Tenterhooks Page 3

  ‘Well, possibly.’

  For a moment we listen, and hear something like a tube train far below us.

  ‘Anyway,’ I tell Trina, ‘those cigarettes are off.’

  No one disputes this. The cigarettes are stale. I have never had a stale cigarette before. I have never had very many cigarettes at all; I smoke only when I am under stress and there are no other options, no sugar, no alcohol, no music, no Mike or Jamie, and no laughs from Rachel. The stale cigarettes came from Rachel, who disappeared from the courtyard during the confusion of waterproofs removal. She returned twenty minutes late for dinner. Sliding next to me on the bench, with a wild wrinkle of her nose in the direction of my mashed meal, she nudged my attention to her hidden hands: beneath the table, three packets of cigarettes, sixty; I swallowed a wave of nausea. And interrogated her, ‘Where have you been?’

  To keep Mr Stanford’s attention at bay, she faked interest in my plate while she whispered, ‘The local sort of corner shop.’

  Local? So there was hope, there was a locality.

  ‘Where?’

  She inclined her head, slightly, ‘About a mile in that direction,’ then laughed briefly, ‘the direction of inland.’

  ‘So,’ I urged, ‘there’s a village or something?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ She was wriggling to slot the packets into her pockets. I kept watch on Mr Stanford for her. Which was a mistake: he was carefully in conversation with Janet the Algae, their heads low and close, but when this composure exploded with a laugh, his gaze came quickly to mine. I smiled beautifully, and he looked away.

  I returned my attention to Rachel. ‘But you said corner shop.’

  ‘I said sort of corner shop. It would be a corner shop if there was a corner.’ She winced her apologies, ‘It’s just a shop, Jenny.’

  I thrashed my meal with my fork. ‘And you’ve missed dinner.’

  She frowned down into the sticky mess, then looked up into my despondent face and widened her eyes to make her point.

  Reluctantly, I smiled. ‘Yes, but you’ll starve.’

  She shrugged this off, ‘We have that box of crunchy mix.’

  I did not say, Why no chocolate? Why sixty cigarettes and no Aero? Because she was right, she did the right thing: the final disastrous touch to the week would be a few extra inches on our hips.

  Now Trina is crashing back across our brittle, smoke-free room. ‘Well, if the ciggies are off …’ Her boots crunch our spillages of cereal. She leaves the door open as she hurries into her own room. Returning, she asks, ‘Want one?’ but immediately turns away to close our door very firmly. There is a plain brown envelope in one hand, a few pinhead pills slipping down over the flap into the palm of her other hand. They line up like beads of mercury in the main crease, the main channel of her palm.

  I want to know, ‘What are they?’

  She extracts one in a pincer of index finger and thumb, and pushes it between her lips. ‘Anti-depressants,’ the reply comes slightly sticky, ‘my mum’s.’

  Rachel sits taller. ‘What do they do?’

  The pills slam back down onto one another in the envelope, and Tina heads for Susie’s vacant bed. ‘Cure depression, I suppose.’ Reclining, she holds the envelope high, keeping open the offer.

  Avril doubts, ‘One of them will cure depression?’

  Lawrence looks exactly how he looks in class: interested, but in facts rather than fun.

  ‘Well, no,’ Trina wails her irritation with Avril. ‘But they can’t make me feel worse than how I feel now.’

  Rachel stretches to the volume control on the tape recorder because the tape has reached ‘Changes’, her favourite track. ‘So why do you have them?’ she shouts over David Bowie, her voice further strained by her stretch.

  Trina’s eyes slot towards her. ‘I nicked them, of course.’

  Rachel dismisses this with a shake of her head. ‘No, I mean, won’t she notice?’

  Trina gives up, chucks the envelope on to the floor. ‘My mum notices nothing,’ she tells the ceiling.

  Rachel’s eyes slide to me on a smile. ‘Wouldn’t I love to have that kind of mum.’

  I tell her, ‘Do you know that Jamie has tried some heroin?’

  Apparently too weary to speak, she widens her eyes, Really?

  ‘Sniffed,’ I inform her, ‘not injected.’ And therefore not addictive, or so he told me. ‘Says it was like lying in a warm bath.’

  ‘A warm bath,’ she repeats, and seems to breathe in as she speaks, her eyes misting.

