The Following Girls

by Louise Levene

  For Helen Louise

  The Hate had started.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four

  George Orwell

  Contents

  Monday 24 February 1975

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Also Available by Louise Levene

  Monday 24 February 1975

  Chapter 1

  The clock on the wall in Room 13 was striking four in the distance as Baker plunged a hand inside her blazer, slid open the flimsy cardboard packet and teased out a cheap cigarette. The jacket’s lapels formed a felty cave that muffled the giveaway hiss of the match and Baker watched the toasted cloud from the first drag as it drifted swiftly upwards on the strong draught from beneath the cubicle door and out of the open window. Escape.

  Someone outside had lost something. No one seemed interested. A sound of shoes hitting the floor, of loos flushing, taps running. The smoker puffed away, smiling, as another flotilla of perfect rings sailed off into the chilly spring air. Baker fidgeted into a less uncomfortable position on the loo seat: back to the wall of one partition, scuffed black lace-ups holding steady against the other, crepe-soled toes wedged either side of the roll of scratchy, papery paper with now wash your hands printed insultingly on every sheet. The top of the holder was scarred with a little pokerwork pattern of cigarette burns.

  Baker’s sideways pose created no tell-tale shadow in the gap below the door which had been left open a cunning inch or two and hung with a stolen ‘Out of order’ notice. She was safe for the moment. Invisible.

  An angry sign about basic hygiene and the vague hope that things might be left as one would wish to find them had been screwed to the back of the door but the lower screw had been removed and the enamel plaque could be swivelled clear to reveal a Rosetta Stone of fruity graffiti on the ancient grey paintwork. Mrs Mostyn was a slag, Amanda Bunter-Byng was a slag, Davina Booth was a slag, and cats liked plain crisps, apparently. The writing was fantastically small and neat and regular, some of it almost illegibly tiny – far too small to see if you were sitting on the seat: ‘Snow White thought 7-Up was a drink until she discovered dwarfs’; ‘Mostyn is a Snog Monster’; ‘I must not obsess. I must not obsess. I must not obsess’; ‘Ireland for the Irish: Peckham for the peckish’. The grey gap was nearly filled. Did Biro wipe off?

  Baker pulled the cap from a new green ballpoint and began greedily colonising the remaining space with angry, anonymous capitals: poison mrs mostyn. strangle mrs mostyn. garotte mrs mostyn. guillotine mrs mostyn. suffocate mrs mostyn. decapitate mrs mostyn. eviscerate mrs mostyn. exterminate mrs fucking mostyn.

  A sharp tap on the door jolted Baker from her murderous trance. Panicked, she let the sign slide back into place. The half-finished cigarette hit the bog with a dying hiss while shaking fingers fumbled for peppermints among the dust bunnies cuddled up in her blazer pocket.

  ‘Have you got the Maths master in there?’

  Baker let off an exasperated sigh of relief as she got down from her perch and opened the door to the friendly figure of Amanda Stott who had a sheet of graph paper resting on the cover of her current library book (Italian in 20 Lessons).

  ‘Don’t bloody do that. Thought you were one of the goons or something.’

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb but it’s mattresses again and I haven’t got a bloody clue. It’s due in tomorrow.’

  ‘“Find the determinant of the following ma-trices”,’ quoted Baker, calmer now. ‘Done my copy and handed it in already, sorry. Queenie had it last.’

  Baker grabbed her bag and sidled out of the cubicle and into the cloakroom.

  ‘God I hate Mondays.’

  ‘Tuesday’s just as bad,’ said Stottie.

  ‘Wednesday’s worse. The exams start on Wednesday.’

  Stott’s younger sister Stephanie was loitering behind her. First years played hockey all through Lent term and every Monday afternoon you’d see another crippled crocodile limping back from a friendly, their knees buttered with yellow mud. Young Stephanie had a filthy pair of goalkeeper’s pads stuck under her left arm and was tricked out in cupcake skirt, spiked hockey boots and a short-sleeved blouse with SS knotted in tidy chain stitch across her tidy twelve-year-old tits, reminding Baker that Miss Drumlin had threatened a double detention if she didn’t sew a similar monogram on her own shirt.

