The Following Girls (29 page)

‘Is that really what you want, Amanda?’ Scratch, scratch, scratch. Shit, shit, shit.

Miss Carson had made a farewell plate of sandwiches filled with 2,000 calories worth of salad cream and sliced egg (had she used the doormat?) held together with toothpicks. There were square, old ladylike tea plates with rudimentary hollyhocks drawn on them and weeny embroidered napkins on the tray. Baker explained that she’d had an enormous breakfast and just pecked at a miniature Swiss roll, remembering Julia jamming them in two at a time. Should have been disgusting, but it wasn’t somehow. Not like she was fat.

Miss Carson looked at her watch. She had promised Dr O’Brien that she’d telephone with a further report as soon as the final session was over, but they’d made scant progress so far. A little more word association? Baker grunted, biting hard to keep herself vaguely alert. Flower? Power. Yellow? Submarine. Long? Short. Fur? Coat. Nice? Biscuit. Lamb? Slaughter.

When was Baker happiest? Ruddy cheek, honestly. When was Miss Carson happiest? Baker turned her head from the couch to look at the psychologist, at her tired-looking face, at the mousey pink ears poking through the rats tails of beige hair: lifeless, greasy, even a dusting of dandruff on the shoulder of her cardie. Three bathside bottles, three wishes gone. Miss Carson didn’t look like she’d ever been happy. Had she ever had a dopey love-in with a beautiful sixth-former? Telling secrets and eating chocolate and laughing at the funniest jokes ever told. Had she ever sat under a Christmas tree expecting a facial sauna only to unwrap a typewriter and a ream of typing paper. (‘I could have got paper from the office,’ Dad had said: baffled; resentful. ‘Janice has loads of paper – all colours.’)

Miss Carson’s face had gone very pink.

‘You’re the one answering the questions, Amanda.’

What had Baker just asked her? This was getting really weird, like she was talking in her sleep.

Were they doing all this to Julia too? And was Miss Carson getting both bookings? Did she already know what Julia was like? Baker tried to visualise Julia stretched out on the couch, Julia scoffing a whole plate of egg sandwiches, Julia thinking of clever answers for the word association: telling them what they wanted to hear, beating them at their own games. When had Julia been happiest? Was it up against a wall behind the Wheatsheaf with Baz, or was it last Wednesday in the organ loft? Baker sighed softly at the memory of the dusty sunlit space, of the sweet taste of dope and tobacco and Jaffa Cakes on her tongue, and the sudden chocolatey thought shoved the more recent memory aside and all at once she was ankle deep in the rough cut grass of her infants school playing field, sucking on Cadbury’s fingers. She could smell the starch on her sun-baked gingham frock, hear the shrill cries of the watching classmates, feel the scratch of the funny old straw hat and the chilly flap of the silky old kimono as she staggered triumphantly up to the finishing line in the dressing-up race and into Miss Gatsby’s arms.

Miss Carson was hunting in her cupboard for a new spiral notebook and didn’t see Baker rub her cuffs across her face.

When they arrived at school for the promised meeting Baker was once again called in first, leaving her father fretting on the bench in the lobby.

Dr O’Brien’s voice was doing that mooing thing again and the musical tones were making it hard to stay awake. Baker stared at the hands in her lap. There was a numb hum in the fingers’ ends and she noticed that the skin on the sides of some of the nails was bleeding where someone had been gnawing at it with their front teeth. Mid-morning sun broke open the showery clouds and raced through O’Brien’s study window, unnecessarily bright. She tried closing her eyes against it but it made no difference.

O’Brien was still talking. Trouble sleeping? How had all the meetings gone? Miss Carson was a remarkable young woman.
Young
? She was thirty-five if she was a day, thought Baker. And Dr Sexton. A very eminent man. Baker was lucky to have been seen at such short notice, very lucky indeed.

The head glanced down at the typewritten pages on her desk and at the notes made that morning on her telephone pad.

Her mouth tightened into a smile, which was directed first at Baker, then into the middle distance: Saint Agatha. The smile warmed and widened a fraction.

‘I may yet give you another chance, Amanda, but I have to be sure that you aren’t going to let me down. You have to tell me exactly what happened last Wednesday, exactly who was responsible. As I told you last week, this isn’t a matter of telling tales; that sort of schoolgirl loyalty has no place here.’

