The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  Sometimes I walk near our house, but that’s difficult when you live, deliberately, in a part of town that people move to, deliberately, when they want to start a family. I never for an instant thought that we’d be any different from the rest of them, the ones who come home with a car seat full of bundle topped off with a little white hat. We brought ours back with us too, only Charles had stuffed his bloodstained shirt into it. That was what we carried over our threshold.

  I can’t say it is getting easier. I can’t even say it is getting less hard. The physical signs have gone now. My breasts were taut with milk that went undrunk for nearly two weeks; the pain of it, like somebody kneeling on my chest, came as a relief, something to focus on other than the constant nebulous ache. The skin of my stomach sagged for months even though all I could face filling it with was the protein shakes Charles wordlessly passed me. I forced them down like fuel because I wanted my body to be ready again.

  Little by little, it is healing. After I put on the weight I had lost, my periods came back as the frost melted, with the first crocus buds that grow in a ring around the base of the tree outside of our house. My lustrous pregnancy hair fell out and regrew in short tufts above my ears—these velvet antlers that curl out when I pull my hair back are the only thing I have in common with other mothers. I see them, patting theirs back down, tutting and fussing, but I twist mine around my fingers endlessly: They started growing with his first breath, they are proof he existed, their length is the span of mine and Charles’s new lives without him.

  I tried to be happy for Margot when her baby came, but when she didn’t tell me—warn me—before posting it online, I realized I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand her complacency. She had no idea how lucky she was, how close she’d stepped to disaster. No woman in childbirth does, because they’re all assured beforehand that it’s as simple as having a tooth out. They have to believe it, I suppose, because you’d go mad with the thought that carrying life inside you came with the very real possibility of its death or yours. But you don’t hear people sobbing in a dental clinic.

  In the very darkest days, I thought a lot about my and Margot’s past. The days when all I could do was endlessly look at the few photos I had of him on my phone until either its battery ran out or mine did.

  This wasn’t the first time someone had been taken away from me as I stood on the brink of sharing a new life with them. And it wasn’t the first time that Margot had moved on as though nothing had happened.

  * * *

  HELEN ARRIVED when we were sixteen. She was in our year at school but a few months older and easily the most sophisticated person Margot and I had ever come across in what was, admittedly, a rather slight social circle. She had a frizz of dark hair that she kept closely cropped to her head, and her school tie was permanently and boldly askew. Within a few weeks, I had started wearing mine that way, too.

  Margot and I weren’t used to having to share each other. Nobody else at St. Dominic’s held any interest for us. They were too quick to laugh at our jokes, too slow to follow our wit, too much a part of the surroundings we both had plans to leave behind as soon as we possibly could.

  Margot was tall and skinny, something her fashion colleagues later lapped up but at school our peers ridiculed her for: Being a young woman with no breasts in the north of England is a tough gig. I had ginger corkscrew curls—that’s a cross to bear the world over. I clamped them down every morning under a hair slide that tended to work its way loose throughout the day.

  But what we lacked in the looks department, we made up for with senses of humor so perfectly matched to each other’s, so nuanced, that the bond between us sometimes felt like telepathy.

  No one has ever made me laugh the way Margot did—not even Charles. I left that gasping, gulping, helpless-with-tears schoolgirl humor behind with my textbooks and pencil case when I finished at St. Dominic’s, but back then Margot could bring it on with as little as a look, an eyebrow raise, or this weird trick she had of hitching her upper lip over her teeth and blinking rapidly. I’d be a puddle on the floor within seconds; one term, our teachers had to separate us in every subject, for every lesson.

  I remember with a fondness tinged with anxiety the aching cheeks after we’d spent a break time together conjugating some ridiculous involved joke or inventing a new character for our repertoire. Those giggling fits always had an edge to them, a breathlessness, a lack of control that brought with it a certain sense of rising panic.

  Once I set Margot off during a choir concert, with such force that the notes she was singing came out as a deep, tuneless bellow that echoed round the hall in stark contrast to the reedy sopranos we were surrounded by. After that, all either of us needed to do was hum the opening bars of the song to crack us both up into convulsions.

  Every break time, we escaped our peers up a decrepit spiral staircase to the dusty music practice rooms housed within the roof space of the brutalist main building. There were no prodigies among the few students who dutifully croaked along in the school clarinet band to challenge us there, so we sprawled on the dilapidated sofa, scrawled our idiolect on the blackboards, and picked at the flaking paint and patches of dry rot that held together our special sanctuary.

  We discovered an opening at one end of a room with a wheezing old piano in it: a small, not-quite-person-height door that lay behind a sheaf of two-dimensional thatched cottages left over from the set of some drama production in years long forgotten.

  The prac rooms were dingy, but this door opened into glorious sunshine. The panes of the refectory’s giant skylights were only a few meters above our heads, the scrape of chairs and clink of local Sheffield-forged cutlery on plates rising from below. It wasn’t a room but a balcony—a minstrels’ gallery above the dining hall that had fallen into sad disuse through St. Dominic’s total lack of anything even approaching a musician, let alone an event with enough pomp to require accompaniment.

