Out of My Depth (4 page)

‘Oh, my. How glamorous. Roman.’ Amanda had tried the name out in a French accent. 'Roman. Nice.’

‘He is,’ I told her, and I couldn’t wait to have Amanda back in my life.

Now, two months after I decided that Tamsin could not possibly be coming to visit, everything had changed. As the train pulled out of the station, a chill passed through me, and I noticed, in a distracted way, that my fingers were trembling as I opened my newspaper. Because I knew that I couldn’t cancel. I was going to have to go through with it.

Suzanne Chapman was fourteen, and she was moving schools. She was furious and terrified. Nobody wanted to move house and leave their friends behind. Her parents didn’t understand that at all. Her little sister Jacqueline didn’t get it either, because she was too babyish. She was only eleven and she thought it was exciting. She was pathetic.

Nobody had a clue what Suzanne was going through. She sat in the front seat of the car, fiddling with her brand new uniform. Her breath was coming quickly, though she was pretending, for her dad’s benefit, to be cool. Too cool for school, she thought. If only. Her old school, in London, had a navy blue uniform, and one, Suzanne now realised, that was halfway decent. It was a normal, knee-length skirt, and a white blouse, and a blue blazer. There had been nothing stupid about it, nothing that marked you out as particularly different or posh. Now she felt ridiculous in a grey pinafore with pleats that made her bum look gigantic, and a green and white striped blouse underneath it with a strange little round collar. On top of this awful combination, she wore a dark green blazer, and, worst of all, she was holding on her lap a shocking object: the school hat. This was a green felt monstrosity, which perched on the top of the wearer’s head like an old-fashioned air hostess’s hat. Apparently you were supposed to keep it in place with hair grips. It made Suzanne sick. She had begged to be allowed to go to the comprehensive, but her parents wouldn’t let her. They thought she needed the discipline of a private school.

She had spiked her short hair up, defiantly. Neither parent had said anything. They had exchanged looks over her head. Nothing was going to make her flatten her dark hair down. She knew she looked stupid with flat hair.

Far too soon, Dad stopped the car. The squeak of the handbrake going on made Suzanne’s stomach turn over. She swallowed. She wasn’t going to know anybody. She was the new girl. She was going to hate every moment of every day. She would spend break times writing letters to her friends in London, plotting to run away from home. She would catch a train back to London and live with, say, Kathy’s family until she was sixteen and could do whatever she liked.

Jackie jumped out of the back door as soon as the engine was off.

‘Wow,’ she said, staring up at the dull grey of the gothic building.

It was the oddest looking school Suzanne had ever seen. It looked half like a church, half like a haunted house. It should be full of bats and ghosts and chains. Those, Suzanne thought, would be better than teachers and blackboards and strangers.

‘Come on then!’ Jackie said, standing by the passenger door. ‘Bye, Dad! See you later.’

Suzanne knew that her father was looking at her. He was off to work now, at the hospital. It was all his fault that they had moved. He had got some stupid new job. As if there could possibly be a job in Cardiff that was better than a job in London. It made no sense, and at first she had thought they were joking, but Mum and Dad had insisted. She avoided his eyes.

‘Bye, Sue,’ he said, trying to lean over and kiss her. She didn’t reply, and didn’t look at him. She just slammed the car door and stalked off. She didn’t look back, although she knew that Jackie was leaning into the car for her goodbye kiss. Jackie was tiny, like a fairy child. She was skinny and cheerful, and Suzanne hated her. She knew that, next to Jackie, she was a fat, ugly, spiky-haired toad. So she quickened her pace and made it to the door before her sister caught up.

There were hundreds of girls milling around on the first day of term. Not many of them looked lost. Suzanne hastily picked one who looked about her own age and decided to follow her, ignoring everyone around her. She could not, however, help feeling like a lost outsider when she heard them greeting each other. That accent! It was the strangest way to talk.

‘All right?’ girls shouted. They ran up and hugged each other. ‘What you been up to, then? How’s it going?’ They formed tight little clusters, surging eagerly into the school buildings, on their way to new classrooms.

