Chloe said something but her voice was muffled by her bag and her head-down position. ‘Tell it to fuck off. I don’t need the stress.’
‘You heard what she said,’ Emma said, still rubbing, and made a clicking noise in her throat. It could have been asthma, or purring. ‘Why don’t you take the hint and go and sit with one of your other friends?’
Her smile made her flat face even wider.
Chloe calls you panhead, I wanted to say.
The walls of the art room were covered in drawings mounted on sheets of black construction paper. One wall was devoted entirely to still life: carrots and tomatoes arranged suggestively and sketched by some joker, wobbly bananas done in felt pen, and a painting of a crumpled crisp packet almost hallucinatory in its detail and accuracy. Another wall devoted to blotchy and smudged attempts at pointillism and one more of pictures of knotted rope, balls of wool, hanks of tangled string: all vivid in black and brown oil pastels, thick enough to scrape your initial into with a fingernail.
I got up, dragged my bag roughly out from under Chloe and went to lean against the paintbrush sink at the side of the classroom. Of course there was nowhere else to sit. It didn’t feel like anyone else had been paying attention, everyone all caught up in the intricacies of their own dramas, but I scanned the room and saw the gaps close up and the empty stools disappear as if the walls themselves were absorbing them.
I should mention this to Donald, I thought, because he will know something about this: herds, mass minds, schools of tiny fish insignificant and edible as individuals, but fearsome and magnificent as one huge flickering shoal. People do it too, I thought, but I already knew that.
Shanks emerged from his office patting the back of his collar. It looked, I thought with a jolt, and before I could stop myself, as if he’d only just put his shirt on. The thought of him being naked in front of a poster of Marc Bolan, maybe even painting like that, made my feet tingle. I closed my eyes and waited for the sensation to pass. Chloe would have called it a cheap thrill. He clapped his hands, as usual, and sat on a corner of his desk, put one ankle on the opposite knee and reached for his register.
‘Glad to see you back in fine fettle, Miss Farley,’ he said.
‘Thanks, sir,’ Chloe said, her cheeks colouring up.
Then he leaned towards her, spoke quietly while the usual classroom noise surged around him, but I heard what he said.
‘Come and see me afterwards. A quick word, please. Bring,’ he waved the corner of the register in Emma’s direction, as if he was wafting away a bad smell, ‘Laura if you want.’
He didn’t sound pissed off, only stern and calm and determined to be kind. He was going to do his pastoral care voice, I thought, and force her to go and see the nurse.
In the first year or two of high school, the nurse, whose real name was Patsy, was called Nitty Nora the Biddy Explorer, because if you went to get a plaster or a suck on your inhaler, she’d always sneak in a check of your head as well.
In Year Nine the girls would call her Dr Jamrag, because you had to go to her office for supplies if you were caught short. She had a drawer filled to the brim with Dr White’s – the sort of hospital-issue sanitary towels that made you waddle and weren’t even for sale in pound shops. Someone once asked for a tampon, and got a lecture about toxic shock syndrome, natural flow and the importance of the hymen. Seeing her for the hymen talk was such a terrifying prospect that none of us were ever caught short – there was a trick you could do with toilet paper and a folded-up sandwich bag that would hold you over until home-time, and we taught it to each other in whispers during PE.
If the Year Tens and Elevens spoke about Patsy at all it was with a bit more respect because there was a rumour that you could get little paper bags full of condoms from her, or at least she knew where you could get them for free, no questions asked. It might have been a rumour, but being sent to the nurse, or being seen coming out of her office meant only one thing to the rest of us. And all of us, well, all of the boys, at least, were obsessed with condoms – there were always one or two stuck to the windows, and such a plentiful supply of them spare for water bombs that the rumour about Patsy and her paper bags was probably true.
I imagined Chloe in her office, and under the folding sick bed, a treasure chest of foil packets shining like coins.
‘What are you doing perched there?’ Shanks said. He looked at me, up on the sink, and shook his head. ‘You’ll give yourself piles – that porcelain must be freezing.’
I know he didn’t mean it. Most adults have completely forgotten the way things are at school. The word ‘piles’ released such a great gale of laughter that it took Shanks several minutes to get the class under control again.
He was standing in front of the longest wall – the one covered in all the coursework from the Year Elevens who were taking art for GCSE. Usually the ones who had problems reading or writing, or getting themselves dressed properly. They were the best pictures though. Chalk, charcoal, pencil, on blue and white and grey paper. Glasses filled with ice and something carbonated, so well drawn you could almost hear the fizz. Car wing mirrors, windows, the curved reflective bonnet of a car. Lightbulbs, more windows, and the strange lozenge-shaped bulbs of streetlamps. I fell into the pictures, gazing at the glass and water, ice and bubbles, until Shanks banged the spine of the register against the edge of the desk and demanded silence.
‘For those of you that have been watching the news,’ Shanks said, and held the closed register in front of his crotch like he was taking a penalty, ‘the rumours that the school is going to close so you can all stay safe at home and in bed have no doubt got your little minds working.’ He put down the register and started to pace. His hair sprung up from his head in thick pale tufts – there was a touch of red in it, as if he’d been a full-on ginger in his younger days. Strawberry blond, although that’s not a very manly way of describing it.
