by Im Griffin
The ensuing four minutes was the most magical time of my whole life. I don’t know how, and I could never repeat it, but for some reason I was able to playThe Swan perfectly, note after note swelling out to fill the great space of the Free Trade Hall. At first I couldn’t quite believe it, and waited resignedly for the first dud note to sound, but as the piece progressed I stopped worrying and actually began to enjoy my performance. All eyes in the orchestra were fixed on me, the violins taking their timing from my bow strokes, and Mrs Bingley had stopped conducting and was standing with her eyes closed, in a kind of trance. I was completely oblivious to the audience, and they could have been leaping around and doing Mexican waves for all I cared, but I was told afterwards that it was the only time during the whole service that the background of shuffling and coughing actually stopped.
The piece finished on a ridiculously high note, but for once I hit it spot on, and so was able to hold it for the full four bars rather than grinding to my usual abrupt halt. Then Esmerelda burst into the finale – I assume Miss Bingley must have paid her in hard cash for her services - and it was all over. Mrs Bingley whirled back into life, her baton twitching frantically at the doomed percussion player, but as she turned round to bring the violas and cellos in, she grinned at me and made a thumbs’ up sign with her left hand.
Chapter 9
By the end of the Autumn term I was beginning to feel reasonably settled, but there were still some things that bemused me. Take the preoccupation my class had with stationery, for example. The style credentials of your pencil case had never been of much importance at primary school; naturally, I had one of those long packs of thirty felt-tips at home which I was extremely possessive about and spent ages arranging into different colour orders, but everyone does that, and there was no way I’d have taken them into school. Felt-tips aside however, I’d never given much thought to pens and pencils - I had a home-made pencil case with a couple of chewed pencils and a leaky biro, and that was all I seemed to need.
I soon found that things were very different at secondary school: in a place where everyone had to wear the same clothes, where make-up and jewellery were forbidden (crosses and stars of David excepted) and where hair had to be ‘simply styled and natural in colour’, stationery was the ultimate fashion accessory, a way of proclaiming your individuality to the world. It had to be plastic and it had to be girlie, preferably decorated with hearts or flowers or cute little animals. Pens which wrote in pink or purple ink were very popular, although most of the teachers hated them, and Miss Heaney, our maths teacher, banned them outright. There also seemed to have a childish fascination with rubbers that smelled of fruit or chocolate, and during boring lessons we would swap them and sniff each other’s surreptitiously.
Miranda and I decided it was time to embrace the trend and we ventured into the posh stationery shops like Paper Tree, where we gawped at the extortionate prices.
“It’s Charlie Ball’s Discount Warehouse or nothing,” I told Miranda grimly.
There I acquired a pink plastic watermelon pencil case and Miranda chose a set of four pastel coloured pens, since she was planning to transform her existing furry pencil case by dyeing it pink. We went halves on a smelly chocolate cupcake rubber and hacked it in two with Miranda’s Swiss army knife. If we were truly committed we would have updated our collections every week, but who could go into Charlie Ball’s and buy yet more pencils when there were 15p packets of biscuits to be had?
Along with the obsession with stationery came an even more tedious obsession with the neatness and presentation of written work, taking absolute precedence over the content of what you had written or even the mark you’d got for it. Never mind if every one of your French spellings was wrong, the important thing was that you’d lined them all up nicely and written them in awful babyish script, with little circles or hearts over the i’s instead of dots, and the kind of a’s that a typewriter does. At lunchtime crowds of fashion victims gathered to fawn around the two or three girls in the class who were considered to have ‘trendy’ handwriting, marvelling at the rounded glory of their script.
“That looks socool, Vikki.”
It helped of course if you had a stupid name that leant itself to the tasteless qualities of the style and here Vikki excelled: she drew little flowers over her i’s and was generally reckoned to have the nicest writing in the class.
