Out of My Depth (10 page)

‘No,’ she said sharply.

‘Go on. You haven’t seen her for years. Of course you’d like to chat.’

‘I said no, and I meant no. Feel free to swap with Izzy, but you can keep Sam with you. Entertain him. Take him to the loo. Give him sweets and colouring books. Does that appeal?’

Patrick slunk down in his seat. ‘Say no more.’

Amanda ignored her family and stared out of the window. She would not admit it to anyone, but she was almost paralysed with nerves. She swallowed hard and clutched the armrest during take-off. She had no idea whether Tamsin was on the plane. She had to be; and that meant she was almost certainly the woman hiding behind that newspaper. She had scrutinised the crowd, and there were no other candidates, unless Tamsin had become as unrecognisable as Izzy.

The trolley came round, and Jake and Freya suddenly came to life. Amanda realised they shouldn’t have let them have the two aisle seats.

‘Dad,’ said Freya, who was sitting next to Patrick. ‘Can I have a Coke? Please, Dad, I’m sooo thirsty. And I’m starving! How about . . .’ She consulted the card in front of her. ‘Pringles?’

Jake said nothing. He knew that whatever Freya obtained, he would get the same. Coke and Pringles sounded fine.

‘Please, Dad?’ Freya reiterated.

Patrick laughed and nodded to the stewardess. ‘Two Cokes, please, and — what flavour Pringles?’

‘Salt and vinegar,’ said Freya, promptly.

‘Cream and chives,’ said Jake.

‘OK. And I’ll have a beer.’

Amanda leaned over. She couldn’t help herself. ‘Gin and tonic, thanks. And a large Galaxy muffin.’

She refused to catch Patrick’s eye. He squeezed her thigh.

‘It’s going to be fine,’ he whispered, as he solicitously placed her drink and her cake on her tray. Patrick knew too well when Amanda was self-medicating.

Half an hour before landing, she moved everyone out of her way and went to the loo. She scanned the fellow passengers as she edged down the aeroplane. Izzy and Sam had chosen, for some reason, to sit right at the back. She looked at them. It surprised her again. Izzy looked as if she had ambled in from a Weightwatchers meeting in a village hall. She had squandered the beauty she was born with. She was just like anybody else, now: a single mother, on the heavy side of normal, with a masculine haircut and cheap clothes.

Then she saw that Izzy was laughing. Sam was on her lap, and they were both smiling at the woman next to them. The woman was laughing too. She had jaw-length hair now, cut stylishly and blacker than it had naturally been, and she no longer wore glasses, but Amanda would have recognised Tamsin anywhere. Her eyes were big and dark without the old specs to obscure them. She was wearing a black dress that suited her slender figure perfectly. Amanda recognised her fingernails. The Guardian was on her lap. She had probably seen Amanda and hidden from her, but when Isabelle appeared she’d come out of hiding to share a joke and to talk about old times. It was a dagger through her heart. Izzy and Tamsin were laughing, without her. They were laughing about her. She was instantly madly jealous. She and Izzy had chatted politely about each other’s lives and children. They had not laughed.

‘Well, well,’ she said, stopping right next to Tamsin and glaring daggers at her. She was trembling at the sight of her. ‘Tamsin Grey,’ she said, swallowing all her complex feelings and focusing instead on the fact that she had been slighted. ‘How the devil are you?’

It was a vicious grey day before Christmas, and Tamsin seethed by her mother’s car. She waved a terse goodbye to Amanda and Suzii, who were heading off to town together. Isabelle had slipped out earlier, illegally, and Tamsin envied her. She hated standing by her mum’s car. All the juniors, in their stupid uniform, kept walking past and staring at her. Some of them thought she was a teacher.

She felt sorry for the fourth and fifth formers whose breasts bulged around the bibs of their tunics. At least this was the season for blazers and for gabardine macs, which hid the worst of that. But she hated going to a school that had such a stupid uniform. She hated lots of things, at the moment.

