The Following Girls (12 page)

‘Who was your letter from?’

A defensive look in Dad’s eyes while the rest of his face chewed chop.

‘You know perfectly well what it was, the name was on the envelope. It’s another brochure from another school.’

‘Lots of girls like to make a fresh start in the sixth form,’ said Spam, ‘and it’s got masses of facilities: swimming pool; judo; language lab.’

What went on in language laboratories, wondered Baker, were there rats in mazes?

‘You’d soon make new friends.’

She’d bloody need new friends after this morning, and she remembered with an unhappy shiver the unfamiliar snotty note in Bunty’s voice.
I don’t have to tell you everything
. Since when? It wasn’t as if Baker specially wanted any of the grisly details about Bunty’s dirty afternoon: it was the principle of the thing. And she’d have to tell somebody . . . Stottie? Or Queenie? Queenie was a bit of a dark horse. Lots of people told her stuff. Surprising people.

The phone rang during the news headlines, interrupting Baker’s miserable musings.

‘Who on earth can that be?’ tutted Dad. ‘It’s gone ten.’ (Though he never went to bed before the
Epilogue
.)

‘It’s for you.’

‘Hello, babes.’ Bunty’s voice. Bunty’s lovely husky smiley voice. ‘Sorry about this morning. I could see Brian earwigging and besides,’ whispering now, ‘there wasn’t much to tell.’

There was the sudden sound of the television as someone opened a door and Bunty’s voice took on a coded, cagy quality.

‘Yeah. Slightly disappointing, very, er,
short
.’

‘Sweet?’

‘Not specially,’ a cough, ‘
premature
.’

‘Oh.’

‘Can’t talk now,’ the huffy thump of her sitting-room door being closed, ‘nothing to write home about, basically. I just wanted to say sorry for being a silly moo.’

‘Silly moo,’ echoed Baker, pressing her eyelids together and beaming with relief.

‘Ni-night.’

Chapter 7

The usual horde of wage slaves poured on and off the train at the Junction next morning, giving Baker the chance to grab a corner seat and light a cigarette, at which point the woman across the aisle tutted off to the other end of the carriage and flumped down next to Julia sodding Smith. Julia Smith. Again. Did she even come to school by train as a rule? She looked up from her book and nailed Baker and her cigarette with an unreadable stare, the blue flannel shoulders giving the slightest possible shrug, a ‘you give me no choice; you brought this on yourself’ shrug.

The long, bare legs looked downright obscene in the commuter carriage. You could see the bowler-hatted man on the other side of her admiring the smooth ivory thighs running parallel with his pinstripes. Julia leaned back slightly, legs parting an inch. It wasn’t about sport at all, was it? Just an excuse to wear a shorter skirt. She had taken a tiny scrap of paper from her bag and was scribbling on it left-handed. Baker puffed stubbornly at her cigarette. No sense not. Too late now.

Someone had left a magazine behind on the seat opposite:
Ads and Admen
. It was like stumbling on an enemy code book:
Playtex to launch bra aimed at 15–24 year olds who want to make the most of limited resources
. The glossy black and white pages were packed with snaps of beardy blokes in snazzy ties with five-point plans for persuading the British housewife that life would not be complete until every family member had a range of products that only they could use. His’n’hers soap, his‘n’hers fags. They even had cheeses of their own: manly mature for the dad, low fat for the mum and novelty triangles for the two point two kids (and Julia). No dog or cat cheese – not yet anyway.

According to
Ads and Admen
there was going to be a new bubble bath campaign which would be designed for the young teen market, advertised in magazines called things like
19
, but read by Lower Fourths in a hurry. The new product was called Three Wishes. The cheap scent, oil and soap it was made of separated out into layers of orange, red and yellow gunk, which meant you had to shake the bottle hard before using, then offer up your three wishes. Baker stared at the carriage ceiling wishing she was thinner, wishing she was twenty-two, wishing Julia Smith would get off her back.

