by Alice Castle
Beth had started off her investigation into teenage life with little expectation of finding anything. Did she even know any teenagers? She was used to seeing gaggles of lovely girls, uniformly gorgeous, long-limbed, usually laughing, drifting through Dulwich Village at home time, making for the expensive cafes like giraffes moving towards a watering hole. But did she ever speak to any? Sometimes she glimpsed them in their natural habitat, when dropping off or picking up Ben for play dates with his friends, though these big sisters of small boys never deigned to acknowledge his presence. And she, as a much older woman and mummy to boot, was of no interest either, beyond a polite ‘hello’.
Then she realised. Though hardly a party animal, Beth did occasionally venture out for dinner or to the theatre, and when she did, Zoe Bentick was Ben’s favourite babysitter. The fact that she lived two doors up on Pickwick Road was a massive help – no Uber fares to tag onto the night’s tariff, and Beth could see her home by sticking her head out of her front door. Zoe was a dream babysitter, one of those swotty girls who’d been liberated from terminal uncoolness by J. K. Rowling’s wondrous invention, Hermione Grainger, patron saint of over-achieving girlhood everywhere.
Zoe was also a definite teenager, being in year, what was it, 9 or 10 at the College School? That made her fourteen or fifteen. Possibly young to babysit someone of Ben’s age, but then Zoe was special. She was responsible, incredibly clever, and best yet, big sister to no fewer than three brothers of her own, so she was great with small boys. The Benticks were bursting out of their tiny Pickwick Road house, even though it was one of the few which had not only had a loft extension, but also had the side return covered over to enlarge the kitchen. There was a home studio plonked in the tiny garden, too. The long-suffering and prolific Bentick parents needed it, so that they had one reasonably quiet spot to quaff their Merlot in the evenings – and presumably gather their strength for more procreation, uninterrupted by the ones they had made earlier.
So, Beth had started out by crawling Zoe’s Facebook page for clues. It felt like stalking, and it probably was, but she’d justified it because she needed information – and the girl she’d found in the Gallery needed help.
Before Beth knew it, she had been deep in a teenage world that she’d previously known nothing about. Zoe herself was not very active on Facebook – she was one of the few girls her age whose nose was permanently inserted in a book. In fact, the last time she’d come round, when Beth had been summoned to Katie’s for a lovely but dauntingly grown-up dinner party, the teenager had been reading Wuthering Heights. They’d chatted about it before and after Beth’s dinner outing, and Beth didn’t mind admitting that she’d enjoyed their talk a lot more than the Brexit squabbles and hand-wringing over American politics that were still dominating Dulwich supper table talk.
But, though Zoe was not a leading light of social media, she had friends who had tagged her in various group shots at school. Before Beth knew it, she was following a trail that was a lot better signposted than crumbs scattered on a woodland path. By clicking on this or that group shot, she could harvest a bunch of names. Then she searched for them on Facebook, and their profiles came up. Depending on their privacy settings, she could see some, or all, of what they posted.
And many of these girls seemed to post every time they drew breath, let alone did something interesting. Considering most of their daily life ought to consist of school and homework, it was amazing how prolific they were. Every hairstyle was documented, every expression practised in the Facebook mirror, every outfit photographed, every party dissected as though the Rosetta Stone was being parsed. There were snaps of them drinking. All right, you couldn’t tell if it was alcohol in the plastic cups they clutched, but the effect on them made it pretty clear that a lot of underage boozing was going on. There were pictures of them smoking, too. And, in some cases, falling over in the street. Always laughing. Because it was all just such fun, wasn’t it? If they were in Zoe’s class or year at school, the fact that they were well under the legal age for any of this behaviour was apparently irrelevant.
Beth had been amazed that posting these tipsy, toking pics wasn’t getting them into big trouble with their parents, with the school – with everybody. They were breaking laws here. All right, the British had a very peculiar attitude towards alcohol, which cut through all ages and all social barriers. Given half a chance, and free access to booze, Brits, from dukes to dustmen, would simply drink until they fell over, and there was nothing much anyone could do to stop that deep-dyed predilection. Beth was beginning to feel sanctimonious, but knew she enjoyed a drink as much as the next person, yes, to the point of word-slurring giggliness in social situations, to take the edge off a little.
