Oligarchy, page 3
The only sugar officially allowed on the diet is in Sherbet Fountains and the reason for this is that the sugar comes in paper, which makes it OK. Sherbet Fountains are wholesome because they are old-fashioned and, in the case of the ones in the village shop, long out of date and on special offer. Tash pretends she’s read somewhere that calories evaporate from old or fermented products. Kimchi is allowed, not that Mrs Cuckoo has ever heard of kimchi. And sauerkraut. And the Bovril gets another tick as well because it is certainly aged. Liquorice is good for you, but no one actually likes the liquorice in Sherbet Fountains and so one day they put approximately twenty liquorice sticks in Bianca’s cubby-hole, just for the hell of it.
The biology teacher is called Dr Morgan and he is a man. He is the only man who lives in the school apart from the headmaster. He has the room next door to Sin-Jin’s. His blond hair is slightly too long and prone to grease and he has grown a little blond beard like a Swedish pop star from the days of the Bovril. The teachers have their own corridor in Maids, the old servants’ wing of the house. On the other side of Dr Morgan’s room is Madame Vincent. Miss Annabel, the arthritic dance teacher, is down the corridor with Mrs Cuckoo. All the other teachers live in the village, or the local town, or Stevenage. The headmaster has his own house in the grounds by the lake where Princess Augusta drowned. He had a wife once, but not any more. Sometimes people say that she left him. Other times the rumour is that she died. There’s an odd little grave in the school grounds that some people believe is hers. Once someone said that she was only twenty years old when she died, and extraordinarily thin, from a disease.
Today’s biology lesson involves a video of a man who eats a miniature camera which then travels through his stomach recording the whole digestive process. It is literally the most gross thing anybody has ever seen.
For reasons unknown there is a painting of Princess Augusta in the biology lab. It looks wrong: dark oil paint set against the bright white walls. It appears not to have been chosen entirely randomly, however, as Princess Augusta is wearing a white dress that could be a nurse’s uniform. Could Princess Augusta have administered aid to anybody? It seems unlikely. There wasn’t even science back in the days of Princess Augusta, surely?
‘Sir?’ asks Lissa. ‘Sir? Princess Augusta doesn’t want to see all this poo, sir.’
‘Girls, please.’ Dr Morgan sighs. ‘This is not “poo”.’
‘It’s still really gross, though, Dr Morgan.’
‘It is called chyme,’ says Dr Morgan. ‘It’s not gross, girls. You all have it inside you right now. All those lovely bits of undigested food, your cornflakes or whatever you had for breakfast …’
‘Bianca doesn’t,’ whispers someone. People giggle.
‘What if you just eat fruit, sir?’
‘Eating just fruit is very unhealthy. You need a balanced diet.’
On screen, the camera travels through a lot of stuff that looks like Sandwich Spread smeared on alien tentacles and then finally gets to the poo.
‘I just can’t believe you’re actually showing us this, sir,’ says Lissa.
‘I’m going to complain to my father,’ says Tiffanie.
Dr Morgan sighs and runs his hand through his scrawny beard.
*
It’s a warm day in early October that reminds Tash of home. Something about the low depth of the heat. Its refulgent glow. The dining room has long windows at the end that no one can see out of properly because they are too high, and covered with criss-cross bits of metal. Down the other wall are normal sash windows, one of which is open. A sleepy bumblebee has got in and is dancing towards the light, initially with hope, then with increasing frustration, because going up and following the light – both of which are hardwired if you are a bee – is not working. The bee cannot possibly know that to escape it will have to first go backwards, then downwards, towards darkness, and then double-back in a direction so completely against its nature and biology as to be unimaginable. But at the end of all that is the open window: the freedom that the bee has probably forgotten by now. The real light.
Natasha imagines someone explaining all this in a spiritual way. Like, how this is so similar to life. An old rabbi at a long-ago school says it. Then Dr Morgan. Mr Hendrix. She watches, willing the bee to just go down. She thinks it very hard, in Russian and then in English. Come this way, she thinks, just a little bit, and then—
Then Sin-Jin comes over with a paperback copy of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and beats the bee to death.
