The Following Girls

by Louise Levene

  The second set of prizes passed off without incident. Finally Lady Henry came to the Fawcett Cup, won this year by Nightingale, whose captain strode smugly forward as the guest of honour placed a still sticky paw on each handle of the solid silver rose bowl and presented it to the sixth-former, drenching the girl’s skirt, flooding the prize table and filling her own snakeskin shoes with cold water as she did so.

  Teachers’ eyes instantly criss-crossed the room, a web of infra-red beams, ready to trap anyone whose reaction was more (or less) than the normal range of giggling. Dr O’Brien, with the presence of mind that distinguished a headmistress from a mere deputy, rose to her feet and, with the merest glance of command, jerked Miss Batty into gear and led the astonished hall in a rousing rendition of the closing hymn (we shall not suffer loss).

  Mrs Mostyn smiled grimly as the youngest girl in the school presented Lady Henry with a bunch of jonquils, while O’Brien chuckled through some cock and bull story about having kept the bouquet in water but no amount of hearty business-as-usual could deflate the happy hall. The traditional epilogue (nine cheers in all for head, staff and school) broke all previous records for volume. Word had already spread about Lady Henry’s syrupy grip, and the ceremony’s watery finale was like the climax of a television comedy programme: a boss to dinner, a custard pie lying in wait on a table, a tray of drinks, a soda syphon. The piano played them out with the school song (a skilful switch from D Major to E Flat Major made the right hand safe once more) and Mrs Mostyn almost expected to see the credits roll: ‘Based on an idea by –’ whom? Probably one of the Amandas in Upper Shell. Amanda Baker? Surely not after last week. Or Amanda Bunter-Byng? Emigrating, apparently. Nothing to lose . . .

  The rest of the staff instinctively manned the swing doors as the girls filed out, listening for clues, watching for any signs of triumphalism. A few minutes later, as the hilarity cleared and the first lunch sitting gathered into a rough queue for the dining hall, Mrs Mostyn skilfully picked off one of the more callow and feeble Lower Fourths: huge, lashless eyes blinking rapidly behind heavy convex lenses. The wily Geography mistress framed her question with care:

  ‘Was anyone with Amanda Baker when she filled the trophy with water?’

  Resistance was useless. Every foe is vanquished. We will take our revenge.

  Baker had headed back to the Shell cloakroom for a quick fag. Two of the cleaners were putting away their mops and buckets. They had just been paid and the older one was checking the notes and coins in her mini manila envelope. The other, younger woman was off down the shops with hers (something nice for his tea), but the old crone managed things differently. Her cleaning hours were nine till one which meant that her old man was out at work and none the wiser.

  ‘Finks I only work Fridays. Keep the rest in the Post Office. Don’t need him to sign nothing like you do with the bank.’

  ‘Rainy day?’

  The woman scoffed.

  ‘Raining now.’

  Sitting on the loo in her usual sideways pose Baker noticed with surprise that the scribbled gag about Cookery O levels had been wiped from beneath the loo roll holder. She pushed gently at the enamel notice on the back of the door with her foot. The missing screw still let the plaque swing freely but the graffiti beneath had disappeared. Gone. All of it. In its place a freshly painted oblong in a slightly whiter shade of pale grey. The extra coat fitted the sign to the millimetre.

  Chapter 16

  Julia was already two thirds of the way down the first joint when Baker arrived.

  ‘Excellent work with the treacle yesterday, Mandibles.’ She picked a baby Swiss roll from the pack she’d brought and posted the entire thing into her mouth, a factory chimney of sponge collapsing into her waiting face.

  ‘Did you hear about what happened to the head girl?’ You could hardly make out the words for cake and butter cream. ‘Indefinite suspension from duties pending investigation. What swines, eh? Wonder where she got the badge from? Can’t have pinched it from the office, not Linda.’

  Baker’s whole body was suddenly paralysed with guilt, so that the smoke she had just inhaled remained trapped inside her by the held breath. It had only been a cautious puff but now every particle of dope was maximised, fizzing under her skin, scrambling her brain. All at once she was too afraid to speak, convinced that she would blurt out the truth and Julia would hate her for ever and tell everyone and make her spend the rest of her life in Coventry.

  ‘Why Coventry?’ she demanded, out loud.

  ‘What about Coventry?’

