26a

by Diana Evans

  They were new girls on old fields. Watley Girls’ High School was set on a hill and didn’t exist when the Victorians were alive. Back then the area was just wide green fields with golf balls soaring across them. Currently, in the aftermath of the Brent depression, the school had leaking pipes in the toilets and drafts crawling in through peeling windowsills. Watley Boys’ High was next door and shared the same entrance. When Georgia and Bessi first walked up the slope past the crowds and gangs, wearing stiff new uniforms and black shoes, still tanned, heads down, there was a hush.

  “That’s the twins,” said Reena to her friends. “I remember them from primary. They went to Niger to live. And now they’re back.”

  Reena had blossomed into a grinning four-foot-eight Pakistani tomboy with a photographic memory. She not only remembered the twins from primary school, she also remembered them from nursery, when they were four, when they were wearing the same-color Puffa jackets with a red stitch inside the collar. She decided, on the basis of a widespread curiosity about their apparent worldliness, twoness, and strangeness, to be their Watley tour guide. She showed them the fence between the boys’ and girls’ schools that had a hole at the end of it, the yellow-grassed area behind the Portakabins where people who had started smoking smoked (“Not me, though,” she told them, “smoking makes you stink”) and the battered monument to Charles Watley, who in 1905 had opened the school with the pledge of, it said under the statue, extending the arm of learnedness and enlightenment to the good people of neasden. There were bits of stale bubble gum around the writing and graffiti scribbled up Watley’s trousers.

  “What was it like in Niger, then?” Reena asked as she led them to the netball courts.

  “We didn’t go to Niger. We went to Nigeria,” said Bessi. “We had servants.”

  “Wow, did you!”

  “And one day I had a really big cockroach on my chest, just here. Sedrick, our bodyguard, sort of, picked it up with his hand without any gloves or anything. And cockroaches can kill you.”

  “Wow, that’s massive, guy!” said Reena, grinning enormously.

  Georgia didn’t feel like saying anything. She closed her face. Bessi told Reena about the big white house, the snake and the Cartwheel Olympics. Reena’s head was turned completely to Bessi now, and Georgia studied the drawn-on auburn streaks in Reena’s black hair.

  The three of them were in the same class, blue for Livingstone. At first Georgia and Bessi sat next to each other with Reena next to Georgia, but Reena requested a while afterward that she sit in the middle. She liked being in the middle of the twins (it gave her stature, like a scientist who’d discovered something weird and knew how to communicate with it). Once she was in the middle, Reena often whispered to Bessi during lessons and sometimes they wrote each other notes that Georgia couldn’t read because her eyes were starting to blur. She had to rub them and blink very hard to see what was being written on the board and it was getting to the point where she could only read books or do her homework in direct sunlight. This was inconvenient because: (1) Georgia was developing a passion for animal and wildlife books and an interest in theories of evolution (which mostly came in small print); and (2) she liked to hand in her homework on time because it was best to.

  It was a growing problem. If she told someone about her eyes, especially an adult, they might—they would, she knew it—they’d take her to an optician and the optician would say she had to wear glasses. He’d make a pair up for her and Aubrey would pay for them over the counter, and if she didn’t wear them he’d say, “Put your glasses on, they cost good money.” So she’d have to. She’d have to sit in class wearing goggles, like her parents, or old-age pensioners, or Fatima, who didn’t seem to have any friends. And people would point. They’d say things like “Georgia’s not prettier than Bessi now ’cause she’s got glasses.” The glasses would make her eyes fatter, like the rest of her. People would laugh.

  But if she didn’t tell someone, she might go blind, and if not, she’d definitely get bad marks and maybe even expelled for not doing homework.