  Avril says, ‘The showers on Mr Stanford’s corridor are better than ours: I went to explore. No mould on his wall.’

  Rachel coughs a laugh. ‘He’d love some mould, Av, it’s biology.’

  Trina tells us, ‘H is for losers.’

  Avril’s incomprehension tightens into a frown, which she tries to feel her way through, begins by mouthing, ‘H …’

  Rachel flips back the top of the cigarette packet, and muses, ‘You hang around with the wrong kind of people, Jennifer Jordan.’

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘I’m older.’ This is our joke, because she is twenty-two days older than me. ‘And one day you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble,’ which is another joke of ours because it is our teachers’ and parents’ favourite declaration. A declaration that is intended for Rachel, primarily, but which seems to reach me by osmosis.

  I indicate the packet in her hands: ‘Not in here,’ I remind her, ‘the smoke alarm.’

  ‘I’m only sniffing.’ She draws the cigarette along the length of her smile, and lingers on the tip, where she inhales dramatically.

  Then we both join in with Bowie for, ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …’

  When we have finished this, our favourite line, there is silence; this is a hard line to follow, and anyway there is nothing new to say.

  After a while, I ask around the room, ‘Do any of us need to do marine biology?’

  Trina mutters, ‘Like fuck.’

  Avril agrees, ‘Never ever.’

  Rachel adds, ‘And I think that we can speak for Susie, too.’

  Susie is taking biology because she wants to be a nurse. Trina wants to be a physio: manhandling rugby players, she tells us and we do not know if she is serious. No one knows what Avril wants to do. Rachel’s reasons for biology are the same as mine. We became friends through biology, on the back bench in O level, from where we would counter Mr Bennett’s descriptions of flawless function with questions about diseases and their cures.

  Suddenly phlegm whinnies in Lawrence’s throat. ‘Well …’ his voice, in our room, sounds odd; seems to sound odd to him, too, because he blinks convulsively, his eyes like moths, and his mouth thins but falls short of a smile. He tries again, rushes, ‘I want to be a vet, so I have to study animals, but not …’ and he fades.

  ‘Not whelks,’ Rachel says for him, turning to him.

  ‘No.’ His eyes fix on her, seem to implore.

  ‘Of course not whelks,’ she reassures him, before returning to the rest of us to announce, ‘so, the Nobel Prize for marine biology is awarded to Trina.’

  Trina struggles up onto her elbows and whines a quizzical, ‘My arse.’

  Rachel explains, ‘Nautical Night’: Trina’s favourite club, once a month on a boat on the Thames.

  Day Three, and Jim has finished our Briefing, has told us what we have to do today: we have to mark square metres on a rock face and note the distribution of barnacles within this grid. He did not apologize; on the contrary, he seemed to think that his little exercise would appeal to us, that this would seem like a good way to spend a day. Yesterday, when we were supposed to be probing rock pools, I wandered and came across Lawrence. He was crouched behind a boulder, lighting a new cigarette from the previous one. When he was dabbing the old stub onto a barnacle, he saw me. His mouth was so busy with the second cigarette that he could only manage to hoist his eyebrows in greeting. I was so shocked that I could think of nothing to say but a sympathetic, ‘T
hey’re stale.’

  He exhaled, sighed smokily, ‘They’re better than nothing.’

  I bumped and tottered back over the rocks to Rachel and asked her, ‘Did you give Lawrence some of those horrid cigarettes?’

  She looked up from her rock pool, and raked through her wind-whipped and salt-stiffened hair. ‘Yes, a few, although he tried to say no.’ Her frown meshed with the streaks of her hair. ‘Why?’ Breathless with the sea breeze, I laughed helplessly as I informed her, ‘He’s behaving appallingly, up there: smoking, and burning barnacles.’

  She stood up, grinned slowly, and reached into her mouth for a limpet of chewing gum which she dropped into the rock pool before she murmured appreciatively, ‘Loz unleashed.’

