Frankie and Stankie (29 page)

Mrs Dudley Andrews makes you dance the quickstep very close together, so that you and your partner will move as one gliding body, joined at the pelvis, to the strains of Victor Sylvester. When she does a try-out with you, she's so close to you that her high, conical breasts are poking into your chest and they feel like giant versions of those steel studs bull terriers have on their collars. All breasts have to be high and conical, so you've got to have a bra, even if your chest size is thirty treble A, but Dinah's dad has a theory that bras are just for saggy old ladies. So Lisa has had proper breasts for a while before the girls' mum manages to sneak her into the Stuttaford's lingerie department and buy her a couple of schoolgirl bras by ‘fiddling on ze greens'.

Dinah has also got a bra, but she hates it because it's so uncomfortable. She's bought it cheap and all by herself, in the
OK Bazaars without even trying it on – because anything is better than having to put up with what Lisa's just gone through. In Stuttaford's, Lisa has had this hyper-genteel lingerie lady with a penetrating voice. The lingerie lady has stationed herself just outside the curtained cubicle and she's kept on trilling out instructions to Lisa in between taking peeks.

‘Shake yourself into it, dear!' she trills. ‘Have you shaken yourself into it properly?'

Lisa is certain that everyone in the five-floored department store is listening.

‘That's the way, dear,' the lingerie lady trills. ‘You have a good shake in there!'

Another of the new girls is not so much new as recycled, because she's the teacher's pet from Mrs Vaughan-Jones's Class Two. The teacher's pet lives quite far away, but she's come to GHS because of the art. Art is one of the three subjects that the teacher's pet is keen to be best at and the other two are English and drama. The teacher's pet still looks the same, with the same short mouse-brown hair and the same slightly down-in-the-mouth expression. The difference is that now, instead of having to be Teacher's Best Little Duster Cleaner and Message Monitor, she's more preoccupied with claiming the class monopoly on intellect. That's except for in maths and music. And any sporty stuff doesn't count, because – even more so than Dinah – the teacher's pet can't do games. Not to save her life. Plus she's got three left feet when it comes to country dancing, so in the end Miss Bowen has to tell her just to hop from one foot to the other during the Scottish Reel display. Even then she can't seem to hop in the right direction, so she's forever crashing into other people.

The teacher's pet is the only person Dinah has met, except for Catherine Cleary, who's completely and utterly tone deaf. It's not that she's a bit off key, or that she hits too many flat notes. The sound that she makes in singing lessons bears no relation to the music whatsoever. When it comes to maths, the teacher's pet has found a suitable quotation in D.H. Lawrence's letters that suits her particular mathematical stance. ‘Having a relationship with
them
,' it goes, ‘is like trying to have a relationship with the letter “x” in algebra.' The teacher's pet likes to quote this out loud as a way of needling any person who is a little bit interested in maths. The
teacher's pet does lots of drama and elocution out of school, so she often gets chosen to read the lessons in assembly when it's Dinah's class's turn. Whenever she reads out loud or does her poetical recitations, the teacher's pet will do these in a special elocution voice in which her accent is quite different from the one she uses for her normal speech.

These days the teacher's pet will quite often demonstrate her intellectual ascendancy by taking issue with the quality of the work set. So if Miss Byrd has got the class busy with still-life painting then the teacher's pet will assert her right to make a composition of writhing nudes. And if Miss Yale is busy with Rider Haggard, then the teacher's pet, instead of reading
The Devil's Disciple
under the desk, will cast public doubt on the school's ability to distinguish good literature from bad. But poor Miss Yale has to do whatever's on the syllabus, so it's not really her fault that most of the books are boys' adventure stories.

Dinah's class has to read
Stalky and Co
and
Prester John
and
Barlasch of the Guard
and
My Early Life
by Winston Churchill. And Miss Yale is trying so hard to help the girls understand what's going on in
Prester John
that she even falls off the rostrum one day, whilst re-enacting Richard Hannay's reconnoitre round the evil black leader's cave. In the story John Buchan has been explaining that Prester John, the charismatic but misguided black preacher who's ‘gone native', is destined, not for leadership, but for perpetual subjugation. This is because in the Bible, Noah's son Ham has accidentally seen his father naked. So he gets sent to Africa as a punishment and he turns into a black man. This is why it's always got to be blacks at the bottom and white people on top. Dinah thinks that bloke-ish Empire racism is always at its most mind-crushingly boring when it comes together, as in
Prester John
, with lots of boy stuff about terrain. Any reference to scarp, scree or sedimentary rock will make her brain go fuzzy.

