‘Will you be . . . I mean, had you thought you might apply to Tonbridge Hall?’
‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. Her eyes were cold. ‘Unless you think it’s too good for me?’
‘How’s your mum?’ I said.
She said, ‘What do you care?’
One day, two years before this, I had been travelling home late from school – a choir practice, I think – and it was almost dark when I got off the 64 at the Victoria bus station, the mid-way point of our journey. I began to pick my way through the litter and oil and filth towards the queue for my bus home, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of our colours, of the clay-and-maroon stripe of our scarf. I turned my head and saw Karina.
She was leaning against a wall, and not wearing her hat. She was smoking a cigarette, and three boys, none of whom I knew, were leaning and cavorting and smoking and foot-swivelling and kicking and lounging in her vicinity. They were not boys from St Augustine’s Catholic grammar school; they were bus-station boys. They had white peaky faces, full of bones; they had lax lips and bendy legs and zipper jackets. I remembered the boys from our primary school, with their elastic belts and scarred knees and grey flapping shorts: and I realized, with a sense of shock, that these were the youths that they would have grown into.
I drew back into the shadows. In those days I was easily intimidated by men, especially young ones, especially young ones at bus stations, who would jeer at my uniform and laugh in my little pale face. It wasn’t so much the men themselves who scared me, but the impulses of rage that leapt inside me at their jeers and leers and off-hand remarks, at the knowledge that they owned the streets. I would have liked to strike them dead with a stare; I wanted to beckon them, let them approach, and then stick them with a hidden knife.
Karina looked perfectly at ease. She barely seemed to notice the boys, yet it was obvious that they were trying hard to attract her attention, that they knew her, that they were tied up with her in some way. Her eyes rested on the shuddering sides of green double-deckers and the tired working people toiling home. She touched her cigarette to her lips.
I was cold, tired and hungry, and this state must have made me invisible, or at least translucent: because though I saw Karina she didn’t see me.
One evening my mother hurried down to the corner shop on Eliza Street, to try and get some bread before they shut. She managed to get the last small sliced, and was carrying it back when she looked up at Karina’s house and saw a face at the bedroom window. It was a face like a white puffy ball: at first she hardly recognized it, but it was Mary, all the same. She waved, but no one waved back.
seven
In the fifth week of term at Tonbridge Hall three things occurred. I shall describe them to you in ascending order of complexity.
The first, simplest thing was that the miniskirt fell totally and decisively out of favour. For some months the fashion had been on the wane, but that October a few of the old guard were out on the streets; by November, the maxi-skirts had won, and there was not a knee to be seen between Heathrow airport and the Essex coast.
Women became – suddenly – poised, mysterious and difficult. They wore long belted trenchcoats, like spies, and put on lipstick in public places. Twenty-six became a more fashionable age than sixteen. What could I do? I looked sixteen. And I could not afford a new skirt. Fleetingly, I wondered if I would have used my five pounds emergency money, if I’d still had it. But what would one skirt have accomplished? The cotton shower-proof came only half-way down my thighs; what extended below was to be showered upon freely, like lamp-posts against which any dog can piss. Even the duffle coat passed on by my cousin did not go much below the knee. I began to attract quizzical glances, as winter drew on, and I came down to breakfast in my pelmet skirts and strange stretched brown-black tights. I heard someone say, ‘Carmel’s so obvious, don’t you think?’
Julianne heard the remark too. Afterwards she bounced across the room, repeating it, extending it, embellishing it. ‘Yes, well, you see, where she comes from they do probably still wear such things, and after all, what is she?’ A second voice chimed in, just as well-bred. ‘A little shop girl, m’dear, a little shop girl.’
What was to compensate me? Admiration in men’s eyes? Not really. In previous eras my legs had been admired openly, by Rogers for whom I cared nothing. But now men seemed not to see me. I knew I had lost a few pounds – well, more than a few – but was there really so little left?
The second thing happened on Tuesday at eight-thirty in the evening – at which point you may picture us, the girls of Tonbridge Hall, gross and sated from troughing, lolling like sultanas each upon her divan. In an instant, a vast howling began, a terrible skull-piercing wail. I leapt up from my desk, believing my head would burst. Julianne’s textbook slid from her fingers and flapped open on the floor, its leaves fanning over and displaying cut sections of heart, lung, brain.
We were unstrung, terribly agitated; Julianne screamed, ‘The devil’s tone, what is it, are we at war?’ We flung open our door. In the corridor what met our view was a procession of young women, faces screwed up against the din, tramping towards the nearest fire exit. ‘Oh, if only they wouldn’t,’ Sue said, hands clawing her hair. ‘If only they bloody wouldn’t!’ The noise was visceral and sickening, as if someone were scraping your guts with their fingernails.
Sophy passed us, marching, her crimped fair hair drifting: trailing in her wake some respectable perfume, possibly the sugar and orange notes of Je Reviens. We heard Claire’s voice, rising, swooping above and below the hideous racket: ‘Ladies, do please remember, especially first-year ladies, please do remember, that in the event of fire the lifts will not be working.’ Claire, it turned out, was some kind of official fire-minder; they were appointed by the warden, one to each floor, and their job was to boss us down the echoing back stairs that no one ever used, to shoulder open fire-doors that no one had ever seen, to shepherd us into the street, and to count us.
As we skittered down the stairs, Julianne began to cough. ‘Why are you doing that?’ I demanded.
‘Authenticity. We really ought to be down at floor level gasping in the air. We ought to crawl.’
The impact of these absurd words was so powerful that when I look back at this scene I seem to catch a whiff of smoke indeed. I seem to see it curling under the corridor’s closed doors, and gradually rising into the air to form a haze at the level of our shoulders; I seem to hear the crackle and spit of threatened timbers deep in the building’s heart. But in fact, on that night, there was nothing but the cold air and the siren’s wail and our indignant chatter as we poured out into a damp, misty street; the lamplight was fuzzy, like the drowned moon in water. The warden herself – forewarned and sensibly clad in a tweed coat – went from group to group: ‘Remember, girls, in the event of fire, don’t stop to pick up your handbags or any possessions whatever – property may be replaced, but human life is sacred.’
By my side, Julianne still hacked and spluttered, her shoulders hunched and knees buckling. ‘What is it, Miss
