Oligarchy, page 10
In the dorms, in the dayless murk of early evening WiFi, the girls share links to sites that explain ‘skinny fat’. Most of these sites have pictures of soft pretty girls that look like Tash and Tiffanie next to pictures of girls that look more like something you’d find if you searched for #thighgap on Instagram. The former is wrong and the latter is correct. Site after site confirms this. After all, who wants to be fat and look thin? Or, at least, who can kid themselves that they look thin when they are a massive UK size 8 and everyone wants to be a US size 00?
Tash gets an email from Weight Watchers inviting her to a meeting in the village. She hasn’t lost any weight in the last two weeks and the website wonders if she needs extra help. Perhaps she does. She can go after supper on Monday. They will have scales there. She can be weighed in. Start afresh. Try to look more like the after pictures than the before ones. Although frankly some – most – of the after pictures are not even that attractive. But it’s not about being attractive. It’s about winning. Tash probably won’t win, but at least she’s still in the running. She fantasises about actually repulsing Nico. She imagines him running his finger up and down her torso like he did that time, but now with the aim of arriving at her breasts or her knicker-line totally ruined by the hardness and reality of her ribcage, like those dinosaurs at the museum.
On Sunday night the girls break out of the attic dorms and it’s like an Enid Blyton book except it isn’t because in what Enid Blyton book do girls escape at midnight to weigh themselves on kitchen scales that they then break? It’s Tiffanie, of course. Her obese lardarse. The kitchen full of food but no one eating any of it. No normal midnight-feast behaviour here. Except that Tiffanie may have pocketed some treacle tart when no one was looking, because it doesn’t matter now that she’s not even in the competition. Rachel is still winning. Who even knew she had it in her? And Becky with the bad hair coming from the outside like some kind of blinkered grey gelding with trust issues. Although she probably won’t be able to overtake at this point, and it looks like Rachel will be the next Head Girl.
You can’t weigh yourself on Google either, in case you were wondering.
On Monday after prep, Rachel goes for her secret run and Tash sneaks off to the village. She has a Weight Watchers gold membership card already: something to do with the black Amex perhaps, or just how thin she is compared to most people on Weight Watchers. No one here has ever seen a gold membership card before. They have never had anyone here who weighs as little as Tash does, with her BMI bordering on underweight. They have never seen a coat like this one, a handbag like that. She smells of hothouse orchids and sultry youth and clean, just-made flesh, that babysmell still somewhere in the mix. She is everything they will never be again, not ever. When she weighs in everyone claps, and some of the women weep. When she leaves, one of the organisers asks if she can touch her, just her arm, just because. It is as if they have been visited by an angel.
Tash can’t help it; she tells the other bad apples about her trip to the village and soon they are all going. First Tiffanie, who obviously really needs it, and then Lissa and then Donya, Dani and even Rachel, who says it is simply research. Everyone signs up for the meetings online and then they head to the village in little clusters in their school cloaks. Perhaps Rachel is the last straw, with her abs and those spring-chicken triceps. The angels have become an infestation and the fat village ladies, the mothers of the village boys and the stable girls, don’t like it any more. They are overrun with thin glorious beauty and they can’t fucking stand it. It is one thing having a picture on your fridge; it is quite another having this perfect flesh pushed in your face day after day after day. They lock up their sons. They complain to the school. The punishments and talks begin again. The headmaster brings in a girl in a wheelchair whose organs almost failed when she was anorexic. The girl is called Jacqueline. Her hair is the skin of a freshly picked aubergine and she is all yin, all nightshade. She is still sneaky too; you can tell by the way she moves her little hands.
The headmaster himself wheels her from the car that delivers her into the school, and then back out again. Someone inside the car is helping, but it looks as if he tips her in, like a pile of apples falling from a wheelbarrow: like a dead body.
It’s too late anyway. Becky with the bad hair gets sent home, and then to some sort of clinic. Imagine: if this can happen to Becky, it can happen to literally anyone. When she returns, they all start calling her Jackie, and then Jack.
‘You are a dangerous little group of replicating cells,’ says Madame Vincent. ‘You girls are a cancer in this school. What about the juniors, who look up to you?’
Becky with the bad hair won’t embrace the name Jack, so Lissa takes it instead. She’s in the race suddenly now too, because being sent home is so magnificent and dreadful. If she can get in real trouble, like getting-sent-home trouble, then her mother will surely notice her and stop thinking only about Douglas. And Suze needs her sister. She has been singing in a country and western band, even though she can’t really sing, and goes around Cambridge at all hours wearing shoplifted mini-skirts and cowboy boots. She came home with a black eye the other week, after a long weird night with Danny, the other vocalist in the band. He did it because he was drunk, and because Suze didn’t like his new song, and because she had raised his hopes only to dash them.
Tiffanie will now only respond to the name Stan, which is a strange French shortening of Estella. Dani has become Beau: like Beauty in Beauty and the Beast, but disguised as a mortal man. Donya started as Sonja, because it rhymed, and because the girls still lap up all the stories about Aunt Sonja that Tash brings back: stories of castles and diets and elegantly poached fish. Then Donya became simply Sonj, with that weird foreign J that everyone loves to say even though you’re not supposed to, but now she is just Son or Sonny. Tash is sometimes Princess Augusta, shortened to Goose or even, more frequently now, Gus.
