‘I was looking for Esther,’ she says.
‘Esther?’ I think about the laptop, and her giggling with Ben. When was that? Yesterday? The day before? ‘I haven’t seen Esther for ages,’ I say.
‘Has she not been to visit you?’
I shake my head. ‘Not today.’
‘Oh.’ Chloë looks disappointed. ‘I can’t find her anywhere.’
‘She seems to be good at disappearing,’ I say with a little smile. I don’t share my hypotheses from last week that Esther can make herself invisible or turn into a bat. Sometimes I do say these kinds of things to people, as surreal almost-jokes but they tend to look at me blankly and just say something like, ‘Er, right …’ and then change the subject.
‘She does indeed,’ Chloë says. She pauses, and looks at her hands. ‘Not that I’ve seen much of Ben lately, either.’ She looks up at me and I am braced for a sad/possessive look which will complicate everything between Ben and I. But instead of this look, Chloë’s face becomes one big, kind smile. ‘He’s happy with you, you know,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Um …’
‘I haven’t seen him this happy for a long time.’
Oh God, now I see where this is going. There’s a long pause, though. Am I supposed to say something now? I’m not sure I know what to say.
‘This isn’t just a conference fling for you, is it?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say honestly. ‘I don’t think so.’
Her eyes flick to the floor, like she’s embarrassed.
‘He thinks you’re pretty great, you know?’
I laugh, also embarrassed. I hate conversations like this. ‘Um … That’s, er … God. I think the same about him, I think.’ I look around at my room and across my bed, in which I have been living for the past few days. For a second it blurs and seems like a boat, stranded at sea. Then it’s a bed again. Old memories. ‘I don’t know why he would think that, though,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I’m great. In fact, the way I feel now, I …’ I’m about to go on about how ill and un-sexy I feel but I don’t know Chloë very well so I take a few steps backwards in my head. ‘I don’t even know who I am half the time,’ I say instead.
Do I sound like the lame teenager I almost certainly once was? I’m just mad. I’m SO confused. My life is so complicated. Me, me, me. Look how muddled I am. Do you think I might be on drugs? My madness makes me sophisticated. Oh, I need more strong coffee and more French cigarettes.
But Chloë just smiles and says, ‘He’s a good judge of character.’ So now I am expecting the big ‘Don’t hurt him’ speech but it doesn’t come. Instead, Chloë gets up and fiddles with a strand of hair that has come loose from the clip.
‘If Esther does turn up, will you tell her I’m looking for her?’ she says, walking towards the door.
‘Sure,’ I say.
And then she is gone.
So what’s in today’s envelope, then? I pick it up off the desk and consider taking a short cut and just burning it before I have even read it. But I don’t. I ease open the flap and pull out the contents. There’s a letter, written on PopCo headed paper, and something else, another sheet of paper. I open this out. Fucking hell. It’s a share certificate. What’s going on?
Dear Alice Butler, the letter says. Thank you for taking part in our Games Testing programme and for offering the suggestion of Paddle Z as the name for the game you played. Although we received many feedback cards and suggestions, we all felt that your idea most strongly encapsulated the feel of this product. We particularly liked the playful juxtaposition of the functional word Paddle with the symbol Z. We were very excited by the versatility of this conjunction. Does the ‘Z’ refer to some sort of ‘Z’ factor (much more impressive than an ‘X’ factor), or does it imply a cutting-edge plural: PaddleZ? The options are all there. Therefore, we are pleased to inform you that we have now officially selected it as the brand name. Please find enclosed 1000 PopCo shares. A crate of champagne will be delivered to your home address when you return from your current assignment. Thank you once again for your valuable input. With best wishes, blah blah blah …
Bloody hell. I only wrote that because I couldn’t think of anything else. 1,000 shares. What are they worth? Probably a lot less than you’d pay a professional brand designer to come up with a product name, but a lot more than I would earn in a month. Maybe I won’t burn this piece of paper. What am I going to do with a crate of champagne? I could share a bottle with Rachel, perhaps while I tell her about my strange adventures here. Perhaps Ben will want to come round and share a bottle with me. I shiver unexpectedly, imagining Ben in my house, in my bed. Will this indeed be more than a conference fling? Will he want it to be more?
