The Following Girls (4 page)

‘I think you’ve got the wrong number. There’s no one here of that name. No one.’ She hung up.

‘Was that Auntie Janet?’

‘Wrong number.’

She hadn’t rung again. Or if she had, Baker hadn’t answered.

When Dad had finally finished shouting through the details of his meeting with Mrs Mostyn and demanding exactly when was she going to start pulling herself together and God knew he’d done his best, Baker left the study and tiptoed back to the garage to rescue the fallen photo.

The inquisitive young Baker had first found it in an old suitcase full of junk that had been stowed inside the roof void above the garage door. There was a bundle of solicitor’s letters – ‘The respondent consistently refused to assist in the running of the marital home despite the petitioner working a 50-hour week to provide for her’; ‘In June 1961 the respondent spent the entire quarter’s housekeeping money on paying a local firm to construct a “menstrual hut” in the petitioner’s vegetable garden’ – gripping stuff. At the back of the bundle were half a dozen short, carbon-copied letters on the solicitor’s letterhead: ‘Dear Madam, Our client, Robert Leonard Baker, requests that any further communication be conducted exclusively via this office and that all attempts at contact cease forthwith.’

Baker had once asked her father if there were any pictures of her mother and he’d said no there weren’t and why did she want one but there were loads in the hidden suitcase: Patsy on a slab at Stonehenge, Patsy in her wedding dress, Patsy with a brand-new non-Jeremy propped awkwardly in her arms like a doll being made to hold something. She had been quite pretty in a wholemeal hippy-ish sort of way: big eyes, light hair like Baker’s, nice and thin. The best snap showed her on her honeymoon between the legs of the Eiffel Tower gazing adoringly at a person on her left, a missing person because the other half was on the sideboard upstairs: Dad staring right into the lens, oblivious to the smiling face at his side, the torn edge masked by the silver frame.

Baker retrieved the dartboard picture from where it had fallen and tucked it back in its hiding place. Older than any of the other snaps, it showed her father looking young, tanned, slightly cocksure, as if he had just got the photographer to laugh at some stupid joke. Not bad-looking really – if it weren’t for all the little holes in his face.

Chapter 3

Bryony and Co. were whispering by the coat pegs again the next morning as they rolled their hand-knitted sports socks down to the ankle bone. There was a fashion for this –
fashion
? Mary Quant quaking in her boots. One of them had a magazine – some retarded girly thing – and there was a picture of a sissy-looking singer with feathered hair. He was actually quite dishy but Baker and the Mandies would rather die than say so. Bryony kissed the page then rolled up the forbidden comic and fed it into the dangling sleeve of her blazer. Another one of those accusing looks at Baker (as if she’d want the stupid rotten thing).

A herd of girls was storming up the cloakroom steps but their stampede was checked by a breathless fair-headed figure who charged through the group waving a sopping scarlet umbrella.

‘Baker? Where are you, you slag?’

‘Bunty? Oh, thank God you’re back. Where the bloody hell have you
been
?’

‘Squitters. Practically death’s door. Hardly left the loo in three days:
nass-ty
. And all those loo books:
Pick
of
Punch
? What can the rest of it be like?’

Bunty’s shoes flew to the far corners of the cloakroom as she kicked them off and two stray fourth formers scurried like puppies to retrieve them, picking up skirt, shirt and jumper as they fell.

‘Thanks, doll. Really don’t worry. They’ll be fine on the floor.’ But they picked them up anyway. It was a gift she had, like remembering birthdays and always keeping track of what your parents last said.

The lace on Baker’s tennis shoe snapped as she tied it so she rummaged in her bag for her black plimsolls – same difference surely.

‘How did it go last night?’

‘
Car
-nage. The Mostyn told him about the front lawn and asked for another forty-seven offvences to be taken into consideration, so I’m not allowed any telly and he’s confiscated my make-up bag for some bizarre reason.’

‘He’ll have forgotten by Thursday. They always do. Mummy says if I don’t pass the mocks I’ll have to drop RE and Chemistry. Suits me, but the old man went ape. Money down the drain, old-old story. Meanwhile,
much
more importantly: did the wicked queen finally flog the piano?’

