Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms

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Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms Page 9

by Katherine Rundell


  Worst were the classes with Mrs. Robinson. “Sit down, Will. You can’t just walk out of the classroom when you feel like it.” Mrs. Robinson had the shortest temper of them all. “The toilet? Is it desperate? Go on, then.” Will got lost, and had to climb out the window of an empty classroom and crouch behind a bush; and Samantha, who had followed, gleefully told the others. They slipped notes into her books, written in jabbing capitals that cut into Will’s chest: Stinking SAVAGE. Filthy tramp.

  It was no easier outside the classrooms. Worse, she thought.

  Will didn’t have a bright plastic pencil case, or money to buy one. She looped her pen and pencil and pencil sharpener together with an elastic band. Samantha ran her fingers over her glitter pens and smiled pityingly.

  At break times, Will crouched in the triangular spaces behind doors with her books. They always found her. Samantha led them—tall, almost unbearably pretty, with pink lips and cheeks and the beginnings of breasts. Prettiness seemed the only criteria for success here. The other girls had little tubes of ink for their fountain pens, and they cut them open and smeared them into Will’s workbooks, hands, clothes. “Now you’ll have to wash!” The twins, Hannah and Zoe, hung back and looked miserable; Will didn’t blame them. She suspected that they might be very clever. It was dangerous to be clever at school. And life with Samantha’s girls against you was like drowning. Worse, in fact—slower, and more painful.

  It was Samantha who showed the others how to widen their nostrils and sniff when Will ran past. They drew back against the walls, whispering and snorting behind curtains of hair, and the teachers called after her from classroom doors, “You!” Will would have to stop, cold and full of dread on one leg. “You! What are you doing? Go and put some shoes on please, now. We do not go barefoot in the corridors.”

  There were the hall monitors, too, who wore badges on their blazers and shouted, “Slow down! I’m not going to tell you again, all right?” And, “You’re late, Will,” with depressed sighs. And, “Mop that up, please, Wilhelmina.” And, “Where’s your napkin, Will? No, your sleeve is not your napkin.”

  At lunch Will took her tray to the toilet block and sat, balancing it on her knees, in the end cubicle. But she couldn’t escape dinner, because Mrs. Robinson took a register. Rumors went round the Formica-topped dining tables: the new girl spat in your food when you weren’t watching. She never changed her underwear. She couldn’t read. She wiped her hands in her hair. Will, born with bush hearing, heard them all. But only the last one was true; everyone did, at home, when their hands were dusty. Except the captain, who was bald, and even he sometimes used his mustache. But the captain was too precious to talk about.

  Instead, she said nothing, and she found, after the first three days of the girls’ curiosity and whispering, that she could easily go from the first bell at seven to lights-out at nine without speaking a word. Will quickly learned the value of silence. She did not cry; there was nowhere to go to cry.

  At the end of the first week, Miss Blake caught her hiding on the roof of the sports hut. Instead of shouting, she clambered up next to her in her high-heeled shoes.

  “Explain it to me, Will.”

  “No.” Will shook her head. “I . . . Sha. I can’t.”

  “Try, Will.”

  “Thank you, ja. But I can’t.” She was struck by how beautiful Miss Blake was, with her large nose and blue eyes. Close up, they were the color of the African beetles. The climb had left muddy patches on Miss Blake’s white shirt.

  “Try,” said Miss Blake. “Sometimes things make more sense when you tell them to other people.”

  Will scrubbed at her face with her palms, thereby making her own brand of cement—dust and gravel and tears. “It’s just . . . The bells, ja. The lessons. I can’t do the work. And the rules.”

  “But we need rules, Will. Can you imagine two hundred girls and no rules? There’d be murders before fourth period.”

  “But it’s them. The other girls. It’s like . . . It’s defeat. It’s like they’ve already lost.” She tried not to let her voice grow any louder, any more desperate and angry. “So they don’t try, ja, to be good or kind or funny or honest.” Will closed her eyes in a miserable blink.

  Miss Blake said nothing, but she sat with Will on the concrete roof, and together they ignored the bell for math.