Baker frowned back up at O’Brien who seemed to be waiting for her to say something but the sunlight was starting to really hurt her eyes now, boring into her head as if a geographer with a magnifying glass on a field trip were trying to light a fire in her skull.

There was a loud knock at the study door, but before Dr O’Brien could pick a button to press Bob Baker’s head appeared. Was this going to be much longer? He had a client waiting. He always called them clients – made him sound professional, he thought, like a lawyer (or a prostitute).

He had slipped his friendly, normal face on uncomfortably over the impatient, unhappy look it was wearing underneath: head on one side, an almost pleasant expression. A face only ever seen outside the home, like the hearty laugh for pubs and party porpoises. He cast the briefest glance at Baker, but his pained gaze flinched away from the sight of her.

‘We shan’t be a moment. Amanda is going to cooperate, aren’t you Amanda?’

Which of course meant that he had to look at her again out of politeness, turning his head dead pan, like a TV puppet.

‘Is she? Good,’ he said as he ducked back out of the door.

Even Dr O’Brien must have been taken aback by the sheer dislike he packed into the three syllables but she showed no sign of it. Baker bent right forward in her chair, wiping her eyes on her knees as she pretended to fiddle with her shoe, then came back up too quickly, bringing on the sick, giddy feeling she’d had when she first crawled out of bed.

The black plastic minute hand of the wall clock gave the faintest possible quiver as it surreptitiously mapped the minutes. Was it even moving? She thought of Dad back on his bench outside, the obsessive twitch ‘n’ twist of his wrist as he looked yet again at his watch. O’Brien was silent now. The TV Gestapo didn’t do silence. They strode about, airing the skirts of their kinky leather overcoats, slapping desks, hands, other people with the gauntlets of their snazzy black gloves. Ultimatums? Ultimata (
Please remember every day: neuter plurals end in
A
). Threats. Promises. There wasn’t a word for that was there? For a terrible thing you were definitely going to do. Not in English. German probably had one, Italian definitely would. A whole mood: the vindictive.

‘Well?’

Baker hadn’t moved from her sulky slump in the chair, but some kind of telepathic shrug must have escaped her because O’Brien bridled at once and leaned across the desk which seemed to narrow as the powdered face grew nearer. Her voice lowered: if Baker didn’t jolly well snap out of it and pay proper attention, then Things would become very Unpleasant, very Unpleasant indeed. Serious offences must be brought to the attention of the Fawcett board of governors, and the ultimate decision would lie with them. She paused while Baker chuckled to herself at the thought of Dr Crippen and Magda Goebbels debating her imperfect future.

‘There is nothing to snigger at, Amanda. I have only to pick up that telephone and your time here is at an end. The governors may even wish to take things further. This is not a moment for leniency. An example needs to be made – of someone. A fitting punishment.’

‘It won’t happen again.’

O’Brien steamed ahead as though Baker hadn’t spoken.

‘This could still very easily become a police matter. Very easily, whatever Mrs Baker may like to think. And if that happens, it won’t just be your place here that’s put at risk. Your whole future life will be changed for the worse. And don’t console yourself with delusions’ (surely she was the only woman on earth who pronounced the ‘you’ in ‘delusions’?) ‘of that “fresh start” elsewhere. No other decent school would take you, unless I were to perjure myself with a very partial and generous reference. Everything will depend on my report and what I say when that telephone rings –
off
the record.’ She leaned back in her chair and her voice when she spoke again was both softer and harder. ‘When I spoke to your father on the telephone yesterday afternoon, he seemed to think you might benefit from a change of scene, as if it were merely a matter of paying a deposit, buying a new uniform, learning a new song. He seemed very distressed when I indicated that it was unlikely to be as easy as that. He mentioned that your mother – your natural mother – had had quite a few problems. A residential home was mentioned? He didn’t elaborate. All very painful, I’m sure. Does he ever speak to her?’

Baker thought miserably of the box of butchered snapshots.

‘No.’

‘No. A very single-minded man in that regard, I should imagine. He’s going to be
very disappointed
if all his plans are scuppered by your refusal to cooperate. Very disappointed indeed.’

Baker bit hard on her tooth again, but the pain seemed very far away and didn’t even hurt any more, not really.