*
Bianca has been sent to the headmaster again, and this time he has asked her to go to his house. The headmaster is known for coming up with ‘improving’ activities for naughty girls. Sometimes he reads them books, extremely boring books, often about Napoleon or Queen Victoria, or sometimes even self-published local history. Sometimes he gives them a younger girl to look after, although nowadays the younger girls and older girls are kept separate because of the recent crushlet-abuse incidents. Bianca wasn’t involved in that, and apparently it really was just a few trips to the village shop, a bit of sewing and only a single episode where one girl locked another girl’s crushlet in the haunted basement of the Dower House.
A crushlet is a younger girl who wants to be you. At best it’s a creepy sort of mentoring. You get a letter in your cubby-hole with a heart sticker on the envelope, or a hand-drawn kitten, or something like that, declaring that a girl has a crush on you. No one wants to be Bianca. Or, at least, the only girls who would want to be Bianca are also the sort of girls who do not own stickers and cannot draw and hate kittens because they are cute, or only like them because they are so light and small.
As Bianca walks to the headmaster’s house she imagines herself a fawn in the dark night, snow falling gently on her ruddy fur, and she thinks about Princess Augusta coming here to drown herself, and wonders if she meant to, or if she just thought she could swim. Was she trying to get the black diamond back? Because, really, what the fuck would you do once it was gone? It must be found, the black diamond. Only then will the light return. The pellucid, desperate light.
*
They go to Stevenage on a geography trip. What kind of geography trip takes you to what must be the worst town in the history of the universe, well, except for all those Soviet ruins, of course, and the towns near Chernobyl? Someone should nuke this one. At McDonald’s they stop for diet drinks and kids’ meals. There are boys; boys everywhere. These are worse than the VBs, surely? They wear clothes from Sports Direct that smell of cheap chemicals and their breath is all Special Sauce and bubblegum vape. Everyone, literally everyone, who lives in this town is fat. The only people who are not fat look like pleb versions of Bianca and have pushchairs full of children, long, stringy hair and thousands of piercings. The men all have ridiculous tattoos. These are not the sexy tattoos of pop stars and footballers but desperate cries for help rendered in fading ink. Luckily it’s autumn, so not many of these can be seen. However, someone remembers the time the girls were taken to a local swimming baths near here and there were fat men with angel wings on their backs, and the names and birthdates of all their children. Tash and Tiffanie link arms because they are now best friends, and Danielle cries the soft tears of a day-girl with mild PMT.
What is the geography of Stevenage? No one knows. As well as the fat people, there are lots of roundabouts and a building site.
‘Sir?’ someone asks the teacher. Mr Hendrix is a Marxist Existentialist with a beard. No one knows how he came to be teaching at the school. ‘Do you really live here? It’s horrible.’
Mr Hendrix smiles. His beard is more authentic than Dr Morgan’s. He has dark hair and is sexier in general. There is a rumour that he has a tattoo of his ex-girlfriend’s name on his chest, but no one has ever seen it. Also the words Fail Better on his upper arm.
‘Yes, I live here. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Oh my God, sir, it’s full of plebs.’
‘We don’t use that word, Rachel. That’s five house points you’ve just lost.’
No one, literally no one, gives a fuck about house points.
‘What about povvos, sir, can we say that?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘And so many fat people. Why are they all so fat, sir?’
‘Because of capitalism, Lissa. Because of your fathers and what they do.’
‘Sir, that’s sexist! Some of our mothers might be capitalists too.’
The girls are given clipboards and sent off to interview locals about extremely boring things like jobs and housing. Geography is surely supposed to be about exotic places, animals, tribes and capital cities, not this shit. Geography should involve yachts at the very least. No one does it properly. It’s cold, and everyone looks for warm places instead. McDonald’s, department stores, Topshop.
Then Donya comes out of a department store with a free sample of a new moisturiser and suddenly everyone needs free samples and there is a rampage of these beskirted long-limbed exotic creatures with great bone structure. They stampede into Debenhams and BHS, both of which smell of bad cafeterias and children’s nappies and wee. None of the shoppers know that the skirts are school policy, that you can’t leave the school grounds without one on. Everyone must think that these girls have chosen, brazenly, to flaunt their legs, their perfect legs, with their expensive knees and beautiful freckles, most of which, thankfully, are hidden under tights: Boots cheapos for the English girls; pure merino for the others.
