The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

They’d been married too many years for her to think about him when he wasn’t physically present.

In fact, even when he was it was sometimes difficult.

Tomorrow night, Sylvia was having a poker party.

Nobody in Burwood had ever had a poker party before.

If only Bill would stop creeping and shuffling about, and start acting like the sort of man who was married to the sort of woman who held poker parties for forty people.

The Hendersons had been to hell and back, which wasn’t to say they’d been to the Congo, but was to say that Bill Henderson had lost his job—unexpectedly—and had a breakdown. Leaving Sylvia to conceal this fact from just about everybody they knew (including themselves) while simultaneously attempting to sell the 1.2 million London home in order to get rid of the 600k mortgage, pay Vicky and Tom’s final terms’ school fees (£8,500), and put together the Henderson re-location package.

She’d been looking for somewhere they could shine—after The Crash, the Hendersons needed to shine—and chosen Burwood after seeing an article in the Financial Times ranking it as fourth highest in the country for male life expectancy, and eighth lowest for teenage pregnancy. These figures spoke affluence, and with the proceeds from the sale of their London Life, the Hendersons bought number two Park Avenue—the largest house on the street—and set about making arrangements for their own Second Coming.

The house had been undervalued for a quick sale—messy divorce, the estate agent who showed her round explained, with as much polite regret as he could muster.

Bill got the job she persuaded him to apply for at Pinnacle Insurance after pumping him with Prozac until he was well over the limit, and in spite of the fact that he was holding out for a job teaching maths at a school in Malawi, which she knew he wouldn’t get because she’d shredded his completed application after promising to send it recorded delivery.

Sylvia’s rise to top of the pile here on Park Avenue had been—much like her daughter Vicky’s at Burwood Girls’—astronomical. Most of their neighbours had been easily won over by her Phoney Femme Fatale persona —everybody, that is, apart from the doctor’s wife at number five, who had an unsettling sense of humour, and the two retired diplomats who lived with their Down’s Syndrome daughter at number seventeen.

Both the doctor’s wife, however, and the two diplomats, had accepted invitations to her poker party.

Sylvia was going to win.

8

While Sylvia lay in bed not thinking about Bill, Bill moved slowly through the fog on Hurst Road in the same direction and with the same frantic plod as the other commuters—towards the station that connected them with the country’s capital: London.

The behaviour of the human traffic on the pavement was the same as the traffic on the roads, despite the fact that they didn’t have a vehicle. Bill had been classifying them over a long series of Fridays. There were the tailgaters who stayed on your heel and refused to pass even when you slowed down virtually to a stop; the centre crawlers who seemed to take up the entire pavement and refused to move over; the obsessive overtakers who insisted on accelerating past you only to immediately slow down so that you were forced to overtake in turn only to find them once more accelerating on your right in a repetitive pattern that could cover the entire Hurst Road stretch to the station itself.

He never spoke to his fellow commuters—nothing more than shifting shapes in this morning’s fog—and yet over the past two years their faces had become more familiar to Bill than his own family’s: to the extent of noting absences on the platform, and wondering why. He’d filled in the hundreds of hours spent toeing the line along the front of Platform 2 while waiting for delayed trains spuriously christening his fellow commuters. There were Zombie Extra, Sid Steroid, The Obliterator, Super Slut, Hobo Becoming, War Criminal, and Dartford Tunnel (so-called for obvious reasons involving over-use by members of the opposite sex), who would have got the title of Super Slut if Super Slut hadn’t already been taken. For some reason they rarely showed together for the 6:08 train. Something that had initially led Bill to the conclusion that Dartford Tunnel was Super Slut on a bad day, which she in fact wasn’t.

Super Slut always got a seat on the train, and Sid Steroid always stood as close to her as he could; close enough to share both his inherent and artificial body odours. If Bill ever stopped to think about it—which he didn’t—he’d realise that he spent a disproportionate quota of the day’s emotions on these commuter fictions: from wondering whether the festive season would bring about some sort of consummation for Sid Steroid and Super Slut to wondering how it was that Zombie Extra and The Obliterator always managed to get through the train doors first even when they’d been standing at the back of a platform cluster.