  Stephanie Stott was leaning against the great double row of sinks that ran back to back through the middle of the room, waste pipes all coursing into a great porcelain drainage ditch beneath. Irrigation. She stared hard at Baker. Her face was dusted with round purplish spots (the sulky, unsqueezable kind). Not just nose and chin but dotted evenly across the whole face like the blisters on the second side of a pancake or something catching in the Beano.

  ‘Can’t you just ask Miss Revie how you’re supposed to do them?’ asked the girl. Baker could smell the cough candy on her breath.

  ‘Afraid not, young Steve. Been tried. Miss Revie has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Knows all about matrices: how to invert them, even knows what they’re for, but she promised faithfully never to reveal the secret to a living soul. Swore a solemn oath. Not even for ready money. Not even for three and a half grand a year. Much easier to copy.’

  ‘I’ll tell.’

  Baker powered up the scary stare that reduced grown German teachers to jelly, but the younger girl failed to wither. Perhaps she was short-sighted? Hardly ideal in a goalkeeper. Perhaps she knew Baker was on probation, knew how little it would take to tip them over the edge. Or maybe she just wasn’t afraid . . .

  ‘You’ve been smoking. Julia Smith says only morons smoke. It’s a tax on stupidity, Julia says.’ Stottie’s sporty little sister worshipped the school games captain. Stottie gave an exasperated, ‘She doesn’t get it from me’ shrug.

  ‘Who gives a stuff what Julia Smith thinks?’ sneered Baker.

  ‘And you’ll get cancer. Even says so on the box. Talk about stu-pid.’

  ‘Very probably. Now why don’t you buzz off and leave us alone. Proles aren’t allowed in the Shell cloaks.’ Baker deliberately translated her thoughts into the moronic school code – the only language they understand.

  ‘I’ll tell.’

  But she did at last leave the room.

  ‘Your young Steve’s a bit of a prat. Is she adopted? Who knows? Maybe it’s you who’s adopted. She looks nothing like.’

  Stephanie Stott had her father’s burly build and the beginnings of her mother’s blousy curves. Stottie, with her boyish frame and pixie face, looked like a doll beside the three of them, like they’d stolen her from somewhere. She was easily the smallest in the fifth – half the size of Linda Madeley who was on the far side of the cloakroom changing for netball practice. Baker watched her slither free of her nylon blouse releasing a gaseous whiff: half Body Mist; half body odour. Behind Linda loomed the beanpole shape of Oonagh Houseman who was trying to keep her back to the room, hoping no one would see how her mother had attached her treble-A bra to the top of her knickers with buttons and tape so that she didn’t throttle herself every time she raised her arms for a save. As Oonagh reached under th
e bench for her gym shoes, the padded shell of white polyester gaped away from her chest. Why not just wear a bloody vest? Yellow wool in winter. Lacy cotton in summer. Vests. Baker frowned at the comfy memory.

  Stottie had scampered off to the form room in hopes of catching Queenie and the one genuine piece of homework done by the sole member of the Beta Maths group who could make any sense of the prep (and her brother did most of it). The result was passed from hand to hand and copied over with sly crossings-out here and there to make the forgery look authentic.

  Baker went across to her peg and huddled into her grubby blue regulation raincoat called, rather grandly, The Grantham and lined with its own peculiar plaid: a doleful chorus of greens and greys like the tartan of some extinct Highland regiment (Dress Grantham? Hunting Grantham? Trench Grantham?).

  The girl changing next to her was sneaking her crucifix into the polished toe of her brogues. She twitched a glance at Baker.

  ‘Don’t look at me.’ Baker was indignant. ‘T’isn’t me who nicks it all.’

