The Girl in the Gallery

by Alice Castle

  Instead of obediently taking her place next to him, Sophia darted him devil eyes and started to pace up and down, twisting the sodden tissue as she went. There was not far to go in the bedsit without coming up against a wall, a pile of clothes, a pizza box, or the door. So, she stopped, and stood in front of him.

  Raf, who’d gratefully zoned out during the pacing and reached for his phone, felt her scrutiny but tried to carry on for as long as possible without acknowledging it. Her mood was clearly not good, and he didn’t want any of it. Eventually, he made the mistake of flicking a glance upwards. She stood there, shivering with some feeling or other, and looking down on him with an expression he didn’t know and definitely didn’t like. She was reminding him of one of those bug-eyed dogs that celebrity bints dragged around with them in bags. Chipolata, was it? Nah, that didn’t sound right, but he couldn’t be bothered to think further on it.

  ‘Wassup, then, babe?’ he drawled again, already bored, not bothering to meet her eyes.

  ‘You know what it is. One of my friends is dead, and another’s in the hospital,’ she shrieked, and as usual her perfect enunciation, even at this high pitch, really irritated him. All those consonants jabbing at him, brittle little knives, while her vowels pounded him round the head.

  ‘You know me, I don’t know nuffin’ about any of that, babe,’ he said, with the megawatt smile that usually had her knickers off. Today, all he was getting was a mean red glare. It was getting him down. For real.

  ‘If you think I’m gonna ask again, why you think it’s my problem, you don’t know much,’ he said, mulish now and hauling himself to his feet. ‘I got someplace I got to be,’ he said, turning over a pile of clothes in a desultory attempt to find the cleanest T shirt. ‘Hey, didn’t you bring no washing for me?’

  He dimly remembered her stuffing some of his kit into a bag, bustling away with it. That was when she was in wifey mode. Despite all the evidence pointing to the fact that that phase of their relationship had passed, he couldn’t suppress a puppyish hope that she would somehow produce a neatly-laundered and ironed pile of clothes.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ she said, all knives again.

  ‘Whatever, babes. Like I said, I’m off out. You stay here if you like,’ he said magnanimously, gesturing round at the ruined furniture, dirty dishes, and telly that no longer worked now the Netflix free trial period had expired. He pulled on some tracky bottoms and the least malodorous T shirt.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere until we’ve talked,’ she said, ominously, her fists clenched, her little jaw set, and those once-beguiling eyes set to mean little slits.

  Now it was Raf’s turn to pace, but when he got as far as the door, he triumphantly flung it open, muttered, ‘Yeah, fuck that, man,’ over his shoulder, and disappeared down the ratty corridor at – for him – a spanking pace. The further he got from his own front door, the more fluid and graceful his lope became.

  He’d had it with Soph, she was more trouble than she was worth. It was a shame, he thought resentfully, with all the hard work he’d put in. Still, best to quit while he was ahead, especially with two of her friends OD’ing.

  He tossed a greasy old chip packet from his pocket on the street, and kicked at it ineffectually as he strolled by. Yeah, now he came to think of it, he was finished with this whole area. Time to move on.

  Sophia, deflated and defeated now, subsided onto the sofa with tears streaming down her face – and ice in her heart. Her hands, with their stubby, freshly-bitten nails, came up to cover a face that was turning red and blotchy with crying. This was one pose she wouldn’t be Instagramming.

  ***

  Leanne sat at her desk and admired the gold swirls on her nail extensions, their blunt tips making them a tiny bit more practical, yet still probably the least helpful accoutrement a secretary could have. Filing, typing, even picking up the phone, were activities fraught with danger, as far as Leanne was concerned. Managing to avoid them, while not giving the gimlet-eyed Miss Douglas or any of her posse of teachers a single cause for complaint, made Leanne’s job ten times harder than it would otherwise have been. But oh, she loved her nails. The morning sunlight glinted off one of the inset rhinestones in this week’s gorgeous pattern – a symphony of golden filigree that rivalled anything a rococo master could have devised.

