The Following Girls (27 page)

There was loads more. Baker had meant to write it all down when she stirred briefly in the small hours, but told herself as the thought occurred that she would be sure to remember it all: so outrageous, so vivid. She had forgotten most of it by morning.

Chapter 19

There was a bus stop just round the corner from Delia Carson’s consulting room but it had been decided that Dad should drive Amanda to her early bird appointments (to make sure she kept them). She was then trusted to make her own way to school in time for the ten thirty bell.

When they had left the house the next morning for Baker’s first appointment Dad had done what he always did, putting his hand inside the letterbox, pushing and pulling at the door even after he had double-locked it. Did he expect the hinges to give way? As he unlocked the passenger side of the Rover he spotted lumps of fresh bird shit on the windscreen and wouldn’t get in the car till he’d scraped them off with a tetchy twig.

He even drove angrily, bullying the gear stick, pushing in front of other cars, hooting at pedestrians even when they weren’t trying to cross the road, constantly looking at his watch to remind Baker that the detour was wasting his valuable time.

The car radio was on loud, making speech safely impossible, but the only station with a decent reception played pop music which made his mood even worse, like he suspected Baker of sending postcards personally requesting each record. Dad despised pop music and, as with anything that wasn’t to his taste – curry, flares, Campari, David Frost – assumed that other people only pretended to like it because it would make them seem ‘different’. All just one big hoax to annoy him. If Baker was listening to the kitchen radio when he came home from work he would walk into the room, still in his hat and coat, and push the ‘off’ button without a word. As if it had merely been left on by mistake, like a light.

Unable to bear another pop song, he began micro-rotating the dial with the safe-breaker fingers of his left hand until he found the ghost of Radio 2. The disc jockey was giving the turntable a rest and cajoling his listeners through a keep-fit routine, like Miss Drumlin with an Irish accent. Baker mimed doing star jumps in her seat. Not a flicker.

Miss Carson’s office was the front room of her flat in a four-storey modern block up beyond the Common. There were weeds growing in the gravel and through the street doormat which looked like a giant version of the thing Spam used to slice boiled eggs with. The voice on the entry phone told Baker to take the lift to the second floor where the door was opened by a middle-aged woman in a bobbly brown cardigan wearing a long string of wooden beads that looped even-handedly over each armour-plated D-cup in turn.

The consulting room had the look of a very small school library, filled with yellow wooden bookshelves and uncomfortable modern armchairs made of stringy springs and slabs of foam rubber covered with hairy stripes. The tiled surround of the coal-effect electric fire provided a sort of makeshift mantelshelf on which were ranged a collection of china cats and kittens. It seemed a weirdly cutesy hobby for Miss Carson with her tweedy togs and Swede-y furniture, but it turned out that the first of these ornaments had been a present from a grateful patient (or its mother). A second patient had assumed she liked cats (which she didn’t) and bought another, and subsequent under-achieving, hyper-sexual, introverted, anti-social teenagers had all added to the herd.

The few unshelved spots of wall bore framed maps of English counties and a few certificates proving that Delia Mary Carson had all the qualifications necessary to nod a lot and ask you why you felt what you felt.

Not that there had been much of that in the first session. Her opening gambit was ‘Do you know why you’re here?’, followed by a spot of word association with Miss Carson firing the triggers at Baker with a sinister part-smile on her face as if every answer were giving the game away. Black: white, house: plant, fruit: five letters.

Spam had produced grilled grapefruit for supper that Friday evening served in stainless steel hemispheres like the cups from a great big robot bra. The fruit was cruelly bitter, barely edible at all unless you shovelled sugar onto it, and the two tastes – Tate and Lyle and sulphuric acid – made Baker’s teeth scream in agony but she didn’t dare say as much in case Spam remembered how long it had been since her last check-up. The pain unlocked another fragment of Thursday night’s epic dream: trying to bite the chocolate off a Mars bar and leaving her front teeth behind in the caramel.