  She hadn’t told Bessi. And what made it all the more impossible was the fact that, because of Aubrey, and Wallace before him, Georgia’s and Bessi’s foreheads were growing at a faster rate than the rest of them, Georgia’s backward and upward, Bessi’s upward and backward. The Watley crowds had noticed it almost immediately. They got called tefal head, elephant girl, balloon head, and asked questions like “Can I rest my sandwich”—or book, or bag—“on your foreledge a minute?” Reena did not go this far, though she did like to call them “Forehead 1” (Bessi) and “Forehead 2” (Georgia). Georgia knew that Bessi looked at her in class sometimes and thought, If she had a small forehead things wouldn’t be so bad for me, and Georgia thought the same, only in a different color (her jacket was green, Bessi’s was blue and white).

  The worst of it was Spam. They always knew when it was coming. Someone would sneak up with one hand ready to aim, most often a member of Big Sian’s gang who hated the twins because the boys fancied them (Jonathan Tikka Brown, for example, had recently given Bessi a gift of a felt frog stuffed with beans, and Lee Maxwell had asked Georgia to go out with him, to which she’d said no thank you).

  The culprit would then slap a greasy palm over the victim’s forehead and shout: “SPAAMMMM!”

  For a moment the palm would not depart. Its imprint remained, hot, and tingling. Two years later, the twins would be forced by their situation to adopt a peculiar hairstyle, an afro version of the flick, that scooped and swiveled tuft of hair that reached up from the crest of the forehead, circled, and then kited back down to, in their case, hide the bulge above the eyebrows. Their version was to be constructed thus:

  Comb the hair with an afro comb, making sure that yesterday’s white specks of dried gel are sufficiently banished from the head.

  Wet the hair and smother with gel.

  Neatly part an ample section of frontal hair, secure temporarily, and scrape the rest back into a ponytail (keep a towel draped around the neck until just before leaving the house so as not to soil the collar more than is inevitable).

  Take the parted frontal clump and comb through with more gel.

  Pull the clump upward, around with a calculated yet sudden twist of the wrist, and then down so that the curly ends brush the left eyebrow.

  Leave to cement.

  The flick would be loyal. It would not wave in the wind or frizz in the heat. And although its gelly residue was not kind to the skin beneath, which often retaliated with small mountains of bacterial rage, the twins would wear the style throughout their adolescence. It repelled Spam slaps. It saved them from themselves.

  GEORGIA BLINKED THROUGH the spring. When the sun was out she closed her sore eyes and drew around the fire, taking the heat, hoping to be healed. She did all her homework and all her reading in the garden or the playground and always sat by the window in class. When Bessi asked her why she’d moved, Georgia said, “I need the light. It helps me listen.” Bessi moved next to her, and Reena moved next to Bessi, eventually maneuvering herself back into the middle, between them.

  Because of Spam the twins wore hats as often as possible. Woolly hats in snow, headbands in PE, caps in the sun. In home economics hats were compulsory, and there was little reading. For Georgia especially it was the most perfect hour of each week. She and Bessi spent it alone in each other, pondering over mixing bowls, touching sleeves. Georgia was careful to carry everything with two hands because she had broken a plate in one of the first lessons, and although the teacher said it didn’t matter, she had been annoyed at herself.

  They cooked sponge cakes with inside jam, spicy vegetable pasties, biscuits and figures in gingerbread. It was here, in home economics, that Georgia and Bessi made an important discovery, about oats and honey, about what they meant when they got together and became a flapjack.

  Flapjacks were the future. Good, sweet and easy. Take the oats and the honey, margarine or butter, sugar and heat, and mix
it to a lumpy, sticky consistency. Flatten the mixture in a baking tray and place in the oven for twenty-five minutes. It was best eaten in the moments between warm and cool, when it was stuck to itself and had not yet been divided. Flapjacks were better than sweets because you could make your own and, a feature which Georgia particularly liked, you could control how fattening they were.