Julia got out of the far door when the train stopped and breezed along the platform to the exit, the pleats of her divided skirt lapping against the back of her thighs beneath the shortie blazer, her not-especially-limited resources bouncing revoltingly as she walked. She walked very fast. In a hurry to get to O’Brien presumably: spill beans, let cats out of bags. Another letter home.

Baker swam wearily against the tide of passengers surging up the stairs to the platform and grumbling at her for bucking the morning trend. She paused just beyond the station entrance to peer in through the steamy windows of the Victory Café and check if Bunty was at one of the tables. Sometimes, when Baker managed to catch an earlier train, they would meet there and spend half a blissful hour and forty pence on two teas and a buttered bun, composing dirty limericks and watching the office workers milling past, the same faces almost to the minute, on their way to take up their places in the ‘real world’ as Mrs Mostyn liked to call it.

The café clock read eight fifteen. Baker almost ran up the hill to the school gate and just caught Bunty in the empty cloakroom, about to head off for Registration.

‘The balloon’s about to go up.’

‘A balloon? We have a
balloon
? Now you tell me. Not a word about it in the prospectus. Can you get a badge for it?’

‘Stop wittering, woman. Julia Smith just saw me having a fag on the train.’

‘Her again? Is she following you? Are you following her?’

Baker didn’t smile but then maybe Bunty wasn’t joking – hard to tell after yesterday. They were back on speakers right enough, but it still wasn’t quite the same.

The two of them sneaked back into the cloakroom after assembly. Free periods were supposed to be spent in the library but the librarian taught first year elocution on Wednesday mornings (Browning, Belloc, Little Yellow Dogs) so there was only the slimmest chance of discovery.

The cloakroom smelled powerfully of gym shoes and wet fish. Wednesday’s domestic science project was to be rollmop herrings, ‘a nourishing and economical supper dish’ according to Mrs Chifley but an odd choice for a class of girls who’d never knowingly eaten a piece of fish without batter on it.

‘It’ll be tripe next.’ Bunty was curled up on the windowsill on top of the radiator. Not a proper window, more of a vent really, designed to make escape impossible – you never saw windows like that on houses. She yanked it open and lit one of her new cigarettes with a flourish. The packet had drawings of flowers all over it and the fags themselves were unusually long and thin with a band of daisies marking where the filter began. Cigarettes for girls.

No dog fags yet (beagles didn’t count; beagles would smoke anything). But they already had children’s fags. Not just the tiny white sugar ones. Baker remembered once buying cousin David a whole chocolate smoker’s set for his birthday: chocolate pipe, chocolate tobacco, a box of chocolate matches, a pack of chocolate fags rolled in edible paper and a huge chocolate ashtray all nesting in custom-moulded dimples in a big cellophane-fronted box. Everything but chocolate lungs. There was no girl’s equivalent. No flowery packs or pink sugar cigarette holders. Nothing to be going on with until you could pass for sixteen and buy the real thing (not that the old man in the fag shop ever cared). Smoking was your destiny, one of the things grown-ups did, like Scotch whisky and headaches and indigestion tablets.

You didn’t wake up on your sixteenth birthday with a royal flush of adult kit (fag in one hand, pack of three in the other), not like one of Mrs Mostyn’s tribes where you got locked in a typical hut while the tattoos healed. In deepest South London the signs of adulthood were awarded in stages like personal survival badges: sherries at Christmas; a dab of lipstick on the bridesmaid; a trendy aunt offering you a few puffs after the wedding. They knew you’d end up with the whole set eventually, but they liked to pick and choose: one minute they wanted to keep you in vests and socks and sandals and ponytails and take-that-stuff-off-your-face-Amanda; the next they were on at you for being ‘immature’ when you didn’t play nicely about the nine-to-four school day plus homework, plus netball practice. A 50-hour week? Miners struck for less.

‘You’re supposed to leave the last third.’ Bunty waved her cigarette at Baker’s Rothman which was almost down to the filter. ‘Says so on this little card thingy – “leave longer stubs and take fewer puffs” – buy more fags, in other words. I mean, how come they carry on selling them if it’s so bloody bad for you? How come your parents carry on doing it? “Wish I’d never star-ted, dah-ling.
”
’ Mummy in the room all of a sudden. ‘But Mummy says the same about plucking her eyebrows and that doesn’t give you cancer – or does it? Maybe it does . . .’