  ‘Coventry Coventry. You know. When nobody speaks to you.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what Coventry’s like: very very quiet,’ whispered Julia, ‘one big grudge . . . Anyway. None of the sixth are sending Linda to Coventry. Everyone likes old Lindy-Loo and they can’t put the head girl in detention so it’ll all just blow over. Bloody hope so. Bloody boring. S’all they talk about in the common room. It dies down for a bit then Heidi Doodah starts it up again. Well she would, wouldn’t she? Being deputy. Suppose she thought her luck had changed. Maybe it was her with the badge? Those creeps will do anything for promotion. It’ll be murder next: a compass point between the sixth and seventh vertebrae, a cyanide capsule in her third of milk. The head girl is dead; long live the head girl.’

  ‘Hip-hip,’ hiccupped Baker. The organ pipes were starting to curve and taper like a really, really big stick of celery. She handed back the joint and took a few deep, dopeless breaths.

  ‘Cow.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Heidi Doodah. Pathetic – that badge business.’

  Baker felt very clever, very cunning, a master criminal, as she persisted that yes, that would explain everything: Heidi and the white pin: motive, means, wossname. Heidi. Not Baker. Not Baker at all.

  ‘You’ve been crying.’

  Baker tried to explain about Bunty but Julia didn’t seem to understand somehow, didn’t see that a great chunk of Baker’s future had been torn away, but then of course Julia didn’t have a best friend. No one to play with. Unless it was Baker? She tried pasting Julia’s face into the gap: Julia at the wedding, Julia at the christenings, a different twosome in the lovely white flat then remembered that Baz or similar would be there to spoil it, then remembered Nick.

  Julia was licking the chocolate off a chocolate Garibaldi now.

  ‘I love this room. Lovely lovely room. No sofa, though.’ She looked about her crossly, rolled up her blazer and tucked it behind her head. ‘Weed me a stor-wee.’

  Baker turned the pages of her Spare Rib, frowning.

  ‘I was thinking about what you said. All that “beat them at their own game” cobblers. Baaaad idea. Mustn’t pretend. You’d turn. Turn into one of them. Has to be another way. I mean,’ words were sliding away from her, ‘look at Spam.’

  ‘Spam Spam? As in tins of?’

  ‘Noooo, silly, Spam-my-stepmother-Spam. Pamela Dawn Baker Spam. Got a proper job, Spam has. Proper, good-as-a-bloke job, but there she is painting her face, depilating her armpits and lining her drawers and putting cosies on the toaster. I mean you don’t catch blokes monkeying about with toasters.’

  ‘Or lining her drawers, I hope.’

  Baker pulled a face and turned back to the personal column.

  ‘“SE London man would like to meet some liberated women socially.”’

  ‘I bet he would,’ snorted Julia. ‘Dirty bugger.’

  Baker turned back to a centre spread on communal living. The Rib women might not depilate their armpits but they’d all end up with the same rash by the look of it, making themselves freely available to anything with a beard. Very liberating.

  ‘Nice for them and all that but it isn’t exactly helping, is it? I mean who cares if some bird in dungarees swears off lipstick and then shags her entire kibbutz? Won’t change anything. Not while there’s a single Spam left pairing socks and pining for an infra-red grill.’

  But Julia was looking bored, the way Bunty did whenever Baker
got into her stride, and so Baker hastily read out another small ad.

  ‘“Jo Hollins would like to hear from other women who have had vaginismus about their experience.”’

  ‘Would she? Would she really? God almighty. You’d pay money not to, wouldn’t you? I bloody would. Is it all sex, that magazine?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Julia basked in her big, beautiful sunbeam, hair spurting across the blue cushion of blazer in a messy stream of golden syrup. The catty stretch of her body and the never-ending warm, white legs seemed to grow longer than the room: Alice in Wonderland with a foot up the chimney. Reaching blindly behind her she dragged a nylon make-up purse from the side pocket of her bag and began squeezing ointment-coloured goo from a tube and systematically concealing her freckled face with expert fingers before coating her lashes in blue mascara and dusting coloured powder on and around her cheeks, sucking them in as she brushed. She finished off with a jammy smear of lipstick from a tiny white pot with a daisy on it before snapping the mirror shut and cramming the whole grubby little kit back in its pocket.

  ‘Seeing Baz later.’

