The Following Girls (31 page)

‘Spam-my-stepmother.’

‘I’ve told your parents to carry on with their dinner, nothing to be alarmed about. I was watching you by the pool this afternoon: exactly how many of those drinks did you have?’

‘Dunno. Dad kept saying “the usual” and Paki-whatsisface just kept bringing more rum and coke. Four?’

‘And when did you last eat?’

‘Lunch?’ Baker couldn’t meet those clever little brown eyes.

‘Really? Could have fooled me.’

The fingers at Baker’s wrist formed a ring with the tip of the thumb, a bony bangle round Baker’s tiny forearm. Dr Jenny remained crouching by the armchair but raised her head and looked bossily behind her until a waiter appeared and let her show off in Spanish for a bit.

‘He’s bringing you a nice ham and cheese sandwich and some Coca-Cola –
plain
Coca-Cola.’ Then she played doctors and nurses some more, pulling at Baker’s eyelids and looking hard at her face.

‘Your stepmother muttered something about tablets?’

‘All sorts.’ Baker sensed herself drifting off once more. ‘Spam keeps them.’

When she woke up again Dr Jennifer was sitting next to her on an armchair she had moored alongside, reading the labels on the trio of medicine bottles kept in her parents’ bathroom.

‘And you’ve been taking this little lot every day for three weeks?’

‘Probbly. Date’s on the label.’

The doctor rolled her eyes but said nothing more, just handed Baker the glass of coke.

‘Drink this and have a bit of your sandwich.’

‘Aren’t you a bit young for a doctor?’

‘Nope.’

‘How’s the patient?’ Bob Baker’s hearty party voice, laid on for the new stranger.

‘She’ll be fine once she’s had a bite to eat, but I think I should have a little chat with you and your wife if you don’t mind.’

Little chat? Mr Baker winced at the familiar phrase. Never anything little about it.

‘Goodnight, Amanda,’ called Jennifer as she led him away. ‘Try to eat up your sarnie. I’ll pop by in the morning.’ Pop. Doctor-y word ‘pop’: pop up onto the couch, pop your things off, pop this under your tongue, pop these pills.

Baker remained on the armchair, sipping at her coke, pretending not to notice the nosy glances of the other guests as they filed out of the dining salon and up in the lift to their schnapps bottles and backgammon boards. After about ten minutes Spam came back.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Gone to bed.’ A strained breath. ‘Amanda? I was wondering . . .’

‘What did she want?’

Spam abandoned whatever she had been planning to say and explained, almost apologetically, that Dr Cooke seemed to think that Amanda’s tablets were too strong.

‘Something about body mass – she did try explaining. She says you should only be taking about half the amount Dr Sexton prescribed because of your being so . . . petite. Says you’ll feel much better – sleep better.’ She unwrapped a smile and warmed it through. ‘Might as well have an early night. Just half a tablet, Dr Cooke says.’

Baker struggled free of the spongy embrace of the chair and followed Spam to the lobby, leaving the mangled sandwich on the table, and assuring her that she felt fine, absolutely fine. She concentrated on taking deep breaths all the way up in the lift and managed a quick goodnight grimace before locking the door of her room and dashing to the bathroom. She was barely in time and some of it got down the front of her cheesecloth smock. She pulled the sodden cotton over her head, forgetting about the full-length mirror behind the door. As she dropped the dress on the floor and smeared it across the wet tiles with her sandalled foot she caught sight of her reflection. She ran a finger experimentally under the strap of her gaping brassiere, tracing the outline of each rib. She put a hand either side of her chest and pushed the whole lot together, remembering Helga’s nutty cleavage. G-ross.

Baker spent the next day in her room writing unpostable postcards to Bunty, reading
Sons and Lovers
and trying to finish her novel.

The dreaded Miriam’s snapdragons had withered in the vase and the penultimate chapter found her crying over the news that Paul was about to be posted to a new job at an animal hospital in Melbourne.
A deep pain took hold of her and she knew that she must lose him and she lay on her bed like a beast awaiting the forgiving blade of slaughter. The memory of his loss came each time like a red-hot brand on her soul. It seemed that even her joy had been like the flame coming off of sadness. Her heavy head tilted at the sound of a taxi engine quivering on the darkling pavement below and she felt her whole soul coil into knots of flame.

