The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  One of the doormen had helped her to her feet and into the office, saying he’d fetch her some water, but returned with two other men she’d never seen before. One had punched her as she’d tried to get away. After that, she’d sagged back into the chair and tried to pretend she was somewhere else.

  We became friends again that lunchtime, in the attic space that had witnessed so many years of us already.

  “But,” Margot said, softly yet sternly, as I agreed to tell Helen the fact of our reconciliation but not the rest of the story. “But. I don’t want her around.”

  The terms were hardly difficult to agree to. Everything that had drawn me to Helen—the glamour, the rebellion, the sophisticated subversion—was now tainted with my and Margot’s experience of what cost they came with. The seediness, the fear, the ugliness. Helen was no more an adult than we were. And I was more than ready to once again inhabit a world where schoolgirls were a protected species, rather than prey.

  “I promise,” I told Margot. “I’ll explain that she was out of order. We go way back, you and me, Helen’s got to understand that.”

  * * *

  WE FOUND HER SITTING in the doorway of one of the math blocks, headphones in and chewing gum. I was barely a handful of words into my declaration before she cut me off, eyeing Margot by my side with an expression that morphed from distaste into empty-eyed boredom as she spoke.

  “Don’t tell me—she’s back, your little shadow. She gets herself roughed up because she doesn’t know any better, and suddenly she’s interesting? Pathetic.”

  “Come on, Helen,” I tried. “Me and Margot are—”

  “You’re not much better, you know!” she blazed. “With that librarian hairdo and your constant fussing. ‘Ooh, Helen, you’re so grown-up,’ ‘Ooh, I can’t stay out late, me mam would kill me.’ ”

  Her mockery of my hated curls and local accent made her accusations sting all the more. I knew how she felt about the people who lived round here, and now I was mortified to learn what she really thought of me. Beside me Margot was cringing too; Helen hadn’t even needed to stand up in order to face us down.

  “Christ, you’re such a pair of little losers!” she spat. “Is there anyone at this school who is actually cool?”

  She gestured for us to leave her in a way that reminded me of something. It was the same arm the doorman had extended over Margot as he “let” her get up from that chair. Helen plugged the buds back into her ears and looked away with set jaw. She was done with us.

  I had assumed the new girl would at least try to slot back into a threesome with Margot and me. I’d foreseen afternoons of awkwardly trying to chaperone a game of conversational tennis between two people determined to hit aces at each other every time. Instead, I was profoundly relieved Helen had ditched us, even though I was still reeling from how poisonous her real assessment of us had been.

  I squirmed to think that Helen had inwardly despised me as some yokel even as I had been reveling in her company. What a delightfully useful idiot I had been for the new girl, selling my oldest friend down the river on her suggestion and—I now realized—for her own entertainment.

  I had far less reason to dislike her than Margot did, but my feelings toward Helen burned with a fierce intensity that was stoked by my embarrassment at having been duped. I would never forgive her, I knew, for looking down on me, for withering my fledgling self-confidence. I was a zealous convert to hating her.

  Later, Helen told whoever she could that she wanted nothing more to do with us. We were weirdos. We were a pair of sappy kids who didn’t know how to have real fun, how to be cool, how to drink—who were bankrupt of street cred. Reputations being what they were at that school, our classmates were delighted to believe her.

  The stories she told that stung the most weren’t the snide lesbian fibs designed to embarrass, they were the truths we had bared to her about our ambitions, our dreams beyond the perimeter fence—bubbles of hope for our futures that were all too easily pricked by the cheery scorn of those who had no such aspirations. Margot and I had laughed off their bafflement before, but we had always had the upper hand; now we were openly mocked.

  We spent more and more time in the practice rooms. The low-ceilinged spaces felt increasingly like bunkers in which to dodge the artillery of our peers; we peered over the edge of the balcony at them as if from the trenches. We could relax there without feeling the weight of Helen’s contemptuous stare. We’d lie on the floorboards of the musicians’ gallery and watch the rest of the school at its business below.

  Bobby Davis rubbing mushy peas into his mate’s hair. Mandy Elton giving the finger behind a teacher’s back. And Helen, of course, whose presence we felt like a chill in the air whenever we had to share a space with her, but who from this angle looked sad and lonely, a little girl quickly eating her sandwich with a book covering her face and her headphones permanently jammed on.

  “I feel a bit sorry for her,” I said, a month or so after Margot and I had made up, as we watched Helen watching the rest of the room from behind The Catcher in the Rye. “She’s so messed up, she wanted to mess us up, too.”

  “I don’t,” said Margot coolly. Sometimes, after the incident in the club, her face and voice were so cold and blank that I’d feel a pinch of fear. “She deserves everything she gets.”

  7

  Once you’ve seen someone in their most fundamental state of grief, it’s like you’ve seen them naked. No, more than that—like you’ve seen them without their skin, all their blood vessels and organs exposed. There’s a power imbalance afterward. It takes time to come back from that, to be able to talk about what’s for tea or what the weather is doing, or to ask if they think their heart will ever mend.