  The snotty, sucked-in look stayed in place even after she had finished – had the wind changed? Didn’t look like Julia any more as she flicked her hair behind her shoulder with a fillyish toss of the head, just looked like the girl on the back of Baz’s bike.

  ‘Got to look my best.’

  Bunty would never have said that. The old Bunty wouldn’t anyway.

  Baker took her last lovely drag on the joint while Julia scoffed the remaining Swiss roll.

  ‘If we had enough cake – which is a pretty big “if”, I admit – we could stay here indefinitely. A cake machine, that’s what this needs, or helicopters; helicopters could deliver it through the roof hole. Food parcels.’

  The heedless trill of a bird was pouring in through the open skylight. Baker didn’t know what kind. Dad would probably have known (but he wasn’t telling). Jeremy would have known . . . The fuzzy buzz of dope and the sunshine and the sweet tastes on her tongue all joined forces to lift Baker’s arm and place her hand in Julia’s warm, strong, hockey forward fingers.

  ‘Me tooooo, babe,’ crooned Julia huskily (though Baker hadn’t spoken). ‘Me too me too me toomee toomy toomy.’

  The birdsong shut off as the door to the loft was flung open.

  ‘So this is where you eat your lunch, is it?’

  Mrs Mostyn was standing in the doorway, flanked by the lunchtime duty prefect and the school caretaker (who was holding a large wrench behind his back like a surprise bouquet). The Snog Monster’s spectacles winked unnervingly in the sunlight, as if her eyes had caught fire.

  Chapter 17

  The duty prefect (who was a tiny bit of a party animal on the quiet) had caught a whiff of spliff on the draught coming down the forbidden staircase and was just about to nip up and investigate when she’d been spotted by the deputy head who was giving Mr Dingle a guided tour of things that wanted sanding down or waxing or repairing or painting over with dove grey non-drip gloss.

  ‘Where are you going? What is it?’ and moments later she was wheezing up the stairs behind the sixth-former, nostrils twitching at the familiar smell of tobacco, shoulders squaring with pleasure in anticipation of the coming scene.

  The Snog Monster had pulled the door towards her so hard and fast that it sucked a sharp breeze in through the skylight, ripping Julia’s poster from the wall and exposing the graffiti-fest beneath. The horror on the evil, fat cock-sucking Snog Monster’s face as she stared at the vandalised wall was partially veiled by the cambric handkerchief that she had pressed over her mouth and nose to avoid breathing the drug-drenched air, but you could still see her upper face which wore a bewildered, almost child-like expression behind the blue sweep of her glasses. Snog Monster? But that was Miss Combe, surely? Wasn’t it?

  Her map-reader’s eye surveyed the tiny room, noting the pub ashtray with its load of cinders and charred cardboard. The Snog Monster’s corseted torso, the hairsprayed helmet on her head, the plucked arches of her brow all seemed to swell in size and importance as the gravity of the impending arrest came home to them all. Her whole manner had altered. She wasn’t the nutty, gladsome-minded, atlas-fixing old Geography mistress any more. Narrowing her mouth somehow contrived to pull up the slack in her jowls and tighten her face like there were wires inside, backstage, changing the scenery. Drugs.

  ‘See that nothing is touched.’ A TV policeman sealing off a crime scene. Her next move was to separate the two suspects: Julia was to remain under guard in the organ loft while Baker was marched off to the headmistress. ‘It’s off to Dr O’Brien for you, young lady.’ Her pearly claw made to pinch Baker’s elbow and guide her from the room but Baker twitched her arm free.

  Girls were log-jamming the corridors on their way from afternoon Registration, but the blue stream of serge meandered either side of Baker and the Geography mistress, sneaking glances to gauge the fifth-former’s state of mind. Defiant? Defeated?

  Baker instinctively kept her guard up, composing her face into a weary scowl and somehow bullying her legs into walking in a straight line.

  The Mostyn hadn’t spoken since they left the scene of the crime but you could tell her mind was struggling with the enormity of the offence and the hideous dilemma now facing the head. Expulsion was traditional but that could be a two-edged sword. Expulsions got into local newspapers and, while the headlines might make it plain that the school stood for no nonsense, the publicity inevitably let slip the fact that nonsense was taking place.

