My Friend Miranda

by Im Griffin

  “Very good dear, that’s the spirit.” Matron gestured towards a door in the far corner of the hall and moved off up the stairs with Mrs Donaldson and the rest of the group, her crooked teeth flashing under the glaring fluorescent light as she told the story of the to-do in the blue room.

  Miranda matched off towards our allocated room.

  “Miranda!” I hissed. “Wait a minute!”

  She turned round with her hand on the door. “What?”

  “Well...do you know what we’re supposed to do when we get in there?”

  “Just talk to them, you prat!”

  “Yes, but what about?”

  “Don’t worry,” she turned the handle. “You’ll think of something.”

  There were five old men sitting in high-backed armchairs in the mauve room, which looked more puce than mauve to me. Miranda plonked herself down next to the man in the far corner, leaving me to scan the room anxiously before selecting one at random. It turned out that I had picked a dud. He met all my attempts at conversation with a bemused silence, and on one occasion even gave an irritated twitch when I lent forward in an effort to make myself heard and momentarily got in the way of the television.

  Fortunately Matron passed by the open door and noticed my predicament.

  She came in and without making any attempt to lower her voice said to me, “Oh, don’t bother with him, he’s mad as a hatter. Sometimes we forget to switch the telly on and he sits and stares at it just the same. Go and talk to Dr Sharman in the corner, he’s a proper gentleman, he is.”

  I approached Dr Sharman warily, but he was already pulling a chair out for me and extending a hand to introduce himself. “Good afternoon, young lady! What a pleasant surprise.”

  Dr Sharman seemed completely with it, and, what was more, he was quite interesting. He used to live quite close to me and he told me what it had been like before they built our estate, when there was a pond with frogspawn and acres of long grass for making dens in. A few minutes into the conversation I was starting to feel really sorry for him. He was just so, well,normal. What must it be like, sitting in here with all your faculties intact, smelling that cocktail of cabbage and urine and having only a few dribbling nutters to talk to? Then he went and blew it.

  “Did you meet the Matron on your way in?” he asked, inclining his head towards me and lowering his voice.

  “Yes,” I said innocently. “She seems very nice.”

  “Ah yes, indeed she does. But she’s trying to kill us you know.”

  I was shocked. “How?”

  “Arsenic in the porridge my dear. Best way to kill someone without leaving any traces. Builds up slowly to the critical level, and then caput! Doctors just think it’s a heart attack.”

  I was beginning to realise this couldn’t be true. “Why would she do that?”

  “For money of course! Out for what she can get when we go. Now for most of this lot it doesn’t matter anyway,” he gestured towards his fellow inmates. “The State’s paying for them, so the best she’ll do is a watch or a few antique bits and pieces. But for someone like me, with a doctor’s pension! I’m a prime target, basically, a sitting duck.”

  He began to get quite agitated, and I was immensely relieved when Matron came in to say it was time for the men’s dinner. She took in the flushed and excited appearance of Dr Sharman and gave me a sharp look, as if to say ‘and what have you been doing to him’? I accompanied her to Miranda’s corner, where a noisy game of chess was in progress.

  “She’s a godsend this one, a real treasure,” the old man told Matron proudly.

  “You won’t be saying that when it’s check mate!” Miranda cackled.

  Matron was positively beside herself with delight. “I haven’t seen you this lively for years Frank. But the young lady has to go home now.”

  “Oh, is she off?” his bottom lip trembled. “But we haven’t finished our game yet.”

  “Don’t worry Frank, look here,” Miranda was busily clearing a shelf in the bookcase behind her. “We’ll put the board up here and finish off next time. Just remember you’re white, ok?”

  “Alright duck, you’re on. We might fit in a quick poker session an’ all.” I wondered it Miranda knew how to play poker already. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

  Miranda gave Frank’s lumpy shoulder a squeeze, and we scurried out after Matron, who was still shaking her head in amazement.

  “Well I never. Frank Doolan, the most miserable man on the planet.”