‘Didn’t dare. Came bloody close on Saturday though. Had three people phone up about the ad, but Dad put his foot down so Spam had to ring them all up and pretend one of the others had beaten them to it. She’s not best pleased.’

The piano was a
bête noire
for Baker’s stepmother. The brilliant white instrument had been bought for Baker at vast, unasked expense from a Bond Street showroom. Baker and Pam had both wanted the ebonised lacquer but that was before Dad’s padification of the front room: orange raw silk lampshades, pearl grey emulsion, a solitary panel of William Morris wallpaper (just the one wall: like they’d run out of money halfway) and a trio of onyx boxes: tipped; untipped; extra strong mints. The piano was stuck there like a great big musical freezer, sheet music (‘Imagine’, ‘The Entertainer’) strewn casually across the lid. Not that Dad played the sodding thing, and now neither did Baker. She could play by ear well enough, and was always surprised at how easily her fingers could pinch out the sketch of a melody, but ‘Für Elise’ was a very different story.

‘Liberace she’s not,’ said Dad when she first played it. Supposed to be funny.

‘You won’t be safe until it’s out of the house,’ warned Bunty, ‘mark my words. Some busybody at work will recommend a Mr Whatifski “who’s made
such
a difference to young Melanie’s fingering”,’ Bunty made a circle with finger and thumb and waggled her hand lewdly up and down ‘and that’ll be that. “Harder, Amanda! Faster! More
eggs-pression
!” Every Tuesday afternoon till you leave home – or shoot him.’

Bunty had got her kit on – all bar the socks, ‘too bloody cold for socks’ – and was rifling through the five pockets of her blazer in a panic.

‘Bugger. Got any fags? Oh, thank God. Got a nasty,
nass-ty
feeling mine are on the dressing table. Mummy will be pleased. Oh well, lung leaflets here we come: lovely, lovely lung leaflets. I could paper a bloody house with lung leaflets. Be quite nice in a way . . .’ She mimed the pattern repeat with the palm of her hand. ‘Or beagles smoking – or beagles’ lungs . . .’

She smiled at Baker and Baker beamed happily back. Not especially pretty – or so Bryony and that lot always decreed when they were doing their ‘marks out of ten’ thing. Looks was their main category – ‘pretty’ all the way down to ‘nice personality’ (consolation prize in life’s lottery) but if you didn’t rate as ‘pretty’ there was always ‘interesting bone structure’. ‘Wossat mean?’ Bunty had demanded when she heard this. ‘Like Quasimodo or something? Bloody cheek.’ After looks came the rest of the marking scheme: dress sense; sense of humour; technical merit; artistic impression; sustained tempo; and God knows what. Bryony had given Bunty’s looks a grudging seven. Deep-set blue eyes (piss-holes in the snow, Bunty said), ratty hair still half-brown, half-blonde from her family’s expensive winter holidays and unstraightened teeth. One of the front ones was slightly whiter and fatter than the others where her big brother Dominic had smashed her face with a cricket ball but it didn’t detract from her appearance because it simply made you conscious of how very often she was smiling.

So, not especially pretty, maybe, but definitely
attractive
. Even Bryony conceded that – couldn’t not: the evidence was inescapable. Bunty had
meaningful relationships
: boyfriends, several boyfriends, boyfriends with
cars
,
older
boyfriends who took her for dinner in trendy Chelsea hamburger places, gave her LPs or bottles of duty free scent. One had even bought her a camera.

‘I rang loads of times. Did you not get a message?’

Bunty re-twanged the elastic on her ponytail while looking past Baker via the cloakroom mirror.

‘Not a peep, but then Mummy’s not a huge fan, let’s face it.’

‘Said you were out with “a friend” on Saturday. Anyone I know? And you can’t have been at death’s door if you were out. I thought you said you were ill.’

Bunty looked thrown then seemed to remember not to, a funny, keeping-a-straight-face look in her eye, the look she used when Mummy was being told lies about trips to the cinema or when homework had been left on the bus. Stupid lies for stupid people, not Baker.

