by Gee, Maurice
Hostel Girl
Maurice Gee
PUFFIN BOOKS
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Published in Puffin Books, 1999
Copyright © Maurice Gee 1999
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ISBN 9781742288529
Chapter 1
OVERBRIDGE
Ailsa set out at mid-morning. Her mother had gone two hours before, pedalling the other way to her job at the biscuit factory and nearly all the dental nurses had caught the 7.15 am unit to Wellington. The suburb was bare and the streets were empty.
She wheeled her bicycle up the overbridge and saw the valley spread out east and west. It ran north to the mountains, narrowing as it went, and south to the harbour, which showed its presence by a pearly whiteness in the air. A couple of late nurses on the platform waved to her. She waved back. They were from the new intake and she didn’t know them well. They seemed friendly enough, but always it was like this, she missed the special friends she’d made in the previous draft and felt there were no new ones she would like as well. The third girl down there, Gloria Wood, already known sarcastically as Glorious, would not do, even though she was fascinating, with her lipstick, her mascara, her scent. But she was conceited and stand-offish and the girl who shared a room with her had asked for a transfer after only two nights. It was hard to think of Glorious drilling children’s teeth.
Ailsa watched a unit come in and the nurses get on. It rolled them away beneath her and Woburn station was empty. The red train shrank as it went down the line and she felt lonely on the overbridge. Sometimes she imagined that it existed outside the world. She went down from it, one way or the other, into places where her life was tangled, where too much trying was asked of her. She liked to linger on the bridge and look up and down the shining rails that cut the Hutt Valley into halves, and in a way cut her life in half.
The wrong side of the tracks, she thought, looking at the hostel’s eight houses. They were two storeys high and packed with rooms — sardined with dental nurses and farm girls and single women, secretaries, shop workers, hoping to find husbands before long.
Her own house was number 4, where her mother was matron when she came home from her day job doing the wages at Griffin’s factory — home from lollies and biscuits to 40 student nurses, who were much more trouble, she said, with their likes and hates and broken hearts and period pains and boyfriends and examination tears. She brought home bags of broken biscuits and left them on the table in the lounge, where some of the nurses gobbled them and others, horrified, clamped their hands to their cheeks — biscuits were bad for the teeth.
‘Stuck-up little misses,’ Mrs McGowan said. Being a matron after her day job tired her out, but what was a widow to do? ‘We’ll be out of here one day,’ she told Ailsa; which meant when she had saved enough money to put a deposit on a house. In the meantime it was seven nights on call, with aspros and ginger water and a firm reminder of the rules.
‘At least I don’t have to cook,’ she sighed; and Ailsa sighed too, for that meant sitting in the dining room at half past five with the roar of 300 voices all around, the clatter of 300 knives and forks, and mutton, mashed potatoes, grey cabbage on the plate, and jam sponge and custard to follow. ‘No washing up,’ said Mrs McGowan. That was something. But they both dreamed of a little house in Wellington, halfway up a hill, with the city shining down below, and one job, maybe in a government ministry; and no grinny nurses, shrieking nurses, crying nurses, or ones who thought they were too good for a hostel; no rules, no curfew, no peeping toms; and no sharing a room at the start of each half-year with someone you’d never seen before.
Ailsa had Betty Briggs this time. Betty was religious and prayed each night, kneeling by her bed. It embarrassed Ailsa. She didn’t know where to look. And Betty had told her that she’d rather she didn’t swear, when all Ailsa had said was ‘damn’ under her breath.
‘I was talking to myself,’ Ailsa said.
‘I heard. And so did Jesus.’
‘Oh, phooey,’ Ailsa said. She asked her mother to shift Betty.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t anything worse?’ Mrs McGowan said.
‘No, just damn. I cut one of my fingernails too short. And she doesn’t like me chewing gum.’
‘Nor do I.’
‘Can’t you put me in with someone else? Even Glorious would do.’
‘Who?’
‘Gloria Wood.’
‘You use their proper names, my girl. She’s too sophisticated for you.’
Sophisticated was something that Ailsa was not. ‘Tomboy’ was a word people used of her. ‘Tone yourself down, young lady,’ the headmistress had told her on her first day at her new school — Willowbank School (where there were no willows and no bank). But you couldn’t be toned down after living in a hostel for three years, with women scooting round you like a basketball team. You had to make some noise if you wanted to be heard and you had to go after things and not hang back. She’d seen too many quiet girls weeping in the corner, too many quiet ones all by themselves.
Ailsa was 14 in that year, 1955. Her father had chosen her name. It was Scottish, and so was he, Scotty McGowan, a Glaswegian settled in New Zealand. He had gone to the war before she was born and was killed in Crete. ‘Call the baby James,’ he wrote. ‘He’ll be my Jimmy boy. And if it’s a girl, Ailsa.’