Bunty lit another cigarette from the remains of her last one – not quite the look the brand manager had in mind – and flicked the still-glowing stub out of the window.

‘At least Spam leaves you alone.’

Bunty was always saying that, pretending to envy Baker her semi-detached stepmother who didn’t do cosy chats and had the grace to take a back seat at parents’ evenings and who wasn’t forever bursting into your bedroom to tell you how much deodorant to use or how your father would be
so
proud if you’d only pass Grade Seven or finish in the top fifteen or stop shaving your legs with his safety razor.

‘I think Mummy sees me as Gloria Bunter-Byng Mark II: new improved, with added flavour, fewer calories, bigger tits, more miles per gallon,’ she giggled.
‘
“Don’t make the dweadful mistakes I made dah-ling.” Explains everything: not being allowed to give up Chemistry, piano lessons. Everything. Her latest wheeze is for me to leave after O levels and do one of Mrs McQueen’s crappy Cordon Bleu courses, then get a job cooking directors’ lunchicles in the city somewhere. With luck I will look so fetching dishing up the
boeuf en croute
I’ll be able to truss and stuff a spiffy little company director and drag him back to the family cave. Never mind whether I’d like it or not. I don’t want to be a bloody skivvy.’

Baker was due a termly careers check-up that afternoon: a quarter of an hour locked in the sick bay with Miss Batty and her leaflet collection.

‘Tell her you’re settled on nursing, that’s what I said. She has
loads
of leaflets on nursing so she feels useful. And you only need about three O Levels cos they teach you it all anyway, so she can’t say you’re aiming too high like she does when you say fashion designer or airline pilot.’

‘I could always say teaching, I suppose.’

Baker pulled out the
Eunuch
and began quoting the bit about teachers and servility.

‘
Only one third of teachers are still at work after six years in the job
. All that training down the drain.’

Bunty yawned. ‘Baker dearie, could you possibly, just once, read a book and then just keep it to yourself? Just to please me?’

Baker caught her breath: what a rotten thing to say.

‘Sor-
ree
. Pardon me for breathing.’ Was she really that boring?

‘No, doll, don’t take it the wrong way but I really mean it. Whenever you read anything you never stop banging on about it. Like Dr O’Brien reading out bits from the paper in assembly – gets on your nerves. Deadly. Nick hates it when I read anything out.’

Nick again.

Bunty shrugged and smiled. An automatic there-that-didn’t-hurt smile and she was all ready to change the subject and no hard feelings. Bugger that. Baker took an angry, actressy drag on her fag and hit right back in a shouty whisper.

‘Sod right off.
Boeuf en croute
’s about all you’re fit for. It’s
important
. It’s not just boring stuff you can’t be bothered to read.’

Bunty did her cute ‘sorry’ face – only not so cute. Must have worked once upon a time when the hair was blonder and curlier, the eyes bluer and larger in that cheeky baby face. A daddy’s girl – you could always tell: they gave it away whenever they tried to win you over by turning on one of those pathetic doggie-in-the window looks. Mummy’s girls worked on a different principle: deceit, bribery, guilt. Baker had herself down as a mummy’s girl – just minus the mummy.

Bunty wasn’t giving up. Nonono Baker was quite right. Bunty knew
zackly
what she meant. Sorry to snap, sorry for being a cow. Falling over herself to be nice. Did Baker want a nice chocolate biscuit? Nice fag, then? And please do lend her the book because yes-no-absolutely, God, no, didn’t want to end up dishing five star
pommes dauphinoise
to James D Right Esq.

‘Talk about getting off on the wrong foot. You’d end up tied to the stove if you cooked to that sort of standard. Lousy cooks like Mummy have a much easier life. Start boning and rolling and they’ll expect it nightly: “What’s for dinner, darling?”, “
Entrecote chasseur
,
Sachertorte
and a spot of
fellatio anglais
to follow.
”
’