Special, p.25
Special, page 25
But Jules kept running over the summer lawn, back towards the Manor.
+
Upstairs in the bedroom a small crowd was gathered around Ali. She was sitting on the window ledge with her arms crossed and was evidently feeling hemmed in.
‘. . . again?’ Caz said as Jules came through the door.
Ali raised her hand to the side of her face. ‘Here.’
‘Can’t see any mark.’
‘No.’ Ali’s tone was dry. ‘Sorry.’
‘Ali!’ Jules thumped to a halt. ‘Did she find anything?’
Ali paused for what seemed an unnecessarily long time before answering. ‘The library books, Izzy’s music . . .’
‘The fag packet?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck!’ Jules kicked the leg of Izzy’s bed. ‘Fuck! Arse!’
‘It’s not a problem.’ Caz turned to face her.
‘It is a fucking problem! That’s the third time I’ve been busted. I’m out.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘I am! She’s got me twice before. She’s been gagging to get me again.’
‘Only an empty packet.’
‘So? You think she cares if it’s got fags in or not?’
Ali interrupted. ‘She wasn’t interested in the cigarettes.’
‘D’you mean?’
‘She was looking for something else.’
‘Like what?’
Ali hopped off the ledge. ‘Other stuff’
‘Yeah, other stuff and fags. She’s been dying to bust me.’ Caz was watching Ali. ‘You could get her for that,’ she said. ‘If you grassed on her, you could get her sacked.’
Ali turned.
‘If you got in now, rang the school, told what happened, you could get her sacked. She’d be out. Teachers aren’t allowed to hit girls.’
‘But,’ said Izzy, ‘it’s just her word against Naylor’s, isn’t it?’ She inspected the side of Ali’s face. ‘Not like you can see anything.’
‘Jaws saw her. If you got Jaws to help, you could get her out. Get her sacked.’
‘No way,’ said Izzy. ‘Jaws isn’t going to grass on another teacher.’
‘She might. She hates Naylor, remember?’
Mel took a step towards the window ledge. ‘Go on. It’d be amazing. Ring the school. Get her sacked.’
‘Why don’t you?’ Caz’s voice was light, careless. ‘Get her out. Revenge.’
Ali’s gaze flickered from one to the other.
‘Revenge!’ chanted Mel in a sing-song voice. ‘Revenge! Ditch her! Get her out! Grass her up!’
The others began to join in. ‘Get—her—out! Get—her—sacked! Ditch—the—bitch!’
Caz stood up and began to walk towards Ali. ‘You could make sure she never teaches again. It’d be amazing. She’d be stuffed.’
‘Re-venge! Get—her—out! Get—her—sacked! Ditch—the—bitch!’
‘Go on. I dare you. One phone call, that’s all you’d have to do. Just call up and you’d get rid of her for ever. Fuck her over.’
‘Get—her—out! Get—her—dumped! Re-venge! Re-venge! Re-venge!’
Caz raised her voice. ‘Ring the school. Ring the governors. Ring the papers or something. Talk to the papers. If you talked to the papers, they’d do it for you. Get her . . .’
Ali half turned and saw Jules standing mute in the corner of the room. She could hear Caz beside her, getting closer, the whiteness at the corners of her eyes. As she hesitated, she felt the little shove of air against her cheek as each of Caz’s words connected. Then she walked out.
+
Downstairs in the TV room, the curtains bloomed in the wind. Ali sat down in one of the chairs and folded her arms.
Jules was uncomfortable. There was something about the way life had been going recently that meant she kept having to ask Ali for things. She didn’t like Ali and her slow glances. She didn’t like the way Ali spent her life watching other people. And she particularly didn’t like asking Ali for things. Not because it made her feel indebted, but because Ali always took so inhiriatingly long to think about everything. Why did it have to be Ali who got hit by Miss Naylor? She does nothing but sit in trees for six months, Miss Naylor hits her and suddenly she’s the centre of the universe. By rights, Jules considered, it should have been her fight, her slap and her glory. She was the one, after all, who had been hated by Miss Naylor for all that time. She would have known exactly how to make the best of the situation.