He’d served up a few of his better stories to Sylvia—such as the time Zombie Extra took a seat vacated by a generous gentleman for Super Slut and how it had come to blows between Zombie Extra and Sid Steroid—but Sylvia wasn’t interested. Sylvia was only interested in the names of people at Pinnacle Insurance who held more senior positions than him.

In fact, she hadn’t only been uninterested in his Zombie Extra versus Sid Steroid story, she’d looked worried and initiated one of her off-the-wall discussions on how St John’s Wort was a genuinely effective herbal alternative to Prozac for the treatment of depression, and how it had changed Barbara Phelps’s husband’s life. When he’d asked who the fuck Barbara Phelps was (let alone Mr Phelps who had a Life), she’d looked at him and said, ‘Precisely.’

He continued to stalk through the fog towards the station.

Sylvia had revisited the St John’s Wort conversation again last night and this had somehow run into a criticism of his lack of initiative when it came to Tom and spending time with Tom. Despite speaking to Tom on the phone and seeing him when he came home to visit and get his laundry done, Bill hadn’t yet chartered a yacht for the weekend and learnt to sail it across the Channel like Mr Phelps, who had a Life, had with his son—cross-Channel sailing being, apparently, the Litmus test for those who were, and those who weren’t paternally engaged. So their relationship was completely dysfunctional.

He was still thinking about last night as he reached the traffic lights just outside the station and drew level with Zombie Extra. Poised on the edge of the kerb and ready with the rest of them to make a road-dash across now heavy traffic, he remembered what it was Sylvia asked him to do last night.

‘I forgot to empty the dishwasher.’

It wasn’t until Zombie Extra turned to stare at him that he realised he’d said it out loud.

9

In the darkness, Sylvia’s ears clearly picked out a tapping, scuffling sound and for a moment she thought it was Bill—maybe he hadn’t left for work yet after all. She lay still and concentrated. There it was again. It wasn’t Bill.

She’d been hearing it for about a week now and told herself they probably had mice. Whatever it was, it sounded like there was more than one of them, which meant they were breeding.

Not wanting to spend any more time alone in the dark, she hit the light switch she’d had installed—one on her side of the bed, one on Bill’s—and the bedroom was instantly illuminated with just the right wattage: low because her eyes had become increasingly light-sensitive recently. Rachel Dent, the Hendersons’ neighbour to the right and Sylvia’s best friend of two years, said it was a side-effect from the Botox, but Dr Forbes said this was unlikely, and Rachel was only saying that because she had a needle phobia and couldn’t do Botox herself. Sylvia had a top-up done earlier in the week ready for tomorrow night’s poker party, and was eager to see if the Botox magic she’d got so addicted to had taken place—it usually took about three days for her face to process the agedefying contents of the injection.

The small, busy sounds stopped and she got quickly out of bed in the camisole and French knickers she still had the body to carry off.

Putting on the kimono Tom brought back for her from China, she went into the en-suite to check on her face. It really was unbelievable. She pushed up her sleep-ridden brown curls (L’Oréal colours 232, 141 and 303) pulled out some grey strays—and could have passed for Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman, on only £300 a shot. Given that Botox Heaven was so accessible, she couldn’t understand why there weren’t queues round the block for it. The number of her friends who hadn’t tried it yet—and who were in her opinion wilfully sabotaging their few remaining prospects—amazed her. Surely electing not to do Botox was as close to self-harm as a woman her age could come without actually drawing blood.

She smiled.

Her face, above her top lip, remained expressionless but she felt that this lack of expression gave her poise and a definitive sort of elegance; the sort the late Princess Diana used to have.

Sighing, she yelled, ‘Vicky!’ through her daughter’s bedroom door before going downstairs and into the kitchen. There was Bill’s milk glass by the sink, which meant he’d forgotten to empty the dishwasher again. She was half tempted to leave it until the evening, but that would only irritate her all day. Like that time he kept forgetting to empty the bin and she’d hauled it out into the middle of the kitchen floor, where it had stood, overflowing, and all he’d done was walk round it day after day—not getting the point.

‘Vicky!’ she yelled again, up through the ceiling this time, as she got the pan out the cupboard and started to make porridge.

