My Friend Miranda

by Im Griffin

  “Miranda says you play the cello! Are you enjoying the junior orchestra?”

  “Did you have a good swim?”

  “Were there loads of soggy plasters in the changing rooms?”

  This last comment was from Miranda’s younger brother, Ben, who was quickly silenced.

  We went into a big room at the back of the house, with a bay window overlooking a tangled, overgrown garden. There were pictures on the walls and some photographs of Miranda and Ben. I homed in on one of Miranda’s class in their first communion outfits. “You were the only girl in your class to have a short dress!”

  Miranda shrugged resignedly. “I know. I wanted a long one but my Mum said it was silly.”

  “Indeed I did,” Miranda’s Mum pronounced as she came through to set the table. “Little girls in great long frilly things. Half of them couldn’t walk properly.”

  “I bet you had a long dress,” Miranda said enviously to me.

  “No actually,” I was pleased to find we had suffered similarly at the hands of our boringly sensible mothers. “My Mum borrowed two dresses from friends and one of them came right down to the floor but she made me wear the short one. Plus I had to wear my ordinary school shoes.”

  Miranda grinned and pointed to her photograph. “See that? The one girl in brown T-bar sandals!”

  And so we found something else in common. It was only a silly thing but it was somehow quite important in identifying us as two of a kind: the girls in the short dresses and sensible shoes, while all around us were miniature brides with elaborate veils and white satin slippers.

  When we sat down to dinner there was an exquisite napkin beside each plate, which Miranda sheepishly confessed to having embroidered herself. I was astounded.

  “You never said you could sew!”

  Miranda shrugged. “I can’t. Not as far as Trotter’s concerned, anyway.”

  “Now Miranda,” soothed her mother, carrying dishes through from the kitchen. “Don’t start all that again. Is Mrs Trotter really as bad as Miranda says, Janet?”

  “Well...” I fiddled with my fork. “She is pretty nasty actually.”

  “See!”

  “Oh. Well even so Miranda, I don’t think I can write that letter.”

  She looked across at me. “Miranda wants me to write to your head to be excused from needlework.”

  Ben guffawed over his lasagne. “She’s allergic to needles!”

  “Don’t be silly Ben. She’s just having problems getting on with the teacher, that’s all.”

  I could feel Miranda tensing on my left at the prospect of her relationship with Mrs Trotter being discussed at the dinner table, so I changed the subject as best as I could, pointing to the big glass jars of purple liquid in the corner of the room.

  “What kind of wine are you making?”

  “That lot’s going to be damson. We’re always brewing some kind of wine or other. But did Miranda tell you about the time the elderflower exploded all over the shed? We had an earwig infestation for weeks afterwards...”

  And so the conversation flowed, relatively smoothly, until we got to the end of the lasagne. Ben wiped his finger round his plate and let out a loud burp, presumably in some sad male attempt to show off, and Miranda turned on him furiously.

  “Ben, that’s revolting! Can’t you at least behave yourself when I have my friends round?”

  Ben clearly didn’t like being told off in public and he became sulky and aggressive. “I dunno, seeing as this is the first time you’ve had anyone round. You didn’t have any friends at Broughton, did you?”

  “Ben, that’s enough!” Miranda’s mum interjected sharply. “There’s no need to go making up nasty stories!”

  “No, it’s true! Me and me mates used to see her standing at the side of the playground on her own. It was embarrassing!”

  Miranda had stopped eating and was rapidly going red.

  “You don’t know anything! You think you’re so clever! You just wait until you go to secondary school and see how you manage!”

  “Well, it can hardly be worse than you! At least I don’t cry when I get home!”

  Miranda pushed back her chair and got to her feet clumsily, upending the salt dish and spilling salt all over the table.

  “That’s even more bad luck!” Ben crowed as she left the room.

  He received a sharp slap on the side of his head from Miranda’s dad and began to sob noisily. I felt rather awkward and unsure of what I should do next. I still had quite a lot of dinner left because I’d been eating slowly out of politeness, but it hardly seemed appropriate to pick up my fork and get stuck in again. On the other hand, I didn’t want Miranda’s mum to think I hadn’t liked it. Fortunately, she picked up on my discomfort and helped me out.

