Read Online The Following Girls by Louise Levene - Free Book Online
Authors: Louise Levene
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row of assorted females holding a large shield, and there on the end, in her dinky little skating skirt, was a slightly younger Bunty. Like the school had taught her to skate.
The main wall outside the head’s study was hung with portraits of Dr O’Brien and the six previous incumbents: shingled, four-eyed frights in gowns and collars and ties, all looking like Eleanor Roosevelt with toothache, with perfectly round black spectacle frames over their beady eyes – as though the pictures had been vandalised. You half expected a Hitler moustache or two and a few blackened teeth. Had they even needed those creepy little John Lennon glasses, or did they just bung them on to look intellectual? All six were at their desks, all desperately trying to cultivate an air of brainy benevolence – hence the book at the elbow. A pipe might have helped.
Bunty always said that Miss Eileen Pinto MA Oxon (1928–1935) seemed the nicest. All the others looked as if they didn’t take sugar. This was one of Bunty’s yardsticks, the first question she’d asked about Spam – and one of the first points in Spam’s favour.
Dr O’Brien’s picture was at the far end: not a huge success. The artist was in regular demand for his ability to do impressions of impressionism without sacrificing the all-important Good Likeness, but the lurid pink of the gown that came with a London PhD ( Anglo Saxon Place Names in Pre-Conquest Charters for Kent ) had somehow infected the whole painting. There were fashionable dabs of green about the face but, with so much Permanent Rose on the palette, some of it had, inevitably, got into the cheeks, giving the subject a faintly gin-soaked look not helped by the water glass on the desk top. The eyes, hard black buttons of eyes stuck in the paint like coals in a snowman, followed you round the room.
Still no sign of the original. The bell rang for the next period and the stairs were filled with a thundering blue mass hurtling from room to room. They didn’t look at Baker (not cool to stare) but Baker was ready to be looked at just in case: slumped against the wall, bored look in place, chewing invisible gum, betraying no sign of the sick fear inside.
Her father really really would kill her. Yeah yeah, it was only plimsolls, but he’d be sure to start anyway. Symptomatic, he’d say (a word he’d taken a fancy to lately), symptomatic of her whole Att -itude. She could already hear him saying it while he snipped her face out of photographs, could already see it typed in carbon on a nasty little solicitor’s letter. Just as she could vividly imagine the O’Brien bitch mooing on about Last Straws and Baker’s new ‘contract’ with the school, drawn up after the whole lawn fiasco.
They still hadn’t got any proper proof that it was Baker who had smuggled in the squeezy bottle full of Domestos and doodled rude words across the headmistress’s hallowed turf, but yesterday’s little chat with Dad meant that everything would have to be just right from now on, shoes included, or she’d be expelled and then what? An awkward, career-wrecking glitch in her academic record, a nasty moment in job interviews (‘What happened here, Miss Baker?’) when they spotted the obvious step down from the glories of Fawcett Upper to one of the bottom-feeders of the educational stream. It was all very well Dad salivating over the glossy brochures, but none of the schools he lusted after would want her.
There were places that specialised in hoovering up troublemakers (even bad girls had to go somewhere). Most of them probably just did it for the money, happy to overlook any number of unfortunate episodes if it meant plugging that embarrassing gap in their cash flow. Other places genuinely relished the challenge of a difficult pupil: new leaves in blotted copybooks. Schoolmistressing was nothing if not a means of showing how bad mistakes could be corrected: a practised blade down the stapled edge; a nifty dab of ink eradicator:
The main wall outside the head’s study was hung with portraits of Dr O’Brien and the six previous incumbents: shingled, four-eyed frights in gowns and collars and ties, all looking like Eleanor Roosevelt with toothache, with perfectly round black spectacle frames over their beady eyes – as though the pictures had been vandalised. You half expected a Hitler moustache or two and a few blackened teeth. Had they even needed those creepy little John Lennon glasses, or did they just bung them on to look intellectual? All six were at their desks, all desperately trying to cultivate an air of brainy benevolence – hence the book at the elbow. A pipe might have helped.
Bunty always said that Miss Eileen Pinto MA Oxon (1928–1935) seemed the nicest. All the others looked as if they didn’t take sugar. This was one of Bunty’s yardsticks, the first question she’d asked about Spam – and one of the first points in Spam’s favour.
Dr O’Brien’s picture was at the far end: not a huge success. The artist was in regular demand for his ability to do impressions of impressionism without sacrificing the all-important Good Likeness, but the lurid pink of the gown that came with a London PhD ( Anglo Saxon Place Names in Pre-Conquest Charters for Kent ) had somehow infected the whole painting. There were fashionable dabs of green about the face but, with so much Permanent Rose on the palette, some of it had, inevitably, got into the cheeks, giving the subject a faintly gin-soaked look not helped by the water glass on the desk top. The eyes, hard black buttons of eyes stuck in the paint like coals in a snowman, followed you round the room.
Still no sign of the original. The bell rang for the next period and the stairs were filled with a thundering blue mass hurtling from room to room. They didn’t look at Baker (not cool to stare) but Baker was ready to be looked at just in case: slumped against the wall, bored look in place, chewing invisible gum, betraying no sign of the sick fear inside.
Her father really really would kill her. Yeah yeah, it was only plimsolls, but he’d be sure to start anyway. Symptomatic, he’d say (a word he’d taken a fancy to lately), symptomatic of her whole Att -itude. She could already hear him saying it while he snipped her face out of photographs, could already see it typed in carbon on a nasty little solicitor’s letter. Just as she could vividly imagine the O’Brien bitch mooing on about Last Straws and Baker’s new ‘contract’ with the school, drawn up after the whole lawn fiasco.
They still hadn’t got any proper proof that it was Baker who had smuggled in the squeezy bottle full of Domestos and doodled rude words across the headmistress’s hallowed turf, but yesterday’s little chat with Dad meant that everything would have to be just right from now on, shoes included, or she’d be expelled and then what? An awkward, career-wrecking glitch in her academic record, a nasty moment in job interviews (‘What happened here, Miss Baker?’) when they spotted the obvious step down from the glories of Fawcett Upper to one of the bottom-feeders of the educational stream. It was all very well Dad salivating over the glossy brochures, but none of the schools he lusted after would want her.
There were places that specialised in hoovering up troublemakers (even bad girls had to go somewhere). Most of them probably just did it for the money, happy to overlook any number of unfortunate episodes if it meant plugging that embarrassing gap in their cash flow. Other places genuinely relished the challenge of a difficult pupil: new leaves in blotted copybooks. Schoolmistressing was nothing if not a means of showing how bad mistakes could be corrected: a practised blade down the stapled edge; a nifty dab of ink eradicator:
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