Tiffanie is wearing a short black leather garment that is against the rules in every possible way apart from the fact that it is a skirt. Lissa is in denim, also not allowed. Bianca is wearing a pink tutu. She’s wearing it over leopard-print leggings, also not allowed. Is it an actual skirt? Or is it in fact one of her ballet outfits? Maybe from the show last year …? Tash only has one skirt: a Halpern zebra-print sequined satin mini she got off Net-a-Porter for £990 with her black Amex when she realised she needed a skirt to be able to leave the school. She didn’t mean to order something so expensive: she didn’t understand the exchange rate. But no one seems to care. Danielle smuggles in the Net-a-Porter packages in return for small gifts: pink Converse; the odd silk scarf. Mr Hendrix can’t do anything about the girls’ choice of skirts. Like, exactly what the fuck is he supposed to do?
The coach is coming at six but Bianca is missing. Eventually the others find her in the basement of the local nightclub, watching with her big lake-blue eyes as the DJ practises his set for the night. The DJ is thin and black with a buzzcut and a t-shirt that says Welcome to the Badlands. He’s playing a record by Azealia Banks and smoking a spliff. It is one of the most complicated and perplexing things the girls have ever seen. Especially now Bianca takes the spliff from the DJ and puffs on it, as if she’s been doing this her whole life. Then she starts dancing, and it looks real, like something off the pop videos they sometimes watch on a Saturday morning at Danielle’s house in the village. Like, no one knew Bianca could dance; well, not anything other than ballet. Her long arms flail about like spaghetti being thrown at a wall. Her tutu suddenly makes an odd sort of sense.
The DJ’s friend comes in.
‘More girls,’ he says. ‘Where you girls come from, den?’ He’s white, but talks like he isn’t.
No one says anything. Everyone is blushing. Everyone is trying to make their limbs do something ‘cool’ but everyone just wants to run away giggling because their insides feel like wriggly worms and childish things. It’s dark down here, and it smells smoky and sour. This isn’t a place for children. The walls are lined in crushed black velvet that looks sort of pathetic in daylight, and also frightening. It’s torn in places, and stained with splashes of beer. There’s a locked cloakroom. A sticky floor. Hints of mucilage.
‘Come on, Bianca,’ says Lissa. ‘The coach is here.’
‘The coach is here,’ repeats the white boy, mimicking Lissa’s accent, making it sound more like the couch is hair. ‘Where de fuck you girls from, den? You posh girls?’
No one says anything.
‘You posh girls want some spliff?’ he says. ‘That what you here for?’
Of course they want some. No one has ever tried drugs before, and now here they are and some skinny pleb is offering it for free. No one is scared. No one’s ever died from smoking spliffs, right? Anyway, there are only two boys and there are five of them even if you don’t count Bianca. If something went wrong, they could … What? But no one thinks of that anyway. Natasha remembers what Aunt Sonja said, though, and only pretends to inhale when it’s her turn. She has the Russian Deep Heat, just in case.
By the time the girls get back to the coach they are in big trouble. Especially as they are even later after stopping to sign autographs on the way back. Why not? That guy in Starbucks thought they were an actual girl band, which was the most hilarious thing ever.
‘That’s another ten house points gone,’ says Mr Hendrix.
‘Sir?’ says Elle, the captain of the hockey team. ‘Sir, they’re not all in the same house.’
‘A plague on both your houses,’ says Bianca, and starts giggling.
The others manoeuvre her to the back of the coach.
Mr Hendrix sighs and puts Bob Dylan on the coach stereo system and all the girls groan because they mistakenly think Bob Dylan is wholesome and a hippy and an anti-capitalist. The only one who likes it is Donya, who has a badly-hidden crush on Mr Hendrix.
‘Sir,’ she says, as the coach sets off in the dark, cold evening.
‘Yes, Donya?’