She liked her name better than all the Janes and Ginnys and Helens at school. No one else had it. She did not like her school. She had started off at Hutt Valley High but then a newspaper called Truth had run some scare stories about immorality among teenagers in Naenae, up the valley — sex parties, nudity, illegitimate babies — and everyone got hysterical. The government ordered an enquiry and published a report, the Mazengarb Report, calling for more religious teaching and higher moral standards; and Ailsa’s mother got worried. She wasn’t strait-laced at all but being alone had made her uncertain about decisions her husband might have made. Schoolboys and schoolgirls having sex among the gravestones in the cemetery! She must find a school where her daughter would be safe.
Nothing Ailsa said made any difference. Halfway through the third term of the sex scandal year she got into her new u
niform — stupid skirt, stupid hat — and cycled off to Willowbank, an all-girls school run by the church, where she was told to tone herself down. She lost her friends from Hutt Valley High. That was that. But she never had any trouble with the girls at Willowbank. They’d all read the stories in Truth and were no different from her — talked a bit different, most of them, and had fathers who were lawyers and ambassadors and MPs; but Ailsa learned new swear words at Willowbank. And the social studies teacher was a communist and talked about the evils of capitalism. It was fun seeing how the girls reacted to that. Ailsa guessed that Mrs Nimmo would get fired before long.
Paying the fees at Willowbank cut into the money Ailsa’s mother was saving for a house. It trapped her in the hostel, it made her cross and sour, but she said no when Ailsa cried, ‘Well, send me back to Hutt Valley High.’
‘You’re there and you’re staying there,’ she said.
‘The girls swear worse. And one of the sixth formers had to leave last year to have a baby.’ As soon as she’d said that Ailsa was sorry. It almost made her mother cry.
Mrs McGowan was pleased with Ailsa’s end of year report though: second in English, third in French, first in Social Studies. She seemed to believe that clever girls could not be bad. Bottom of the class in Divinity. That made her frown.
‘I’ve never done it before so it’s not my fault,’ Ailsa said.
She liked Divinity — the parables and stories and the moral lessons fitting in with them; but didn’t like the lessons without the stories — what Mrs Nimmo called the humbug side of religion. (Mrs Nimmo was bound to get the sack.) She supposed that if she tried she could at least get off the bottom of the class, to please her mother.
Ailsa rode down from the overbridge into a part of the valley where the houses were bigger than the ones on her side and the sections grew more trees. There were no state houses. The cars were parked in garages, not on the front lawn. Her tennis racket was clamped on the carrier and her sun visor was hooked on the handlebars. She felt just as easy here but liked it better the way her side of the valley made more noise and swarmed with people at the start and end of the day. The wind was always colder on the western side of the bridge.
She looked at the sky. There were fat-bellied clouds over the ranges, heading south. She was glad she had taken her mother’s advice and clamped her cardigan with her racket on the back of the bike. She hoped there would be time for a game before it rained.
She turned into the drive at Helen’s house. It was the first time she’d been invited there. Helen was top in French, and top in Divinity too, and was the best tennis player in the fifth form. Ailsa wasn’t sure she liked her — she had grapes and chicken drumsticks for lunch (on days when her mother didn’t call in the car and take her home) and was boy-mad and never stopped talking about new dresses she had bought. Ailsa couldn’t work out when she wore them all. But she was, in an odd way, eager to be friends, asking, yes, yes, what? to everything Ailsa said about the hostels, as though they were a foreign land. She wasn’t the least bit snobbish about it, not as far as Ailsa could see.
The drive was made of shells that crackled as she rode over them. The garage was as big as a house. Mrs Page’s car was inside. Beyond it, in the shadows, was a yacht on a trailer. Ailsa couldn’t read the name. She wondered what sort of car Mr Page drove.
The tennis court ran halfway across the back of the section. Ailsa rode past the house, ignoring whoever might be watching from inside. Maybe there was a housekeeper or a maid. She leaned her bike on the wire, unclamped her racket, swung it a few times, and wondered if she should go on the court and practise serves. There were plenty of balls lying there. It was a grass court. She had never played on one of those before.
‘Ailsa,’ Helen called from the house. She was standing in the French doors like someone in a mirror, wearing red shorts and a blouse with stripes in the collar and puff sleeves. Ailsa felt she’d worn the wrong thing — her school tennis clothes — and felt awkward, especially as Mrs Page stood inside the room like a coloured fish floating deep in a pool.
‘Come and have some lemonade. Say hello to Mummy,’ Helen said.
Ailsa put down her racket and went inside. Just be yourself, her mother always said. It was good advice. Ailsa knew you made mistakes when you tried to pretend. She smiled at the woman.
‘This is Ailsa, Mummy, from my class,’ Helen said.
