The Following Girls

by Louise Levene

  Spam topped up both glasses the instant they were empty, and returned the sherry to its hiding place. Bob Baker had built a louvre-doored cocktail cabinet in one of the alcoves, but Spam always kept her sherry bottle in the cupboard under the sink. At one time she used to write ‘window vinegar’ on the label in magic marker, but soon realised that it was not one of the cupboards her husband ever went to.

  ‘I’d better put the kettle on again.’

  Evil Bette Davis was out in a rowing boat with nice Bette Davis.

  ‘Oh dear,’ giggled Spam, pouring herself another drink. ‘This’ll end in tears.’

  She placed her glass on the undershelf of the coffee table between sips and Baker instinctively did the same: not hidden exactly, but you wouldn’t necessarily spot them from the sitting room door. She lay back on her sofa and looked at the one wallpapered wall through half-closed eyes, a psychedelic explosion of acanthus, hibiscus and palm fibre. Trippy.

  Bette Davis was in Glenn Ford’s forgiving arms and Baker and Spam were fast asleep by the time bad light stopped play in the greenhouse. Bob Baker wore the same hard-done-by air he wore on weekday evenings, like fuchsia-fucking was a full-time job.

  ‘Any danger of a cup of tea?’

  Spam stumbled down the dusky garden path in her bedroom slippers to retrieve the teapot, tray and untouched cup that he had left in the shed, then shut herself in the kitchen with the Cliff Adams Singers.

  ‘Bit loud,’ he said, before striding in and turning the harmonies down to a barely audible whisper.

  Baker wandered woozily into the room after him, her arms at her sides, her middle fingers inside the sherry glasses. Spam was standing at the sink, washing-up brush in her blue-gloved hands as her husband neutralised the offending broadcast. She gave him a fixed, three-large-sherries stare, picked up the teak-sided wireless by its handle, dunked it in the boiling bowl of suds and scrubbed at it before leaning the stuttering appliance against the plate rack.

  Bob Baker glared coldly at his daughter.

  ‘This is your fault.’

  Three Wishes? I wish I was dead; I wish I was dead; I wish I was dead.

  Chapter 20

  ‘Dr O’Brien left instructions that you are to wait in here. Miss Bonetti was expecting you at ten thirty but she will be back directly.’ The school secretary ushered Baker into her office and closed the door behind her just as the bell went for the next period.

  Baker had caught the empty train from Miss Carson’s flat after her session on Monday morning and then spent a naughty forty minutes nursing a cup of black coffee in the station café, watching workmen attacking great platters of bacon and beans and sunny sided eggs while she read a discarded copy of the Daily Mirror: ‘John and Yoko step out again’.

  ‘Was your train delayed?’ asked the secretary, suspiciously, as Baker sat down.

  ‘I just missed one. I got lost looking for the station.’

  The secretary wasn’t even listening but was busy with a box of newly printed prospectuses, opening the back cover of each one and using a ballpoint to add a neat zero to the fees.

  ‘I was on leave when the proofs were sent,’ she explained. ‘I doubt anyone will imagine you can get a term’s education for the price of a box of cigars, but I’m not sure I could bear all the jokes from the fathers.’

  ‘I was expecting you at ten thirty,’ said Miss Bonetti as they dashed up the stairs to the Maths Room.

  ‘I just missed a train. I couldn’t find the station.’

  They stopped outside the classroom door.

  ‘A word to the wise,’ said the Maths teacher. ‘Never give more than one excuse: dead giveaway. I’ll expect you at ten thirty sharp tomorrow.’ Almost human.

  The chatty room fell silent as Baker entered it and thirty thirteen-year-old stares followed the prodigal fifth former as Miss Bonetti directed her to a desk in the far corner of the room.

  ‘Can you all turn to page seventy-three please: matrices.’ She then handed Baker a bundle of bandered worksheets: French vocab, laws of motion problems, trigonometry problems, a précis to make, a human ear to label. ‘That should keep you busy.’

