The Following Girls (22 page)

The terrified Brian tried desperately to post the note through the hinge in the desk but the Snog Monster snatched it from her sticky fingers just as the bell sounded for lunch.

‘Stack the atlases on the shelves and put the rest in the glueing tray. Look lively! I’ll deal with you later, Bryony.’

All six ravenous fifth formers dashed from the room, leaving Mrs Mostyn squinting crossly at the note. The new girl – Natasha? – was apparently asking the other one about a member of staff. A very unpopular member of staff it would seem.

Why do they call her the Snog Monster?
The note began. How coarse.
Got off with a forest ranger on a field trip
, Bryony had replied.
Name three people who haven’t
, quipped the other one.

Mrs Mostyn realised with a not altogether unpleasant ripple of shock that they must be discussing Miss Combe. How cruel girls could be.
She is such a stupid fat ugly old cow
. Old? The poor woman was barely thirty.
Dad says she smells of wee. No wonder everyone gives up Geography. She is so fucking boring
.

Mrs Mostyn felt a warm wave of vindication despite the revolting language. The girls’ opinion of Miss Combe’s brand of Geography was manifestly as low as her own. Should poor Miss Combe be shown the note? The temptation was all but irresistible. That would wipe the smile off her face, if she were to learn what the girls thought of her precious pebble formation:
fucking boring
. There was more muck on the other side but a tardy twinge of Christian charity prompted Mrs Mostyn to tear the note in two without another glance. She screwed the scraps into a tight ball and lobbed it into the corner bin.
A goal for Mostyn minor!
(One never really lost the knack.)

Chapter 15

Bunty’s eyes were dry the next morning but she had been crying almost all night and no amount of cold water or witch hazel seemed to soothe her swollen and sausagey eyelids. The black rings underneath didn’t look real – old lady make-up: Lady Bracknell, Miss Havisham, Mrs Mostyn.

‘Christ, doll. Look at the state of you,’ said Baker. A rare hug and the tears started again.

‘She spent yesterday morning up in town choosing a new bed. Got to the Tottenham Court Road before the showrooms were even open and tipped the salesman twenty quid to get it delivered today because no-power-human-or-divine was going to make her spend another night in her old bed after
this
.’

‘Is your old man still on the sofa?’ wondered Queenie, who had just arrived with Stott.

‘He’s away on business all this week. Sorting everything out before we
g-go
.’ The last word, a great gasping sob, only quietened when she stuffed a man’s hankie into her mouth.

‘Go?’ Baker’s mouth had dried so suddenly that she almost barked the word.

‘Australia. Mummy didn’t really want to go when they first offered him the transfer, but now I’ve given her no choice, apparently.’

‘
Australia
?’ It didn’t sound any more real when Baker said it out loud, and when she tried to picture it she only saw koalas and eucalyptus leaves. An orange and yellow map showing concentric circles of rainfall (or lack of it).

‘Blimey. She didn’t waste much time.’

‘She was on the phone half the night in floods. “Transported” she called it. All my fault obviously. Dad turned the posting down a couple of months back,’ gabbled Bunty, ‘but they still want him so she made him ring and say he’s changed his mind and yes please can he have a zillion ozzie dollars and house with pool after all please and they said yes so we’re g-going.’ More tears.

When would they go? Where would they live? What would they take? Who would they know? What were the men like? On and bloody on went Stottie and Queenie, like it was just chat.

‘A swimming pool . . .’ drooled Stott.

Baker kept her head down, scrabbling under the bench for her tennis shoes. She ripped out the broken lace and began threading it back in a different pattern, awkwardly pinching the frayed ends of tape through the eyelets with the ragged pads of her nail-less fingertips. She breathed deeply, concentrating hard on reabsorbing the tears gathering in the back of her nose, but her eyes were wet when she met Bunty’s bloodshot glance and it was all she could do not to howl out loud.

As they marched off to assembly Bunty filled Baker in on further details. Big brother Dominic was furious at his parents’ plan to leave the country and Bunty had a bruise on her cheek to prove it.