Jules could also see that the feeling was mutual. Ali’s distrust was almost palpable. She was sitting down low in the chair, her arms clamped tight against her chest, watching Jules with her usual expression of considered stupidity.
Jules was suddenly furious. ‘So what were they looking for, then?’ It came out almost a shout.
‘Other stuff.’
‘Like what?’
‘They took Izzy’s CDs, the library books . . .’
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. They just did.’
‘How come she hit you, then?’
Ali rested her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. ‘We had an argument, she got pissed off, she hit me.’ Jules scowled at her. ‘Can’t see any mark.’
‘It faded.’
‘So how do I know it happened?’
Ali shrugged. ‘Don’t believe me. Not my problem.’
Silence. The curtains flapped against the corners of Jules’s vision. ‘What was she doing?’
‘Told you. Searching stuff’
‘Why? What for?’
‘Don’t know. Why does she usually search stuff?’
‘Because she’s a nosy poking bitch.’
Ali smiled.
‘Why was she searching now?’
To Jules’s surprise, Ali opened her eyes and sat up. ‘I don’t know. She was doing it in a particular way.’ She sounded thoughtful now, less defensive. ‘Perhaps someone had tipped her off about something.’
‘Tipped her off about what?’
‘About searching. Told her to look for something.’
‘What, like grassed?’
‘Mmmm. Maybe.’
‘The fags.’
Ali closed her eyes again. ‘Told you. She wasn’t interested in the fags.’
Jules was incensed. Didn’t Ali care if she was expelled? Didn’t she care that this was Jules’s life they were talking about? Didn’t Ali give a fuck about anything but trees and books? ‘What else then?’ She was shouting again.
Ali didn’t say anything for a while. ‘Izzy’s CDs . . .’
‘And?’
There was a silence so long that Jules wondered if Ali had fallen asleep.
But Ali was not asleep. She was thinking. From the way Jules was behaving, she had either forgotten about the medicines, or she didn’t think they’d have found them, or—more likely—she genuinely didn’t know they were there. It wasn’t like she was playing innocent. It was more like she really was innocent. Should she tell Jules? Should she tell her all of it, or none of it, or just some of it? For a second, she felt only a kind of stunned and weary pity—for Jules, for Hen, for all of them.
‘In your drawer,’ she said, balancing each word with particular care, ‘was Izzy’s medicine.’
An electric silence. ‘WHAT?’
‘Izzy’s medicine was in your drawer. In a little black tin box.’
‘Wha . . . how?’
‘I don’t know. It just was.’
‘Are you saying,’—Jules’s voice had risen a full two octaves—‘Are you saying I stole her medicines?’
‘I’m just saying—’
‘I didn’t steal her medicine! How could I steal her medicine? I rescued her!’
‘I know, I know.’ Ali flapped a placatory hand. ‘I’m not saying you did.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Is that black box yours?’
‘What black box?’
‘A tin. Like an old money box. With a slit in the top. Sort of so big.’ She measured out a rectangle.
‘No.’ Jules’s eyes widened. ‘No! That’s not mine! I didn’t steal her medicine! I totally absolutely did not—’
‘Fine,’ said Ali, ‘All right, all right, I believe you.’
‘I DIDN’T!’ shouted Jules, ‘I so utterly and completely didn’t! Someone else did!’
‘Whatever. There was something else. Not in your drawers.’ She stopped again. Another endless pause. Jules wanted to turn her upside down and shake her till the words came out. ‘There was something in Hen’s drawer.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t think it was the thing that they were looking for.’
‘What was it?’
‘Bags,’ she said eventually. ‘Food.’
‘Food? What sort of food.’
‘Rotting food. There was food in there. All the meals from last week.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Just that. Food. All the meals Hen doesn’t eat. It was in her drawer. You know there’s been a funny smell for a while?’
Jules nodded.
‘That’s it. When Hen can’t get rid of stuff, she hides it.’
The silence stretched out. But it no longer separated Jules and Ali. Now it made them complicit.
‘But . . . but she’s sick. In the loo. Every morning. Every meal.’