  Baker began labelling her ear with a pencil that had her surname embossed in gold on one of its faces. Spam had given her twelve of them as a stocking filler and she’d assumed at the time that ‘Baker’ had been chosen so that the whole family could use them, but sometimes she wasn’t so sure – no one else wrote in pencil. As she worked, she listened to Miss Bonetti explaining what matrices were and what they were used for and why they had to be inverted.

  Miss Kopje’s blundering had not been confined to the English timetable and Miss Bonetti was forced to teach an almost identical Maths lesson three classes in a row, the exact same words over and over and over. And then again for revision. Then next year for the next lot of gamma mathematicians. What a life. By mid-afternoon Baker felt she could probably have given the lesson herself but, just as she was getting the hang of it, she was co-opted by Mrs Mostyn for yet more urgent work on the atlas mountain.

  ‘Didn’t we finish them all last Monday lunchtime?’

  The Snog Monster, puffing along the corridor, didn’t even look round.

  ‘Not altogether.’ Very tight-lipped. ‘A slight problem.’

  Mrs Mostyn barged into the Geography Room and over to the glueing table and the final batch of Africas. The new countries had been meticulously coloured then neatly labelled in black ink: French West Ivory, Tarzania, Upper Cheetah, Tangoland, Democratic Republic of Mambo, Rumbaba. Bunty’s tell-tale Greek a was unmistakable and the shading was, as always, exquisite, but this was not what she had been asked to do.

  Slap? Tickle. Village? Idiot. Finger? Painting. Mountain? Molehill. Brother? Big. A whole week of trying to second guess what a nutter might say. Quite a strain. On the day of the final psycho session Dad was going to wait outside and then drive Baker on to school for their meeting with O’Brien. Spam said she was in the middle of an audit and they both pretended to believe her. Another audit? Bob Baker had never involved himself in the finance side of his firm – birds and nerds, he reckoned – but she was ready with an answer as always. A takeover this time: due diligence (whatever that meant). Any more questions and he’d have felt a fool.

  The car turned into the rainy cul de sac five minutes early and he pulled over some two hundred yards from Miss Carson’s building and lit a cigarette. His hand shook as he struck the match. When Baker climbed in he uttered his first words in four days (a new personal best).

  ‘So,’ he began, for all the world as though they were on speaking terms, ‘what sort of thing has she been asking you, this Carson woman? All my fault I suppose? That’s the way now, isn’t it? Blame the parents.’

  Baker squeezed at the uneaten breakfast sandwich jammed into her pocket, feeling the soft white bread between her fingers.

  ‘Doesn’t say much. Just keeps asking how I feel about things.’

  ‘Is that it? How you feel? How you—’

  There was a piece of string tied around his finger, like a pinkie ring and he stopped shouting when he caught sight of it. An old trick of Pam’s mother’s (or so she said).

  ‘Patsy – your mother – she saw a psychiatrist. Months and months it went on. “Depressed”. She was depressed?’ He turned wildly to Baker. ‘Disappeared for six weeks. Didn’t even telephone. And you in your carrycot in the back of the car when I was out on site inspections. Nappies. Depressed? She was never right after.’

  He threw the remains of his fag out of the window into a puddle. His face was wet when he turned back. He restarted the car and drove Baker closer to the front door, sparing her a run through the rain. But he did it automatically, Baker told herself, just as he automatically switched off lights and closed gates, just as he automatically left the table without thinking to clear it.

  The music started as he turned the key in the ignition Something inside has died and I can’t hide and I just can’t fake it. He punched the radio of
f.

  Cat? Mouse. Blue? Sky. Cold? Hot. Sad? Happy. Needle? Haystack.

  Miss Carson had begun their sixth and final session by whizzing through the usual preliminaries, like Miss Drumlin touching her toes, but after the word association warm-up she began probing more deeply than usual, conscious that she had had little of substance to put in her report to dear Dr O’Brien.

  ‘Just try to relax, Amanda. I want you to think back again to when you were a very little girl, to when you first found out that your mother wouldn’t be coming back.’ She left a five-second pause, as if that were the time it usually took to look up a memory. ‘Think right back to that and try to think how that made you feel. How did you feel?’

