The Following Girls

by Louise Levene

  ‘Mark my words: Sir John and the other governors will want to take the firmest possible line, whatever she may like to think. I shall see to it personally.’

  She stopped short as she turned the corner on her way to the pigeon-holes. What, pray, was Baker doing there?

  Snog Monster. Legend had it that the nickname, older than anyone could remember, referred to an Ordnance Survey field trip to the New Forest or somewhere on which the Mostyn had been spotted in the waxed cotton arms of a National Trust ranger during a camp fire singsong. Can’t have been true, thought Baker, looking at the old bag’s Crimplene bulk. You could fit two skeletons inside that mass of flesh, easy. But the name had stuck. Even the first years used it.

  Mrs Mostyn squinted, nonplussed, at the pigeon-hole that Queenie had emptied then turned tutting to Baker as she stammered out her story.

  ‘In trouble again? I had rather hoped that your father would have had the chance to talk to you very seriously after the little chat we had yesterday evening. I don’t think I have ever seen a parent so disappointed. In any case, you can’t stay here all morning.’ Powdery jowls dangling playfully over the top of the tie-necked blouse. ‘Dr O’Brien has quite enough to do on her return without your plimsoll nonsense. Is this a free period? Come with me. You can do a detention right now in the Geography Room: plenty to do.’

  Much as Baker abominated the Snog Monster, anything was better than O’Brien and a letter home. With any luck this summary detention from Mostyn wouldn’t clock up a nasty little pink slip, so Dad needn’t find out. And the actual detention itself would be worse if the Drumlin had any say in the matter because the Drumlin always found filthy physical things for you to do like washing tennis balls or whitening goalie pads or chipping Juicy Fruit off the bottoms of chairs.

  Baker tailed after the Snog Monster to her lair. The box pleat beneath the baggy arse of her skirt flapped from side to side as her veiny great legs scuttled along the corridors, like the back end of an elephant on a nature programme. On she trundled, past the Music Room where first years were wrecking ‘The Skye Boat Song’ (one of the treats being lined up for Founder’s Day) and past the Art Room whose masterpieces spilled out on to the noticeboards of the corridor outside. None of them was current, indeed most seemed to have been there since Baker and her father and Spam had come to that fateful open day when Dr O’Brien sold Dad on the idea of Fawcett and ‘the rosy path of golden possibilities’. Nearly all of the art was signed ‘Dora Hardcastle’ who was clearly nothing if not versatile: portraits, landscapes, the odd abstract and a stomach-turning still life of a Bakewell tart and what the Mandies had agreed could only have been a Scotch egg (Bunty’s favourite).

  ‘I blame Cezanne,’ sneered Queenie (whose mum dragged her round galleries every weekend while Daddy played golf).

  ‘I blame Mrs Chiffley,’ said Bunty. ‘I’d know those Domestic Science leftovers anywhere.’

  ‘Where is Bakewell?’

  ‘Bakewell’s a place? I thought it was just a cooking instruction.’

  Mrs Mostyn shared the Geography Room with a Miss Combe. Miss Combe had only graduated in 1970 and was keen to bring all that she had learned to the classroom. Out had gone capital cities, map-drawing, imports, exports. In had come pebble formation, ox bow lakes, meanders, town planning and ‘acid rain’. Miss Combe had her own cocoa bean, her own crumbs of bauxite and a special dinky apparatus to prove, after two weeks of drips, that rainwater would wear holes in limestone or similar – just in case the students thought she was making it all up, presumably. Far quicker simply to tell them, reflected Mrs Mostyn, or chalk it on the board, or give them a sheet about it.

  Her keen young colleague, physical geographer to her unpainted fingertips, had mentioned with pride that the upper third in her last school could all parrot the chemical formula for sulphuric acid. Doubtless. But could any of them name three cities in West Germany? fretted the Snog Monster. Or say where pineapples came from? Or find Minsk? Mrs Mostyn liked her girls to have a good basic grounding in old-fashioned human geography – capital of Albania; neighbours of Switzerland; countries through which the Rhine flowed; uses of palm fibre, yam, that sort of thing – what Mrs Mostyn liked to think of as the useful sort of geography that enabled one to take an intelligent interest in people’s holiday stories, or overseas postings.