Porridge was good for her. It had been good for Kate Winslet. The nutritionist had told her that. Sylvia had gone through a bad patch two years ago, just before they moved, skipping breakfast and living off crackers, bananas and emetics. The morning bowl of porridge had done just what the nutritionist promised: re-instated regular bowel movements and aided weight loss. The resulting weight loss far exceeded her expectations when she realised it wasn’t just her own jeans she could now fit into, but her seventeen year old daughter’s as well. She made a point of trying on Vicky’s jeans—her weight barometer—once a week.

She went to the foot of the stairs. ‘VICKY!’

There was the sound of a toilet flushing and water running.

She went back into the kitchen and laid out two bowls on the black marble surface she still wasn’t convinced went with the granite floors.

Vicky rounded the corner, bleary and grey.

Sylvia, concentrating, filled the two bowls with porridge before looking up. ‘What happened?’ she said, taking in her daughter.

Vicky hauled herself onto the bar stool and stared at the steaming bowl of porridge. ‘When?’

‘I don’t know when, but you look like shit.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you feeling okay?’

‘No.’

‘Ill?’

‘Don’t think so.’ Vicky stuck her spoon into the porridge then let it drop against the side of the bowl. ‘I can’t eat this.’

‘It’s what the nutritionist prescribed—plus it’s freezing out there.’

‘You’ve been out already?’

Ignoring this, Sylvia said, ‘So you need something hot inside you.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ll be hungry mid-morning, and end up buying a muffin.’

‘And?’

‘And—’ Sylvia faltered. ‘That’s no way to eat.’

‘That wasn’t what you were going to say.’

‘What was I going to say?’ Sylvia pulled herself up onto the other stool.

‘I don’t know—something about muffins and getting fat.’ Vicky paused. ‘You think I’m getting fat?’

‘I think you should eat your porridge—you need to eat properly…out all the time…takeaway pizza.’ She paused. ‘There’s no balance.’

‘Are we still talking about food here?’

‘What else would we be talking about?’ Sylvia started to eat. ‘It just occurred to me…’

‘What?’

‘That your jeans haven’t been through the wash much recently.’

‘So?’

‘So?’

‘So, I don’t like wearing jeans all the time and anyway we’re not even allowed to wear them to school.’

Sylvia nodded slowly. ‘Well, we all need to be careful.’

‘I don’t believe this. You’ve started already and it isn’t even eight o’clock.’

‘You’re the one who won’t eat their porridge,’ Sylvia observed.

‘I was diagnosed bulimic less than two years ago and you’re telling me I’m fat? I mean, I’m like no therapist or anything, but I’d say that’s dangerously counter productive.’

‘Is that a threat?’ Sylvia asked. ‘As I recall, you had symptoms of mild bulimia—that’s not the same as being diagnosed bulimic. It was to do with the depression and the binge eating and you’re over that now.’

‘Yeah—over that; all done and dusted with that one.’

‘Are you trying to initiate a conversation about depression, Vicky? Is this a cry for help?’

‘A cry for help? If I’d gone down that road I’d have fucking lost my voice by now.’

‘Are you trying to tell me you’re depressed again?’

‘I love the way you stress the “again”; like, here we go again, here’s Vicky getting all boring and time-consuming again.’

‘So are you?’

‘What? Still boring?’

‘Depressed—’

‘Noooo!’ Vicky shouted.

Sylvia waited. ‘Your porridge is getting cold.’

She watched as her daughter picked up the spoon and shoved in mouthful after mouthful, until the bowl was empty. ‘You want to watch you don’t get indigestion.’

Vicky stared at her, her mouth full.

‘I just need to know you’re on top of things. This is an important year for you. I know you’re hearing it from your teachers, but you need to hear it from me as well—and dad.’

‘Dad doesn’t even know what year it is—and you never made O Levels let alone A Levels. So what are you talking about?’

Sylvia resisted the instinctive urge to take a swipe at her daughter’s face—primarily out of respect for the fact that Vicky had actually made the effort to put make-up on this morning. She used to hit Vicky a lot as a child and was of the opinion that a ‘tap’ never hurt anyone. Vicky had—possibly—been tapped more than Tom, but then Vicky had been a difficult child, even as a toddler. ‘Curdled,’ her mother used to call it. Some children just came out like that—curdled. So, ignoring the reference to her lack of higher education, Sylvia said, ‘I just want you to know that your dad and me are behind you at this point, which means you’re free to focus on the opportunities ahead.’

