The Following Girls
Read The Following Girls Online
Authors: Louise Levene
For Helen Louise
The Hate had started.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Contents
Also Available by Louise Levene
The clock on the wall in Room 13 was striking four in the distance as Baker plunged a hand inside her blazer, slid open the flimsy cardboard packet and teased out a cheap cigarette. The jacket’s lapels formed a felty cave that muffled the giveaway hiss of the match and Baker watched the toasted cloud from the first drag as it drifted swiftly upwards on the strong draught from beneath the cubicle door and out of the open window. Escape.
Someone outside had lost something. No one seemed interested. A sound of shoes hitting the floor, of loos flushing, taps running. The smoker puffed away, smiling, as another flotilla of perfect rings sailed off into the chilly spring air. Baker fidgeted into a less uncomfortable position on the loo seat: back to the wall of one partition, scuffed black lace-ups holding steady against the other, crepe-soled toes wedged either side of the roll of scratchy, papery paper with now wash your hands printed insultingly on every sheet. The top of the holder was scarred with a little pokerwork pattern of cigarette burns.
Baker’s sideways pose created no tell-tale shadow in the gap below the door which had been left open a cunning inch or two and hung with a stolen ‘Out of order’ notice. She was safe for the moment. Invisible.
An angry sign about basic hygiene and the vague hope that things might be left as one would wish to find them had been screwed to the back of the door but the lower screw had been removed and the enamel plaque could be swivelled clear to reveal a Rosetta Stone of fruity graffiti on the ancient grey paintwork. Mrs Mostyn was a slag, Amanda Bunter-Byng was a slag, Davina Booth was a slag, and cats liked plain crisps, apparently. The writing was fantastically small and neat and regular, some of it almost illegibly tiny – far too small to see if you were sitting on the seat: ‘Snow White thought 7-Up was a drink until she discovered dwarfs’; ‘Mostyn is a Snog Monster’; ‘I must not obsess. I must not obsess. I must not obsess’; ‘Ireland for the Irish: Peckham for the peckish’. The grey gap was nearly filled. Did Biro wipe off?
Baker pulled the cap from a new green ballpoint and began greedily colonising the remaining space with angry, anonymous capitals:
poison mrs mostyn. strangle mrs mostyn. garotte mrs mostyn. guillotine mrs mostyn. suffocate mrs mostyn. decapitate mrs mostyn. eviscerate mrs mostyn. exterminate mrs fucking mostyn
.
A sharp tap on the door jolted Baker from her murderous trance. Panicked, she let the sign slide back into place. The half-finished cigarette hit the bog with a dying hiss while shaking fingers fumbled for peppermints among the dust bunnies cuddled up in her blazer pocket.
‘Have you got the Maths master in there?’
Baker let off an exasperated sigh of relief as she got down from her perch and opened the door to the friendly figure of Amanda Stott who had a sheet of graph paper resting on the cover of her current library book (
Italian in 20 Lessons
).
‘Don’t bloody
do
that. Thought you were one of the goons or something.’
‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to
disturb
but it’s mattresses again and I haven’t got a bloody clue. It’s due in tomorrow.’
‘
“Find the determinant of the following ma-trices”,’ quoted Baker, calmer now. ‘Done my copy and handed it in already, sorry. Queenie had it last.’
Baker grabbed her bag and sidled out of the cubicle and into the cloakroom.
‘God I hate Mondays.’
‘Tuesday’s just as bad,’ said Stottie.
‘Wednesday’s worse. The exams start on Wednesday.’
Stott’s younger sister Stephanie was loitering behind her. First years played hockey all through Lent term and every Monday afternoon you’d see another crippled crocodile limping back from a friendly, their knees buttered with yellow mud. Young Stephanie had a filthy pair of goalkeeper’s pads stuck under her left arm and was tricked out in cupcake skirt, spiked hockey boots and a short-sleeved blouse with SS knotted in tidy chain stitch across her tidy twelve-year-old tits, reminding Baker that Miss Drumlin had threatened a double detention if she didn’t sew a similar monogram on her own shirt.
Stephanie Stott was leaning against the great double row of sinks that ran back to back through the middle of the room, waste pipes all coursing into a great porcelain drainage ditch beneath. Irrigation. She stared hard at Baker. Her face was dusted with round purplish spots (the sulky, unsqueezable kind). Not just nose and chin but dotted evenly across the whole face like the blisters on the second side of a pancake or something catching in the
Beano
.
‘Can’t you just ask Miss Revie how you’re supposed to do them?’ asked the girl. Baker could smell the cough candy on her breath.
‘Afraid not, young Steve. Been tried. Miss Revie has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Knows all about matrices: how to invert them, even knows what they’re
for
, but she promised faithfully never to reveal the secret to a living soul. Swore a solemn oath. Not even for ready money. Not even for three and a half grand a year.
