Girl 38

by Eva Jozefkowicz

  I remembered my dream the following week when we had our first swimming lesson of the term and were practising diving. I’m terrible at swimming – I struggle to do half a length of breaststroke without getting tired, but at least it meant that we wouldn’t have to do anything in groups and I wouldn’t even have to talk to anyone for a whole hour.

  Gem loves swimming – she’s been doing it since she was tiny and she gets super-competitive about it. In primary school she’d topped the league at three junior swimming championships. Then her little brother was born and her mum didn’t have the time to take her to swimming club any more, so Gem would try to get me to go to the local pool every Saturday, with my dad driving us both there and back. I went, of course, because it was Gem, but I hated every minute of it, though I insisted to Dad that it was great. Even with floats, I was constantly worrying about being out of my depth and sinking to the bottom.

  In our school swimming lessons, Gem would always show off and try to race against the boys, although she knew full well that nobody was as fast as her. She never said it out loud, but her long-term goal was to represent our school in the county championships. Only one girl and one boy were chosen from each year group, and it was currently Gem and Paul Miller from 8N, who is also insanely good.

  Our swimming teacher, Mr Leonard, who we were all a little scared of, separated us into our usual three groups based on ability and speed, and we got into our lanes.

  ‘We’ll start off with ten lengths of alternating front crawl and breaststroke as a warm-up,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. I made a mental note to use him as a model for my villains in later episodes of Girl 38.

  ‘I want you to give me your very best from the outset,’ he said. ‘Remember – we’re aiming for speed, style and…?’

  ‘Stamina,’ Gem finished off, slipping expertly into the water. She’d recently saved up her pocket money to buy a special swimming cap which was supposed to help you glide through the water more quickly. Every second counted.

  ‘That’s right, Gemma. In you all get.’

  ‘Hi, I’m new,’ Julius said, standing at the edge of the pool in his too-big swimming shorts. They were tied tightly at the waist, as if he was making sure that nobody would pull them down. Maybe he’d finally realised that he needed to keep his guard up.

  ‘Ah, yes – Julius, is it? Right. Where do you want to go? The fast, medium, or slow lane? How would you rate your ability?’

  ‘Erm, well, I suppose I can go quite fast,’ said Julius.

  ‘Go in the medium lane,’ Mr Leonard instructed.

  I made sure that I went at the very end of the slow lane, behind Ruby, who is almost as bad as me. Her long legs seem to fly out in all directions when she swims, so I made sure I left a big enough gap before following her. I started my painful attempts at front crawl, but after a few strokes I was already messing up the breathing. I’d done half a length when the whistle blew and Mr Leonard shouted, ‘Julius. Move to the fast lane.’

  On the second length, I relaxed into the steady rhythm of breaststroke – pull with arms, head up, head down, kick. It would all be OK. Now that Gem had humiliated Julius enough, she would get bored with it. Then, I would hopefully get a chance at some point to say sorry to him and tell him that it was just a joke that was taken a bit far.

  I wondered what Ania was doing. Did she spend her days painting, Chester curled up at her feet? Did she read the hundreds of books in her house? Did she daydream about Mila and the things they got up to when she was young? Maybe she wrote letters to her? Some people still do that.

  Once, on a school trip to the British Museum, I saw a mummy of a pharaoh who had been buried with a love letter. It was in hieroglyphics and had survived more than five thousand years, rolled up next to his head. I stared at it through the glass of the cabinet and wished that the person who had written it had known that their love had lived on for centuries and was now being seen by visitors from all over the world.

  In a world like Girl 38’s, there would be no letters. There might not even be email in the way we know it now. Maybe everyone would have little chips inside their arms and messages would be transmitted through these. You’d feel a little zap of electricity on your skin and you’d know someone was communicating with you.

  I was still thinking about this when I finally finished the warm-up and saw that Mr Leonard was ordering everyone out of the pool.

  ‘Come and gather round,’ he said. There was an unusual look on his face that I’d never seen before and I realised that it was extreme excitement. His bushy black eyebrows furrowed in a fierce ‘V’.

  ‘Julius, stay in the pool, please.’

  We stood on the side shivering and stared at Julius, who was clinging on to the edge at the deep end.

  My intuition told me that things were about to take a turn for the worse. How did he manage to be constantly singled out? Maybe Gem had done something to set him up without telling us? I imagined her kicking him ‘semi-accidentally’ so that he collided with somebody swimming from the other direction.

  But it turned out that Gem hadn’t been involved.

  ‘Everyone, I want you to observe Julius closely as he does two lengths of front crawl. I want you in particular to watch his breathing, his tumble-turn and the way he glides through the water after he kicks off. I think you’ll agree that it’s impressive. Julius, whenever you’re ready…’

  We watched as he pushed himself off at the other end of the pool. Mr Leonard started the stopwatch. For the first third of a length only his back was visible as he slid effortlessly through the water, like the eels that Mum always loved watching when we went to the aquarium.

  Then he began to kick more vigorously as his head turned from side to side every three strokes. When he reached our end of the pool, he did a quick tumble-turn at a diagonal (like a real professional) and he was off again. It was like watching an Olympic swimmer, except one without a cap and in massive oversized shorts that looked like they belonged to his dad.

