The Following Girls (32 page)

There was a man in a suit at the café’s corner table behind the workmen and he was gobbling up the monstrous ‘breakfast special’ as advertised on the blackboard outside – two eggs, bacon, mushrooms, sausage, beans and ‘a slice’ (didn’t say what of). There was something wrong with the skin on his hand, a big, Ceylon-shaped patch that hadn’t been coloured in properly. Baker had a sudden unwelcome vision of the rest of the uncorrected atlas on his chest, his thighs. She carried on watching as he made each million-calorie forkful of fried food before finally squeegee-ing up the egg yolk and tomato sauce with his last square of fried bread. G-ross.

Baker paid for her tea, feeling oddly daddyish (as she always did) at leaving her fourpence change for the waitress next to her uneaten second biscuit. She decided to take the bus the three stops up the hill (forty-four lengths of Australian crawl was enough exercise for anybody) but the next bus that came was full and an angry conductress – a slimline Snog Monster – was relishing her strict one-in-one-out policy. Baker leaned against the glass wall of the shelter, out of the wind, resisting the urge to light a cigarette. Someone would be bound to see, some beady-eyed prefect eager to pass on the news that Amanda Baker’s latest copybook was now as blotted as all the others had been. And right at that very moment, when her head was so full of prefects and of cravings for the sweet rush of nicotine, she saw Julia.

She was with a group of girls from the school up the hill beyond Mildred Fawcett, and they were all slouched against the newsagent’s window and pulling optimistically at the steel drawers of the fag machine. Julia had taken a tube of toffees from the pocket of her blazer and was handing them out with an automatic, Buntyish largesse that was sure to make the new girl very popular. The mismatched games kit was gone and, like Baker, she was kitted out in a new summer uniform, but the cheap-and-nasty striped fabric of the huge un-Fawcett frock, the chunky black purse-belt and heavy brogues made her look like an off-duty nurse. She hadn’t been expelled, nothing so common, nothing the Fawcett governors need debate; she had been ‘asked to leave’ like a drunk in a pub.

The lovely auburn hair had been feather cut by a blind, one-legged hairdresser and the cornflower eyes, like those of everyone in her new gang, were crudely outlined with a ring of kohl pencil. Baker wondered how Baz felt about the new look.

Their spark of recognition was immediately spotted by a big scary girl with pierced ears and chipped burgundy nail varnish.

‘D’you know each other?’

‘My old school: year below.’

Julia handed the rest of her sweets to the girl and ambled across to the shelter.

‘Still there then?’

‘Just this term, Dad says. Wants me to go to St Ursula’s next year.’

‘Snobby.’

‘What’s yours like?’

Julia’s mouth narrowed and widened: half leer, half sneer.

‘Different.’

Funny how just a few smears of black wax, a few random snips of the scissors could defuse a person’s loveliness.

The new pals would all like her so long as she was free with her sweets and fags. And dope? Might very well (it was a very Unschool school) but they wouldn’t worship and adore, all the glamour had gone. The bloom. And it was all Baker’s fault. If Baker hadn’t caved in to O’Brien, if Baker had kept her mouth shut, told no tales, then Julia would still be at Fawcett Upper leading the cheers for the house tennis. Hip-hip?

‘I told them it was you,’ Baker said baldly.

Hard to say why it had to be said. She must have known.

‘
I
told them it was
you
. Fat lot of good that did me; still got chucked out.’

Julia gave her another quick look of dislike then turned on her stacked heel and rejoined her mates as they jumped the queue for the bus and barged up the stairs past tutting passengers to blow smoke rings and swear and generally embody the ethos.

Old Dingle was unpadlocking the gate as Baker arrived and she was alone in the classroom: at least twenty minutes till Registration. Stottie was usually in early but there was no Stottie just now because Amanda Jane Stott had been suspended. Mrs Mostyn caught her consulting the equations of motion she had inscribed in Biro on the top of her thigh in readiness for a physics test and there was to be a governors’ meeting to decide whether she would be allowed to keep her scholarship. No more scholarship would mean no more Stottie. ‘She’ll probably end up with Julia Smith. Her parents could never afford the fees.’ (Or so Bryony had said.)

Baker felt in her tote bag for her homework and spotted the striped edges of Bunty’s latest air letter. Warned off diary-keeping, Bunty wrote almost daily: long, rambling letters about beach barbecues in the balmy autumn sunshine and a man named Jason who drove a convertible but hadn’t been circumcised and thought Bunty was twenty next birthday.

Mummy Gloria had picked out a house – heated pool, sun deck, walk-in closets and an ‘open-plan conversation pit’ – and she was coming back to London to mastermind the sale of the house and careful packing of her precious Imari dinner service. Mummy also had plans to throw cash at Dominic and somehow persuade him to give Australia a try. He could have his own car, jammy bugger. Dominic had been unimpressed. He could have a bloody car anyway, surely. All his friends were getting cars when they left school. What sort of car? demanded Mummy, who hadn’t stopped fretting about it in case they bought the wrong sort and he turned his nose up. The Smeatons had bought their eldest a car so irredeemably naff it had yet to leave the garage. Imp? Was that a car? Mummy had asked (she was clueless about cars). MGs were smart, weren’t they? Perhaps Roy would run to an MG out of his relocation allowance? Did they have MGs in Australia?

