Oligarchy, page 11
*
Only Rachel, with her staggering new immune system and her fresh gut, full of probiotics and little helpful creatures and gumption, does not succumb to the sickness bug. Is it because she spends so much time outside? Is it because she is essentially perfect now? Of course, the vomiting has made the others lose astonishing amounts of weight, apparently, but Rachel can’t see any of her friends to find out more. They are in quarantine, lying on camp beds in between the real beds of the hockey team, being puked on occasionally by Bella and Elle and Becky with the bad hair. It’s like a WWI sanatorium in there. Spanish flu. Death. Amputations. Cheerful nurses in crisp uniforms, except … There are no nurses. Occasionally Sin-Jin looks in, an embroidered handkerchief pressed over her face. Miss Annabel doesn’t go near the first floor, let alone the dorm. Miss White managed to visit once and swore – out loud – and then her face turned the colour first of the puke and then of ghosts and so someone told the headmaster that they’d need agency nurses but the school matron said not to be so silly and she’d come and get the buckets when she had a moment.
The crushlets are sent home. Year 10 is sent home. The only girls left in the school are the ones with the virus, and Rachel. It’s like a zombie film, or it would be if anyone had ever seen one. Also, if it were a zombie film then Rachel, the one surviving humanoid (teachers obviously don’t count), would presumably have to rescue someone or do something heroic but she’s far too busy for any of that.
‘Come on,’ says Miss White to Rachel. ‘There’s no reason why we can’t do PE on our own. What do you want to do? Javelin? Long jump? Sports Day’s coming and you must want to win something? Let’s train you up. One to one.’
Rachel runs a fast hundred metres, and then two hundred metres and then a 5K. Miss White wonders about a heptathlon or a decathlon. Can Rachel throw? Nope. Can she jump. Yes. Yes – Rachel really can jump. Now she’s not fat, she can snake her body like a bendy piece of liquorice up and over the bar of the high jump, no matter how high Miss White raises it. And the thick mat is there each time like a massive waterproof sponge. Thwack, wriggle, up-and-over, thwack, wriggle … Until the time when the thick plastic blue mat just isn’t there any more, when Rachel somehow overshoots, misses and lands on her arm. Thwack, ow, fuckfuckfuck.
So now Matron is busy with Rachel and her broken arm in sick bay and the buckets go uncollected for hours. For a whole day. Zoe and Ayesha recover enough to get some slightly stale chocolate logs from their trunks and no one’s exactly stopping them and they binge-eat them and then immediately throw them up again, the thick brown puke adding interest to the custardy bile that is all anyone has managed to produce for days.
Eventually Matron comes and removes all the remaining food from the dorm and the girls are put on a starvation diet. It’s the only thing for a vomiting epidemic; everyone should know that. You starve until there’s nothing to come up any more, not even bile: only then are you cured. Only then can the thing no longer be spread. You go two days beyond that point, even when the patients beg you for food, just to be sure. Each day someone brings a 12-pack of Evian and dumps it in the dorm like a massive bunch of bananas being delivered to a gorilla’s cage. Then they lock the door. Or they may as well.
