Sex and Stravinsky

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Your mum’s brilliant,’ Mattie says. ‘Your mum’s cool.’

  Mattie and Maggs are Zoe’s two best friends, and they’re sitting together just behind her in the bus. Meanwhile, she’s got revolting Sadie sitting beside her, whom nobody else wants. The trouble is, if you’re just a little bit sweet and kind like Zoe, then you always have a moment of feeling sorry for people like Sadie, because everyone else is giving them the brush-off. But as soon as you weaken and let her in, then she starts patronising you and ordering you about, just as if she was doing you a favour by sitting next to you. So Sadie starts being a spoiler almost as soon as they’ve got under way. The class has begun singing, but when Zoe joins in Sadie shuts her up by putting her hand across Zoe’s mouth, which is horrible, because it’s kind of clammy and it smells like old dishcloths that have been left to dry in a ball.

  ‘You really shouldn’t sing with a voice like that,’ she says.

  ‘Like what?’ Zoe says, all mumbly, from under Sadie’s hand, and she looks at Sadie indignantly but Sadie just laughs and says, ‘You should see your face. You look all gawky and stupid like that.’ Then she lets her go.

  Zoe slumps silently in her seat. She knows what’s going to happen over the next four weeks.

  Mattie and Maggs are good friends of hers, but it’s kind of understood that they have a prior claim on each other, because they’ve been friends since the preschool playgroup and their mums met in the antenatal class and they do Pilates and Book Club together. Sometimes the families even go on holiday together, and now Mrs Mead has gone and partnered them with a pair of French girl twins in that downtown apartment, so they’ll be in and out of the shops and cafés together, as a foursome, while she’ll be stuck in no-man’s-land with the Tall Merry Fellow and his sister Véronique, and most probably having to do all those crappy outdoor boy things like whittling, and cataloguing how many yellow Lego bricks you’ve got. Thinking about it is just too excruciating.

  And any time when she’s actually free of the Tall Merry Fellow – like on the class outing to Versailles or somewhere – then Sadie will be there, insinuating herself, which will make all the others run away; Sadie, who is right now chewing her packed lunch with her mouth open, but Zoe knows better than to tell her not to, because she’s the kind of person who’d think it’s hilarious to stop chewing and open her mouth really wide, so that you can see all the mushed-up food and saliva swishing around on her tongue.

  Behind her, she can hear Mattie and Maggs giggling softly together about nothing and everything and, every now and again, either one of them will lean forward and whisper something in her ear, but if ever she turns round, then she right away starts to feel car sick, even though she’s wearing her special pressure-point wristbands. Once, a few years ago, for the outward-bound trip to Glasebury, Caroline had got her these amazing little sticking plasters from the doctor that you stuck behind your ears and they worked brilliantly, but now you can’t get them any more, because the way they worked was to leak toxins into your ears or something. Anyway, right now Mattie and Maggs are having a giggle about their sandwiches.

  ‘My mum always cuts the crusts off,’ Maggs says. ‘It’s because she thinks she’s making canapés.’ She pronounces it ‘can-apes’, which makes them giggle some more.

  ‘Mine too,’ Mattie says. ‘Why do they do it when they know we like the crusts?’

  Zoe half turns round.

  ‘I expect your mums like the crusts as well,’ she says. ‘They’re probably sitting in the kitchen dipping your crusts into their morning coffee.’

  ‘Dipping them in blobs of Hellmann’s, most likely,’ Mattie says. ‘Oh yum.’

  ‘Zoe’s mum’s probably making hers into bread-and-butter pudding,’ says Maggs. ‘God, but your mum’s so brilliant.’

  ‘Stop fidgeting,’ Sadie says, and she takes Zoe’s chin in her hands and jerks her head back to face the front.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Zoe says.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Mattie says.

  ‘ “Leave her alone,” ’ Sadie squeaks, in would-be mimicry, giving Zoe a poke with her elbow.

  But Maggs, who is pulling the lettuce out of her sandwich, has started putting the bits on Sadie’s head, which is causing them another bout of giggling. Zoe’s mum doesn’t use Hellmann’s because the eggs aren’t free-range, so she always makes her own mayonnaise.

  ‘Control yourself, child o’ mine,’ Sadie says to Zoe, not realising she’s got bits of lettuce on her head.

