Playing with the Grown-ups

by Sophie Dahl

  'Have you been on holiday?' she asks, hearing Kitty's accent, handing her an extra blanket.

  'No, I live in New York. I'm going to visit my family.'

  'That's nice, lucky you. Are you going to see your mum and dad before you have the baby?' she says, casting her eyes down at Kitty's stomach.

  'Yes,' Kitty says, because that way it is easier.

  Chapter Two

  I just need distance,' her mother said, frowning. 'Bestemarna and Bestepapa don't understand the mechanics of change. I suppose it's their age, though one would expect a bit more from Elsie and Ingrid. Amazing that we're related to a bunch of such narrow-minded people.'

  'You're having distance,' Kitty said. 'You're moving to New York.'

  They were packing her mother's suitcase. Kitty put a silk shirt in the suitcase, and took it out again when her mother wasn't looking.

  'Emotional distance,' she said. 'Until they recognise my choice as being positive.'

  In which case, Kitty felt, the distance was going to last a very, very long time.

  'I don't mind if YOU speak to them. They're still your grandparents,' she added. 'I'm not asking you to choose or anything.'

  'Will you come back for Christmas?' Kitty said.

  'Yes. I will - or you'll come to me.'

  'Where will I sleep?'

  'In the bedroom I'll make for you.'

  'All right. Do you think Mr Fitzgerald will write to me at school?' Kitty asked, making a face at Swami-ji's photograph over her mother's shoulder as Marina wrapped him tenderly in a cashmere shawl.

  'Yes. I'll ask him. He should.' She turned, and placed her hands on Kitty's cheek. 'I think it will be easier for you to have more of a relationship with him when you're a bit older. Do you know what I mean? I know that's not necessarily what's right, but it's just the way it is now, Magpie. That is the mystery of God's grace. I understand that it's desperately confusing though . . .'

  'Because of his wife?' Kitty asked.

  'Well, yes, sort of. I think the whole thing makes him feel guilty.'

  'You mean me?' Kitty found it difficult to believe someone who had not even met her could feel guilty about her from afar.

  'No, darling, not you. The whole thing is just rather complicated.'

  'I hate complicated. I like everything to be simple, and straightforward.'

  Her mother kissed her.

  'I know you do. Which is one of the reasons you're going to Dourfield - it's a lot more simple.'

  Her mother's god-daughter, Evie, was one of the reasons Dourfield had been chosen. Evie had been at Dourfield since she was seven. Before school started Kitty had only met her twice in her life. They had a strained tea the week before school, up in London, at Evie's big house in Chelsea Green. Evie was impish and wore Levi Sols, and Kitty had felt like a moron in her stripy jumper dress and her mother's fake pearl earrings, which had looked so bold and cool when she'd put them on in the morning.

  They sat in Evie's room, which had a double bed with a canopy and her own television.

  'What music do you like?' Evie asked Kitty, surveying her stripes and earrings in a way that was not covetous.

  'Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday . . .' Kitty racked her brains trying to think of something she'd seen on Top of the Pops, because Evie looked at her blankly.

  'Who?' she said, wrinkling her little nose.

  'Oh!' Kitty said. 'I know! I like Seal. I think he's really handsome.'

  'He's black,' Evie said flatly, as if this ruled him out. 'With creepy scars. What about Bros?'

  Kitty remembered a pair of skinny blond boys who wore leather jackets.

  'Uh . . . Yeah, I like them too.'

  Evie pointed to a poster on her wall.

  'I'm going to marry Matt,' she said confidently. 'I'll be Mrs Goss. By the way,' she added, 'you're not going to bring clothes like that to Dourfield, are you? Because people will think you're really WEIRD.'

  'My jeans are in the wash,' Kitty lied, because she didn't own a pair of jeans. She wore Elsie and Ingrid's hand-me-downs, and her mother's costume jewellery. Her love for all things shiny had earned her the family moniker of 'Magpie'.

  When they left, her mother said to Evie, after giving her a beautiful necklace of dusty bottle-green beads, which Kitty instinctively knew she would cast to the back of a dark drawer, 'You will look after Kitty, won't you, Evie my darling?'

  'Yes, Marina.' Evie smiled sweetly and Kitty's mother squeezed her gratefully, which annoyed Kitty.