‘Are you related to Jimi Hendrix, sir?’
‘Yes, Donya.’
‘Are you really, though, sir?’
‘What do you think?’
*
The Year 11 common room is cleared out to be painted and someone finds a slam book from 1988 hidden behind the Bovril. Lots of faded photographs of thin girls with weird flicky hairstyles pasted with actual glue next to fountain-penned lists of Things about Themselves: their favourite colours, bands, nicknames and so on. It’s surprisingly dull, except for an old piece of paper that falls out that explains how to make friendship bracelets, which is of interest to Danielle, who likes making cute retro things. The second half of the book has been completed by boys at the Harrow School in London. They have pasted in photographs of themselves and song lyrics they like, often by Van Morrison, their career aspirations, their favourite animals (mostly snakes) and their ‘ideal woman’. Vanessa Paradis features a lot. There are pictures of her in a yellow sweatshirt and boyfriend jeans looking quite fat by today’s standards. Probably over eight stone.
Donya insists on taking the slam book to history class.
‘It’s a kind of history,’ she says. ‘It’s like folk history or something.’
‘Vestiges archéologiques,’ says Tiffanie.
Mr Hendrix agrees about folk history, which is how the girls have come to be creating a new slam book that they are going to send to the boys who are at Harrow now. Turns out that Mr Hendrix, for all his Marxist Existentialism, actually went to Harrow, and so he is going to set it up with the history teacher there. And Bianca’s twin brother goes there too. No one knew Bianca even had a twin brother, and she might even be lying: you never know. Anyway, everyone will re-enact the 1980s by producing new slam books and sending them through the actual post.
‘Sir?’ says Rachel. ‘Princess Augusta never had to glue her photograph in what is essentially a catalogue for—’
‘A sex catalogue,’ says Bianca, darkly. The photograph she has chosen to put into the slam book makes her look like a praying mantis in shadow. Her massive eyes perch atop a long, dark line that might be wearing a black dress and standing against a black wall.
‘This is basically organised prostitution,’ agrees Lissa.
‘Catalogue de sexe,’ says Tiffanie, with a sparkle in her eyes. Does she make this stuff up, or is it actual French? No one knows. Madame Vincent does not talk about anything to do with sexe. Is sexe French for sex? It seems too easy somehow. Too lazy.
‘Girls,’ says Mr Hendrix. ‘If you had any house points left I’d be taking them away. What’s wrong with you? This is your chance to experience history as it is lived.’
‘Can’t we just go on the internet, sir?’
‘It’s not the same, girls. You know that. Now, let’s think of some contemporary touches we can add. Who wants to suggest something?’
In the end they all add their real mobile numbers to their profiles, except for Bianca, who makes one up.
*
Behind the Bovril also lurked a calorie-counter from the olden days before the internet. It’s a little paperback with tiny writing and pink and brown stains that might be jam and Bovril but also might not be. It gets passed around during prep when Sin-Jin is asleep. The game is this: find the grossest, most calorific meal you can. Is it fondue? (What even is that?) Fondue with chips. Fondue with chips and beans and Thousand Island dressing and trifle. And pie. Lots and lots of pie. With mash, made with a whole packet of butter and several large tablespoons of double cream. Double cream dripping off the spoon and down the sides of the plate and on the floor. People treading in the double cream and slipping on it and dying.
The game was Bianca’s idea.
Bianca’s last game involved finding pictures of the celebrities with the fattest arms. The one before that was collecting screenshots of obese children from Instagram. There was also the Fat Ballerina Challenge, where you had to find images of professional dancers and zoom in on their arses or their stomachs or their chins and rank the most gross body parts in order.
Later, in bed, Tash gets out her silver phone and looks on the Weight Watchers site. In a day you are supposed to eat 23 points’ worth of food. She browses the restaurant possibilities. She’s hardly eaten Indian food in her life, thank God, because Indian Restaurant Chicken Tikka Masala is 81 points. The very thought is dizzying. If you added pilau rice (20), naan (28) and a couple of onion bhajis (18) that would be 147 points. Almost a whole week’s worth of points in one meal. Without pudding or anything.