‘There’s only two loos on this floor, remember? And when someone else is in them, she’s scared of being full, so she has to get rid of it somehow. She can’t put it in the bin because she’d get busted. So . . .’ Ali swallowed. She didn’t like having to say this out loud. ‘So she puts all the food in bags. Some of it’s like sick stuff and some of it is just normal food she managed to hide.’
‘Don’t understand.’
‘At meals, she takes the food, but she never eats it, right? She hides it, or she . . . she tries to get rid of it in the loo. There was other stuff, as well. Stuff she’d bought in Stokeley. Sweets and biscuits and stuff. Fruit. Rotting.’
Jules looked as if she too might be sick. ‘That’s . . .’
‘Yeah,’ Ali said drily, ‘I know. Gross.’
‘That’s fucking vile.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘That’s fucking unbelievable. Mutant.’ Jules’s eyes swirled. ‘So we’ve been sharing a room . . .’
Ali nodded. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’
Jules sat blinking stupidly for a while.
‘Miss Naylor was trying to get me not to tell anyone else and I wouldn’t promise so she hit me.’
‘Fuck,’ said Jules softly. ‘Fucking hell. Fucking . . .’
And Ali sat plucking at the polish on the chair’s wooden arms, watching all Jules’s certainties fall apart.
. . . Friday
Ali paused outside the door, raised her hand and then lowered it again. She didn’t feel particularly nervous. If anything, she felt unusually calm, almost serene. The pause was not because she was scared of knocking on Jaws’s door, but because she would like to have found all the right words and assembled them in the correct order before she spoke. She needed to say something that didn’t have Caz’s snarl at the back of it, to say something made out of her own thoughts, not someone else’s. Caz’s vehemence had frightened her. Miss Naylor was a thwarted old bitch who deserved everything she got, but still. There was something a little too avid in Caz’s instruction. And besides, this was her war, not theirs. If she could get Jaws to support her then perhaps she might be able to do something. Perhaps she wouldn’t need to bother with her plan. Perhaps, at the final moment, it might be possible to rely on the solidity of adults after all.
Ali didn’t particularly mind about the slap. The point of it, which she had understood almost at the same moment that she saw Miss Naylor’s hand begin its trajectory towards her, was not what it was, but what it meant. Ali couldn’t remember a single instance in all her time at the school when anyone had touched her. Not deliberately, anyway. Someone might brush past on their way to the library or whack her accidentally during PE. But otherwise nothing. At the beginning and end of term she would watch the others embracing each other in an ecstasy of devotion. But they’d somehow manage to do it without skin ever quite making contact with skin. No one touched. It wasn’t done. It didn’t happen. Touching was for grandparents and dogs.
When she had first arrived, it seemed sometimes as if she lived with a roomful of ghosts, and that only the faint vapour of someone else’s smell proved their material existence. They—these girls with whom she spent so much of her life—shouted and banged and snored and cried, but they also glided between each other as surely as if they weren’t there at all. In a packed corridor or a sweating gym, Ali would watch them shifting and feinting. When people did touch, they apologized with a sense of genuine horror. And now Miss Naylor had touched her. Not just touched her, but slapped her. That contact had broken something. Not merely the understanding that teachers did not hit pupils, but something else as well. Boys might hit each other to achieve their aims or prove a point, but girls didnt need to. Girls never got that close. There were other ways to ensure they got heard. And so when Miss Naylor raised her hand to strike Ali, she couldn’t help thinking there was something a little bit crass in the gesture. Ali was not political—had never been in a position to become political—but she was learning. She was learning.
The floorboards squeaked underfoot. She raised her hand, paused once more and then knocked. Jaws opened the door. Her skin was very pale, almost blueish, and the little ploughed lines at the top of her nose seemed more prominent than usual.
She looked back at Ali and as she did so, Ali noticed the shape of a shadow moving against the wall behind her. She knew before she spoke that it was too late.
‘I was . . .’
The shadow on the wall shifted slightly, came closer.
Ali tried again. ‘I was just wondering . . . I was . . . to come and ask . . .’