What she really wanted to do, Baker realised, was bump off all of her characters, but that would be copying Bunty, wouldn’t it? (‘I’m killing
everybody
.’) And then she remembered that Miss Gleet would not be seeing
13 for Croquet
at all, now that Bunty was ten thousand miles away, and Baker curled up on her bed, the memory of Bunty’s loss like a red-hot brand on her soul and cried as if she would never ever stop.

Spam, dial set to
prison warder
, brought up melon chunks and some rolls for breakfast (and half a tablet), then some scrambled eggs for lunch (with half another tablet), and Dad finally appeared with a ham roll and half a Mandrax on his way down to dinner and asked, almost shyly, if she wanted to go and look at some gardens tomorrow?
Gardens
? Not really, Dad, no. But the weird thing was that he and Spam went anyway: Baker flip-flopped down to breakfast at the usual time the next morning to find a note from Spam (two half tablets sellotaped under the signature) saying they’d hired a car and headed off and would see her at teatime.

Baker ordered tea and toast and was fiddling with the butter dish in grown-up solitary splendour when Dr Jenny Cooke skipped in, still in her girly white running shorts – like Julia, only thinner and without that gorgeous hair. Was Amanda on her tod? And, without waiting for an invitation, she had nipped over to the buffet, filled her plate with slices of fruit and sat down in Dad’s chair. Pure chance? Baker didn’t think so (there was no place laid at her usual table). Dr Jenny ate her banana with a knife and fork, cutting each slice into peculiarly small mouthfuls, and when she had finished she pushed back her chair, rolled back the bottoms of her Bermuda shorts and the capped sleeves of her blouse and began rubbing sun cream into her calves and forearms with a strange, unsensuous action, like Spam waxing the sideboard. Did Baker play much tennis? Baker began a muttered explanation about school tennis being a bit of a lottery with only three courts between thirty and the Drumlin only being interested in girls who had learned to play elsewhere, and besides Baker loathed and despised games of any sort, but Jennifer Cooke cut her short.

‘I could show you a few strokes if you like, but you’re probably heaps better than I am.’

Baker once again felt as if she were watching her own body as it got up from the breakfast table and led this funny new tennis partner up to its room to change its shoes and then back down to the court where Dr Cooke proceeded to show Baker’s body what it had been missing. It seemed that the secret was to carry on swinging the bat after it had made contact with the ball – a secret Miss Drumlin had never divulged.

They swam afterwards.

Baker’s shirt billowed up around her as she stepped down into the warm water, like pyjama floats in a personal survival exam.

‘You keeping that on?’ More hard, rude, diagnostic looks at Baker’s figure.

‘I hate this bikini. Spam bought it.’

Dr Jenny dived straight in and swam two lengths under water (as Baker knew she bloody would). She was wearing a schoolgirl swimsuit with a racing back, a red one.

‘What house were you in? Did you have houses?’ said Baker’s voice.

‘Brontë.’

‘No badges?’

‘The old suit fell to bits. I just like them this shape – they stay on in the water.’

‘Bet you did have badges though. You’re the type: good prefect material.’

‘Cheek. Race you to the end.’

She was out and on the side before Baker had gone ten yards.

‘I’m useless.’

‘You’ll get faster, promise. I’ve got a stop watch upstairs. I could teach you the Australian crawl if you like.’

The rest of the morning was spent by the pool playing Travel Scrabble. And when lunchtime came the meal was actually edible for a change, because Jenny chatted up the hotel chef and got him to make special round omelettes with juicy bits of potato in, so they were spared the usual fight for the running buffet. The other guests were denied omelettes. Miffed or what.

‘
Warum konnen wir nicht omeletten haben
?’

‘
Sie muss ein spezielle diät befolgen
,’ said Jenny, unanswerably, then turned to Baker to translate: ‘I told them you were in training.’