  ‘I’m not your “child”,’ Zoe says. ‘Stop saying that.’

  ‘Child,’ Sadie says.

  Zoe sighs. She takes her new Henrietta Marchmont ballet book out of her backpack, just for the pleasure of holding it in her hand, because she couldn’t possibly read it on the coach without wanting to puke. This one is called Lola Keeps a Secret and it’s the third book in the series, so Lola is now living in London, in ‘digs’, while she attends the ballet school, and, if she’s lucky and works hard, she’ll maybe start dancing with ‘the Company’ in a year or two. Lola has come from a remote farmhouse thousands of miles away in Africa, and now, because she’s a scholarship girl and having to watch every penny, she can’t ever afford to fly home and see her family, or even go to the cinema, or buy new clothes, so she has to darn her tights and scour the school noticeboard for an outgrown tutu.

  But ballet is her passion; ballet is her life, even though everyone else on the farm where she comes from just likes cattle breeding and horse riding and they don’t understand where she gets it from – and also, they’re all about thirty centimetres taller than Lola. At the end of the last book, when she was newly arrived in London, Lola had just met this boy called Sergei, who is also at the ballet school, and he was really kind and helpful to her and it turned out they were in the same digs, but he’s got a past life in Russia that he never talks about.

  Zoe only discovered the Lola books about six months ago and they’ve made her long to do ballet even more, but Caroline thinks it’s just because she wants the pink satin shoes and the pink angora crossover cardigan and the leg warmers. Zoe has read the first two books in the series about five times each and she’s also sneaked in another ballet book right at the top of the hat box, because it’s very flat and she could do it once Caroline had finished putting in all the clothes and toiletries, et cetera. It’s called Ballet Class and it teaches you about all the ballet positions and exercises and warm-ups to practise by yourself.

  ‘Do you still read those babyish books?’ Sadie is saying, just as if Zoe’s new Lola book was Postman Pat or something, so she sighs and puts it away and pretends to fall asleep.

  School trips are always in a coach, even though ever since last year they could have got to Paris on the Eurostar. But no. It’s got to be the sick-making coach that takes all day. Coach, coach, ferry, coach. Then it’s all those hours through France on the motorway that mostly looks just like England, except with more crashed cars by the side of the road and the hoardings are in French. Then comes the moment she’s been dreading, when they finally end up exhausted in this tarmac playground at the French school, where the exchange kids are waiting for them along with their mums and dads. That’s except for Zoe’s.

  Because the Tall Merry Fellow is nowhere, although his mother and his sister are there and both of them reek of cigarettes. Neither of them smiles at her and they’re not very talky – well not to her, anyway. The mum is gaunt and creased-looking and her face is kind of putty-coloured, like cigarette smoke has got into all her wrinkles. She seems really angry and crosspatch, while Véronique is sneery and smug-looking, with spiked-up hair, and she’s wearing her navy school cardigan with no shirt under it and with the top three buttons undone to show her Wonderbra cleavage. And she does this stroppy-looking, no-blink eye contact with Zoe, which is really disconcerting, so that you don’t know where to look.

  ‘Viens!’ says Maman. ‘Vite, vite!’ And she’s striding towards her car like she’s got a train to catch.
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  She gestures that Zoe should put her things in the back. She and Véronique get into the front, so Zoe clambers hurriedly into the back alongside the beautiful hat box, and with her backpack on her lap. She’s noticed Véronique staring hard at the hat box with all its German luggage labels, and she gives Zoe this horrible look.

  Both of them start lighting up cigarettes in the car, which makes Zoe reach for the second of her freezer-bags and ensure the top is open, at the ready. She’s only sicked up once so far, and that was on the ferry. Right now, she’s not sure whether Caroline has given her the phrase for ‘Please stop the car, I feel sick’, but she feels too sick to pause and look sideways in the backpack to check and anyway she’s feeling much too shy to speak.

  Oh, please God, she’s thinking desperately, let me think of something else. Don’t let me think about puke. Anything but puke. Je m’appelle Zoe. Je n’aime pas le, le, le livre. No, that’s not right. Je n’aime pas – Oh, please, please don’t start thinking about liver. Do not. Think about the Tall Merry Fellow. Like where is he? Maybe he was feeling shy as well? Maybe he’s feeling really embarrassed about having a girl for his exchange, just the same as she is about having a boy? Oh God! Oh no! Puke!