  When they were in the car she gave a sigh of relief.

  'I feel a lot better,' she said. 'You'll have a friend.'

  Kitty looked at her in disbelief. Which part of the equation didn't she get? Her mother had to be truly gormless if she thought that a 501-wearing, Bros-loving, pixie girl and she were going to be bosom buddies. Kitty raised an eyebrow meaningfully.

  'Don't be such a worry wart,' her mother said. 'You'll be fine.'

  'That's what you think. And she's a racist,' Kitty said, shooting her mother a nasty look through her glasses.

  Ingrid and Elsie left for Paris the day before she left for Dourfield. Ingrid gave Kitty her most treasured possession, a soft T-shirt that said 'Never mind the bollocks'. She wrapped it up in tissue paper and left it on the top of her school trunk. It hadn't been washed, and it smelled of her Rive Gauche and clean hair. Elsie wrote her a note that said 'If you want to run away you can come and live with us,' and stuck silver star stickers on the envelope. Kitty thought of them, wearing ballet shoes, drinking café au lait, eating baby bites of delicate French pastries, their blonde hair swinging as they shimmied down the rue de L'Uni-versite.

  On Sunday night, Elkie Brooks sang on the radio as they turned into Willow Road, the street that housed Dourfield School. If the next song is by James Taylor, Kitty said to herself, then we'll turn around and go home. It will be a test. There was no next song though. It was a phone-in for the saddest love story; Barbara from Epping won.

  They unpacked her trunk, watched the parents mill around uncomfortably drinking tea and eating digestive biscuits, making small talk with the eager house-parents.

  Trying to postpone the terrible, inevitable departure, she kept stalling her mother.

  'Come and look at the bathroom - there are four little baths all neat in a row!' Kitty was gay, a hostess.

  'We saw it together before. I should really make a move, my darling,' her mother answered.

  They had walked into the garden of the boarding house. Kitty could hear children outside the stone walls playing 'Mother May I' on the street. She thought irrationally, I will never be able to play again. The sun was going down. She tugged at her blazer. They made their way to her mother's red Beetle. A scarlet letter in a sea of Volvos.

  Her mother opened the door and kissed her head.

  'Mummy, please don't leave me here,' Kitty said urgently. 'You can't. Please let me come back to Hay with you.' Snot and tears were pouring down her face but Kitty didn't care.

  Marina started to cry too.

  'Goodbye, Kitty. You'll be all right. I promise.'

  She navigated her limbs into the small car and shut the door.

  Kitty longed to throw herself at the car but the other parents were watching and she wanted them to think she was brave. She watched as the car pulled out of the driveway, disappearing behind the wrought-iron gate.

  Lying in a room full of strangers, shivering in her foreign sheets, in her checked pyjamas with their scratchy nametag, she was too ashamed to cry. She wondered if Bestemama and Bestepapa were thinking of her. They would be finishing supper now, in the all-pervading silence that had descended since her mother's departure. Marina's studio was stripped to an old bleached shell. There was nothing left of her at Hay but the views she once loved.

  The lights were turned out, a blissful nod to succumb privately to the tears that had been pricking at her eyes, for hours. She held her breath so she wouldn't make a noise that was audible, and buried her face in her pillow
. She wanted to run away, but she realised she was in the middle of nowhere, the nearest train station twenty-five miles away. Her hand scrunched up in the sheets by her side. She felt something brush against it that could have been a ghost, or a moth. Kitty thought the dormitory was haunted and more tears came.

  Seconds later she was clasped by a hot little hand, and Evie's voice whispered, 'Don't cry, Kitty, the first night is always horrible, but you'll get used to it. I did.' And she held Kitty's hand tightly in the dark, so tightly she could feel Evie's pulse beating steadily against her own, calming like the hands of a clock.

  In the morning Kitty smiled at her shyly.

  'Why are you looking at me like that? Are you spastic or something?'

  The dorm was frigid with cold; Evie was putting on her tights and vest under the sheets.

  'Just because your mother's my godmother, does not mean we have to be friends.' She said it loudly, so the other girls heard.

  Kitty quickly recognised what Evie was offering her. She would be an ally only in the dark.

