by Carmen Reid
‘And doctor mum,’ Min chipped in, rolling her eyes. ‘Plus I babysat. I did a lot of babysitting. I have four little brothers and sisters,’ she added for Gina’s benefit, ‘and we’re all going to be doctors. That’s the Singupta family plan.
‘I drank a lot of water too,’ she went on, ‘because home food is so hot after boarding-school food, and I listened to talk and more talk about promotions at the hospital and the latest weddings.’
‘Instead of hanging out at the flash new riverside penthouse in Glasgow, Amy flew first class to Dubai,’ Niffy continued, ‘and turned mahogany by the five-star pool while her dad pursued a “great new business opportunity”.’
‘Yeah . . . a business opportunity dressed in head-to-toe Dolce,’ came Amy’s reply. The colour and glamour of her ‘holiday’ (tagging along while her dad considered buying a nightclub in Dubai City) was still so bright in her mind that the boarding house looked particularly dingy by comparison.
‘And she dreamed of the gorgeous Jason Hernandez,’ Niffy went on, ‘and the day when he will finally sweep her into his arms and offer to be hers for ever.’ There was no mistaking the tease in her voice.
‘Oh, please, put a sock in it!’ was Amy’s response.
‘And what about you?’ Min asked. ‘No, no, don’t tell me: you spent three weeks at Blacklough Hall in the rain . . .’
Min thought with a slight shudder of the one and only visit she’d made with Amy to Niffy’s ‘ancestral’ home. Blacklough had once been a splendid country mansion set in vast grounds, but now it was shabby and decaying; a place with terrifyingly big dogs, freezing bedrooms and threadbare carpets and curtains. Everyone had stayed huddled in the kitchen for the entire weekend, only venturing out once in a while to get soaking wet on a walk.
‘You should come and stay with me in Durban – we’d have a great time,’ Min had offered Niffy in sympathy as soon as the trip to Blacklough was over.
‘Or me in Glasgow!’ Amy had volunteered. ‘You’d have your own bathroom – with underfloor heating and a Jacuzzi.’
‘Were you riding Ginger?’ Min asked now, ‘or listening to your mum and dad’s rows, or smoking behind the stables with your big brother?’
‘All of the above,’ Niffy admitted, thinking of the latest round of parental arguing. Glasses and vases had been thrown; furious threats of divorce had rung round the cold and crumbly corridors of the Hall.
‘I’m so glad to be back at school. If only Ginger could be stabled nearby, then I could totally love it here,’ Niffy admitted.
Amy’s groan at this was interrupted by the loudest, most awful wailing alarm Gina had ever heard. Fire alarm? Air raid? She cowered with her fingers in her ears.
‘Supper!’ the other three girls explained.
‘And I love school food,’ Niffy added, springing up with enthusiasm.
Much later that night, Gina lay in her narrow bed, sleepless despite her jetlag, and listened to the breathing sounds of the other girls in the dorm. She had no recollection of ever having shared a room before – well, apart from sleepovers, when no one ever slept. Min gave a cough and turned over, causing her bed to creak.
‘You asleep yet?’ Niffy whispered. Gina didn’t reply, sure that it wasn’t aimed at her.
But then, still in a whisper, Niffy added, ‘Gina?’
‘Yeah?’ Gina kept her voice low.
‘Goodnight. Don’t worry – it takes us a week or two to settle in again, and Amy and I have been here since we were ten. You’ll take a while to get used to everything, but you’ll get there.’
Ten?! Gina stared up at the shadowy, unfamiliar ceiling, wondering if she would ever get used to anything. There had been the supper, eaten at long tables in the dining room. Surrounded by the chatter of the ninety teenage girls who boarded at this school of 450 girls, Gina had picked at a plate of something she could only describe as glop.
‘What is this?’ she’d asked Min, mystified.
‘Cheese-o-beano pie. Speciality of the house . . . delicious!’
Gina had been able to identify orange beans and mashed potato, and she’d taken a nibble of the dark toast topping, only to choke on the weird salty taste.
‘Grilled Marmite toast,’ Min had explained, wolfing down another large mouthful. For such a dainty, petite little thing, she could really eat, Gina couldn’t help noticing. Maybe she was bulimic . . .?
