words? Silly moo.’

  ‘GTP,’ said Bunty. It was short for ‘Good Team Player’ and it wasn’t a compliment.

  Baker looked at her watch.

  ‘Off we trot.’ She scraped the remains of her hotpot onto the top of the stack of plates. ‘Triple English? They want locking up.’

  Miss Kopje, the librarian, who had a knack for such things, had spent the previous August wrestling with the upper school timetable. For three weeks her dining room suite was loose-covered with pencilled charts and scraps of coloured paper, but there had been no getting round it. Nothing to be done. There had been a ‘terrible glitch’, a ‘ghastly blunder’ with the blocking (as the deputy head had put it when she broke the news to the staff room) which meant that three of the Upper Shell’s five weekly English lessons would now all take place one after the other on Tuesday afternoons. The girls weren’t too thrilled about this but Miss Gleet had burst into tears at the news. A repeat prescription for lithium had taken the edge off the pain and then an old college chum had suggested the energy-saving wheeze of having her fifth formers write a novel to use up the final four weeks of term.

  Queenie had called hers Wanted on Voyage and it was all written in postcards. ‘The Gleet eats up that kind of tripe with a spoon,’ said Stottie, enviously.

  ‘Bloody gets on your nerves though. Has she let you read it? Really, really hard to tell who’s wishing who was where.’

  Baker’s novel was called The Snapdragon Harvest.

  ‘You can’t call it that. She’ll know you’re taking the mick.’

  ‘She loved it. Look: “Intriguing title” it says here. Liked the plot summary as well: young woman meets rude man; rude man fancies young woman, becomes less rude, young woman marries rude man. I didn’t mention “Rude Man” in my plan, obviously, just some rubbish about self-discovery, love and loss and a dark family secret – practically wet herself. I didn’t tell her about the twist at the end either.’

  Miss Gleet was going to hate the twist. It occurred four pages before the end – the bit in the ‘true love’ stories when the scales fall and it dawns on the heroine that Rude Man is not, in fact, an overbearing, sadistic pig but the love of her life. The bit when she thinks she’s never going to see him again just as the taxi turns round or the telegram arrives or she finds the first class plane ticket tucked into her knicker elastic and yes, reader, she can have him after all, that bastard she didn’t want in the first place. That was where Baker was putting her twist.

  ‘I nearly called it The Forgotten Wishbone but then she really would smell a rat.’

  ‘Mine’s called Thirteen for Croquet,’ said Bunty as the four Mandies slumped into the back row of desks, ‘and I’m killing everybody.’

  Miss Gleet had a new top, stretchy and zebra-striped and she was wearing a fashionably chocolate-coloured lipstick to celebrate (‘Secret Squirrel’ according to the label).

  ‘What’s
black, white and brown round the mouth?’ whispered Baker.

  ‘Quieten down, everyone,’ sang Miss Gleet.

  Stronger medication was definitely an improvement: 25mg with the midday meal and she was nicely relaxed by Registration. Relaxed enough to spend the first thirty minutes of the triple English marathon reading to the Upper Shells from a novel selected from the rather limited supply in the school book cupboard. Jane Eyre would make a change, Miss Gleet felt (young woman meets rude man). Miss Gleet had no recollection whatever of reading out the exact same passage a fortnight earlier, but there wasn’t a peep from the Mandies, nothing from Brian and the gang either. Brian and Paddy both had Charlotte Brontë sitting on their desks but were busy playing Hangman in their laps. Baker slipped the Eunuch from her bag and tucked it inside Jane Eyre. The Gleet, who’d read English and Drama at university, always insisted on acting out all the parts. Helen Burns was done in very snotty Scots.

  ‘I wish she’d do “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow Dog” again,’ yawned Bunty under her breath. ‘I liked that one. I hate school stories.’

  Baker was miles away in the land of the Eunuch.

  ‘Female students are forming a large proportion of the arts intake at universities,’ said the Eunuch, ‘and dominating the teaching profession as a result. The process is clearly one of diminishing returns: the servile induce servility to teach the servile.’