  Were there right answers to questions like these? If there were, Baker hadn’t revised them, couldn’t even manage an intelligent guess. How did four-year-olds feel? Multiple choice would have been much easier but Miss Carson liked you to show your working. ‘Fine’ would definitely be the wrong answer – nothing could possibly be fine, you wouldn’t be there talking to Miss Carson if anything was fine. The model answer was almost certainly ‘I thought it was my fault.’ Classic guilt trip material, meat enough on that for a whole symposium.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Baker, keeping her voice nice and flat, talking slowly so Miss Carson could get it all down and so that she herself would have time to monitor whatever nonsense she was saying while, backstage in her own head, she could wonder away at whatever she liked, like having a book in your lap while Mrs Horst handed out Xeroxes on Xerxes.

  ‘Confused,’ Baker said finally. The psychologist licked her lips. ‘But Pam’s my mother now.’

  Miss Carson’s face fell and a nervous finger hooked part of her blonde bead curtain of hair behind her ear.

  ‘Were you very angry?’

  Almost against her will, Baker thought back to that peculiar afternoon. Spam in the white trouser suit drinking white wine from a glass cross-hatched with cuts, like the pattern on a slab of gammon, a glass so new it still had a gold sticky label on it. Bob Baker in his favourite chair – were the other chairs jealous? – and Spam’s white bell-bottomed bottom perched on the arm. The first Mrs Baker, the real one, had had a trouser suit in a jazzy green and orange check, and it went with a small orange-coloured suitcase, and she would wear it all together whenever they went on holiday or when she and ‘Manda’ went to stay with Grandma. Grandma had a photo of her in it – probably why Baker could remember it so clearly. Patsy had never worn trouser suits at other times and so, when the four-year-old Amanda had seen ‘Auntie Pam’ in the same sort of get-up, she immediately assumed Daddy’s friend must be off somewhere, leaving in her going-away outfit – only she never went away.

  Baker tried to remember back to the day Spam actually moved in, tried to remember if anyone had made a speech. Something must have been said: ‘Pam is going to be living here from now on’, something like that, something plain, nothing about a new mother or loving each other very much – not Dad’s style. And there must have been a decision made about who called who what, because Pam had definitely never tried to force the whole ‘Mummy’ nonsense. She never actually said as much, obviously, but she wasn’t really the maternal type. She’d memorised all the words and could mime along fairly convincingly – baked cakes, embroidered initials, all that – but she was really spastic about the physical side. She gave strange, dry, loveless hugs like whole-body handshakes. She used sometimes to kiss the top of Baker’s head when Baker was about five, but then she didn’t kiss Dad much either – ever, that Baker could remember. Baker used to think they must be kissing passionately in secret and went through a phase of bursting into rooms in the hope (or fear) of catching them in flag, but they never were.

  ‘Amanda?’

  The psychologist always went very quiet after posing one of her questions (not that she said much when you replied, just a grunting coo and slow nods of her long, blonde head). It wasn’t like a normal conversation. She never seemed to feel the least bit awkward about awkward silences, and so you found yourself prattling on to fill the gaps she left, talking bollocks and listening out for the worrying hiss of the pencil when you said anything she considered significant – when you gave yourself away.

  A change of subject. Why did Amanda think that Dr O’Brien had arranged these meetings?

  Because she was a silly bitch? Because she was a silly bitch and she had to be seen to do something? Because it was the ultimate punishment. Because she knew that Dad would never forgive her now.

  ‘Forgive you?’ prompted Miss Carson.

  Baker realised far, far too late that she had said all of this out loud.

  ‘Forgive you? For what happened at school?’

  And Baker was so angry she almost spat at her. Was she really that thick?

  ‘For all this. All this psycho-whatsit. He hates it and O’Brien knew he would hate it. The next-door neighbour saw us getting in the car this morning and he told her I had a dentist’s appointment. He’d never live it down if she found out I was mental.’ It was fun watching Delia pretend not to react to that one.

  Miss Carson tried a different tack.

  ‘What was the name of your friend?’ She appeared to have had another chat with Dr O’Brien.

