Crawlers (2 page)

Here we go again
, thought Ben.

Robert was still smiling, but in his round, pudgy face his large cow-like eyes were darting about nervously. Robert was young for their year, not much more than thirteen. He was overweight and a bit sweaty. Robert wanted to be accepted. He would do anything to join Hugo and Josh, be part of their team, bask in their glow.

‘I do
so
love your accent, Robert,' Josh purred after a moment, once he'd selected which form Robert's humiliation would take this time. ‘Let's hear it again: say “photograph”.'

Ben watched as Robert started to squirm.

Accents mattered at Walsingham: there was only one acceptable way to speak and any deviation set you apart from the crowd, left you vulnerable. Robert worked harder than most to hide his home accent. It was part of his effort to be accepted. But Josh knew the truth and would never allow Robert or anyone else to forget it.

Robert's smile faltered. ‘Photograph,' he said gamely, keeping the ‘o's and ‘a' long.

‘Not like that,' said Josh. ‘Say it how you
normally
say it.'

Robert looked at his feet.

Why does Robert put up with this?
Ben wondered, watching him. Why did anybody?

‘Photograph,' murmured Robert, in his own voice.

‘
Footergruff
,' echoed Josh, delighted. ‘Have I got that right, Robert?
Footergruff.
You try it, Hugo.'

‘Footergruff,' said Hugo, grinning again.

‘Footergruff!' said Josh – then sneered. ‘It sounds like one of Hugo's farts.'

Ben cleared his throat and said: ‘Leave him alone, Josh.'

Josh flinched. ‘What did you say?'

‘I said,' said Ben, ‘leave him alone.'

‘Now, boys,' said Mr Clissold nervously from the driving seat. ‘There's no need for unpleasantness.'

‘None intended, sir,' said Josh, sounding shocked for the teacher's benefit, but staring hard at Ben. ‘We were only having a bit of fun. Weren't we, Robert?'

‘That's right,' said Robert.

‘Ben here just got the wrong end of the stick,' said Josh, with a smile that showed his teeth. ‘Didn't you, mate?'

Ben gave Josh an answering smile that was every bit as sincere as Josh had been in calling him ‘mate'. But said nothing.

AN EXPLOSION OF
sound resolved into beats. There was a bar of keyboard intro, made thin and tinny by a mobile phone's built-in speaker. Then Samantha Jackson and Lauren Wallace started to sing.

‘
OOOOOOOH baby babe . . .
' they crooned, grinning at each other as everyone on the bus turned to stare at them.

Ms Gresham, their teacher, gave them a weary look. ‘Stop that, you two.'

‘
OOOOOOOH baby babe
,' Samantha and Lauren sang, louder, ‘
I'm a slave to your love!
'

Jasmine Ashworth rested her head against the cool glass of the bus window and sighed.

The Swatham Academy for Girls was a comprehensive in East London. Jasmine, Samantha and Lauren had been students there since they were eleven. Having no minibus was among the least of Swatham's problems: government inspectors had recently put the Academy on what they called ‘special measures'. Officially described as ‘inadequate' in the inspectors' report, the school had
been given one year to show drastic improvement or it would be closed.

‘Samantha and Lauren, turn that music off
right now
,' said Ms Gresham.

Ms Gresham was a supply teacher, recently drafted in to Swatham as part of the improvement drive. Jasmine liked her. She was young for a teacher, and with her chic, boyish bob and her smart grey trouser suits she looked good too. Also, unlike some teachers Jasmine could name, Ms Gresham was passionate about her subject – English literature – hence tonight's outing to the theatre. Ms Gresham had a black belt in aikido. She had crossed America on a Harley-Davidson. She had done things with her life. None of that made the slightest difference to Samantha and Lauren.

‘Why?' Samantha asked as the tinny beats continued.

‘Yeah, miss, what we got to turn it off for?' said Lauren.

‘Two reasons,' said Ms Gresham. ‘First, you're disturbing the other passengers on this bus. And second, because if you don't, then on Monday you'll both get two hours' detention.'

Jasmine lifted her head from the glass and watched what happened next in the reflection against the darkness outside.