They are all in disguise. This is important. They have code-names.
The infestation of angels now moves on to the church. It is another punishment, one not appreciated by the village vicar, who believes religion is many things but not this. The mothers of the village boys turn up to look, and nudge, and complain, and so the flock is massive, for two weeks only. Far bigger than the turnout for Dr Morgan’s funeral, which was attended in the end only by Dr Moone, Sin-Jin and Miss Annabel. The angels flutter now in their green cloaks and roost in the gallery above the main congregation. Natasha – today Tash, Moustache, Mustafa, Muskrat, Muscles, because she has always had strong arms after all – looks down at the women with their pig-leg limbs, their thighs bigger, surely, than any body part on any known creature, and she prays for them once more. Dear God, she says, earnestly, in her head. Dear God, please bless these ladies and remove fat from them, oh God. Let them feel beautiful and in this feeling release them from fat and the discomfort they must surely feel when they have to take off their clothes in front of their husbands, or have a bath. Afterwards she is not sure if she said this prayer in English or Russian and she goes back to the Hail Mary in French, because it is so comforting.
On the way out of church one of the Weight Watchers women seems to wait for her. This woman is big – they all are – with breasts like permanent crossed arms under her cheap supermarket clothes. Her weather-beaten face hangs in elephantine folds around a pair of massive, unattractive glasses. Yet there is something beautiful about her that Tash can’t quite fathom. Some vague wisdom in her eyes. But there is more in the eyes too: swirled about in the wisdom is envy and resignation and something important. Knowledge.
‘So,’ says the woman. ‘I just wanted you to know that I didn’t agree with what the others did, and I said so. You’re always welcome in the village as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Thank you,’ says Tash. ‘But what do you mean?’
‘When Weight Watchers banned you all.’
‘Oh. Well, our school banned us first, so.’ Tash shrugs.
‘What’s your name, girlie?’
‘Gus.’
‘Gus?’
‘Short for Augusta.’
‘Like the princess?’
‘Yes. Exactly like that.’
The woman sighs for a long time. ‘He did it to his wife,’ she says. ‘And now he’s systematically doing it to the whole school. Don’t your mothers care?’
The way she says systematically is interesting from a language point of view. It’s a long, complex word that she quite brutally glottal-stops right in the middle. She jabs her finger in the direction of the school just at the moment of the glottal stop.
‘Sorry? Who?’
‘Your headmaster,’ says the woman. ‘That’s who.’
The others have already gone on ahead. On the way back Tash searches alone for the little grave, amongst the sharp green erections of the late-spring flowers. Was it here, down this narrow path? Was it nearer the fountain? Eventually she finds it down a half-hidden track behind the horse sculpture, in a spot from which you can look back over the lake to the school buildings beyond. The stone has been recently cleaned, and someone has put a simple bunch of freesias in front of it, using a jam jar as a vase.
*
The slam book comes back, and at first no one can remember what it even is, this thick, bulging hardback notebook laminated in plastic. Wait. Was it actually laminated in plastic before or … Did the boys at Harrow do that? How sweet. How quaint. How—
‘Whose idea exactly was this?’ asks Miss White. She’s turning the book over in her hands like it’s something about to be sent off to be decontaminated, or possibly blown up, like those elderly ladies’ handbags from the olden days when they used to leave them in Boots and people thought they might contain a bomb. Now, of course, people are more careful, and strap bombs to themselves. Nowadays nobody puts them in elderly ladies’ handbags – or in slam books, for that matter.
‘Mr Hendrix,’ says Bella.
‘It was actually my idea,’ says Donya.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ says Elle sourly. ‘It was Bianca’s.’
Everyone is so veryvery grumpy. Having a light body has not translated into having a light heart. Indeed, these bodies can no longer contain these hearts. Tiffanie has not cried in five years but now she is tearful all the time, and her tears get stuck in her new wrinkles like blobs of shark oil. Lissa sighs a lot and says bitchy things. She points out Rachel’s remaining backfat, for example. The cellulite under her bum cheeks. Dani isn’t speaking to her parents. Donya has started reading the weird books about radical Islam sent by her sexy cousin, but even then the words sort of blur, and it’s all so tiring.
Putting your calories into MyFitnessPal every evening takes such a long time and is laborious and depressing. Rachel has been on at them all to not put in what they’ve eaten today retrospectively but to use the app to plan what they’re going to eat tomorrow and stick to it. Everyone is friends with everyone on MyFitnessPal, even people they don’t like, even Becky with the bad hair. Rachel is also friends with Jordon and, through him, the twins Millie and Izzy, and some of the other fitness instructors at the gym. She can see what Jordon eats in a day. It makes her feel close to him. He never writes to her – he says writing isn’t really his thing – but he does ‘like’ every weight loss she puts into the system. He eats a lot of protein powder and egg whites and cottage cheese.