Right now the best thing about school – the best thing about life for Dinah – is the posh-voiced new girl with widely spaced blue eyes, whose name is Maud McDonald. The new girl has half-inch-long black eyelashes and a thick rope-like blonde plait that comes halfway down her back. Shock waves pass around the class when she first speaks, because her accent is proper RP, which is a thing
only heard of in the movies and on long-wave radio. Plus Maud is an automatic giggle name. Everyone knows that.

‘It's from Tennyson,' says the new girl and she promptly starts reciting – a thing that she does in the same voice as she uses for her normal speech.

Yet she hasn't come from England. She's come from the Maris Stella Convent, just down the road. And, like the teacher's pet, she's come to join Miss Byrd's art class. The posh-voiced new girl hasn't been in the class five minutes, before she's established that she'll take no part in games.

‘Sinus trouble, Miss Chase,' she says.

Miss Chase is wearing her jaunty little netball skirt with Airtex shirt and pendant whistle and she's blinking at the new girl in amazement. The accent has left her momentarily disempowered.

‘Tennis?' she says. ‘Hockey? Netball?'

‘Sorry,' says the new girl. ‘Doctor's orders. Not until I've had my sinuses drained.'

‘Swimming?' says Miss Chase. ‘PT?'

The new girl is sorrowfully shaking her head. ‘All out of bounds for me,' she says. ‘I only wish I could.'

Miss Chase ventures that the new girl will need to bring in a doctor's certificate.

‘But of
course
,' she says. ‘Of
course
.'

The new girl has learned lots of Latin at the Convent. Plus her art work is very good.

In the shuffle of moving to the morning's first lesson, the new girl seats herself alongside Dinah. Both have headed for the back row. Within minutes Maud has won Dinah's heart by passing over a spot-on cartoon of the Girls' High School's most aged and boring pedagogical fixture – Miss Legge, who is right then taking the class for history. By the end of the week, by the end of the day, Dinah and Maud are firm friends. And they've soon become so transfixed by each other's company that they can't ever go home straight after school.

Instead they slope around the town centre for hours, trying on all the clothes in Truworth's and playing with the rows of little pots at the make-up counter in Payne Brothers. They ride the escalators up and down in John Orr's and spend hours over the
Vogue
Paris Original patterns in the big books at the Sewing Notions counter.
Between them they become completely obsessed with clothes and, on weekend occasions at Dinah's house, they put her dad into a rage by spending several hours at a stretch doing literary criticism on a single month's issue of
Vogue
magazine. They do this on the lawn just below his study window, so he can't block it out.

‘When I was your age,' he yells out of the window, ‘I saved up all my pocket money to buy a microscope!'

The girls sit tight, biting down their giggles and waiting in hope that he'll elaborate. They want chapter and verse on his meagre fiscal allotment in childhood, but he just retreats back through the window. Once he's gone they whisper some verse to each other:

And sometimes if I have been
gud

I get an orange after
fud
.

This is one of their best giggle poems, a thing which they relish along with ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth' and certain Wordsworthian lapses. Soon they are running up clothes together on Dinah's mum's ancient Singer and Dinah is nagging for a clothes allowance which she promptly spends, when she gets it, on a powder-blue wool overcoat in a climate that has no winter. She says goodbye to her flat buckled shoes and buys torturing stilettos with four-inch heels and vicious winkle-picker toes. She chooses an ‘auburn' hair tint in the chemist that makes her blonde hair go neon-orange, especially in bright sunlight. Then she settles, after a month, for a more permanent, sophisticated silver. The silver happens in the nick of time because the ‘auburn' has provoked Lisa's wrath and Mrs Clegg hasn't exactly helped.