  ‘Thirty-five and a half seconds! That’s incredible!’ shouted Mr Leonard, staring at his watch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so happy.

  ‘Whoop! Way to go!’ I turned to see Arun cheering and some of the other boys in our class clapping like mad, and I felt a chill go down my back.

  ‘We’ve never had anyone in this school who’s got anywhere close to thirty-five seconds,’ Mr Leonard explained, walking back to where we stood. ‘It means that we have a real chance in the championships. Were you in your county team at your old school?’ he asked Julius, who I now noticed hadn’t even been wearing any goggles.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Surely you must have been in some sort of squad?’

  Julius stared at him as if he was speaking a different language.

  ‘I used to swim in the sea in Yell with my brother from when I was wee. He taught me to swim. Then they built the big pool near our school a coupl’a years ago and I went there. Much easier to swim in the pool than in the sea. Far less choppy, and warmer too.’

  ‘You must have had a good coach there?’

  ‘Nah. I just went with my mate, Terry, every Saturday. We’d race each other. He usually won, but the last time I went before I moved down here, I beat him. He might have let me have it, though – you know, because I was leaving.’

  ‘Come and see me at lunch,’ said Mr Leonard. ‘I think you show great promise. I want to discuss a few things with you.’

  A sick drumming of doom started as I slid back down into the water. Julius was going to be chosen for the team. I knew that he was at least five seconds faster than Gem and he wasn’t even trying, so he would definitely take Paul Miller’s place. Gem would still go to the championships to represent the girls, but Julius would obviously be the star of the show – if Mr Leonard was so ecstatic about his time, he could probably go far. He might not just be the fastest boy in our year, but maybe even the whole school.

  A small part of me hoped that Gem might be OK
about it. After all, he didn’t deliberately try to outshine her. He didn’t even know about the championships. But, as I soon found out, this made absolutely no difference – if anything, it made the situation a whole lot worse. And when Gem saw Arun giving Julius an encouraging slap on the back as he walked away behind Mr Leonard, she was madder than I’d ever seen her.

  TEN

  ‘I can’t believe that little idiot,’ she said, glancing at Julius, when we were sitting at lunch later that week. I thought she was referring to what happened at swimming, but she continued, ‘He’s pretending that nothing’s affecting him, although deep down I know it is. He hated the maggots, and he was squirming inside when he was wearing his silly little costume.’

  ‘At least it seems that he didn’t tell Mr Kim about the letter,’ Dilly observed. She was always scared of getting in trouble.

  ‘You need to do something that will get to him,’ said Ruby, picking out the tomato chunks in her salad. She was never hungry and seemed to survive on lettuce leaves. ‘I have an idea. I reckon that we could pretend to be a mystery girl who fancies him. He’s exactly the type to go for something like that. We can send him lots of subtle messages to show that she’s keen and eventually get him to meet with her – he’ll get ready for a date with his “mystery girlfriend” and we’ll tell him to turn up in a special spot. We’ll make sure it’s a place where loads of people can see him looking like an idiot when his girl doesn’t show up. It’ll be perfect. What do you reckon?’

  She looked at Gem and I could tell that she was hoping she would love the idea and praise her for coming up with it. She nervously wound one of her plaits round and round her finger. I realised with horror that I probably often had the same look on my face.

  Gem chewed slowly, deliberately keeping us waiting.

  ‘It’s not a bad plan,’ she said. ‘I have to have a think about how we can make it more effective, though. But in the meantime, we should definitely get hold of his number. It’ll come in useful, I’m sure. Kat, you try and get it over the next couple of days.’

  ‘What? Why me?’ I asked, maybe a bit too quickly.

  Gem raised her eyebrows at my protest.

  ‘He’s already got a thing going on with you. Everyone can see that. He was trying to chat to you after history last week, remember? I even thought he might like you then. You know, properly like you, if you get my meaning.’

  They cracked up laughing as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

  ‘D’you know what?’ Gem continued. ‘I think we should actually write the messages from you. He’ll think you’re well into him and get really excited. Then it’ll serve him doubly right when he finds out it’s not true. We’ll hit him right where it hurts!’ she said, chuffed at how quickly she’d come up with it.

  A bubble of panicked laughter erupted from my mouth.

  ‘No way. He doesn’t like me like that. We should do it from someone anonymous – a mystery girl. It would be much funnier that way.’

  ‘Get the number as soon as you can and let us all know when we’re ready to go,’ Gem insisted.

  ‘What if I can’t?’

  I considered telling them about my conversation with Julius at the bus stop to prove that there was no way that he would ever trust me. The only reason I didn’t was because I was worried that Gem would have a go at me for revealing that I was involved. If Julius had told the teachers about what I’d said, they would immediately suspect her too, as they knew we did everything together.

  ‘Don’t be silly. He’ll be so happy for you to ask him for his number. He won’t believe his luck.’

  ‘I can’t ask…’

  But Gem was no longer listening. I could see her eyes wandering across the lunch hall, where Arun and his gang were sitting at one of the far tables, still in their sports kit. They’d just come back from Rugby Club and were high-fiving each other over and over, deliberately drawing attention to themselves.