  Mrs Mostyn’s pet detention was the never-ending business of updating the school’s stock of atlases. Half of these dated from 1944, the other half 1955, and the world was not what it was. Dr O’Brien had very generously offered to replace them all – Miss Combe was mad keen – but Mrs Mostyn, who begrudged spending school money every bit as fiercely as she begrudged spending her own, had resisted: unnecessary expense; nothing that a few duplicated cut-outs or an extra-fine nib couldn’t put right. Besides, new atlases would have meant New Geography and she was determined to hold out against this for as long as she possibly could. None of the scholastic publishers bothered with proper political maps any more, so it was by no means certain that the old copies would be replaced with anything suitable.

  Miss Combe didn’t seem to care for maps at all, or map-reading. Such a skill, such a pleasure, so satisfying. Mrs Mostyn mused miserably on the ignorance of Miss Combe’s current Fawcett first formers. Not one, not one could read a real, grown-up map and the simpler one tried to make it, the worse it seemed to get. Only last week Mrs Mostyn had sketched a diagram of the Indian railway system and more than half of her upper thirds assumed there were no stations between Bombay and Madras just because she hadn’t marked any. A 32-hour non-stop train journey? Dimwits. Made you wonder why they even bothered with an entrance examination – they’d let in anybody.

  Mrs Mostyn opened the door to the Geography Room and showed Baker to a large desk already laid out with a stack of dog-eared old atlases and three trays filled with trimmed and coloured countries which were to be glued over any anachronisms. The Belgian Congo was Zaire now, Basutoland was Lesotho, Rio de Oro was Spanish Sahara, etc. The biggest change was French West Africa, which used to be a big bad blob of bottle green but was now a picaninny hairdo of a dozen little countries: more border controls; more wars; more capitals to learn.

  Baker stared at the offending outline, as green and random as an English pasture – though much larger. Heaps larger. And should you be in any danger of forgetting how much larger, the publisher had included a scale map of the British Isles in the bottom outside corner of each page (although the double page spread of New South Wales had a scale map of old South Wales – some sort of cartographical joke).

  Africa had undergone so many changes that on some pages the whole continent had to be papered over with the replacement that Mrs Mostyn had drawn and duplicated and which the upper thirds had cut out and coloured in using the poshest possible aquarelles which blended surprisingly well with the old coloured plates.

  Baker picked up one of the atlases, took one of the new Africas, buttered it with the paste spreader and held it carefully above the page before dropping it in place, draping a blank sheet of paper over it and smoothing the whole lot down. Bye-bye Belgian Congo. Bye-bye Tanganyika. Odd how some borders were straight and others wiggly. Rivers? Rock formation? A drunken cartographer? They never told you stuff like that. And why didn’t Ethiopia put up a fight when the French and Italians and Brits came and divvied up their whole coast into private Somalilands? And Lesotho and Swaziland, tiny pimples on the chin of South Africa. Barmy. Like granting political independence to Clapham Common.

  Mrs Mostyn watched Baker stick down her first map (neater than expected) and returned to her marking: thirty-two second year exercise books containing labelled sketches. The previous week’s homework, a cross-section of an oil refinery, had been an a la carte dog’s breakfast of laziness and ineptitude, but they at least had the excuse that oil refineries were hard to draw. This week’s, ‘A Typical Home in Malawi’ (née Nyasaland), was a simple enough assignment: a thatched roof of palm fibre shaped like a giant half cocon
ut on top of a cylinder of wattle and daub. Only three labels and a drawing any toddler could do, yet nearly all of them contrived to make a mess of it. ‘Use a ruler when labelling’ wrote Mrs Mostyn’s red pen for the eighth time. Was it, in fact, typical, this hairy brown igloo? wondered Mrs Mostyn to herself. Or did the modern Malawian live in a concrete bungalow and use their palm fibre for something else entirely? (it had many, many uses after all).

  Baker was actually rather enjoying her punishment. Even the sticking-in business was quite satisfying, fiddly but not difficult. She had a funky little rhythm going: take Africa, butter Africa, position Africa, stick Africa: simple; automatic; mindless (in the sense that it left your mind free to go where it liked). Every duff bit of ‘see me’ C minus homework and they warned you that you might end up stacking shelves in Safeways or copy typing but how bad could it be? Probably quite nice.