  Purse-belts and make-up and cherished gold-nibbed fountain pens and puzzle rings and illicit transistor radios went missing from the cloakrooms all the time. No one was ever caught, but then no one tried particularly hard to catch. Culprits meant punishment: suspensions, expulsions, police even (if the swag had any real value). ‘Items of value must not be brought into school’ said the Fawcett Code (the implication being that they would be stolen if they were), but it didn’t go as far as ‘No Stealing’. Odd really, mused Baker, the way they let it slide, made it the victim’s fault. They were so strict in other ways, but the blind eye they turned to petty thievery meant that someone – could be the girl next to her, the crucifix-hiding business might just be a blind – was getting away with murder: a secret unflashable stash of cash and pens and lip glosses. Baker stared round the room: could easily be her, or her, or her . . .

  It couldn’t be a new problem. You even got it in Enid Blyton. Had all the sneak thieves over all the years grown up normal? Had they just grown out of it? Were they all in Holloway (nothing about that on the honours board)? Or did they take the values they’d learned at school with them into the outside world (like the Speech Day speakers always said) and spend lunch hours and tea breaks rifling through desks and lockers, fiddling their expenses and cheating the tax man?

  There was an unread copy of the Fawcett Code pinned up on every cloakroom noticeboard. Drafting rules was obviously a tricky business. Stealing wasn’t mentioned and you couldn’t very well say ‘No smoking’ either, or ‘No gambling’ or ‘No spitting’ or ‘No chewing tobacco’ or ‘Usury is forbidden in the lower school’ because putting such things on the list of rules would admit that they took place. So the ‘Code’ was just general blather about keeping to the left in corridors and ‘showing consideration’. A flyblown copy of the most recent edition was hanging alongside the upper school timetables. Baker groaned again at the thought of the next day’s lessons. What kind of masochist scheduled netball at nine fifteen in the bloody ratbagging morning?

  Bang in the middle of the corkboard was a plastic-covered copy of the school photograph and there on the back row were Amanda Baker, Amanda McQueen, Amanda Stott and Bunty, alias Amanda Bunter-Byng: the Four Mandies. They sat unsmiling in a sea of smiles, hair trussed madly into the side ponytails they’d given each other the moment Mrs Mostyn, perched just off-centre in her cap and gown, had completed her last-minute inspection. Stott Minor was sitting cross-legged at her feet in a stiff new blazer, her face caught mid-sneeze as if recoiling in horror from her closeness to the Snog Monster.

  Baker hastily shouldered her book bag. With Queenie and Stottie off playing mattresses in the form room she was on her own and she was sure Bryony and that lot were talking about her. One of them stared across, then whispered something. The others sniggered and muttered things in aigy-paigy then laughed some more. Bryony (safety in numbers) wheeled round to face Baker, her chin orange with spot concealer.

  ‘Girlfriend left you? No Bunty to play with?’

  Baker turned to leave without answering.

  ‘Better watch out,’ persisted Bryony. ‘Big Brother is watching you don’t forget: Stephanie Stott’s a right little tell-tale.’

  It might have been worded like a warning but she wasn’t really worried on Baker’s behalf. She was glad.

  ‘She wouldn’t dare,’ said Baker.

  But she would though. Young Steve was kinky for the uniform, for the whole badges and prizes business, for her precious scholarship. And she didn’t even mean any harm really – not in her own eyes. Smoking wasn’t just unhealthy (said so on the packet, showed you on the lurgy lung leaflets); it was Unschool. The way Stott minor saw it, once Mrs Mostyn knew and you’d taken your punishment, learned your lesson, it would all be all right again. It wasn’t nastiness in its weird little way, Baker could see that. Nastiness you could deal with. Nastiness and you could be nasty back.

  As she sauntered down the stairs past the smart front lobby Baker spotted the headmistress’s secretary shoving purple tulips into a surplus silver trophy (Greek Dancing and Eurhythmics) in readiness for the fifth form parents’ evening. The main hall was cluttered with chatty groups of chairs and tables with jaunty subject flags on them, all lying in wait for Baker’s dad.

  Baker’s dad hardly bothered to hide his disappointment any more as, one by one, the chances of certificates on the study wall melted away. Neighbours’ girls were Queen’s Guides or Duke of Edinburgh Awarded or pictured leotarding uncertainly from end to end of a four-inch beam in local newspapers. And Daddy’s girl? Daddy’s girl was in detention for putting half an onion in another girl’s lunch box (it had been left over from Queenie’s Quiche Lorraine – shame to waste it, said Queenie). The parents’ evening would give him plenty of fresh ammunition, especially once they told him about the front lawn business. They couldn’t prove it, thank God, but the net was definitely closing in. Maybe she could just not go home at all?

