Oligarchy, page 14
‘No, that sounds lovely,’ says Tash. ‘But …’
Aunt Sonja is going to the fridge for the champagne. She pops the cork and then pours two glasses.
‘You are old enough for a couple of glasses of champagne, right?’
‘Oh yes,’ says Tash.
She actually turned sixteen a few days before and wondered if anyone would notice, but they didn’t. Not old enough for champagne; well, not legally, but old enough to go to Selfridges with her black Amex and buy a pair of pointed cowboy boots with gold buckles. Frustratingly, these have not satisfied her in the way she’d thought they would. Whenever she puts them on all she thinks of is Nico and how impressed he’d be to see her wearing them, and how much more that makes her hate him.
They sit on the sofa with the champagne. Aunt Sonja has poured it into the best crystal saucers, rather than the usual flutes. She presses a button and jazz starts playing through the hidden speaker system in the flat.
‘Right. I’m going to show you some pictures,’ says Aunt Sonja. She gets her phone. Presses a few more buttons. ‘You’re going to tell me what they have in common.’
Natasha is still looking at the phone until she realises that the pictures are also on the television screen. Now she looks up. Here, one by one, are all the powerful women of the world. Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, Oprah Winfrey. Then come some that Natasha doesn’t recognise, but have the same aura. They seem to all be in the throes of a television interview or giving speeches on stages, wearing Madonna mics and shiny patent beige stilettoes and—
‘What do they have in common?’ asks Aunt Sonja.
‘I was going to say that they’re all fat, but these ones aren’t fat,’ says Tash.
Indeed, the one on screen at the moment is a youngish dark-haired woman in a red satin dress with perfect arms that Bianca would have said were fat, probably, but are not. They are the colour of piano keys and so long and toned and—
‘Well, this one’s obviously been airbrushed,’ says Aunt Sonja. She sips her champagne. ‘But try harder. What do they have in common?’
Tash shrugs. ‘They’re all powerful?’
‘Yes, and?’
‘Um, maybe rich?’
‘Yes, they are all richer than your father, in fact. Many of them are billionaires. Do you know what that means?’
‘I guess, having more than a billion pounds?’
‘Dollars, actually. But what does it mean?’
‘I don’t know. Um, you can do what you want?’
‘Well, sort of. Actually, some of these women can’t do exactly what they want, at least not in public, because they run companies and countries and people expect certain things from them. They’re role models, which can be constraining. Come on. What do they look like to you?’
‘God, I don’t know. All different. Not that attractive necessarily. I mean, only one of them is really skinny, and she’s got massive glasses and weird hair and …’
‘“All different”,’ repeats Aunt Sonja. ‘Good. OK. Now look at these pictures.’
She presses a few more buttons, and up come the celebrities, women famous for acting and singing and dancing and charming and entertaining. They all look, they all look …
‘These ones all look the same,’ says Natasha.
‘This is what I have discovered,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘This is one of the puzzles of being a woman. This is what you have to think about as you grow up. How powerful do you think these same-looking celebrities actually are?’
Natasha’s heart suddenly fills with love for Aunt Sonja, who, she now realises, is trying to give her some moral instruction, some basic feminist grounding. Aunt Sonja, with her skinny arms and sad eyes and bad relationships, who lives all alone in this soulless rich person’s apartment, who has a cleaner and a PA and business of her own but who is clearly so very unhappy, Aunt Sonja actually loves Natasha, and that is why she is doing this. Tash’s eyes fill with tears.
‘It’s OK,’ says Tash. ‘Thank you. I mean, I see what you’re saying, and it’s reallyreally interesting, and soso right, but, you know, I’m not anorexic. You don’t need to worry about me in that way. Some girls at school obviously are, and, like, it’s got really out of hand lately, but it’s just not me. I even tried to catch anorexia because I wanted to be thin – basically to look like those people on screen – I mean the celebrities – but I couldn’t. I’m not going to lie. I did try. But my brain just isn’t wired that way.’
‘OK,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘Good. I can see that. But mine is.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t be like me.’