  “Why don’t you go and fetch Miranda for pudding, Janet? She’ll be in her room; right at the top with the pink door.”

  “Ok,” I could hardly wait to get out of there. “The lasagne was very nice, thank you.”

  I climbed the two flights of stairs to Miranda’s room, and tapped gingerly on the pink door. There was no reply but I went in anyway, seeing as I could hardly go back downstairs without her. She was sitting on her bed stroking some tatty-looking bit of blanket.

  “Are you alright, Miranda? Don’t worry about your brother; they’re all the same. In fact, if anything mine is worse, he does a kind of running sports commentary instead of talking properly, and it isso irritating.”

  Miranda smiled weakly but made no comment, so I felt obliged to keep going.

  “Like when he gets up to change channels on the TV, he feels he has to tell everyone about it.”

  I pinched my nose with my fingers and put on my best Tom whine. “And he’s making a bid for ITV, yes, he’s definitely moving towards it...oh! Will he make it? Yes, he’s closer, he’s almost there, it’s within his grasp...Yes! And what a channel change that was! The crowd are in raptures...”

  My voice tailed off weakly. Nancy and Ella always thought it was hilarious when I did my impression of Tom, but maybe you had to live with him to appreciate it.

  Miranda was muttering something into her blanket.

  “It’s not true I had no friends at my old school. Ben always says that and it’s not fair.”

  I resigned myself to an in-depth analysis of her previous friendships.

  “So what was it like at your old school?”

  “It was generally fine. There was just a group of three or four girls who were really nasty, and spent all their time picking on everyone else.

  “Oh yes. There’s always some of them.”

  I knew there could be nothing as spiteful as little girls. The boys at primary school hadn’t seemed to operate the same sophisticated systems of bullying and mass victimisation, mainly because their social interaction was on a much more basic level – they just grunted at one another and ran around after a football – but the scenes which had taken place in the female-dominated far-flung corners of the school grounds had been fairly gruesome at times.

  The chief bully had been Helen Simpson, an abrasive blonde who had a different best friend every other week. At morning break a ritual was enacted, whereby girls fawned around Helen, vying for the privilege to sit on her table at lunch. Most of us ate school dinners, but Helen demonstrated her elite status by bringing a packed lunch, complete with a can of coke and a chocolate bar. The packed lunch brigade were not allowed into the hall until fifteen or twenty minutes after the school dinner sitting, and the chosen three girls would therefore have to eat slowly, to ensure they were only half-way through their meals when Helen arrived. A miserable fourth person who was ‘saving’ Helen’s place would have to eat as quickly as possible and refuse any seconds, vacating the goddess’s seat immediately upon her arrival.

  Just as Helen’s ‘in’ group varied, so did the poor unfortunates at the other end of the scale. Helen would choose her victim on a whim – her clothes were wrong, or she had a funny way of running, and would launch
into a concentrated campaign of mental and physical abuse. The victim would be completely cut off from the rest of the school because everyone was too scared of Helen to consider going near her. Then, just before complacency set in among the other wearers of crap clothes and funny runners, Helen would tire of the cowed appearance of the current victim and would move on to someone else.

  Although I had never suffered personally, I remembered ‘playing’ alongside her while she repeatedly humiliated another girl by forcing her to bend over and be smacked with a tennis racket because she kept getting the rules of the game wrong. It was not hard to imagine how that other girl could have been Miranda.

  I told all this to Miranda, and she seemed to perk up a bit. Perhaps Helen Simpson came across as even worse than the bullies from her primary school. At any rate, she abandoned her soggy blanket and came back downstairs for ice-cream. Miranda and I were allowed to do our own chocolate sauce and hundreds and thousands, but Ben was still in disgrace and was given a gratifyingly small squirt of sauce by Miranda’s mum.

  After seconds Miranda led me to the back door.

