Relatively Strange (13 page)

Chapter Fifteen

I’d passed my eleven-plus exam with flying colours, a rewarding combination in differing ratios of my ability and Elizabeth’s brains and had moved on to St. Margaret’s County Grammar School for Girls. In the smaller, safe environment of Junior School I’d had an assured place in the hierarchy. In this new establishment I was a somewhat nervous small fish in stiffly unyielding, brand new winter uniform, clambering daily on to the bus and heading to a vastly larger pond. In my form there was no one from my previous school and I was, frankly, unsure whether there was best friend material there at all – certainly not another Elizabeth.

For a while, things looked bleak. Everything was big and intimidating; miles of beige linoleumed corridors which confusingly all looked the same; new routines; more regulations than you could shake a fist at and a constant balance to be maintained on the horns of my own personal dilemma. I certainly knew by then the rules I had to abide by. On the other hand, I was what I was and it was no more possible for me to switch off some things than it was for others to emulate them. There were times though when I was so much more than thankful for my talents.

*

Once a week we had Art which stretched, God help us, over three, forty-minute periods. The two art mistresses Mrs Burrell and Miss Rawn had fiery tempers, fearsome reputations for artistic eccentricity and were spoken of in the hushed tones usually reserved for triple axe-murderers. First weekers, lined up outside the art studio for our inaugural session with Mrs Burrell, beneath regulation green overalls, several sizes too large to allow for future growth, stomachs were a-churning and knees were a-knocking.

For full ten minutes after the 9.30 bell had tolled and no need to ask for whom, we waited in quivering anticipation. At 9.40 the studio door was flung wide with enough force to hit the wall, where missing plaster chunks testified to previous impacts. In a once-upon-a-time-white now grey and paint-splattered smock, towered Mrs Burrell. Her head was haloed by bright, upstanding hennaed hair and two pairs of glasses, suspended by knotted shoelaces, bounced uneasily on the mobile shelf of her unfettered bosom.

“Well?” she barked. We all jumped, as one.

“What in hell’s teeth are you playing at eh? eh?” Twenty eight pairs of eyes widened. No one spoke, no one shuffled and I suspect several of us tried to stop breathing for a while.

“You sad, sorry lot, just how bloody long were you going to stand there like cows waiting for milking?
You
,” A nicotine-stained finger shot under the nose of Helen Schlieman, whose misfortune it was to be at the front of the queue. “Was there a little something you might have done?” Even from where I stood, halfway down the petrified line, it was obvious that all logical thought, let alone power of speech had temporarily deserted poor Helen. She opened and shut her mouth a couple of times but nothing was ready, or willing, to come out.

“My sainted Aunt Fanny!” Mrs B. smote herself dramatically on the forehead, raked her hair to even more upstandingness, stalked further down the line and fixed another hapless victim with a basilisk stare.

“
Well?
” she yelled, “Have you not got the wit God gave you.
What should you have done
?”

“N-N-N-knock?” ventured one bright and brave soul.

“No, no, no, no. You don’t knock. YOU. COME. IN! It’s on your timetable isn’t it? It’s your lesson isn’t it? Now for what little time we’ve got left –
move!!
” Miserably, trampling each other’s heels in our haste, we crowded into the enormous sky-lighted room and stood, huddled together for protection.

“Well, don’t just stand there stargazing. Find yourselves a donkey.” A donkey? We stared desperately at each other, mutual incomprehension merging with blind panic. The woman was totally mad, certifiable, no doubt about it.

“
A donkey, a donkey.
” shrieked the lunatic Burrell, stamping first one sturdily shod foot then the other. “You.” with one demonic bound, she was before me, I nearly wet myself before I realised she was addressing my neighbour – still, too close for comfort.

“You girl, blondie, what’s a donkey?” In desperation, if ever a bit of extra help was needed it was now, I scanned and knew. Alongside me Sylvia Witters was making a despairing start.

“Well it’s got four legs and …” I nudged her sharply and she followed my glance to the paint-splattered, wooden combined seats and easels around the perimeter of the room.

“One of those?” she said pointing doubtfully.

“Well, thank you, Thank you
very
much. Now everyone go and sit on one. No, not you.” She’d reached out and secured my arm in a vice-like grip, “Since you’re such a clever puss you can be our model today.”

In her welcoming speech our new Headmistress, Miss Frearsome, a lady, making up with undeniable and unbendable authority what she lacked in inches – the only time I ever saw her disconcerted was when a camel spat in her eye once on a zoo outing – had informed us our schooldays would be the best of our lives. Sitting for an hour and a half, too terrified to so much as twitch and draped in dusty velvet with a laurel wreath on my head, wax grapes in one hand and anchoring a jug, achingly on my shoulder with the other, I was inclined to think differently.

*

Like anyone, I craved popularity at school, and of course it wasn’t hard for me to say the right things. I gained a reputation for being sensitive and intuitive and friends always said I gave good advice, although this was usually because I knew what it was they wanted to hear. In any institution however, there are always those whose main source of entertainment is making someone else’s life a misery. There was a group of four third formers, tall, cruelly supercilious and universally feared by anyone younger and smaller and not a few older and larger. And within the school and its surroundings, there were plenty of unobserved areas, in which head honcho Tina Braun and her coterie could be found on most days, giving someone grief.

