BEXHILL SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, Assembly (9 page)

“Good. I can
just about afford it.” She paused. She could see two other women
approaching, carrying clothes which they obviously intended to try
on. Sally winked at Linda, always a sign that some mischief was
afoot, and disappeared back into the cubicle. Linda could hear her
changing out of the dress and pulling on her jeans. Then there was
silence. The two other women were waiting impatiently. A shop
assistant came past and the one of the ladies asked whether there
was a second changing room.

“No, there’s
just the one,” then - raising her voice a little - she asked
whether everything was all right in the cubicle.

“Almost done,”
came Sally’s voice over the partition, followed by a loud
‘raspberry’. Linda flinched with embarrassment.

Another minute
passed, during which the waiting ladies eyed Linda as though the
wait was her fault. Inside the cubicle, Sally licked her forefinger
again, pressed her lips against it and blew another raspberry.

Then, in a
penetrating and crystal tone, came Sally’s plaintive voice:

“Hey, there’s
no paper in here!”

Linda choked,
took one look at the aghast faces of the two ladies, and fled,
convulsed with laughter. At that moment Sally opened the door,
looked the ladies in the eyes, and said “No paper. Better bring you
own” as she marched towards the check-out.

Linda was
waiting for her at the top of the escalator.

“You’re
awful
! Those poor ladies - they’ll probably have
coronaries!”

“It made you
laugh, anyway. Now it’s your turn.”

Linda eyed
Sally. They’d been here too often before: one egging on the other.
It usually ended in disaster.

“All right, let
me think. Anyway, Mum wanted me to get some stuff from the
supermarket, so let’s go there.”

They made their
way to Tesco and Linda tossed a few items into a shopping cart. She
became frustrated by a supercilious customer who insisted on
blocking the aisle with her trolley as she slowly scanned each
shelf, taking products down and examining their labels in great
detail.

“Excuse me,”
said Linda, “may we get past?”

The lady gave
her a frosty glance. “You should learn patience. It’s a virtue, you
know.” She returned to the label, making no attempt to move the
well-laden cart. Linda looked at Sally, who shrugged and silently
mouthed “Silly bitch”. The lady added the can she had been reading
to her trolley and, making no attempt to allow the girls to pass,
moved slowly on down the aisle. Linda looked at her closely. She
had the arrogant, pompous look of a ‘pillar of the establishment’.
She wore a heavy tweed two-piece suit and a hat with a feather. Her
shoes were of the ‘sensible’ variety.

“Front pew,”
Linda whispered to Sally. “Husband reads the lesson and invites the
vicar back to the Hall for sherry afterwards. They last had sex on
VE Day in 1945, and even then, she wasn’t very willing.” Sally
smiled - Linda had captured the essence of the woman. They shuffled
along in the wretched woman’s wake.

A moment later,
Linda’s eyes lit up. “Aha!” she said, conspiratorially.

“What do you
mean - ‘Aha’? Has her girdle snapped?”

“Patience,”
Linda replied. “It’s a virtue.”

As they
approached the end of the row of shelves, ‘Lady Muck’ was carefully
comparing different brands of toothpaste. Linda quickly grabbed
something off the opposite shelf and, to Sally’s astonishment,
deftly inserted it in amongst the other items in the woman’s
trolley. Sally raised a quizzical eyebrow when Linda caught her
eye. Linda winked.

As they turned
the corner at the end of the row, Linda managed to overtake and
propelled their trolley quickly to the end of a counter, close to
the check-out station.

“Wait,” she
said to the perplexed Sally. “Waiting is also a virtue,
probably.”

When she saw
‘Lady Muck’ approaching the cashier along the neighbouring line of
shelves, she judged the moment carefully, then shoved her trolley
quickly towards the till. The carts clashed.

“Look where
you’re going, you stupid girl!”

“Oh, so sorry!”
said Linda, “Please, madam, you go first.”

“Thank you,”
said the tweedy figure frostily. “I should hope so, too. It’s rare
to find good manners in the young these days.”

She started
pulling items out of the cart and placing them on the counter. She
eyed the two girls.

“You’re at the
grammar school, are you?”

“No, ma’am,
we’re at Bexhill Girls’ School, if you know it.”

“Of course I
know it.” She was paying no attention to what she was unloading,
simply placing things randomly on the counter for the sales girl to
ring up on the till. “Might have known you were from a private
school, you wouldn’t find those state school oiks showing any
civility.”

