The Following Girls

by Louise Levene

  When was Baker happiest? Ruddy cheek, honestly. When was Miss Carson happiest? Baker turned her head from the couch to look at the psychologist, at her tired-looking face, at the mousey pink ears poking through the rats tails of beige hair: lifeless, greasy, even a dusting of dandruff on the shoulder of her cardie. Three bathside bottles, three wishes gone. Miss Carson didn’t look like she’d ever been happy. Had she ever had a dopey love-in with a beautiful sixth-former? Telling secrets and eating chocolate and laughing at the funniest jokes ever told. Had she ever sat under a Christmas tree expecting a facial sauna only to unwrap a typewriter and a ream of typing paper. (‘I could have got paper from the office,’ Dad had said: baffled; resentful. ‘Janice has loads of paper – all colours.’)

  Miss Carson’s face had gone very pink.

  ‘You’re the one answering the questions, Amanda.’

  What had Baker just asked her? This was getting really weird, like she was talking in her sleep.

  Were they doing all this to Julia too? And was Miss Carson getting both bookings? Did she already know what Julia was like? Baker tried to visualise Julia stretched out on the couch, Julia scoffing a whole plate of egg sandwiches, Julia thinking of clever answers for the word association: telling them what they wanted to hear, beating them at their own games. When had Julia been happiest? Was it up against a wall behind the Wheatsheaf with Baz, or was it last Wednesday in the organ loft? Baker sighed softly at the memory of the dusty sunlit space, of the sweet taste of dope and tobacco and Jaffa Cakes on her tongue, and the sudden chocolatey thought shoved the more recent memory aside and all at once she was ankle deep in the rough cut grass of her infants school playing field, sucking on Cadbury’s fingers. She could smell the starch on her sun-baked gingham frock, hear the shrill cries of the watching classmates, feel the scratch of the funny old straw hat and the chilly flap of the silky old kimono as she staggered triumphantly up to the finishing line in the dressing-up race and into Miss Gatsby’s arms.

  Miss Carson was hunting in her cupboard for a new spiral notebook and didn’t see Baker rub her cuffs across her face.

  When they arrived at school for the promised meeting Baker was once again called in first, leaving her father fretting on the bench in the lobby.

  Dr O’Brien’s voice was doing that mooing thing again and the musical tones were making it hard to stay awake. Baker stared at the hands in her lap. There was a numb hum in the fingers’ ends and she noticed that the skin on the sides of some of the nails was bleeding where someone had been gnawing at it with their front teeth. Mid-morning sun broke open the showery clouds and raced through O’Brien’s study window, unnecessarily bright. She tried closing her eyes against it but it made no difference.

  O’Brien was still talking. Trouble sleeping? How had all the meetings gone? Miss Carson was a remarkable young woman. Young? She was thirty-five if she was a day, thought Baker. And Dr Sexton. A very eminent man. Baker was lucky to have been seen at such short notice, very lucky indeed.

  The head glanced down at the typewritten pages on her desk and at the notes made that morning on her telephone pad.

  Her mouth tightened into a smile, which was directed first at Baker, then into the middle distance: Saint Agatha. The smile warmed and widened a fraction.

  ‘I may yet give you another chance, Amanda, but I have to be sure that you aren’t going to let me down. You have to tell me exactly what happened last Wednesday, exactly who was responsible. As I told you last week, this isn’t a matter of telling tales; that sort of schoolgirl loyalty has no place here.’

  Baker frowned back up at O’Brien who seemed to be waiting for her to say something but the sunlight was starting to really hurt her eyes now, boring into her head as if a geographer with a magnifying glass on a field trip were trying to light a fire in her skull.

  There was a loud knock at the study door, but before Dr O’Brien could pick a button to press Bob Baker’s head appeared. Was this going to be much longer? He had a client waiting. He always called them clients – made him sound professional, he thought, like a lawyer (or a prostitute).

  He had slipped his friendly, normal face on uncomfortably over the impatient, unhappy look it was wearing underneath: head on one side, an almost pleasant expression. A face only ever seen outside the home, like the hearty laugh for pubs and party porpoises. He cast the briefest glance at Baker, but his pained gaze flinched away from the sight of her.