Where is he, anyway? Bizarrely, I find that I am really missing him.
*
My new strategy for surviving at school is a constantly evolving entity. At first, I take a jumble of things – images, ideas, people – and pack them for school every day as carefully as my grandfather packs my lunch box (I told him that school dinners weren’t working out). I take ideas about imprisonment and freedom from Woman on the Edge of Time. I tell myself that no one’s life is as bad as the heroine Connie’s life. She is locked in a cruel mental institution despite not being mad. I am trapped in this school but at least I can lock the door when I go to the toilet. On the other hand, Connie has the ability to time travel to a better world. I do not have this ability. But sometimes, when things are really bad, I imagine that I too can summon this future up in my head and step into it as easily as stepping through a door. I take this image of another world around with me all the time, folded up in my head like an old map.
Other things I carry around with me, in my head: snapshots of Roxy, of Jasmine, of the blue-haired girl in the clothes shop. They wouldn’t take any shit, I know that. (I am using words like ‘shit’ now a lot in my head. This is what happens when you are exposed to so much adult literature before you are even twelve.) Sometimes, if one of the boys says something to me, something designed to hurt my feelings or humiliate me (and there are myriad ways of doing this at school, believe me), I say something so horrible back that they leave me alone for a while. When Mark came up to me recently and asked why I don’t have any friends, I looked at him with Roxy eyes, and imagined myself with blue hair and said, ‘Get fucked, Mark.’ No one says things like this at school, not in the first year. Another time, the other kids got hold of one of those anti-vivisection leaflets. ‘Where’s your cat, Butler?’ they kept saying. I didn’t know what they were talking about until they slapped this image down on my desk – a cat with wires coming out of its exposed brain – and said, ‘We found your cat, Butler. Sorry to say it’s not in a very good state.’ They all laughed, probably imagining that I was about to cry, or wet myself or something. Instead, I looked coolly down at the image and then looked up at them in a confused, grown-up way and said, ‘I don’t have a cat, you morons.’ I didn’t let them see that they had upset me. I have learnt various rules. Cry in the toilets, not in public. Use the scary, dark toilets on the third floor for this purpose, as no one else uses them. Use swear words that they don’t understand. Scare them before they can scare you. Never appear weaker than them.
Every day, I eat my lunch with the Rural Studies goats, and I do my homework there in the field, so I have more time to spend with my grandparents when I get home. I mark off days on a sheet of paper I carry around as well. I have worked out that my sentence here is something like 1,205 days. It’s slightly depressing that I have only served about thirty of them but I haven’t completely given up on Plan B yet either, although it’s almost as hard to find people in the village who want their cars washed as it is to work out what my necklace actually means.
Gradually, though, the other kids do stop picking on me. I have made it quite simple. I am weird and I am mean and if they do try to pick on me I give it back to them worse. There’s no way I can keep this up for longer than a couple of weeks but, as I thou
ght, I don’t have to. Hit the weakest targets first, that seems to be the main agenda of the popular kids. And I won’t let myself be a weak target, so they move on to other people, eventually. My strategy has worked. I can’t have a best friend, of course, or any sort of friend. It would be too dangerous, as there would be a definite risk of this person feeding information back to the popular kids. Divide and rule. But if you don’t add yourself to anything you can’t be divided. I don’t disclose any of my secrets and I have my special reflector shield, too. They can’t get me!
A few weeks into this experiment, I decide that I might join chess club and computer club after all. If you’re popular you can never contemplate doing anything as geeky/weird as this. But I am not popular. I can do what I want. And what would they say to me anyway? ‘Alice, you like playing chess!’? Here are some more rules I have learnt. You must never ignore them. You must never use sarcasm back at them. You shouldn’t try to reason with them. You must never talk to them in a soft voice, or avoid eye-contact. All these things are losing moves. If one of them says to you, ‘You like playing chess,’ you say back to them something like, ‘Well, you like playing with yourself, but I’m not making a big deal of it.’ You make it short, snappy and loud enough for the rest of the class to hear (but never the teacher). Remember that you have the advantage. You know in advance what embarrassing hobbies you are about to take up, so you can work out responses beforehand. The only danger in this method is that you will occasionally get challenged to actual physical fights, but that’s OK in my case because all arranged fights take place in the field after school and I am already on my bus by then.