Inside, it smelt of polish and officialdom. The girl Suzanne was following had long blonde hair and she was quite tall, so it was easy to keep her in sight. The corridors were long and unfamiliar, and she felt sick with longing for the old, comfortable school, where she had known everybody since she was seven, and everybody knew her. She looked at the cracked cream paint on the walls. She reached out and pulled a bit off, just for the hell of it. The plaster work behind it was crumbling. Crumbs of plaster fell onto the tiled floor. Suzanne walked away quickly. She had lost the blonde girl. She felt tears in her eyes, and she blinked them back furiously, stopping for a moment and breathing hard in an attempt to get rid of them before she embarrassed herself.

A teacher walked by, and Suzanne tried to walk alongside her. The lady was about her height, and she looked weird. She was almost spherical and there was a big wart on her chin. Suzanne managed to say, ‘Excuse me,’ but at the same time a much bigger girl walked up to the teacher, and said, ‘Hello, Mrs Spencer. Good holidays?’

Suzanne dropped back, disheartened. She was going to have to try harder to ask for help. She stopped walking, and a girl walked heavily into her back, pushing her forward and making her stumble.

‘Hey!’ said the girl, who was broad and dark with thick eyebrows. ‘Watch where you’re going, will you?’

‘You watch where you’re going,’ Suzanne muttered, wishing she had some gum to pop at this horrible girl. People swept past her. She was not going to cry. She was not.

The woman put her hand on Suzanne’s shoulder before Suzanne noticed her.

‘Hello,’ she said, in a kind voice, smiling. ‘You look lost. Are you new?’

It was a teacher. She was skinny, with brown hair in a bun, and a flowery blouse with a funny brooch on it. She had a friendly face and she was the first person in this awful school who had shown any concern for Suzanne at all.

‘Yes,’ Suzanne said in a small, grateful voice. ‘I’m in the fourth form. I don’t know where to go.’

The woman smiled again. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll soon have you in the right place. Do you know who your teacher is?’

Suzanne shook her head.

‘Well, we’ll find out. I’m Mrs Grey. I teach French and I’m the careers adviser too. I’m sure we’ll be coming across each other. I’ll be looking out for your spiky hair. My daughter’s in the fourth form. Tamsin. What’s your name?’

Suzanne had loved Mrs Grey for that, and by the time she found herself in a big, airy classroom, she had recovered some of her bravado. Her form mistress was a wiry little PE teacher called Mrs Davis, who welcomed her in quite a friendly way and picked on someone called Amanda to look after her. Amanda, Suzanne discovered, was the blonde girl she had followed. That almost made her smile: if she had carried on trailing her, she would actually have brought her to the right place. She wasn’t sure that she liked Amanda, who seemed a bit snooty and was always twirling her long hair around her fingers, but she supposed she had no choice. She had to hang out with her for a while.

The fat rude girl with big eyebrows was in the room too. She was called Janie, and she glared at Suzanne, who decided to stick with Amanda. Janie whispered to her friends, and the other girls turned to stare at her. Suzanne thought they were laughing at her hair. She was the only new girl in the year. She thought about her real friends, in London, and made pacts with God. If He would perform some miracle to transport her back there, she would literally go to church every single day for the rest of her life. She would become a nun. A missionary in India. He wasn’t listening. Either that or He didn’t believe her.

At break, Suzanne followed Amanda out into the playground, and two other girls soon joined them. One of them was skinny, with greasy brown hair. The other was someone Suzanne had noticed across the classroom, because she was the only really striking member of the form. She was a glamorous girl with very long, slightly curly hair which was reddish brown. Her complexion, Suzanne noticed enviously, was flawless and creamy, and her face was perfect. Suzanne wanted to be this girl. This girl was prettier than anyone she had ever met, and she was slim as well.

‘This is Suzanne,’ Amanda said, bored. ‘This is Tamsin, and this is Isabelle.’ She turned her back on Suzanne, and the three girls swapped stories about their summer holidays.

Amanda had been to Majorca, and was pleased with herself. She recounted several stories about boys at the hotel asking for her phone number, and then told them about one occasion when she had pretended to be sixteen and gone on a date with a waiter.

