The Following Girls (13 page)

‘And Stottie thought those language classes were a waste of time.’

And Bunty smiled again. Not the daddy’s girl simper this time but a proper smile, like a toy with a light on inside.

‘Couldn’t your dad get you a job breaking stock or something?’

‘With my maths? You’re barmy.’

‘Yeah, but you can do
sums
. Oonagh Houseman wants to be a doctor like her dad and she’s a semi-moron.’

‘So? Probably an advantage. My GP’s a halfwit.
My GP’s a halfwit. He wears a halfwit’s hat
.’

‘I reckon you can take this whole daddy’s footsteps lark too far,’ said Baker. ‘My dad’s a surveyor and no power human or divine is going to get me into that lark: wandering in and out of hot huts in hard hats all day, drinking tea and quantifying aggregate or whatever it is he does on his “projects”. I don’t want any job that has its own headgear.’

‘Except Queen,’ said Bunty, ‘and policewoman, ob-viously. What
is
aggregate anyway?’

‘You get it in football.’ Queenie had just arrived from double Art. ‘Leeds United are on it.’ She squinted across at Baker’s advertising magazine.

‘Three Wishes, eh? What would yours be?’

A funny look on Bunty’s face, like she’d been asked this one before and always got it wrong.

‘Smaller tits, longer legs and a Lamborghini. How about you, Baker baby, what are your three?’

‘Roxy Music,’ she lied.

‘There’s
four
of them. Five, possibly.’

‘Yeah, but not the
bald
one,
ob-viously
.’

As the Mandies jostled back out into the corridor towards their History lesson, Baker saw Julia coming in the opposite direction.

‘You can’t go on meeting like this,’ muttered Bunty in come-to-the-casbah tones. Cow. Like she was jealous or something.

The sixth-former stumbled along the crowded corridor and deliberately bumped Baker with her tote bag as she passed and, before Baker could speak, crackled a folded scrap of paper into the side of her bag. Bunty stared after her in surprise.

‘Getting a bit bolshie, isn’t she?’

Baker was almost fighting for breath, heart racing.

‘She’s put something in my bag . . . a note.’

‘Oh shit. Wossit say?’

Baker’s voice was cold, dry.

‘
I don’t have to tell you everything
.’

She dumped her bag on a desk in the far corner and, with her back to the blackboard, began reaching into the side pocket for the bit of paper Julia had put there, trying and failing not to catch on the torn skin around her nails.

‘Amanda!’ Mrs Horst’s cracked soprano rose above the buzz of arriving Upper Shells. ‘Bags over here please. Test today, don’t forget. Pencils are provided.’

The note was in too deep and the Horst would be sure to think it was a crib and confiscate it and read it. But read what? If Julia had reported her to O’Brien what did she need to send a note for? What was she after?

Mrs Horst began going over the previous week’s homework – a freehand map of Ancient Egypt – and itemising her disappointment: colours too strong; not coloured enough.

‘
Print
place names, please and make a note of my corrections. Very nice, Joanna.’ (This in an undertone to her pet.) ‘Only one S in Rosetta, Davina.’ But today’s special treatment was reserved for Bunty.

‘Was this supposed to be a joke, Amanda? Because I can tell you here and now that I am not amused by it.’

Girls on all sides craned to see the map in her hand.

‘It’s topological, Mrs Horst.’

‘It’s to be done again.’

And all at once Bunty lost her rag, her voice getting louder, her face getting redder as she demanded what the hell was wrong with it. Any fool could see it was Egypt (it had ‘Egypt’ written on it for one thing). North, South, East and West all worked, Thebes was south of Rosetta (only one S). It was only supposed to be a basic outline. It wasn’t as though they were all planning to go there on a hiking tour for Christ’s sake. If they were, they’d buy a proper map, wouldn’t they? Or hire a native guide, or get the tour bus, or a
ta-xi
.