Dr O’Brien stared steadily at Baker, giving the girl time to grasp the seriousness of her situation, time to decide whether this silly little pash was worth the sacrifice, worth invoking her father’s perpetual displeasure.

There was a metal bin in the corner beneath the window and Baker eyed it fixedly, calculating how many steps it would take to stagger across and be sick into it, but instead she finally retched out the confession that O’Brien was waiting for. It was Julia. Julia Smith. Tell him Julia did it all. It was all Julia’s idea. Not me: Julia. And she burst into tears.

O’Brien removed her spectacles and put them in the leather caddy of her desk set.

‘Sit up straight and blow your nose. Daddy is waiting.’

Chapter 21

Bob Baker was quite pleased with the hotel in the end. He hadn’t planned to go away at Easter time (they had Corfu booked for August), but he felt a bit better about it when his firm chalked it up as compassionate leave. Dr O’Brien said they should get Amanda away from her little gang and a two-line chit signed by Dr Sexton, upgrading Baker’s joint in the organ loft to the status of ‘Nervous Breakdown’, meant that the three weeks weren’t going to eat up his annual holiday after all. Spam’s friend Sandra the travel agent had found them a late cancellation in a five-star full-board package in the Canary Islands and he was pleasantly surprised: linen changed daily, lavish buffet lunch, silver service, crazy golf, English newspapers and a separate swimming pool next to the car park for all the screaming kids.

Baker had devoted the first two days to mooching on her balcony getting hideously sunburned and now spent the daylight hours sweltering under an orange umbrella, fastidiously lifting the edges of the burned patches and peeling off the skin in the largest possible sheets before laying them over the arm of the sun lounger. The towel under her was permanently damp – with sweat, not pool water – ‘Come all this way and you won’t even swim,’ moaned Dad, staring crossly in his daughter’s general direction as she lay dozing in a saffron-coloured kaftan (he didn’t actually make eye contact any more, hadn’t for weeks). ‘There’s English girls your age over there. Why don’t you go and see if they want a game of table tennis?’

The girls, about six of them, all seemed to know each other already and passed the time painting their bitten toenails, monitoring the poolside and giggling about passers-by – marking them out of ten most likely. There was a German boy they all fancied and the level of chat dipped whenever he was within ogling distance. They stared at Baker; she could see them through the mesh of her straw hat and they were obviously talking about her. One of them had just wrapped herself in a towelling changing poncho then curled up under her umbrella, grabbing a book and sucking in her cheeks while the others all miaowed with laughter.

Baker was supposed to be revising and there was a George Orwell novel lying impressively (she hoped) on the table beside her, but she preferred writing postcards and drawing ‘my room here’ crosses in the middle of the swimming pool or on the tops of palm trees. The messages on the other side were all coded in aigy paigy although it was absurdly easy to decipher when you saw it written down: daygad haygates maygee naygow.

The first card had been for Bunty. Bunty was already in Sydney with her mother, staying in a company flat while house-hunting. Baker had the address but the postcard she wrote had not been sent because the hotel shop didn’t have stamps for Australia.

‘Can’t I just use a load of the six peseta ones?’

‘We’ll find some,’ said Dad, thriftily (they didn’t).

Spam, born and bred in a cold climate, could never get used to holiday heat. As usual, she had pushed her beach umbrella up to the pool’s edge and sat beneath it on a moored lilo, her legs dangling in the water, water so blue you expected her feet to come out covered in newly grown copper sulphate crystals. Every hour or so she would hail a passing waiter and order another rum and coke,
por favor
.

She had bought herself a Spanish phrasebook at the airport but German would have done just as well. The hotel was so Kraut-friendly they actually served bockwurst at the breakfast buffet (for the first half hour anyway; early German birds stripped the hotplates clean by eight o’clock). They began queuing long before the dining room opened, just as soon as they had secured the best sunbeds with bath towels and copies of
Brigitte
(
Wass junge männer von den mädchen wollen
). Everyone said that was what they did and that really really was what they did. Maybe it was
all
true, maybe Queenie had it all wrong and Africans irrigated their fields with an Archimedes screw, ate yam. The fraus and frauleins would lie on their baggsied beds, systematically basting and roasting every inch of visible flesh, hands behind their blonde heads to tan their armpits while husbands and teenage sons played a murderously hearty variant of water polo that put the grown-up swimming pool out of bounds for hours at a time.