Then there had been the Year Four sitting room – a beige and pink place with battered chairs and sofas, a TV no one switched on and a piano – where she’d met the other boarders in her year. A quick-fire of names and faces she hadn’t a hope of remembering yet.
Strangest of all had been bedtime.
The wailing siren had warned them all that it was nine o’clock: ‘Fourth Year’s slot for the showers,’ Amy had explained.
Gina had watched her roommates strip off, don dressing gowns and head for the bathroom. Once they’d gone, she’d undressed in privacy, put on her pyjamas and decided that, if there was a communal shower they all had to stand in together, she was calling her mom and flying home the next day.
Not that calling home was going to be easy. Cells weren’t allowed (her lifeline home had been handed in!) and Niffy had told her about the elaborate queuing system for the boarding house’s two payphones and three Internet computers.
‘Basically, you’re lucky if you get to make a call or pick up your email twice a week. That’s why we have to resort to letters! Can you believe it! We’re the last teenagers in the twenty-first century to still communicate by post!’
The showers turned out to have cubicles. There were also three private baths, but the rows and rows of sinks, towels and wash bags with name tapes in the bathroom had made Gina think of her personal pink bathing boudoir with utter longing. This was just so impersonal, so public. Where was she supposed to put on her make-up?
Close to 10 p.m., the loud screeching hinges of the fire door along the hallway had set Amy off on a countdown: ‘Nineteen . . . eighteen . . . seventeen . . .’ And sure enough, as she reached one, the Daffodil dorm’s door had opened and Mrs Knebworth, or the ‘Neb’, as everyone nicknamed her, had come in to wish them goodnight.
‘Lights off in fifteen minutes and no later. We all need our beauty sleep,’ had been her parting shot.
‘Some more than others,’ Amy had muttered once the door was shut again.
‘The Neb may seem friendly,’ Niffy had whispered to Gina, ‘but really she’s the devil in disguise.’
Closing her eyes now and trying to summon up sleep, Gina felt a tear slide from the corner of her eye. Why had her mother sent her to jail?
Chapter Four
THE WAILING ALARM had not just woken Gina but nearly sent her tumbling from her bed in panic at 7.30 the next morning. A frantic hour and a half followed: jostling for space in the bathroom, applying light make-up (on her bed with the aid of a compact mirror), dressing in the stiff new uniform and seeing immediately not just how horrible she looked, but how wrong.
Amy and Niffy’s uniforms were well worn in and customized. Amy especially had found a way to make the individually hideous items at least slightly flattering. Her white shirt looked soft and comfortable and was unbuttoned low. Her sludgy cardigan was shrunken and bobbly, so it hugged her slim figure. Even better, her grey skirt was above the knee and worn with thigh-high socks and ballet pumps.
Gina suspected that just about every girl in Year Four would be dressed like Amy, whereas Gina – in box-new, oversized clothes and woollen knee socks – would be labelled ‘dork’ before she even opened her mouth.
Once Gina had her entire enormous uniform on, complete with Min’s safety pins to hold up the skirt, she angled the mirror on top of her chest of drawers to take a look at herself and was so horrified that, to her total embarrassment, she let out a muffled sob.
She looked much worse than any of them. Even Min, whose clothes were voluminous, at least still managed to look pretty.
‘Erm . . . Are
you OK?’ It was Min who responded to the sobbing sound first.
‘No!’ Gina admitted. ‘I am not OK. Look at this gross outfit!’ She turned to them so they could take a better look at the full horror of it. ‘I can’t go out like this! People are going to laugh at me.’
And it was the thought of this – of a whole class full of strangers laughing and sniggering at her – that made Gina crumple down onto her bed, very close to a big, embarrassing, noisy crying outburst.
There was an awkward silence.
‘Oh my Lord!’ Niffy said finally. ‘Well . . . there’s no point in denying it. You look like a total twerp. Look at that skirt – it’s nearly at your ankles! As for the cardie – you’d have to be built like Barbie to fill that one up.’
Although this wasn’t exactly helpful, it did at least stop Gina’s tears in their tracks. She wasn’t ready to laugh with Niffy yet though.