Suppressed giggles (
ta-xi
clinched it) and a thrill of anticipation breezed round the room. Mrs Horst had gone very pink. Her lips were trembling with unspoken retorts and ingenious punishments, but Bunty was unstoppable. Straight to Dr O’Brien’s office? That suited Bunty just fine. The Horst had asked for ‘A Sketch Map’ – Bunty jabbed at her prep diary with a furious finger. S-k-e-t-c-h. If she wanted pages copied from the atlas then she should have bloody well said so.

And with that she shimmied out from behind her desk, extracted her tote bag from the mound under the blackboard and stormed from the room.

‘Great telly,’ muttered Queenie.

You could see that Mrs Horst was at a loss as she weighed up the pros and cons of a. keeping her cool and handing out the multiple choice papers or b. chasing after Bunty and rugby tackling her before she reached the blasted headmistress. O’Brien could be tricky. She was frightfully keen on ‘cross-fertilisation’ as she called it, and Bunter-Byng’s lazy little map might be exactly the sort of thing she was after. The girl would be punished for discourtesy but the damage would have been done . . .

Mrs Horst grew up in a world where a mistress would have left an exam room without a qualm if the need arose. The girls would all have been ‘on their honour’ not to cheat, sighed Mrs Horst to herself, but leave this fifth form zoo without supervision and you could definitely wave goodbye to ‘exam conditions’. And yet there’d be no time left for the progress test at all if she risked delaying the start till after her return . . . Her dilemma was resolved by the History monitor taking the pile of test papers from the front desk.

‘Shall I hand these out, Mrs Horst?’

Oh well. With any luck O’Brien would be out in any case. As the class settled down to its test (
Mark Antony was defeated at a. Trasimene, b. Trebia, c. Actium, d. Antirrhinum
), Jennifer Horst returned to her chair and set about tearing the offending map from Bunter-Byng’s book together with the companion half of the sheet at the back: as if it had never been.

Trying to present a calm front, she made a circuit of the silent room, oblivious to the frantic semaphore of signs and pointings as Upper Five A collectively upped its average. The mistress noted with unworthy satisfaction that the foreign-looking girl whose name she could never remember was circling her answers instead of cancelling them with the neat vertical line specified in the exam board’s rubric, thus invalidating her entire paper. There was always one. It would be a useful object lesson to the rest of the class when the results were pinned up: nought out of forty: naughty. But Mrs Horst was rather ashamed at the pleasure it gave her to contemplate the tearful scenes and caught the girl’s eye, giving her head a cross little shake. The silly creature frowned at her paper and hastily rubbed out the ring around answer a. and circled d. instead: Mrs Horst
was
a sport. The mistress sighed again and turned away. What was the point?

‘Fifteen minutes have gone, you have five minutes left.’

Mrs Horst gazed out of the window at the rainy spring sky. She was still itching to go downstairs and collar the Bunter-Byng baggage: give her some lines or some copying to do, some rocks to break – Mrs Mostyn wouldn’t have hesitated. Mrs Horst’s heart was still drumming hard from the girl’s assault. It didn’t use to be like this when she did her B.Ed. Nobody had mentioned not letting your pupils smell fear; riot, rebellion, gross impertinence, third party, fire and theft hadn’t really been anticipated, not in
fee-paying
schools. The better type of girl knew how to behave and even the charity pupils were no trouble, a few rough edges but generally pleasant enough and keener, if anything. Nowadays one could scarcely tell the two tribes apart. Bunter-Byng didn’t have a scholarship. Her grandmother had been one of the original thirty Fawcettians but it made no odds. The girl was discourteous at the best of times, and as for that lunatic tirade about the lazy so-called map she’d drawn . . . Almost as though she were
trying
to get herself expelled from the room, or miss the test . . . This worm of doubt arrived too late. Damn. By now the girl might be regaling the head with her topological tosh. Damn, damn, damn.

Test over, Mrs Horst returned to the chalkface. Could anyone tell her the three causes of the
Graeco–Persian
wars? Anyone?