Teenagers, dealing with all kinds of awkwardness and blessed with fresh young livers that brushed off the abuse, were notorious for experimenting whenever they got the chance. She’d sometimes nipped behind the bike shed at school to take a puff on an illicit cigarette – who hadn’t? But she hoped even her teenage self would have had more sense than to slap pictures of it all online.
And this was just booze and cigs. Where they were, drugs were sure to follow. Were all those actually cigarettes? And what exactly had everyone taken before thinking it was a great idea to take every photo at a 45-degree angle?
Beth had shaken her head slightly as she pulled up another shot of one of Zoe’s friends, looking as though she’d passed out on the shoulder of some Wyatt’s boy on a bench which had to be in Dulwich Park. Yes, she recognised the rhododendron bushes in the background. They were near the boating pond. Lots of joshing comments under the shot made it clear that this was particularly hilarious. Poor girl, thought Beth. A time would come, and soon, when she would so regret not just that evening, but the fact that it was plastered all over the internet as well.
And Beth had had access to all this simply by leaping from one profile to the next, without becoming anyone’s friend and without her growing interest being signalled at all to those whose pictures she pored over.
If it was this easy for her, Beth realised, how much simpler might it be for someone who really knew what they were doing, who could delve further, and who had the time and inclination to befriend these girls – all of whom, horribly, seemed desperate for approval and appreciation? To a paedophile, it must be like supermarket sweep. These girls posed in bikinis on summer holidays, wearing tiny shorts in the park, lolling about in their back gardens in cropped tops and minis, at festivals in tiny dresses. They were young, they were beautiful. They were stupid. They were so vulnerable. It made Beth want to cry.
Among the mêlée of faces crying out for recognition, there were a few who stood out as that bit more outrageous, more determined, more attention-seeking. Either they were prettier, more photogenic, more prolific in their posts, or just seemed more desperate to get likes. One, in particular, seemed to the be superstar of the bunch. Her dresses were lower, or higher, or just plain sassier. She had a cheeky look, though she was not necessarily prettier than any of the rest. But she was ubiquitous, and shameless. She had a trademark smile, that crooked her mouth up a mile on the right-hand side, making her look a little bit knowing. Whenever she produced that smile, she got a deluge of likes. It seemed to be her ‘Blue Steel’. Beth smiled wryly. She’d loved the film Zoolander, a parody of the fashion world, where a male model spends his days perfecting a repertoire of looks that are actually identical. Ironic that nowadays it was being used as a template to achieving Instagram glory by Dulwich teens.
Thanks to that certain smile, this girl’s popularity seemed to be growing inexorably, post by post. She had far more Facebook followers than there were pupils at the College School, or at all the schools in Dulwich put together, plus those of Camberwell, Sydenham, and even Lewisham for that matter. Beth clicked on the serried ranks of fans to find out how that could be, and realised many of them were people who looked well over school age, who should surely have better things to do.
And behind th
e bland profile pics of teenage lads, who knew who could be lurking? The lonely thirty-stone truck driver from Minnesota pretending to be thirteen was an urban myth everyone had heard. Everyone Beth’s age, anyway. Anybody who was safely in Minnesota was ok with her – while they stayed that far away. The real danger was the man round the corner pretending to be the girl next door. And why so many grown-up women would want to watch the posturing of a teenager was a complete mystery to her.
Maybe these kids were still innocently presuming everyone was exactly who they seemed. She knew that they had some sort of cyber-threat training in secondary school. The trouble was that this generation – like all generations before it – assumed they knew everything. Having grown up with these marvellous devices in their hands, they would listen with barely concealed irritation to some dumb old guy trying to scare them.