“Thank you,
ma’am.” Linda was overdoing the unctuousness, but wanted to hold
the silly woman’s attention. “Were you at Bexhill, by any
chance?”

“Good Lord, no.
I was at a proper school, but I shouldn’t think you’d ever have
heard of it.”

She’d finished
unloading her basket and the cashier was ringing up the items one
by one. Linda held her breath.

“Excuse me,
madam,” said the cashier, “did you realise there’s a
‘two-for-the-price-of-one’ offer on these today?”

“On what?”
demanded the tweed two-piece.

“On these.” She
held up a box of condoms. “You can get twelve for the same price as
six.”

“What’s that
you’re holding?”

“Durex -
there’s a special on them this week.”

By now, both
Linda and Sally were having the gravest difficulty keeping a
straight face.

“Where did they
come from?” There was now a tinge of
angst
to the imperious
voice.

“Dunno,
Birmingham maybe.”

“I meant, how
did they get into my shopping. I most certainly didn’t put them
there.”

“Look, madam,
if you’re embarrassed, I can go and get the other pack myself.”
Linda could have hugged the salesgirl.

“I don’t want
any blasted contraceptives. Just throw them away, will you.”

“You sure,
dear? They were in your basket.”

“Of course I’m
sure, and don’t you dare call me ‘dear’”.

“Very well
then, madam, but I’ll have to call the supervisor to credit you.
I’ve already rung them up.”

“To hell with
your supervisor, I’ll just pay for them. Now please get on with
it.”

“Well, I can’t
charge you if you’re not going to take them. It would confuse our
stock-taking.”

“All right, all
right. I’ll take them then. Just put them in with the other things,
but please get on with it, girl.”

“So you’re sure
you don’t want the other pack, even though it’s free?”

Linda and Sally
wondered whether the girl was deliberately winding up ‘Lady Muck’,
or whether she was just thick.

“Listen to what
I say, girl!” roared Tweedy. “I don’t want those wretched things at
all and I certainly don’t want two packets of them! Now will you
just give me my bill?”

“I getting very
confused, madam,” said poor Tracy, ringing a buzzer beside her
seat. “First you said you didn’t want the condoms, then you said
you’d take them, now you say you don’t want them after all. I’ll
have to get the supervisor to sort this all out.”

“Cordelia!” a
plumy voice boomed. A second tweed-clad figure marched out from
between two rows of shelves. Linda instantly labelled her ‘Tweedle
Dee’.

“Cordelia,
dear! Didn’t expect to see you here - I thought Johnson did the
shopping for you.”

“Oh, hello,
Margaret. It’s Johnson’s day off, so I thought I’d pick up a few
things myself. Didn’t expect to have to deal with a stupid girl
like this.” She indicated Tracy, who looked up expectantly at
Grace, the supervisor, who now stood beside her.

“Now, madam,
how can I help you?” asked Grace, with as much sweetness as she
could muster. Grace’s ethnic background was West Indian, so she
treated Cordelia to a wide and gleaming smile.

“Just tell this
wretched creature here to get on with my bill. I don’t have all day
to waste.”

“So what appear
to be de problem, Tracy?” Grace raised her eyebrows.

“Well, Mrs
Grace, this lady doesn’t seem to be able to decide whether she
wants these condoms or not, and I’ve already rung them up. I think
I may have confused her when I told her there’s a special offer on
them.”

“Good heavens,
Cordelia, I hope you’re not buying those for Veronica. She’s much
too young!” Tweedle Dee butted in.

“I’m not buying
them for Veronica,” boomed Cordelia. “Now can we just get on with
it?”

“Oh, I see, I
see
,” said Tweedle Dee, looking sideways at Cordelia. “Well,
if they’re offering a second pack, I’ll take it for Buffy - might
get him interested again. Maybe Miles could give him a few
tips.”

At that moment,
an extraordinary figure joined the group. Linda hadn’t noticed that
Sally was missing, but now what were unmistakeably Sally’s
jean-clad legs arrived from between two aisles, surmounted by a
bizarre costume. It consisted of a white, plastic dustbin-liner,
the top of which had been knotted into what, if imagination was
stretched to the limit, could conceivably have been interpreted as
a representation of a condom. Two eye-holes had been hastily
prodded into the plastic a few inches below the knot. The
apparition held a clipboard, which, from her angle, Linda could see
contained no paper and so presumably had just been seized in haste
off one of the shelves. The other hand held a pencil. The pencil
had not been sharpened.