Not a single hand raised.

‘Amanda McQueen, let’s have
one
cause shall we? One reason for Xerxes’ invasion . . .?’

‘Boredom?’

‘Don’t be flippant, Amanda.
Examiners
don’t like it.’

Mrs Horst began drawing an outline of the Grecian coast (after eighteen years on the job she could do this blindfold) and sketching edited highlights of the Battle of Salamis with coloured chalks. She then called Bryony to the front to have a stab at labelling the arrows. She tried not to ask Bryony
every
time, but the lazy fool was always good for a laugh and this morning she excelled herself. Mrs Horst got little enough in the way of amusement but Bryony Cotter insinuating Hannibal into the Athenian high command was definitely one for the album. Did they not listen to a word one said? Then the grisly realisation dawned: in the previous week’s multiple choice the barmy answer (it was fun to include at least one barmy answer, Mrs Horst always felt) had suggested Hannibal as a potential leader of the Allied fleet.
Maddening
how quickly such tiny seeds of misinformation could flower, infinitely more robust than the real thing – like dandelions (and just as hard to uproot). She waved Bryony back to her seat and began automatically filling in the missing names. Again.

Mrs Horst hadn’t exactly planned a teaching career but it had seemed a terrible pity to waste her degree. One never admitted as much at parties, at interviews, even in the staff room – it sounded so small-minded said out loud – but the old notes still came in very handy. It would have been perverse not to make use of all that knowledge, all that blotless underlining and labelling. And teaching had looked like an attractive option at the time because she had, foolishly, made the mistake of seeing her chosen career in terms of what the world at large always thought of as perks: the pension; the annual sixth-form trip to Rome or Athens or Crete; those fabled long holidays. In fact the sixth-form trips were growing rowdier and less manageable by the year, and as for the holidays, one forgot that they would need to be taken at a time when the museums and galleries of Europe (as well as the cafés and beaches and camp sites and swimming pools of Europe) were full of schoolchildren, and the guidebook-guzzling parents of schoolchildren doggedly introducing their offspring to each foreign land just as they’d introduced them to chicken pox.

Mrs Horst looked out at the sullen sea of unresponsive faces. The remaining three Amandas were all together on the back row. They’d retrieved their bags from the heap and one of them was quite obviously hiding a book or magazine of some sort inside her historic atlas: Amanda Baker, already on the brink of suspension or even outright expulsion according to the last staff meeting. Disruptive. Destructive. One more slip and the girl would be suspended. Should she say something? A report would have to be filed. Meetings with O’Brien. Meetings with Mostyn. Meetings with parents, even. Angry, guilty, defensive, customer-is-always-right parents. Ghastly. She struggled to picture Mr Baker. Had he been there on Monday night? Fathers didn’t always come, but it was always unpleasant when they did. They behaved like someone sending something back in a restaurant: this isn’t what I ordered. Finally she took a deep breath, strode down the aisle and twitched Baker’s copy of
Ads and Admen
from inside her book. She could decide later what action to take.

For the last five minutes of the lesson the History mistress tried her hand at a pep talk. They must all do their very, very best. Mrs Horst thought of Hannibal sending his men into battle at Cannae – a seamless flow of oratory: inspirational; passionate; hortatory (
hortor
,
hortari
,
hortatus sum
).

Baker yawned openly. Go through all your notes, droned the Horst, for the millionth time. Learn your dates and spellings, read the question, go through your answers scrupulously. Everyone will die.

Bunty was already at the head of the tuck shop queue when Baker got there (an adoring first former had let the older girl push in).

‘Blimey, that was quick.’

‘Want one?’ Bunty took a hungry 100-calorie bite from her chocolate snack. ‘No? Please yourself.’

‘Was O’Brien not there?’

‘No she was there all right, just couldn’t be bothered. “I’m not interested in this nonsense” – her very words – apologise to old Horst-face, re-do map, go to tuck shop, go directly to tuck shop. Fancy a fag?’