  On the day she was twelve, there was no breakfast in bed. Kitty woke in her narrow bed as the electric overhead light flickered on to illuminate the other nine narrow beds in the room.

  'Up you get.' The strident voice of the housemistress Mrs Phelan rang out.

  There was a thin chorus of dissonance.

  Kitty didn't tell anyone it was her birthday. She got up and went over to the sink in the corner of the big hospital white room to see whether her face looked any older. It didn't, but there were the scarlet beginnings of a spot between her eyebrows. 'A bindi spot', her mother would have called it. She realised grimly that this and the two straggling hairs under her left armpit was the puberty she longed for, the thought of which, along with her mother, made her eyes well. She wanted to ring and tell her mother, but they weren't allowed to speak on the phone for the first two weeks so the boarders could 'adjust'.

  Kitty brushed her teeth and washed her face with the facewash her mother had bought from Boots the Chemist's. She then stroked cucumber water on the way Marina had shown her, which made the other girls laugh. They said she was like an old lady. 'Be sure to do your neck and décolleté,' her mother had said the night before she left, as they were packing her trunk. 'Then you'll always have beautiful skin.'

  'Like yours?' Kitty said.

  'I have never in my life gone to sleep without washing my face,' her mother said. 'Not even if I was raddled with exhaustion.'

  In the dining hall, Kitty stood in line with Rosaria and Olivia. Kitty knew from the moment she saw her that she would love Rosaria, who was tiny and ferocious with the biggest cackling laugh she'd ever heard. It was like the rattle of a machine gun. She could swear fluently in Italian, and her eyes were green like the orchard at Hay. Olivia was quieter and more reserved but she had a dark wryness to her which Kitty trusted, because it reminded her of Bestemama. Olivia was tall like her, with size seven feet. Rosaria was a size three. They were all in the same form. Rosaria and Kitty had been placed in the bottom stream for maths, and the top for English. Olivia was in the top stream for everything. They were in different dorms.

  The eggs swam in a silver tray of grease, and the sausages lay anaemic next to forlorn hash browns. Vegetarianism was now a viable prospect, she thought.

  She sat down at one of the long wooden tables with Rosaria and Olivia. The day was grey like the Lifebuoy soap in the girls' bathroom.

  'Ugh.' Rosaria looked at her fried eggs sadly. 'Do you think they're trying to fatten us up and give us spots so no one will ever fancy us and we will remain pure and unsullied till the sixth form?'

  A shudder went through Kitty. I can't stay here till the sixth form. Be calm, she told herself. It's like Nora says, 'This too shall pass.' Nora would have been taking Sam and Violet to nursery right now, warm in the smoky fug of her Golf, listening to Radio 4 as Sam and Violet chattered in the back. But now Nora was in New York, taking Sam and Violet to kindergarten in a yellow taxi. Nora was probably living in a constant state of fear due to muggers and 'the immigration'. Could she buy Angel Delight in Manhattan? Kitty doubted it. I could get her some with my pocket money, she thought, and send it to her when I have my first exeat: from 12 p.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. That was six weeks away. The trees at Hay would be practically naked by then.

  She had imagined boarding school as Malby Towers and The Twins at Saint Clare's peppered with a bit of Grease. She'd thought she could start her own gang and they'd wear pink satin jackets at weekends. Kitty hoped she'd have a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and second-skin leggings. She made the fatal mistake of confiding this to Evie and her group by the pond after lacrosse.

  She sat with Veronica, Evie's best friend, Imogen Holli-day, the prettiest girl in the school, and Rosaria and Olivia. She was good at telling the spookiest ghost stories, and she told three in succession that made them squeal. Kitty miscalculated. She took their post-story pleasure to mean that the forum was now hers for the taking.

  'I've got an idea,' she said quickly, high with a sense of belonging.

  'Yeah?' Evie yawned.

  'You know in Grease - the film Grease - how they have a gang of girls?'

  'Yeah.' Evie looked over at Veronica.

  'Well, I thought we could, you know, do it here. We could make pink jackets and stuff..'

  Rosaria shook her head and gave Kitty a look of syrn-pathy, which made her heart sink.

  'YOU want to start a gang?' Evie gave a yowl of laughter. 'Like in Grease? Uh, how old are you?'

