by Carmen Reid
‘Well, what about photocopying them?’ Gina wasn’t going to be fobbed off. ‘It would save us all so much time.’
A gasp, both from Miss Ballantyne and Gina’s classmates, met this outrageous suggestion.
‘Really!’ Miss Ballantyne snapped, giving the icy look St Jude’s staff had nearly all perfected.
‘What?’ Gina had asked.
‘These notes are the fruit of years of teaching; they are covered with my edits, with my thoughts and observations. They are not just to be photocopied and handed out, erm . . .’
‘Gina Peterson,’ Gina had offered, then, cheekily referring to the teacher’s age, she added, ‘Maybe you knew my mother, Lorelei Winkelmann?’
Miss Ballantyne’s face gave a distinct flash of recognition at the name and she looked at Gina closely. ‘Indeed!’ she snapped ‘Well, we shall see how you fare, Gina.’
Gina would have liked to ask something about her mother, but Miss Ballantyne had turned back to the board and was writing again.
The conversation was clearly over and the boredom of the history lesson continued without any further outrageous interruptions.
‘She wouldn’t know what else to do with us,’ Niffy whispered into Gina’s ear. ‘She makes every class copy out the same notes year after year. I’ve even checked a Fifth Year’s old jotters – exactly the same, word for word.’
Gina was hoping that at least the physics lesson would go a bit better, because she’d been receiving some intensive tuition from Min. Last night, in the study room, while Amy worked on a detailed sketch of Jason’s face and Niffy busied herself drawing her horse, Ginger, over and over again, Min and Gina had tried to get to grips with the physics homework.
Gina had watched Min do solution after elegant solution. She’d listened, she’d copied, she’d hesitantly tried to do the examples herself as Min watched. Then she thought she’d finally got it.
Now, as Mr Perfect called her up to his desk, she wasn’t so sure.
‘Great homework,’ he told her as he flicked through the pages she’d worked on with Min. ‘Such a dramatic improvement. You’re suddenly on a par with Asimina.’
Uh-oh. Gina thought she’d detected a worrying hint of playfulness in that comment.
‘Would you talk me through this one please?’ Mr Perfect asked, pointing at one of the pages of her homework.
Gina tried; well . . . she began, she stumbled on, she cleared her throat, she meandered . . . Everything Min had told her seemed to have evaporated from her head.
Finally, sensing the giggles rising from the class, not to mention the heat from Gina’s cheeks, Mr Perfect told her to go and sit down, with the parting shot: ‘I’m glad you’re benefiting from some extra tuition at the boarding house, but I think it’s best if everyone works at their own pace.’
He looked directly at Min as he said this, and there was no mistaking Penny Boswell-Hackett’s mean snigger. Gina went back to her seat with her cheeks burning.
‘Sorry,’ Min whispered to her.
Gina blinked hard to contain the rising tears. Several seats along, there was another girl who was also trying not to cry. She was blowing her nose, wiping at her face with her tissue and sniffing hard. Gina remembered that her name was Jenny and wondered if any of her friends knew anything about her.
‘Jenny Scott?’ Amy asked when Gina met her in one of the corridors during the lunch break. ‘She’s all over the place – sneaking out to the loos to sob, coming back to class with a red face. I don’t know what it is. Not even Giselle, her best friend, knows. Hope it’s something really juicy though – we haven’t had a scandal for ages. Maybe she’s pregnant!’ Amy tried to look excited, but as they were talking about a girl who still wore two pigtails, woolly knee socks and shoes with buckles, this hardly seemed likely.
‘Maybe someone’s died,’ Gina suggested.
‘Maybe her cat,’ said Amy unsympathetically.
‘Oh look, it’s the little boarding-house cheat. I wouldn’t bother copying Amy’s homework because she’s not good at anything, are you, Amy?’
‘Well, apart from spending Daddy’s money,’ added a second voice.
Neither Gina nor Amy needed to turn round to see who was behind these horrible remarks.
‘Get knotted, Penny,’ Amy snarled.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, am I in your way? I’m just signing up for the Year Four debating contest. Is that why you’re here too? Oh no, I forgot, you’re not good at debating, are you? It’s not the kind of thing you’d learn at home. They still use their fists to settle every argument in Glasgow, don’t they?’