Bunty’s lips wriggled into a saucy grin.

‘Only old whatsisface.’

‘Anywhere nice?’

‘We had lunch at some Italian dive near Harrods then he drove me back to his place.’ Her voice lowered to a whisper, confiding suddenly – almost in spite of herself. ‘His flatmate was
away
for the weekend.’

Baker made her eyebrows waggle up and down and waited for Bunty to answer her unspoken question, edging slightly closer so that Bryony, still over by her peg pretending to re-tie her shoelaces, wouldn’t hear, but Bunty didn’t elaborate, just pouted in a ‘wouldn’t you like to know?’ sort of way and fiddled some more with her elastic. Baker so wanted to be cool but curiosity was building up inside her, like trying to hold your breath for three minutes under water and the whispered questions burst out before she could help herself:
did you let him
,
what did he say
,
will I like it
? But instead of answering – or even promising to tell all at break – Bunty carried on pulling at her ponytail.

‘Come on. Stop playing hard to get, you silly moo.’

‘I don’t have to tell you everything. Besides, bit
tacky
. Nick asked me whether I would – obviously assumed I’d go gushing to the whole hockey eleven first chance I got and I said no, actually, I wouldn’t and he thought that was quite mature actually.’

She looked back to the mirror, twisting her hair into a bun and skewering it in place with a hard-bitten HB pencil.

‘Bunty!’ there was the threat of tears in Baker’s voice. Bryony was still lurking by the coats, obviously relishing the row even if she couldn’t catch the words themselves.

‘Nick calls me
Amanda
. . .’ She turned to Baker. ‘Get your own dirty stories.’ And flounced from the room.

‘Lovers’ tiff?’ sneered Bryony.

The cloakroom chatter dimmed as a big, cross prefect’s voice boomed into the room. She was wearing her blazer over what were said to be her own clothes (a sixth-form privilege): grey serge skirt, grey tank top, white blouse – like a black and white photo of her fifth-form self.

‘Get a move on, you lot.’ She glared at Baker. ‘Might have known
you’d
still be here.’ Only seventeen but she wasn’t a girl any more. She’d caught the tone of voice perfectly, like a toddler in a playgroup home corner moaning about mess in fluent mummyspeak. ‘Pull your socks up. You’re going to be late for Registration. Do me five hundred lines by Thursday: “I will not be late for Registration”.’

‘But we
will
be late for Registration,’ countered Baker, happy to have any row that would jar her out of her shocked state. ‘You just said.’

‘Seven hundred lines. One More Word and I’ll make it a thousand.’

‘Make it two thousand. Enjoy yourself. Keep the change.’ Baker looked archly up at her. ‘Go on. I
dare
you.’

Always a lovely moment. Like a hand of poker in a film. The prefect longing to throw her weight about but knowing that she’d reached maximum what with Mocks coming up. Next week maybe, the Baker girl had been asking for it . . .

‘I’m watching you. We all are.’

Stottie had finally tracked down the precious Maths master and was copying zeros and ones onto a sheet of graph paper. Once upon a time Amanda Stott had been rather good at Maths (she’d got her scholarship for being the only ten-year-old in the exam room who could multiply fractions), but she had wrestled in vain with the matrix business. Her mum hadn’t left off about last night’s bad report and was demanding to be told every grade from now on. The Maths monitor was grumpily gathering the last few sheets of prep.

‘Come on, Stott. I’ve got to get this lot downstairs.’

Stottie crossed out one of the mysterious numbers and inserted a neat figure seven in its place.

‘Can’t have it
too
perfect or she’ll smell a rat.’

‘She’ll smell a bloody rat anyway, you silly moo,’ insisted Queenie, looking over her shoulder. ‘You can’t have
sevens
in matrices.’

‘You can’t? Why can’t you? Is it just sevens? Can you have eights?’

‘I don’t
know
. You just can’t. Or maybe you can but not in this prep you can’t and if she finds out you’re playing silly buggers then she’ll twig it was copied and that’ll knacker it for the rest of us. Cross it out again; put a one instead. One’s safe – or zero. Zero’s always good; they like zero.’