  Now Jim is slamming through the swing door into the courtyard, keen to lead us down to the shore for another day of excitement. But every day we are allowed a few minutes before we leave, in which to zip and Velcro ourselves into our layers and to fetch anything that we have forgotten. Then Jim will bark, ‘Notebooks?’ Because according to him, the notebook is the indispensable tool of the marine biologist: a pocket stiff notebook, in his words. A pocket stiff, in ours. As we leave the bench to follow him, my pocket stiff falls open onto the floor. Bending down, I scan the displayed page, the words which, on our first day, we had been told to copy from Jim’s blackboard: Supplementary fauna key: Limpets; if no groove, look into shell mouth; if mother-of-pearl, then top-shell, if no mother-of-pearl, then winkle. Beneath this I had scrawled, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, Trina’s favourite Bowie track, which she sang for hours in the minibus. I pick up the book by the cover and the pages spin to today’s copied words, the chart on which we are supposed to record the distribution of barnacles: on bare rock, on weeded rock, in rock pools, in crevices, on pebbles, under boulders, on plants, on animals. Across the top of this chart I have written ‘Suffragette City’, which is my own favourite.

  I am going to check on Rachel. When I came into the Briefing and told Mr Stanford that she was too ill to leave her bed, he turned from me without a word and hurried across the courtyard to our dormitory block. That was five minutes ago, and he has not yet returned. During the night, I woke twice, briefly, barely, to see Rachel away from her bed. The first time, she was standing by the window, stooped over something in her hands. She was pearly in the overspill of floodlight from the courtyard. Her T-shirt, the hem flopped on the tops of her thighs, turned her into a child’s drawing of a girl in a dress: the triangular dress and long lines for legs. But no colour: all of her was pearly, even her eyes. And the earrings: the show of earrings reduced to nothing, to polite pearls. She was drooping, and then came the sound that told me what she was doing: the smash of a pill through a membrane of silver foil.

  I asked, ‘You okay?’

  She seemed unsurprised to hear me, but this apparent calm could have been simply the careful slowness of her turn towards me. A small sound came despite her closed mouth; not quite a groan. Then she made an effort to elaborate: ‘I’m having a baby.’

  Period pain. In reply, I made a similar sound, but lower and heavier: the appropriate show of sympathy. Then sleep must have washed up over me again and pulled me away.

  The second time I opened my eyes, she was coming into the room; and behind her, the corridor buzzed with the far away roar of water into a toilet bowl.

  ‘You okay?’ I checked again.

  But by now she was more resigned, throwing me an almost tuneful, ‘Uh-huh,’ as she crossed the room to her bed. I heard the rasp of drawn bedclothes, then the wince of bedsprings beneath her.

  This morning she lay in bed while we moved around her. She moved only her eyes, which were no longer pearls but dry pink petals. I was followed by them as I rushed around the room, finding my clothes and throwing back questions. ‘So what do I tell Mr Stanford?’

  ‘That I’m ill.’

  ‘Yes, but do I say with what?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘Have you had any painkillers this morning?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Will you be okay?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Mr Stanford had not seemed to want to know the details, had said nothing before he turned and hurried away. But now, as I come through the door to the dormitory block, the corridor is full of his voice, a voice which washes over the walls, ‘Well, I simply do not believe that an aspirin or two won’t fix you.’

  Rachel’s voice burns into his. ‘How would you know? And I’ve had an-aspirin-or-two, in fact I’ve had three.’

  Turning the corner, I see them in the doorway to my room: they mirror each other across the threshold, propping up the doorframe, arms folded hard. There are squeaks from Mr Stanford’s buttercup-yellow waterproofs. Rachel has draped a cardigan over the T-shirt which emphasizes the knot of her arms.

  Mr Stanford creaks taller, ready to move away. ‘Fresh air will help.’

  Rachel bends fiercely into the fold of her arms: ‘I can’t, okay?’ she bellows after him, even though he has moved no more than half an inch, has swayed rather than moved. ‘I can’t go clambering over rocks all day with a swollen endometrium.’

  Endometrium is impressive; I wish that I could see Mr Stanford’s appreciation. The tone of his reply, however, is studiously bland: ‘I can’t have you lounging around here all day. So I’ll expect you to join us in five minutes.’

  I am close to his shiny back, now, but he does not know that I am here, nor, apparently, does Rachel, because her eyes do not move from his face. Behind me, I can hear someone bumping through the door.

  I try to appeal, ‘Mr Stanford …’

  But Rachel finishes, ‘You’re a pathetic wanker,’ and flops away.