‘Hello, Ailsa. It’s nice of you to come,’ Mrs Page said. She was a tall woman with an elegant face. Her neck looked as if it had been stretched. Helen had once described her mother as willowy, and one of the other girls had said, ‘Like a cricket bat.’ But willowy was right, if you thought of bendiness. She made an inclination of her head at Ailsa.
‘Sit down, do. Helen will get you a drink.’
She sat down herself and Ailsa sat carefully in a chair, remembering to keep her knees together. She was sweating from her ride.
‘Lemonade?’ Helen said.
‘Thanks.’
Helen went out and Mrs Page, with a little smile, so quick Ailsa almost missed it, said, ‘Helen tells me you live at the YWCA.’
‘Yes,’ Ailsa said. ‘In the dental nurses’ part. My mother is the matron.’
‘That must be interesting.’
‘Some of the time it is. It’s hard work for Mum.’
‘Oh?’
‘The girls keep getting sick. And coming in late, so she has to tell them off. She has to do the switchboard too on Saturday nights.’
Mrs Page gave another smile — she specialised in quick ones, gone before you knew, as though they hurt. Ailsa guessed she was wondering how a hostel matron managed to send her daughter to Willowbank School.
‘But we have some fun there,’ she said.
Helen came back and gave her a glass. ‘They have peeping toms,’ she said.
‘Only one,’ Ailsa said. ‘A couple of years ago.’
‘He stole scanties off the line,’ Helen said.
‘Helen!’
‘They caught him,’ Ailsa said. ‘He was only 15. He was a loony.’
‘It sounds,’ Mrs Page said, ‘unsavoury. But of course, it’s no reflection, Ailsa, on you. I think your mother is much to be admired.’
‘Mum’s good,’ Ailsa said. She felt she was being a bit too much Hutt Valley High. ‘She does the wages at Griffin’s factory in the day.’
‘I’m astonished she can manage,’ Mrs Page said.
‘We’ve got a ping pong room upstairs, over the caf. Helen can come and play if she likes.’
‘I really think tennis is enough.’
‘Shall we go out?’ Helen said. ‘Bring your drink.’
‘It’s nice to have you here, Ailsa,’ Mrs Page said. ‘I do like to see the court being used.’
They put their glasses on the umpire’s stand and started hitting balls back and forth. There were gardens round three sides of the court and tall trees beyond so you seemed to be playing in a hollow, deep down. Tennis needed yelling on the sidelines, Ailsa thought, but perhaps it was just as well to be alone today because Helen was going to beat her easily. She was skinnier than Ailsa but moved as fast as a fox terrier. Ailsa felt like a labrador; but she believed if she could only get to the ball she would smack it hard where Helen could not reach. Getting there was the trouble. Helen ran her round the court without any mercy. And the grass made the ball bounce lower than she was used to. At the end of the second game she swallowed her lemonade in a couple of gulps.
‘Two-love,’ Helen said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been playing since I was five.’ She waved goodbye to Mrs Page, going out in her car. It made Ailsa feel better that the woman was not watching from the house, with her bendy neck and fleeting smile.
‘You should stretch out more,’ Helen said. ‘Not hold your racket so close to your side.’
‘Thanks,’ Ailsa said.
‘And throw the ball higher when you serve.’
‘Oh thank you, my dear,’ said Ailsa.
‘
I’m only trying to help. Don’t try to hit the ball so hard.’
They played some more.
‘Six-love,’ Helen said.
‘You’d be about the worst tennis player I’ve ever seen,’ said a voice.
Ailsa swung round and saw a boy sitting in a wheelchair outside the wire. He must have come from the house hidden by the lemon tree on the lawn, and he sat like some sort of king on a throne, making a sneery little smile.
‘Ailsa hasn’t played much,’ Helen said. ‘That’s my brother,’ she explained. ‘His name’s Calum. You don’t have to take him seriously.’
Why not? Because he’s in a wheelchair? Ailsa thought. But she was smarting from the boy’s remark, and she said, ‘I’d be good enough to beat you.’ Then she blushed at it. What a thing to say to someone crippled!
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Well, play some more. Let’s see you miss a few more shots.’
‘I’ll get another glass of lemonade,’ Helen said. She went into the house. Ailsa came off the court. She sat down on the grass by the wheelchair. Remembered her mother’s advice, which seemed to mean that she could ask what she’d like to know.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘I’m Ailsa, like your sister said.’ He was a strange-looking boy, with some of his mother’s bendiness — bent in his face, which made him ugly and good-looking at once: a sinister look. She guessed he was about 16.
‘What I mean is, why are you in this?’ She tapped her fingers on the wheel of the chair.
‘I like sitting down.’
For a moment she wondered if it was true — if going round in a wheelchair was a game he played. Wondered if he was right in the head.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘I was born without any legs, so I have to sit.’
Startled, she looked down. ‘What’s these then?’