With an
appalling simulation of a Birmingham accent, the vision spoke.

“’Scoose me,
ma’am. We’re condoocting a survey amungst our laidy coostomers to
ensure we provoide complete satisfaction. We’d mooch appreciate
your ‘elp. Now, first question, could you tell me ‘ow often you and
yer ‘oosband ‘ave sex?”

Cordelia turned
puce. Linda quickly disappeared down an aisle, doubled over with
laughter. Grace’s eyes grew to saucer-like proportions. Tracy’s
mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Only Tweedle Dee found her
voice.

“If she’s like
Buffy, once a year. After the Hunt Ball.”

After that,
things happened quickly.

Cordelia
shouted “Blast the lot of you!” and tried to barge through the gate
at the till. It wouldn’t budge.

“Open the damn
thing!” she yelled. By now other customers were becoming attracted
by the commotion. One of them, by chance, happened to be a casual
correspondent for the local newspaper. He had voted Labour all his
life and didn’t much like ‘toffs’, as he called them. He reached
into his pocket for the notebook he always carried with him.

Tracy regarded
the struggling, tweedy figure in front of her. She resisted the
temptation to press the ‘OPEN’ button which would release the gate.
She hadn’t really considered such matters before, but she was -
quite independently of the journalist - reaching the conclusion
that she didn’t much like toffs either.

“Don’t you want
your things?” she asked. “Not even the Durex?”

“I don’t want
anything from your bloody shop and I’m never coming here again. Now
let me out!”

The crowd was
greatly enjoying the spectacle.

“Say ‘please’”,
said Tracy.

Cordelia was
now apoplectic. “Just open this wretched gate, damn you!”

“Now madam, I
don’ like de way yo speakin’ to ma staff here. Please will yo calm
down and act civilised.”

“What would you
know about civilisation?” the purple-faced matron almost spat the
words. “I’m sure it doesn’t exist in whatever jungle you come
from.”

Racism,
especially overt, is never a good idea. It was an especially bad
idea when applied to Grace, who had suffered her unfair share of
abuse over the ten years since she’d arrived from Jamaica, hoping
to make a better life for herself and her family. She had developed
a way of dealing with such situations.

She turned to
Tweedle Dee. “Perhaps, madam, yo’ would like to ask yo’ fren’ to
cool down. Maybe she might even want to apologise to young Tracy
here. Before I decide whether to call da police,” she added with
slow deliberation.

Tweedle Dee
could see that things were getting out of hand and that a
‘spectacle’ was being created, that worst nightmare of the upper
classes.

“Cordelia dear,
why don’t we just put your things in your bag, pay the bill, and go
and have a nice cup of tea somewhere?” She started placing
Cordelia’s groceries, including the disputed condoms, into her
capacious shopping bag. She glanced up at Grace and whispered
conspiratorially.

“Poor thing’s a
little overwrought. She didn’t mean what she said just now. She’s
got nothing against blacks: why, I even saw her speaking to one the
other day.”

Grace’s smile
was fixed. “Well dat’s OK den. Tracy, take de lady’s money an’ open
de gate.”

Cordelia and
Tweedle Dee swept through and made their imperious way out of the
store.

Tracy looked up
at Grace.

“Thanks, Mrs
Grace. But when did you start using that funny way of talking?”

“Oh, sometimes
you have to play the role people expect of you.” She patted Tracy
on the shoulder.

The crowd began
to dissipate. The journalist folded his notebook and put it back in
his pocket. His story, under the headline ‘Commotion in
supermarket’, appeared on page 3 of the next edition of the
Courier. Johnson discretely hid the paper before Sir Miles or Lady
Cordelia saw it.

The ‘condom’
melted away down an aisle, muttering “See you outside” to
Linda.

***

The girls were
enjoying their day very much. They walked arm-in-arm down the High
Street, replaying the scene in the supermarket and dissolving into
fits of giggles at each turn of the story. Suddenly, Sally gripped
Linda’s arm. “Look!” She nodded to the window of a café on the
opposite side of the road. In the window, Lady Cordelia and Tweedle
Dee were sipping cups of tea.