  “I’ve got something to show you. Just wait while I get the key.”

  She fumbled around in one of the drawers and produced a key and a torch.

  “I always take the torch in case Ben’s left his skateboard out for me to fall over.”

  We stumbled down the garden path, giggling and making owl noises. Some of the bushes were so overgrown that Miranda had to hold the branches back and pass them to me to stop them twanging into my face. At the bottom of the garden there was a dilapidated-looking shed, and Miranda unlocked the door and ushered me inside, gesturing that I should be quiet.

  It took a while for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, so I heard them before I saw them, a series of squeaks and rustlings. Then Miranda shone her torch into the middle and I was able to make out a huge cage, with two great furry things rooting around inside it.

  “Rabbits?” I said unsurely.

  “No, you nit! They’re guinea pigs!”

  “Oh.” The only guinea pig I’d seen before was my cousin’s, and it wasn’t much bigger than a hamster. These were like small dogs.

  Miranda was undoing the hatch at the side of the cage.

  “Do you want to hold one?”

  I wasn’t sure. “Suppose it tries to make a bid for freedom?” I knew this tended to be the way with hamsters and gerbils.

  Miranda laughed. “They won’t. They know where the food comes from.”

  She picked up a gingery one with a big white spot on its back and deposited it into my arms, tucking a piece of lettuce in beside its nose.

  “They love lettuce but they can’t have too much because it gives them diarrhoea.”

  I felt the way I feel when you’re visiting someone who’s just had a baby and they thrust it upon you – convinced that it’s going to do something unpleasant on your knee. However, for Miranda’s sake I tried gently stroking the guinea pig and it was actually quite nice, with a comforting smell of warm straw.

  “That’s Uncle Roger you’ve got,” Miranda said. “We named him after our real Uncle Roger because they’ve got the same colour hair.”

  I chucked him gently under his chin. “Hello Uncle Roger. I’m going to put you back now in case you’re missing your friends.” I gently manoeuvred him back into the cage, and he was immediately approached by the big black one, whose attention had been caught by the piece of lettuce still dangling from Uncle Roger’s mouth.

  “Angela!” scolded Miranda. “Oh well, I suppose it is time you were having your tea.”

  We changed their water and filled the feeding tray with carrot, cabbage and a carefully rationed pile of lettuce, which Angela set about demolishing.

  “You’ll regret it Angela,” Miranda warned her, and then we had to go back inside to ask her Dad about driving me home. In the car we had Miranda’s Paul McCartney tape on and her Dad told us it was a big con because most of the songs were by the Beatles, and so Paul McCartney was making easy money from people like me and Miranda who didn’t remember them from the first time round.

  As luck would have it, in the week following our conversation about bullies Miranda had her first serious run-in with the ones from our class. It happened as a result of a particularly awful but very funny dance lesson.

  In general dance was proving every bit as terrible as I’d imagined. For a start, we weren’t allowed to wear our gym skirts, but had to present ourselves in just our aertex shirts and black knickers. It wasn’t so bad for me because I was fairly skinny, but for the podgier girls like Honey, Lynn and Miranda, it was hideously embarrassing.

  Then there was Mrs Mistletoe, the senile old fool who played the piano. I think that the dance lessons were the highlight of her week, and either she paid the school for the privilege or she was on some kind of occupational therapy programme, because she couldn’t play the piano to save her life. She was so keen that she was always ready at the piano stool when we filed in, with her handbag placed primly on the chair beside her, and one of her collection of ridiculous hats balancing precariously on her head.

  “Good morning girls,” she would beam, and we’d mutter something unintelligible and huddle into a shivering knot at the far end of the gym. There wasn’t much point talking to her anyway: she was deaf as a post and off her tree into the bargain.

  Next Miss Timpson would bounce in wearing her shiny padded tracksuit – no goose pimples on her legs - and explain whatever stupid theme she’d dreamt up for the lesson.