  The most essential element of a flapjack was its filling, its personality. Apricot was bitter, nuttier than cherry. Cherry with coconut was richer than cherry alone. Raisins were dreary yet sturdy, and peach and nectarine had not yet been tried. “Peaches are soggy,” Georgia mentioned to Bessi as they experimented with strawberry, in their aprons and white chef hats and the big steel ovens all around them. “It might not work.”

  “We could try it dried,” said Bessi, “and maybe with almonds.”

  Pineapple and cashew worked. Pears didn’t. Jam fillings, such as raspberry and black currant, worked very well. It was a feeling of triumph and pure satisfaction to bite into a flapjack whose personality, whose very soul, you had created. But Georgia and Bessi tried not to eat too many of their own creations. They preferred to sample other brands with the money they were earning from starting jobs as papergirls and waking up bewildered at six in the morning.

  For as they traveled through flavor, they were realizing that their interest in flapjacks went much further than home economics. This was business.

  Georgia suggested it first, in the loft when Kemy had just tasted cinnamon and blueberry during the summer holidays and said it was good, eve. “It’s good, Eve” was a line from the film Being There, starring Peter Sellers, in which he played a simple gardener whose exposure to plant life had instilled in him a natural aptitude for utopian political philosophy—when he agreed with things he said, “It’s good, Eve” to his love interest, Eve, and at the end of the film he walked on water. Georgia liked the film, and she felt a special affinity with the gardener. “It’s good, eve,” she kept saying. Bessi joined in, and Kemy soon followed.

  Today it was hot outside, almost as hot as a morning in Sekon, and in the loft it was hottest. The windows were open and Mr. Kaczala was mowing his lawn in a straw hat.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Georgia said.

  “What about?” Bessi was leaning out of the window and throwing candy wrappers at Kemy down in the garden. The wrappers got caught in the breeze and floated away.

  “About flapjacks.”

  “Me too.”

  “I think we should have a company.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Georgia crossed her legs on her bed. “We could make different flavors and sell them to shops and people.”

  “Wholesale and retail.”

  “And make a living.”

  “Yes,” said Bessi, “but bigger than that.” She turned from the window and looked straight at Georgia. “We could build an empire, Georgia!”

  Georgia thought for a minute, then said, “As long as we had enough money to live on, that would be enough for me.” She started unwrapping a hazelnut flapjack by Traditional Treats. She held it with two hands and took a bite.

  “But we could be rich—even famous!” Bessi was saying, pacing up and down. “We could be the Famous Flapjack Twins!”

  They laughed. They moved instinctively toward the beanbags, which had finally lost their smell. They sat on them these days much less than they used to. They were finding, as they got older, that some decisions could be made quite simply on their own, without having to sit down.

  “Want a bit?” Georgia offered Bessi her flapjack. “It’s not bad.”

  Bessi took a piece, tasted it. “Too stodgy,” she said.

  “Maybe a bit sweet too.”

  “Ours will be perfect,” Bessi said. “Ours will have just the right amounts of everything, not too sweet or heavy—flapjacks should be lighter, I think, in general—no silly flavors that don’t sell, something for everyone.”

  “I agree.” Georgia went silent, then said, “So, what shall we call it? Are you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  They closed their eyes to drift through possibles. The lawn mower mowed and the birds outside sang birdsong.

  Bessi suggested, after five minutes: “Flap Your Jacks.”

  “No,” they said together.

  “Um, what about World of Flapjacks, like World of Furniture?” said Georgia.

  “No.”

  “Jack Your Flaps.”

  Pause.

  “The Twins’ Flapjack Company?”

  Pause.

  “G + B Flapjacks.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Or…Flaming Flapjacks.”

  “Lighter Flapjacks.”

  “Flapjacks from Heaven.”

  Georgia said, “I know! What about what you said, the Flapjack Twins!”

  “The Famous Flapjack Twins.”

  “But I don’t want to be famous,” said Georgia.

  “That’s all right, I’ll be famous for you—you can be the manager and I’ll be the face.”