  In the moments before Jack’s little chest stopped moving—I had never seen a baby’s tiny rib cage fluttering close up before and it seemed every breath would exhaust him it was so hard fought for—Charles and I wrung out all our human longing, all our desperation, let all our despair loose in that hospital room.

  It was there in our sobs, the relentless shaking of our heads as if we could command the inevitable not to happen. I kept saying it, no no no, but Charles was silent until the end. When he shouted as Jack left us—Jack, the little boy he’d hoped and planned for, a name he’d chosen years ago for the son we surely would eventually have—the one word he cried out was “Don’t!” A bark of a command, an order any father might give to his child if it strayed too close to danger, but in this case forever destined to go unobeyed.

  There is something about sharing a moment with someone when the veil of civility that we drape over our lives is tugged loose to reveal everything visceral and base lurking underneath. The smell of mortality, Shakespeare called it. It makes ordinary interaction difficult to resume. For a while, at least.

  That’s how it was after Helen.

  * * *

  I SAW HER IMMEDIATELY—that frizz of dark curls looking down on the midday morass below, scanning and rescanning for the two heads that weren’t up there alongside her. Helen hadn’t really hidden herself, just sat down behind the wooden handrail. It meant I witnessed the precise half second she saw me and Margot as we entered the hall together before veering to the right to climb the stairs ourselves.

  That day, Margot had suggested the two of us walk up the hill to the Peppercorn and order our sandwiches in paper bags to take back and eat in the dusty rooms at the top of the spiral staircase.

  Helen was too far away for me to tell whether there was a wounded note in her expression, but no distance could dilute the look of undisguised rage she wore at the fact that Margot and I hadn’t been where she had expected to find us, that she wasn’t privy to our plans anymore and no longer knew the rhythm of our lives.

  Standing, Helen glowered down at us. That was the moment when Margot slipped her arm through mine and waved up at Helen, a thin smirk across her featur
es.

  I turned to my friend, puzzled.

  When I realized, I felt cold all over.

  Those stages clicked past quickly, like a camera shutter flicking through shots; the next sequence seemed to drag on forever, even though there was no time to undo it.

  Then, even as my heart screamed in protest, Helen leaned against the handrail in front of her.

  A noise, then, like the first bowing of a cello during tuning: wooden and scratchy.

  There was a pause, a beat. The instant before the drop on a record, after the cymbals in “Blue Monday,” which Margot had put on a tape for both of us only a few months earlier. It can’t even have been a second, but it felt like much longer.

  Helen pitched forward as the rail gave way beneath her hands, the sourness wiped from her face by a terrible surprise, not at all like the insouciance we’d found so irresistible.

  If the groan of rotten timber hadn’t alerted the audience below to the tragedy that was happening above their heads, the shriek that rang out soon focused their minds. The sound hung over us all as jarringly as the broken balcony. The racket hushed in an instant, just in time for a noise like a bunch of thick celery stalks snapping as Helen hit the floor, twenty feet below where she had been only moments before, inches from where Margot and I stood.

  And then the screams began.

  Students and teachers rushed to encircle Helen, to see what they could do for her.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Margot whispered, motionless with fear.

  Watching the blood trickle toward the tip of her shoe, I said: “I know what you did.”

  8

  The police wanted to speak to us even before we had been delivered into the arms of our parents that afternoon. After the initial hush and the horror came the inexorable, grinding process of rooting out the truth.

  “What happened, girls? Tell me what happened.” Ashen-faced, Mrs. Wilson yanked us up the couple of steps onto the dais in front of the headmaster and deputy’s offices.

  What had happened? One minute Margot and I had been talking, the next a misstep, a tremble, a note of panic, and air where there had been a girl. Black blood on the green lino floor.

  There was only one option. To say anything else would only lead to more questions. Questions about why and how, about where we had been and who knew what.

  “We never even knew she was up there,” I told our teacher, clear and dead eyed. “We’d only just walked in with our sandwiches.”

  It was easy, really.

  All I knew, I told the sergeant who questioned me on the chintz sofa in my parents’ sitting room, was not only did we not know Helen was in the prac rooms at the time, we hadn’t even been aware of the minstrels’ gallery.

  Had we ever been up the spiral staircase? Of course, everybody had. Had we lingered? No thanks, too spooky. What secret door?

  And that was what Margot said, too—that old telepathy again, only this time neither of us was laughing.

  The police officer made notes and asked more questions. He doubled back to certain moments and tested from other angles. He never seemed to doubt my words; his rigor was simply part of a professional habit that had been honed on detainees far more likely to deceive him than the stunned, shocked schoolgirl who faced him on the settee.

  By the time my interview was over, I was shaking so violently my teeth chattered and I couldn’t keep my knees still, whether under the intensity of the scrutiny or with the effort of upholding something I knew to be untrue, it was hard to tell. All I wanted was for the policeman to leave. Once he was gone, I told myself, I would be able to relax and catch my breath, to stay my shaking limbs and wait for the adrenaline to leave my body.