Beth sighed and turned again to the girl’s posts, clicking through the now familiar stream of poses wearing little dresses, tiny playsuits, cutesy hats… The girl was striking, you had to give her that. It wasn’t until Beth had got to a shot of her wearing white, in a dimly lit room, that she realised what had been troubling her about this particular girl for some time. With growing horror, she realised she bore a striking resemblance to someone she had seen before.
Someone she had last encountered lying on a cold marble slab in the Picture Gallery.
Was it the same girl? Beth pressed her nose almost to her laptop screen. She was pretty sure, but not certain. Still, there was no doubt in her mind about what she had to do next. For once, her phone was easily to hand. She grabbed it, and dialled.
Chapter Four
Harry York sat with his head in his hands. It had been a dicey half hour, to say the least. The first misstep from the machines had turned out to be just the opening salvo in a cacophony of horrible noises, from increasingly urgent beeps from the heart monitor to the buzzing of the panic button he started pressing, when the interval between his PC running for help and the help itself arriving looked as though it would never end. Then his ears were full, suddenly, with the sound he’d dreaded most of all; the remorseless low squeal of the pulse monitor as the girl finally flatlined. After that came the thunder of the crash team charging up the corridor with a cart filled with yet more equipment, as if the poor child wasn’t attached to enough machines already. He had been glad to be pushed out of the room as the professionals fought over which bit to poke, prod, and shock next.
He wasn’t expecting anything after that. The public, fed on a diet of miraculous hospital dramas, saw resurrection as everyone’s God-given right as soon as the defibrillator paddles came out. But York knew that fewer than three per cent of attempts to restart the heart were successful. It had been part of his training, not least to ensure that police on the streets weren’t too downcast when their own best efforts almost always failed.
Yet, against the odds, this girl had rallied. Who knew what germ of a survival instinct still fluttered within? York wondered if any of her ribs had been cracked during the CPR, or whether she was one of the few who had effortlessly floated back to life. Somehow, given her traumatic day so far, he doubted that anything had gone smoothly. And this might not be her last brush with the grim reaper. No-one yet knew if there was anything still going on in that pretty head of hers, even if her cells had decided they wanted to live on.
The white-coated doctor, sweaty after his efforts, had been in a rush to get somewhere else. He had also looked young enough to still be working for his Scouts first aid badge, despite the rigours of his training and the punishing NHS hours he was putting in at A&E. ‘Got her back. Close one. Has she been conscious at all?’
Naturally, he wasn’t the doctor who’d treated the girl earlier, or the one York had spoken to on the phone, and he wouldn’t be the one caring for her later, either. The NHS’s mysterious shift system seemed designed to ensure that you never had the same doctor twice during the course of your treatment.
‘Nothing so far. I was told earlier that these next few hours were crucial – that if she is going to regain consciousness then the sooner the better. They weren’t sure about any brain damage…’
‘Well, this little episode won’t have helped, that’s for sure,’ said the doctor, his straight fair hair flopping over a face which was unlined but grey with exhaustion, apart from two hectic patches of red on his cheeks.
‘Will it have set the timings back? Will she just wake up later now?’
The doctor shrugged widely, then unhooked her chart from the foot of the bed. ‘Drugs, we don’t know what… She’s been under, what? 12 hours now?’
‘As far as we know. She was found unconscious, no idea when or how she got into that state.’
‘Mmmm.’ The doctor’s lips were pursed, like a housewife presented with a bruised apple by an unscrupulous greengrocer. ‘I suppose you’re waiting for her to open her eyes and tell you who gave her what?’
York smiled ruefully. ‘That would be excellent. If she could provide names and addresses, then better still.’
The doctor put his head to one side. ‘Yeah. You could be waiting a long while.’
‘Is that your medical opinion?’
‘For what it’s worth.’ He turned back to the bed, where his patient lay, still and apparently serene under another smoothed blanket, the bank of machines at her side now purring benignly, perfectly placid again, whatever was going on inside her body. He rested his hand gently for a second on her inert arm. ‘Her situation wasn’t great before this cardiac incident, from what I’ve seen on her chart. But inevitably something like this is a setback, a deterioration of her condition.’
