The Following Girls (14 page)

‘See you round the sheds in a minute. I’ve changed my mind about getting some chocolate.’ Baker picked up a disgusting great marshmallow biscuit thing and waved it (a funny look from Bunty).

Baker watched her friend shoulder through the quad door and out of sight before binning her unwanted biscuit and fleeing back through the refectory to the ground floor cloaks.

The room’s two-tone grey paint job switched from gunmetal to dishwater at about tit height with a black gloss tide mark where the two shades met. The shiny grey ceiling was beaded with chilly white dishes of light, a dozen at least, but the thick glass of the shades and the thrifty wattage meant that they had small impact on the gloom (not a light to read name tapes by). Beneath the coat pegs hundreds of outdoor shoes and plimsolls lay trapped inside the wire-fronted benches like lace-up lab rats.

Baker slipped into one of the cubicles, delved into her bag and finally unearthed Julia’s scrap of paper. The note had been written on the inside of a chewing gum wrapper, the letters scratched onto the chalky surface of the foil’s white lining, its edge serrated like a blade, a minty smell still clinging to the inside. Just one line in rough capitals – as if written with the wrong hand: ‘
meet me
.
organ loft
.
tomorrow
1.15’. No signature. No chances taken.

The school organ had breathed its last before Baker even started. The retirement of the only mistress who could play it and the lack of interest shown by even the more musical Fawcettians meant that the restoration fund was a long way down the head’s list of priorities (above ‘redecorate sick bay’ but some way below ‘re-turf vandalised front lawn’ and ‘query twinning with Dusseldorf’).

The ‘loft’ (really just a room full of dusty pipes) was secured by latch and padlock – but the Mandies (who habitually checked all doors and routinely hid any key they found) had made short work of that, thanks to the tiny screwdriver on Queenie’s multi-purpose knife. Dry, warm, slightly spooky, it ought to have made the perfect breaktime hidey hole, but the floor was almost all plasterboard and there was only really room for one bum on the joists – last thing you wanted was one of your size fives poking through the assembly hall ceiling. The bike sheds and loos made safer (if chillier) hideouts.

What did Julia want a meeting for? Why didn’t she just report her to Mrs Mostyn and be done with it? Had she had a change of heart about shopping her to the Drumlin? Or had she decided to dream up her own punishment instead?

Such a lot of girls left after the fifth form that anyone left standing was automatically made a prefect, whether or not they were Good Prefect Material, and some of them could be downright sadistic. The previous year’s Upper Sixth had ganged up on a scholarship first former they’d all taken a dislike to: Claudia something, very tall, very swotty, played the bass recorder. They had decided that her old man was a dustman and threatened to tell everybody and would sing the special song whenever she walked past, pinching her hard where it wouldn’t show. Made her cry. She left at the end of her first year. Turned out her old man was nothing of the kind, not an
actual
dustman anyway, no dustman’s hat or anything. Just worked in an office in the cleansing department.

‘Did he live in a council flat?’ demanded Bunty at the time.

‘Denbigh Avenue? Doubt it.’

‘And what
are
gorblimey trousers?’

Julia knew that Baker was within an ace of getting thrown out (
I’ve got my eye on you
), knew she had only to report her for smoking to get her suspended at the very least but what did a meeting in the organ loft have to do with it? What was she after? A pep talk? It could hardly be blackmail? Or could it?

Chapter 8

Queenie wasn’t the only girl who’d given up Chemistry. Lured labwards by the promise of a white coat and the mad scientist fun of drawing fantastical Professor Branestawm experiments with their nifty little plastic stencils, the would-be chemists soon became baffled by the alphanumeric soup of the periodic table. Trouble was that it wasn’t especially popular with staff either – as Dr O’Brien had long ago discovered. Any Chemistry graduate with half a brain got a job pouring test tube contents into beakers in ‘industry’ (if the photos in the ICI leaflets in Miss Batty’s filing cabinet were any guide). The dregs of the university Chemistry faculties assumed teaching would be an option once they graduated, but they had little stamina for the work and even less aptitude and seldom lasted more than a year or two.