  They wrapped everything up so quickly it was unseemly, my mother said, but the school wanted it all sorted before that balcony—and the rest of that rickety old shithole—became a health and safety target for the local press. So our version of events stood, and life went back to normal. Almost.

  As soon as Helen’s body struck the floor, Margot and I were a two once more, every bit as intensely bound as we had been before, only this time by what we had done—what we had let happen, what we hadn’t said. Before we had only needed each other—now, each of us had only one need from the other: silence.

  I let Margot understand that if she ever left me, I could ruin her life at a stroke. All I needed to do was change my statement with the police: “You were taunting her. I know what you did.” I’d always been the one in charge of our friendship, the one who decided where we went on a Saturday and what we bought, what music we liked, how we cut our hair, or what color we painted our nails. Now I was in charge of her future, too.

  I realize now—as Charles has told me so regularly over the years—that I made a rod for my own back. That threat, the lingering chance that I might change my story, made Margot even more anxious, even more needy, so that I ended up devoting much of my adult life to clearing up her messes and soothing her fears. The number of times Charles and I have sat down to dinner, only for the phone to ring or the doorbell to go and for it to be Margot, white faced with that cowlike expression, saying, “Sorry, I just need some help,” “Sorry, but can you listen,” “Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to function by myself.”

  I never liked to think about why she was always so jumpy, about what might have happened to make her doubt her own judgment even as a successful, grown woman. I certainly didn’t like to think about what my part in that might have been.

  * * *

  I NEVER DID FIND OUT where Helen went, only that the rehab facility most suited to her injuries was near London, where her family had come from in the first place. My parents and the few teachers who ever spoke about the incident to me mentioned words such as traction and bed rest. One told me Helen would live in a hospital for the best part of a year. The bones in her legs had shattered and there were fractures in her spine that would mean she needed to lie still for at least three months.

  They said she needed a halo vest, which I thought was darkly comic given how she’d treated Margot, until I looked it up and found out they screw those into your head. There was nothing funny about that.

  It would take months before she could sit up again, I was told, then years possibly before she’d walk—but she would one day, and in all likelihood without lasting damage eventually. Anyone who knew her as an adult would probably never even realize what she’d been through, Mrs. Wilson told me on my first day back at school after it all happened.

  “Can I write to her?” I asked then.

  I already knew what I would send: mixtapes and coded notes, whispers by post, sniggers in envelopes that would suffice until we could see each other again.

  “I’m afraid her parents have asked us not to pass on their new address, sweetheart,” she replied. “Helen wants to start afresh where she is now.”

  And that was that.

  Afterward, it was like being friends with a war vet, someone haunted by what they have done and had done in return. The camaraderie was gone, the joy too. The innocence. There was no more laughter. Margot and I didn’t go out again, we simply clung to each other like ballast for the final two years of school, before we could go to university.

  Cambridge was a relief for me. New friends, uncomplicated friends—at least, uncomplicated by monstrous reality: The usual wealth, beauty, and status niggles were all there. Simple anxieties for adult-sized children as yet untouched by the world. Fun with them didn’t feel like a millstone around my neck. I reveled in being young with them, because what had happened with Margot and Helen felt like it had aged me by several decades even before my seventeenth birthday.

  We were the only people who knew the truth about why Helen had fallen, and we shared the heft between us like pallbearers. Although we never spoke of it directly, there was a comfort to be had in our guilt, mutual if unequal, as I’d come to th
ink of it. In the carefully balanced scales in which our friendship sat, loaded and lethal, safe only if we both kept to the bargain we had made.

  That’s why we stayed in touch all those years. We had shared interests and similar personalities—and we did care for each other—but it was the fault line at the heart of us both that glued the pair of us together. I tried to distance myself from Margot as much as I could, but the pattern was set: I could never turn her away when she needed me.

  When she told me she was pregnant a few months after I had dropped her a line saying the same, it felt like a wholesome new beginning. Flowers growing on a rubbish heap. As we compared notes and shopped and planned, closeness sprang up again. We were as thick as thieves; the old telepathy returned. She called me once straight after I’d felt a Braxton Hicks.

  But when Jack died, all that disappeared overnight. I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I hated Margot. I loathed her for her unknowing smugness, for her life’s carrying on the way mine was supposed to, her abundant body ripening while mine was a sterile husk incubating only this terrible sense of loss.

  Jack’s death fretted at something distant in me, the way raindrops on the surface of a pond eventually stir up the silt below. The feelings I’d pushed deep down within since school came rushing back up to the surface, familiar resentment and remembered wrongs, like Greek Furies at the window.

  I told myself, when I saw the picture of Lila that she posted on Instagram, that I’d just been hurt by Margot’s thoughtlessness, by her inconsiderate flaunting of her own healthy, happy baby. But I was lying to myself. I wasn’t wounded by it, I was incensed.