Jaws shook her head. ‘I can’t.’ She was almost whispering ‘I can’t.’ She looked so hopeless, so empty, that Ali had the uncharacteristic urge to console her.
The shadow moved behind Jaws. ‘Who’s that?’
Ali didn’t reply.
Miss Naylor’s head appeared over Jaws’s shoulder. Jaws didn’t turn, she just ducked slightly. Miss Naylor didn’t say anything for a while. Ali wondered wildly if Miss Naylor was waiting for Ali to censure her. If she started to speak now, would Miss Naylor accept what she had to say?
‘We’re going back,’ Miss Naylor said eventually. ‘Tonight. Tell the others. Go and pack.’
She took the door from Jaws’s grasp and shut it. Ali started to run.
+
Hen and Caz were out on the roof, not speaking. It was a hazy afternoon, and the sun had blurred until the shadows weren’t shadows any more, just blank spaces where the light used to be. Hen had been looking up at the clouds, watching the way they made the roof seem to slide away beneath her. There was something restful in this isolation and the sense of the huge spaces above her.
Then she’d heard the latch on the window and seen Caz’s face melting through the blank glass. Caz looked swiftly left and right and then slithered through.
‘Hi,’ said Hen.
‘Hi, said Caz.
And that was it. They’d stood there, each with their separate cigarettes, their separate packets and separate lighters, leaning on separate bits of the roof, gazing up at separate bits of sky. They’d been like that for five minutes or so, each pulling the filter from their lips with a soft thump as they exhaled. Hen stubbed hers out under one of the tiles and lit another one immediately. The second cigarette was intended as a warning to Caz that she had no intention of leaving.
Just now, just recently, Hen didn’t want to speak. Under normal circumstances, with Caz in a bad mood, she would have sat here, spooling through all the possible things she could say and coming out with the dumbest one. She would have found something—men, teachers, Jules, Izzy, the weather, whatever—to talk about. She would have burbled on for a while and sooner or later, Caz would have put down whatever sulk she’d picked up and they would have talked. Not meaningfully, not even generously, but just enough so that Hen knew she was still in there, still had access of a limited kind. But these were no longer normal circumstances. Hen had no idea how to speak to Caz any more. All those faces above her, laughing. When she looked at Caz now, she had the sensation of knowing too much, of holding information that she would rather not have had. Just at the moment, she wanted Caz to go away.
‘Are you OK?’ Caz spoke so softly that Hen almost didn’t hear her.
‘Fine.’
‘Fine fine or fine hick off?’
‘Both,’ said Hen boldly.
‘It’s just . . . I’m worried about you. We all are.’
‘Why?’
‘We worry. You don’t always seem fine.’
‘Like how?’
Caz sighed. ‘You just seem . . . unhappy. Wrong. Like things aren’t good.’
‘I’m fine. Really.’
Caz was still smiling, but she went on, inexorable. ‘It’s just . . . the others talk about you. They say stuff. How you look ill. How you’re not as much fun as you used to be. I’ve told them, Hen’s OK, but they still talk about you.’
‘They should stop bitching.’
‘Know they should. But they’re worried. They see you, the way you look . . .’
Hen looked up towards the clouds and the open sky.
‘. . . and really it’s not surprising.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘They say you look terrible. So sad. Like a skeleton. I don’t say these things, I think you look . . . different, but they do.’
‘You think I look horrible?’
‘I didn’t say that. You don’t look like you used to.’
‘Horrible.’ Hen’s voice had flattened.
‘Different. Not so . . .’
‘Not so what?’
‘Not so . . .’ Caz looked away and took a long drag. ‘I don’t mean this unkindly, but not so good. Not so good-looking as you used to be. Your face is all bony now.’
Hen felt two things at once: a furtive delight, and the old fear again. Don’t you realize, she wanted to shout, don’t you realize, I did this for you? To be more like you, to get to that holy fucking golden place where you are. Each day, each meal, when I’m sick, I think of you, the shape of you, your impossible stomach, your perfect shoulders. That’s what I want. You make me sick. But all she said was, ‘Thanks.’
