The Following Girls (2 page)

Bang in the middle of the corkboard was a plastic-covered copy of the school photograph and there on the back row were Amanda Baker, Amanda McQueen, Amanda Stott and Bunty, alias Amanda Bunter-Byng: the Four Mandies. They sat unsmiling in a sea of smiles, hair trussed madly into the side ponytails they’d given each other the moment Mrs Mostyn, perched just off-centre in her cap and gown, had completed her last-minute inspection. Stott Minor was sitting cross-legged at her feet in a stiff new blazer, her face caught mid-sneeze as if recoiling in horror from her closeness to the Snog Monster.

Baker hastily shouldered her book bag. With Queenie and Stottie off playing mattresses in the form room she was on her own and she was sure Bryony and that lot were talking about her. One of them stared across, then whispered something. The others sniggered and muttered things in aigy-paigy then laughed some more. Bryony (safety in numbers) wheeled round to face Baker, her chin orange with spot concealer.

‘Girlfriend left you? No Bunty to play with?’

Baker turned to leave without answering.

‘Better watch out,’ persisted Bryony. ‘Big Brother is watching you don’t forget: Stephanie Stott’s a right little tell-tale.’

It might have been worded like a warning but she wasn’t really worried on Baker’s behalf. She was glad.

‘She wouldn’t dare,’ said Baker.

But she would though. Young Steve was kinky for the uniform, for the whole badges and prizes business, for her precious scholarship. And she didn’t even mean any harm really – not in her own eyes. Smoking wasn’t just unhealthy (said so on the packet, showed you on the lurgy lung leaflets); it was
Unschool
. The way Stott minor saw it, once Mrs Mostyn knew and you’d taken your punishment,
learned your lesson
, it would all be all right again. It wasn’t nastiness in its weird little way, Baker could see that. Nastiness you could deal with. Nastiness and you could be nasty back.

As she sauntered down the stairs past the smart front lobby Baker spotted the headmistress’s secretary shoving purple tulips into a surplus silver trophy (Greek Dancing and Eurhythmics) in readiness for the fifth form parents’ evening. The main hall was cluttered with chatty groups of chairs and tables with jaunty subject flags on them, all lying in wait for Baker’s dad.

Baker’s dad hardly bothered to hide his disappointment any more as, one by one, the chances of certificates on the study wall melted away. Neighbours’ girls were Queen’s Guides or Duke of Edinburgh Awarded or pictured leotarding uncertainly from end to end of a four-inch beam in local newspapers. And Daddy’s girl? Daddy’s girl was in detention for putting half an onion in another girl’s lunch box (it had been left over from Queenie’s Quiche Lorraine – shame to waste it, said Queenie). The parents’ evening would give him plenty of fresh ammunition, especially once they told him about the front lawn business. They couldn’t prove it, thank God, but the net was definitely closing in. Maybe she could just not go home at all?

If she stopped off in the café by the station she’d be able to miss the 4.50 and catch the 5.10 or even the half past. There’d be no Bunty to talk to, but anything was better than going home. Dad wouldn’t actually be back from the parents’ meeting till gone 7.30 by the time he’d done the rounds of all the subjects but she knew that the sense of dread would be stronger if she went home. The house would still be humming with the aftershocks of the row they’d had at breakfast: why did she always
this
, why could she never
that
.

Stottie and her sister were still at the main gate when she got downstairs.

‘Don’t suppose I could stay over at your house tonight, could I?’

Amanda Stott’s face gave a twinge of disappointment.

‘Any other night would have been brilliant, but I’ve got a sodding piano exam. Mum’s picking me up, then taking Stephanie to her gymnastics club, then dashing back here for the you-know-what.’

‘Bum,’ said Baker and slowly headed off down the hill to the station.

‘You could come tomorrow . . .’ Stottie called after her.

‘You said
sodding
,’ Stephanie Stott was saying. ‘I’m telling Mum.’