Mummy Gloria had no plans to buy Bunty a car but they’d have to eventually. All her new friends could drive. She would be staying with one of them while her mother was back in London: Mimi, her new best friend. Mimi could drive; Mimi had her own phone in her bedroom; Mimi wore false eyelashes to parties. There seemed to be quite a lot of parties. Bunty’s last letter had given a blowjob-by-blowjob account of the thrash held to celebrate the sixteenth birthday of a girl called Arlene who’d got a Swiss watch and a gold A on a chain and had worn a burnt orange halter-necked maxi-dress to blow out the candles on a cake shaped like a giant smiley badge. Bunty was getting the exact same maxi-dress in burgundy and what in Christ’s name was she going to wear under it with her boobs and everything and Mimi’s mum had cut her hair the same as Mimi’s and some bloke called Garth (who
was
circumcised – like Baker was keeping score) thought they were twins and Bunty was saving up for a gold A like Arlene’s because nobody had to call her Bunty any more thank God.

Baker frowned at the letter. It was definitely Bunty’s writing. She tried picturing scruffy Bunty in false eyelashes and a convertible, tried picturing a Bunty who cared how her hair was cut. A feeling like pain seemed to hum through her but the sensation was muffled, as if the pain were happening next door, or next year. A lot of things felt like that. Even when Dad shouted something at her it wasn’t loud any more: like a man two gardens away, like something upstairs she couldn’t be bothered to fetch. No real urgency. Nothing to do with her. Not her problem.

Baker scrunched the blue sheet into a ball and volleyed it into the waste paper basket under Mrs Lorimer’s desk.

The form room was gradually filling up. Almost last to arrive were Bryony, Victoria and Natasha who was arm in arm with Queenie. They all called her Mandy and she didn’t even mind.

‘Have you remembered your novel?’

It was Beverly Snell who had hurried in early for English monitoring porpoises. All the novels were due in today after their final Easter polishing. Miss Gleet had left her a cardboard box to put them all in. It had held forty-eight packets of smoky bacon flavour crisps and there was every chance it wouldn’t hold the weight of thirty novels.

She was still hovering by Baker’s desk.

‘Amanda?’

Amanda
. Nobody called Baker Baker any more.

Beverly beamed dimly down at her.

‘I’d love to read yours. You can read mine if you like. Does yours have a happy ending?’

‘No. Yes,’ said Baker. ‘No.’

‘Is it finished?’

‘I’ve just got one last bit to do,’ said Baker. ‘Shan’t be a tick.’

Baker took
The Snapdragon Harvest
from her desk and began copying out the final sentences that she’d scribbled in her rough book the previous evening. The fringe on her new pageboy fell forward and she could pretend not to see Queenie, arm in arm with Tash and lusting over one of the pin ups of the boy wonder in Brian’s latest comic.

‘Very snogworthy.’ (One of Tash’s words.)

Queenie and her new friends had all been to a pub disco at the weekend: worn bowling shirts, drunk Pernod and blackcurrant, won erections from beardless boys drenched in after shave as they shuffled round the hall to slow soul music (the food of lurve).

Baker crunched a new blue cartridge into her fountain pen and began copying.

She lowered herself into the cold chair and quivered with misery

Damn: ‘quivered’ again. She tilted her head back, closed her eyes and breathed deep:
Shook
?
Trembled
?
Oscillated
? Perfect: vintage Gleet. The English mistress was giving a prize to the best novel. Baker opened her eyes and squinted up at the ceiling. Every single one of the drawing pins had gone . . .

. . . oscillated with misery: never to see him again, never again feel the dread heat of his quick, dark hand. She looked across to the window sill with its urn of desiccated snapdragons, the blossoms an emblem of all her withered hopes. She felt rather than heard the slam of the taxi door, the fearless, bright step on the crushed cinder path – an intruder? But it was a step she knew, a step she loved and dreaded. In a moment his nerveless hand had swung the oak barrier clear of his path and she was locked in the maximum security of his imprisoning arms.

‘
You came back!’ she quivered.

‘
Yes. Yes. Yes
!
’

Baker crossed a few Ts, then took a set square from her smart new tin and drew a short line under her work with a red felt-tip. All done. Double tennis later.

Acknowledgements

This is a novel about friends, parents and teachers but it is not about my own friends, parents or teachers and any similarities are entirely coincidental. It is essentially a story about growing old, about shrinking horizons and the gradual death of the angry teenager inside.

Kyran Joughin and my husband Peter Mulvey kindly read the early drafts. My agent Anna Webber has been hugely supportive and Helen Garnons-Williams, my editor at Bloomsbury, improves every text she touches.

Many dear friends helped me relive the teenage years. I would especially like to thank Ismene Brown, Caroline Davidson, Fiona Green, Caroline Griffiths, Susannah Herbert, Caroline Miller, Victoria Merrill, Victoria Pile and my beloved daughter Lily Mulvey for sharing their thoughts and memories. Most of all I would like to thank the poet Helen Buckingham, a girl who refused to follow and to whom this book is affectionately dedicated.

A Note on the Author

Louise Levene is the author of
A Vision of Loveliness
, which was a BBC
Book at Bedtime
and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and
Ghastly Business
. She has been the dance critic of the
Sunday Telegraph
since 1998 but has also been an advertising copywriter, a window dresser, a radio presenter, an office cleaner, a crossword editor, a university tutor, a college professor and a saleslady. She lives in London with her husband and their two children.

Also Available by Louise Levene

Ghastly Business

London, 1929. A girl is strangled in an alley, the mangled corpse of a peeping Tom is found in a railway tunnel and the details of the latest trunk murder are updated hourly in the evening papers. Into this world steps Dora Strang, doctor’s daughter and filing clerk to the country’s preeminent pathologist, Alfred Kemble. Thrilled by the post-mortems and court cases, Dora is further fascinated by Kemble himself, a glamorous and enigmatic war hero. But her job holds several surprises and as things take a distinctly ghastly turn the tabloid journalists sharpen their pencils in morbid anticipation . . .