  She never really minded detention – better than lessons anyway. She had once spent a very pleasant lunchtime punishment removing graffiti from a batch of upper fourth French books. Someone had written ‘pointless’ in enraged capitals down both margins of a spread on the proper use of the past historic but the verb rubbish was all still perfectly legible. Why did it need to be removed? Pour encourager les autres? Or because no one must ever know that the past historic had been invented by Rampton and White because there simply wasn’t enough French grammar to fill a textbook otherwise. Baker hadn’t been the first to set about those pages with the ink eradicator: there were bleachy blobs in the margin where other uncomfortable truths had been blotted out. French got off pretty lightly. A few of the other textbooks had been past saving, like the History primer where all the line drawings of historical figures had had their heads filled in with turquoise felt tip: Smurf Thomas Cranmer; Smurf Ignatius Loyola; Smurf Bloody Mary.

  By the time the bell went for break Baker had edited twenty-three atlases. The Snog Monster seemed almost pleased.

  ‘We’ll worry about Ceylon another time,’ she conceded, indulgently. ‘And I hope that will teach you to wear the right shoes in future. Off you go now. I need to memo Miss Drumlin and I have to get your pink slip done for Dr O’Brien.’ An almost nasty smile as she saw Baker’s flinch of surprise: ‘You didn’t think you were going to get off that easily did you?’

  Chapter 5

  It had actually been a Miss Drumlin detention that brought the four Mandies together in the first place. Some row about name tapes had prompted her to keep the four first years behind, sorting lost property in the hockey hut one afternoon, and when they’d finally finished they had all scurried guiltily down the road to the out-of-bounds Victory Café. Bunty, who’d already eaten most of Baker’s Cornish pasty at lunchtime, had scoffed an entire toasted sandwich and was on her second glass of Tizer when her face suddenly fell as she spotted the multi-chinned profile of Mrs Mostyn gliding past the station at the wheel of her little snot green Morris Minor and drawing to a halt just beyond the bus stop. She walked back to the café and stood on the other side of the glass and stared at them. It had reminded Baker of the zoo but she wasn’t sure which of them was the animal.

  Mrs Mostyn beckoned to them with a fur-lined hook of kid glove which then uncrooked and pointed to the car. Waving aside their buts and can’ts about violin lessons and trains to catch, she had driven them back to the now empty school. A trio of girls from a rival grammar who were draped against the record shop window had watched, laughing as she bundled them into the back and stuck up two fingers as the Morris pouted off up the hill.

  Eating toasties in local cafés had never featured on the Fawcett not-to-do list but a staff meeting was hastily convened (Mrs Mostyn, Dr O’Brien and a passing Biology mistress who had stayed late to refresh the formaldehyde round the yellowing pickled baby). The three had decided that punishment of some kind was definitely in order and the offence was roughly translated into ‘Unschool behaviour’. All four sets of parents had been telephoned to come and fetch their errant daughters. Mrs Stott and Mrs Bunter-Byng pitched up first and led their daughters to the school gate with wait-till-I-get-you-home faces, although new girl Bunty had seemed oddly relaxed for someone in so much trouble.

  ‘Thought you’d be out getting Dominic.’

  ‘Dress rehearsal.’ Then a smile (a very small smile, like a coin left in the powder room) for Mrs Mostyn.

  ‘Hamlet,’ she explained.

  Bunty had opened her mouth to add ‘Gertrude’ but a warning glance made her think twice.

  Baker’s dad had been out at a site inspection so Spam had come on the bus and the pair of them had been given a lift home by a very bad-tempered Mrs McQueen. There wasn’t much chat, each woman mentally concluding that the other’s child had been the ringleader. Mrs McQueen was driving very fast in order to get back to her afternoon card party.

  ‘Do you play at all?’

  Spam’s face, reflected in the rear-view mirror, was being kept unnaturally straight.

  ‘Poker? Used to, once upon a time.’

  ‘Canasta. We get together most Mondays.’

  Baker could see Queenie’s mother sneaking glances at Spam, at the documents spilling from her bag, at the butch bunch of home and office keys in her hand as they pulled into the drive, saw her mentally crossing Mrs Baker off the list.

  ‘All four of you?’ Dad hadn’t seemed sure whether that made Baker’s first ever detention better or worse. ‘What are their names, these new mates of yours?’

  ‘Amanda.’ He thought she was joking until Spam explained.

  ‘I wanted Jane.’ The strangest look on his face. ‘Jane Margaret. My mother’s names,’ and retreated to his study without another word.