Much
easier to copy.’
‘I’ll
tell
.’
Baker powered up the scary stare that reduced grown German teachers to jelly, but the younger girl failed to wither. Perhaps she was short-sighted? Hardly ideal in a goalkeeper. Perhaps she knew Baker was on probation, knew how little it would take to tip them over the edge. Or maybe she just wasn’t afraid . . .
‘You’ve been smoking. Julia Smith says only
morons
smoke. It’s a tax on stupidity, Julia says.’ Stottie’s sporty little sister worshipped the school games captain. Stottie gave an exasperated, ‘She doesn’t get it from me’ shrug.
‘Who gives a stuff what Julia Smith thinks?’ sneered Baker.
‘And you’ll get cancer. Even says so on the box. Talk about
stu-pid
.’
‘Very probably. Now why don’t you buzz off and leave us alone. Proles aren’t allowed in the Shell cloaks.’ Baker deliberately translated her thoughts into the moronic school code – the only language they understand.
‘I’ll
tell
.’
But she did at last leave the room.
‘Your young Steve’s a bit of a prat. Is she adopted? Who knows? Maybe it’s you who’s adopted. She looks nothing like.’
Stephanie Stott had her father’s burly build and the beginnings of her mother’s blousy curves. Stottie, with her boyish frame and pixie face, looked like a doll beside the three of them, like they’d stolen her from somewhere. She was easily the smallest in the fifth – half the size of Linda Madeley who was on the far side of the cloakroom changing for netball practice. Baker watched her slither free of her nylon blouse releasing a gaseous whiff: half Body Mist; half body odour. Behind Linda loomed the beanpole shape of Oonagh Houseman who was trying to keep her back to the room, hoping no one would see how her mother had attached her treble-A bra to the top of her knickers with buttons and tape so that she didn’t throttle herself every time she raised her arms for a save. As Oonagh reached under the bench for her gym shoes, the padded shell of white polyester gaped away from her chest. Why not just wear a bloody vest? Yellow wool in winter. Lacy cotton in summer. Vests. Baker frowned at the comfy memory.
Stottie had scampered off to the form room in hopes of catching Queenie and the one genuine piece of homework done by the sole member of the Beta Maths group who could make any sense of the prep (and her brother did most of it). The result was passed from hand to hand and copied over with sly crossings-out here and there to make the forgery look authentic.
Baker went across to her peg and huddled into her grubby blue regulation raincoat called, rather grandly, The Grantham and lined with its own peculiar plaid: a doleful chorus of greens and greys like the tartan of some extinct Highland regiment (Dress Grantham? Hunting Grantham?
Trench
Grantham?).
The girl changing next to her was sneaking her crucifix into the polished toe of her brogues. She twitched a glance at Baker.
‘Don’t look at me.’ Baker was indignant. ‘T’isn’t me who nicks it all.’
Purse-belts and make-up and cherished gold-nibbed fountain pens and puzzle rings and illicit transistor radios went missing from the cloakrooms all the time. No one was ever caught, but then no one tried particularly hard to catch. Culprits meant punishment: suspensions, expulsions,
police
even (if the swag had any real value). ‘Items of value must not be brought into school’ said the Fawcett Code (the implication being that they would be stolen if they were), but it didn’t go as far as ‘No Stealing’. Odd really, mused Baker, the way they let it slide, made it the victim’s fault. They were so strict in other ways, but the blind eye they turned to petty thievery meant that someone – could be the girl next to her, the crucifix-hiding business might just be a blind – was getting away with murder: a secret unflashable stash of cash and pens and lip glosses. Baker stared round the room: could easily be her, or her, or her . . .
It couldn’t be a new problem. You even got it in Enid Blyton. Had all the sneak thieves over all the years grown up normal? Had they just grown out of it? Were they all in Holloway (nothing about that on the honours board)? Or did they take the values they’d learned at school with them into the outside world (like the Speech Day speakers always said) and spend lunch hours and tea breaks rifling through desks and lockers, fiddling their expenses and cheating the tax man?
There was an unread copy of the Fawcett Code pinned up on every cloakroom noticeboard. Drafting rules was obviously a tricky business. Stealing wasn’t mentioned and you couldn’t very well say ‘No smoking’ either, or ‘No gambling’ or ‘No spitting’ or ‘No chewing tobacco’ or ‘Usury is forbidden in the lower school’ because putting such things on the list of rules would admit that they took place. So the ‘Code’ was just general blather about keeping to the left in corridors and ‘showing consideration’. A flyblown copy of the most recent edition was hanging alongside the upper school timetables. Baker groaned again at the thought of the next day’s lessons. What kind of masochist scheduled netball at nine fifteen in the bloody ratbagging morning?