Surprisingly, it was Amy who came to the rescue. Although yesterday she’d seemed pleased that Gina’s uniform was too big, today she seemed to have had a change of heart. Maybe she understood an outfit crisis only too well.
‘Just take everything off,’ she instructed Gina briskly. ‘You look about the same size as me, so you can borrow my spare things for the next few days, and at the weekend you can go to the uniform shop and change everything for smaller sizes. How about that?’
This was such a kindness, Gina’s tears threatened to break out again, but fortunately they were nipped in the bud when Niffy added, ‘You should be warned though, before you borrow her clothes, that Amy smells.’
‘I do not smell!’ Amy retorted angrily.
‘You stink,’ Niffy replied. ‘You’re always covered in melony, fruity, stinky stuff. Hair gel and body spray and all that kind of thing.’
Amy rolled her eyes and began pulling her spare school clothes out of a drawer for Gina. ‘Funnily enough, not everyone wants to smell of horse and dog.’
As Gina gratefully took the much smaller clothes from Amy’s arms, she clocked her totally bare face. Where yesterday there had been blusher, lipstick and eyeliner, today there was nothing but the gleam of moisturizer and lip salve.
‘Is make-up banned?’ she wondered out loud.
‘Not exactly,’ Amy told her. ‘But no boys – so what’s the point?’
Gina hadn’t considered this. School with no boys. Not one. This was going to be a very new experience. School with no flirting, school with no crushes! But then again, school with no lame jokes, or fist-fights or truly terrible come-ons.
After they’d made their beds and breakfasted in the packed dining room, it was time to set off on the five-minute walk to the main school building.
‘You are in 4C, aren’t you?’ Min checked. ‘Same form as us?’
Gina nodded. They’d gone through the subjects they had in common last night. Everyone was doing English, maths, French, history and biology, but she and Min were taking chemistry and physics, while Niffy and Amy did art and Spanish.
‘Shame,’ had been Niffy’s comment. ‘Winding up Mrs Lexington-Harris, head of art, is one of the highlights of our week. But Min will look after you in physics – Mrs Wilson loves her. Min’s her star pupil and Mrs Wilson already thinks she is’ – her voice had dropped to a mock whisper – ‘Oxbridge material.’
‘And what’s that?’ Gina had asked.
‘Clever enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge University.’
‘Oh yeah . . . right.’ Gina did know what that was all about. Her own mother had already been bandying the words Harvard and Yale about, although Gina was quite obviously not even one of the cleverest girls in her class. Far from it. That was a big part of why she was at St Jude’s, no doubt about it.
They crossed the boarding-house gardens and followed a path past several large playing fields to the main school. The great square stone building loomed up out of the grass. Four storeys high, with the top attic floors set into an immense slate roof, it was, Gina thought, much more imposing than it had looked in the handbook.
‘How old is the school?’ she asked Niffy, who was walking alongside her.
‘Erm . . . early nineteen hundreds, I think. The first St J’s girls wore hats, gloves, ankle-length pinafores and probably corsets. Can’t have been much fun playing lacrosse in a corset.’
‘I’m sure they didn’t play lacrosse,’ Min said. ‘Far too unladylike.’
‘Yeah,’ Niffy agreed. ‘They were too busy learning how to cook, sew and become perfect wives to Edinburgh doctors and lawyers.’
‘Yeah, then at some point in the fifties,’ Min went on, ‘the school dropped the cooking and sewing classes and started teaching the girls how to become Edinburgh doctors and lawyers themselves.’
‘My mum always said that one of the scientists who invented the Pill was from St J’s,’ Niffy added. ‘But it’s always been hushed up because it doesn’t fit with the school’s image. St J’s is very, very proper.’ She gave a roll of her eyes. ‘They’d still make us wear hats, gloves, pinafores and corsets if they could.’
‘What else should I know?’ Gina asked.
But Min had a question: ‘Should we be telling Gina to steer clear of Penny and her gang?’
‘I’m sure she’ll work it out quickly enough,’ Amy replied. ‘Let’s just put it this way. Every year has a set of poisonous bitches in it, and Penny, Piggy and Weasel are ours.’
‘Piggy and Weasel?’ Gina felt as if she needed some further clue to these girls than just the nicknames the dorm girls had given them.
