PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘I’m not wearing this outside,’ Emma says, during our first proper PE lesson. This takes place on the Friday of our second week at school because of all the induction activities. ‘Miss?’ She starts waving her hand in the air, trying to get the attention of the PE teacher, Miss Hind. ‘Miss?’

  ‘What is it?’ Miss Hind says.

  ‘Do we have to go outside wearing this?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asks Miss Hind, sharply.

  ‘Emma.’

  ‘Well, yes, Emma, you do.’

  ‘But it’s disgusting, Miss.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Emma? It’s what?’

  ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, backing her up.

  ‘There’s boys out there, Miss,’ says Michelle.

  I will later find out that what Michelle wears for ice-skating is much, much more revealing than our frumpy PE skirts. But I will also learn that she would rather die than have anyone see her in these outfits.

  ‘Why don’t boys have to wear skirts?’ says Tanya. ‘It’s really sexist.’

  ‘Why can’t we just wear tracksuits?’ I say.

  ‘Professional sportswomen wear skirts like yours,’ Miss Hind says.

  ‘But we’re not …’ Tanya starts.

  ‘Or, if they’re athletes, they wear just knickers. Haven’t you seen them on the telly?’

  Our classmates are looking at us with a mixture of admiration and awe. It is so great going around with this lot. I have never had people look at me like this before. But so far we are the only girls who will stand up to the teachers so I suppose we do deserve some sort of recognition.

  ‘In fact,’ Miss Hind says. ‘You will be the ones wearing only knickers if you complain again. All of you. Do you understand?’

  ‘We’ll go on strike if she tries to do that,’ Emma whispers to me. But we do stop complaining at this point. We know deep down that resistance is futile in these situations and that teachers always get their own way in the end.

  ‘Right,’ Miss Hind says. ‘All jewellery in here please.’

  She starts walking around with a tattered cardboard box. This bit takes ages. Various girls have only recently had their ears pierced, and can’t take out their studs in case their holes close up. These girls are issued with bits of tape to stick over their studs. It looks very stupid. Although all my friends have had their ears pierced for ages, I’m not going to have mine done until the holidays (if my grandparents even let me). There’s no way I am going to draw attention to myself by going around with tape stuck to my ears. Other people have valuable crucifixes that they don’t want to put in the box, even though Miss Hind assures them that the box will be locked in the PE safe during the lesson. When she gets to me, I’m so busy talking to Emma that I hardly notice she’s there.

  ‘Necklace, please,’ she says sternly.

  Everyone looks at me. I can feel myself blush.

  ‘What, me?’ I say stupidly.

  ‘Necklace, please. Hurry up.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Necklace!’

  ‘I’m not supposed to take it off, Miss.’

  She is cross now. ‘I have just about had enough of you girls. Put the necklace in the box, please.’

  ‘I had a note from my parents …’ I can’t say grandparents. No one knows that I don’t live with my parents like any normal child. No one in this room attended my birthday party, and even if they had they wouldn’t know my domestic set-up because of the village hall. Alex is the only person to have ever noticed I don’t have parents. ‘… at my last school. I just need a new one. I …’

  ‘Have you ever seen someone’s head ripped off because they have been wearing a necklace during sport? It’s not very nice. Or watching someone’s face turn blue as they choke to death, strangled by the crucifix they “have to wear because of Jesus”? I am not going to lose my job because one of you girls is too stupid to listen and follow rules correctly. No excuses. In the box.’

  I am almost crying as I fiddle with the clasp on the necklace. I don’t even know how the clasp works, as I have never taken it off before. In the end, Emma helps me, for which I am very, very grateful. I go to drop it in the box but Miss Hind grabs it as it is about to slide in.

  ‘What is this thing, anyway?’ she asks, opening the catch and looking inside the locket. As she does this, the small picture inside (of my mother) flutters onto the ground. I go to pick it up but she is quicker than me. Now she’s holding the locket in one hand and the picture in the other hand. I thought she would look at the picture but it’s too late. She’s seen the code.