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘The older girl. The one you were found with,’ said Miss Carson, pretending to truffle through her notes for the name. She made it sound kinky the way she said it: found with.

  ‘Julia, I think you mean.’ It came out much quieter than Baker intended.

  ‘Ju-lia, that’s right. Tell me about Julia. What was she like?’

  A trick question, like those first-form English lessons where they got you to write about your family, knowing full well that there’s no neutral way of describing people. Baker imagined herself filling out a passport application or giving the police a description of a missing person as she answered but even filling in a form could be revealing.

  ‘About seventeen. Auburn hair.’

  Another tickle from Miss Carson’s pencil.

  Baker looked round the room. The antique map business was bloody strange, like she was frightened her choice of pictures might say something about her. The print for the place names was incredibly tiny. Too small for the Snog Monster to put right if Surrey went to war with Kent or if Croydon demanded direct rule.

  ‘Yes, but what was she like?’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Is. What is she like? What does she like?’

  ‘Likes sport.’

  Only she didn’t, did she? Not really. All just a front. A licence to wear the shortest skirt in the school, to show off those long golden thighs, that hot shower of hair, the dirty laugh, the clever fingers as they re-laced a pair of plimsolls or rolled a joint. Baker thought again of the groping glance that Julia had got from the pinstriped ponce on the train. And Baz. Baz with his motorbike and his heavy metal records and his ‘dealer’ – a man in a pub with little polythene bags in a little polythene bag.

  ‘Did Julia ever introduce you to him?’

  Shit. Baker’s empty stomach rolled over. She had been thinking aloud again. What else had she said? The pencil was still scribbling hard. She must have said something.

  ‘Do you often make friends with older girls?’

  ‘Her birthday’s in August. Only two months older. Are all your friends forty?’ Made her smart, that one. Serve her right.

  But friends meant something else here, didn’t it? Like found with. She was a prefect, explained Baker. First smart thing she’d said, she could see the woman absorbing the new information, could practically have coloured in the picture it had evoked, the cosy Angela Brazil-ian idea of how prefects and younger girls might co-exist: good examples, hairstyles copied, racquets borrowed, advice given. All Baker had to do now was stay awake. One of her teeth was slightly loose – bit weird. Did you still have first teeth at fifteen? It was sore when you bit down on it or pushed hard at it with your tongue. No sleep while that
was happening.

  Next topic on the list: was Amanda good friends with her stepmother? What planet was this woman on? Good friends? Were Stottie and her mother – her real, actual Cinzano-drinking mother – ‘good friends’, chums? Or Bunty and Gloria? And Spam wasn’t even a relation.

  ‘Pam’s very kind,’ said Baker. Keep it simple, translated-from-the-German: last Christmas she has me a typewriter bought.

  Did Baker write stories? Did she perhaps keep a diary? Must be gravy for Miss Carson when they said ‘yes’ to that one – unless it wasn’t. Unless your patient had Stottied the whole thing and penned it purely for prying eyes to read: Dear Diary, I wish I had long apricot hair and long skinny legs and a long skinny boyfriend with a motorbike. I wish men creamed their pinstripes at the sight of my thighs.

  ‘Is that really what you want, Amanda?’ Scratch, scratch, scratch. Shit, shit, shit.

  Miss Carson had made a farewell plate of sandwiches filled with 2,000 calories worth of salad cream and sliced egg (had she used the doormat?) held together with toothpicks. There were square, old ladylike tea plates with rudimentary hollyhocks drawn on them and weeny embroidered napkins on the tray. Baker explained that she’d had an enormous breakfast and just pecked at a miniature Swiss roll, remembering Julia jamming them in two at a time. Should have been disgusting, but it wasn’t somehow. Not like she was fat.

  Miss Carson looked at her watch. She had promised Dr O’Brien that she’d telephone with a further report as soon as the final session was over, but they’d made scant progress so far. A little more word association? Baker grunted, biting hard to keep herself vaguely alert. Flower? Power. Yellow? Submarine. Long? Short. Fur? Coat. Nice? Biscuit. Lamb? Slaughter.