  “Today we’re going to do the sea during a storm, crashing down onto the rocks. I want these girls here to cluster into this corner and be the rocks – you, you and you, yes Vikki, there’s no reason why you’re not suited as a rock.” She stuck her elbows out and moved heavily from one foot to another to demonstrate the dance of the rocks.

  “Then all of this group here can be the sea. You need to stand in a line, no Geeta, facing the rocks, and then I want to see you moving backwards and forwards with the tide, until the storm breaks and you crash down onto the rocks!”

  The sea sullenly arranged itself into a raggedly line. I was on the end next to Geeta, who was grumbling away to herself; she was captain of the inter-form netball team and was livid that we were wasting our time ‘prancing around’ when we could have been practising.

  With the rocks and the sea spoken for the only people left were Jasmine and Miranda. Miss Timpson was acting as if they’d won a prize or something.

  “And you two, Jasmine and Miranda, you will be the boat! Link arms to make a boat, that’s right, try and loosen up a bit Jasmine dear. Now when the storm starts your boat is going to be struggling against those huge waves.”

  “We could capsize even,” Miranda suggested.

  “Yes Miranda, excellent, excellent! And then perhaps you could manage to right yourselves, and we’ll see your relief at the end when you’re bobbing up and down on a calm sea once more.”

  She rubbed her hands as if in eager anticipation of the dramatic feast that lay ahead and walked over to the piano. “Now Mrs Mistletoe, do you think you can play us something suitable?”

  Mrs Mistletoe cocked her head sideways and embarked on some dreary dirge meant to represent the sea at rest. We held hands and trudged backwards and forwards listlessly.

  “You are the sea!” entreated Miss Timpson. “Feel the flow of the waves.”

  She noticed the rocks, who were venting their frustration by stomping around for all they were worth.

  “Stand still rocks! We don’t want you moving until the storm begins.”

  They subsided and stood with their hands on their hips, looking decidedly fed up.

  “But for goodness sake don’t stand like that!” Miss Timpson shouted. “Stand like a rock!

  Jasmine and Miranda were in front of the waves, making a kind of swaying action with their arms that Miss Timpson considered appropriate for a boat. Jasmine was rigid and scowling, but Miranda was totally
absorbed in the whole ridiculous exercise, she was even making little paddling movements with her hands to push herself through the water.

  “Good Miranda good!” Miss Timpson praised. “At least someone is making an effort!”

  Personally I found Miranda’s enthusiasm for dance entirely unfathomable. She was normally so disdainful of girlie activities, and yet once a week at the Broughton Sports Centre she attended modern dance classes where they presumably did just this kind of thing. I had put it to her that dancing was sissie, and that she might as well just wear a frilly tutu and pink tights and have done with it, but she persisted in stating that while ballet was indeed for sissies, modern dance was ‘cool’ and not at all lacking in street cred. She was even prepared to come out and say thatThe Kids from Fame was her favourite television programme.

  The calm bit seemed to have gone on forever and even Miss Timpson was getting bored. She gestured to Mrs Mistletoe and attempted to drum up some enthusiasm amongst the sea.

  “And now the waves are bigger and bigger! Can you feel your movements growing wilder and more intense? Rocks – prepare yourselves for the onslaught! At any moment the storm will break!”

  “Charge!” muttered Trisha, loud enough for the rest of the sea to hear it, but too quiet for Miss Timpson who was standing by the piano and attempting to whip Mrs Mistletoe’s playing into a stormy frenzy. Still holding hands, we surged forwards like the Hokey-cokey-cokey gone out of control. We smashed the boat clean in two and threw ourselves against the rocks, several of whom went down under the impact. There were shouts of pain and colourful seafarers’ curses.

  “Stop that now!” shouted Miss Timpson. “Do you hear me, stop at once!” The ranks of the sea had just been reforming for a second charge, but we came to a guilty halt, and stood sheepishly with our hands hanging by our sides. Mrs Mistletoe soldiered on oblivious, and Miss Timpson had to bang on the lid of the piano to make her stop playing. The wounded were picking themselves up from the floor and inspecting their limbs for cuts and bruises. Jasmine was almost in tears.