  It had happened before (under a previous administration) and the then head had very cunningly finessed the offence into ‘smoking on school premises’ (even the Advertiser had bigger stories than that to run with).

  The handkerchief that had covered the Snog Monster’s face when she first smelled smoke was now rolled round the remains of the last joint which she held cupped in her hand so that passing girls shouldn’t spot it. When they reached the main lobby she fished a brown envelope from the tin bin beside the staff pigeon-holes and carefully placed the cambric bundle inside it. You could almost see the thought of fingerprints crossing her mind before it trotted back to the corner where her wildest dreams resided. Hard to imagine the head wanting to go as far as fingerprints – or involve the police at all (more’s the pity).

  And was Dr O’Brien even in her study? Mrs Mostyn gave a tut of vexation when the coloured lights stayed unlit. Typical.

  ‘Wait here.’

  There was an ache in Baker’s head. Her forefinger tracked the pain to a pulsing line on her temple which stopped when you pressed it and surged back whenever you let go. She blinked dozily around her. Her eyesight was still playing tricks with perspective and the wall of dead heads seemed to be nosing out at her disappointedly through their parcel gilt windows, whispering to each other. She breathed deeply, trying to clear the weirdness from her blood, trying to picture those blue blobs of oxygen climbing aboard passing rafts of haemoglobin, pushing the dopey particles overboard. Could they do tests? She lurched to her feet and began pacing the lobby. It was what they did in films. That and coffee. And hot towels? Or was that something else?

  She stopped pacing and stood unsteadily in front of one of the notice cupboards on her way back to the bench. For a split second she thought that the list of school governors was the same one that Queenie had pinned there – same position in the box, same flimsy yellow paper – but she looked in vain for Magda Goebbels or Dr Crippen. The next frame still sported the newspaper cutting about the victorious skating team. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before, just slightly narrower where happy little Bunty had been razored away. Even the caption had been doctored so that her name, conveniently at the end of a line, had been filleted out. Bunty. Unbunty. Remembering the loss of her best friend took the edge off Baker’s terror – briefly, anyway – gave her a choice of scabs to pick.

  She half opened her eyes. Spam was saying her name ov
er and over and shaking her awake. The alarm clock was much much louder than usual. Spam didn’t use to wear glasses . . . horrid, old-lady glasses with blue upswept frames . . .

  ‘Pull yourself together and come with me.’ Dr O’Brien had gone AWOL and Mrs Mostyn, damp with perspiration from trotting back and forth between the staff lobby and the organ loft in her least sensible shoes, was taking out her frustration on Baker who now had to be moved so that the Smith girl could be brought in for interrogation. She grabbed Baker’s elbow and bustled her along the corridor and into the Drama cupboard. ‘Sit there,’ said the Snog Monster, gesturing uncertainly at a papier mâché toadstool. ‘Dr O’Brien will be back at any moment.’

  Baker sat heavily on the red spotted seat, hoping hard that it would crumble beneath her, but its novelty outline had been modelled over a genuine stool and the structure held her weight. She heard the key turn in the lock and the tarty tap of the Mostyn’s sling-backs on the linoleum as she winced off in search of the errant headmistress.

  The Drama ‘cupboard’ was in fact a fair-sized box room, sister hutch to Careers and nosebleeds and filled with scenery and props from dramatic productions. There was a wicker skip filled with jerkins and buskins and a great wardrobe rail holding everything from Mephistopheles to the March Hare. The shelves too were lined with theatrical bric-a-brac: a gramophone horn for Pygmalion, a cracked and mended tea set for The Importance of Being Earnest, a huge paper pulp teapot for the Dormouse in Alice with a prompt sheet still glued to its back (‘I breathe when I sleep,’ said the Dormouse).

  Baker was very very sleepy and the wicker skip was almost the size of a single bed. People escaped from prison camps in laundry baskets – on the telly they did anyway: forged papers, uniforms made from army blankets and dyed with boot polish . . . She lifted the lid of the basket, releasing a home-to-a-strange-house-for-tea smell of mothballs and stale scent. The chest was filled with costumes that had been pieced thriftily together from old curtains and scraps of mumsy finery, moth magnets that had been sulking unworn in the backs of wardrobes: waists too small, rags too glad for the spammy mummies who had once worn them so prettily. Baker hoicked her leg over the side and climbed in, the wicker lid slamming with a scratchy squeal behind her.