In a haze of painkillers and late-spring sunshine Rachel sleeps in the best sick-bay bed and dreams she is fat again. She remembers her moustache. Platefuls of potatoes. Cheese sandwiches. Dr Moone is looking at her again and writing down her measurements and explaining how important it is for women to be elegant and beautiful, and that norms, non-aesthetes, haters, plebs – these people from the outside will say you’re too skinny, but that’s not actually possible. He shows her that book again, his hardback of black and white photographs of Grace Kelly. That is the ideal, he says. This is the kind of thing humans must aspire to. Not men, who are lost forever after the Fall, but women, by nature far closer both to angels and forest creatures, who can save us all with their pure beauty. He reads to her from Coleridge: ‘Oft she said, “I’m not grown thin!” and then her wrist she spann’d’. He expounds, as usual, on his theory of asthenics, where bodies must be lean, breastless, taut. The dream dissolves into Rachel accidentally ordering a slice of chocolate cake in a café – the same café they went to on the Cambridge trip – and it being served with whipped cream. Rachel is trying to say no to the cake and the cream but she’s lost her voice and …
She wakes up sweating, with damp sheets. But it’s OK. There was never any chocolate cake. Rachel sits up and breathes, and when she finds Matron is not there she sneaks into the sick-bay office and weighs herself. It’s OK. Nothing has changed. It’s fine. The box is safe. Rachel sees her life now as a small, rectangular glass box, and in the box is everything of importance to her, tidily arranged. There’s her gym plan, her school exercise plan, her records on MyFitnessPal. How clean and neat it all is. Nothing else matters. She thinks of the twins with their perfect bodies and how they are nothing more than that but how wonderful it is: to be just body, just pure. Why would you need exams? Well, except the ones to become a personal trainer, which is what Rachel is going to be. She imagines herself with her clients in the sunshine in a park, doing bootcamps. Then it’s the summer and she is toned and brown, unlike her worst clients, and there she is on a beach with Jordon, with one of those bikinis that fit in the crack of your bum, and she has her navel piercing and he turns to her with his deep blue eyes and says—
‘Why are you out of bed, missy?’
‘I’ve only got a broken arm,’ says Rachel. ‘I don’t see why I have to stay here.’
‘It’s just until your mother can come and collect you,’ says Matron.
‘Why can’t I go back to my dorm?’
‘They’re cleaning everything out, after this norovirus or whatever they decide it is. Anyway, I want you where I can see you. Make sure you’re eating.’
‘I thought everyone had been banned from eating.’
‘Ha, yes, well, that would suit you, wouldn’t it?’
Matron is about as far away from Grace Kelly as you can get without being a man. Although she may as well be a man. She is vast, un-made-up, hairy. She is sexless, like a dough-ball. From her neck to her knees, a zone that should be all interest and angles and light and shade, there is just one great milky mass, like a boring hike on the moon.
‘You know diets don’t work?’ she says to Rachel. ‘It’s all a big con.’
Rachel rolls her eyes. She holds her glass box close to her. Says nothing.
‘Diets make you put on weight in the long run,’ she says. ‘I don’t suppose your fancy-pants magazines tell you that, though.’
‘Doesn’t sound very scientific,’ says Rachel.
‘No? Well, what would I know? I’ve only been a nurse all my life.’
‘If dieting doesn’t work, then why is everyone so thin?’
‘What, your friends?’ Matron cackles. ‘They’re fifteen. Everyone’s thin at fifteen. Well, except you, of course. You were properly chubby. May have just been puppy fat, who knows? Anyway, now you’re thin because you’ve been on a diet. So next time you get fat, you’ll be fatter than before. That’s how it works.’
‘I won’t get fat again,’ says Rachel. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Is it?’
‘Anyway, I know you’re a nurse and everything, but—’
‘But what?’ Matron raises her eyebrows.
Rachel shrugs. ‘I just …’
‘I’ve been dieting all my life, love. And look where it’s got me.’
‘What about Grace Kelly?’ says Rachel. ‘And Kate Moss?’
‘They’re not like us, darling,’ says Matron, and winks.
*
At the height of the savagery, when the naked starving girls are left for hours and hours with their buckets unchanged, with no WiFi, no food, no clean clothes, no nothing – not even any village boys baying at the windows for sex – someone takes a series of photographs. It’s disgusting when you think about it, what goes on in these institutions. Someone should do an exposé. These poor skinny wretches so forsaken, flesh-fallen and alone.
But when Suze sends the pictures to the tabloids all she gets back are brief notes saying ‘no thanks’ and ‘not for us’ and ‘to be honest, love, our readers don’t care what happens to toffs’ children in their elitist schools’.
‘Oh well,’ she says to Lissa. ‘I tried.’
They are mucking out the ponies. When Lissa isn’t here a woman from the village helps, and her daughter rides Lissa’s pony, Apple. When Lissa is here the daughter cries and the mother has one slice of toast in the morning instead of two. Suze didn’t ride Plum for years but now here she is again with her hair in a long plait wearing a check shirt and no make-up.
‘What happened with your teacher?’ asks Suze. ‘The one who died?’