  WILL MANAGED TWO WEEKS WITHOUT changing her clothes or washing her hair. She wanted to keep the smell of Africa as long as she could. But she didn’t think it could last, and after lunch on her second Thursday, Mrs. Robinson stopped her in the corridor.

  “Come with me.” She held out her hand, which Will did not take.

  “Your uniform’s arrived, at last.” Mrs. Robinson was holding a parcel. She looked at Will again—Will, whose head didn’t come up to Mrs. Robinson’s armpit—and frowned worriedly. “Your guardian didn’t give us your height, only your age. You’re very small, my dear; I think the skirt will be rather too long.”

  Will didn’t care. She smiled her secret smile into her chest. The captain wasn’t the sort to know about waist measurements and pleated skirts. She was surprised, now she thought of it, that he even knew how old she was.

  “I must say, though”—Mrs. Robinson smiled without using her cheek muscles—“it was a charming letter she wrote, your guardian. She told us all about you, Wilhelmina.”

  “What?” Will’s head came up with a snap. “She?”

  “That’s right. Mrs. Browne. And you have had an exciting life, haven’t you?”

  Will stood silently. Any minute, and this woman would pat her on the head.

  “Wilhelmina, my dear, you do have to answer when a teacher speaks to you. It’s not optional.”

  “Oh.” The thought of the captain made it hard to speak in a normal voice. She whispered, “Sorry.”

  “And?”

  “I— What?”

  “I said, you must have had a wonderful life in Zimbabwe?” Mrs. Robinson patted Will on the head. “Didn’t you?”

  “Ja.” Will shied away and gripped handfuls of hair, snuffing their still-African smell.

  “What was it like, Wilhelmina?”

  “Good.” Will bit her teeth together. “I loved it. It was good.”

  The teacher tried to put an arm round Will’s shoulders. They were as stiff and bony as the back of a chair. Mrs. Robinson sighed.

  “Well. Here you are, then. Two skirts, four shirts. Try to keep them clean, Wilhelmina.”

  Will climbed into the skirt, shirt, cotton tights. She’d never worn tights, though Cynthia Vincy had drawers full of silky nylon ones that she and Simon had borrowed to carry their stolen oranges. These itched, but they blunted the cold.

  The skirt came down past her calves. Will tugged nervously at the too big waistband. If it fell down during class, and the girls laughed, she’d have no choice but to fight. And she couldn’t bear to be kept in at break time, again.

  “Try the blazer.”

  It was the green of banana leaves, with the school coat of arms embroidered on the pocket. She’d never had anything so expensive-looking. She could see, in the mirror, that she looked ugly and strange; thin and pointy, and several sizes too small for her eyes. She tried not to think what her dad would have said. He used to laugh at the smartly dressed girls they passed on their shopping trips, and say, Look at that hat! You’d look like a flower in a tea cozy, my wildcat. And, You can’t dress fire in a frock.

  The collar scratched at her neck and made her face itch. That was why, Will told herself angrily, her eyes were watering. The shoes were far too wide and short. “Dancer’s feet, you’ve got,” said Mrs. Robinson, and Will bit her lip. Elf’s feet, her father used to say—so she put her boots on over the tights.

  “Very nice,” said Mrs. Robinson. “Very pretty.” She ignored Will’s look of incredulity. “You’ll fit in very nicely.”

  The girls in the line for dinner didn’t agree.

  “You look like you shrunk in the wash!”

&n
bsp; “Except you can see she doesn’t wash.”

  “ ‘See?’ Smell, you mean.”

  Miss Boniface (whose name, Will thought, did not suit her; she was the science teacher, a stump of a woman with square glasses and large square feet) seemed to agree with that. She caught Will as she ran out of the cafeteria with her plate of food, headed for the toilet block. “How long have you been here, Will?”

  “Two weeks,” Will said. It was Thursday. That made it two weeks exactly.

  “And have you washed your hair since you came to Leewood, Will?”

  Will looked down at Miss Boniface’s feet. “No.”

  “Don’t look so sad, my dear! Nobody’s going to shout at you. But please ensure you have a bath tonight.” Miss Boniface walked on too soon to hear the laughing that followed Will out the door.

  “Stinking little Silver!”

  “Filthy savage.”