Lauren was pouting – which in Jasmine's opinion was never a good look for her: with Lauren's chubby cheeks, big forehead and squashed nose it tended to make her look even more like a sulky pug dog than she did already. But Lauren
wasn't the reason Jasmine didn't want to turn round yet.

Samantha was looking Ms Gresham dead in the eye.

In the three years since they'd all started at Swatham, Samantha had made herself quite a reputation. She had been suspended for fighting no less than three times – once, most memorably, for grabbing another girl by the hair and slamming her face into the edge of a hand basin in the toilets, breaking the girl's nose. To avoid outright expulsion for this incident Samantha had claimed she'd acted in self-defence. Her victim – understandably wary of making Samantha angry again – had backed up her story. Jasmine, and almost everyone else at Swatham, had used the same caution around Samantha ever since.

‘I'm not kidding, Samantha,' said Ms Gresham, looking straight back. ‘Turn that music off or you'll be sorry.'

Like Jasmine, Samantha was nearly fourteen. Her hard blue eyes and prominent cheekbones gave her a face a narrow, pinched look. Slowly she touched a finger to a loose strand of her bottle-blonde hair, tucking it behind her ear. Then, once she'd made it clear she wasn't being rushed, she dropped her eyes to her phone. The music cut out.

‘Miss,' she said, rolling her eyes, ‘it's
boring
on this bus, innit.'

‘Yeah, miss,' chorused Lauren. ‘We've been on here for ages!'

‘It's not far now,' said Ms Gresham (though Jasmine thought she sounded every bit as impatient to get there as Samantha and Lauren). ‘The curtain goes up at seven forty-five. We should arrive just in time to get to our seats. But right now, we'll just have to pass the time with a little conversation. What shall we talk about?'

No answer.

‘How about what you're all going to do when you're older?' said Ms Gresham brightly but with obvious desperation. ‘Well? Who wants to start?'

Now Jasmine had another reason to keep looking out of the window. She knew
exactly
what she wanted to do when she was older. But she wasn't about to mention it now.

Jasmine was an only child. Her mother worked shifts at their local supermarket; her father, a musician, had left before Jasmine was born. Jasmine's mum wanted Jasmine to leave school at sixteen, get herself a paying job to help support them both – ‘start pulling her weight', as she put it. Obtaining her permission to come to the play tonight had been bad enough; when Jasmine had told her mum about her real ambitions, there had been a row. Her mother had called Jasmine ‘a dreaming good-for-nothing like your dad'. But Jasmine knew she wasn't a dreamer. She had
plans
.

She was going to get the best exam results – not just the best her school had learned to tolerate from its pupils but
the
best results it was possible to get
. Then she was going to go to the best university, where she would study Earth Sciences. Jasmine would graduate with a top-class degree and soon after that she would realize her ultimate goal: she would become an environmentalist, using her skills and knowledge to change destructive behaviours of governments and industry all over the world.

Jasmine knew what she wanted out of her life. But talking about things like that – even to Ms Gresham – just wasn't what you did around Samantha and Lauren. So she kept looking out of the window, avoiding Ms Gresham's eye.

As she did so, however, Jasmine felt a small pang of guilt. Because if she didn't answer, and Samantha and Lauren stayed silent, then the only person left was . . .

‘Lisa,' said Ms Gresham, rounding on the fourth of the students she was taking to the theatre that night. ‘What do
you
want to be?'

Through the curtain of lank, mouse-brown hair that she kept over her face at all times,
Lisa Staunton darted her teacher a pleading glance. But Ms Gresham was implacable.

‘Come on, Lisa,' she coaxed. ‘You can tell us.'

‘Yeah, Lisa,' said Samantha. ‘We're all friends here.' Samantha's voice was sincere. Only the smirk she gave Lauren when Ms Gresham wasn't looking told the truth.

Jasmine turned to watch.