She hated Lodwell’s and the stupid girls who went there. She hated the fake freedoms of the sixth form: hated the rank instant coffee that the girls made for each other in the common room, handing it out grandly in brown-ringed mugs as if it were a badge of adulthood rather than a nasty drink. She hated the fact that, at the age of seventeen, she was compelled to keep the same school hours as the seven-year-olds in the junior school. She hated the consensus, amongst her year group, that a lack of uniform and the occasional free period added up to some sort of genuine loosening of the rules. Some of her classmates even seemed grateful. They were, she supposed, institutionalised. And right-wing. And stupid. She replayed the argument she had had that afternoon, with Janie, in her head.

Tamsin shifted from foot to foot. She was ready to leave this dump and never look back. She leaned on the car, which was a battered red Astra. Mrs Davis reversed out of the next space in a cream Skoda, and gave Tamsin a little wave, which she returned with the smallest hand movement she could manage.

She hated the fact that most of her contemporaries stank of smoke and spent much of their time climbing over the back fence. That should not have to happen. She would have the vote in less than a year. If, as Mrs Spencer insisted constantly, they needed to learn to organise their time like adults, then surely they should be allowed the adult privilege of nipping to a shop if they needed something, or researching an essay in the city library, or simply writing it at home. Why did this institution have a right to compel her to partake in ‘Prayers’ every morning? She thought there must be a law against that, but when she asked Mrs Spencer to excuse her on the grounds of atheism, Mrs S laughed and patted her bottom.

The best thing about school was the work. Now, there was something she could never say out loud. There was a sentiment to cause raucous laughter in the sixth-form common room, where banal conversations revolved around boys and ‘going out’ and Simple Minds and boys and boys and sex and blow jobs and boys. Many of her contemporaries were alarmingly experienced. In fact, she thought there were probably about thirty virgins, in a year group of ninety. The only ones she could be sure of were herself and Isabelle, and she was fairly sure that Suzii and Amanda would have told all if they had gone all the way.

The boys she met did not particularly interest Tamsin. Sometimes, at the Square Club, she would get off with somebody, but she had yet to meet any boy she could talk to without the conversation seeming to be at cross purposes. From time to time she wondered whether she might be a lesbian. Was it a coincidence that she – a girl whose own mother soothed her with the promise that ‘you’ll grow into your looks’ – was best friends with the most beautiful girl in the school? Everyone was spellbound by Izzy. The music nerds couldn’t believe their luck to have someone so enchanted walking among them. Tamsin sometimes examined her feelings for her friend, but she never found anything sexual in them. No, she was certainly heterosexual. She just had a feeling she was going to have to go a fair distance from Cardiff to meet the man of her dreams.

So while the others talked about boys, Tamsin felt like a member of a different species. She threw herself into economic theories and calculus and Othello, where she came up against sexual passion at a certain remove. Studying was the best way of shutting out the sex talk. It was also her passport out of South Wales. She was taking maths, economics and English. She had put down English because she hadn’t known what else to do, but after less than a term it had become her favourite subject. Now, she thought she might apply to universities for English, rather than for economics. She was beginning to wish she had taken art instead of maths but she thought it was too late to change.

‘Hi,’ she said to her mother, who half jogged up to the car, carrying her huge bag in both arms like a misshapen baby.

‘Sorry, darling,’ said Mrs Grey, who was slim and smart, with her hair in a bun. She was completely different at weekends, and Tamsin still found her teacherish uniform odd. ‘Got caught up with some in-fighting in the staffroom.’

‘Who?’

‘Can’t tell, I’m afraid.’ She unlocked the driver’s door, and the central locking clunked open.

Tamsin climbed in gratefully and set the heating to come on as high as possible when the engine started. As they pulled carefully out of the drive, her mother anxious not to mow down eleven-year-olds, Tamsin said, ‘Would they let me swap maths for art?’

Her mother laughed. ‘No. They wouldn’t and I wouldn’t. You know what I think of Ros Powell.’

‘I know she’s scatty.’

‘She’s worse than scatty. She’s bollocks. Don’t repeat it, but honestly.’ She turned to Tamsin and frowned. ‘I mean, I’m not a philistine. You know I’m not, don’t you? I like a Rothko as much as anyone does. But the woman has no idea. To be a credible abstract artist, you need to be able to be figurative first. Otherwise it’s just Emperor’s New Clothes. No fourteen-year-old has earned the right to be abstract. So what’s she doing papering the corridor outside the art room with pretentious sub-sub-sub-Pollock drips, produced by the fourth form? No wonder they love her. They can get away with anything.’