  Those who can’t, teach . . . Baker stretched out her finger and teased a pencil across the desk and into her hand. Miss Gleet was doing Mr Brocklehurst now in an all-purpose, whippet-keeping, northern accent. Her eyes stayed glued to her text and didn’t see Baker underlining the bit about servility.

  ‘Education cannot be and never has been a matter of obedience.’

  ‘Beverly, if you could gather in the books and if the rest of you could carry on with your novels. I have a few errands to run. I shan’t be long. I’m leaving the door open and Mrs Rathbone is next door if you need anything.’ A warning.

  The Gleet left a trail of scent behind her as she swept from the room. Queenie gave an educated sniff.

  ‘Ugh. Je Reviens.’

  ‘Not if I see you first.’ Bunty, quick as a flash.

  ‘What is black, white and brown round the mouth?’ remembered Stottie.

  ‘A nun eating—’

  ‘Ssshh!’ hissed a girl by the door as a stray goon paced past.

  ‘G-ross.’

  ‘Give it a rest, can’t you?’ sighed Queenie. ‘I thought the new top looked quite swish.’

  Brian and Paddy were still on the same round of Hangman which they managed to keep going almost indefinitely because they cheated, drawing shoes and bow ties and scrubby little penises on their condemned men so that the game lasted longer and no one ever really lost. Paddy’s word was dirndl; this was going to take time.

  Baker got out her English file and opened it at the most recent chapter of The Snapdragon Harvest. She had made the mistake of handing it in for comment and the carefully typewritten pages were now awash with the Gleet’s shrill red ballpoint.

  It was late spring which she loved and dreaded. Why dreaded? She came upon the great bank of snapdragons and her heart quivered with brightness. What does this mean?

  My lamb! Really? barked Miss Gleet.

  There was a cold correctness in the way he put his bicycle in place that made her heart sink. Why? Her innermost soul shrank within her in a coil of torture. He was looking at the snapdragons disconsolately and the white tilt of his neck, slender and firm, gave her a sharp pang that resonated to the depths of her soul. She sensed the very quivering stuff of life in him. Over-use ‘quivering’. Down to her bowels went the hot spasm of fear. Her mouth parted with suffering and her heart was scalded with pain. Ouch!

  She lingered to gather the snapdragons, tenderly, passionately. Be more sparing with adverbs wrote the Gleet, censoriously. The love in her fingertips caressed the peachy bursten blossoms, Bursten? the passion in her heart came to a glow upon the petals but why had she the dull pain in her soul?

  ‘Why must you always be fondling things?’ he cried, in his musical caressing voice.

  Interesting but overwrought quivered Miss Gleet. Lawrence would be disappointed.

  The only Mandy who took the novel business even remotely seriously was Stott. Stott had nearly finished A Mind of Her Own which was about a fifteen-year-old runaway with a drunken father who goes on the road with a pair of juvenile delinquents.

  ‘What was the Gleet verdict?’

  ‘Only shown her the plan so far,’ said Stott. ‘“Gritty.” Gritty! Wait till she sees it. The gang bang’ll make her hair curl.’

  Bunty and Stott both had a free last period on Tuesdays. Bunty had made a run for it, but Stottie had hung around in the library and was now loitering by the school gate in hopes of catching Baker on her way home and renewing the offer of the spare bed.

  ‘Sorry about yesterday. How about tonight? Cheese on toast for tea.’

  ‘I’m not a big cheese person. How did the exam go?’ The question was automatic but the answer bloody wasn’t. The Handel Suite in G had gone quite well considering and she was fairly pleased with the Scarlatti Sonata and the Beethoven adagio was a breeze but the contrary motion scales were a bit of a nightmare and she hadn’t done herself justice in the sight reading (not having Baker’s flair for it) and so she only got merit and Mrs Stott was really disappointed. Mrs Stott had bought a bar of milk chocolate all ready to give to her and had given it to Stephanie instead.

  Baker fought hard to stifle a yawn.

  ‘But merit’s brilliant, surely? No one ever gave me merit.’

  ‘Yes but Steff got distinction for her grade three last year.’

  ‘Stephanie’s going to get very, very fat by the sound of it.’

  ‘Do come round. We could make a Rice Krispie cake – you used to love that.’

  ‘Not allowed out, sadly.’ Dad’s curfew was practically a blessing.