They eat hot pasta with truffle grated over it, then pâté and salad, then the cheese and the cake. Tash feels oddly steadied by the food she has eaten: like a ship that has just come through a storm. Aunt Sonja switches off the television and asks Tash all about her meeting with Caleb, and nods and frowns and then talks about blockchain until it’s time for bed. As Tash goes to sleep she can hear the familiar sound of Aunt Sonja vomiting in her bathroom, but this time maybe a bit less than usual. And all the images of women she’s seen disappear from her mind, and she is left with only one picture: the woman with the cigarette in the black and white photograph from the wall of the French House.
*
Everything smells of cheap paint. Miss Annabel can’t stand it. Cheap paint, bleach, the fags of the contract cleaners. The vomit smell still lingers on the first floor, despite all of the attention it’s been paid. She shudders. Slips a little on the grand staircase, because the backward women from the village didn’t understand that you don’t use polish to clean wooden stairs because it’s dangerous. Someone should warn the girls? Or maybe not.
Anyway, now some bruises on her shins to go with the ones all over her arms that she has hidden today with a lemon cardigan. Tomorrow, the same one in shell pink, then back to the lemon again. Her Achilles tendon doesn’t feel quite right. Her lungs ache. When are the girls coming back? Without the girls, this hollow old building has no meaning at all. With them it’s almost as bad, but at least the time passes more quickly. The sound of their pointless activities is at least a barrier between this world in which Miss Annabel finds herself, and the blindfold nothingness beyond.
*
The message subject is Legal Action to be brought by Captain Downlowe. Is he a captain? Who cares? It sounds better. It sounds like something from the BBC period dramas that Aunt Sonja enjoys on a Sunday evening. Tash has taken to this remarkably easily. It didn’t take long, during Tash’s first visit to Aunt Sonja’s offices, for her to learn how to send a phishing email for someone’s passwords. So now she’s practising on the headmaster, because why wouldn’t you? And also because she actually wants the headmaster’s passwords because she wants to know everything he knows. Or, at least, everything in his emails.
The morning after the champagne and the feminism Natasha found a USB drive on the floor in the kitchen, which had the word SECRET written on it in silver Sharpie. She put the kettle on and regarded the plastic device for a few seconds before putting it on top of Aunt Sonja’s things on the counter: her diary and her phone and her iPad. She must have dropped it. Or, actually, that silver Sharpie detail was a bit obvious, so …
‘Well done,’ said Aunt Sonja, as they got into the car to be taken to the office in Bloomsbury. ‘You’ve passed the test.’
‘Test? Oh. The USB?’ said Natasha.
‘Do you know how many people would have taken that and put it in their computer?’
Tash shook her head.
‘Almost everyone. But you’re clever. And trustworthy.’
For the rest of the week, Natasha had learned all about what happens to the people who put those USBs in their computers. Sometimes all their files are wiped out, just like that, to teach them a lesson. But more often it just allows the gentle insertion of a little file with the instruction to send copies of everything to the original owner of the USB, who is usually Aunt Sonja or one of her colleagues.
The headmaster opens the document. Of course he does. Tash gets the subtle vibration that says her virus is in his computer in the last five minutes of prep, when Sin-Jin is asleep and snoring even though it’s still light and summery outside. When the bell goes, the girls simply leave her sitting there in her chair, head drooped like an old, dead swan.
Rachel has swapped with Dani, so now she has Bianca’s old bed. Dani was having nightmares in it, but Rachel – so much thinner now after the break – said she enjoyed nightmares. ‘I like them really dark and violent,’ she said, with no expression on her pale face.
‘Well, er, good,’ said Dani. ‘Enjoy.’
Has anyone changed those sheets yet? Nope. Someone’s painted the walls, though.
Rachel doesn’t go for runs any more. She sits on her bed with her headphones in looking at pictures on her phone and listening to Abbey Road. She doesn’t sell her clean-eating guides to the crushlets now. Madame Vincent sends an email to the headmaster, registering her concern. Then the headmaster emails Rachel and asks her to go and see him at his house if she has any troubles she wants to share with him, anything at all. Maybe she will; maybe she won’t. It all depends how she feels.
Mrs Cuckoo is retiring and so the Year 11 girls are given the task of helping to organise all the many cookbooks she’s accumulated in the school kitchen. It’s supposed to help with the stress of revising for the upcoming exams. Someone has had the idea that a section should be created in the school library for these books, most of which still include margarine in cake recipes, and one of which actually has recipes for curried hare.