  Angela Douglas, emerging from her office that moment and seeing the full ten nails held up to the sun in glory, was forcibly reminded of the complexity and beauty of the ironwork of Wyatt’s school gates.

  Normally, she was tolerant of Leanne’s nail fetish. She’d had secretaries in the past with complicated love lives, some with pets and some, God forbid, with children who got ill and needed collecting at the most inconvenient moments. Leanne’s nails, though a nuisance, were definitely less bothersome than most alternatives. But today’s pattern was unfortunate. She was bitterly aware that the College School’s bog-standard frontage bore no comparison to either Leanne’s nails or Wyatt’s glorious entrance and, though she had more pressing troubles aplenty, the corners of her mouth tugged down as she beheld the fiesta of gold before her.

  ‘Leanne, if you have a moment, could you find Miss Troughton for me?’ said Miss Douglas, in tones which could have started the nuclear winter unaided.

  But Leanne was no amateur. She immediately moved her hands as if to frame the view. ‘Just thinking about them blinds we got on order, Miss D. Quote still hasn’t come in.’

  Miss Douglas, not fooled for a millisecond but appreciating the girl’s effort, sniffed, said nothing, and clicked her door shut again. Leanne sighed and levered herself up from a chair so ergonomically padded that it resembled a womb. If it had been any other teacher Miss D had wanted, she would just have rung through to the staffroom and put the wind up them. But if it was Miss Troughton, then Leanne had to personally hunt her down and bring her back here. It usually meant a crisis, and Leanne knew full well that something was up. Everyone in the school had been walking on eggshells since the news came in about poor Simone Osborne being in the hospital.

  Leanne had been astonished. She knew all the worst offenders in the school – her position, right outside the Headmistress’s door, meant she saw them troop in, cocky as you like, and saw them slink out, chunks torn off them and put right back down in their places. Simone had not had a whisper of trouble in her short career at the school. She remembered the discussions the Headmistress, the Bursar, and the old Trout had had about taking her on in the first place. There’d been other candidates, but they’d all wanted to take a chance on the bright kid with the mother who’d clearly worked all hours to keep her two decently shod and out of trouble.

  She was a nice sort of girl when she came – smiley, cheerful, grateful, but trying not to show it too much – and the full bursary meant she got everything the others did, the works. No-one knew the difference. Except, in a school like this, stuffed with smarty-pants girls, everyone knew everything. Simone may have looked the same as the rest, but there was not one girl in the school who didn’t know she was this year’s charity case.

  Leanne remembered with a guilty pang that she’d passed her in the corridor last week. Some of the girls didn’t trouble to give her the time of day. Who was she kidding? Most of them. But Simone had always smiled and said hello. But that day, you could tell she was a million miles away. And that nice new uniform? Hanging off her.

  Leanne had wondered, then. Had the girl got in with the pro-anas? There was always a bunch of them in the school. No getting away from it, these days, with girls. Leanne thought it was ridiculous. She was happy in her own skin, she thought, her thighs rubbing comfortably together as she walked the endless corridors to fetch Troughton. But there was something about these posh girls. They all lost it, round about the same time. Year 8. They’d start to go feral. Things usually escalated in Year 9, before settling just as the work piled on for GCSEs.

  Hormones were terrible things; Leanne knew only too well. She tended to pick a little too mu
ch at the carbs at her time of the month. Well, at most times of the month, really. But these girls, getting their first taste of the complicated soup of conflicting desires that made up a woman, well. They just went AWOL for a couple of years; that was the only way to describe it, really.

  The skinnies were the worst, unless you counted the cutters. The cutters were fairly new; there hadn’t been any when she’d first joined the school eight years ago. Then there’d been the first – a real Emo with dyed black hair. You could get away with that – just – as the regulations said ‘natural’ colours were ok. Morticia Addams-black was hardly natural in her book, but it was better than pink. First, this girl had taken to wearing long jumpers all summer, even on the hottest days, even insisting on wearing one in PE when the rest were in short sleeves. Then she’d just sat around weeping.

