The Wicked Girls (22 page)

Kirsty feels herself blush, looks down. The waitress returns with her coffee. ‘I put some chocolate on top,’ she tells her.
‘I hope that’s OK.’

‘Thanks,’ says Kirsty, who’s more of a cinnamon girl.

She stirs the drink, peeps at Amber. ‘I’m sorry, Amber.’

A frown: suspicious, defensive. ‘Sorry? What about?’

‘No,’ says Kirsty hastily. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t. I was trying to apologise if I’d offended you. And because
I … I didn’t know about Blackdown Hills. I didn’t know that had happened to you.’

‘Yeah? And if you’d known, what would you have done about it? Come galloping to the rescue?’

‘You know I … Oh, God. I just didn’t know, that’s all. And I’m sorry.’

The defensive look is still on Amber’s face. I’m handling this so badly, thinks Kirsty. Jim would do it so much better. He’d
know how to talk to her. I wish I could ask him.

Amber is shaking her head repetitively. ‘Yeah, well. I’m not the tragedy you seem to think I am, Jade. As it goes. It may
not be
Farnham
, but I’m doing OK. For your information, we’ve bought
our
house, too. I’m not a charity case. I don’t need your pity, thanks all the same.’

Kirsty is ashamed, wrong-footed; squirms at the tone. She’s angry with
me
? I didn’t do it. I didn’t send her to Blackdown. ‘Yes! Sorry. God, I’m doing this all wrong. I know I am. I didn’t
mean to …’ She dries up. Stirs her coffee again, miserably, while Amber studies the flock wallpaper from behind her stupid
sunglasses. Kirsty catches sight of a figure in the window: Rat Man, from before. He’s leaning his arm along the glass to
shade his eyes, and peering in. Funny little man. Something of a pest around here, I’ll bet. She turns her gaze back.

‘You know what I think?’ ask Amber.

Kirsty doesn’t really want to know. But she owes it to her. ‘No,’ she says.

‘I think you got Exmouth and therapy and education because you were the kid who got led astray,’ she says. Challenges her
to contradict the statement. ‘In the end, that was what it was.’

‘Amber, I had to work for it!’ she protests. ‘They didn’t just hand me university on a plate. I did it on my own.’

Amber’s eyes narrow as she interrupts. ‘Yeah, but we all know why you got the chance to do that, don’t we?’

‘Why?’ asks Kirsty, miserably.

Amber fiddles with her teaspoon and glares at her. ‘Because I was evil, and you were misguided. It was what they said in the
papers, after all. There’s nothing like a cut-glass accent on a kid to make her an evil bitch, is there?’

The words come out in a rush, the flow stopping suddenly, as though she’s run out of breath.

‘Oh God, Bel,’ says Kirsty. She doesn’t want to believe it. A kid’s a kid. Surely that’s true, isn’t it? ‘I’m so sorry. I’m
sorry. I’m sure it was just a lottery thing. It has to have been.’

Amber looks away again, her face inscrutable behind her dark glasses. ‘Yeah, well,’ she says. ‘Don’t think you can just come
in here and get my forgiveness. It’s not absolution time, Jade. Just so you know. I don’t think it’s OK that you got helped
and I got punished. Whatever the rest of the world thinks. I was no more responsible for what we did than you were. And now
I know, a bit of me’s going to hate you till the day I die.’

Amber stands no chance of snatching sleep before her shift begins, so she comes in to work early. She feels restless, uncertain,
and wants to be among people, because people are the best way to stop you thinking. Amber never comes to Funnland as a visitor,
and finds herself suddenly keen to experience the pump-pump-pump of music, the hyped-up laughter of strangers, the breathless
whirl of light and movement, without thinking about the junction boxes and the pistons, the pulleys and the cranes and the
smoke and mirrors that bring it all to life.

She comes in through the back gate. Jason Murphy is off, she notices; a thin, solemn black man she doesn’t recognise watches
her as she swipes her card and opens her locker. She nods at him and receives a neutral nod – neither friendly nor unfriendly,
nor curious nor bored – in return. She dumps her bag, but keeps her jacket on, emptying her keys and cash into the buttoned
breast pocket.