‘Oh my God,’ says Rachel, when the girls open the book onto the full-page picture of the hare, its skinned pink and grey body laid out with all its legs splayed like extreme, bad-taste pornography. ‘I’m going to be—’
But then Rachel is always looking for excuses these days: excuses to throw up, or pass out, or take to her bed. She has migraines, stomach-ache, leg-ache, arm-ache, temporary blindness. She shivers all the time. She is growing hair in improbable places. The moustache hasn’t come back, but instead she has this fine downy fluff all over her face, as if she’s a polar bear cub, or a pale shrew. But somehow she is also becoming more and more beautiful. No one wants to admit it, because it is so fucked up, but there is something truly compelling in her frail boniness. It’s not so great when she’s naked, that’s true: but in clothes she looks the fucking bomb.
Maybe that’s why no one does anything.
Dominic and Tony are still haunting the school. They have a ‘clinic’ on a Friday when girls can go to them with their ‘issues’. The crushlets go and moan about homesickness and mild bullying, and the Year 10s go to talk about their career options. One of the Year 9s has actually managed to develop a crush on Tony and goes there with her skirt rolled up about as far as it will go to discuss when he thinks she should lose her virginity and how. Natasha hates Dominic and Tony so much that she goes nowhere near the Dower House on a Friday. She doesn’t ever want to see Dominic again, or have to deal with any more of his thoughts on abuse. So between French and history she now walks the long way around, past the sheep chomping on the dry grass, then down by the lake.
There is a sparkle. For real. A sort of black glint, right in the middle of the water. She can definitely see it now.
And, in an upstairs room in the headmaster’s house, a familiar thin silhouette looking out across the surface of the dark deep. A roman nose in profile. Rachel. She is macilent, yes, but magnificent too, under his instruction. But the real question is this: is she a good enough swimmer?
*
No one particularly wants to get expelled so close to exams, or indeed Suze’s party. Everyone knows that parents are funny about troublemakers. But still.
‘We’ll sign out in the Walks book after lunch,’ says Tash. ‘Nip to Stevenage and be back in time for supper. Literally no one will know.’
‘I am certainement go-ange,’ says Tiffanie. She’s back to her normal self now, after going home for Easter. Her extra fat has gone. Is she still ‘skinny fat’? Probably, but she doesn’t care. As long as she looks OK on the outside, which she does, why should she care? Like, pretty much every single boy in fifth form at Harrow seemed to think she was the most attractive girl in the school, so. And she’s rich, and French.
‘I mean, I really don’t need anyone else to come,’ says Tash. ‘But …’
But Donya is definitely coming. And Dani. Everyone wants to see Mr Hendrix again, to have another stab at getting him to fall in love with them, or at least show them one of his tattoos. And of course everyone wants to see what Tash is up to, because she’s not really saying anything. The only thing they have to do is agree not to tell Rachel. Or Lissa, because Lissa will probably tell Rachel if she knows. And Lissa can’t be compromised because of the party. Being banned from going to a party is something that can be worked around. But if the party was cancelled altogether? Or if Lissa’s friends were uninvited? No.
What’s the worst that can happen? The rest of the form is sworn to secrecy via Ayesha, who catches the apples approaching the school gates in jeans and does not believe the walk story, not for a minute. But Tash doesn’t say where they’re really off to: she says they’re going to London in secret so Tiffanie can sleep with one of the Harrow boys. Big mistake. You could normally rely on Sin-Jin and Madame Vincent and Miss Annabel to go through a whole Sunday without noticing that four of the most troublesome girls in the school are missing. Madame Vincent has a new catalogue full of things you can dress poodles in. And half a bottle of sherry. And a letter from her sister in Paris. Sin-Jin has a box of rose and violet creams and a violent American novel. Miss Annabel has her bruises, and a whole crushlet ballet to choreograph. But no sixteen-year-old can keep a secret for longer than half an hour and so they go to the headmaster’s office, sob-wracked, to confess on the apples’ behalf. It’s Becky with the bad hair, of course. It always bloody well is. With Bella and Elle in tow. And Ayesha, saying she really didn’t mean to get anyone in trouble.
*
Mr Hendrix is not pleased to see them. Not at all.
‘Where the hell did you get this address?’ he asks.