  Baker got home to an empty house and found the second post on the doormat: yet another brown envelope. She left it lying where it was, then made a tactical retreat to her bedroom. There would almost certainly be one of Spam’s spazzy little notes on the kitchen worktop: ‘Be an angel and sort out a few spuds/grate cheese/pod peas/curl butter if you’re back in time, sausage. Fondest P’ but that only worked if Baker made a bee-line for the biscuit barrel and Baker wasn’t hungry.

  She was fast asleep over her Scripture revision when she heard the slam of the front door, shortly followed by the resentful rattle of saucepans as Spam, still in her coat, lit the oven and began peeling two pounds of King Edwards while her husband lay on the sofa with a can of lager and the second post until his supper was on the table.

  ‘Who was your letter from?’

  A defensive look in Dad’s eyes while the rest of his face chewed chop.

  ‘You know perfectly well what it was, the name was on the envelope. It’s another brochure from another school.’

  ‘Lots of girls like to make a fresh start in the sixth form,’ said Spam, ‘and it’s got masses of facilities: swimming pool; judo; language lab.’

  What went on in language laboratories, wondered Baker, were there rats in mazes?

  ‘You’d soon make new friends.’

  She’d bloody need new friends after this morning, and she remembered with an unhappy shiver the unfamiliar snotty note in Bunty’s voice. I don’t have to tell you everything. Since when? It wasn’t as if Baker specially wanted any of the grisly details about Bunty’s dirty afternoon: it was the principle of the thing. And she’d have to tell somebody . . . Stottie? Or Queenie? Queenie was a bit of a dark horse. Lots of people told her stuff. Surprising people.

  The phone rang during the news headlines, interrupting Baker’s miserable musings.

  ‘Who on earth can that be?’ tutted Dad. ‘It’s gone ten.’ (Though he never went to bed before the Epilogue.)

  ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘Hello, babes.
’ Bunty’s voice. Bunty’s lovely husky smiley voice. ‘Sorry about this morning. I could see Brian earwigging and besides,’ whispering now, ‘there wasn’t much to tell.’

  There was the sudden sound of the television as someone opened a door and Bunty’s voice took on a coded, cagy quality.

  ‘Yeah. Slightly disappointing, very, er, short.’

  ‘Sweet?’

  ‘Not specially,’ a cough, ‘premature.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Can’t talk now,’ the huffy thump of her sitting-room door being closed, ‘nothing to write home about, basically. I just wanted to say sorry for being a silly moo.’

  ‘Silly moo,’ echoed Baker, pressing her eyelids together and beaming with relief.

  ‘Ni-night.’

  Chapter 7

  The usual horde of wage slaves poured on and off the train at the Junction next morning, giving Baker the chance to grab a corner seat and light a cigarette, at which point the woman across the aisle tutted off to the other end of the carriage and flumped down next to Julia sodding Smith. Julia Smith. Again. Did she even come to school by train as a rule? She looked up from her book and nailed Baker and her cigarette with an unreadable stare, the blue flannel shoulders giving the slightest possible shrug, a ‘you give me no choice; you brought this on yourself’ shrug.

  The long, bare legs looked downright obscene in the commuter carriage. You could see the bowler-hatted man on the other side of her admiring the smooth ivory thighs running parallel with his pinstripes. Julia leaned back slightly, legs parting an inch. It wasn’t about sport at all, was it? Just an excuse to wear a shorter skirt. She had taken a tiny scrap of paper from her bag and was scribbling on it left-handed. Baker puffed stubbornly at her cigarette. No sense not. Too late now.

  Someone had left a magazine behind on the seat opposite: Ads and Admen. It was like stumbling on an enemy code book: Playtex to launch bra aimed at 15–24 year olds who want to make the most of limited resources. The glossy black and white pages were packed with snaps of beardy blokes in snazzy ties with five-point plans for persuading the British housewife that life would not be complete until every family member had a range of products that only they could use. His’n’hers soap, his‘n’hers fags. They even had cheeses of their own: manly mature for the dad, low fat for the mum and novelty triangles for the two point two kids (and Julia). No dog or cat cheese – not yet anyway.