  For two girls longing for the chance to escape, gazing down on the rest of the student body as it stuffed itself on bland meals was both invigorating and depressing. We lay on our stomachs so we wouldn’t be seen above the railings, the wooden spindles of which were so rotten many had broken or crumbled clean away, and gossiped callously about the cliques spread beneath us.

  Margot and I learned to hide ourselves by raising only the tops of our heads above the lower skirt of the railings, where the wooden struts were attached to the floor. We came to know by heart where the slats were gap-toothed and how to avoid being seen through them. We’d learned not to brace ourselves against any of them—they splintered easily and bowed at the slightest touch.

  From above, we watched bonds form, friendships dissolve, and kept an eye out for the more outrageous table manners. Margot and I took it in turns to narrate, as though we were watching a BBC nature documentary, and found ourselves so amusing that we had to stop regularly to catch our breath and wipe the tears from our eyes.

  We made ourselves a nest up there in the eaves, wove it from schoolgirl giggles and small-town daydreams. Margot and I barely ever spoke to the other pupils; we were an exclusive club of two. By the time Helen arrived, it had been years since anybody else had bothered trying to join.

  Helen hadn’t tried—perhaps that was what made her intriguing. She’d just shown up one day—it was a Wednesday, I remember; Helen was so exotic she didn’t even start on a Monday—and sat, aloof, in the form room while the teacher introduced her. She was freckled and substantial—not big or plump, but womanly in a way Margot and I wouldn’t become for several years. Helen wasn’t as tall as either of us, but she drew glances because she held herself straight-backed and with her chin high. She made eye contact like a painting does, with everybody and at all angles. Hazel searchlights winkling out secrets and a thin-lipped smile as though she found herself funny.

  Helen spent her first day not with her dark, curly head down trying to fit in, but co
mpetently answering questions in biology, French, and geography as though she didn’t care what the rest of us thought of her.

  It wasn’t until I went to university and met other students from private schools that I realized what had shaped Helen into the sort of mature and confident young individual rarely seen among the breeze blocks, prefabs, and chips on the shoulder at St. Dominic’s. She had never mentioned it, and we had never thought to ask.

  Nobody else in our class had the social skills, so Margot and I introduced ourselves to her on her second morning. I say “Margot and I”: I was always the more self-assured of the two of us. I gave Helen our names with all the anticipation of handing a child a much-longed-for Christmas present. She received them with a steady expression, but gratitude—and curiosity—twinkled behind her eyes.

  “How are you finding it then?” I asked as nonchalantly as a sixteen-year-old can manage.

  I leaned on the desk at which Helen was sitting alone, the book she was voluntarily reading marking her outsider status, while she waited for the bell to ring for registration. Margot loitered to one side, unsure how to stand in order to look at once approachable but also occupied, not too available. (This was the reason why, in years to come, she would smoke until she was thirty.)

  “Not bad, thanks. Having some mates might improve things a bit though. Do you guys fancy going to the Peppercorn at lunchtime?”

  And like that, Helen established a new ritual. I could see that Margot ached at how easily and how fluently the new girl had turned her own weakness, her own indebtedness, into a position of strength with that invitation, handed out with all the grace of a socialite, even if it was just to the tatty café along the road from the school.

  I never forgot how casually Helen had done it, either. That deftness was one of the first things that drew me to her. I’ve often wondered whether the new girl even realized she was manipulating the pair of us, or whether it just came naturally to her.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T LONG afterward that Helen followed us up to the prac rooms.

  I had just dropped my rucksack onto the floor and pitched myself down on that sagging sofa. Margot was sitting at the ancient piano, repeatedly pressing the very highest key, trying to discern the sound of the note from the noise of the hammer.

  “Why do they even have this one?” she grumbled as a crashing noise came from beyond the door to the staircase.

  We jumped in unison: Nobody had ever disturbed us here. We weren’t convinced that many of the staff even knew about these rooms, either.

  Helen careened through the door, dust powdering her hair and a spiderweb streaking along the sleeves of her green school blazer. When she tumbled into the room that day, it was the first time I’d seen anything other than studied boredom cross her features.

  “This place is amazing!” She brushed her fingers along a blurb of our bubble writing on one of the chalkboards.

  “Did you follow us up here?” Margot asked, uselessly, from the end of the room. Of course she had.

  “Yeah, sorry for being creepy.” Helen shrugged mischievously. “I wanted to know why I could never find you two at lunch. Where you were hiding.” She gazed around the drab room with its bits of scenery dotted here and there and haywire old music stands with their broken antennae as though it were filled with glistering treasure. “Does anybody else ever come up here? They don’t know what they’re missing.”

  Margot spoke next, and I was glad. I didn’t yet know how to deal with the situation; Margot and I had constructed so much of our personalities up in the prac rooms that Helen’s unexpected arrival in there somehow felt like far more of an intrusion than the way she had crash-landed into our friendship.

  “Actually, there’s more,” Margot said, standing up from the piano stool and shifting aside the backdrops propped at one end of the instrument.

  She pushed open the half-height hatch onto the gallery and gestured through it. “Stay down though. Don’t let anybody see you.”

  Margot and I followed Helen through at a crouch and our eyes met over her back. I had the sense we had opened the door to more than just the balcony.