Bob Baker was happy growling over his idiot crossword and refused to join them when Spam suggested a family round of Scrabble. It was the only board game he could be made to tolerate –
educational
– but it was always a relief when he didn’t play. He huffed and puffed when they didn’t put their words down straight away but would then take ages over his own turn, flicking through the dictionary or consulting a dog-eared list of two-letter words he’d once cut out of the
Daily Express
and which he kept under the plastic insert in the Scrabble box.

‘
Za
? What in blazes is
Za
?’

‘It’s on the list.’

But he never liked it when Baker played him at his own game.

‘That’s never a word.’

‘It’s in the dictionary at school.’ Baker had held her face in place perfectly (the way you always could when the lie
really
mattered) but Spam had tumbled immediately.

‘What the ’eck is
ek
?’

‘
Ek
?’ Not the ghost of a smile. ‘It’s a disease of sheep.’

It was over a month until the cricket season got going, so mowing the lawn and stabbing it repeatedly with a garden fork took most of Dad’s Saturday. Spam thought it might be fun to go for a drive somewhere on Sunday. Hampton Court? Whipsnade? But there was a great deal to do in the greenhouse, apparently, and Bob Baker spent the whole of Sunday tickling his double fuchsias with a squirrel hair paintbrush, making Winston Churchill mate with Dollar Princesses in hopes of bigger blooms or longer stamens.

Baker wasted the morning in an oily bath of Three Wishes (she hadn’t yet made any) and when she came downstairs she found Spam sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by a nest of straw and about half a dozen steel discs perforated with a swirl of sharp holes which, if correctly assembled, became a device for mincing meat and grating vegetables. Spam – who could replace the vacuum cleaner bag blindfold – had been completely unable to engage the wingnut as shown in diagram A and was left with just the base unit clamped uselessly to the Formica table top, waiting in vain for something to mince. The near-hysterical Spam was wheezing quite nastily and her cheeks were streaked with mascara. She held a finger to her lips, picked up one of the steel discs, aligned it with the flange (
diagram B
), and pointed, magician’s assistant-style, as it rattled straight through and clanged against its friends in the little heap on the table.

Baker picked up the box which was decorated with a noughts and crosses layout of drawings of finely minced foods. She put her hand in and rummaged down the sides, lifted the flap in the base, assuming the missing component was hiding inside. Spam, still weeping with laughter, had now turned her attention to the recipe booklet.

‘What kind of person serves grated carrot as an hors d’oeuvre?’

Dad returned to his half-hardies after lunch and stepmother and daughter stayed indoors with the Scrabble board. Spam sent Baker out with a cup of tea and a plate of butterfly cakes at three o’clock and she found her father cutting Lady Boothby into dozens of tiny pieces with a razor blade.

He grunted and nodded his head at a space on the bench when he saw the tray, then carried on slitting each cutting down the middle before dipping the twigs into a jar of fungicide and poking them into one of the compartments in a vast egg-box-like tray. Forty-eight? Ninety-six?

‘What will you do with them all? You’ve only got four hanging baskets.’

‘What? Just put the tray down, can’t you?’

And she went back inside to find Spam slotting ‘banjaxed’ across two triple word scores.

‘Did you cheat?’

‘Course I cheated. I
hate
this game,’ and with varnished finger and thumb she flicked hard at the edge of the board and sent the tiles flying across the shag pile (X and J were never seen again: bye-bye
banjaxed
).

‘Maybe there’s a film on?’

And the pair of them took a sofa each and Spam poured two large amontillados and they watched Bette Davis playing identical twins (identical-looking anyway; their personalities weren’t a bit alike).