  The matron had been on it. She accidentally-on-purpose spilled a cup of water on the girl, got the sweater off and saw the fine network of scars – ruby red for the recent ones, silvery spider’s webs of old marks. Parents were dragged in, straight off to the Wellesley for a term, then she was back with a load of plasters and talk of a skin graft. Miss Douglas was that relieved when the girl transferred to a sixth form college for A levels. Her parents had come up with that limp old excuse that she needed a bit of freedom, wanted to mingle with boys. But she and Miss Douglas had known that the girl couldn’t cut it at the College School. Which was ironic, when you thought about it, Leanne thought with a smile at her own cleverness.

  You’d have thought that would be enough to put anyone in their right mind off the whole cutting business, but these girls weren’t, were they? Some of them were so clever they’d left normal far behind. Worse, it had turned into a team sport, with little clusters of them daring each other and egging each other on. Parents were the last to cotton on. ‘She said her little brother scratched her.’ ‘Oh, she said it was just a paper cut.’ Honestly, for a lot of clever dicks, they were blimmin’ idiots, these parents, that was for sure.

  But what the girls got out of the business? That Leanne didn’t understand at all. She’d even asked one, a weedy little thing by the name of Amber. Well, these troubled girls spent so much time waiting to go into Miss Douglas’s room, she kind of got to know them. And she was curious.

  ‘Release,’ this Amber had said. ‘I feel all this pressure, all this tension and I’ve got all this stuff just crowding in on me. Then I cut, and it seems to take everything else away.’

  What kind of sense did that make? None at all, as far as Leanne was concerned. She wasn’t into pain, no thanks, and the idea of seeing blood running down her own arm? Well, it turned her stomach. She knew people who liked a bit of suffering – there were enough friends of hers, as full of piercing holes as colanders, her mum said. They did it for a reason. But this? You didn’t even get a bit of jewellery at the end. You had to hide yourself and feel shame. Nah, not for her, not in a million, and why it was such a thing for these rich girls she couldn’t fathom. She supposed everyone wondering why they did it made them feel a bit special. But it was plain stupid.

  Leanne snorted to herself, and a Year 7 girl slinking along to the loos, hoping not to be seen, instinctively ducked. Leanne took no notice. She should be sympathetic to these girls, she knew, but they had parents, counsellors, and the school to do the caring bit. She just thought they were twits. They had all this, and they risked chucking it away before they’d even got started.

  If she was an employer, she’d be looking at any jobseekers, making sure they had no marks on their arms and were a decent size. Why would you want to get lumbered with someone who was only going to get signed off sick and spend all their time mooning about being ‘sensitive’ and ‘troubled’?

  No, a normal girl with a balanced outlook on life was the way to go, thought Leanne, swinging her arms slightly as she ambled down the corridor. Then she caught a nail on a doorpost and stopped stock still for five whole minutes, cursing with every ounce of her concentration and every swearword in her not-inconsiderable lexicon. The little Year 7 girl, cowering in the entrance to the loos, too scared to come out and reveal herself yet desperate now to get back to class, learned a whole lot of new vocabulary that definitely wouldn’t be in her next spelling test.

  ***

  By the time Miss Troughton settled her comfortable bulk into an easy chair in Miss Douglas’s room, her friend’s patience was more or less exhausted. Somehow, it was much easier to get exasperated at Leanne and Bernie Troughton than it was to face the potential disaster that was threatening to engulf them. But Miss Douglas, still outwardly calm in today’s serene royal blue dress, knew she had to hold it together.

  She clutched the pearls in the double rope round her enviably unlined throat, and took a deep breath. Against her inclinations, she’d been on a mindfulness course last year to see whether it was suitable for the school, and found herself liking it enough to insist that any nervy girls breathed deeply before telling her their woes. Every now and then, she even remembered to apply some of its counsel herself. Today was just such a moment, with thoughts spinning out of control, anger firing off in irrelevant directions, and even the concerned face of her dear friend annoying her so much that she itched to slap those doughy cheeks.