Penny scrawled her name on the notice and then, with Louisa in tow, disappeared off down the corridor.
Amy turned her attention to the sheet of paper on the notice board, which Penny had just signed.
‘Debaters wanted,’ she read out. ‘All girls interested in the Year Four debating contest planned for the end of term, please sign up before Friday . . . Well’ – Amy reached for the pen dangling from the board by a long string – ‘let’s see what the loathsome cow thinks about this.’
‘Are you sure?’ Gina asked as Amy wrote her name right underneath Penny’s.
‘Oh yes, I’m sure. How hard can it be to argue with a sour-faced snob you can’t stand?’
‘You did what?!’ Niffy was appalled by Amy’s debating contest news.
She, Amy, Gina and two other boarders were all cosily eating toast and drinking mugs of tea in the Year Four sitting room that evening. (Gina understood tea now: people in Britain had to drink it all the time to stay warm. The sun never shone here, and when it did, it was pallid and weak, just like the tea.) Min was half-heartedly playing the shabby-looking piano.
‘Is there anything you’re not good at?’ Gina had asked as Min struck up.
‘Mais . . . oui!’ Min had replied.
‘Let me just get this straight: you’ve signed up with Penny Boswell-Hackett for the Year Four debating competition? Are you out of your mind?’ Niffy was so het up, she spluttered tea onto her chair. ‘Balls,’ she added, uselessly wiping at the stain with her hand.
‘Well, how hard can it be?’ Amy protested. ‘You’ll all help me to write a good speech. Anyway – Penny? She couldn’t kick her own arse!’
‘How hard can it be?!’ Niffy’s voice was raised. ‘Amy! Hello! We’re talking about Penny! Penny’s entire family is made up of lawyers. Her dad’s a judge, her uncle’s a sheriff, her mum’s a barrister, her big sister’s at Edinburgh University doing – guess what – law! Penny was born to debate. She probably has to make the case for how her eggs are going to be cooked at breakfast every morning. Her parents will be coaching her. They’ll want to see her wipe the floor with her opposition. You’ll be demolished!’
Amy was not looking quite so confident now, and Min’s piano playing had slowed so she could listen in to this.
‘What’s the topic?’ Min wanted to know. ‘What are you debating?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Amy answered. ‘But you’ll help me, won’t you? Anyway, it’s a home crowd – no one likes Penny. It’ll be fine . . .’ She looked from face to face, willing them to support her.
There was a pause long enough for Gina – who knew nothing about debating contests but could, according to Mrs Parker, write a decent essay – to feel that she had to step in with a bit of Californian ‘can do’ attitude. ‘You’re right,’ she insisted. ‘Someone has to stand up to that brat. We’ll train you, Amy. We’ll make sure you win.’
‘Or at least don’t look like a totally useless, utter tit,’ Niffy added, without quite so much optimism.
Way after dark, way after lights out, Niffy and Amy sat on the wide top rung of the fire escape outside the dorm window, wrapped in their dressing gowns: Amy in pink silk with dainty matching slippers, Niffy in a bobbly blue tartan thing inherited from her brother. Her slippers, like many Nairn-Bassett household items, had embroidered crests, but far too many holes.
‘What are you doing o
ut there?’ Min called to them more than once. ‘You better not be smoking, or I’m going to tell the Neb, I really am. Haven’t you heard of lung cancer? Heart attacks? Pulmonary obstructive disease? Emphysema?’
This just made Niffy and Amy giggle because they were sharing a perfumed cigarette bought for 60p from a Year Four who kept her Silk Cut hidden in an empty bottle of baby powder.
From the fire escape they could see the Neb’s bedroom window on the ground floor. The light clicked on behind pulled curtains and Amy breathed in sharply and tried to flatten herself against the railing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Niffy said calmly. ‘She can’t see us.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve seen her open the curtains and look out before, but she’s not spotted me yet.’
‘How often are you out here?’ Amy asked.
‘Oh . . . once in a while.’
Amy thought she could detect a tinge of sadness in these words. She didn’t like to think of Niffy being out here on her own, worrying about something.
‘Is everything OK with you?’ she wondered.