Baker took out
Sons and Lovers
on the train so she could pretend not to be looking at the gang of girls from the school up the hill who were huddled round a shared cigarette at the far end, glancing across at her. They were all wearing platform shoes and trendy French-length skirts and two of them had blonde streaks in the front of their hair where the fringe flicked up – very Unschool. All of them had pierced ears and one had a phone number inked ostentatiously onto the back of her hand. The whole lot changed trains at the junction and made a point of walking to Baker’s end of the carriage so that they could each take a passing kick at her ankles as they piled out onto the platform. Bunty would have kicked back.

Chapter 2

A big brown envelope was wedged under the front door addressed to Robert Baker Esq and franked ‘Mary Kingsley High School’.

Baker was still in her coat, propping the post against the mirror above the hall table, when the key clicked in the lock and Mrs Baker came in, negotiating the door with two supermarket carriers and a shoulder bag bulging with papers from the office.

‘You’re back late.’

‘Netball.’

‘
Netball
?’ An old-fashioned look. ‘If you say so, sausage. Your dad won’t be back till later. I nipped out at lunchtime and got him a nice pork chop but I didn’t think we’d wait. Fancy an egg on toast or something? Boiled? Fried? Scrambled? Poached? Pickled? Addled?’

‘You choose.’

Mrs Baker was heading off down the hall when Baker remembered about the initials for her games shirt, and yes, it was a bit urgent, and no, it wouldn’t be just as quick to teach Baker how to do chainstitch.

‘Won’t take me a minute,’ Mrs Baker sighed. ‘Let me get tea out of the way.’ Coat off, she began fussing around the kitchen, halving a grapefrut and putting Dad’s chop on the grill in readiness for his return while simultaneously rustling up their own tea.

It was always busy in Mrs Baker’s kitchen, even when there was no one in it. Every other tile had a daisy transfer, every surface was crowded with patterned tins. There was a toytown table with four matching yellow stools that stowed under it like something out of a caravan. A set of fancy plates too-good-to-use were hung in a row by the window next to a calendar with pictures of all the cats they had never had posing irresistibly in gumboots and Christmas stockings. Keeping them company was a spider plant which lounged from the ceiling in the macramé hammock that the eight-year-old Baker had made in junior school.

Baker watched the kitchen clock twitch nearer six thirty and felt her mouth growing dry at the thought of the evening ahead: a storm of reproaches followed by the usual one-way ticket to Coventry, with Dad relaying all instructions via his wife: Pamela Jean Baker; Pam;
Spam
.

‘Pamela,
could
you be kind enough to ask Amanda if she has finished her homework. Pam love, could you ask Amanda to pass me one of those serrated spoon things.’

The grapefruit spoons were all part of her stepmother’s ‘dream kitchen’ – what kind of nutter dreamed about kitchens? – and lived in the pantry with the rest of her equipment: a special flowerpot contraption just for cooking chicken, stainless steel dishes just for avocados, toy bolts that held on to your sweetcorn and a mad gadget with a butter curler at one end and a melon baller at the other (what more did a girl need?).

All of Mrs Baker’s cooking was seasoned with a very heavy hand thanks to the giant thirty-pot rack of herbs and spices nailed to the wall by the back door. Very few of her pet recipes actually called for turmeric or fenugreek or asafoetida but she had taken to adding them randomly to things to keep the levels even. Baker’s teatime scrambled egg tasted really weird and by the time she’d cut off the crusts and picked out the bigger bits of spice she’d gone off the whole thing.

‘Are you not going to eat that?’

‘I was going to ring Bunty.’

‘Surely it can wait till tomorrow, for heaven’s sake? You’ve only just seen her,’ protested Mrs Baker as Baker picked up the receiver.

‘No I haven’t. She wasn’t in school again today; she’s been away since Thursday.’

‘I expect she’s poorly. Lots of bugs about.’

The twelve-year-old Bunty had missed the first two terms of the first year. Her dad had been transferred south from his firm’s Edinburgh office and Baker’s best friend-to-be had arrived at Mildred Fawcett out of the blue one Saturday on the morning of the inter-school tennis tournament. Baker had budged up to make room for the new girl on the spectators’ bench and together they had sat through a semi-final in which a second year called Julia Smith, Stephanie Stott’s pin-up girl, had made short work of a player from a rival school four years her senior.