‘Oh my God, you’re talking in platitudes. Did you take an evening class or something and not tell us?’

Sylvia drew herself slowly off the bar stool and Vicky instinctively flinched as she took a step towards her.

‘Why are you so angry?’

‘Because I’m sick of you talking to me like I’ve screwed up already when I haven’t even taken my mocks yet.’ Vicky stopped. ‘This is about me not getting Head Girl, isn’t it? You think me not getting Head Girl was because I’m not on top of things.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘God, it must have been awful for you having to break the news to all your friends—about me not getting Head Girl. How humiliating for you.’

‘So I thought you’d get it—what’s wrong with that?’

‘I keep telling you but you won’t listen—there’s no way anybody other than Grace was going to be Head Girl this year.’

‘So it was a foregone conclusion?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘But I thought you said people voted?’

‘People did—’

‘You’re making it sound like the whole thing was rigged,’ Sylvia said, interested.

Vicky, who’d been staring strangely at her, got down from the stool, went over to the dishwasher, opened it—saw it was full—then shut it again.

She turned round, arms folded. ‘Have you had something corrective done?’

Sylvia, startled, said, ‘What?’

‘Your face—it looks like somebody just ironed it.’

‘A good night’s sleep.’

‘Ruth reckons you’ve had corrective surgery.’

‘When did she say that?’

Vicky shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Some time. I asked Tom and he said “no”, but now I’m not sure. There’s definitely something different going on with your face.’

Sylvia touched her face with her fingertips then held protectively onto her throat under her daughter’s gaze.

‘Have you been getting Botox?’

Before Sylvia had time to defend herself, Vicky’s face contracted suddenly.

‘What is it?’

‘Sick—I’m going to be sick.’

She ran past the breakfast bar and upstairs.

Sylvia waited.

The sound of retching—distant—came from upstairs.

She went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Vicky? Are you okay?’

No response.

‘There’s air freshener up there—not the one with the orange lid that smells like old men—I’m writing to Airwick about that one. There’s a can with a blue lid—Topaz Haze or something?—use that.’

Still no response.

‘And you might want to have a shower while you’re up there. Your hair looks like it could do with a wash. I know you already did your make-up, but—’ She paused; her throat felt hoarse. The sound of banging came from upstairs. ‘Vicky?’

She needed a boyfriend, Sylvia thought; that was the problem. She walked slowly back into the kitchen, opened the dishwasher and shut it again.

Rachel must have mentioned the Botox to Ruth—why else would Vicky have come up with that crap about her having corrective surgery? Well, who needs any sort of Heaven at seventeen—least of all one where they inject you with Botox?

10

Vicky went next door to number four where the Dents lived—in a house half the size of number two, built in the fifties on a plot where stables for number two used to stand. She walked to school most mornings with Ruth—partly out of convenience but primarily because out of all her group, it was Ruth she liked best. Ruth had been the first friend she made in Burwood as an unwilling urban transplant who spent most of her time shut in her room dazed with loneliness and the amount of time she spent on Facebook.

The friendship had been engineered, in the beginning, by their mothers—Sylvia, in order to offload, and Rachel out of generosity—and in many respects it mirrored the burgeoning friendship between Sylvia and Rachel themselves, who became inseparable when Rachel started to emulate Sylvia. After bringing the Hendersons back from the brink, meeting somebody who wanted to be her was the best thing that could have happened to Sylvia.

It was the same for her daughter, Vicky.

Despite inauspicious beginnings—Vicky initially mistook Ruth’s choking shyness for aloofness—Ruth was soon buying Vicky wholesale.

Vicky had been to a pathologically competitive girls’ school in London that regularly provided the worlds of business, banking and government with leaders. It was intimated to the girls that reproduction was for the weak and stupid and that using your womb as nature intended was a less suitable fall-back position in life than having a breakdown and doing VSOS in Central Africa. Vicky had been on track for 12 GCSEs—including Ancient Greek and Chinese—and total mental and emotional collapse.