‘I’m here to tell you that’s not even half true – there are no plans for closures, and if there were, I’m sure I’d know about them before Terry Best. While the council has had a chat about 8 p.m. curfews for the under-sixteens, that’s not something the school would decide, so there’s no point passing around that petition when you’re supposed to be listening to me, Rachel Briggs. Thank you. In your bag until home-time.’
The thing is Shanks wasn’t even that tall. Chloe said height, the ownership of a car and foreplay were all you needed from a man – expecting anything else was being picky, a perfectionist, and the reason why I shouldn’t be expecting to get a Valentine from anyone but Donald this year. Again. She could talk. Carl had both ears pierced.
‘No closure, no curfew, but I’m asking you – for the sake of yourselves, your parents and my nicotine-addled heart – to be careful with yourselves. I know what you get up to at night. Monsters, the lot of you, sneaking out of the back bedroom window as soon as your parents are asleep. I know what you get up to in the bus shelters, in the back of the train station, on the roof of the Spar, round the docks, underneath the jungle gym in the kiddies’ swing park – Danny Towers.’
He stopped for the expected laugh, which came. Danny was shoved and punched by his friends, and smirked proudly.
‘I’m a realist,’ Shanks said, glanced at me on my porcelain perch and almost winked. ‘I’m not asking you to stop. I’m not telling you to stay in at night and I’m not telling you that you need to spend the whole weekend hoovering up for your mother and arranging flowers at St Peter’s. I’m not that old that I don’t remember what it’s like. What I am doing, is asking, imploring, beseeching and warning you that whatever you do, do it in pairs. At least. Promise me, 3Y1, that you’ll be sensible until this pest is caught.’
He’d got serious towards the end – his voice slowed and dropped until he had the attention of almost everyone in the room.
‘But, sir, he’s packed it in,’ Danny let his voice slide up at the end as if he was asking a question. We all spoke like that.
‘When I say “caught”, I mean caught properly – not just taking a rest, not just having a bit of time off over Christmas or while it’s a bit nippy out – but locked up somewhere, answering to a cellmate who just happens to be two foot wider than he is, and someone’s doting dad. Do you hear me? Now’s not the time to start getting careless.’
I saw the back of everyone’s heads, nodding at him obediently.
‘Chloe,’ he said quickly, ‘get your head up off the desk and stop whispering. Emma? Turn this way please. Is there something about this you think doesn’t apply to you? You think you’re immune to what’s going on in this city? The last victim was fifteen – you’re not far off that now, are you? If he’s stopped, brilliant – you won’t catch me complaining. But a fortnight without an attack and some rumours about some poor boy who didn’t find his way home doesn’t mean you’re all safe. I don’t want to be called into the headmaster’s office one morning to be told one of you lot has been caught in the crossfire between Jack the Ripper and a vigilante mob – right? Think about it, and wash that make-up off your face before Mrs Grant sees you and decides to be less tolerant than me. One more detention this term, Chloe, and it’s a meeting with your parents.’
Emma was stiff and pale and horrified – probably because she wasn’t used to a telling off. Slowly, very slowly, Chloe lifted her head. Her face was red. She was shaking with laughter.
After the wreck of morning registration, I didn’t even attempt the dining hall. There was no chance I would be able to go in there, queue, pay, sit, eat and return my tray alone. My stomach squeaked and popped with hunger.
You’re chubby anyway, I thought briskly, and walked in the other direction towards the library and the bank of computers you were allowed to use for homework. I had Donald’s paperwork with me. Might as well try to type some of it up.
Despite everything, there was something soothing about the typing. Donald’s handwriting was always cramped and erratic – often smudged because he was left-handed. I didn’t find it difficult to read because I was used to it – I’d done jobs like this one for him before and it was how I knew how to type. Before Year Nine, when I’d finally been allowed to use the school computers for coursework, I’d used Barbara’s old Silver Reed – a portable with a slipping ampersand key and a matching plastic case the colour of a hearing aid – the one that Donald had ruined with a lump of lard. I remember I used to spray the ribbon with water from the plant sprayer and wind it back up again because I didn’t know you could buy replacements.
Sometimes what I found out during this typing was interesting, if not exactly useful. The Montgolfier brothers made a balloon, and tested it by offering convicted criminals a pardon if they survived a trip over the Channel. Or Wrigley’s chewing gum: the first product in the world to be sold with a barcode.
I sat at the computer furthest away from the door in a corner next to a mural of famous dead writers waving and wearing the school colours. The computer hummed and the monitor crackled with static as it loaded up. I took Donald’s exercise books out of my bag, fed my floppy disk into the front of the unit, and started to type.
The 27th of January, at the entrance of the vast Bay of Bengal… about seven o’clock in the evening, the Nautilus… was sailing in a sea of milk… Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon… was still lying hidden under the horizon… The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters.
‘It is called a milk sea,’ I explained…
‘But, sir… can you tell me what causes such an effect? for I suppose the water is not really turned into milk.’