‘Yup, everything’s fine.’ Niffy let smoke puff out of her nostrils.
‘Everything OK at home?’
‘No!’ Niffy gave a smoky laugh. ‘It’s never OK at home. You know perfectly well they’re always fighting about money – how to make the hundreds of thousands needed to keep Blacklough from falling to bits. But meanwhile they phone, they email, they even send postcards telling me that everything’s fine.’ Making her voice even plummier, she added, ‘That’s the Nairn-Bassett way.’
‘They should just sell that dump, buy somewhere much smaller, have a great stash in the bank and be happy,’ Amy informed her.
‘Ha! Haven’t I explained it to you? Blacklough has been in my mother’s family for five generations!’
‘Oh, who cares!’ Amy said pithily. ‘We had rickets in my family for three generations. No one seems to miss them now they’ve gone!’
Niffy shot her a look which made it plain that family stately homes and malnutrition weren’t exactly the same thing.
‘They’ll get over it,’ Amy assured her.
There was silence while Niffy moodily smoked the cigarette down, then stubbed it out and momentarily wondered what to do with the butt before flicking it into the gutter.
Amy realized she could contain her secret no longer and burst out with the news: ‘I got an email from Jason!’
‘You didn’t!’ Niffy sounded almost too surprised.
‘Oh yes I did! It said . . .’ And Amy began to recite, word perfectly, because she had read the email at least thirty times over: ‘Hi Amy, hope this is yr email address. Got it from someone’s sister. Are you going to invite a few of us to the Year 4 ball next month then? All best, Harry, Milo, Peter and Jason.’
‘I’m not sure if that technically counts as an email from Jason,’ Niffy pointed out.
But Amy, her arms wrapped tightly round her knees, wasn’t listening. She just smiled very, very broadly at the dim, early summer night sky. ‘He’s going to come to the ball!’ she said quietly. ‘The summer ball! It’s just pure . . . dead . . . brilliant!’
But then, with a wail of panic, she added, ‘What am I going to wear?’
Chapter Nine
WHAT TO WEAR to the ball? How to do your your hair for the ball? Which dances to practise for the ball? These questions took up a serious amount of the girls’ free time during the following weeks.
Along with all the rumours and counter-rumours about which boys were coming and which were not:
‘Jason is definitely coming, he emailed!’
‘Llewellyn won’t be allowed! He’s not at one of the invited schools.’
‘Oh dear, what will Penny do?’
‘Better watch out, Amy – it’s happened before!’
‘Angus has been asking Jason if you’re definitely going to be there, Niff!’
‘Has not!’
‘Has.’
The four inhabitants of Daffodil dorm, along with another two boarders from their year – Suzie and Lucy – were once again in the Arts Café on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted after yet another trawl round all the potential dress shops in Edinburgh.
Amy still had ‘nothing, zip, nada!’ to wear. The fact that her chest of drawers and the two large suitcases under her bed were crammed full of clothes didn’t make the slightest difference. Now she was totally depressed because Lucy had found a dress and she still hadn’t.
‘OK, I’m seriously considering the blue one in Harvey Nichols,’ she told them, ‘but they have a new delivery of stock next week – so I might just hang on a little bit longer to see if there’s anything better in that.’
Amy might have been only fifteen, but she was already on first-name terms with the personal shopper on floor two.
‘What are you wearing again?’ she asked Gina.
‘A really nice pink dress. I bought it with my mom to bring over here and we got shoes for it too.’
‘Oh!’ came Amy’s envious sigh. ‘This is just mince. I really want to be sorted out. There’s only one more Saturday to go!’
‘Till what?’ Dermot asked, arriving at their table with a tray of coffees. As the boarders were now café regulars, he was getting to know them quite well.
‘None of your beeswax,’ Suzie told him with a smile.
Gina jumped in to inform him, ‘There’s a dance at school, but over here it’s apparently called a ball.’
‘Ooooh! Are we all going to the ball, gerrrrls?’ He rolled his ‘r’s theatrically. Then, spotting the large shopping bag tucked under Lucy’s chair, he leaned down to take a peek inside, before throwing up his hands and declaring, ‘Cerise chiffon . . . I am overcome! My dear’ – he gazed at Lucy – ‘you are going to be the belle of the ball.’