  The atmosphere on the bus back into town was one of jubilation. Matron had told Mrs Donaldson about Frank’s transformation, and even Nancy was impressed.

  “I could never get him to say anything to me. Just the odd comment about the war and a lot of empty silences.”

  “So what’s your secret then Miranda?” Mrs Donaldson asked.

  Miranda shrugged proudly. “I don’t know really, I’ve just always got on with old people. My mum says it’s because I have no shame – I’ll talk to them about anything.”

  Nancy held her hands out pleadingly. “Well, you can have a crack at Mrs Ogilvie next time as well. She says she’s tired of me going on about pop groups she’s never heard of.”

  And so it was that Miranda became the darling of Hilton House. I managed a little better over time – I even befriended a couple of old ladies who became quite fond of me – but it was Miranda that everyone asked for, and Miranda who went away at Christmas weighed down with boxes of chocolates twenty years past their sell-by-dates, and a selection of half-used old lady perfumes.

  Chapter 5

  As the weeks went by, Miranda and I developed our own special routines, revolving largely around the journeys to and from school. We caught separate first buses in the morning, but met in Piccadilly at half past seven to get our second bus together. Miranda wouldn’t have travelled so early through choice, but I liked riding on near-empty buses with no school kids in sight, and so I nagged her mercilessly until she began to get up earlier. My mum thought I was crazy to be leaving the house when it was still dark. “You’ll have to get your own breakfast if you intend to leave at seven every morning.”

  “Fine,” I replied.

  The truth was that I liked making my own breakfast, because Miranda and I had hit on the concept of our own proper ‘breakfast club’, consisting of a veritable feast consumed on the second bus.

  It began fairly tamely: Miranda was running too late to eat her breakfast one morning and grabbed a half-packet of cream crackers from the tin at home, which we nibbled from our usual position in the front right hand seat on the top deck. The journey was so much more fun with consumables, and we decided that we might as well have sandwiches at leisure on the bus as shovel down toast in a panic at home. The next day I turned up with a great wedge of brown bread and peanut butter, and Miranda had sandwich spread and whole pickled onions – the other advantage of preparing your own breakfast was that you could have just what you wanted without any busybodies interfering.

  Miranda was definitely the queen of exotic breakfasts. I sometimes varied my menu with the odd plum or apple after my peanut butter sandwiches, but my efforts were feeble alongside the contents of her Tupperware box. Her sandwiches were crammed with illicitly fried eggs and sausages, and oozed ketchup down the front of her duffle coat, or if they had baked potatoes for dinner she would persuade her mum to cook an extra one, and bring it onto the bus wrapped in tin foil. These delights were washed down with hot Ribena or coffee from a plastic thermos flask.

  I was grateful for the bits of sausage and cups of my Ribena coming my way, but the only downside to Miranda’s breakfast were the strong odours which wafted down the bus, causing fellow passengers to stare at us in curiosity and occasionally irritation, especially if it was an egg day.

  The next part of our morning routine was playing the piano in one of the music practise rooms. Sometimes if one of us panicking about an imminent music lesson we would practise separately, but usually we went in room nu
mber nine together and just messed around. Room number nine was our favourite because the piano sounded really nice, and also because it was angled so that from the door you couldn’t see the person playing or the person lurking in the corner. We’d stay there plonking away happily and drinking the remnants of the Ribena until about a quarter to nine, when it was time to trudge upstairs to give in our homework and get our books ready.

  Going home was obviously the most important part of the day, and it didn’t take long for Miranda and me to get it down to a fine art. The aim of the game was to get out of school as quickly as possible, thus catching a super-early bus with preferably no other school kids in sight. We were well-conversed with the various options: if we were really early we might make the 23, otherwise we could bomb it down past the lights for the 21 or the 176, and only on the direst days would we be forced to mix with the black-uniformed masses on the 20X. Nancy thought I was pathetic and said so, but she didn’t understand the adrenaline rush of running for the 23 and making it, and then sailing off into town knowing we’d be home before half past four.