The pursuit of neatness reached ridiculous extremes with the excessive use of liquid paper. I had always been taught that if you made a mistake you should cross it out and get on with whatever you were doing, but that wasn’t good enough for the neat-freaks. Every tiny slip of the pen was lovingly corrected, and when we were taking dictation the teacher often had to be begged to stop.
“Hang on Miss, I’m still waiting for my Tipex to dry!”
Miss Heaney loathed liquid paper and began to confiscate any that she found in the classroom, awarding the owner with a detention for good measure, but still people used it – they were every bit as addicted to the stuff as the people who sniff it, but presumably having considerably less fun.
I didn’t think my work was particularly messy, but nor did I go overboard on neatness; I don’t like to compete at things that I’m not any good at, and my handwriting was already too far gone to salvage. Furthermore, it offended my fast-growing feminist sensibilities to think that girls were wasting so much time and energy on something so trivial. Perhaps there were eleven-year old boys out there wetting themselves over their neatly underlined headings in co-ordinating colours, but somehow I didn’t think so. I preached my politics of non-neatness to Miranda, who despite having a talent for calligraphy made scruffiness into something of an art form: her school writing was so bad that more than one teacher suspected a deliberate ploy to prevent them from reading what she’d written.
On the day when she was supposed to rendez-vous with Miss Heaney over a ‘See me Miranda! This work is impossible to read!’ scrawled down the margin of her maths book, Miranda was sick. Our phone started ringing at half past six in the morning, but I was fully occupied in front of the landing mirror, my hairclip clutched between my teeth as I attempted to backcomb my hair into Trisha Chalmers-esque heights of glory. The ringing went on for ages and I was just thinking that maybe I ought to get it when my parents’ door opened, and my mum emerged looking like death to attempt a feeble jog down the stairs to the phone, tripping over her dressing gown hem in the process. Her voice drifted up to me.
“Who? Oh, Miranda. It’s very early you know.”
There was a long pause doubtless filled by Miranda’s excited squeaking on the other end of the line. Her phone manner was confusing at the best of times and I suspected it might prove a bit much for my mum in her current condition. Judging by her expression as she wearily climbed the stairs, I was right.
“That was Miranda. She phoned to let you know not to wait for her in town. She’s not well.”
This was news. If Miranda was ill there was a good chance I might get it too, just in time for needlework on Friday.
“What’s up with her?”
“I’m not sure. She wasn’t making a huge amount of sense.”
“Mum!” I could hardly start working on my symptoms if I didn’t know what I was aiming for.
“She’s got some spots apparently. They’re taking her to the doctor today.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “You have had chickenpox, haven’t you?”
“You know I have.” I pulled back my hair to reveal a hideously unsightly pock-mark on my left temple.
“See this? If you hadn’t stopped me picking them when I was too young to know any better, I wouldn’t be scarred for life!”
My mum peered short-sightedly.
“I can’t see anything. Still, that’s all right then. And in future if the phone rings when you’re up and I’m not, can you answer it please?”
She stomped back into her bedroom, and seeing as I was already late for the bus I abandoned my hair and sneaked a pack
et of crisps out of the cupboard for breakfast.
I felt slightly uneasy on the journey to school. Miranda had never been off before, and it would be a bit weird without her. Who would be my partner in swimming when we practised life-saving? And what would I do at lunchtime?
I ended up going down to the dining hall with Rachel and Sinead. Yesterday’s pasties were on offer cold for 10p each, and if Miranda was there we’d have had a couple each and smothered them in tomato ketchup, but Rachel screwed up her nose and said, “Ooh, I can never understand who buys that stuff. I mean, just for the sake of saving some money...”
Then I felt like I couldn’t get any, and had to go for the shepherd’s pie instead, which had bits of gristle in and tasted of dog food.
Shepherd’s pie aside however, it was quite a nice lunch; Rachel and Sinead were great sources of gossip whereas Miranda never knew anything, and they told me some story about a girl in the year above who had been suspended for attaching razor blades to her enemies’ locker doors.