‘Are you saying she won’t regain consciousness, Doctor?’
The young man gave York a long, level look. He was used to breaking bad news to relatives. In this case, it wasn’t family ties going down the tubes, it was an entire criminal case. It was clear it mattered to this policeman. A lot. ‘I’m not saying anything for sure. You can never say never with the brain. There are people who’ve woken up after years… but there are a lot more who simply never do. It’s unpredictable. What I can say is that she is stronger than she looks. She’s still here, and that’s against the odds. Keep hoping. We don’t see a lot like this, thank Christ, but even one is too many. Good luck.’
York’s – and the girl’s – ten minutes were up. There were plenty more people suffering downstairs and only one boy in a white coat to sort them out. He collected up an armful of folders, nodded to York and dashed away, harassment marring his pleasant face.
And now it was time for York to leave the girl, too. He took his head out of his hands, got up from the chair, and took a last look at her. He was curiously reluctant to go, despite the loathing for hospitals that told him fresh air and a change of scene were urgent requirements. Though no-one had yet mentioned the word coma, he knew the longer the girl dallied before waking, the worse things were. And wasn’t it family that was supposed to bring people round? The whispering of a mother, the playing of favourite tracks by a sister, the silent hand-holding of a dad or brother. These were the things that ripped people from the velvet of the deep unconscious and forced them up into the jostling world again. This girl was getting none of the stimulation she needed. The only attention she’d really had, in hours, was the terrifying mugging of the CPR.
But York was not family. He might feel for her, in her lonely splendour. She was more than ever now like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her prince to awaken her. But if he had any hope of finding out what had happened to her, he had to abandon the silent vigil. She’d have to make do with the pimply PC stationed outside. He could ill afford it, but the lad would stay put outside, with an ear straining for any more nonsense from those monitors and a promise he’d get help more quickly next time. At least he knew where to go now.
York, meanwhile, had another princess to protect – in his mind, anyway. He dreaded to think what Beth would do or say if she got an inkling of the way he saw her. But, though she�
�d never admit to being in distress, she’d certainly been in mild peril this morning and her phone call just now had given him pause for thought. It was time he picked her brain about all this. Knowing her, she’d be a gold mine of information. Would she divulge anything to him, though? He’d just have to use his wiles, he decided with a grin, slipping his phone back in his pocket and giving the PC a brisk pat on the back as he sauntered away. The PC sat up a little straighter, and listened intently to the beeps from the room. All was well – for now.
***
Miss Troughton sighed as the bell shrieked and the girls – 7D this time; quite a nice bunch but not a single linguist amongst them, alas – repacked their bags, which seemed to require immense amounts of giggling and argy-bargy. ‘Ah, we’ll move on to the next lesson in silence, please. Taisez-vous,’ she said, raising her voice to that teacher pitch which always cut through the babble.
Thank goodness, this lot were fresh enough to the daunting world of Secondary School to quieten down immediately, and they trooped out of the door giving a pleasing, though probably erroneous, impression of docility. Miss Troughton wiped the last of the names of vegetables – which she had a horrible feeling that some of them wouldn’t recognise in English, let alone a second language – off the white board, and then stuck her head out of the classroom door, wondering if she had time to sprint to the staff loo and back before the next lot.
Outside, she spotted a gaggle of girls – Year 9s, if she wasn’t mistaken – in an intense cluster outside the girls’ toilet. Uh-oh. She stepped closer, then could tell even by their back views that this was the group she thought of – political correctness could go hang itself – as the Skinny Minnies. While the school had no-one at present who was in any sort of medical danger from anorexia (and yes, she knew there were plenty of caveats in that sentence), this bunch were on her list as a group to watch. She tiptoed further down the corridor, thanking the Lord for her soft soles. Angie Douglas might well turn her nose up at such comforts, and she was never going to argue that these lumpen shoes represented the most stylish choice out there for a woman of her build, but there was a lot to be said for rubber. She felt like the hippo in Fantasia creeping up on a load of half-starved gazelles.