  ‘Do you reckon she knows she’s the Snog Monster?’ Queenie was thoughtfully detaching slabs of chocolate from around a breaktime Mars Bar with her front teeth.

  ‘Probbly,’ said Bunty. ‘Somebody must have spilled that bean by now; it’s been going on for years. Probbly flattered. There are worse nicknames. Fuckface is worse.’ (Fuckface taught Physics.) ‘Sheepshagger’s much worse.’ (The Australian domestic science teacher.)

  ‘Hardly any point having a name,’ concluded Baker. ‘Only gets changed. My baby cousin was christened Kate: no Katherine, no middle name, no nonsense. Made no difference. Likes to be called Twinkle. Twinkle.’

  ‘If I have a boy, I’m going to call him Bill,’ said Bunty.

  ‘Billy Bunter-Byng?’ spat Queenie. ‘Don’t be bloody daft.’

  ‘Yes but it won’t be Bunter-Byng will it? I’ll be Mrs Wotsit.’

  ‘Mrs Charlton?’ Baker hadn’t meant to join in but she couldn’t help herself. Nick Charlton. The man with the obliging flatmate.

  Baker stuck her head round the corner of their playground hiding place to check for passing goons. A mistress and two prefects patrolled the perimeter fence all breaktime and every second or third circuit they were supposed to hike over to the bike shed (not all the way, just close enough to make them all stub their fags out).

  The corrugated iron structure was hidden away at the far end of the yard, not exactly convenient for the (three) cyclists but then it had been something of an afterthought. Back when the school was first established the sainted Mildred had dreamed vaingloriously of a brave new world in which all of her girls motored to school or flew in personal gyrocopters (the founder was a big H.G. Wells fan). Even constructing something as prosaic as a bicycle shed had seemed a betrayal of the bright future promised.

  Julia Smith was one of the prefects on duty (the bloody girl got everywhere). She was heading towards the Mandies’ hideout but doubled back when she saw Baker’s head poke round. Her orange ponytail swinging cheerily as she skipped back down the slope. A self-consciously sporty walk.

  ‘Xerxes,’ said Queenie. ‘If I have a boy I’m definitely calling him Xerxes.’

  ‘Boys have all the fun,’ agreed Bunty.

  ‘Or Atahualpa. And if it’s a girl, I’m calling it Dido.’

  ‘Dildo?’

&nbs
p; ‘I want four girls,’ decided Bunty.

  ‘And wotcher gonna call them?’

  ‘Amanda.’

  Even Baker smiled.

  ‘Yeah, but what if you get boys?’

  ‘Four boys? No thanks. I shall leave them on a hillside like the Spartacuses. And I’m definitely not having a bloody Dominic. Did I tell you he’s got a girlfriend? Mummy’s furious – jealous probbly. Her darling boy.’

  Darling Dominic. Daddy had wanted Dominic to go to boarding school but Mummy couldn’t bear to part with him, instead agreeing to drive the fifteen-mile round trip across London twice a day to get him to and from a school that snobby old Mr Bunter-Byng approved of. Dominic not boarding meant that Bunty couldn’t be made to either. Not that her mother hadn’t tried: ‘You’ll love it, darling. I did. Heaps of fun.’

  ‘So what’s this girlfriend like, then?’ Queenie asked.

  ‘Dunno. I was still stuck in the loo when she popped round. Calls herself Soo with two Os, like Sooty’s little friend. Mummy says she’s common. Heard her on the phone to Aunt Marcia. Not “people like us”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Calls him Dom, Mummy says – Mummy hates that, she’s such a snob.’

  ‘Do they have a meaningful relationship?’ nosed Queenie, wasting no time.

  ‘Probbly. Sounds the type. Lots of buttons undone apparently. “Damaged goods” according to Mummy – this is all to Aunt Marcia. She tells me nar-sing. I was earwigging on the extension. “Damaged goods”, honestly.’

  ‘You know Brian’s got a boyfriend, don’t you?’

  ‘Has she indeed? Meaningful?’

  ‘Dunno. Tash told me – she gets quite chatty on the bus. Still at the planning stage, she reckons. Snogs and feels but no shags yet, she says.’ Queenie nibbled on her chocolate some more. ‘Says she’s giving him her virginity as a seventeenth birthday present.’