  Maman is driving sort of angrily, veering sideways and lurching back and forth, as she keeps on trying to overtake other cars on the way home. Zoe’s been given no explanation for her exchange partner’s absence and, while Maman and Véronique are having these rather staccato exchanges between themselves, they’re talking much too fast for Zoe to follow a word and both of them are behaving as though she wasn’t there. Zoe’s stomach has risen unstoppably to her throat and she’s just in time to throw up discreetly into the freezer-bag, which she clamps shut, and she then starts reaching for her backpack, but not before Maman and Véronique have noticed.

  ‘Merde!’ says Maman, without slowing down or even turning round, but Zoe can see her contemptuous expression in the rear-view mirror, while Véronique looks at Zoe and smirks.

  Maman makes a right turn and swerves to a jerky stop.

  ‘Descends!’ she says. And, when Zoe hesitates, she reaches over and wrenches open the back door. ‘Descends et jette le!’ she says, making throwing gestures, i.e., that Zoe should litter the verge with her vomit bag. ‘Voilà, et maintenant, remonte!’

  When Zoe’s back inside the car, she hears Maman say to Véronique, as she roars off like she’s on a starting block, ‘Cette fille est une idiote!’

  They skirt around the town centre, on and on, and eventually end up in this new suburb, where all the roads look like Scalextrics, but the houses are kind of different-horrible to the ones where Zoe’s gran lives. These ones have steeply pitched grey pyramids for roofs with plastic dormer windows and white-plastered outside walls and crazy-paving paths to the front doors that look a bit like the Yellow Brick Road. And, while true to Caroline’s map there’s lots of woodland just behind the houses, the only trees in the gardens that she can see are these nasty little dwarf conifers. It’s like there’s a rash of them all over the housing development and there’s also quite a lot of dog crap. Plus the Tall Merry Fellow’s house has got these clinky-clunky wind chimes that are supposed to sound like the rainforest hanging over the front door.

  ‘Alors,’ Maman says, throwing her fag-end into one of the two dwarf-conifer pots that stand to the left and right of the front door, just as Zoe is deducing that Maman will probably be driving her and Véronique and the Tall Merry Fellow to school every morning, dodging and weaving and lurching, so that she will be throwing up over and over, until soon there won’t be any freezer-bags left. Or will they be allowed to catch a bus?

  On the floor, inside the conifer house, are those scratchy Dutch carpet tiles and there’s an open staircase to the upstairs rooms. It stinks of dog, though there doesn’t seem to be any dog, worse luck. No Mimi is there to come and greet them. Véronique is instructed to show Zoe to her room, which she does in a big huffy sulk from halfway up the staircase. She just waves her arm haphazardly in the direction of a bedroom door to the left.

  Zoe opens the door and then shuts it behind her. She plonks the hat box and her backpack on the bed. Then she turns round to look at what is obviously a boy’s bedroom. It’s got shelves with animal skulls – like maybe from deer and rabbits – and there are several torches on the bookshelves. Quite big ones. After a little snoop, Zoe finds a tobacco tin containing a survival kit with a length of fishing line and waxed matches and a compass and a miniature folding knife and water-sterilising pills. Then she sees that there’s a football on the desk and a black T-shirt over the chair that says ‘Zizou’. Nobody has even bothered to tidy away a pair of walking boots that are standing in the middle of the floor, with balled-up hiking socks stuffed into the tops.

  Zoe puts Lola Keeps a Secret and her Ballet Class book on the table beside the bed, on top of all these Tintin books in French, and she opens a drawer for her clothes, but inside it’s full of boys’ boxer shorts and socks and bathers, and there’s even one of those embarrassing things that makes you really glad to be a girl. It’s a thing that’s meant to hold a groin guard in place – Maggs once explained it to her when they went to a sports shop to get gym shirts for PE. It’s a kind of white-pouch thing, with dangly straps that are supposed to go up a boy’s bum crack and they’re fixed to an elastic waistband.