She can hear the strains of ‘We Are Family’ coming from the waltzer, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ from the Terror Zone, ‘Echo Beach’
from the Splash Zone; her ear has become so attuned to the repetitive assault to the senses that she can hear each song individually,
knows that each will be followed by ‘I Feel for You’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’. Somewhere out there,
she knows that Vic and his mate Dave are doing their Sister Sledge dance together, their little bit of showbiz, all manly
shoulder-leaning and jazz hands; a little bit of theatre that makes the
punters laugh and feel like they’ve witnessed a moment of joyous improvisation. Improvisation that, if they hung around the
same spot long enough, they would get to see at eleven minutes past the hour, every hour. In seventeen minutes’ time the students
at the roller coaster queue will ‘spontaneously’ become Take That, patting their chests and pointing to their crotches with
choreographed abandon.

Automatically, she runs her eye over the punch cards in the rack. Funnland still has a punch-card system, as well as the swipe-keys,
so that Suzanne Oddie can tell if any of the staff have been sneaking in for a bit of fun without paying. Few cards have been
punched yet: just the early-evening skeleton crew who circle the compound, emptying bins and picking up litter with long-handled
tongs. Amber had to fight long and hard to get the tongs: before she did it, the cleaning was an onerous cycle of stoop and
stand, stoop and stand, absenteeism through back strain a serious problem. She notices that Jackie has punched in already;
wonders why her laziest colleague is suddenly keen. Starts worrying, again, about what she’s going to do about the budget.

Shit, she thinks. I’m not going to get a minute’s peace. If I’m not thinking about what happened this afternoon, I’m going
to be worrying about that. I don’t see how I’m going to do it. Could I cut back everyone’s hours, so no one has to go? Christ.
And then it would be unfair on everyone.

She realises that she’s been standing here for a full minute, staring at her locker door as though in a fugue, and that the
security guard is staring at her, this time with curiosity in his gaze. Pull yourself, together, Amber. Come on.

She shakes her head impatiently and heads out into the park.

The rain has died off and the park smells of damp and doughnuts. Over the babel, beyond the howls from the rollercoaster,
Amber can dimly hear the crash and drag of the sea. She walks and pauses, only half aware of the surging crowd, and considers
her options. She has been in Whitmouth for years, but has never
ridden its famous roller coaster. She was too poor to afford the entrance fee when she first arrived here, and lately familiarity
has rendered her almost immune to its existence, beyond the need to scrape and scrub its surfaces clear of chewing-gum.

She shakes her head, like a horse under attack by a fly. It’s not work-time yet. She refuses to allow herself to think about
work until her shift begins. It’s intruded enough on her day already and, as days go, anyone would say that it had been a
bad one. It was a mistake, facing Jade, thinking she was ever going to get a resolution; she knows that. She sets out to the
head of the queue.

The roller coaster is always staffed by teenagers and early-twenty-somethings, a crew employed on the basis of their looks.
It’s Funnland’s most prominent attraction, and policy dictates that the showpiece ride should have the showpiece staff. They
even dress differently from the rest of the park staff: jewel-like in wasp-yellow Bermuda shorts and skin-tight scarlet T-shirts
with the ride’s
EXXPLODE
!! logo scrawled across the front. She knows them all, of course. Two are the offspring of her own
staff and one, a girl called Helen, lives four doors down on Tennyson Way, and is on her way to Manchester Uni and the big
wide world in the autumn.

Helen’s on the gate now. Undoes the staff barrier and lets Amber through. ‘Hi, Mrs Gordon,’ she says. ‘How are you?’

‘Good, thanks,’ lies Amber.

‘Is there something up?’ asks Helen with polite concern. Amber is always amused, the way this girl talks to adults as though
they were teachers, in an era when even teachers don’t get talked to like teachers. ‘Do we need to suspend?’

‘No, no,’ says Amber. ‘Nothing like that. It just suddenly hit me that I’ve been working here six years and I’ve never once
ridden this thing.’

‘Ooh,’ says Helen, and laughs. ‘Ooh, how funny. I rode it about six times a day, the first week I was here.’

‘Yes. Of course, I’m not here when it’s working, most of the time.’

‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I guess not. Anyway. Let’s sort that out.’

She waves a hand at the front boarding gate, where four people – the winners of the queuing system – stand proudly awaiting
the next train. ‘Get yourself in the line for car one and you can get on the ride after next.’