Lissa shrugs. ‘No one really knows. He was probably a paedophile.’
‘Fucking hell. These fucking schools.’ Suze shakes her head.
‘Yeah, well,’ says Lissa. ‘Literally no one cares.’
Suze went to a local day school. But by the time it was Lissa’s turn their parents had split up and their mother had to travel so much more and there just wasn’t anyone at home for weeks on end; well, except Suze and her boyfriends. There was the memorable year they dropped acid and watched The Silence of the Lambs while the house flooded and no one did anything. The year they set fire to the thatch of the village shop. The year one of the boyfriends got kicked almost to death by one of the ponies, which actually served him right.
And now Suze is getting married to one of them. The one who gave her the black eye. This is what they’ve come out to the stables to talk about. It’s not that Suze needs Lissa’s blessing exactly, but it’s clear that there’s something to explain. Specifically, why is Suze going to leave Lissa for a violent psychopath who actually – last time Lissa checked – lives in a fucking bungalow with his mother in one of the drab villages on the other side of Cambridge?
‘It was literally a one-off,’ says Suze, about the black eye. ‘I mean, I punched him too that night.’
‘Mum says—’
‘Yeah, like Mum knows all about relationships.’
Lissa winces. If she could just manage to get hospitalised before the wedding …? But she doesn’t have the willpower of some of the others. Becky with the bad hair has it but then she does all that sport, all that no-pain, no-gain stuff. Lissa is still too partial to chocolate, and lemon sweets, and the half-eaten tube of Polos she always carries for the ponies. Even if you skip lunch and never eat pudding these things add up. And also if you like to eat crisps when you’re sad and lonely. She’s not really got skin in this game.
‘Anyway,’ says Suze. ‘I’m having an engagement party, and you can invite all your friends.’
‘Really? Will there be boys?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well …’
‘We’ll get wasted. It’ll be great.’
*
At Aunt Sonja’s, Tash is having trouble getting out of bed. She’s fine now, really she is. Like, she can actually get out of bed without puking or passing out. She has even started eating again. That last day of the sickness at school, when all the remaining girls were told to go down to the dining room, and it was oddly cold and light and echoey and Mrs Cuckoo brought them each a mug of either Marmite or Bovril and one slice of dry white bread and some of the girls cried and some stuffed the whole piece of bread in their mouths and then tried to bargain with other girls for their slices. Some picked the crust off first and then ate it in little pieces, delicately, soberly.
Not one person left a single crumb.
Before that, Miss White had insisted on weighing them, because the whole thing had accidentally created a very impressive set of stats that she might be able to use in some way, possibly in collaboration with Dr Moone. And indeed, Year 11 had, during the sickness episode, lost a total of ten stone: the equivalent of one whole girl (admittedly quite a large one).
Again, the tabloids wrote back with disdain. ‘So it possibly could be a story, that your posh, upper-class, oligarch bitches had mass bulimia so bad that someone actually died, but that’s not what happened, is it? Your cosseted girls just had an ordinary sickness bug, probably caught from one of our competitors’ readers, and no one died, because the weight of a person is not a person and if you think our honest readers want to hear about your fat-cat science experiment then you’re fucking deluded.’
Or words to that effect.
That last hour before they left for home, all the photos of them in their too-big skirts like a photoshoot for the next generation of supermodels. And now everyone is bouncing back. Dry toast quickly became toast with butter, which became toast with butter and jam, which became full roast dinners and big sighs of relief from all the parents, or at least the ones who care, and the whole chapter fading into history except …
Tash does not know what to eat. She does not know what to eat, and she does not know what to wear, and she does not know what to do. This is why she can’t get up. As long as she stays in bed everything’s on hold. Even breakfast. What does a normal person have for breakfast? Does a normal person even have breakfast? Anastasia’s book recommends fasting for as long as you can overnight: ideally having your dinner at 5 or 6 p.m. and then not eating again until lunch the next day. Tash can’t remember why. Something to do with giving your digestive system a rest and preventing bloating? Because who wants to be bloated, right? But then everything else you read about being healthy says to eat breakfast. Eat oats. Except don’t oats contain those thingummies that make you fat and mad?