After lunch we went back to our classroom and sat in a row on the radiator. This activity was fraught with danger because many of the radiators were decorated with blobs of old chewing gum, which at high temperatures formed a kind of viscous grey liquid and stuck irremovably to items of clothing. Only a few days previously Honey Sanka had got gum all over the back of her skirt and been forced to wear her PE skirt while the other one was being frozen in the Home Economics room, in the hopes that the gum could then be scraped off. Honey was a big girl and had clearly found waddling around school clad in a skirt so teeny you could almost see her knickers rather humiliating, and although my legs were considerably thinner than hers, I still didn’t fancy it. What was more, following Honey’s experience a school notice has been issued forbidding us to sit on the radiators, and I suspected that future victims would not receive much in the way of sympathy.
Besides our radiator posse, as Rachel called us, there were a few of the packed lunch girls munching their sandwiches surreptitiously. Eating in the classrooms was another thing we were not allowed to do, and there were regular lunchtime patrols by teachers trying to catch people in the act. Consequently the standard practise was to stow your sandwiches in your desk and eat with the lid open, ready to slam down the lid and swallow rapidly should a teacher appear. Vikki Charlton was going on about her diet, even though she wasn’t vaguely fat.
“All I’m allowed is a tuna sandwich and an apple. And the tuna has to be in brine, not oil. It says you can lose up to ten pounds in a week.”
Meanwhile, Amber was eyeing her yoghurt pot with deep suspicion. “This yoghurt is revolting.”
“What flavour’s it supposed to be?”
“Fudge, it says. ‘Creamy dairy fudge’ in fact.”
Vikki abstemiously passed the pot to Trisha, who grabbed it and took an experimental slurp. “Ooh! That is foul! Tastes like rancid butter.”
“Yeah, well I’m not eating it. I’ll have my Wispa instead.”
However, the disposal of the yoghurt posed a bit of a problem. The packed lunch girls normally had to take their rubbish home, because the classroom patrols always checked the rubbish bins and had been known to hold full-scale enquiries if any food wrappers were found. Amber clearly didn’t want an opened pot full of yoghurt sloshing around in her lunchbox. She waved it in the air in despair. “What’ll I do with it then? Anyone want a fudge yoghurt?”
Not surprisingly, no one did.
“Pour it out of the window,” Rachel suggested.
“Someone might see it on the way down. Or it might go on someone’s head.”
This idea had immediate appeal to Trisha and she set off towards the window, yoghurt in hand. But Vikki had other plans.
“Hang on Trish, I’ve got a better idea. Stick it in the hole in Sturdy-Gurdy’s desk.”
Miranda’s desk was one of the older models, with a hole for the inkwell. Obviously there was no inkwell any more, and instead Miranda liked to use the hole to store her treasured set of pastel pens during lessons. The illegible qualities of her handwriting did not stop her from decorating her work with pink and orange squiggles.
Trisha sauntered over to Miranda’s desk and peered into the hole. Vikki’s proposition had clearly grabbed her. She waver the yoghurt pot tantalisingly over the desk. “Well? Shall I?”
“Ooh Trisha no!” screeched Katherine, loving every minute of it. “It’ll start to smell.”
“Don’t worry Katherine,” said Vikki reassuringly (Katherine’s desk was just in front of Miranda’s), “Sturdy’s BO will mask the worst of it.”
There was a round of tittering and a general craning of necks to catch the action. Rachel looked at me to see if I was going to interfere but there was no way I was saying anything. I knew when the public opinion was against me.
The yoghurt slid out in pale greasy lumps. Trisha shook the pot to get the last drops out and then wiped her fingers fastidiously on the top of Miranda’s desk. She tossed the empty yoghurt pot over to Amber. “Yours I believe.”
Amber held it between her finger and thumb and wrapped it in the cling film from her sandwiches with an air of exaggerated distaste. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered to inspect the yoghurty inkwell. Katherine was overcome with glee.
“If she grasses you up you’ll getdone, Trish.”