‘Except bloody Mummy saw me leaving,’ she said, flicking her hair back. ‘I mean, Mummy! She never notices anything, but for some reason this time she did. And she sent Daddy to find out where I was going because she didn’t believe me that I was going to meet this girl. So he finds us in the bar, me with a bottle of lager in front of me, and he marches me straight back upstairs. I was so mad. But they were even madder with me, and then — it was so embarrassing — Daddy went to the hotel manager and said the waiter was buying drinks for underage girls, and poor old Pedro was sacked on the spot! So that was the end of my holiday romance.’ She shook her yellow curtain of hair down over her face, and tossed it back again.

The others made sympathetic noises and agreed that it was both embarrassing and unfair.

‘We went to France,’ offered the beautiful Isabelle, ‘and I didn’t even have any amount of holiday romance. We were staying in a gite with my cousins. All I did was lie around and read magazines and stuff. But it was nice. Hot, though, and I knew I was going to burn, because I always burn with my skin. Or get freckles, which is worse. So I had to keep in the shade.’

Suzanne stared again at Isabelle’s alabaster skin, and made herself look away.

They looked at skinny Tamsin. ‘Went to London,’ she said. ‘On my own. Well, I stayed with my penfriend but her parents were working so we just did what we wanted. It was cool. We walked around loads and saw the Houses of Parliament and Tower of London and all that, but the best bit was, Ellie knew all the pubs where we’d get served, so we got to spend most afternoons sitting at tables on the pavement, getting slowly pissed.’ She smiled. ‘Or quickly pissed. My best holiday ever, actually.’

Suzanne felt small. She wanted to talk to Tamsin about London, but they all seemed to have forgotten she was there. Eventually, Isabelle turned to her.

‘What about you, Suzanne?’ she said, speaking as if to a four-year-old child. ‘Did you do anything fun?’

Suzanne forced a brave smile. ‘Moved to Cardiff. That was the main thing. We moved from London. I’ve always lived in London, until now. So that was a bit weird.’

Tamsin was pleased. ‘You’re from London? That’s cool. Someone to talk to about it! I’m in love with London now. We could go back up there together at half-term.’

Suzanne was delighted. ‘Well, I’m definitely going at half-term. I’ve got all my friends there. In Hammersmith. You could come with me, no problem.’

Tamsin nodded. ‘So why on earth would you move from the world’s coolest city to this shithole?’

Amanda looked affronted. ‘Cardiff’s wicked! There’s nothing wrong with it, if you know where to go.’

‘Oh, God, Amanda,’ said skinny Tamsin. ‘You have no idea.’

Suzanne swallowed. ‘My dad’s job,’ she said. ‘At the hospital. I didn’t have a choice.’

‘That’s a bit rough,’ Isabelle sympathised. ‘I mean, Lodwell’s isn’t a bad school, I don’t think, but I’d hate to leave all my friends and start again somewhere fresh, however good it was there.’

Amanda looked at her watch. ‘Hey, guys. Let’s get chocolate. Only five minutes left.’

Isabelle shook her head. ‘Yeuch. I’m hardly awake. Count me out.’

Tamsin shook her head. ‘Not hungry.’

Suzanne touched Amanda’s arm. ‘I would love to,’ she said. She felt that chocolate and a fizzy drink might well get her through the rest of the morning. ‘Where do we get it?’

Amanda looked surprised. ‘Really? Excellent! A snacking buddy. The fourth form sell it in the corner of the hall. I could murder a Mars Bar and a Diet Coke. How about you?’

‘Mmm. Twix. And Diet Coke.’

And they walked off, arm in arm. Suzanne was pleased to have a tall, blonde friend who liked chocolate, and she made a point of blanking Jackie, who was skipping around with two other girls, trying to catch her sister’s eye.

Les Landes, France

August 2005

We were sitting outside, on a warm evening. I could barely remember the winter. It seemed to have been hot for ever.

There was a bowl of cheesy vegetable pasta in front of me. This was my favourite dish from Roman’s repertoire, and I was relishing the prospect of eating it. I speared a pasta butterfly. Inside the house, the phone rang.