When he finished by wiping an imaginary tear from his eye, Niffy and Gina didn’t just laugh, but also applauded his performance.
Dermot made a little bow then bounced off to take orders from another table.
‘Isn’t he a sweetheart?’ Gina whispered.
‘No wonder you lot are in here every weekend!’ Suzie said. ‘Who is he?’
‘He’s Dermot. His dad runs the café and he’s just about to sit his Highers. But all the time he’s not studying, he’s in here earning his pocket money.’ Gina, who had never even had to make her own bed to qualify for her generous allowance, found this deeply impressive.
‘Niffy? What about you?’ Amy was still on about dresses. ‘Min’s going to wear my little red number, but what are you planning?’
‘Oh . . .’ Niffy stretched out her long arms and yawned, as if this was the most boring conversation in the world. ‘I thought I’d go to Topshop – they have dresses, don’t they? Quite cheap? I’ve only got about thirty pounds left in my account.’
‘Thirty quid?’ Amy was truly horrified. ‘You can’t even get a decent eye shadow for that!’
‘Well, I’ll leave it just a little bit longer. Maybe my dad will stick a tenner in an envelope if I ask him nicely.’
‘So what is this ball going to be like?’ Gina asked, beginning to feel quite excited about it. ‘Are the guys really going to come in tuxedos? Like in the movies?’
‘Yeah, or kilts!’ Niffy enthused. ‘You can’t really say you’ve experienced Scotland until you’ve had a twirl round the dance floor with a guy in a kilt.’
‘Yeah, but you have to watch the metal buttons on kilt jackets when the twirling gets wild,’ Amy added. ‘They can cause flesh wounds.’
This didn’t sound so cool to Gina. ‘What!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wasn’t going to get involved in any of your complicated Scottish dances anyway, but now I’m definitely propping up the bar.’
‘Oh yes, there will be all the non-alcoholic fruit punch you can drink,’ Suzie informed her.
‘What am I going to wear?!’ Amy wailed once again, her head in her hands.
Chapter Ten
‘ARE YOU G
OING into town?’ Niffy asked at breakfast on the actual day of the actual Year Four summer ball. Finally the long awaited event had arrived!
‘Yeah, just as soon as we’ve finished,’ Amy told her. ‘They’ve had to do a few alterations, but my dress is going to be ready to collect just as soon as the doors open this morning.’ There was no disguising the excitement in her voice. She had finally found it – the dream dress. The dress that would be the envy of every single girl at the ball.
‘Well, it’s just . . . I thought maybe I’d go in with you and you could help me look in Topshop, because I’m still not sorted out.’
Amy looked at Niffy in disbelief. ‘What!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s today, Niffy. Tonight. You can’t go in your jodhpurs, you know.’
‘Shame really,’ Niffy growled.
‘I don’t know if I’ve got time to help you look,’ Amy said. ‘Gina and I were going to go in, get the dress, buy some new lipsticks, then come back here and do our hair, our nails, our make-up . . . you know.’
‘Amy, it’s eight thirty-five a.m.,’ Min reminded her.
‘OK, here’s the plan,’ Niffy instructed. ‘We set off after breakfast, you and Gina go to Harvey Nicks, I go to Topshop, then at twelve thirty we meet in the Arts Café. You have to be ready by then, Amy,’ she warned. ‘You have to have the new dress, the new shoes, the new blusher, new lip gloss, new hair gel and whatever else it is you need. Then we’ll have a coffee to perk us all up and head back here with hours to spare before the seven-thirty start. What about you, Min? Are you coming with us?’
Min set down the large glass of orange juice she was drinking and answered, ‘Amy’s lending me something, so I’m fine. I’ve got to put in some training this morning. I’m so slow. Grinding to a standstill.’
Just then, Selina Davis, one of their fellow Year Four boarders, returned to the table, gingerly dangling two fresh pieces of toast in her fingernails, with the news: ‘You do know that it’s Daffodil’s turn to wash up after breakfast today.’
The groan this brought from the four girls was so loud and so heartfelt that the Neb scuttled over from her table at the dining-room window to find out what was wrong.