‘Blimey,’ muttered the new Amanda as yet another backhand whistled across the court to a parrot house chorus of cheers.

The precocious thirteen-year-old, her face and arms already freckled after a week of spring sunshine, tossed another ball and the two Amandas watched her easy stretch for the serve, watched the handful of fathers in the back row pretending not to see the sooty flash of gusset. ‘Good shot!’ Dad’s voice cutting through the girlish trebles. ‘Two-handed backhand,’ noted Spam who used to play but didn’t play any more.

Julia won her match in straight sets but the crestfallen away supporters began to look more confident when everyone filed back to the court after squash and sandwiches.

‘Attagirl, Theresa!’ shouted somebody and a tall blonde girl of seventeen strolled to the baseline, her ducky white tennis dress and fancy aluminium racquet announcing how seriously she played. Miss Drumlin had called both girls to the net and as she stooped to retrieve Julia’s tossed wooden Junior Slazenger (rough), the two Amandas saw the smiling Julia lean across the net to the older girl and murmur something under her breath. Made Theresa blush, whatever it was, and made a complete mess of her ground strokes. She held her serve for the first game but Julia won the next five with ease.

‘Come
on
, Theresa!’ but there was a defeated note in the cries of the rival spectators and they were easily drowned out by the Fawcett fan club. Theresa kept pulling down the hem of her white frock and her serve had become so hit-and-miss that Miss Drumlin could barely contain her smiles as she logged each double fault. Julia Smith was smiling too as she swooped to grab yet another mis-hit and ping it neatly toward her opponent’s feet but there were tears in the losing player’s eyes and she fumbled the catch.

It was Julia’s fourth match that day but, fuelled by lemon barley and custard creams, she was still playing full out and her game seemed to get faster and nastier with every point and her demoralised opponent was barely bothering to run for the shots by the end, concluding the final game with a sulky smash into the net. Bryony and friends, sitting cross-legged on the asphalt behind the baseline, all joined the mooing cry of
Jool-ya Jool-ya
as hands were shaken and the cup was presented, but Baker and the new girl didn’t join in the cheers.

‘Talk about gamesmanship. Could you hear what she was whispering to her?’

Baker shook her head.

‘She’ll go far,’ said her new friend. ‘Good prefect material.’

The summer term had started for real the following Monday and Baker managed to bag a double desk for the pair of them, forcing Stottie to chum up with Amanda McQueen. Baker and Bunty had been sitting together ever since (subjects permitting), spoke most evenings and spent Saturday afternoons at each other’s houses planning their future when they would leave home, get jobs and share a big beautiful white bedsit somewhere. They were going to be each other’s matrons of honour, godmother each other’s children, take turns as mystery guests on their
This Is Your Lives
then, finally, grow old and tipsy sipping Napoleon brandy in a fancy apartment on the Boulevard St Michel. Or Something. Bunty had it all worked out.

Dad hated it whenever Bunty phoned Baker or Baker phoned Bunty and found things to do in the greenhouse whenever she came round but he was equally baffled by all Baker’s friendships. The way Dad looked at it, friends were people you told jokes to in pubs or played squash with at clubs or ‘had over’ to mix drinks and talk bollocks about mileage. That’s how his friends worked. Not to be holed up in an airless bedroom for hours at a time burning joss sticks and listening to some long-haired layabout with a guitar. And
talking
. What
about
, for heaven’s sake? A question he asked every time Baker put down the receiver. ‘You’re with her all day.’ He’d trained his wife to ask the same question but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

Bunty’s mother took twelve rings to answer Baker’s call, then said she was very sorry, Amanda, but Amanda was unable to come to the telephone and actually Roy was expecting rather an important call and basically just get off the line. Baker hung up and went back to the kitchen.

‘She any better today?’

Baker shrugged and after scraping her tea into the swing-top bin she picked up her book bag and nipped down the hall to the garage, closing the door silently behind her and switching on the light. She yanked the three darts from the centre of the board on the back of the door and, reaching up to the shelf that ran round the top of the room, pulled down an old snapshot of her father and tucked it under the wires by triple twenty so that it hung just over the bull’s eye.