  ‘We shan’t be a moment. Amanda is going to cooperate, aren’t you Amanda?’

  Which of course meant that he had to look at her again out of politeness, turning his head dead pan, like a TV puppet.

  ‘Is she? Good,’ he said as he ducked back out of the door.

  Even Dr O’Brien must have been taken aback by the sheer dislike he packed into the three syllables but she showed no sign of it. Baker bent right forward in her chair, wiping her eyes on her knees as she pretended to fiddle with her shoe, then came back up too quickly, bringing on the sick, giddy feeling she’d had when she first crawled out of bed.

  The black plastic minute hand of the wall clock gave the faintest possible quiver as it surreptitiously mapped the minutes. Was it even moving? She thought of Dad back on his bench outside, the obsessive twitch ‘n’ twist of his wrist as he looked yet again at his watch. O’Brien was silent now. The TV Gestapo didn’t do silence. They strode about, airing the skirts of their kinky leather overcoats, slapping desks, hands, other people with the gauntlets of their snazzy black gloves. Ultimatums? Ultimata (Please remember every day: neuter plurals end in A). Threats. Promises. There wasn’t a word for that was there? For a terrible thing you were definitely going to do. Not in English. German probably had one, Italian definitely would. A whole mood: the vindictive.

  ‘Well?’

  Baker hadn’t moved from her sulky slump in the chair, but some kind of telepathic shrug must have escaped her because O’Brien bridled at once and leaned across the desk which seemed to narrow as the powdered face grew nearer. Her voice lowered: if Baker didn’t jolly well snap out of it and pay proper attention, then Things would become very Unpleasant, very Unpleasant indeed. Serious offences must be brought to the attention of the Fawcett board of governors, and the ultimate decision would lie with them. She paused while Baker chuckled to herself at the thought of Dr Crippen and Magda Goebbels debating her imperfect future.

  ‘There is nothing to snigger at, Amanda. I have only to pick up that telephone and your time here is at an end. The governors may even wish to take things further. This is not a moment for leniency. An example needs to be made – of someone. A fitting punishment.’

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  O’Brien steamed ahead as though Baker hadn’t spoken.

  ‘This could still very easily become a police matter. Very easily, whatever Mrs Baker may like to think. And if that happens, it won’t just be your place here that’s put at risk. Your whole future life will be changed for the worse. And don’t console yourself with delusions’ (surely she was the only woman on earth who pronounced the ‘you’ in ‘delusions’?) ‘of that “fresh start” elsewhere. No other decent school would take you, unless I were to perjure myself with a very partial and generous reference. Everything will depend on my report and what I say when that telephone rings – off the record.’ She leaned back in her chair and her voice when she spoke again was both softer and harder. ‘When I spoke to your father on the telephone yesterday afternoon, he seemed to think you might benefit from a change of scene, as if it were merely a matter of paying a deposit, buying a new uniform, learning a new song. He seemed very distressed when I indicated that it was unlikely to be as easy as that. He mentioned that your mother – your natural mother – had had quite a few problems. A residential home was mentioned? He didn’t elaborate. All very painful, I’m sure. Does he ever speak to her?’

  Baker thought miserably of the box of butchered snapshots.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. A very single-minded ma
n in that regard, I should imagine. He’s going to be very disappointed if all his plans are scuppered by your refusal to cooperate. Very disappointed indeed.’

  Baker bit hard on her tooth again, but the pain seemed very far away and didn’t even hurt any more, not really.

  Dr O’Brien stared steadily at Baker, giving the girl time to grasp the seriousness of her situation, time to decide whether this silly little pash was worth the sacrifice, worth invoking her father’s perpetual displeasure.

  There was a metal bin in the corner beneath the window and Baker eyed it fixedly, calculating how many steps it would take to stagger across and be sick into it, but instead she finally retched out the confession that O’Brien was waiting for. It was Julia. Julia Smith. Tell him Julia did it all. It was all Julia’s idea. Not me: Julia. And she burst into tears.

  O’Brien removed her spectacles and put them in the leather caddy of her desk set.

  ‘Sit up straight and blow your nose. Daddy is waiting.’

