Tenterhooks

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. ‘Looks 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.

Frozen, we listen to the approach of Mr Stanford’s steps, but they stop short of our doorway.

‘Why don’t you walk around down on the shore,’ he says, presumably to Lawrence, ‘see what you can find in the rock pools, do much the same as you did yesterday.’ His voice is low, is a display of kindness and a play for conspiracy: he is wary of Lawrence, now, but has to try to win him over. The implication of this plan for Lawrence is that he can go alone to the shore, which means that he will not have to go, or not for very long.

Suddenly there are two more steps and Mr Stanford looms close to our doorway, but remains in the corridor, from where he addresses us en masse: ‘You lot have a bug,’ these words spat and orchestrated by jabs of his index finger. And now he is gone.

When the far door crashes, Rachel flops sideways onto her bed and whines into her pillow, ‘A bug, that’s pathetic, he’s pathetic.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ I tell her, ‘this could cause trouble for those caterers.’

The end of Day Four, which is the end of the trip: Day Five requires us only to Depart.

We have had dinner and now we are in the library. This is our first visit to the library, which was discovered half an hour ago by Trina who had decided to wander around the building rather than face a dish of shepherd’s pie, which she had nicknamed sheep worrier’s pie. We stayed, but as we trooped from the canteen, she called to us from the top of a short flight of stairs. When we reached her, she enthused, ‘Get a load of this!’ then lunged to open one of the doors with a fanfare, ‘Da da!’

We hurried inside to claim one of the long tables and six of the chairs which are almost armchairs. No one else came in here after dinner, and now the old stone building holds a deep hush crumpled only slightly and rarely by cymbals in the kitchens below. We are sprawled, heads on arms, our talk sliding over the shiny surface. The table is warmed by an avenue of lamps with jade shades. The wax is cooking, smells to me like a mixture of butter and honey. Which mixes in turn with the trace of soap dried into the crook of my arm. I feel warm and clean for the first time in five days. The wood of this table could have been made from chestnuts hammered smooth; occasionally I feel that I am slipping on the surface, even though I am as low as I can go. From here, the rain sounds dry, like the hiss of seeds in a shaken pod, and looks wonderful, the luminous streamers and their stray raindrops clean and intricately linked on our black windows.

Yesterday we had our day off, but today we had to work much harder than usual. Jim and Mr Stanford goaded us, yelling through the fizzy spray for us to Take it easy but ensuring that this was impossible. They chose a particularly steep and exposed stretch of shore for the belated barnacle head count. Then we were allowed twenty minutes for lunch, rather than forty: Lots to do. And at the end of the day we were not allowed to leave the shore until three quarters of an hour later than usual.

Our day off had been like a Sunday but better, with gossip and tapes, face packs and make-up. Lawrence had dawdled on the beach for a while, luminous in his waterproofs, shrunk to a toddler far below our window. We saw him throwing sticks and stones across the water. No one else ventured from our room, until we had to go to dinner because we had finished our own supplies. In the canteen, Mr Stanford had tittered, ‘Hello, girls, are you better?’ as if there was a joke which he was in on. Then he said nothing more to us until he came to our main door unnecessarily early this morning, sometime before seven o’clock, to scream, ‘Wakey wakey, wakey wakey!’

I sparked awake to see Rachel, to see her wake. Her face lagged behind her, filled with sleep. Disgusted, she muttered, ‘Wanky wanky, in his case.’

Now, in the library, the muscles in my back and legs are hot and heavy from the long, hard day. For the last half an hour, we have talked of nothing else but the injustice of this week, our exile to this peninsula, this enforced biology. All of us except Lawrence, but his eyes follow the conversation, rippling his sagged brow like a dog’s. One of us is kicking a table leg, has been doing so for quite a while; a slack kick, but these aimless prods have been knocking through our tender bones and building up in our bloodstream. Slumped here, in one another’s warmth, our faces are droopy and darkening.

‘We’ve lost a week of our lives,’ Rachel moans into the blurred reflection of her lips.

‘I wish that we had lost it,’ Susie sighs through a stray strand of hair. ‘It’s been the worst week of my life.’

‘Worst and utterly pointless,’ I remind her.

Trina snarls, ‘This place should be burned down. With Jim inside.’

‘And Mr Stanford,’ adds Rachel.

‘Well of course Mr Stanford.’

Rachel hauls her eyes to Trina’s face, then smiles. ‘He’s the kindling.’

Trina looks worried, ‘Sounds too nice, for him,’ and turns on one of her pockets. ‘We could burn it down,’ she chucks the box of matches high above us, the little yellow and black box a big square bee which drops dead into the palm of her hand. All the matches click simultaneously on the bottom of the box. It is hard to know if she is serious.

Avril chips in, ‘Or at least smash it up a bit.’