Peripherally aware of them and their activities I happened to be passing the games store one day and heard the unmistakeable, shrill tone of Tina B, amidst much laughter. I knew if Tina and Co were having fun, odds were, somebody else wasn’t. I won’t pretend I leapt in there ready to defend the weak and vanquish the wicked but as I walked past, my mind already on other things, I caught a mental whiff that made me acutely uncomfortable. A musky excitement; feral pleasure multiplied by the several minds concentrating – very unsavoury. Almost against my will, after all it wasn’t my fight, I pushed open the door. In the gloomy, sweat and rubber-scented interior of the large hut used to store rounders and tennis equipment, the gang were in full swing and were delighted to see me. Someone come to stick her nose in – what could be more fun than that?

The wretched girl they’d cornered, pale face blotched and tearful was in my form. Linda, a nervous person with a habit of rubbing her thumbs frenziedly together when called upon to speak in lessons, as if hoping to produce a spark, physically if not mentally. She was struggling to recover the contents of her school bag which had been strewn around the floor of the shed. Her relief washed over me as I stood there, she saw another victim too, but at least someone to divert some of the attention. I moved forward to pick up one of the exercise books from the floor. Tina moved at the same instant, placed her foot on the open page and ground down triumphantly.

“Oooh, seems to be ever so stuck.” she announced. Hysteria rocked the ranks – that Tina was a wit all right, no doubt about it. I ignored her, stooped for another book. Quick as you like the foot descended again. This time she also caught the tip of my finger, it hurt. I straightened up, annoyed, this was silly.

“Haven’t you got anything better to do?” I asked.

Tina and cronies could hardly believe their ears, or their luck – first-formers didn’t talk back, they did as they were told, made it snappy and were scared. This was way too good to be true.

Phillipa, another jewel in the crown of the school, sauntered over and turning sideways used her not insubstantial hip to give me a hefty shove that made me stagger. Linda, who’d been unobtrusively backing towards the door, found her exit blocked by a blonde bombshell called Shona. Linda started to cry again and I got fed up. I visualised an ants’ nest we’d had outside the back door last Summer. I remembered clearly how it looked when they swarmed one day in July, a heaving, scuttling black mass, silvered by newly grown wings. It took just a second or two to assemble the picture fully in my mind and then I opened up to Tina. The effect was gratifyingly instantaneous, unexpectedly contagious and truly educational. Tina shrieked loudly and commenced a strange little jig, brushing and slapping desperately at herself. I’d supplied the visuals, it seemed Tina’s imagination and fear was supplying the rest.

Whilst the other three had no idea what could possibly be causing Tina such sudden grief, the general consensus seemed to be if she was that scared, she knew something they didn’t and they also started shrieking and hopping, it was all rather lively. I helped a baffled, still snivelling Linda retrieve the rest of her books, no interference now – everyone seemed to be otherwise occupied and we left. I felt more than a bit pious and I’d like to say that such a salutary experience reformed my chums in the third form. Sadly that wasn’t the case and although they never troubled me again, poor Linda became the focus of their ire for almost an entire term and short of attaching myself to her permanently, there was little I could do to help. I wondered, guiltily and often whether, without my interference they’d have simply teased, bullied and then moved on.

Chapter Sixteen

When I was sixteen I killed a man. I didn’t mean to do it, but on the other hand it wasn’t quite an accident either.

In our second year at the school we were re-streamed according to which subjects we were taking for ‘O’ level and in my new form I became close friends with Faith Brackman. The physical antithesis to me, she was a tall, slim, quietly spoken, graceful girl – refined, my mother stated approvingly. She had short-cut, fine fair hair and was blue-eyed, with a soft dreamy expression belying a quick and astute mind and a formidable rapport with a netball. Together with Rochelle Lind and Elaine Henner we became a close-knit group. We were at an age then when we were being allowed further afield on our own and weekends were taken up with outings to the cinema and wonderfully long, warm, lazy summer days, swanning around in Hyde Park. We’d consume vast picnic lunches; formulate grandiose plans for the future; launch hysterical rowing sessions on the Serpentine and on the way home cram into tiny photographic booths in Woolworths to create wacky and witty strips of photos.

Rochelle and Elaine were both very open, thoughts and emotions bubbling continually on the surface. Faith was the opposite, introverted and with a curiously rigid, compartmentalised mind, the like of which I’d never come across before. Whilst with most people the head-jumble is simply horrendous, Faith’s was neat, tidy and orderly, almost filed and labelled. She was extremely restful to be with although, for my own protection, as much as anyone else’s privacy, I did try to keep myself to myself and made it a point of honour not to go paddling about in friends’ heads.

Rochelle’s parents were acrimoniously divorced, a rift from which fallout was still descending on Rochelle and Tom her seven year old, bespectacled and front-toothless brother. She was a comfortably built girl with shiny, curly long brown hair and glasses forever sliding in unscheduled descent down her short nose. Asthmatic, with a slightly breathless way of talking, whenever she told a story our breath hitched unconsciously in sympathy. We were always hunting for her inhaler which was never where she thought she’d put it. She was also endlessly weary from reassuring whichever parent she was with, how infinitely superior in every way they were to the other.

“Honestly,” she told us, “It’s like having three children in the family, with Tom the most sensible.” It was sad to see how, as time went on, matters only seemed to sour, worsen and grow more complicated. Each of her parents found then broke with subsequent partners and Rochelle, a nurturer born and bred, took on an astonishing variety of equally angst-ridden ex’s, including two new sets of siblings with completely fresh sets of problems.

Elaine’s parents were much older than mine, She’d arrived to an astonished mother who, happily putting a spreading waistline and missed monthlies down to an early Change, never really got over the shock of finding she was seven months pregnant with her only child. I don’t think her father, early fifties then, mid-sixties when I knew him, ever fully adjusted either. He’d answer the door when we walked Elaine home after school and there’d be just a second or two of polite but puzzled inquiry as he peered from the entrance hall, as if trying to place her.