Amber quails slightly at the thought of being at the front. Her natural comfort zone would be better served by having some
other cars, rather than clear air, in front of her. But she knows she’s being honoured, and concedes. As she takes her place,
she is rewarded with the silent, baleful scrutiny the British reserve for queue jumpers.

The train pulls in and the queuers close ranks, as though they expect her to push in. Amber stands back to preserve their
blood pressure, turns away and surveys the park.

On the far side of the concourse, the staff gate opens and a knot of people steps through. She recognises one of them as Suzanne
Oddie, and sees that she is surrounded by the deep blue and health-and-safety yellow of what can only be police uniforms.
She doesn’t think much of it. There have been police in and out of the park since the murder, and there’s the odd copper in
here every day, even in the quiet times. She moves to the front of the gate as a new wave of riders is let through from the
main queue, sees a sea of disappointed faces as they catch sight of her standing there. There’s hardly ever just one single
seat taken on a row. People like to ride in pairs: courage in numbers.

What’s Jade doing now? she wonders. Did she find our little tea as disturbing as I did? My God. I had no idea. All this time
I’d thought she’d be like me: trained by fear, squashed by shame, ducking out of harm’s way, keeping her head down. And now
I know that everything was different for her, I’ll never be able to forget it. I’ve let the genie out of the bottle. It won’t
go back.

It’s not fair. It’s not bloody
fair
.

A train thunders overhead and her skin tingles with the change of air pressure. It’s been designed that way so that the screams
from above will raise adrenalin levels. With three trains on the circuit, you hear this twice while you’re queuing, and,
whatever your rational brain tells you, your lizard brain is primed, by the time the safety bars clamp down, to believe that
it faces danger. For Amber, accustomed to waiting in the dark for the sound of approaching footsteps, to striving never to
attract attention, it’s a disturbing sound. She wants to turn tail and flee. But her train is rumbling to a stop and the passengers
behind her are bunching to board, and she knows it’s too late. As the riders before her detrain on to the far platform, she
steps with wobbly ankles into the pod and takes her seat.

Shit, what am I doing? she asks herself. This is a crazy, stupid thing. It’s more like punishment than pleasure. But maybe
that’s exactly why I’m doing it. I feel bad, so now I’m beating myself up. I’m doing what I was trained to do. After all,
in a place like Blackdown Hills, the best they hoped for was that we’d own the blame and learn to take our punishment.

The harness comes down, clunks into place. Pin-down. The people next to her breathe, laugh and throw each other anticipation-filled
looks. Amber grips the padded shoulder bars and closes her eyes. Gulps. I hate things like this. That’s the real reason I
never go on them. Every other reason is just an excuse. Over and over in my life, I’ve felt like I was falling out of control.
There’s no way I’d volunteer to feel like that for fun.

‘Hold tight, here we go,’ bellows the automated announcer, and the wheels lock into place on the track. Oh shit, thinks Amber.
There’s nothing I can do to stop it now.

She remembers her first night at Blackdown Hills. Still screaming after the sentence, her throat hoarse but her voice carrying
on unbidden. The shower, half cold, the ache of medicated soap, the empty, falling blackness. My mum. She wasn’t even there
in court. They hate me. I am their disgrace. She remembers black night through the bars on the windows, the falling silence
as she walked, late and damp and frightened, into the mess hall for the first time. Hard, speculating eyes turning to check
out the notorious newcomer. Officer Hills pushing her forward by an arm, no sympathy in her demeanour.

They reach the crest of the first climb. There is nothing between her and the track, clear air before the plunge. The train
creeps forward, gathers momentum and clunks violently to a halt, throwing her forward against the restraints. She is hanging
face-down, a hundred feet of drop before her. She feels her stomach lurch. The woman next to her starts to cackle nervously.

Lying awake. It was at Blackdown Hills that she learned not to sleep. After lights-out was the feral time, when girl gangs
stalked the corridors and misfits wept with fear. Bel Oldacre, awake in the dark, ready to claw her way through the walls
as, night after night, she listened to the click and scritch of metal as people tried the lock on her barricaded door. Sometimes
a muffled cry or the sound of a chase invaded the darkness. They knew who she was. Of course they did. How many twelve-year-olds
who talked like the Queen were there in the country’s institutions?