‘All my fault, he says. I tried telling him that I can’t be the
only
reason we’re going – I can’t be, can I? I’m sure Dad’s got a floozy somewhere, some other reason Ma wants out. Anyway, Dominic insists he wants to stay behind and be a boarder and just doss down with Aunt Marcia in the holidays. Australian schools would be full of
grockles
, Dominic says.’

Dominic had unveiled this plan over supper the previous evening and, although his father was sure he’d see sense eventually, Mrs Bunter-Byng had a horrible feeling he was serious. He could be very stubborn. Once the plates were cleared the two children could hear her screaming and carrying on: that Roy had to
do something
and that she couldn’t go to Australia without her baby. Brother and sister, listening from their usual spot at the top of the stairs, retreated, embarrassed, to their rooms.

Bunty’s mother had spent her life dabbing a sort of conversational concealer over the ugly fact that she preferred one of her children to the other. She had never hidden it particularly well. Yes, true, she was always scrupulously fair when filling stockings or slicing chocolate cakes or deciding bedtimes or smacking anybody but you only had to look at her, only had to watch her brush back his curly golden fringe with the tenderest possible touch of her pearlised coral manicure, to see that Bunty had only scraped silver in this particular race.

It infuriated Baker. Mummies were supposed to be above all that. Weren’t supposed to go off in search of themselves, weren’t supposed to have favourites like a silly little child laying out its foreign doll collection in order of preference. Couldn’t the stupid woman have kept it to herself? It would all have blown over eventually, that creepy crush on her baby boy. Love didn’t stay the same. Give it five years – ghastly girlfriends, debts, in-laws, babies – and love could flood in or leak out, curdle, boil dry, evaporate. It wasn’t for ever – whatever the songs said. Any more than you could decide for ever and always which was your very favourite dress or which was the most comfortable chair in the drawing room. Ask yourself again in ten years’ time. Twenty. Ask when your knees didn’t bend any more. Bunty wouldn’t always have come second.

Founder’s Day preparations meant that Tuesday morning games was cancelled (no sense getting them all sweaty) and school assembly was taken at an unusual lick. There was a rather terse prayer (the shortest in the book) followed by two verses of ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’ played
allegro moderato
by the versatile Miss Batty (the Prizegiving service would be starting at eleven and there was no sense giving them all hymn fatigue) followed by the news headlines. The Upper Third hockey squad had disgraced itself again, and could girls please note that the Biology Lab corridor was out of bounds until the locksmith and the insurance people had made their report (a happy snigger from Baker).

The hall was dressed to look its best. Every girl wore a blazer. There were explosions of iris and pussy willow in two of the four urns and a strong smell of Traffic Wax rising up from the now slightly slippery parquet. Mrs Mostyn had swapped the familiar purple passion-killer for a very tight dress and jacket in a hideous hymn book green.

Baker lived through assembly in a trance of misery at Bunty’s news. When she eventually looked up and scanned the stage she saw that the head girl’s rosewood throne was empty – not like her to miss a speech day. Whispers were being passed down the long rows of canvas chairs. By the time the chain of hisses reached Baker’s end it sounded like ‘knicker wiping’ but was, in fact, ‘nicked a white pin’. The surplus chair left vacant by Alison Hutchinson, the light-fingered head of Nightingale House, was under a cloth in the green room and would now be joined by another from the set because Mrs Mostyn had finally spotted the unearned badge on Linda Sprake’s blazer lapel. Nothing was said, the girl’s name wasn’t even mentioned: just a brief announcement that Heidi Dobrowski had been appointed head girl (and head of Fry House) with immediate effect. Mrs Mostyn cut short the puzzled applause and launched into some heart-warming yawn from
Gladsome Minds
, her delivery unusually impressive. She seemed almost
aroused
by the gravity of the offence.

