Helen was groping in her pockets for tissues now. The tears were rolling down her cheeks. Her mouth hung open and her lips looked blubbery. I think her nose was blocked. She couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t stand to watch. Jumping to my feet, I started rooting through everybody’s pockets, coat after coat, until I came across one of those little cellophane packets of five tissues.
‘Here. Take these.’
Helen’s so good. Even before she’d managed to prise one out to blow her nose, she’d peered up at the peg to read the number, and asked in a really shaky voice,
‘Whose are they?’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘They’re only tissues.’
I don’t know if it was my impatience showing through, but Helly crumpled visibly, and took to snivelling again. I felt a right brute, and cursed Mrs Lupey for not having had the sense to send Liz. Liz would have known what to do. She was Helen’s best friend. She would have put her arms around her shoulders and given her a comforting hug.
I slid my arm rather clumsily around her back and gave her a little tentative squeeze.
‘Get off!’ she snarled. ‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Fine!’ I scuttled backwards to my place on the bench opposite. ‘Fine by me! I won’t come near you again. I’ll just sit here quietly and count the coats!’
I sat there quietly, counting the coats. But I couldn’t count anywhere in Helen’s direction because by now she was looking such a mess it would have been embarrassing for both of us. So I just ended up staring about, desperately wishing I’d had the sense to bring down my school bag. At least that way I’d have had something to read. I hate sitting anywhere without a book. I’m one of those people who get all nervous when the cereal packets are lifted off the breakfast table and there isn’t anything to read any more.
There wasn’t all that much to stare at, either. We all wear the same clothes, after all. Four hundred girls’ coats – just a sea of navy blue. This is a girls’ school, if you can believe it. And my mum sent me here. She got fed up with having a row every single morning about what I was going to wear and what I was going to put in my lunch-box, and another row every evening about all the tatty bits of paper I brought home.
‘Has this been marked?’ she’d ask, peering, suspiciously at anything she found. ‘Why hasn’t he said anything about your appalling spelling?’ And if I hid my work, what I got was this: ‘What did you do all day? Not much, I bet. You know what your trouble is, don’t you? You’re being encouraged to grow up pig-ignorant.’
That’s not very nice, is it? I had to put up with a lot of that. Then one day I came home from school and made the very serious mistake of telling Mum I needed shampoo for my Science homework.
She stared.
‘What are you doing in Science?’
‘Care of the hair.’
‘Care of the hair?’
She went mad. You have never seen anything like it. She went berserk. Then she phoned up my dad in Berwick upon Tweed.
‘Washing her hair lessons!’ she screeched down the phone. (I had to hold the extension away from my ear.)
‘Don’t be so silly, Rosie,’ said my father. ‘She must be doing hair shafts, and follicles, and sebaceous glands and the like.’
Mum put her hand over the phone, and bellowed at me:
‘Are you doing hair shafts, and follicles, and sebaceous glands and the like?’
I put my hand over the extension, and bellowed back:
‘No. Just greasy hair, and normal hair, and dry, permed and damaged.’
Then she went mad all over again. From the way she was yelling, she didn’t even need the telephone. I should think everyone in Berwick upon Tweed could hear her without any trouble at all.
‘The child is growing up pig-ignorant,’ she told my dad. ‘It’s all tatty bits of paper, and sloppy projects, and “spelling doesn’t matter”. I’m going to find a proper school. Somewhere with real books and red ink and silence.’
‘But Kitty’s happy where she is,’ said my dad. ‘You might unsettle her.’
‘Better unsettled than illiterate,’ Mum snapped, and went on to talk about how a good education was an investment for life. You’d think, to hear her going on about it, that I was an index-linked pension or something.
Then Dad gave up his side of the battle.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Last time she came to stay with me I mentioned Mrs Pankhurst, and she thought I was talking about my cleaning lady.’
‘Well, there you are!’ crowed Mum. ‘What can you expect? She does no History at all, unless you count that project on the Black Death that she does, year after year.’
And that seemed to settle the matter for both of them. Mum went out and looked at every school she could find, and picked the one with the most real books and red ink and silence.
The only trouble was, it was a girls’ school.
‘I can’t go to a girls’ school,’ I howled.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Call yourself a feminist? What’s wrong with girls?’
So here I am. And I quite like it now I’m used to it. When you get bored with teachers droning on at you, it’s better to have whole chapters of real books to read under the desk than tatty bits of paper. The silences aren’t too crushing – you can always whisper. And sometimes you find something really nice and encouraging written at the bottom of your work in red ink. Mum’s more contented, too, now I get up and put on the same drab miserable navy-blue jumble as everyone else every morning, and lunch-boxes are forbidden. And I’ve stopped noticing that there’s no boys.
‘Helen, it’s not a boy, is it?’
‘No!’
I didn’t think it was, somehow. Helen’s quite young for her age, if you see what I mean. Sometimes I see her on Saturday mornings in Safeways, tagging along behind her mum’s trolley. I saw her last week going past the washing powders with a man with grey hair that sticks out just like my father’s. The man was offering Helly something from a paper bag, while she stubbornly turned her face away. Maybe the two of them had just had a row.
‘Is it your dad? Have you been quarrelling with him?’
‘No, I haven’t!’
She glared at me as if I were her deadliest enemy on earth.
‘Oh, pardon me.’
‘Listen,’ she shouted. ‘I didn’t ask you to come down here. So leave me alone!’
Even a saint can only stand so much. I lost my temper.
‘You listen,’ I shouted back. ‘I didn’t ask to miss my favourite double art lesson to come down and sit in this smelly dank hole and be snarled at by you! So be polite.’
I’d never get in the Samaritans. Now tears were sheeting down her cheeks. She might have been standing under a cloud-burst.
‘Oh, Kitty,’ she said, her voice all wobbly. ‘I’m sorry.’
Just at that moment, through the wall, I heard the ring of second bell. I couldn’t let anyone see her in this state.
‘Quick,’ I said. ‘Before everyone tramps through to lessons. Get in the cupboard!’
I reached out and pulled her to her feet. Before she could pull back, she caught a glimpse of her. reflection in the mirror between the racks. She looked the most dreadful sight. Her face was blotchy where it wasn’t scarlet. Puffing around her eyes made them look piggy and bloodshot. Dried tears had stiffened all the hair round her face.