  They were waiting for her when she reached the bathroom. Five of them: Samantha, Louisa and Joanna, Bex and Vicky. The bath was filled to the top with water. The room was icy cold.

  Will tried to back out again, but Louisa had darted behind her, pulled the door shut, and locked it.

  Samantha said, “We’re here to make sure you wash properly.”

  “Go away. Please, ja.”

  “No. We’re not having you stinking up our bedroom.”

  “Filthy little savage.”

  “Dirty midget.”

  They surrounded her in a ring.

  Will said, “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Do you think we’re afraid of you? Of a savage with scabby knees?”

  “You won’t dare. I’ll bite.”

  Samantha said, “Get in.” She splashed a handful of water at Will. “Come on, gypsy. In you get.”

  There were too many of them. The room was too small to dodge in. Louisa poked Will in the back. “Come on. Get in.”

  Will whipped round and spat straight in Louisa’s face, but the floor was slippery and she skidded and landed on her back. The girls pounced. Louisa and Vicky grabbed her arms, and Joanna and Bex dug their nails into her legs and they lifted her, fully clothed, into the bathtub. Will tried to bite and kick, but it was four against one, and her lungs weren’t breathing properly in the icy water and she could only spit and gasp, “Foul. You’re foul.”

  “She still smells of dirt,” said Louisa.

  Samantha pulled open a bottle of shampoo and emptied it over Will’s hair and forehead. “There. Now she smells of coconut and vanilla.” She wiped her hands on her blazer and turned away. “Let’s go.”

  Will stopped fighting. She wiped the shampoo out of her eyes. She couldn’t see for tears and soapsuds.

  Samantha turned at the door. “And if you so much as think about telling on us, we’ll put dog poo in your school bag, okay? Don’t forget to empty the bath when you leave. It’s in the rules.”

  Will waited until their footsteps faded. Then she relocked the door and stripped off her soaking uniform. She’d brought her shorts, T-shirt, sweater, and boots to put on after her bath, along with her long woolen scarf to dry herself with. She didn’t have a towel. At home, she dried in the sun by the rock pool. Now she pulled her dry clothes on, coughing and shivering, and sat down to think.

  She must have fallen asleep on the floor of the bathroom, because she awoke to hear the clocks striking across the school. Eleven strokes, and a first that must have woken her up—midnight. The school was silent. There were only the noises of rain and cold, and farther off the roar of the main road. She sniffed at her hair. Africa had gone from it.

  She wrapped herself in her scarf and fumbled for the apples she had stored in the two big pockets of her shorts. She had taken a piece of cheese, too, from the dining hall, but it seemed to have sunk to the bottom of her shorts. Fighting, and crying, had left her famished. Will groped with her bitten nails, sorting through bits of leaf, the gloves from Lucian, her father’s watch, Simon’s wildcat, his flashlight, and the captain’s pocketknife, all glutinously mixed up with chewing gum and pencil shavings and, yes, there it was, what felt like the cheese, warm and soft and a little sticky, but definitely edible.

  “Ndatenda hangu,” Will whispered, “ja!” And she felt her chest contract. There were still some good things in this world. Cheese was one of them.

  Will pulled at the tangle from her pocket as carefully as her fingers would allow, but the cold air made her awkward, and the captain’s blade bit down into her hand. Will swore and snatched back her fingers, and the knife dropped onto a tile, cracking it down the middle.

  The sound rang, agonizingly, down the corridor.

  Will held her breath. Very distantly, a door opened and closed. A cold drench of dread swept over her. She could still get back to bed, she told herself. She was faster than any teacher. But her legs wouldn’t move toward the door. Instead, holding the flashlight in her teeth, Will scrambled onto the windowsill. The window stuck. Will pushed with both hands; she shoved with her shoulders, her knees and feet and head. The window burst open. She hesitated, crouched on the sill. An excited gasping noise came from somewhere nearby. It took Will a few seconds to realize it was her own breath.

  The bathrooms were on the first floor, but in the dark, it looked a long way down. The footsteps were approaching the door now. Will half-dropped and half-jumped into black air; her left foot caught on the sill, and she twisted blindly and landed with a muddy thud on her back.

  Her foot was on fire. She curled into a ball, biting on her knuckles and forcing herself not to cry.