Trisha was back in her spot by Vikki, nonchalantly adjusting her wrinkled socks. “Yeah, but how will she know it was me? They can’t do anything when they don’t know how it got there.”
We all nodded sagely, like Catholics agreeing on the infallibility of the pope, and then the bell went and it was time for history.
Miranda was off on Friday as well (I don’t think that anyone who was sick on a Thursday ever recovered in time for Friday) so she didn’t see the damage to her desk until Monday. She spotted it at lunchtime, when she was sitting on her desk and I was perched on the radiator next to her. We were sharing a bar of cooking chocolate, appropriated from Miranda’s mum’s store cupboard, and Miranda suddenly began to choke on hers. I bashed her vigorously on the back while she gestured in dismay at the festering yoghurt.
“What’s that white stuff in my inkwell?”
Fortunately there was no one else around at the time as most people were out practising for inter-form hockey and some of the others were next-door swapping confidences with 1O. I decided to feign total ignorance.
“What white stuff? Oh, yuk! Do you think it’s Tipex or something?”
Miranda was sniffing it. “No, it’s too yellow. And it smells a bit. Kind of like off milk.”
She looked totally fed up. “Some scumbag has poured milk or yoghurt or something into my desk. I suppose they did it last week when I was sick.”
“Are you going to tell?”
Miranda shrugged. “What’s the point? No one will own up and they’ll just think it’s funny.”
“But you can’t leave it there!” What was I protesting for? I didn’t want to get involved in any clean-up operation. Fortunately Miranda just seemed to want to forget all about it.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Shall we go and play German hopscotch?”
Surprisingly, although the yoghurt stayed there until the end of the year (and presumably forever after for all I know) it never smelt particularly bad. The surface acquired a greenish waxy hue and hardened up; if you poked a pencil in it dented the surface rather than going in deep. Miranda stopped storing her coloured pens in the inkwell and accepted it as another of life’s misfortunes, and Amber started bringing in strawberry and raspberry yoghurts instead.
The only consolation was some information I gleaned at a family party from my eldest cousin. She was taking a year out before going to university and was working in a frozen food factory for £2 an hour. Her job was to pick out the dud raspberries from the conveyor belt and toss them onto the floor, and she informed me with grim satisfaction that at the end of the day all the raspberry mush was swept up to go into yoghurts. From then onwards
I used to watch Amber as she spooned yoghurt into her perfect mouth and whisper ‘raspberry mush, raspberry mush’, and this somehow gave me quite a lot of pleasure. I would have liked to share the joke with Miranda, but I decided that the less she knew about the whole sorry incident the better.
Chapter 10
For the lesson before Christmas, Mrs Donaldson had said that we could have a party. She split us into three groups: one to bring savoury snacks, one to bring sweet things, and the four girls on the end bench to bring bottles of pop. She said that her contribution would be a surprise. I was in the sweet things group so I made a chocolate sponge cake, decorated with smarties and little silver balls. Miranda brought a banana cake with lurid pink icing, apparently due to a faulty lid on the bottle of food colouring, and there were several other cake tins in evidence.
When we arrived at the lab clutching our spoils, there was a notice pinned to the wall which read ‘1M: wait here until I call you!’ We clustered round the door, trying to peer in through the semi-opaque glass panels, and it was suddenly flung open by Mrs Donaldson, who looked utterly charming in her pair of antler deely-boppers. “Let the party begin! In you come then.”
There were oohs and aahs as we filed in. The science labs had been transformed into a Winter Wonderland. Strands of silver glittery stuff hung from the taps, there was artificial snow sprayed on the windows, and fairy lights were draped across the top of the blackboard and the science cupboards. We sat down in our usual places and looked expectantly at Mrs Donaldson. She clapped her hands and winked at Miranda and me.
“Can you set up your Bunsen burners please? Just one for every four people today.”
There were ripples of consternation and excitement as we got the Bunsen burners out. We couldn’t possibly be going to do more boring experiments about solubility or boiling points, could we? So what did we need them for?