  I watched Helen take in the scene: the vast windows onto the sky and the view into the busy cafeteria below. I couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride—or smugness, perhaps—that we had been the ones to introduce her to it.

  “This. Is. Soooo. Cool,” Helen breathed. “Oh my God, we’re going to have so much fun up here.”

  Behind her, I saw Margot’s face go slack.

  So why were we surprised when we found Helen waiting for us the next time we made our way up the decaying steps?

  “I thought we could rearrange some of the furniture.” Helen had already dragged a chair in from the anteroom, placed the piano stool between it and the sofa like a coffee table. “Give it a new look.”

  “You’ve cleaned all our stuff off the boards.” Margot spoke through what sounded like a mouthful of sawdust as she took in the walls, denuded of our chalky jargon. “You had no right to do that.”

  Helen looked surprised at her tone and, with it, a little impressed. “Oh, sorry! I thought it was just old doodles. Are we cool?”

  I had never seen Margot look less enthusiastic when she nodded in reply, but it seemed enough to satisfy Helen, a cuckoo in the nest Margot and I had fashioned for ourselves.

  2

  We started going to the café every lunchtime instead. The practice rooms now looked scruffy and sad by comparison: a childhood den versus what we thought of then as a sophisticated refuge.

  Margot and I drank milkshakes and Helen had peppermint tea, something I could tell Margot regarded as an affectation. I tried it but had to swallow my first mouthful with a badly stifled gag.

  “It’s good for your skin,” Helen said, laughing.

  Helen wasn’t funny the way Margot was. She was too self-possessed to ever give herself over to the gales of giggles the two of us used to share. When she did laugh—one sharp and skeptical outbreath through both nostrils—I felt delighted to have wrung it from her, and such was my preoccupation with repeating the triumph, I began to find Margot less amusing.

  After school, we three would decamp to someone’s house, ostensibly to do our homework, but more often to watch MTV and read magazines. Helen had a stack of well-thumbed glossies that nestled in a nook in the corner of her bedroom that had once been a fireplace. Her house was an old barn that had been converted; neither of the postwar semis that Margot and I had grown up in had anything that resembled the crannies that Helen’s home did.

  Margot’s own slightly tattered collection—inherited from the waiting room at her father’s dental practice—rivaled Helen’s, though, and we flipped through them as we lay on the floral bedspread, the fluffy blue carpet, the burger-shaped beanbag, feigning knowledge. Helen wanted to be a barrister; I had it in my head to be a gallerist, simply because I thought the word sounded sophisticated. Margot said she just wanted to write about people who were more interesting than anyone she had ever met—even Helen, she didn’t quite say.

  Margot used to unleash my hair from the clip that held it on those afternoons and try to twist it into new styles while Helen gave instructions. One day I started to paint Margot’s nails while she did mine, our hands spread out in a yin-yang of us both as we always had. Helen was content to watch for a time but then insisted we try it as a trio, and it descended into Rouge Noir smudges across all of our knuckles. The difference between Margot and me was that I found it funny.

  The seasons changed as the dynamic did. We found one day that it was spring and the three of us had become inseparable. We marauded as a threesome, swapped clothes, and made tapes for one another, carefully copying an extra each time, so we could all listen to the same compilation at once.

  Mine were gutsy and guitarish, Margot’s full of pop tunes we could make up dances to. Helen, w
hose elder sister was on her year abroad in Marseille, peppered hers with French songs that we sang along to phonetically. I didn’t much like the tunes, but I knew that wasn’t where their value lay. Years later, when Charles mentioned him casually on one of our early dates, I’d be grateful for that basic grounding in MC Solaar. It wasn’t until then that I realized the accretion of culture could be accidental, and cynical.

  I forgot that Helen was the new girl, had ever been a stranger, until one day when I was off school sick and the two of them, Margot and Helen, went to the café together without me. I knew Margot well enough to know she’d feel uncomfortable without me there as a backstop, and it made me feel protective and contemptuous of her in equal amounts.

  What Margot has never understood about herself is that three is an ideal number for her: enough to deflect some of her intensity, enough to take off the self-imposed pressure to carry a conversation, enough for her even to seem garrulous. She could have thrived in a three, but I knew how desperately she wanted us to be a two again—just as I recognized that I was enjoying the way Helen had opened up the rather airless friendship that Margot and I had shared before.

  In Helen, I saw a recklessness I’d always strived for but had been too scared to embrace alone. Margot liked to be safe and quiet, warm and cozy, but I wanted to feel the chill of high-altitude decisions, to stand in the blowing gale of a life lived on the edge. Helen never even seemed worried about the drop.

  The day I was ill, conversation between the two of them would take more effort than usual; I knew that. I imagined it as I lay on the sofa at home, covered with a knitted blanket my grandmother had made, the TV droning in the background. Margot would be tongue-tied and self-conscious without me, at a loss for what to say next. The harder she had to search for sentences, the less likely she’d be to find any that intrigued Helen. Our three-way friendship was based on my translating Helen into something Margot could understand and respond to. For Helen, it was that she liked me, and Margot came as an inseparable part of the package.