Sometimes, if you go too far, the other kids will say you are ‘gross’ or ‘disgusting’. Then you simply say, ‘Do you want me to tell everyone how disgusting you are? I’ve heard all sorts of things about you …’ When you have spent some time inside the popular group, this will make them nervous. Sometimes this person will try to catch you on your own and say things like, ‘What did you hear?’ Then you know you have won. And you also know that they do have a disgusting secret. After all, who doesn’t? At school we may all act like those neutered dolls you can buy, the ones with a smooth plastic space where their genitals should be, but under our clothes we all have holes through which we pee and shit.
So, one Wednesday, not long before Christmas, I go along to the orange-carpeted library in which chess club takes place. The boys look at me nervously and/or contemptuously as I take a seat at one of the desks to wait for Mr Morgan/Moron to come. But I have forgotten how awful Moron actually is. When he enters the room he performs a comedy double-take and then laughs at me.
‘What do we have here?’ he says. ‘A damsel in distress?’
‘I’ve come to join chess club,’ I say.
All the boys in the room, including Alex, are looking at me.
‘You’ve come to join chess club,’ Moron repeats. ‘Oh dear. Tell me, Miss Butler, what set you are in for maths.’
‘Two,’ I say.
‘Now boys,’ he says to the others in the room. ‘Tell Miss Butler what set you are all in for maths?’
‘One,’ they chorus.
‘I’m afraid this is a top set club only,’ Moron says to me.
He starts to say something else but I am already out of the door, my face red, tears starting to form. I flee from the main buildings and up to the field. I intend to eat my lunch with the goats as usual, but I am not really hungry. I am too angry to be hungry. How dare he?
This is now war. I am an agent of the French Resistance, lurking in forests. I am an SOE saboteur, armed with a knife and some plastic explosives. I will blow up their bridges and murder them in their sleep. Well, once I have stopped crying, that is. Miss Hind is still giving me trouble. Well, she’ll get it. Moron will get it in triplicate. Any kids who give me any more trouble will get it, too. Who am I? I am Edmond Dantés.
For the next two weeks I plot and plan and then I go to work. I can’t believe I am actually doing this! I spend a lot of time on the third floor of the school, lurking in the dark toilet, so I already know the rhythms of this strange floor, full of cobwebs, echoes of écouter et répéter, and the chalky smell of Moron’s classroom. I know that Moron only teaches up here, in his horrible poky little maths room, and nowhere else. This classroom is never used for anything other than his vile, élitist maths lessons. I fully expect that when Moron dies and turns into a ghost, this is where he will hang around. Oh God. I am terrified of being found out. I am terrified of being sent to Miss Peterson again, but I know logic will get me through this. So I superglue his windows shut on a Monday (while he is on lunch duty) and let off a stink bomb on the Tuesday (lunch duty again). Girls never touch stink bombs and I have no link with this classroom. Teachers’ logic will suggest that a boy from Moron’s class has done this in order to get off the lesson. No one will suspect me. And I am right. Apparently, when the crime is discovered, Moron storms out in a rage and his precious chess club are kept on detention for a week while he waits for one of them to own up. Knowing that I was the actual perpetrator of this gives me such a surge of adrenaline that I can hardly breathe for a week. I never, ever would have thought that I would actually do something like this. Up yours, Moron!
Rachel and her family are away over Christmas so I spend my time reading and concocting new schemes in my imagination. I could never carry out any of these ideas – they are too complex and the stakes too high if I was caught – but I find that I get almost as much pleasure from simply dreaming them up in my head and then watching myself carry them out in the dark space behind my eyes. I break into Miss Peterson’s office and change all the popular kids’ reports; I write Miss Hind Sucks Dick on the sports hall wall (it’s those adult books again). I steal Lucy’s school skirt from the changing rooms on a day when PE is before lunch so she has to go around for the rest of the day in her PE skirt. In my mind, I am unstoppable.