  I feel like I will definitely cry in a minute. Why is she doing this?

  ‘What on earth is this?’

  As an adult, you could say something nonchalant, like, ‘Oh, it’s from a boyfriend. It’s a coded message of love.’ Or, ‘Oh, my grandfather was interested in cryptography a long time ago. It simply says “I love you, Alice” in secret code.’ But I am a child.

  ‘It’s a picture of my mother,’ I say, playing dumb.

  ‘Not that. These numbers and letters. 2.14488156Ex48,’ she reads out, slowly. ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Miss Hind sneers at me. ‘You wear this on your neck. You must know what it is.’

  Everyone is staring at me. Even my new friends are looking at me like I am a weirdo or something.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I manage to say, again, as tears start to form in my eyes. If only there was something I could say. But there isn’t. I can’t say it’s a phone number or a birthday or anything like that. No one goes around with a jumble of numbers inside a locket. No one. I can’t tell her the story of why I have it, in front of the whole class. Apart from it being weird and embarrassing, my grandfather told me never to tell anyone about the necklace. This is why I put the picture in it. But I never thought anyone would actually be able to examine it the way Miss Hind is doing now. The silence seems to go on for ever.

  ‘Well?’ she says.

  Will I ever escape from this?

  ‘It is probably a hallmark, surely?’ someone suddenly says, in an odd accent. I look around and see that it is Roxy, this French girl no one ever speaks to. Being French is even weirder than having no parents in this school. Don’t ask me why. ‘Perhaps you have never seen one before?’ she says to Miss Hind. ‘If it’s a Paris hallmark then you would only have seen it if you bought the most exclusive jewellery, which I find doubtful …’

  All I know about Roxy so far is that she previously went to an English-speaking school in Paris and speaks English and French perfectly. She is a year older than the rest of us and gets picked up from school every day in a sleek black car driven by a good-looking man in blue jeans. I am thinking, Yes, I’ll say my dad bought it for me in Paris, but Miss Hind has already lost interest in the necklace. In about one second it is in the box and she is on the other side of the room, pinning Roxy up against a rusty sanitary towel machine.

  ‘You little …’ she starts to say.

  ‘Put her down, Miss.’ This is Emma. ‘Miss, you shouldn’t do that.’

  Roxy’s pale face is still defiant. ‘Hit me if you want,’ she says to Miss Hind in her soft French accent. ‘But if you do, my father will make sure you get the sack.’

  This PE lesson is definitely not going well.

  Miss Hind releases her hold on Roxy. ‘You three,’ she says, meaning me, Emma and Roxy. ‘Get out of my bloody sight. Now!’ Teachers don’t usually say ‘bloody’. Michelle, Lucy, Sarah and Tanya are regarding us with both sympathy and distrust.

  ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ says Emma.

  ‘Headmistress’s office. Now.’

  We leave the changing rooms still wearing our PE kit. All I keep thinking, as we walk across the concrete playground into the main building, is that my necklace is in there, in that box. How will I ever get it back now? I can’t go home without it and leave it here all weekend. I want to be w
earing my proper school uniform, not my PE kit. But I am not going to cry.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say to Roxy.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Emma. ‘We’re in so much trouble.’

  But it is thrilling, in a way.

  ‘You know, there is no such thing as a Paris hallmark,’ Roxy says.

  We all laugh. We are in trouble, but we are free. The only problem with my laughter is that there is a terrible anxiety hidden inside it. I have to get my necklace back.

  The headmistress is called Miss Peterson.

  ‘Why are you three here?’ she says, once we are inside her room. Her room is off the newly refurbished school foyer, which is next to the school hall. It is hot and stuffy and smells of glue and school dinners.

  ‘We have no idea,’ Roxy says, sweetly. ‘There was a minor disagreement with Miss Hind and …’

  ‘Miss Hind pinned Roxy against the wall,’ Emma blurts out.

  ‘We were really scared,’ I add.

  ‘All right,’ Miss Peterson says. She sighs. ‘I am fairly sure that you are exaggerating, as girls your age are prone to do. Members of my staff do not pin people against walls. Roxy?’