  Another careful breath, and she let go of the pearls and brought her hands together on the desk, closing her eyes briefly. She was just about to speak when Miss Troughton broke into her thoughts in that impetuous way she had when she’d had an idea.

  ‘What about an assembly? For the whole school? For Simone?’

  Miss Douglas compressed her lips for a moment. It was a good idea, there was no denying that – but she’d already thought of it herself, and had knocked up a version of her address first thing this morning.

  ‘There are wider issues here,’ she said, her voice arctic.

  ‘Of course, of course, but just to show some sense of community…’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ll have the assembly, that goes without saying. But the real question is what the hell we’re going to do with Year 9.’

  ‘Year 9?’

  Now Miss Douglas was exasperated. ‘It’s not just the one girl any more, is it? Yes, Simone is gone; that’s very, very sad.’ Her face compressed, and for one terrible moment she thought the tears were going to come. But it would have been like the Statue of Liberty weeping, instead of just looking permanently aghast. She couldn’t do that, to her friend looking on – or to herself. After a spasm of feeling, and yet another breath, Miss Douglas mastered herself and went on. ‘But it’s not just one girl. There are others affected, and we’ve got to stamp on this now. There’s Lulu Cox in the hospital already, and who knows what else is going on amongst that group? Do you have any idea?’

  Miss Troughton blinked. She might be many things, but no-one would see her as a natural confidante for fourteen-year-olds.

  ‘I’ve talked to Matron, we’ve identified the group…’

  ‘Well, that’s not hard, now, is it, given that two of them have been hospitalised? There aren’t that many of them left.’ Miss Douglas was at her most withering.

  She suddenly got up and started padding round the room, her high heels abandoned under her desk. Miss Troughton was one of the only people in the world who knew just how much her shoes pained her. Like the Little Mermaid, every step in heels was like a knife. But the shoes were part of her official persona, and that had to be maintained. She wore flats on the drive to and from school, and kicked off the heels every moment she could. Some days, she scarcely needed to walk in them at all. But today was going to be tough on all fronts. Feet, body, and soul were already aching – and it wasn’t even break time yet.

  ‘We’ve got to get control back, show the parents this isn’t going to happen again, and it goes without saying that we need to emphasise that unfortunate friendships have been forged out of school and that’s the root of the problem…’

  ‘You mean… pretend nothing’s been going on here?’

  �
�Pretend? Pretend? I think you’ll find it’s no pretence,’ said Miss Douglas, raising her eyebrows at Miss Troughton. ‘The girls simply don’t have time to work up whatever strange business has been going on while they’re within these gates. We keep them busy every minute of the day, with a timetable crammed with activities designed to stretch young minds and keep them fully occupied.’

  Miss Troughton’s lips moved as she tried to memorise what she recognised as the party line. ‘Fully occupied, yes, yes, of course.’

  ‘We support the parents in their quest to find out the root of this… problem. And we, as a school, will do everything we can to stamp out whatever the hell has been going on, but we are not, repeat not, taking responsibility for it. Do you understand, Bernie?’ Miss Douglas halted in her pacing in front of her friend, who was still filling every inch of the easy chair with her bulk, and frowning with the concentration required to internalise the school’s message.

  ‘Yes, yes, I see, Angela… But…’ Miss Troughton mumbled, head down, avoiding her friend’s steely gaze.

  ‘But what?’ said Miss Douglas stiffly.

  ‘But the girl is dead, Angela. The poor child. She was so sweet and so bright. It’s so out of character. Of all the girls to be experimenting with drugs, I’d never have picked Simone. She had so much to lose. Her mother… It’s just unbearable. She was so thrilled when Simone got the place. Now, think of her.’

  It was too much. Suddenly, Miss Troughton collapsed into the sobs that Miss Douglas was rigorously holding back. Tears ran down the scarlet cheeks and disappeared under the tightly-buttoned collar of her shirt.