Lisa Staunton was a mystery to her. Ever since their first day at Swatham Lisa had slipped instantly into the role of school victim and underdog – and stayed there. Samantha and Lauren barely bothered to mock Lisa to her face any more. Instead, she had become a kind of Swatham catchphrase: if, say, an elbow of your school blazer was wearing through, you could say it had ‘gone a bit Lisa' and everyone would know what you meant. Lisa's much-mended clothes were the stuff of school legend, together with her spots, her overbite, her total lack of friends and a host of other attributes, real and imagined.

But despite the fact that Lisa was treated so cruelly, Jasmine sometimes wondered if she didn't secretly somehow
like
it that way. She did nothing to defend herself. Her default reaction to everything was simply to sit there, shoulders hunched, hair over her face, silent, passive. She was doing it now.

‘What were your ambitions when you were little?' asked Ms Gresham. ‘What would you most love to do, Lisa? What are your dreams?'

For another moment Lisa didn't answer – just quivered slightly like a cornered animal. She blinked her watery eyes very rapidly several times, then, to everyone's astonishment, said: ‘I used to want to be a ballerina.'

The four girls and their teacher shared a short silence.
Then Samantha and Lauren burst into hoots of laughter.

‘What's so funny, you two?' asked Ms Gresham, annoyed.

Jasmine sighed. It was going to be a long evening.

THE LIGHTS OF
the entranceway were dazzling after the darkness outside. Ben followed Mr Clissold and the maroon-jacketed backs of the other boys down a white-walled, fridge-bright passage. Automatic glass-panelled doors slid back and the Barbican opened around him.

Ben looked up, surprised. At the time it was built the Barbican was probably supposed to look smart and futuristic. It didn't any more: to Ben, it just looked weird. The proportions were boxy and lumpish, the lights low and gloomy. The carpet beneath his feet was an unappealing mud-grey with what looked like thousands of blue worms trampled into it for a pattern, and almost everything else he could see was made out of concrete, spattered with small embedded stones, giving the walls the texture of lumpy porridge. Beyond the black open counter that served as the Barbican's box office the foyer splintered into a confusing array of
walkways and stairs that led in contrary directions, like something out of an Escher print.

The Barbican
, thought Ben,
looks like it was designed by a kid.

‘Hi!' said a voice, interrupting his reverie. Ben looked down: a man had come out from behind the counter. He was dressed all in dark blue with an orange armband. He had an unfeasible gelled blond hairdo and an equally unfeasible smile: his eyes looked oddly glassy and blank.

‘I'm Jeremy,' he said. ‘Welcome to the Barbican. This way, please.'

‘Jeremy' led the group along a walkway, down two flights of stairs that were carpeted in the same horrible pattern, and finally held open some double doors off to one side of the foyer's lower level.

Suddenly Ben and his tutor group were in the stalls of the Main Theatre. The auditorium and its upper balconies were a good size and mostly full; the noise of over a thousand people chatting and settling into their seats swelled around Ben as he followed the group along to their row. He had been to big theatres before, so this didn't faze him.

Ben realized he was going to be sitting next to Robert. To his surprise, Robert was smiling at him.

‘Thanks, Ben,' he murmured as Ben sat.

‘What for?'

Robert's smile faded a little, but he leaned closer to Ben. ‘For . . . you know, sticking up for me.'

Mr Clissold had sat down on Robert's left, in the middle of the group; Hugo and Josh were beyond him, almost certainly out of earshot, what with the surrounding noise of the rest of the audience. But Robert obviously felt he was taking a big risk in saying what he had. Ben figured he'd better say something back.

He shrugged. He opened his mouth. He got as far as: ‘It was noth—'

Then an ice cream landed on his head.

The sensation was very cold and very sudden, and at first Ben was uncertain what had actually happened. As he groped in his sticky hair to find out, a chilly dribble of vanilla ran down the side of his neck. He looked up, and his eyes met those of a girl sitting above him, at the front of the circle.

The girl was about his age, and she was
gorgeous
. Her skin was the colour of melting chocolate. Her large and beautiful dark brown eyes stared straight down into his. Her lips, even pursed in deep annoyance as they were, filled Ben's mind with sudden and distracting thoughts of kisses. Ice cream on his head or no, he couldn't take his eyes off her.

The girl looked along her row. At the spot directly above where Ben had been sitting, something was happening.