  ‘Yes Miss,’ she says. ‘I think it was a misunderstanding.’ The way she pronounces the word ‘misunderstanding’ makes it seem to go on for ever. She turns the ‘s’ sounds into ‘z’, rolls the ‘r’ in a disconcerting way, and when she gets to the ‘stand’ bit of the word, she pronounces it ‘stond’. She spoke more normally when she was just talking to me and Emma. I wonder if she just plays up her accent when confronting people like Miss Peterson. I would if I was her, and a bit braver than I am.

  Miss Peterson sighs again. ‘You have been here less than two weeks,’ she says. ‘The fact that I have seen you so early is a bad sign. A bad sign.’ I hate it when teachers repeat things like this. It’s as if they think they are performing Shakespeare, not talking to eleven-year-olds. ‘I am going to keep an eye on you three,’ she continues, pointing at us. ‘Understood? If I see you in here again before the end of term it will be letters home. Now get out of my sight.’

  We troop out into the glossy foyer. It has a weekend feeling to it already. The canteen at the far end of the hall has its silver shutters rolled down and there are no oniony cooking smells. A couple of men seem to be bringing equipment in from a van outside. It must be for the senior disco, which is happening tonight. The junior disco isn’t for another two weeks but my friends are all planning to go. I don’t know how I will be able to go. I wouldn’t be allowed to go home on the bus afterwards but being picked up by my grandfather could be fraught with problems. Anyway, I can’t worry about this. I have to get my necklace back.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell on Miss Hind?’ Emma says to Roxy, as we walk out of the main doors into the car park.

  Roxy rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t tell on teachers,’ she says. ‘If they find out you have told tales on them they will go out of their way to give you hell. Besides, headmistresses always back up the teacher. It is better to get revenge your own way.’

  There is another hour left until the end of the PE lesson and therefore the end of school. We wander out of the building and around to the deserted changing rooms.

  ‘Do you think we should get dressed, then?’ Emma says.

  Roxy is already changing into her school skirt.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, shrugging. ‘I don’t see what else we are supposed to do.’

  This lost hour into which we have tumbled is very difficult for us to understand. Everything is so planned and structured at school. You never find yourself floating free of structure and timetables and supervision. But we are, somehow, free and unsupervised. For the next two or three minutes we struggle into our school uniforms, scared that someone will turn up and we will get into more trouble. Then we look at each other blankly. We are not allowed in the library or the canteen (which is shut now anyway) or in any of the playgrounds while lessons are going on.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Emma. ‘Shall we just go home?’

  ‘I have to wait for my father to come,’ Roxy says.

  ‘I get the bus.’ I say. ‘And I have to get my necklace back.’

  ‘Miss Hind is a right cow,’ says Emma. ‘What are we going to do, then?’

  ‘We will break into the safe,’ Roxy says.

  ‘She’d know,’ Emma says. ‘Then we’d get letters home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She would know if we took it.’

  ‘If we could even break into it in the first place,’ Emma says.

  I bet I could get into it but I don’t say this. ‘I’ll have to wait for the end of the lesson and then ask her for it,’ I say instead. The thought makes me shiver.

  ‘We will stay here with you and wait for her,’ Roxy says. ‘No one should be with that bitch on their own. You don’t know what she might do.’

  Emma and I exchange a glance. No one our age uses the word ‘bitch’, especially not in this film-star accent. Roxy is someone we shouldn’t be friends with. She’s too odd. But yet we know we will be friends with her. Especially me. I am odd too, of course, although I do a better job of covering it up.

  Waiting for Miss Hind turns out to be a complicated affair. We realise that if we are still here in the changing rooms, dressed, when the others come back, we will definitely be called lesbians. You simply can’t watch other girls change and shower unless you are doing those things yourself. So we end up doing a strange tour of the very edge of the school boundaries until we end up at the top of the Rural Studies department where the goats are kept. Apparently, when you get to the third year you have to learn to milk the goats. Yuck! And you have to dissect things in biology. Emma and I have already talked about going on strike when this happens. Striking is a very fashionable thing to talk about at school at the moment, perhaps because of the miners. Emma brings it up all the time.