His flat is on one of the melancholy pedestrianised streets where everything is shut because it’s Sunday. It’s above a charity shop that has a summer-themed window with slink mannequins from the olden days in summer dresses with high heels. The dresses have been belted in a way you would rarely belt a dress in normal life, but it doesn’t really matter on this witnessless street that looks like it’s been prepped for a zombie apocalypse.
Tash doesn’t say that in fact she’s now got everything she could ever want to know about Mr Hendrix: his date of birth and all his passwords and his bank account details and how veryvery overdrawn he is and all the books he buys from Amazon despite being an anti-capitalist. At least the books themselves are anti-capitalist. Well, sort of. They are all paperbacks by men on atheism and war and the crumbling health service and awful things that happen in Africa. He is a member of an online dating service. Mr Hendrix! With his beautiful eyes and his lovely thick hair. It is this last detail that has made Natasha vow never again to use her new powers in a voyeuristic way. She should have just got his address and left the rest of his hard drive alone. She tries to erase the details from her mind. The receipt for another tattoo; a digital download of the newest, most expensive videogame ever made; a subscription to Apple Music, to a local gym—
‘Can we come in?’ asks Tash.
‘No you cannot fucking come in,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’
He’s dressed in gym clothes. He looks a bit sweaty. Is that why?
‘Um …’ Tash takes a step forward. ‘But—’
‘What are you trying to do? Get me locked up as a sodding paedophile?’
‘We’re actually all over sixteen now, sir,’ says Donya.
He shudders. ‘I’m not your teacher any more, thank God. Don’t call me “sir”.’
‘What do your new girls call you?’
‘Yeah, what do all the Emilys and Hannahs call you, sir?’
He doesn’t reply. But he doesn’t shut the door either. From what he’s saying, he should be slamming the door in their faces, but he isn’t.
‘Didn’t you like being our teacher?’ asks Dani.
‘It was a job,’ he says. ‘But since you’ve asked, actually no. No, I did not like being your teacher.’
‘Why not?’ asks Donya.
He sighs. ‘That fucking place. And you. You’re all so shallow and annoying and …’ There’s a long pause. He clearly thinks one of them is going to interrupt him to defend themselves, but they don’t. Instead, Donya’s eyes fill with tears. No one says anything, they just regard him sadly.
‘And of course in the end you actually managed to kill one of your teachers,’ says Mr Hendrix, into the sad silence. ‘Bravo. And – guess what? – I had an awful feeling I’d be next. Because you’re actually evil. And now you’re here. Now you’re after me, just as I feared.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in evil,’ says Tash.
‘Is that all you can say?’ says Mr Hendrix. ‘Is that literally all you can fucking say?’
He looks like he might cry. Teachers are not supposed to cry. But he isn’t their teacher any more. He walks into his flat, leaving the door open, so they follow him in. He goes into the small kitchen and opens a cupboard. The girls stand in the front room listening to the creak and bang of cheap plywood and MDF. A stifled sob, and then a slam. No one sits on the drab dark furniture. There’s a peace lily in a large pot by the window. It has a single white flower and a lot of brown leaves. On the floor in front of the television is a PlayStation controller and a pile of marking. There’s a takeaway pizza box under the coffee table. It’s no wonder Mr Hendrix can’t get a girlfriend if he lives like this. And also if he goes around calling innocent people murderers and then actually crying.
He comes back from the kitchen with a glass of clear liquid.
‘Vodka,’ he says. ‘Do you want some? Let’s all get drunk, and then I can seduce you against your will even though there’s four of you, because have you heard that women are now so weak and so pathetic that any man can do whatever he chooses to any of them at any time? Just because he has a dick! Even if it’s small, even if he’s impotent, even if he ejaculates prematurely, even if he is so shy he can barely speak to a girl, let alone try to kiss her, let alone …’ He shuts his eyes. When he opens them again they are shooting death-rays of something that might be fear or sadness or just hatred. ‘Just by being here, you could ruin me. You must know that? And you must realise that if I were to even so much as touch one of your skinny arms without asking first then that would pretty much end my life? Even if I asked first, I’d still be in danger. And if I dared to help you when you were drunk? If I dared to help you get into bed so that the other teachers didn’t find out and suspend you and—’