I see four heads jerk, and in the corner of my eye I detect one smile, Lawrence’s smile, so secret that even he lowers his own eyes.

Rachel laughs, ‘Well, don’t let us stop you, Av, if you feel so strongly,’ but suddenly she is serious: ‘I do think that we should do something; I do think that something should be done.’ She stops to look around us, to check that she is speaking for all of us.

I have to point out, ‘Not something that will put us in a similar correctional institution, but for a lot longer than a week.’

She slots her hair down behind her ears, a decisive movement, the opposite of a shrug, to imply that she had already thought of this; and pointedly says nothing, Goes without saying.

I stand up and take a few paces to stretch my legs, to uncoil the blood that is sunk deep in them. The blood moves so slowly that it feels granular. I stroll down a wall of books. The spines are slotted so tightly together that I cannot imagine how any of them are ever taken away from the others. Many of them are ringed with combinations of various leathers, coloured from yellow to mahogany, and finished with a chain of gold letters. But, oddly, I am drawn to the pamphlets which are placed here and there in the impressive display. Their spines are too thin for the labels of their catalogue numbers, which are wrapped around regardless like tatty and useless plasters. I start with one of these pamphlets, reach and hook a finger over the top of one of the furry cardboard spines and beckon it down to me. It falls easily from two swollen hoary spines and drops into my hands like a dead butterfly. I walk across the room, the blood purring now in my calves, and push my pamphlet between two bulky books.

As I turn around, Susie stands so abruptly that it is as if a line has been cut and she has bobbed to the surface. Her walk, though, is purposeful. I am not sure that I have ever seen her like this, and certainly not this week, when her only freely-chosen movement has been her stumble down the corridor to the phone. Now she selects a big book, the weight of which seems to surprise her, but to which she rises. She carries this book in a firm fold of arms which is further clamped by a frown of concentration. On the other side of the room, she swaps the book for another, which she swaps for yet another to cover her tracks.

With Trina, it is different. She stands with a slap of the table, skips to the wall to snatch a slimmer book which she moves to the shelf below, and runs with the newly-displaced volume to other shelves where she shuffles books. Whenever she pushes a book into place, she delivers an extra slap to the spine. Rachel has been watching us, levered high on her arms: her gaze scans us and in a few seconds she has seen the implications. Suddenly she is up, and busy with books. She zigzags the room more than we do, seems to cut deeper into the order of the shelves. Avril moves one pamphlet, but when she returns to her chair, her face is transformed, full and vivid with a smile. Lawrence pauses to decide where to put his book but in the end fails to manage anything worse than a clean swap, which is better than nothing.

After a minute or two, we clunk back into our chairs, on to our table. The library is no longer fully functional, but looks no different from before, remains beautiful. The damage is invisible, and beyond repair. There are too few misplaced books to raise suspicion: if a book is missing from its place on the shelf, then it is on loan, or it is a unique loss; if a book is found in an inappropriate place, then this is a simple mistake, a small carelessness. No one will ever know what we have done. The return of books to their proper places will be haphazard and piecemeal. Eventually some books will wash up, but never all of them; some will stay sunk on these shelves forever.

3 TIE-BREAKER

I kick open the kitchen door, my hands full of my colouring book and pens.

Inside, Mum is telling Dad, ‘She should have a proper meal.’

I slide onto a chair, sit up at the table.

Mum says to me, ‘Can’t you go in there?’ and her head jerks towards the door, the living-room.

‘I need a surface.’

Noisily clearing too much space for my book and pens, she continues, ‘I don’t want her to go back again without having had some proper food.’

She means Alison.

‘Well,’ Dad says cheerily to his newspaper, ‘she said she’d have salad.’

‘But when she says salad, she means salad cream. She pushes the salad around her plate then mops up the salad cream with bread; haven’t you seen her do that?’

‘Her grandmother is a greengrocer, remember; I’m sure that she has plenty of greens.’

‘Her grandmother works too hard, her grandmother is too old and tired to play mum. I wouldn’t be surprised if the last thing that she wants to see at the end of the day is a green; I wouldn’t blame her if she nips two doors down to Giuseppe for chips.’

Whenever Mum takes us into the shop, Alison’s grandma gives each of us an apple: this means three apples now that Michaela has teeth. Eliza and I say Thanks-Mrs-Mortimer, Michaela’s version is Ta-Mi-Moma. None of us are keen on apples, but we pretend. Mum tells Dad that the apples are embarrassing, that they make us look like scroungers; but when he says that she can always go somewhere else, her answer is I’ve shopped there since the day I was married and I suppose I’ll shop there until the day I drop.

Dad says, ‘I think that Mrs Mortimer and Tim are coping very well.’

Mum’s hands are propped on her hips, they look like claws. ‘Coping. They’ll need to do more than cope. You think she’s coming back, don’t you. You’re a fool, like Tim.’