And she was – in a way. The rest of the holiday carried on like that. Spam and Dad would go off to the other side of the island and look at a parrot sanctuary or some interesting rock formations (‘oxymoron’ Jenny said), and over the next fortnight Baker’s swimming got quite fast. Even her German improved. The nightmares had stopped – she had no dreams at all now – but she couldn’t lose the weird, out-of-body feeling, like it was all happening to someone else.

‘It’s a pity you weren’t well and all that, but it’s quite nice to have made some friends at last,’ confided Dr Jenny. ‘The other English families have got the idea that I’m stuck up. I requested a bit of Chopin on my first night – I was talking to the pianist in the bar and he’s actually classically trained, would you believe it – but it didn’t go down especially well. Silly of me, I suppose.’

Baker heard the click of a cigarette lighter and instinctively sniffed for the toasty aroma of the first pristine puff. They played a bit more Scrabble, Baker taught the doctor a few choice two-letter words until her opponent got
quixotic
across two triple word scores.

‘So how come you’re on so many drugs? And who is this Dr Sexton? Did he prescribe them over the phone? Jolly heavy doses.’

‘Dunno. School made me go. It was that or get expelled. He’s a psychiatrist, but I only saw him once for about half a minute.’ Dr Cooke’s bony face had that obsessive alert look Miss Carson used to get when she was taking notes in her head. ‘Did my Dad put you up to all this?’

Dr Cooke took a last, filter-singeing drag of her fag (she smoked even harder than Julia).

‘Nope. He’s just worried about you that’s all. Thought I might be able to help.’ She tossed the fag end into the hibiscus bed. ‘Time for lunch.’

Chapter 22

It was far too early for school – the gate wouldn’t be open for a quarter of an hour – and the April breeze was whipping round the railway station and blowing a chill through Baker’s hair, still wet from her early morning trip to the swimming baths. There was a smell of toast and fried bacon wafting from the Victory Café and she shoved open the glass door and made her way to a window table, studiously deaf to the mutterings of the breakfasting workmen – automatically on skirt alert, like dogs trained to bark every time a footstep crunched across the gravel driveway.

She’d ordered a twin pack of digestive biscuits with her tea and when they came she carefully snapped each one in half before jabbing it into the scalding liquid. She turned to the bag plonked on the seat beside her.

There were postcards from Dr Jenny in the side pocket. The latest was a picture from some Italian gallery of a woman sawing a man’s head off. It looked familiar – or was it just something she dreamed? Jenny Cooke hoped she was well and eating properly and that her revision was all going to plan and that her backhand was getting plenty of practice.

Dr Cooke had sent her first postcard (Botticelli’s Venus) in an envelope and Bob Baker had opened it (accidentally, he said) but then asked later how Dr Cooke was and was she enjoying her new job in paediatrics, which showed that he must have read to the end of it. Baker told Jenny what had happened in her reply which she had written on the topsheets of an invoice book she bought in Woolworths, leaving the carbon copies on the greenhouse bench under a jar of rooting hormone where Dad would be sure to find them. ‘Wossis?’ he sputtered, waving the pink flimsies at her over the breakfast table. She couldn’t read the look on his face.

As he stormed off upstairs Spam had given Baker a funny smile, reached out an undecided hand and held it against her cheek for a moment. She probably meant it for a caress but she made contact like someone who had heard the whole icky business described but never actually seen it done, touching only with the back of her loose fist, like she was afraid to catch germs – or leave fingerprints.

‘You sleeping any better, sausage?’

She did
ask
, at least. Dad hadn’t asked. Dad was now up in the spare room taking the week’s shirts from the cellophane bags the laundry put them in and steaming the folds from front, back and sleeves. Spam generally drew the line at pressing pressed shirts but hadn’t been able to resist running a proud warm iron over Baker’s school summer dresses. The brand-new fabric gave off the lovely old kindergarten smell and Baker had a happy flashback of hanging her tiny red blazer on her very own cloakroom peg. It had had a coloured picture of a teddy bear in place of a number, just as the sight chart at the annual medical showed outlines of a train, a house, an apple – like a page torn from a colouring book. A wonderful, friendly, wordless world.