Mildred Fawcett’s last upper school Chemistry mistress had left mid-term under something of a cloud. Her replacement, conjured into being at terrifyingly short notice, was, quite unprecedentedly, a man.

‘Male?’ marvelled Queenie.

‘Definitely says
Mister
Mars on the noticeboard. Emergency appointment, apparently. Started Monday but he’s been ducking assembly, jammy bugger’.

There was no one in the lab, male or female, when they filed in. Stott grabbed the back bench and the three Mandies settled down to chat.

‘Have you worked out what you’re going to say at your careers interview?’

‘I’m considering Hairdressing.’

Miss Batty had lent Baker a copy of
Modern Careers for Girls
to prepare her for that afternoon’s advice session. It was fifteen years out of date.

‘
“The true hairdresser,
”
’ read Baker,
‘
“must have an innate artistic sense and a creative flair . . . physical fitness is essential for this career.
”
’

‘It always says that,’ said Bunty. ‘What if you had a wooden leg?’

‘A one-legged hairdresser? Don’t be daft. Do you know any one-legged hairdressers? I rest my case.’ She continued flicking through. ‘How about Dentistry? “Physical fitness is essential, as is first-class eyesight.” Doesn’t say anything about hairdressers needing perfect eyesight.’

‘Aha. Well that’s Tash’s feather cut explained.’

‘I might just say Secretary. Got to say something.’

‘Secretary? You can do better than that.’ Stottie all peculiar and serious as per usual. ‘You’re so lucky – you could do
anything
.’

Brian, Vic and pals had set their hearts on becoming secretaries –
bilingual
secretaries. Strange the way they all wanted the same job – not like they could all save desks for each other. Baker looked across to the next bench where the gang were sitting.

‘Do you think they’re all from another planet? Like that film with all the creepy blonde kids.’

‘
Village of the Bland
.’

‘They’re definitely telepathetic. Look at them.’

All six had pulled their blue science overalls as tight as they would go and secured the ties in the same slipped reef knot on the left side. Crossed legs all coated in an identical mildew of ash grey stretch nylon, lips subtly smeared with a lick of Vaseline from the same slim tin.

‘Did you really say Nursing at your last Careers thingy?’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Bunty, ‘kept the Batty quiet.’

‘And what d’you really want to be?’

‘Wanna be a Bunny.’ Bunty rolled her torso, emphasising her cup size.

‘You’re a silly moo, you are. You said you didn’t want to be a skivvy and a Bunny’s just a skivvy with ears. And all those old leches. And all that
wiping
. Bad as nursing.’

‘Yeah, but the tips are bigger. Nobody tips nurses, just cheap chocolates, and anything beats typing, whatever Bryony says – even if it is bi-bloody-lingual. What the hell do they do all day, anyway?’ continued Bunty. ‘
Cher monsieur
,
merci pour votre correspondence
,
wollen sie im Schwartzwald spazieren gehen
?
Quel est votre sujet préféré
?’

Not that Bryony’s secretarial fantasies went anywhere near the actual typing side. Bryony pictured herself in a maroon pencil skirt and blow-dried page boy, booking plane tickets, travelling to business conferences, buying duty free scent and alien brands of aspirin (in fluent French, obviously). Not messing about filing documents or opening post or reconciling petty cash. There would be people for that (monolingual people). There was usually a boss in Bryony’s picture: young, blue-suited, a man of distinction (big spender).

Still no sign of Mr Mars who was, as they spoke, panting up the hill to the front gate. The arrival of a male Chemistry teacher had unsettled the senior common room. The only men’s lavatories were the one in the Music block and the brick outhouse used by Mr Dingle the school caretaker. The existing staff agreed that the simplest solution would be to reallocate the headmistress’s private privy. And do you know, actually, yes, Dr O’Brien had in fact given the matter a great deal of thought and no, she concluded, it would set a potentially dangerous precedent to give ground to that extent, dignity of the office and so forth, and Dr O’Brien decided that, on reflection, the walk to the Music block would do their new colleague no harm at all.