Ruth’s early feelings for Vicky, clouded as Vicky was in the aura of the city she’d been forced to leave behind, were ones of reverence, and Ruth’s reverence healed Vicky in a way nothing else could have done. The more Ruth wanted to be Vicky, the more Vicky loved her. Ruth understood that, for Vicky, living in Burwood was like living with a permanently infected wound. Despite having spent the past nine years of her life happy in this small commuter town nestled in the valley of affluence between the North and South Downs, she now learnt to actively despise it—and the people in it—for Vicky’s sake.

Just as when Vicky fell in love with Mr Sutton, Ruth was expected to do the same in order to keep her company.

While Vicky was often cruel to Ruth—nobody else was allowed to be.

During the cruel phases, Ruth maintained a sobbing silence and simply waited for Vicky to come back round.

Saskia was nowhere near as devoted as Ruth, but she was swayed by the Aura of London surrounding Vicky. A complicated home life and an inherent and distracting talent for painting prevented Saskia from becoming worshipful, but Vicky liked her because she was beautiful.

She liked Grace the least.

Grace had so many part-time jobs—including raising a younger sister their mother was never home to raise herself—that she was rarely able to commit to the social life of the group, and this bored Vicky. Any latent chance of real intimacy had now been buried under Grace’s appointment as Head Girl.

This morning the Dent family—apart from Ruth—were already out on the drive.

Nathan Dent, Ruth’s stepfather, was trying to get something off his shoe and Rachel Dent was trying to get into the car because she was volunteering at the hospital that morning. The Audi estate was emitting the mellow, warning ping it had been programmed to make when the driver’s door was left open too long.

‘My shoe,’ Nathan said over the voice of the Sat Nav, Giselle, who was trying to initiate conversation.

He stared down at the toe of his right shoe. What he had taken for a mark was in fact a cut in the leather. Between yesterday evening and this morning, something had either wilfully or unwittingly lacerated the leather across the toe of his shoe. The shoe was now irrevocably damaged…flawed…imperfect. Imperfection brought on nausea and panic, which led to bouts of unaccountable rage—like the one he experienced briefly now, standing on his drive on a Friday morning.

‘It’s ruined.’

Rachel looked down at the shoe he’d pushed through the gravel and fog towards her for inspection.

‘Where?’

‘There. Completely ruined.’

‘Is not so bad. Can’t you get repair?’ She’d dropped her pronouns and forgotten her tenses like she used to do when she first learnt English; something she only ever did when she got anxious.

‘It is not so bad. Can’t you get it repair-ed. Look, I know you don’t care.’ He paused, but Rachel didn’t respond to this. ‘But the shoe’s beyond repair and—for me anyway—that’s frustrating. I walk home in a perfect pair of shoes and by the next morning—mysteriously—they’re completely ruined.’ He paused again. ‘And that’s frustrating.’

Rachel continued to remain silent. She wasn’t being obtuse, she just had no idea what she was meant to say—how to respond without aggravating him further, which she was bound to do. With an effort, she leant suddenly forward, aiming clumsily for his cheek, and missing as Nathan turned to meet her kiss. Her lips bounced uncomfortably off the side edge of his chin and she mumbled ‘sorry’—aware that it was last night she was apologising for…for having fallen asleep when he wanted to make love to her.

Nathan calmed down as soon as her misjudged lips touched his face. The shoe was forgotten. ‘Okay, well—I’d better be off,’ he said, sounding almost cheerful now, and even managing a small smile.

Rachel watched him walk down the drive in his beige CIA Mac, nodding at Vicky Henderson who was backed up against the red brick wall that separated number two Park Avenue from number four. He got to the gate post, which was fast becoming obscured in bamboo, stepped in a puddle, cursed, shook his foot, then crossed the road, narrowly avoiding the bus going into town that nobody ever used because everybody in Burwood owned a car. Even the elderly shunned using their bus passes in favour of battery operated mobility aids.

By the time Nathan got to the junction with Hurst Road, he was wearing the tight smile he wore most of the time for his dealings with the world: a quietly overbearing, sarcastic smile that the majority of people were unwilling to probe behind.