  “Shut up,” she whispered. “At least you can feel it.” That meant her foot was still attached. Shakily, Will got up, pressing herself into the shadow of the wall. As far as she could see in the moonlight she was still in a single piece; she’d lost some of the skin on her knuckles on the way down, her pocketknife cut was bleeding a little, and she’d bitten her tongue, but she was—astonishingly, gloriously—free. She was ready to shout and shriek and spin and give a wild horseboy whoop when Miss Blake’s voice above her head said, “No one in here. Try the classrooms.”

  “I have done, Angela.”

  “Try again. I’ll look in the arts room.”

  Will waited until their noise settled back into silence. Then, “Penga!” breathed Will. “Penga. Have some sense, Will.” She could have ruined everything. She swore under her breath—she was so stupid—until tears began to prick at her throat and nose, and then she whispered, “Courage, hey. Truth, ja, and courage.”

  She started at a halting run along the main road. A shooting star tore across the sky. Will gave a wordless cough of joy and sped up. The stars danced a war dance overhead. She fell over the sidewalk and then her own shoes. As she got up, she found to her surprise that she was shaking with cold and pain and nerves. She wrapped the scarf six times round her neck. She pulled her sweater up round her throat. Slowly, with more careful steps, Will walked onward into the night.

  WILL STOOD ON ONE FOOT on the pavement, covered in bright sunlight. She could see a gate, and people taking flimsy English money from behind glass screens, and more people than she’d ever seen before in her life. Cars—more cars than she’d known existed—drove dizzyingly by. Across the street, red buses disgorged crowds of men and women, dressed alike in black suits and expressionless faces.

  She had walked for five or six hours, using the maps pasted to bus stops to guide her. All she wanted was to keep on in a straight line away from the school. She had lost herself and bumped into things in the dark, and had slept for an hour or so on the bench of a bus shelter, and then she had found a file of schoolchildren heading excitedly—where? Somewhere that wasn’t school, she could see from their faces. And she had followed six steps behind them. And now here she was, standing on one foot, in sharp winter sunlight, under a sign.

  LONDON ZOO.

  Will was feeling decidedly better. In fact, she realized, quite hugely and wildly better—so much better she had to sing, very soft
ly, behind her hair. She was also feeling achingly hungry. She had eaten the first apple at midnight, and the second at two in the morning, and the third and fourth together with the cheese as an inadequate breakfast when she’d woken up in the bus shelter. Smells of bacon sandwiches and hot chocolate were rising in puffs from inside the zoo walls. It was easy to slip into the stream of children and in through the gate, as easy as working Shumba in with the cattle. Easier, in fact, because she didn’t have to lasso any of the children.

  Will had never been in a zoo. She knew about them, though, in theory. The idea was a horrible one. There were bars everywhere. It was like Leewood all over again. But the animals, Will grudgingly admitted, looked glossy and properly fed. Which was more than Will was feeling. Her stomach nudged up against her skin again, declaring its emptiness. She shook the feeling off and kept walking, photographing everything with her eyes. There were bushes—I could hide in those, she planned—and benches. Those’ll be useful later. There was a pen of impala flinging their heads around in the sun. They looked happy, like she and Simon used to be in the early mornings, when the air smelled of bougainvillea and redbush tea. There were vast cages full of multicolored birds, all of them singing.

  The zoo had got some things wrong, though, she thought. No monkey with self-respect would choose a metal climbing frame, and the baboons had the wrong color of bananas, firm and cartoon-yellow. At home the ’boons ate them black and spotted, or brown as second best. Once, back at home, a gang of adolescent baboons had snatched a stem of brown bananas, along with a lump of cheese the size of Will’s foot and a jug of beer from the veranda table, and then had lurched drunkenly around the farmhouse for days, dodging Lazarus’s broom and chittering.

  Will spent a long time standing in front of the baboons, balling up handfuls of her hair and laughing giddily. When the wind grew too strong, Will worked her way back to the warthogs, which were under cover. She’d always loved warthogs; they were evidence, she reckoned, that the world wasn’t always anxious and difficult. It had a sense of humor. She stopped by their enclosure and grinned at their paintbrush tails, flicking to and fro like pendulums.

 

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