Spam had poured the sherries without a word. On the rare Christmasy occasions when Dad included Amanda in a round of drinks the doling out of the stingy half glass would always be accompanied by a significant look and his idea of a joke (‘Don’t go getting drunk’) and his eyes would follow every sip, but Spam glugged out equal measures using white wine glasses rather than the skinny cranberry-coloured schooners that came with the decanter (a wedding present from the firm). Dr Sexton had said nothing about abstaining from alcohol or operating heavy machinery but both were contraindicated in the small print on the ‘dos and don’ts’ leaflet that came with Baker’s tablets. Didn’t say
why
. Just said don’t.

Spam topped up both glasses the instant they were empty, and returned the sherry to its hiding place. Bob Baker had built a louvre-doored cocktail cabinet in one of the alcoves, but Spam always kept her sherry bottle in the cupboard under the sink. At one time she used to write ‘window vinegar’ on the label in magic marker, but soon realised that it was not one of the cupboards her husband ever went to.

‘I’d better put the kettle on again.’

Evil Bette Davis was out in a rowing boat with nice Bette Davis.

‘Oh dear,’ giggled Spam, pouring herself another drink. ‘This’ll end in tears.’

She placed her glass on the undershelf of the coffee table between sips and Baker instinctively did the same: not
hidden
exactly, but you wouldn’t necessarily spot them from the sitting room door. She lay back on her sofa and looked at the one wallpapered wall through half-closed eyes, a psychedelic explosion of acanthus, hibiscus and palm fibre. Trippy.

Bette Davis was in Glenn Ford’s forgiving arms and Baker and Spam were fast asleep by the time bad light stopped play in the greenhouse. Bob Baker wore the same hard-done-by air he wore on weekday evenings, like fuchsia-fucking was a full-time job.

‘Any danger of a cup of tea?’

Spam stumbled down the dusky garden path in her bedroom slippers to retrieve the teapot, tray and untouched cup that he had left in the shed, then shut herself in the kitchen with the Cliff Adams Singers.

‘Bit loud,’ he said, before striding in and turning the harmonies down to a barely audible whisper.

Baker wandered woozily into the room after him, her arms at her sides, her middle fingers inside the sherry glasses. Spam was standing at the sink, washing-up brush in her blue-gloved hands as her husband neutralised the offending broadcast. She gave him a fixed, three-large-sherries stare, picked up the teak-sided wireless by its handle, dunked it in the boiling bowl of suds and scrubbed at it before leaning the stuttering appliance against the plate rack.

Bob Baker glared coldly at his daughter.

‘This is your fault.’

Three Wishes? I wish I was dead; I wish I was dead; I wish I was dead.

Chapter 20

‘Dr O’Brien left instructions that you are to wait in here. Miss Bonetti was expecting you at ten thirty but she will be back directly.’ The school secretary ushered Baker into her office and closed the door behind her just as the bell went for the next period.

Baker had caught the empty train from Miss Carson’s flat after her session on Monday morning and then spent a naughty forty minutes nursing a cup of black coffee in the station café, watching workmen attacking great platters of bacon and beans and sunny sided eggs while she read a discarded copy of the
Daily Mirro
r
: ‘John and Yoko step out again’.

‘Was your train delayed?’ asked the secretary, suspiciously, as Baker sat down.

‘I just missed one. I got lost looking for the station.’

The secretary wasn’t even listening but was busy with a box of newly printed prospectuses, opening the back cover of each one and using a ballpoint to add a neat zero to the fees.

‘I was on leave when the proofs were sent,’ she explained. ‘I doubt anyone will imagine you can get a term’s education for the price of a box of cigars, but I’m not sure I could bear all the jokes from the fathers.’

‘I was expecting you at ten thirty,’ said Miss Bonetti as they dashed up the stairs to the Maths Room.

‘I just missed a train. I couldn’t find the station.’

They stopped outside the classroom door.

‘A word to the wise,’ said the Maths teacher. ‘
Never
give more than one excuse: dead giveaway. I’ll expect you at ten thirty sharp tomorrow.’ Almost human.

The chatty room fell silent as Baker entered it and thirty thirteen-year-old stares followed the prodigal fifth former as Miss Bonetti directed her to a desk in the far corner of the room.