Baker managed to dodge the others after assembly and hid herself in one of the loos in the junior cloakroom, smoking her way through a new pack of JPS, trying to conceive of a world without Bunty. The imagined future stretched ahead of her, a photograph album with captions but no pictures: Bunty and Baker go flatsharing; Bunty and Baker get jobs; Bunty and Baker get married . . . So much of their future was bundled up together in Baker’s head that Bunty emigrating was like a fiancé dying, or being gazumped or having a miscarriage or failing the eleven plus: a whole chunk of your future cancelled.
And what will you be when you grow up?
People didn’t ask you that any more but, whichever of Miss Batty’s pink folders she ended up in, Baker had never been in any doubt of the only answer that truly mattered.

Things had to change, Baker knew that. School would stop, parents would die, the man of your dreams might turn out to be a nightmare, an ex-husband, a
late
husband even (more room in the bed; less mess on the floor). But Bunty would have been a
Diorella
-scented shoulder to cry on when he dumped you for a dolly bird, been around for a long boozy lunch after the divorce came through, been there to squeeze your hand and pass the hip flask in the first car at the funeral, rung you up when another old girl dropped dead or had twins.

But not from
Sydney
. Nobody ever just rang from Sydney. And even if they did, it was only ever thrifty, three-minute hellos, like Spam and Old Mother Spam: fine-thank-you-how-are-you-I-never-interfere.

The tightness in her chest as she sat curled up on the loo felt like a great big blood pressure cuff, binding her ribs, making it harder and harder to breathe. The sobs gave her away.

‘
There
you are.’

Baker could hardly see Stottie for tears as the other girl sidled into the cubicle and wedged herself into the ledge of the narrow window below the cistern.

‘Bunty’s been looking everywhere for you.’

‘I’ll never see her again.’

‘Of course you will.
Course
we’ll see her again. She won’t have
died
. She’ll just be living somewhere else.’

‘In Australia. Might as well be dead.’

Talking made it much worse. She glared up at Stottie, snotty strings gumming her mouth together as she wailed.

‘I don’t want to
grow old
without her.’

Anyone but Stottie would have sniggered, but Stottie wasn’t sniggering and Baker was too tear-blind to see the stricken look that opened and closed on her friend’s face the millisecond before she patted Baker’s hand and settled for silver.

‘She might come back.’

‘Don’t be daft. They’re
emigrating
.’

‘No, I mean once she’s left school. Come back here, get a job. We’ll all see her again. She won’t stay there for ever, she can’t do . . .’ Stottie’s certainty shaken by the thought of a swimming pool.

She made Baker wash her face and comb her hair. Stottie herself was all tidied away in readiness for Founder’s Day and her Lady Henry handshake. She produced the all-important polythene bag from her inside pocket, then did the necessary with the contents of a twist of cling film.

‘Hope to God my mum never finds out.’

‘Nothing in the diary.’ said Baker, tartly.

Lady Henry had been planting a tree, a crab apple, and had had to change her shoes in the back of the car. Lady Henry was much in demand. She had few obvious qualifications but she arrived in a Bentley, wore pearls and a hat and her name looked well in school magazines and local papers whenever she presented a cup or cut a ribbon or let tiny crumbs of mortar trickle from the blades of gilded ceremonial trowels.

The headmistress took the floor, her gown flowing impressively over her tweeds, her blue-black hair held in tight, cartoonish waves by the best part of a can of lacquer, the gas cabinet pong cut with a few dabs of long-fermented
Blue Grass
. Applause was the life-blood of any Founder’s Day. Dr O’Brien, like Julia (and unlike Mrs Mostyn), had learned precisely how best to harness the energies of four hundred bored but excitable adolescent girls: noise and plenty of it. Like a music hall barker, she began to talk up the delights of their guest – distinguished, tireless charity work, active on many committees, a true Fawcettian and so on – and cranked up a fairly respectable ovation as Lady Henry’s clean navy courts made their way to the platform where she was installed behind a refectory table, its lino hidden by a length of red plush from the drama cupboard and dotted with a burglar’s wet dream of silver plate.