  ‘We’ll get them!’ Arun shouted. ‘When we go out on that pitch tonight, they won’t know what’s hit them!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dilly asked.

  ‘They’ve got the final of the rugby tournament tonight,’ said Gem grimly. ‘I reckon they’ll win. They’re good. Arun’s the team captain. Bet he’ll be awarded a prize at the Sports’ Ball.’

  Suddenly, Gem’s eyes looked glassy, and she turned away from us. For a moment, I thought that she might be about to cry, but she coughed and hurriedly put a handful of chips into her mouth.

  That was when it hit me why she’d mentioned the ball. She was supposed to have been the swimming star there, but now everyone’s attention (maybe even Arun’s) would be on Julius.

  ‘So, you’ll get the number tonight?’ she said, not looking at me.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  *

  But when I walked out of school that day, trying to get Julius’s number couldn’t have been further from my mind. In fact, I’d decided to pretend to Gem that I’d attempted to talk to him but he’d ignored me. In reality, I was going to do everything that I could not to bump into him. I even planned to avoid the bus stop and walk home instead. It would take me ages, but I was desperate.

  Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way.

  ‘Hey, wait up!’

  My heart sank. Julius was rushing across the road to catch up with me, his hair a moving cloud of white-blond. I kept walking, hoping he might think I hadn’t heard, but within seconds, he was next to me.

  ‘Hey,’ he repeated, as if nothing had happened. ‘How was your day?’

  I stared at him. Why wasn’t he mad at me? If I were him, I’d be fuming. The cartoon version of me would have little waves of steam coming out of my ears.

  ‘Yeah, not so bad,’ I said. ‘Yours?’

  ‘Grand,’ he said, grinning. ‘Been doing some extra training with Mr Leonard. It’s awesome about the swimming thing. It made me feel better after last week. I looked like a right prat with the whole dressing-up thing. But I realise it was a joke. It’s probably what you guys do to new kids. At the docks near my old school, they did an initiation for new fishermen by knocking them off the boat into the freezing water on their first trip – coat, boots and all. Horrible. One of them ended up in hospital with pneumonia. I got away lucky with the Frodo costume and a wee bit of mocking.’

  His accent was stronger than ever when he got excited, and he talked faster than anyone I knew. It was as if his head was buzzing with so much excitement, that he didn’t have time to dwell on anything bad that happened to him.

  ‘Well done on the swimming championships. That’s cool,’ I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘It’s so hard to get into those. I don’t think I would have been able to swim fifty metres in double your time.’

  ‘I bet that’s not true. And even if it is, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure there’s loads of stuff that you’re awesome at. I can tell that about you straightaway, and I’m a good judge of people,’ he said.

  I felt my face heating up, but Julius didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Hey, come round to mine some time?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘My mum keeps saying that I should invite some of my new mates to our house. It’s a pretty big place – it belongs to my nan, but she’s not managing quite so well now, so we’re here to look after her. I’ve never lived in a house that big before. In Yell, we just had a wee red farmhouse and that was for the four of us. Now my brother Kit’s gone off to uni, Dad’s still in Yell and we’re here.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He probably thought that I was talking about his nan, but in my head, those words covered a whole lot more. I wanted to tell him the truth. The confession was there, waiting on the tip of my tongue. I opened my mouth but then clamped it shut again. I couldn’t do it.

  ‘She’s going to be OK. She’ll just need a bit of a hand with things.’

  ‘Do you miss your dad?’

  ‘Aye, a lot – and Kit too, although he’s annoying most of the time.
But the plan is we’ll all be back together at Christmas. It’ll be awesome. Anyway, do you reckon you’ll come round? Remember – 7, Jupiter Close. It’s just off the high street.’

  ‘Erm, yeah. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Will you give me your number?’

  I read out my phone number to him, and within a minute I saw a text come through from his phone.

  ‘There, now you have mine too.’

  I couldn’t believe how quickly I’d succeeded in Gem’s task, but instead of feeling relieved, I felt devastated.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. What else could I do? Then, ‘I’m walking home today,’ I told him as we got to the bus stop, and before he could say anything, I waved goodbye like a maniac and marched down the street at a hundred miles per hour.

  ELEVEN

  I walked home through the park. I thought it might give me time to think about what to do, but my mind was blank. I picked at another hangnail until a trickle of blood made its way down my finger, all the way to my knuckle. I sucked it. It tasted cold and metallic.

  I passed our old nursery, on the edge of the park, next to the huge playground. It was almost empty, but there were two girls who looked around four years old still hanging out on the climbing frame. One was blonde and the other dark-haired. They looked like Gem and me when we were little. Behind the window, to the left of the nursery entrance, I could see the class where we’d met and she’d asked me whether I wanted to be friends.

  Things had seemed so much easier then. When did it all get so difficult? I trailed in the direction of home.

  ‘Katherine?’ Ania was sitting on the front porch of her house wearing a beautiful printed headscarf. The parrot-headed walking stick lay by her feet. I felt myself instantly relax.