Sometimes I think about kissing Alex, and doing things with him that adults do in the books I read. I imagine looking up his number in the phone book, ringing him and arranging to go walking in the park on a Sunday evening. We will both wear scarves and he will kiss me in the snow. Then he will say, ‘You know, I’ve never told anyone this before but I am a millionaire/spy/time traveller with my own lavish apartment. Would you like to come and see it?’ And it will just so happen that I am in possession of a magic button that stops time for everyone in the world apart from me, and whoever I am with. (I wear this button around my neck.) So we go back to his place and I press the magic button and then we go to bed like adults for as long as we want, and …
I’m not sure if my new fantasy world is good or bad. Sometimes I write up very sanitised versions of my stories for English assignments and I always get an A or an A+. I think I might like to become a writer one day. I don’t plan any more actual sabotage missions for the time being; it turns out that thinking about them is enough. But I do plan one major coup. Just one.
In the summer term, there are tests and exams and all kinds of scary things, so this is when teachers plan other things like Sports Day (hell) and Non-Uniform Day (double hell). There is also something called the Groveswood Chess Tournament. And anyone can enter. I read the notice on the board every day, just because it thrills me so much. The Groveswood Chess Tournament, it says. Open to all pupils. Winner will play Mr Morgan. Sign up or come and watch. Will someone take Mr Morgan’s cup away from him this year? Oh, joyous day. It is not lost on me that most schools would not have a tournament in which any pupil can take part but a teacher always wins. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if it could be different this year?
I make my grandfather play chess with me every night. Practice, practice, practice. Will I be good enough to win any games, or will I get beaten by one of the obviously-much-cleverer-than-me chess-club boys? It doesn’t matter. Every moment I manage to stay in the competition will be a moment Moron will hate and that’s good enough for me. As long as I don’t have to play Alex. That
would be too much, I think. I think if I had to play Alex I would throw the game almost immediately. I couldn’t sit looking at him for all that time, not after the thoughts I have been having. But I don’t play Alex. On the day of the tournament, a bright June Saturday, I sit in the ghostly sunbeams in the main hall and play Robin and Neal and Gavin and Stephen and I beat them all. My grandparents sit in the audience among chess-club parents and clap every time I win a game. I can’t believe how well this is going! I suppose my grandparents are not surprised that I am beating all these boys; and it probably doesn’t seem that odd to them when I make it to the final. But I know what an anomaly I am. I know I won’t be able to breathe properly for a month after this.
All through the ‘final’ (the real final is against Moron, of course, but this is the final between two pupils) I am so nervous that I almost lose. My opponent, a kid called Wayne, is actually very good. He is playing a kind of Queen’s Gambit game with which I am not familiar. It could go either way for a while. Then almost too late, I understand what he is doing. Luckily, I still have time to trap his king and, with my hands shaking so much I think I might drop the pieces, I win. I am going to play Moron!
I expect him to be impressed, and possibly humbled, by the fact that I am facing him at all. I imagine that he might say something like, ‘Well, Miss Butler, I was wrong about you.’ But he doesn’t. Instead, as we shake hands before playing, he says quietly, ‘Women always get to the top by nefarious means. Well, let’s get this over with then. I reckon you’ll be a five-minute job, maybe less.’
I am actually quite scared of playing Moron. I expect he is really rather good at chess and, after all, he has never let a pupil beat him before. However, once he has played his first few moves, I recognise his attack completely. It’s a Rubinstein attack, exactly the one used by Kasparov in a game I studied in one of my grandfather’s chess books. My grandfather even wrote a Mind Mangle column about it. So when Moron moves his queen to c2 and gives me a smug look, I am totally prepared. His big error is to completely ignore what I am doing and press on with a carbon copy of Kasparov’s attack. Ten minutes later, I have won.
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