‘I sit here,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I always sit here.’
The rest of the class was at my back, staring. I could hear them, the unknown and largely harmless bragging and racket of the boys and in between their deeper and more rumbling sounds, the high-pitched snarl and snap of the girls, gossiping, testing and comparing.
‘Come on,’ I said reasonably, and put my bag on the table, ‘there’s loads of room.’
I was going to ask Chloe how she was feeling. It was easy to get her to talk about herself. I might even have smiled – a sticky and fearful smile, forced and less grown up than I would have wanted. I’d have been Emma’s friend, and endured a threesome to avoid being thrown to the rest of the form like bloody chump from the back of a boat.
Chloe stretched her feet out under the table. Her shoes met my shins. It wasn’t a kick but more of a push that transferred the mud from the bottom of her shoes onto my socks. She yawned luxuriantly, the back of her hand over her mouth, and then leaned forward and draped herself over the pile of bags and coats on the table. Bizarrely, Emma looked at Chloe through that yawn with a kind of pride on her face. Like Chloe was a new baby or the best sort of clutch bag. There was sheer love in that look, and a kind of smug ownership too, that depended on me being there to see it. I saw myself sitting there, only last week, and understood in a terrible cringing flash of insight what people meant by the lessbefrens thing.
‘I don’t remember her sitting here before,’ Chloe said, and settled over the desk, using Emma’s bag as a kind of pillow. I could see the top of her head, her razor-sharp parting and the complication of a French plait so tight it was making her hair come out at the temples.
Emma put down the homework diary and rubbed Chloe’s back.
‘She’s still not well,’ she said, with sickly kindness, ‘probably shouldn’t be here at all, but she was desperate to get out and away from her mum.’ She licked her teeth behind her lips and stared glassily into the air between us, determined not to look at me. ‘They’ve decided she’s grounded for fucking months,’ Emma said, as if to no one.
Chloe said something but her voice was muffled by her bag and her head-down position. ‘Tell it to fuck off. I don’t need the stress.’
‘You heard what she said,’ Emma said, still rubbing, and made a clicking noise in her throat. It could have been asthma, or purring. ‘Why don’t you take the hint and go and sit with one of your other friends?’
Her smile made her flat face even wider.
Chloe calls you panhead, I wanted to say.
The walls of the art room were covered in drawings mounted on sheets of black construction paper. One wall was devoted entirely to still life: carrots and tomatoes arranged suggestively and sketched by some joker, wobbly bananas done in felt pen, and a painting of a crumpled crisp packet almost hallucinatory in its detail and accuracy. Another wall devoted to blotchy and smudged attempts at pointillism and one more of pictures of knotted rope, balls of wool, hanks of tangled string: all vivid in black and brown oil pastels, thick enough to scrape your initial into with a fingernail.
I got up, dragged my bag roughly out from under Chloe and went to lean against the paintbrush sink at the side of the classroom. Of course there was nowhere else to sit. It didn’t feel like anyone else had been paying attention, everyone all caught up in the intricacies of their own dramas, but I scanned the room and saw the gaps close up and the empty stools disappear as if the walls themselves were absorbing them.
I should mention this to Donald, I thought, because he will know something about this: herds, mass minds, schools of tiny fish insignificant and edible as individuals, but fearsome and magnificent as one huge flickering shoal. People do it too, I thought, but I already knew that.
Shanks emerged from his office patting the back of his collar. It looked, I thought with a jolt, and before I could stop myself, as if he’d only just put his shirt on. The thought of him being naked in front of a poster of Marc Bolan, maybe even painting like that, made my feet tingle. I closed my eyes and waited for the sensation to pass. Chloe would have called it a cheap thrill. He clapped his hands, as usual, and sat on a corner of his desk, put one ankle on the opposite knee and reached for his register.
‘Glad to see you back in fine fettle, Miss Farley,’ he said.
‘Thanks, sir,’ Chloe said, her cheeks colouring up.
Then he leaned towards her, spoke quietly while the usual classroom noise surged around him, but I heard what he said.
‘Come and see me afterwards. A quick word, please. Bring,’ he waved the corner of the register in Emma’s direction, as if he was wafting away a bad smell, ‘Laura if you want.’
He didn’t sound pissed off, only stern and calm and determined to be kind. He was going to do his pastoral care voice, I thought, and force her to go and see the nurse.
In the first year or two of high school, the nurse, whose real name was Patsy, was called Nitty Nora the Biddy Explorer, because if you went to get a plaster or a suck on your inhaler, she’d always sneak in a check of your head as well.
In Year Nine the girls would call her Dr Jamrag, because you had to go to her office for supplies if you were caught short. She had a drawer filled to the brim with Dr White’s – the sort of hospital-issue sanitary towels that made you waddle and weren’t even for sale in pound shops. Someone once asked for a tampon, and got a lecture about toxic shock syndrome, natural flow and the importance of the hymen. Seeing her for the hymen talk was such a terrifying prospect that none of us were ever caught short – there was a trick you could do with toilet paper and a folded-up sandwich bag that would hold you over until home-time, and we taught it to each other in whispers during PE.
If the Year Tens and Elevens spoke about Patsy at all it was with a bit more respect because there was a rumour that you could get little paper bags full of condoms from her, or at least she knew where you could get them for free, no questions asked. It might have been a rumour, but being sent to the nurse, or being seen coming out of her office meant only one thing to the rest of us. And all of us, well, all of the boys, at least, were obsessed with condoms – there were always one or two stuck to the windows, and such a plentiful supply of them spare for water bombs that the rumour about Patsy and her paper bags was probably true.
I imagined Chloe in her office, and under the folding sick bed, a treasure chest of foil packets shining like coins.
‘What are you doing perched there?’ Shanks said. He looked at me, up on the sink, and shook his head. ‘You’ll give yourself piles – that porcelain must be freezing.’
I know he didn’t mean it. Most adults have completely forgotten the way things are at school. The word ‘piles’ released such a great gale of laughter that it took Shanks several minutes to get the class under control again.
He was standing in front of the longest wall – the one covered in all the coursework from the Year Elevens who were taking art for GCSE. Usually the ones who had problems reading or writing, or getting themselves dressed properly. They were the best pictures though. Chalk, charcoal, pencil, on blue and white and grey paper. Glasses filled with ice and something carbonated, so well drawn you could almost hear the fizz. Car wing mirrors, windows, the curved reflective bonnet of a car. Lightbulbs, more windows, and the strange lozenge-shaped bulbs of streetlamps. I fell into the pictures, gazing at the glass and water, ice and bubbles, until Shanks banged the spine of the register against the edge of the desk and demanded silence.
‘For those of you that have been watching the news,’ Shanks said, and held the closed register in front of his crotch like he was taking a penalty, ‘the rumours that the school is going to close so you can all stay safe at home and in bed have no doubt got your little minds working.’ He put down the register and started to pace. His hair sprung up from his head in thick pale tufts – there was a touch of red in it, as if he’d been a full-on ginger in his younger days. Strawberry blond, although that’s not a very manly way of describing it.