Uncle Tim, Alison’s dad, has a gold tooth in the corner of his smile. I love that tooth, it must have a story to it, like a locket or a scar. Mum says, That tooth always surprises me, you’d never think that he was the type. I could try a gold tooth for the face I am drawing in my book; but of the pens that I have, the closest to gold is yellow. And yellow is not quite the same. A yellow tooth would be quite different.

Across the table from me, Dad warns, ‘Shhh,’ and cocks his head towards the door.

‘Oh, she knows,’ Mum says. ‘It’s you men who won’t believe that her mother has abandoned you.’

Another, ‘Shhh,’ but this nod is for me.

‘Oh, Madam’s oblivious when she’s drawing.’

I hardly even remember what Alison’s mum looked like; she went away so long ago. She was not around for Christmas last year, or even the summer holidays. Of course I remember her hair, the colour of her hair: close to the colour of Uncle Tim’s tooth. One of the tricks of the trade, was Mum’s joke, because Auntie Anne had been a hairdresser. Perhaps she is a hairdresser, in her new life – Mum told me that she has a new life. She was supposed to have given up when she married Uncle Tim but she never quite did, because sometimes we were put on a high stool in the middle of her kitchen so that she could trim our hair. When she was trimming my hair, I could smell her perfume, handcream, and washing powder, I would close my eyes and listen to her special scissors, her sleeve on her arm, her high heels whenever she took one of her definite steps to one side or the other. Sometimes a cold blade would brush my forehead, the tip of my ear. Feathers of hair would fall and settle on my shoulders, then eventually topple and fall onto the tiles in a circle around me. My fallen hair was darker than Eliza’s: we dropped trails of hair that did not mix. And then, not wanting to leave her out, Auntie Anne would graze Michaela’s baby fluff with her blades.

Dad leans harder over his newspaper but says sideways to Mum, ‘You worry too much, Alison’s hardly tubby.’

‘Oh, I know that; that’s my point: she’s a scrap, she’s looking poorly.’ Mum has come to the table and picked up my black pen, she is tapping the tabletop with the white lidded tip.

Dad says, ‘She’s missing her mum.’

‘Aren’t we all, but we have to keep going.’ The pen returns to the others, is slotted into line.

‘Her brother seems better.’

‘Oh, that bruiser. I’m glad we never had a boy.’

‘But, he’s older, he has friends.’

And today he is with those friends, playing football somewhere, leaving us in peace. The boy in my picture is wearing shorts which are too long to be football shorts. His knees are chubby, like the girl’s cheeks; I am going to have to use a lot of pink.

When Mum went to have Michaela in hospital, Eliza and I had to stay with Auntie Anne whenever Dad was at work. Just like Alison and Jason, now, staying sometimes with Mrs Mortimer. Mum had problems with Michaela, she was in hospital for weeks before Michaela was born. So for weeks I stayed in Auntie Anne’s kitchen while she cooked, washed up, tidied, ironed. And this was what I wanted: I did not want her to worry over me, I wanted to colour in the pictures in my books while she hummed and turned between the sink, the cooker, the cupboards. I wondered about Mum: where she was, what she was doing, and what if she never came back. While I was colouring, I liked to listen to Eliza playing with Jason and Alison in the garden, their laughs sliding into the kitchen on the sunshine, over the blue and white tiles. I liked to hear Auntie Anne’s laugh, too, when she was on the phone in the hallway: there was something in this laugh of hers which told me that she had forgotten that I was there.

During the summer, I moved from the kitchen down the hallway to the living-room, to try to draw some of Uncle Tim’s tropical fish: drawing from life, Auntie Anne called this. I drew and coloured a whole book of fish. The day when Mum came to fetch us, she took brand new Michaela into the kitchen and stayed for a while. I could hear her laughing and complaining that Michaela had been born early, a few weeks before Auntie Anne’s birthday, because otherwise they could have shared the same birthday. Whenever I looked up, I could see her and Auntie Anne through the serving hatch. They were both sitting on those high stools. Auntie Anne’s legs were crossed, but so closely that her bare feet were side by side on the same rung; her legs looked like a long silvery tail. I called through to ask Auntie Anne how old she was going to be. Her quick laugh could have been a cough. ‘Rox!’

Mum said, ‘Twenty-one,’ and smiled without moving her mouth.

Then Auntie Anne told the truth: ‘Twenty-one years older than you, I’m going to be twenty-seven.’

‘I’m six.’ I was thinking aloud, although not very loudly.

‘I know you are,’ she said, more quietly.

And now I am eight. Like Alison. Alison and I are the same. Our mums were the same, too.

Now Mum leans back on the twin-tub and complains about Alison: ‘What’s she doing in there? She watches too much telly. And much too close to the screen. Kids – why do they do that? What do they think they’re going to miss?’ Her voice sweeps towards me. ‘Why do you kids do that?’