‘I see you've dyed your hair to match your sister's,' Mrs Clegg says to Lisa when she goes in to the Tearoom and General Store to get some flour.

Lisa returns, incandescent.

‘When
my
hair,' she spits, ‘is normal. And
yours
makes you look like a walking Belisha Beacon!'

Maud has had her hair cut, Grace Kelly-wise, to the shoulder and both girls have begun to sleep in huge steel rollers every night, which gives them permanent cranial corrugations.

And then there's Angela. Sweet, curly-haired Angela with her rosy cheeks and sparkly eyes, who can now do
mille-feuille
pastry
and a rough-puff that melts in your mouth. For weeks, every breaktime, the girls come together in an awkward threesome, though usually it's with their respective, uninvited hangers-on. Then one day Dinah does the deed. I divorce thee. I cast thee out. Maud is my best friend now. Angela walks away in silence, accompanied by her attendants who are muttering
sotto voce
and casting backward glances.

After that the girls never speak again. They make no eye contact. Not once in four years. Yes, once. By mistake. Angela and Dinah are alone in a long school corridor. They are walking towards each other. They come face to face. They look into each other's eyes. They smile. Then each girl remembers. Oh my God. This is the person I do not acknowledge. This is the person whose existence I deny. They erase the smiles and walk on.

In the history class, the aged Miss Legge never leaves her teacher's chair and she seldom looks up from her notes. She rules by virtue of her powerful toxic aura and manages to catch every whisper. She sits four square with her knees wide apart in a mannish navy pinstripe suit which she wears with a collar and tie. Her stockings are rolled to the knee just above the level of the pinstriped skirt and she wears black unisex lace-ups. Her straight, snow-white hair is cut severe and short. Miss Legge has small darting eyes and a flickering silvery tongue. She has infallible, rigid classroom control, even though her teaching method can bore almost to death. It consists of her gabbling out the Gestetner-ed history notes non-stop for the whole hour. Then she'll instruct the girls to go home and learn that section by heart. So every alternate history lesson is spent in total silence, as the girls write out the previous day's notes from memory while Miss Legge keeps an eagle eye open for signs of conferring or copying.

Miss Legge requires the notes to be repeated word for word. No synonyms allowed. So that if, for example, a pupil writes that at the Boston Tea Party, colonists were angered by the tax imposed on ‘certain listed commodities' Miss Legge will cross it out and write, ‘ “Certain enumerated commodities” – see notes.' Then she'll write, ‘Minus ½% – see me.'

Even given Miss Legge's regime of reptilian terror, Dinah and Maud find it almost impossible to focus on their homework, except for when it's one of the half-yearly exams, where you have to pass or
else you get kept down at the end of the year. So it's thanks to Miss Legge's brain-rotting history exams that Dinah suddenly discovers her own prodigious short-term memory. She's found that she can sit down at night with a flask of strong black coffee and five hard-covered foolscap notebooks and by sunrise she'll be able to recite the whole lot off by heart. She does this through a system she's evolved which depends on memorising paragraph headings that cue her into the detail. It's a futile skill – except that it ensures she can always pass exams on last-minute cramming – because Dinah's brain will only hold the information for a certain limited time. After a fortnight the contents of the notebooks will have gone – erased as if they had never been. And it has the advantage of driving Miss Legge completely up the wall with rage, because it confounds all her direst and most malicious predictions.

‘You will fail your exams, Dinah de Bondt,' she says. ‘You will fail most miserably, mark my words.'

And then, two days later, Dinah will sail smugly through the history exam without a synonym in sight. Miss Legge is absolutely certain that Dinah has to be cheating. She begins to make a habit of positioning herself behind Dinah's left shoulder for the duration of any exam. Over the next four years she becomes Dinah's personal one-on-one invigilator, but Dinah doesn't mind. She's usually too busy regurgitating. ‘Certain enumerated commodities, blah, blah and blah.'

In the four years of Miss Legge's brain-rotting history lessons, there's only ever been one single out-loud challenge, only one proper interruption. And that's when, suddenly, in the middle of Miss Legge's reading out loud, she utters the word Fascist.