Derek Mars had underestimated the time it would take to get from his designated lavatory (blue paper, most amusing) to the main building. Pins could have been dropped as he finally crossed from the lab door to his bench beneath the wide, green blackboard. The tweed jacket and old whatsits tie were regulation issue but the cut of his cavalry twill Sta-Prest strides was unexpected.

‘Ooh,’ whispered Baker. ‘Do clock the trousers.’

‘Gorblimey,’ said Bunty. ‘How does he get them on, do you reckon? Do his feet unscrew?’

Baker, suddenly inspired, got to her feet and began to applaud. The new master’s face quivered suspiciously. Was this normal? No one had said anything about this in the staff room. Other things, yes, but not this. The rest of the class joined Baker (say what you liked about them, they were a game crowd) and he reached the front bench to a respectable ovation. He signalled his puzzlement to a girl whose spectacles and keen-as-mustard front row seat inspired confidence.

‘It’s traditional, sir.’

Was it? And how would he ever find out? The staff room was still falling silent whenever he entered it – he half suspected them of passing notes.

Derek Mars had had every intention of giving up teaching. His very first job after qualifying had been at a large Church of England school: single sex, selective,
absurdly
well-equipped. The head of department was a former Rugby Blue and regularly bullied the headmaster and board of governors (not a BSc between them) into buying whatever kit he fancied: infra-red mass spectrometer, electron microscope, you name it.

The boys assigned to Derek Mars had been loud and large but they weren’t delinquent or idle. They passed exams, moved on to good technical colleges, a few even went to university. Big, brash, hairy, confident, sarcastic boys, boys with a sixth sense for weakness, boys who twigged at once that Mr Mars was not a master to fear or obey.

The headmaster had called him in for a fireside chat at the end of his first term (said it was ‘routine’ but none of the other new masters was summoned) in which he was told he would soon ‘learn the ropes’. Did he play golf at all? He’d said no but the old fool persisted with his fatuous analogy –
yips
, forsooth – and bleated on about how it was probably just honeymoon nerves and would all come out in the wash – rather an off-colour metaphor mixture, Derek Mars felt.

But he never did ‘find his form’, never did lose that feeling of almost weepy panic when faced with twenty pairs of unforgiving adolescent eyes, seasoned critics of the genre who’d seen the whole thing done better and more persuasively elsewhere, who saved their plaudits for virtuoso performers like Harris with his tricksy little packets of gun cotton.

By his second year even the new intake had been primed to watch for his nervous stammer, his clumsiness with laboratory glassware – ‘C-c-c-careful sir!’ Mars was barely taller than his second form students and was skinny with it. They called him Stinker, apparently. The can’t-be-bothered dullness of the sobriquet was depressing in itself. The department head rejoiced in the name of ‘Flash’ Harris thanks to his meretricious antics with primitive explosives.

And as Derek Mars inched through the syllabus with his middle school mediocrities (a senior colleague had nabbed the A streams and Flash Harris creamed off the sixth form) he began to feel more and more as if he’d been written into one of those plays his mother took him to, dry as common room sherry, that told of misanthropic schoolmasters who couldn’t understand why it was that boys never teased them or sent them Christmas cards or asked them which girl to ask out or which horse to back. Harris had all of that: faintly louche, avuncular (but not like any uncles Derek Mars had ever had).

Stinker had only just survived his second year, kept going by the comforting thought that he had given notice. He’d spent both Christmas and Easter holidays applying for jobs but was only offered the humblest bottle-washing lab work with lousy hours, the meagre salary notionally enhanced by promises of early promotion once he ‘knew the ropes’ (more blasted ropes).