  Chapter 21

  Bob Baker was quite pleased with the hotel in the end. He hadn’t planned to go away at Easter time (they had Corfu booked for August), but he felt a bit better about it when his firm chalked it up as compassionate leave. Dr O’Brien said they should get Amanda away from her little gang and a two-line chit signed by Dr Sexton, upgrading Baker’s joint in the organ loft to the status of ‘Nervous Breakdown’, meant that the three weeks weren’t going to eat up his annual holiday after all. Spam’s friend Sandra the travel agent had found them a late cancellation in a five-star full-board package in the Canary Islands and he was pleasantly surprised: linen changed daily, lavish buffet lunch, silver service, crazy golf, English newspapers and a separate swimming pool next to the car park for all the screaming kids.

  Baker had devoted the first two days to mooching on her balcony getting hideously sunburned and now spent the daylight hours sweltering under an orange umbrella, fastidiously lifting the edges of the burned patches and peeling off the skin in the largest possible sheets before laying them over the arm of the sun lounger. The towel under her was permanently damp – with sweat, not pool water – ‘Come all this way and you won’t even swim,’ moaned Dad, staring crossly in his daughter’s general direction as she lay dozing in a saffron-coloured kaftan (he didn’t actually make eye contact any more, hadn’t for weeks). ‘There’s English girls your age over there. Why don’t you go and see if they want a game of table tennis?’

  The girls, about six of them, all seemed to know each other already and passed the time painting their bitten toenails, monitoring the poolside and giggling about passers-by – marking them out of ten most likely. There was a German boy they all fancied and the level of chat dipped whenever he was within ogling distance. They stared at Baker; she could see them through the mesh of her straw hat and they were obviously talking about her. One of them had just wrapped herself in a towelling changing poncho then curled up under her umbrella, grabbing a book and sucking in her cheeks while the others all miaowed with laughter.

  Baker was supposed to be revising and there was a George Orwell novel lying impressively (she hoped) on the table beside her, but she preferred writing postcards and drawing ‘my room here’ crosses in the middle of the swimming pool or on the tops of palm trees. The messages on the other side were all coded in aigy paigy although it was absurdly easy to decipher when you saw it written down: daygad haygates maygee naygow.

  The first card had been for Bunty. Bunty was already in Sydney with her mother, staying in a company flat while house-hunting. Baker had the address but the postcard she wrote had not been sent because the hotel shop didn’t have stamps for Australia.

  ‘Can’t I just use a load of the six peseta ones?’

  ‘We’ll find some,’ said Dad, thriftily (they didn’t).

  Spam, born and bred in a cold climate, could never get used to holiday heat. As usual, she had pushed her beach umbrella up to the pool’s edge and sat beneath it on a moored lilo, her legs dangling in the water, water so blue you expected her feet to come out covered in newly grown copper sulphate crystals. Every hour or so she would hail a passing waiter and order another rum and coke, por favor.

  She had bought herself a Spanish phrasebook at the airport but German would have done just as well. The hotel was so Kraut-friendly they actually served bockwurst at the breakfast buffet (for the first half hour anyway; early German birds stripped the hotplates clean by eight o’clock). They began queuing long before the dining room opened, just as soon as they had secured the best sunbeds with bath towels and copies of Brigitte (Wass junge männer von den mädchen wollen). Everyone said that was what they did and that really really was what they did. Maybe it was all true, maybe Queenie had it all wrong and Africans irrigated their fields with an Archimedes screw, ate yam. The fraus and frauleins would lie on their baggsied beds, systematically basting and roasting every inch of visible flesh, hands behind their blonde heads to tan their armpits while husbands and teenage sons played a murderously hearty variant of water polo that put the grown-up swimming pool out of bounds for hours at a time.

  ‘We will fight them on the beaches,’ growled Bob Baker.

  He did try boycotting the pool entirely on the second morning, but the nearest seaside had black volcanic dust instead of sand which dirtied your feet and left a sooty mess in the seams of your beach bag – ‘like putting up deckchairs on a slag heap’ said Bob – and so it was back to the pool after lunch where the only three remaining sunbeds were round behind the paddling pool.