  Georgia was uncomfortable. “But if you’re the face, I’m the face too. I don’t want to be on telly. I just want to make flapjacks.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Bessi, “you won’t have to be on telly.”

  “Good. Okay, then. ’Cause I won’t do it.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Georgia chewed her flapjack. “I just want to bake them and sell them, that’s all.”

  “I want to make them too and choose flavors.”

  “We’ll do it together,” Georgia said. “We’re partners.”

  Bessi smiled to herself. “The Famous Flapjack Twins,” she said, marveling.

  “It’s good, eve,” said Georgia.

  “It’s good, eve,” said Bessi.

  There was another pause in which they both were thinking very deeply. Bessi rubbed her arms, which had browned in the sun, bringing back Sekon coffee.

  Georgia said, with worry in her voice: “So…how do you build an empire, then?”

  “I don’t think it’s easy. And you need a car,” said Bessi. “But Daddy might help.”

  “If I’m manager, I’ll probably have to be better in math. I’ll work harder.” Georgia frowned.

  THEY WENT BACK to school after summer and concentrated. They experimented with more and more flavors. Georgia battled with her eyes through math and they passed through autumn, the leaves dancing across the river, through the chocolate wind, falling about on Gladstone’s lawns. Georgia knocked on his door one night. He was looking older and his dressing gown was fraying but the glint was still there in his smile, the soft light in his eyes. She told him, “Me and Bessi are going to make a flapjack empire.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful,” he said. “I knew it would be.” She asked him if he was all right. He said, “Yes, dear, I have started sleeping.”

  “Will you be here next time?” she asked.

  “There are no answers, Georgia, only the places,” and he closed his eyes in front of her.

  There were not many students in the second year at Watley High who knew what sort of work they wanted to do in later life. They had dreams, whims and notions. If they liked science they imagined themselves dressed in white in laboratories, cutting worms in half under microscopes. If they liked music, as Bessi did, they might picture themselves holding microphones, playing guitars in black studded leather, or sitting at a piano in evening wear on the stage of a large, dimly lit concert hall. Others simply wanted to be famous, like Sasha Jane Sloane (1969–1974, yellow for Churchill), who had gotten spotted by a photographer in Waitrose and was now a supermodel.

  The future was creeping up behind them and gently tapping, applying a slight, steady pressure. In English, on a frosty day in November, Miss Pinh asked each member of her class to stand up in turn and say what they wanted to be when they grew up.

  Georgia stood up, hating all the eyes watching her but feeling proud to know for sure, to not to have to lie. She said: “I want to
be a manager and partner of a flapjack company with Bessi.”

  Someone laughed. Miss Pinh squinted her eyes and said, “That’s very good, Georgia,” and Georgia sat down.

  Reena shot up and said, “A spy,” then sat down and it was Bessi’s turn.

  Bessi stood up. She said: “I want to be the partner and face of the Famous Flapjack Twins”—She shouldn’t have said the name, thought Georgia, someone might tell!—“and after that I want to be a singer, and then I want to meet a nice man and get married and have two children. I’d like to have twins but my mum said I won’t because I am one, so I’d like to have a girl first and then a boy.”

  The class was silent. Big Sian’s shoulders were bouncing up and down. A wave of wintry darkness washed into the room.

  Georgia was confused. After flapjacks? After flapjacks? What did she mean? There was no After Flapjacks. Not now anyway, not that she could see, not yet. She looked up at Bessi, standing there with her chin up, her back straight, ready for endings. Where was she going?

  Bessi sat down. Georgia tried to catch her eye, but Reena whispered something in her ear.

  On a piece of paper that night Georgia wrote something down. The thoughts pushed their way out. She used a red pen: I don’t know what I am. But After Flapjacks, if I had to be something, I would work in a flower shop. She kept her eyes shut when Bessi came to bed, and later, in sleep, she knocked on Gladstone’s door. There were dead leaves on the windowsill and the glass was murky.