‘Tiggy and Louisa. Tiggy must be short for something, but no one ever calls her anything else, so who knows? I don’t think you’ll want to hang around long enough to find out. Unless you like the company of snobby Edinburgh bitches,’ Amy added.
‘Oh, they probably aren’t that bad if you’re a friend of theirs,’ Niffy chipped in. ‘It’s just that Amy and Penny have never really got on. Penny once went out with someone Amy was considering chucking—’
‘Yeah, but I hadn’t!’ Amy reminded her. ‘He was still my boyfriend, that’s the point.’
‘And,’ Niffy went on, ignoring the outburst, ‘Penny has been at St J’s since she was three and she’d got used to being the cleverest girl in the class and the best at everything. So when Amy arrived at the age of ten and started doing better than her at maths and art, not to mention Min turning up two years ago and being brilliant at physics and chemistry, Penny just went in a huff . . .’
‘Yeah, and she’s been in it ever since,’ Amy added.
‘Unfortunately 4C is quite small,’ Min said, ‘so it’s a little hard to distance yourself from the three of them.’
Oh great, Gina was telling herself again. Didn’t matter where in the world you went to school, there were always gangs. Another thought crossing her mind was that when she got back home, back to her real school, she was going to be so, so much kinder to new girls. It had never occurred to her before how terrifying it was to join a new class, make new friends, new enemies, find out where everything was and how everything worked all over again.
Because Min had been the first person to respond to her uniform crisis, because she seemed the nicest of the three and the geekiest and the one least likely to refuse, Gina – hating having to do this – turned to her and asked quietly, ‘You will . . . um . . . be around today, won’t you? Just to kind of show me where everything is? Won’t you?’
Min smiled and nodded.
The words, ‘I spy boarders,’ greeted them as they walked into the classroom. They came from a tall girl with a pale, narrow face, a mane of long, curly brown hair and cruelly short fringe. She might have been pretty if she hadn’t had the fringe and such a sneer across her face. ‘Did you sleep well, girls, in your cosy little dorm? Ooh – and a new girl . . . She’s almost as tanned as you, Amy. Been to the Costas for a holiday, have you? Daddy got a little place in Benidorm?’
‘Go away, Penny,’ Amy growled.
But Penny held out her hand to Gi
na and said, ‘Penelope Boswell-Hackett. How do you do?’
‘Gina Peterson.’ Gina shook the hand offered; she didn’t feel as if she had much choice, although this was obviously the Penny she’d been warned about.
‘So where are you from?’ came the abrupt question.
‘I’m just here for a term. I’m from the US . . . California.’
‘Oh dear,’ replied Penny. ‘Blonde and Californian . . . good luck. Let’s just hope you’re not stupid as well. And you’ve had to borrow a uniform, you poor old thing.’ And with that she turned on her heel and headed back to the far corner of the room, where a knot of girls giggled at her return.
Gina felt her face burning. ‘Where do I sit?’ she hissed at Niffy.
‘Here, just take the desk beside mine.’
Gina sat down at the cramped, old-fashioned desk. She watched as Niffy lifted up the lid and began to unpack some belongings from her school bag into the belly of the wooden beast. This was like being at school in a different century. The room was pea-green with a scuffed wooden floor, a chipped iron monster of a radiator and two enormous windows, set high up in the wall. If a teacher in a long woollen dress carrying a cane had walked in, Gina would not have been surprised. She wondered if her mother had sat in this classroom once, and yet again she struggled to understand why her mother had wanted to send her to this place.
When the school bell rang at 8.50, an almost normal-looking woman came into the room and took the register. Gina tried to put names to faces, but gave up halfway through. It would take some time.
‘Welcome back, girls . . . Welcome to our new girl, Gina Peterson . . . And off we trot to assembly,’ the class teacher, Mrs Redpath, instructed.
Along with the rest of her class, Gina headed for the cavernous wood-panelled hall, already filling with hundreds of St Jude’s girls. She followed Niffy and Min into a row of seats somewhere in the middle of the hall and picked up the small red hymn book on her chair before sitting down.
‘You’re about to see the Banshee in action,’ Niffy whispered. ‘Pick a word, girls: excellence, ambition, dedication or proud. Person with the lowest score buys the treats on Friday.’