  The Germans had clearly devised some kind of rota for their daily colonisation of the poolside. Bob Baker didn’t get up as early as they did (or was it stay up as late?), but after two further days of sitting in sunbed Siberia he simply nipped out of the dining room while they were still downing their breakfast bratwurst, gathered up the artful litter of personal possessions, folded them neatly and put them in a pile by the spare beach umbrellas, before selecting a poolside lounger and stretching out on it.

  ‘Das ist mein platz.’

  A large red-faced blonde was pointing crossly at the trio of beds. Bob Baker, conscious of a group of watching English tourists on their way to crazy golf, pantomimed looking about him in search of a name tag.

  ‘Nein.’

  This refusal to play by German rules made him a huge hit with the other English families – with their dads anyway. They stood him drinks in the poolside cabana thingy (thatched, Malawi-style) where the cocktails were served in hollowed coconuts garnished with slices of uncertain fruits – yam, probably. He wasn’t a great reader – give or take Wisden and the Fuchsia Breeder’s Handbook. Other dads were wading through airport thrillers, but when Bob Baker wasn’t infra-red grilling himself on a sunbed he preferred propping up the bar with his new friends, asking them which airline they came on and cadging cricket scores from their English newspapers.

  ‘Ne-ver!’ he was barking yet again.

  Defeated Germans, thriftily downing alcohol brought from home, looked on disappointedly from their blue-glass balconies.

  ‘You were very funny today being.’ A blonde woman in a bikini had undulated by and begun making conversation. Spam was under her umbrella, reading, so self-contained, so detached from this good-looking, sunkissed Englishman in his tight blue briefs that the chatty fraulein hadn’t made the connection and didn’t trouble to lower her voice, so that both Baker and her stepmother were able to tune in.

  ‘Only kidding,’ Bob Baker suddenly fearing that his Churchill act would make him appear unsophisticated.

  ‘Kiddink?’ She made her blue eyes go comically wide.

  ‘I make a leedle joke, yes?’ Dad was saying in that silly sing-song English he always used for foreigners.

  Her breasts were very large for someone so slim and Bob Baker was finding it hard not to gawp. They were the colour of hazelnuts apart from the tiny white triangles where her bikini top was out of line. Pam wore a one-piece. Pam preferred not to tan. He thought with distast
e of his wife’s pink and peeling chest and brilliant white belly.

  ‘You make ex-cellent joke. Helga, my name is Helga.’

  Helga leaned forward and Bob Baker suppressed a gasp as she put a brown hand on his thigh just as his daughter got up and walked past the bar to join Pam at the poolside, her scrawny teenage body encased in a long orange nightdress thing she’d been wearing since they arrived. He saw Helga sizing her up with a glance.

  ‘Enklish girls. Zay do not like the sun.’

  ‘Who’s that woman Dad’s talking to?’

  ‘Where?’ Spam put down her book (War and Peace? On holiday? Fooling nobody.) and raised the brim of her floppy hat to squint across to the bar. ‘Dunno. Some kraut.’

  ‘She had her hand on his leg.’

  Spam raised one eyebrow and retrieved her book from the concrete lip of the deep end.

  ‘In this heat? Rather her than me. Have you had your tablet?’

  Baker had been on Dr Sexton’s diet of tablets for nearly a fortnight now. The nightly mandies were having less and less impact on the daytime uppers and she was getting hardly any sleep. Her mind remained manically alert and the small hours were taken up with devising a bedroom farce written entirely in useful phrases gleaned from Spam’s little book.

  Do you speak English? I don’t speak English. I am on holiday (I am on business). Is this seat taken? My wife is ill. I need a room with a large bed. I want more wine. The paella is very good. No thank you, I don’t want any more paella. That is enough paella. Yes, it is very good. Just a small helping. My wife is in London. You have very beautiful hands/hair/eyes/buffet dishes. I don’t understand. My wife doesn’t understand. My room has a view of the sea. Please bring me an ice bucket and a bottle of your finest champagne. Yes, I slept very well.

  Your husband is very nice. He speaks English very well. He is very tall. My wife has telephoned. I have spoken to the night porter. Can you direct me to a chemist? This woman is known to the police. What kind of a hotel is this?