  Obviously, being first out of school required skill, cunning and powerful leg muscles. For example, we were not supposed to collect our coats from the lockers until the end of the day, but there were precious seconds to be saved by getting the coats at lunchtime and carrying them around under our arms, to make them less obvious to the teachers. Miss Heaney was the only one who always spotted you had your coat, but she was so uptight about people missing lessons that she would never send you to your locker to put it back. Then there was the preparation at the end of the last lesson; ideally you would have put everything away before the bell went, but some teachers were a bit funny about this, so the best ploy was to leave one book on your desk and pretend to be utterly engrossed in it. Then as soon as the bell went: geronimo! You were out of that classroom and racing down the corridors faster than a bat out of hell.

  It took us a bit longer to work out what to do at lunchtime. At my primary school we had spent our lunchtimes playing games: running games like Scarecrows, British Bulldogs and Tiggy on the Yellow Lines, or more contained girls-only pursuits such as elastics, skipping and hopscotch. These things went in cycles; there had been one long summer when we played elastics non-stop for weeks, and Nancy and I had practised at home by tying our elastic round the legs of the kitchen stools. As we got into third and fourth year juniors there had been an increased tendency for the girls to hang around in little gossipy groups, either leaning against the wall that ran along one side of the playground, or huddled in the corner near the bins, but this got boring after a while, and besides which, it was often too cold to keep still.

  Here we were allowed to stay inside so there wasn’t the same need to generate body heat, but even more so, playing games clearly wasn’t the done thing. Sitting on your desk reading Smash Hits or Just Seventeen was cool; playing Tig outside was not. Or at least, it was acceptable if you were Vikki and Trisha and played Tig in an ironic kind of way, with lots of screeching and hair-tossing and adjusting of clothing, but not ok for the likes of Miranda and me. Instead we wandered around outside, or went to the music block if we could get a free practise room.

  Failing all else, we just sat in our classroom and did our homework, which at least meant there was less to do at home. The teachers didn’t like it and would tell you off if they saw you but I didn’t understand what their problem was, since at least it was getting done. Miranda’s theory was that they had load of books to mark in the evenings and couldn’t bear the thought of us lounging around watchingTop of the Pops, and I think she was probably right.

  One particularly mild day towards the end of October, Miranda and I were sitting on a wall in the paved area behind the dinner hall, feeling slightly discontented after a morning when we had been threatened with both a maths test and a science test, and a lunch of steak and kidney pie, with no steak in evidence but plenty of slimy bits of kidney. I decided we needed some action.

  “Hey Miranda, do you know how to play German hopscotch?”

  “What, where you have to throw a stone to land on a square? I was never much good at it.”

  “No, that’s plain old English hopscotch. German’s much better and there are no stones involved.”

  Miranda looked doubtful but she agreed that things were pretty boring as they stood at the moment, and helped me find a stone to scratch numbers onto the paving stones. A quick explanation of the rules and we were off.

  German hopscotch is completely different from English hopscotch in that there is no throwing of stones to govern where you jump, rather, the skill is in your jumping ability, and in particular you need to be able to turn in mid-air so that you are facing the right way for your next jump. The squares are numbered in a grid from one to ten, and the bigger the squares the further you have to jump – the paved garden was quite a challenge because the paving stones were huge.

  I went first, and bounced my way neatly through the routine: first one to ten; then two, four, six, eight, ten; then three, six, nine; four eight five ten off. You’re allowed up to three twisters, which is when you’ve landed facing the wrong way and you swivel your feet round on the spot to point yourself in the right direction, but I was a pro and didn’t need any. Having completed the course without making any mistakes, I had to choose a square, which Miranda then had to remember not to jump on. I picked four as I always do, because it comes up a lot. Also the ultimate tactical aim is to have four, five and six, because then the other person has to jump from three to seven and it’s practically impossible.

  Next it was Miranda’s turn. She started off slowly, thinking about each jump before she made it, and smirking triumphantly at me each time she successfully avoided my square. As she grew more confident she speeded up and then she forgot and jumped on four when she was starting the four times table.

  “Oh!” Her immediate moan of disappointment was so heartfelt that I let her off and said she could still pick a square. She went for six, which meant that my master plan was foiled, but I could still get five and make things pretty tricky for her.

  In fact it was Miranda who did the tactical playing and me who ended up facing all the nasty jumps. During my second go I became careless and landed on a line, and although Miranda was prepared to give me another chance I felt it was only fair to stand down. Then she made it faultlessly through her turn and picked five herself, causing me to muck up the next time too when I didn’t quite make it from four to seven. From then onwards I tried harder and I didn’t lose another go, but then neither did Miranda, which meant that when every square was taken she had six and I had only four.

  German hopscotch soon became a standard thing to fall back on when there was nothing else to do. Miranda was addicted and even practised on her own – I know because I saw the pitch she drew on her drive at home - and she would try to get me to play while we waited at bus-stops or when we were supposed to be dribbling hockey balls round cones. We didn’t advertise what we were doing because we knew we’d only be teased, but some of the girls who had fewer pretensions to coolness asked to join in, and I like to think that we were trend-setters in our own way.

  It was a shame Miranda wasn’t as good at other sports as she was at German hopscotch. Although the old cliché about being last to be picked for team games wasn’t exactly true, since we did after all have Honey in our class, she was still rather an unpopular choice, and then inevitably ended up either as a back in hockey or as wing defence if we were playing netball. This was partly due to her asthma – she made such a drama if she had to run anywhere that the game had to be halted while she fussed around with her inhaler, but there was also a misconception that Miranda’s squat stature might prove useful for defensive purposes. In fact she was such a wimp that all an attacking player had to do was charge straight at her, whereby she would cower and jump out of the way, leaving the attacker with a clear run at goal.

  The only sport Miranda was really good at was swimming. Her asthma
seemed less of a problem in the water than on dry land and she was strangely graceful, her stumpy arms and legs propelling her along at high speed. Her nickname in swimming lessons was ‘Moby’ and she was even chosen to do butterfly in the inter-form swimming, although she lost by half a length to some show-off from 1O with a Speedo cap and yellow-tinted goggles.

  If PE lessons constituted shaky ground for Miranda though, needlework was far worse. That first Friday had only been a sign of things to come, and in time Miranda and I grew to truly hate Mrs Trotter. She had a catalogue of irritating little rhymes and phrases which she chanted repeatedly to remind us what we supposed to be doing, but the problem was that if you had missed out on the original explanations her gems of wisdom were entirely incomprehensible, and nothing infuriated Mrs Trotter more than a blank stare. In the interests of self-preservation I did my best to keep up: ‘mummy, daddy, baby’ was for when you were doing tailor tacks, and was supposed to remind you to do three different-sized loops; ‘diamonds are a girl’s best friend’ meant that you should not cut through the diamonds on a pattern on pain of death; and ‘1-2-3, 1-2-3’ was for fastening on and off with a sewing machine.

  Unfortunately Miranda just didn’t seem to have the right kind of mind for these things, and needlework lessons represented a steady downward spiral for her. Never a Friday went by without a comic interlude when Miranda’s uneven stitching would be held aloft for the class’s amusement, although she was by no means the only one to feel the sharp edge of Mrs Trotter’s tongue. A group of several of us had begun to emerge, dubbed ‘the lemons’, and we could frequently be found slaving long into the lunch hour over unpicked stitches and contrary machines. Furthermore, with the exception of her ‘stars’, Mrs Trotter was a fickle creature, and would turn on anyone who happened to get on her nerves, reducing them to tears within minutes. However, Miranda’s role as chief lemon, or ‘the slow one’, as Mrs Trotter came to call her, seemed almost inevitable.