  We manage to time it so that we get back to the changing rooms two minutes after school has ended. This has to be quick, because my bus is waiting in the car park already, and Roxy’s father will be here soon as well. Miss Hind is there on her own, sorting through a box of hockey balls.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss,’ I say.

  She turns around. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I came to collect my necklace.’

  ‘I’m sure you did. I see there are three of you here. Is this necessary? Are you too much of a baby to come and see me on your own?’

  I want to shout at her. I want to say that she is violent and unstable and has already pinned one of my classmates against a wall today. I would be mad to see her on my own. Instead, I just say, ‘Can I have my necklace, please?’

  She sighs and gets the cardboard box. ‘I was going to confiscate this over the weekend but I can’t be bothered really. Here you go.’

  She throws it at me but I am too slow to catch it. It falls to the floor, almost in slow motion. My poor necklace! I let out a yelp as I bend down to pick it up.

  ‘What do you say, then?’ says Miss Hind while I am trying to rub stagnant water off the necklace. She says it in the kind of voice people use to prompt you to say thank you.

  ‘What?’ I say back.

  ‘What do you say?’ A bit more stern – but she actually wants me to thank her.

  I look at her with hatred in my eyes, then I look back at my friends. ‘Shall we go home, now?’ I say to them. I am not thanking this woman. No way. I am not the bravest person in the world but I will not be intimidated by this. I don’t care how hellish she makes my life at this school. If I have to, I will run away to Russia, perhaps with Alex. Without saying anything else, the three of us walk out of the changing rooms.

  I spend most of the weekend in my room. School now seems to be one long complicated knot of things that I can’t tell my grandparents about. I certainly can’t explain about the necklace, not that I have to now, since I actually got it back. But everything at school – all the painful inadequacy I feel – comes from the fact that I am not normal. I am not normal because I l
ive in this village, with my grandparents, in a house with no TV. I imagine living where Emma does, on the estate just in front of the school building, with normal furniture and oven chips and parents and catalogue clothes. This would be heaven. I could invite Emma over for tea, then. I could dream about Alex coming around one day and not laughing at me. (He may have no parents but I bet he has a TV and normal books in his house.) So now I have actually wished my grandparents and everything I love away, all because of what people at school think.

  If your friends threw themselves off a cliff, would you do it too? Well, no. If they threw themselves off a cliff, I wouldn’t have to worry about what they think any more, so that’s a stupid question. I can’t deal with this. My grandparents are both too caught up in their work to take me into town. I will not have a pleated skirt by Monday. I will not have lip-gloss. I have to do something about this. But what? Will my friends like me for another week without these things? I have a plan to ask my grandparents if I can have dinner money instead of a packed lunch, so I can buy chocolate at the van at lunchtime like my friends do. Perhaps I can save some of the change for lip-gloss? So next week I will have to feel guilty because of that, too. What am I turning into?

  My mother’s diary turns out to have been written in the 1960s, when she was a teenager. Her life then seems a million miles away from my life now, however. She went to the girls’ grammar school and was obsessed with her violin. Every entry in her diary mentions how much practice she has done that day, as well as whether she has any spots! I wish I was at the grammar school. Why did no one tell me that everything was going to be like this? I thought my mother’s diary would be the secret way into her mind but there isn’t that much in it apart from the notes to do with her violin practice, or homework. I feel guilty about this as well (guilt is my new best friend), but I feel almost cheated by the diary. I have searched it for secret messages or code, but there is nothing. On the plus side, however, some of the novels in the box are very interesting. Some of them even have dirty bits! I have decided to get to know my mother by reading these books instead. Although I am not cold, I snuggle up in bed with these books all day on Sunday and try not to think about going back to school. I wish I could contract a terminal disease so I don’t have to go to that place tomorrow. My stomach ache starts at about six o’clock on Sunday evening and I can’t listen to anything my grandparents say at all.