  If she stopped off in the café by the station she’d be able to miss the 4.50 and catch the 5.10 or even the half past. There’d be no Bunty to talk to, but anything was better than going home. Dad wouldn’t actually be back from the parents’ meeting till gone 7.30 by the time he’d done the rounds of all the subjects but she knew that the sense of dread would be stronger if she went home. The house would still be humming with the aftershocks of the row they’d had at breakfast: why did she always this, why could she never that.

  Stottie and her sister were still at the main gate when she got downstairs.

  ‘Don’t suppose I could stay over at your house tonight, could I?’

  Amanda Stott’s face gave a twinge of disappointment.

  ‘Any other night would have been brilliant, but I’ve got a sodding piano exam. Mum’s picking me up, then taking Stephanie to her gymnastics club, then dashing back here for the you-know-what.’

  ‘Bum,’ said Baker and slowly headed off down the hill to the station.

  ‘You could come tomorrow . . .’ Stottie called after her.

  ‘You said sodding,’ Stephanie Stott was saying. ‘I’m telling Mum.’

  Baker took out Sons and Lovers on the train so she could pretend not to be looking at the gang of girls from the school up the hill who were huddled round a shared cigarette at the far end, glancing across at her. They were all wearing platform shoes and trendy French-length skirts and two of them had blonde streaks in the front of their hair where the fringe flicked up – very Unschool. All of them had pierced ears and one had a phone number inked ostentatiously onto the back of her hand. The whole lot changed trains at the junction and made a point of walking to Baker’s end of the carriage so that they could each take a passing kick at her ankles as they piled out onto the platform. Bunty would have kicked back.

  Chapter 2

  A big brown envelope was wedged under the front door addressed to Robert Baker Esq and franked ‘Mary Kingsley High School’.

  Baker was still in
her coat, propping the post against the mirror above the hall table, when the key clicked in the lock and Mrs Baker came in, negotiating the door with two supermarket carriers and a shoulder bag bulging with papers from the office.

  ‘You’re back late.’

  ‘Netball.’

  ‘Netball?’ An old-fashioned look. ‘If you say so, sausage. Your dad won’t be back till later. I nipped out at lunchtime and got him a nice pork chop but I didn’t think we’d wait. Fancy an egg on toast or something? Boiled? Fried? Scrambled? Poached? Pickled? Addled?’

  ‘You choose.’

  Mrs Baker was heading off down the hall when Baker remembered about the initials for her games shirt, and yes, it was a bit urgent, and no, it wouldn’t be just as quick to teach Baker how to do chainstitch.

  ‘Won’t take me a minute,’ Mrs Baker sighed. ‘Let me get tea out of the way.’ Coat off, she began fussing around the kitchen, halving a grapefrut and putting Dad’s chop on the grill in readiness for his return while simultaneously rustling up their own tea.

  It was always busy in Mrs Baker’s kitchen, even when there was no one in it. Every other tile had a daisy transfer, every surface was crowded with patterned tins. There was a toytown table with four matching yellow stools that stowed under it like something out of a caravan. A set of fancy plates too-good-to-use were hung in a row by the window next to a calendar with pictures of all the cats they had never had posing irresistibly in gumboots and Christmas stockings. Keeping them company was a spider plant which lounged from the ceiling in the macramé hammock that the eight-year-old Baker had made in junior school.

  Baker watched the kitchen clock twitch nearer six thirty and felt her mouth growing dry at the thought of the evening ahead: a storm of reproaches followed by the usual one-way ticket to Coventry, with Dad relaying all instructions via his wife: Pamela Jean Baker; Pam; Spam.

  ‘Pamela, could you be kind enough to ask Amanda if she has finished her homework. Pam love, could you ask Amanda to pass me one of those serrated spoon things.’