All the conversations the girls have had about food. All the diets. Rachel’s factsheets. You put them together and there’s nothing left. There is literally nothing anyone can eat. Maybe broccoli and other green vegetables. That’s it. Everything else is a violation of something. And Tash does not have an objective any more. That’s the other problem. Does she even want to be thin? Well, yes, of course: don’t all girls want to be thin? But, OK, wait: what if she was fat instead? What if she was fat and invisible with her special adipose shield that would prevent any other abuser from getting anywhere near her?
That was what Dominic said in their last session before the sickness.
‘You put on a few pounds, girlie? Trying to keep the wolves at bay?’
It was true, but the main reason was Tiffanie and her sudden espousal of food: expensive chocolates sent from Paris, and vast filled loaves from the village shop; whole white bloomers cut and stuffed with an entire packet of cheese and half a jar of Hellman’s and a massive dollop of Branston. One for everyone!
Dominic told Tash all about butch lesbians who hate men and keep them away with their actual bodies. Their ballast. Their fearsomeness. The beards they grow from the testosterone produced by spending all their time thinking about fannies.
Has anyone written to the tabloids about Dominic? Perhaps. But they probably wouldn’t be interested in him, either. After all, what’s he really done? Tried to help a few pretty girls be less mad. That’s not a crime, is it?
‘I don’t hate men,’ Tash had said. But was that strictly true? She hates Nico, after all. And Teddy Ross, probably. And of course Dominic and Tony. Dr Moone has started creeping her out a bit. But she loves her father, and Mr Hendrix is quite nice too, not that she has seen either of them for ages.
‘It’s natural when you’re a victim of abuse,’ said Dominic. The way he said the word, Tash remembers, makes it sound like amuse. You are a victim of amuse.
‘What is?’
‘You either become afraid of men, or you become a total slag and throw yourself at them. But once you get to that stage you’re totally fucked up. You need to treat the root cause before then. Dig out the decay before it can spread.’
‘Literally nothing happened,’ said Tash. Or maybe she didn’t. Hadn’t she stopped saying that by then, given that it never had any effect on Dominic? Wasn’t she just waiting by then for him to give up and go away? Hadn’t she just resigned herself to the fact that she had been abused, ruined, ravaged, and it was actually worse because she did not remember it? Her innocence gone. Her life over. Chipped, tarnished, broken. Her past dragging behind her like Dr Moone’s leg.
Being pure means you can think straight. Being one of the abused means something quite different. How can you ever relax if you’ve been abused? Can you be happy? Nope. Happiness in the abused is at best a sort of hysteria, a mania, an emotional quelling. It shows you have not fully appreciated the gravity of what has happened to you. So how should a victim be? A victim should definitely wear sombre, or possibly extreme, clothes, should never have fun, should cry during any future sexual encounter, should feel scarred at all times …
But should victims eat breakfast?
Tash puts her head back under the covers. Soon she hears the quiet click of the door closing. Aunt Sonja, off to work. Aunt Sonja, who said that time you should only eat fruit in the mornings but has changed her mind recently and has a single poached egg on a wholewheat muffin. Maybe Tash should just do that. Maybe … She closes her eyes and sees Princess Augusta with her harp between her large legs. Princess Augusta being ravaged by the sultan. Princess Augusta’s pure love for Sir Brent Spencer. But does anyone truly know anything about Princess Augusta? After being ravaged by the sultan, did Princess Augusta feel like a victim? Might she have been fascinated instead? Might she have actually ravaged him? She could have left him bleeding and afraid, or just deliquescent and rapt, whispering in his hoarse hopeless voice that he loves her, loves her above all others, that he will die for her a thousand times, as she laughs cruelly at him and goes back to Sir Brent as if nothing has happened.
And what did she eat for breakfast the next morning?
Tash stands up slowly and puts on her dressing gown. She goes to the sunlit kitchen and stares at the Thames, pulsing as it always does, not caring whether its traffic is party boats or commercial barges or little ferries going between art galleries. The fluorescence shining only on the pure today, because perhaps the fluorescence has a sense of humour, or perhaps it is all subjective anyway.