  Mr Stanford swings deep into the room, silver eddies on his waterproofs, to yell, ‘I’ll have you for that, no one speaks like that to staff, you’ll be in a lot of trouble when we go back to school.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ her voice comes weary and muffled from the depths. ‘And who’ll believe you?’

  His hands rise, then slap back onto the doorframe: dismay, then emphasis, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But I see the nervous flutter of his glue-yellow fingernails on the white-painted wood. ‘In any case,’ he swells, ‘I have witnesses.’ And his face slides around to me.

  I have to stand my ground, to tell him, ‘I don’t think that you do.’

  So his eyes widen to latch onto Lawrence. I know that it is Lawrence who has come up behind me because I can hear him wheeze, the rhythmic twang of his bronchioles. I turn and see the splayed hands of the shrug with which he places himself beyond Mr Stanford’s reach, Sorry, mate, I heard nothing. Three pairs of eyes bob behind Lawrence: Susie, Trina and Avril have arrived. Trina says, ‘In fact, none of us is feeling too good, all of us are having our periods.’

  Before I can laugh, Mr Stanford roars at us, ‘Stop it,’ the command spurting from a faceful of loathing.

  Suddenly Rachel is in the doorway again, hands high on the frame, tiny wings of cotton in her armpits. ‘It happens,’ she says to his back, and when he turns, her head inclines to one side, ‘or didn’t you know? Happens in girls’ boarding schools and nunneries, or wherever women live together in close confines; we fall into sync, our hormones mix in the air or something.’

  ‘True,’ adds Trina, who would not have known; she knows very little biology.

  Mr Stanford flings his reply around all of us, ‘Of course I know that,’ but his puffing face is squashed by a frown.

  Susie announces, ‘Mine is so bad that I need to lie down,’ and swishes on his waterproof on her way into our room. She trails her own waterproof, which whispers from the floor.

  I cannot believe that this will work.

  Mr Stanford’s gaze hops around us, from face to face, sharp, looking for a weak link; but in the meantime, he tries to seem to move towards conciliation, ‘Oh come on, girls.’

  Rachel unwinds her mouth, but this is not quite a smile. ‘Look
s like you’re five girls short of an expedition.’

  He coughs up a laugh, forces himself one step further from conciliation to good humour. ‘Girls, don’t be silly.’

  ‘Oh, but we are silly, because of those silly hormones of ours,’ Rachel lowers her head so far that it comes close to her shoulder, ‘but of course, it’s part of our charm.’

  ‘Avril?’ he asks, suddenly; he has decided that she is the weak link.

  She shivers to attention. ‘What?’

  He bullies her, ‘You can’t tell me that you and all your friends here are indisposed?’

  She manages a faint echo, ‘Indisposed.’ How much of this has she missed? Someone elbows her, and with a wobble she adds, ‘Oh, yes, I’m always indisposed.’

  Trina whoops, ‘Never a truer word!’

  Rachel folds down from the doorframe, slowly, calmly, and says to Mr Stanford, ‘You’re always telling us that the only truth is science, that truth is proof and proof is science. You’re always telling us to believe nothing unless we have proof. Now you have a hypothesis, that we don’t all have our periods today. So, where’s your proof?’

  Faced with this challenge, Mr Stanford stamps away down the corridor and slams the door. The sound wave crashes into our silence.

  Trina whispers, ‘Temper, temper,’ and we scurry into our room.

  Rachel is sitting on her bed with her pillow held hard to her stomach. Suddenly she is struck, ‘Lawrence.’

  Trina echoes with, ‘Loz.’

  We turn to see him drowning in the darkness of the corridor, flapping away our concern. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

  I am horrified, ‘It is not okay.’ We overlooked him because everything happened so quickly.

  Susie appeals to him, ‘Come in here, for God’s sake.’

  Trina calls, ‘You can say that you have prostate trouble.’ She seems serious.

  He stops.

  Rachel worries her lower lip with a sharp tooth. ‘We could try saying that we need you here to look after us.’

  Avril wants to know, ‘But what is wrong with us?’

  Trina despairs, ‘I’d like to know what is wrong with you.’

  But suddenly we are knocked back into silence by the thump of the far door.