  There’s no way she can mingle her clothes with boys’ boxer shorts and especially not with that groin-guard thing in there, so she decides to leave all her clothes in the hat box, except for her pyjamas, which she puts under the pillow. But – oh gross! – someone else’s head has been on the pillows. No one has even bothered to change the pillowcases, so she’ll just have to spread a bath towel over them and first thing tomorrow she’ll have to ask Mattie and Maggs about buying some sheets and stuff. That’s if she’s got enough money. And even then she doesn’t know how she’s going to stop Maman from noticing. Meanwhile she’s just going to have to sleep on top of the bedspread.

  Then, to help block out the awfulness of everything, she sits on the bed and reads her Lola book until Maman yells up for her to come downstairs and eat.

  But when Zoe opens the door to come out, she goes mental.

  ‘Zut! Pas là! Espèce d’imbécile!’ she says, and she charges up the stairs and jabs her finger towards the next door along. ‘Là!’ she says, and she flings it open.

  It gives on to a sort of boxroom with a camp bed and no reading lamp, but at least it’s got clean pillowcases and a clean duvet cover.

  ‘Mets tes choses là-dedans!’ she says, so Zoe scrambles to move her hat box and her backpack – and she remembers just in time to collect her pyjamas.

  It’s only the three of them for supper – still no sign of the Tall Merry Fellow – but at least, to Zoe’s relief, it isn’t home-made ‘soups and terrines’, or even one of those ‘family dishes’ with animal innards in them that look like bits of chopped-up worms. It’s just potatoes au gratin and a bit of salad and then some of that not very nice supermarket ice cream that tastes like baking margarine with strands of red jammy stuff running through it.

  ‘Bon appétit,’ Maman says, with a face like a shrunken head.

  Then, once Zoe’s in bed, she remembers she’s left her Lola book along with Ballet Class on top of the Tintin pile next door. She’s too scared to go and retrieve them in case the floorboards creak – and anyway there’s no lamp to read by. Plus she’s feeling too exhausted and stressed.

  And next morning they drive, Maman, she and Véronique – stop-start, stop-start – through all the busy traffic and the petrol fumes and the ciggy smoke, until Zoe is sick into the third of the freezer-bag collection. This time the sick is a mix of undigested Frosties and full-cream milk.

  ‘Merde! Merde!’ Maman says once again. ‘L’imbécile!’ and Véronique does one of her smirky looks all over again, but this time the car doesn’t pull to a stop, so that when she gets to the tarmac playground, Zoe is still clutching the freezer
-bag.

  School isn’t actually all that bad because Maggs and Mattie’s bubbly blonde twins are quite good fun and they right away pull up an extra chair for Zoe at their work table. Then they sportingly shout, ‘No room! No room!’ when Sadie tries to squeeze in, because their dad has got them an abridged CD of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in English, to prepare them for their hosting duties, so they know ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’ off by heart.

  It’s only at home time, just when the five of them have hatched this plan to go out together, that Véronique barges in and pulls Zoe off and marches her to a bus stop. Then the bus carries them all the way back to the conifer house, where nobody is at home.

  After that, Véronique spends about two hours locked in the bathroom, with wafts of stinky bath-oil smells coming from under the door. Then, once she’s all dolled and spiked up, with lots of make-up, and this really tight skirt that’s making the tops of her thighs squeak together when she walks, and shoes with wobbly high heels, she gets both of them to walk back to the bus stop. All the way, she’s having to stop and tug at the skirt, because it keeps on riding up her bum.

  In the town centre, they meet up with three of Véronique’s horrible scary friends, who all stare at Zoe and roll their eyes as if she was either a complete freak or else somebody’s pain-in-the-arse baby sister who’s insisted on tagging along.

  ‘J’ai dû l’amener avec moi,’ Véronique says rudely, without even making any introductions.

  They spend the next hour in McDonald’s, mainly in the Ladies’, where they glam up and spike their hair up some more, before starting on Zoe’s appearance, completely ignoring her protestations. They stuff loo paper into her treble-A bra, and stick lots of blusher and eyeliner on her face and then they try to straighten her hair with mousse. Meanwhile, the slimmest of them has helped herself to Zoe’s Moschino jacket, though it’s a bit tight for her under the arms and it’s making a stretchy crease all along the back, below her shoulder blades. The girl just dives out of the way each time Zoe tries to grab it back and all of them have a good laugh.