‘Suzii’s enjoying it.’

‘Tell Suzii to watch out. It’s all very well putting a leaf in a matchbox and calling it “found art”, but it won’t wash with the examining board. That’s why Ros’s results are always so lame.’

‘Yeah, but Suzii can draw. She quite likes it that she doesn’t have to, though. I’ll tell her to keep practising.’

‘Do.’

They sat in silence for a while. Tamsin fiddled with the radio, eventually fixing on Red Dragon FM. Her mother left it for a couple of minutes before switching to Radio Four. Mrs Grey indicated right and pulled out onto the dual carriageway that would take them home to Penarth. She looked at Tamsin, and Tamsin smiled back.

‘You hate school, don’t you?’

‘Can you tell?’

‘You never smile until we reach this part. The fast road home.’

‘Of course I hate it. I despise everything about it. It’s a shithole.’

Mrs Grey laughed. ‘That’s my office you’re talking about.’

‘I don’t know how you stick it.’

‘They pay me. And I can see precisely why you hate it, but I’m glad you decided to stick with it. You’ll get good grades there, and that’s all you need. Just hold on to that. And whatever you do, don’t change to art. I will personally tell Mary Spencer not to allow it. In fact I’m going to tell her pre-emptively.’

‘Don’t! She’ll only squeeze my bum again.’

‘So I’ll tell her to squeeze your bum if you so much as mention the word “art”.’

‘Point taken. You win.’ She looked at her mother. ‘I had a huge fight with Janie.’

‘So I heard.’

‘Fat racist bitch from hell.’

‘And you already knew that, so it might have been a little ill-advised to pick a fight about apartheid with her.’

‘But I can’t, Mum.’ She looked at her mother. ‘I just can’t let her say that stuff without charging over. You do understand, don’t you? Did you hear what she said to start it? I was sitting with Izzy in the common room, and she said loudly, looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, something like: “They need the whites, you see, because it’s us that keep the peace. Otherwise they’d just be having tribal wars.” And then she waited for me to pick her up on it. So I had to.’

‘And it descended into quite a brawl, if my class were correct in their reporting of it.’

‘Of course it did. I told her she was racist, she said her uncle lived in South Africa so she has a first-hand account of the situation, unlike me who just believes whatever I read in the Guardian — and she spat out “Guardian” as if I was reading Trotsky.’

‘So you said?’

Tamsin remembered the conversation.

‘You might not like it,’ Janie had added, ‘but it’s a fact. It may not fit in with your world view. That coloureds are downtrodden and repressed and we’re mean and oppressive. But did you ever think about this? That whites are far more advanced than the coloured races for a reason? That we have an innate superiority?’

Tamsin snorted. ‘Have you ever heard of a man called Hitler?’

‘This has nothing to do with him. His issue was with the Jews. Although my uncle says the Holocaust has been exaggerated. But that’s a different issue. The fact is, you don’t know what really goes on in South Africa.’

‘Whereas your Uncle Adolf is thoroughly au fait with the politics of the townships?’

‘He has servants from places like that, yes. Which amounts to a lot more experience than you have, Tamsin Grey.’

‘Lucky servants. Those lazy Africans need British men like him.’

Janie, who had a particularly fine zit between her overgrown eyebrows, raised her voice at this.

‘No!’ she said. ‘No, my uncle is African. That’s something that really bugs him, the fact that he’s supposedly never going to be a “real” African because he’s white. If that’s not racism, I don’t know what is!’

Tamsin had been incredulous. ‘Urn,’ she said. ‘I think I know what is. Racial segregation of beaches and parks? Mixed marriages and interracial sex being illegal. The Black Homeland Citizenship Act — you know what that means? That black people were told they weren’t even citizens of South Africa. The Sharpeville massacre, that was pretty racist. Having to be white to be allowed to vote? Racist. And locking up Nelson Mandela. He should be President, not your racist Mr de Klerk.’