  'Twelve,' she said, ploughing on. 'You could be the leader.'

  'If we were to have a gang, you mong, WHICH we never would, but IF we were, A, you wouldn't be in it. And B, Imo would be the leader because she's the prettiest.'

  Imogen opened her big eyes.

  'I don't want to be in a gang.' She sounded worried.

  Evie sighed with exasperation.

  'There is NO gang, Imogen,' she said.

  Evie and Veronica proceeded to spend the next forty minutes pointing at Kitty, and howling 'Pink ladies!' or taking her glasses, and throwing them in the pond where they floated on a light layer of scum. She discovered a sad social truth that day. Court jesters jest, they don't come up with the ideas.

  When all the other girls were unpacking with their mothers, her mother had tried to put a picture of Swami-ji on her bedside locker.

  'Please don't do that,' Kitty yelped.

  'No one's going to notice,' her mother said. 'He can watch over you, protect you.'

  'Honestly, it's fine.' Kitty saw Evie look over slyly. 'I'll put him on my pinboard later. Then he can watch over everyone.' She smiled.

  'That's a lovely idea,' her mother said.

  Everyone thought she was odd: she felt it.

  Kitty stared out of the window in the biology lab, wondering if she had the guts to run away. She thought it would make them worried then angry at home, remembering then that home was fragmented.

  A Madonna song played in her head: 'If I ran away, I'd never have the strength to go very far.'

  Madonna knew what it was like. She understood. Perhaps she could adopt me and I could be her back-up dancer, Kitty thought. Her brain filled with scenes of transatlantic glamour.

  'Are you eating, Kitty?' Mr Ridgeley the biology master sounded concerned.

  The class was silent. She thought about it. No, for once she was not consumed by the thought of food. Kitty gave what she thought was a pathos-filled face, the face of a hungry urchin.

  'No. I haven't been very hungry.' Her voice wobbled in the warmth of his concern.

  'I meant, are you chewing gum? The chewing of gum is not permitted in my lab. Your nutritional habits are not my concern. They are the territory of matron. Now, spit it out, please.'

  Kitty gave him an injured look and spat out her Bub-blicious in the bin. If Madonna had heard I wasn't eating, she thought, SHE would have cooked me a Philly cheese steak, and after eating and giggling, we would have
broken out into an impromptu rendition of 'Holiday', followed by shopping for ra-ra skirts on Broadway.

  Bestemama and Bestepapa came to take her out on Saturday after games. She sat by the gates keeping watch for the old regal BMW.

  Ibsen howled with excitement when he saw her, his jowls swaying from left to right, his tongue lolling like a madman's. Kitty dived into the car on top of him.

  'Have you spoken to Mummy?' It fell out of her mouth automatically.

  Bestepapa made a bitter peppery noise.

  'No, darling, we haven't. Do you remember that we decided it was probably better to let her get settled in New York, and speak to her when everything is a bit clearer?' Smiling at her, Bestemama's face became a mask of reassurance. Kitty preferred Bestepapa's grimace.

  They went to a little hotel in the town, and she ordered a Coke. It tasted forbidden and ambrosial.

  'Is the food at your prison FILTHY?' Bestepapa smeared a scone with jam, and passed it to her.

  'Filthy. You'd hate it. Greasy fried eggs, baked beans, lumpy cardboard porridge and gammon and pineapple.'

  'Dis-gusting. Can you smuggle in contraband?'

  'I baked you a belated birthday cake, polenta and lemon.' Bestemama handed Kitty a tin with roses on it.

  After tea, up on the top of the hill above the town, they surveyed the sea of green, fields filled with water from the recent rains. Ibsen pulled on his lead looking longingly at the sheep. Kitty pretended they were just visiting, and for a moment she appreciated everything around her, the damp air, the cathedral that rose below, mothers and fathers walking with their families.

  'It is beautiful here,' Bestemama said.

  'It is, but not beautiful like Hay,' Kitty replied grudgingly.

  'We could kidnap her, or pretend she has appendicitis,' Bestepapa said as they pulled into the driveway of Dour-field.

  'Enough, you silly man. We'll see her very soon.' Bestemama held Kitty tightly as she kissed her goodbye, filling her nose with rosewater and Pond's cold cream.