Everyone has sort of flopped. They are hanging over their chairs like old coats; like drunks in a Munch painting. It’s almost four o’clock and there’s nothing to look forward to. The school has stopped providing afternoon tea because literally no one eats it. Instead, prep begins early. Then music lessons, or drama. Then fish and vegetables. Then MyFitnessPal, then bed. No one even likes music or drama any more because they seem to come from another dimension entirely, an irrelevant, lost life that the girls are no longer living. They are hungry ghosts, flickering on the edge of this world.
But now this. The slam book. Filled with pictures of unknown boys, and their responses to the girls’ questionnaires, and – importantly – a bit where each one has ranked the girls in order of who they fancy most, and in which Zoe does surprisingly well, despite being fat. Is it her skin? Her pretty face? But no one knows of this treasure just yet, because Miss White won’t give it to them. She thinks it’s inappropriate. Rachel has to spend three hours at the headmaster’s house before he agrees to talk to Miss White about it. Rachel comes back from this sortie glowing with pre-Head Girlness and a sort of clandestine power. She has learned other things. For example, everyone thought that Mr Hendrix had been banned from the school for some creepy and disturbing reason connected with Dr Morgan, and possibly men in general, but it isn’t that. The headmaster has hinted of a ‘dark secret’, something not many of the girls know about, and he’s told Rachel to never mention this, but after lights-out she asks them all, and Tash says it might be about her and Tiffanie and the photographs that do not exist. The ones taken by Dr Morgan, the paedophile who then killed himself.
No one can remember now why these facts were supposed to be concealed, and so Tash and Tiffanie tell all about what is supposed to have happened on the Malibu night and how they don’t remember it but are still nevertheless victims of abuse.
They try to remember what happened to Amaryllis Archer.
The following day the slam book is there in the Year 11 common room. The apples manage to grab it before Becky with the bad hair even knows it’s there.
What you need to know about Bianca, writes Bianca’s twin, Caleb, who does exist, albino-looking and weird in his photo like a grounded fledgling. What you need to know about Bianca is … And then whatever Caleb wrote has been Tippexed out. The girls chip away at the Tippex with their compass points, but underneath is just scribble. Who has done this? What on earth was he trying to say?
*
It’s not food poisoning. No one eats food, so no one is likely to be poisoned by it. It’s a virus. A vomiting virus. It strikes the hockey team first. Did they catch it from their last away game, to that hideous concrete pleb school on the other side of Stevenage where the other girls sledged them by saying that their parents don’t love them, because how could they if they sent them to boarding school? Were the germs maybe on the ball? In the mud? In the other girls’ stringy hair? Their melancholy pubes? No one knows.
It had been an upsetting game not just because they were beaten by the plebs, the Emilys and Hannahs – the utter indignity – but also because of the dark figure on the sidelines, a sexy teacher in a leather jacket, a teacher known by these boarding-school girls to have his ex-girlfriend’s name tattooed on his chest, and the words Fail Better on his upper arm. A teacher not belonging to them any more, but now belonging to the plebs, as if they didn’t already have everything: homes with parents who actually care, who even occasionally go with them to Topshop on a Saturday and then buy them lunch at EAT or Pret.
Not that anyone can think about food now. The hockey players are all in the same dorm, luckily, the vast rectangular sunlit one on the first floor. It’s the biggest dorm in the school, always occupied by those stupid-but-happy girls with lots of friends who prefer being in crowds: team players, leaders, followers, extroverts. They all have bouncy hair. The beds in this dorm have not been slept in by dead girls and do not carry faint stains of periods and dusty bits of old sherbet. These girls make sure they change their sheets regularly. They know how to put duvet covers on. Their parents send them pink throws and hot-water bottles with knitted covers. In this dorm are teddy bears and medals and little trophies and hairbrushes with the big matted clumps of hair removed from them and not put in another girl’s bed, or set fire to, but simply thrown away.
And now the dorm contains buckets filled with yellow puke.
A sour smell everywhere. The girls are hot, sososo hot, and then cold, sososo cold, and their limbs ache and actually is it possible to just take off your arms and legs and could someone please come and suck the heavy rancid stuff out of their brains and – woah – sitting up is too much effort and vomiting on the floor by the bucket is actually a great achievement considering, and anyway no one cares and everyone wants to die.
This is literally the worst thing that has happened to anybody. If they had the choice, right now, between being mildly sexually abused by a dead biology teacher and this, days more of this, this pukey, churny, constant nausea and weakness worse than the wilted parsley Mrs Cuckoo sometimes puts on the steamed fish, they’d take the first one: the painless photos, the slight smoothing of the sheets in such a way that—
‘What smoothing?’ Tash had asked Dominic. ‘I still don’t understand what is supposed to have happened. There wasn’t any “smoothing”.’
‘What about rubbing?’ he’d asked. ‘Was there any rubbing?’
Anyway, even moderate sexual abuse would be better than this. Anything would. All pleasure in life is gone. The joy of eating went a long time ago, of course, but now there is not even joy in starving. Those narcotic feelings of missing a couple of meals have been replaced by a general feeling that existence is entirely without purpose. No one can read. No one wants to listen to music. No one has a future. Everything is pointless.