‘No, my boy; and the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the presence of myriads of infusoria, a sort of luminous little worm, gelatinous and without colour, of the thickness of a hair and whose length is not more than seventhousandths of an inch. These insects adhere to one another sometimes for several leagues.’
‘… and you need not try to compute the number of these infusoria. You will not be able, for… ships have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles.’
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
June 1854. South of Java. Aboard the American clipper Shooting Star. Captain Kingman reports:
The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky… appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.
The British Meteorological Office has established a Bio luminescence Database, which presently contains 235 reports of milky seas seen since 1915. Surely bioluminescent organisms must be the explanation for them? But most of these organisms simply flash briefly and are incapable of generating the strong, steady glow observed. Marine bacteria alone glow steadily. However, calculations show that unrealistic concentrations of bacteria would be needed to generate the observed light. Herring and Watson admit there is no acceptable explanation of the milky sea and yet urge observers of it to retain the water, spiked with bleach, for further study.
Here, Donald’s notes dissolved into fragments. I rearranged, trying to line his words up into coherent sentences. I may have distorted his meaning – I really don’t know.
Milky Seas Sightings in British Waters and Their Uses: a request for attention, funding and assistance with further research.
Do not want to hand this project over.
There are commercial as well as social and humanitarian applications to any possible findings that must be explored with all haste.
Letters to BMS and various university marine research departments (unanswered) enclosed for your records and perusal.
N. B. What kind of bleach?
Nearly forty minutes later I set the document to print and packed the folders and papers away in my bag. I went to the printer, which was on the side of the librarian’s desk at the front of the room. There was a red biscuit tin in the shape of a telephone box with a slit in the top for your money. Mr Brocklehurst (Broccoli, or Meat and One Veg) never looked up. As long as he heard money going into the tin he was happy enough with you taking your printouts. They were five pence each, but I shoved a handful of pennies through the slit, keeping my eyes on his bowed head. I was paying so much attention to him that I didn’t see Chloe and Emma, leaning on each other, grinning like leggy, white-socked vampires, and pulling the sheets out of the printer as they arrived.
‘What’s this?’ Chloe said, the bundle clutched tight between her fingers. She was creasing the pages – holding on tight and expecting me to grab for it.
‘Give me it,’ I said. Emma leaned over, put her head on Chloe’s shoulder and ran her fingers along a line of text.
‘Despite my age and lack of swimming ability it is my fervent hope,’ she read in the seal-like bark that we heard from the remedials who were forced to read out in class.
‘What the fuck is that?’ she asked.
Broccoli turned his head and smiled.
‘You girls wouldn’t mind taking that outside, would you?’
‘Of course not, Mr Brocklehurst,’ Chloe said, and tucked the sheets under her arm. ‘Come on,’ she said, over her shoulder. Emma sniffed, and followed without looking at me.
I waited until I saw them through the glass doors, huddling over the pages and laughing. I followed too. The corridor outside the library was busy. The second meal sitting was over, and the day was too cold for anyone to want to go outside.
‘So,’ Chloe said.
‘I’m writing a story,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’
The trick, I thought, was to keep my hands in my pockets. Sit still, don’t lean in, don’t grab for it. Stand back, breathe casual. She only wants it because she thinks it’s important.
‘Really?’ Chloe said, got so close it looked like she was sniffing the pages. She turned them like a fan. ‘What about?’
‘Explorers.’
‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘This is your dad’s, isn’t it?’
‘What?’ Emma said.
Chloe turned away from me. I saw the side of her face – her mouth opening and closing, a loop of hair curled around her ear. She had a mole on the side of her neck. I stared at it. I wanted to stab it with a pencil.
Emma screwed up her nose. Panhead. Panhead. ‘Her dad’s writing a story?’
Chloe licked her lips, took a breath, and spoke as loudly as she could without shouting.
‘No one’s supposed to know, but Lola’s grand— I mean, dad – he’s gone soft in the head. He’s got this junk room where her mum keeps him because he’s not safe to wander around the house on his own.’
Emma glanced at me. Are we going too far? she seemed to ask. It wasn’t funny anymore and Emma wasn’t cruel, not like Chloe. This was worse. This was pity, and the effort of understanding. Ah yes, she was thinking, that’s why you’re the way you are. That’s why you’re not one of us – always on the outside, left at home on New Year’s Eve, waiting outside the car on Boxing Day. Standing guard. Watching, waiting, following. It’s because of your dad. He’s soft. I should have known.
I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t true. Not even half true. There had been accidents with aspirin and disposable razors, but Chloe made it sound like we kept him chained to a bolt in the wall. More than the untruth of it, the betrayal took my breath away. I knew they weren’t like ordinary parents, of course I did. Things had been bad enough for me without Donald and the junk room and his writing being made public knowledge. It wasn’t a junk room, it was a den, and it had taken me a long time to let Chloe come and see me at my house.
‘Give me those back, Chloe,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s no need for it.’
Chloe hooted with laughter.
‘Come here, Em, have a look.’
Emma glanced at me again, almost reluctant but not quite, and leaned against Chloe, reading the papers over her shoulder. She giggled and started to read aloud.
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