Oligarchy, page 9
This is so wrong but Tash now really, really wants to laugh. Are they saying that Dr Morgan sexually abused them in some way? That’s ridiculous. When he was putting them to bed? But they had their clothes on, didn’t they? And they were so drunk and probably smelled of vomit and he was actually very kind to them and, it seems, never did tell anyone. Poor, dear, sweet Dr Morgan with his terrible biology lessons and sour breath.
‘When did he die?’ asks Tiffanie.
‘After he was confronted with the photographs. I told him I was about to alert the police and, well, I suppose he felt his life was over.’
It feels cold in the room all of a sudden. Tash thinks of how she lay in bed that night – Snow White, maybe, but with that tropical, sickly edge – still in the clothes she’d put on for the disco. Donya … Wasn’t it Donya who helped them off with their clothes much later? Or Lissa. Maybe both of them. The room spinning. Getting up to be sick again. No sign of Dr Morgan then, after lights-out. Tash remembers the feeling on the Underground when that man touched her: it was confusing, and over so quickly. Could Dr Morgan have done something like that to her, but worse? She tries to feel it. She can’t feel it. She tries again.
An abuse victim. A survivor of abuse. Her abuser dead in the lake.
People do forget this kind of thing, don’t they? Don’t they?
But of course they are changed and broken forever.
*
Another parent has written to complain about the programme of talks on eating disorders. You are fucking crazy, the email says. You are really out of your pathetic fucking minds. If the girls were smoking weed, would you bring in a drug dealer to let them try heroin to see how bad it is? No, you fucking wouldn’t. Well, actually, you probably would, because you have no fucking idea what you are doing and you are completely, hopelessly out of touch. Is anyone there under the age of 70? I mean, seriously, what planet do you actually think you’re fucking living on? I am withdrawing my daughter as of Monday.
And that’s the end of Flick.
*
Dominic and Tony are back.
‘Right,’ Dominic says to Tash. ‘We’re going to have no fucking around here, OK? No silly laughing or messing about like last time. Getting over PTSD is no fucking picnic, I can tell you. You’re going to have to co-operate with me.’
They are in a quiet room in the Dower House. Outside, Tash can see Detective Inspector Amaryllis Archer striding around the grounds in her usual jeans and high-heeled boots. Whenever she appears, Tash can’t take her eyes off her. She has the same confident air that Aunt Sonja has, but without the secrecy and sadness. She is also about three stone heavier. She’s not fat, not really. She’s solid, a bit curvy. Should she have tucked her top into her jeans the way she has? Her boots are pointy. She wears a lot of make-up but in a sort of bold, fun way. Electric blue eyeshadow and blusher the colour of a perfect pink spring morning. She is wearing a leopard-print belt and a purple faux-fur hooded jacket and massive gold hoop earrings. She has dark skin and big hair: really big hair.
Tash thinks back to one of those early days in the dorm, when Tiffanie was explaining how you come up with your personal style for each season. The secret is pairing two words that don’t usually go together. Ideally, one of the words should reference a current fashion trend from this actual season and one should be something seemingly random that you have in fact spent hours and hours thinking about. So, for example, you could have cocktail safari, or mermaid outlaw, or vagabond princess, or cowgirl strip-club, or revolutionary vaudeville, or ballet tramp (which is Tiffanie’s all-time favourite and involves going everywhere in beat-up ballerinas and 501s with her feet slightly turned out like Charlie Chaplin’s while simultaneously channelling Harpo Marx and Anna Pavlova).
Tiffanie is in the next room with Tony.
To get over PTSD you have to really face what happened to you. You have to write it down and then read it out over and over again until it no longer bothers you. It’s like people who are afraid of spiders having to sit in a room with a spider in a tank and then out of the tank and then near them and then on their actual hands. The problem is that Tash has no idea what actually happened or even if anything did. How can you let something out of its tank to crawl on you if it was never there in the first place?
She stares out of the window. You can almost see the lake from here. Amaryllis Archer’s look is kind of party pirate. Tash wonders if she chose that theme deliberately at the start of this season. Tiffanie says that sometimes it’s acceptable to keep a look for several seasons, like Kate Moss did in the olden days when she wore her boho roadie ensembles for literally years. Would someone like Detective Inspector Archer even have time to construct a themed look? She must be so busy solving crimes after all. Maybe it’s accidental.
‘… do you?’ says Dominic.
‘Sorry?’ says Tash.
He breathes in for about a million years and then sighs heavily.
‘You are going to have to get with the fucking programme, girlie,’ he says.
‘Sorry,’ says Tash. She shrugs. ