My Friend Miranda

by Im Griffin

“Have one of my sandwiches,” Miranda offered, but I declined and then regretted it immediately.

  Things just went downhill from there. We were chucked out of our favourite music practise room because Esmerelda Napier had her cello grade eight that morning and wanted to warm up. Miranda and I hated Esmerelda because she was brilliant at the cello whereas we were rubbish, and she was also one of those irritating cellists who insist on swaying around and tossing their waist-length hair all over the place. Of course there were other practise rooms free when Esmerelda initiated negotiations to get ours, but by the time she had successfully booted us out (by threatening to tell Mrs Bingley about the Ribena on the piano keys), all the practise rooms were full. That meant we had to trudge up to our form room, only to find everyone revising for a French test that I’d never even heard of.

  Despite frantic preparations I messed up the French test, and in art I got my self-portrait back with C-plus, ‘rather unimaginative’ written on it. I was incensed. Surely the whole point of a portrait was that no imagination whatsoever was required? Or perhaps I was supposed to have dreamt up a whole new appearance for myself: I quite fancied being a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with flowing auburn hair and an artistic, sculpted nose. Would that have earned me an A? By break time I was thoroughly fed up, not to mention very itchy in the tights department and completely starving, and my only thoughts were on getting myself to the school tuck shop and ingesting as much sugar as possible.

  I was just packing my bag ready for the next lessons when I became aware of Vikki and Trisha eyeing me up from bitch corner. They cackled amongst themselves for a while and then Trisha called out, “Oh my God! Have you seen Pritchard’s hair?”

  It was true that my hair was not at its best. I had gone to bed the night before with it still wet, and risen in the morning to discover it forming a bizarre ridge along one side of my head. Normally I found that smoothing it down with a damp face cloth did the trick, but I’d been too preoccupied with the trawl for tights to get round to such petty things. I hadn’t even had breakfast, for crying out loud!

  Trisha’s first comment achieved some weak sniggering and deciding there was additional mileage in this particular joke, she continued with, “She looks like a right dog, doesn’t she?”

  I thought this was going too far. My hair may have been ridiculous, but there was no call for wanton nastiness. In the usual way of things I’d have smiled weakly and shuffled off to the tuck shop, but today I’d just had enough.

  “At least my hair hasn’t been bleached until it looks like a straw-coloured bog brush! Give me the natural look over your birds nest of split ends any day.”

  There was a stunned silence. I thought I’d better quit while I was still ahead so I marched out pronto, aware of everyone staring at me.

  Miranda caught up with me as I zoomed down the corridor. “Janet, that wascool. But I don’t think Trisha’s too chuffed.”

  “Tell me about it.” The enormity of what I had done was beginning to strike home. I would be tormented endlessly by Vikki and Trisha and ostracised by the whole class. No doubt they’d start by thinking of some awful nickname for me. What would it be, Lardy Chardy? Prissy Pritchard? God, I needed that mars bar more than ever.

  I left it until the last minute possible to go to maths in the hope that Miss Heaney would already be there, but for once she was late. I walked over to my desk like a condemned man going to the scaffold, feeling the poisonous looks from Vikki and Trisha searing into my flesh. This was going to be just as bad as I’d imagined. However, I’d barely sat down before Geeta, Rachel and Sinead were there by my desk. “Hey Janet, congratulations! You told that old cow.”

  “You’d better not speak to me,” I moaned miserably. “My days on this planet are numbered.”

  “Have no fear,” Geeta said, winking slyly at me. “The whole class is on your side. She can’t touch you!”

  At this point Miss Heaney arrived and so I didn’t have time to voice my doubts. In fact though, in the days ahead Geeta was proved right. Not that Vikki and Trisha were prepared to let it go completely. They still looked at me as if I were the scum of the earth and muttered unpleasant things about me just within earshot. But the mass mobilisation of the whole class versus me never happened, and if anything my popularity increased for a while. Gradually Vikki and Trisha moved onto ignoring me and then back to our previous uneasy relationship, and I assumed they had removed my name from their list of potential victims because they didn’t say anything really nasty again.

  We could always console ourselves with the knowledge that however bad Vikki and Trisha got, there were bound to be other people further down the pile who were having an even worse time of it. On the occasions when Miranda and I were unfortunate enough to catch the 20X bus into town we were repelled by the sight of Eileen Fisher, a seriously sad case from one of the other classes, who was so desperate for human contact that she attempted to bribe the prep girls with sweets and ice-pops. Most evenings the ice-pops just melted into coloured liquid inside her nerdy leather briefcase, but occasionally a couple of the bolder girls would rudely snatch her offerings and escape to safety on the upper deck, comfortable in the knowledge that Eileen, with her protruding elbows and oversized feet, could not possibly make it through the crush of bodies on the stairs.

  Eileen was truly repulsive. Her skin was ravaged by eczema and pre-pubescent acne, her nose was always running, and her lips were chapped, with an ugly red patch around them where she had tried to moisten the sores with saliva. She had tight greasy curls which grew outwards rather than downwards, resulting in a comical Afro effect, and earning her the nickname ‘pube-head’. If forced to communicate with her, it was best to keep your distance, as her breath stank of boiled eggs and picked herrings.

  Even Miranda had the good sense to realise that Eileen was a no-go area, but unfortunately her mum had other ideas. Miranda’s mum had met Eileen’s mum at one of the school open evenings and taken pity on her, as the only mother with a small child in tow (the other mothers would not have dreamed of anything soinappropriate), and someone clearly rather out of her depth. Mrs Sturdy had been touched by the story of the battle fought for Eileen’s place at our venerated establishment, coming as she did from a deadly primary school, which would nowadays be classified as ‘failing’, and considered it Miranda’s Christian duty to offer Eileen the olive branch of friendship.

  Miranda might have got out of it had geography not conspired against her; Eileen only lived a mile from Miranda, going from fairly pleasant Salford to horrendous, urine-scented, ganglands Salford, and they were therefore ideally situated for visiting one another. Miranda related with shudders Eileen’s visit to her house in the August prior to school starting.

  “We were having tea and she wasn’t saying anything, just eating really fast, even though mum hadn’t served her own yet, and then suddenly she let out this really loud fart. And it wasn’t just a noise, you know, it smelt disgusting...”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “Did anyone say anything?”

  “No, how could we? But she went bright red, so we knew she’d done it. Ben made some crappy joke when she’d gone, but mum told him off”.

  I found Eileen completely unbearable, and even though I too was supposed to be a Christian and therefore in a position to be nice to Eileen, I just couldn’t do it. Had she been pathetically grateful for the scraps of kindness we threw our way I might have tried harder, but she wasn’t: she was cocky and argumentative and considered herself a supreme authority on any subject.

  Take for example the argument about physics that Eileen, Miranda and I had on the bus into Manchester, in those first few weeks of term before I had vowed never to speak to Eileen again. It was unbearably tedious, but only through relating it can I demonstrate how awful she was.

  We had been learning the equations ‘work done = force multiplied by distance moved’ and ‘power = work done divided by time taken’ and we had been told to calculate our individual power. To do this you neede
d three numbers: your weight; the height of the flight of stairs outside the lab, which Mrs Donaldson measured with her extra-long tape-measure; and the time it took you to race up the stairs. The work you had done against gravity was your weight multiplied by ten multiplied by the height of the stairs, and then you divided it by your time to get your own personal power.

  Inevitably, the exercise had turned into a competition to see who was the most powerful. It should only have taken a few minutes for us all to run up the stairs but instead it went on for a whole lesson as we raced up again and again in attempts to improve our times. Honey had been appointed as time-keeper and came in for increasing abuse from people who didn’t like the results she gave them. In the end Mrs Donaldson had to intervene when Honey was reduced to tears by Vikki Charlton, who had failed for the fourth time to break the ten-second barrier and condemned Honey as a ‘useless heap of blubber’. We were all sent back into the lab and I was pretty disappointed because it had been my go next, and I had been sure I would improve if I used Jasmine Allardyce’s two-at-a-time technique.

  After we had all calculated our power and the results had been put into a table on the board it became evident that the heaviest people had done the best: Lynn Docherty had come top and she wasn’t remotely fit, just pretty fat. Although I had managed a good time my low weight meant that I ranked somewhere in the middle, and Miranda was irritatingly more powerful than me because she weighed more.

  Miranda and I were discussing the weight versus speed issue on the way home when Eileen Fisher interrupted us. “We did that last week. What was your power then?”

  I didn’t want to tell her but Miranda was still glowing from her relative success and piped up, “Two hundred and seventy-seven Watts.”

  “Is that all?” Eileen scoffed. “Mine was three hundred and five.”

  We looked at each other in disbelief. No one in our class had got more than three hundred.

  “Were you the best then?” Miranda asked.

  Eileen smirked and shrugged. “No. Katie got three hundred and seventeen.”

  I joined in the conversation against my better judgement. “Your class must have calculated it differently or something to get such different results from us.”

  Eileen preened herself. “I don’t think so.”

  “Tell us what you did then.”

  Eileen began to describe their experiment and I interrupted her almost immediately in triumph.

  “See! You ran up a different staircase from us.”

  She answered me in an infuriatingly smug voice as if I was particularly stupid.

  “No because the staircase doesn’t make any difference. If it’s higher then you just have a longer time, so it all balances out.”

  “I know that!” I could have thumped her. “But the staircase outside our lab has a big landing in it whereas yours was just straight up. That means we took longer because we had to run across the landing.”

  “No,” said Eileen. “Your power is just to do with your weight and the height you have to carry it up. Horizontal bits don’t matter.”

  I rolled my eyes at Miranda in despair. “Tell her she’s talking a load of crap Miranda.”

  Miranda looked anxious. “I don’t think you can compare the two experiments. Not when the stairs are different.”

  “Of course you can!” Eileen rejoined. “That’s the whole point of the equation.”

  And so the argument raged all the way to Piccadilly, increasing in intensity as Eileen became ever more pompous. Afterwards I was furious for allowing myself to be sucked into a conversation with her. All that mattered was that I knew I was right – I didn’t have to justify myself to Eileen. The worse thing was that she now seemed to be labouring under the misconception that Miranda and I were her friends. She would pop up from the bus seat behind us on the way home like some pube-headed gremlin, or if the bus would busy she would wedge herself up against us and breathe her foul fumes into our faces. Then as if this wasn’t enough, she began calling out when we passed her in the corridor, and even came round to our form room a couple of times.

  I was seething with frustration. “Miranda, this has got to stop. Besides the fact that I hate Eileen’s guts, people are going to start thinking that we’re her friends or something soon.”

  Despite the fact that Miranda was teased and impersonated on a regular basis we were still at a reasonable position in the class’s social register: nowhere near the top, which was obviously the preserve of Vikki and Trisha and their chosen followers, but comfortably above the likes of Honey Sanka and Emily Tate. That could all change rapidly if we were spotted hanging around with Eileen.

  “I know Eileen’s awful,” Miranda said sadly. “She’s just so difficult to get rid of.”

  I proposed a simple strategy whereby we would ignore Eileen if confronted by her in an enclosed space, such as the bus, and run away altogether if she tried to talk to us at school. Miranda wasn’t completely happy but she agreed it was the only way.

  The strategy worked a bit. The problem was that Eileen was very thick-skinned, so when we tried to ignore her she just talked away regardless – she didn’t seem to care whether she got a response or not. We managed to avoid her at school for several weeks though, and I dared to think that perhaps she had got the message. Then she had the nerve to turn up in our form room one Friday morning.

  She sidled over to the radiator where we were sitting, and I was aware of half the class watching to see what was going on, and preparing their bitchy comments for later.

  “Hey Miranda!” she called cheerily. “I wanted to ask you something.” Miranda looked despairingly at me and I rolled my eyes skywards.

  “It’s about tomorrow night,” Eileen continued.

  I had to act because I knew Miranda wouldn’t. I grabbed her arm and pulled her off the radiator. “Comeon Miranda! We’ve got music practise to do.”

  We half-marched, half-ran out of the room, and set off at a brisk pace down the corridor. When we reached the top of the stairs I made the mistake of turning round and saw Eileen just outside our classroom, staring down the corridor after us.

  “Who does she think she is?” I asked Miranda in disgust.

  The day passed by without further event but at around half past eight that night Miranda phoned me in a total panic. “Eileen’s mum just phoned mine! She wants me to go out for dinner with their whole family tomorrow night. And my mum says I have to.”

  I cursed Miranda’s inability to stand up for herself. “So what’s the big occasion?”

  “Apparently it was her birthday today.”

  “Oh.” I did feel a bit mean. Probably Eileen had gone through the whole day at school without anyone knowing or caring.

  Miranda sounded anxious. “I don’t have a choice really do I?”

  “No Miranda, I don’t suppose you do.”

  Afterwards I wished I’d been more sympathetic. Poor old Miranda had to suffer an evening with Eileen and her weird family, and on top of that I’d made her feel guilty for messing up the ‘avoiding Eileen’ strategy. But the whole thing was just soannoying.

  The inevitable outcome of Miranda’s dinner with the Fishers was that she and Eileen became closer, although you still wouldn’t exactly have called them friends. Miranda tried to weaken my defences with sob stories about Eileen’s family and their miserable lives, but I refused to listen. I didn’t want to feel sorry for Eileen on a regular basis because then I would have to be nice to her. I was probably being distinctly unchristian but I knew that to survive at school and avoid being a victim yourself you had to steer well clear of all the other victims. There was no way I was being dragged down by Eileen Fisher.

  Chapter 7

  The first time I visited Miranda’s house was the Saturday after October half term. We were planning to go swimming at her local pool, which was one of the few leisure activities available to eleven year-olds in inner city Salford. There had been much discussion of the bus-routes from my house to hers, and w
e had agreed that I would catch either the 34 or 35, which meant a twenty-minute walk at my end, but took me almost to her house. I was to stand up ready for off immediately after the Tattoo Parlour, and Miranda would be stationed at the stop waving frantically.

  As I got dressed that morning I felt miserably aware of the inadequacy of my wardrobe. Tight jeans were the fashion, but my mum didn’t like girls in jeans, and still made me wear little-girlish dresses and skirts. The only trousers I owned were a pair of checked slacks which Helen Simpson, an unpleasant girl from my old school, had amusingly dubbed ‘table cloth trousers’. In the end I put on a long blue corduroy dress, which was at least free of flowers and lace collars.

  Everything went according to plan. The bus was on time, and Miranda was thoughtfully waving a large Union Jack; a remnant, she explained, from the Royal Wedding celebrations a couple of years before. She was wearing a tartan pinafore and a green polo-neck jumper underneath her school coat, and my self-consciousness over my own childish outfit quickly evaporated. We went straight to the pool and stayed there doing handstands and competing to see who could swim the furthest underwater until our fingers were shrivelled and we were starving hungry.

  I had been invited to go back to Miranda’s house for tea, so we cut back through the council estate and turned right onto Park Road. It was an area which had once been very wealthy but had fallen on hard times. Many of the huge red-brick Victorian terraces were shabby, and banks of doorbells at the entrances listed the multiple occupants within.

  Miranda’s house itself was wonderful: the windows contained panels of original stained glass, the door was painted a vivid emerald green, and ivy crept across the brick façade. An over-laden apple tree stood in the middle of the lawn.

  “It’s great” I enthused.

  It was infinitely preferable to our faceless detached house with built-in garage, on a modern estate.

  Miranda’s parents were nice but quite old – at least ten years older than my mum and dad. They greeted me like a celebrity. “So this is the famous Janet! We’ve heard so much about you.”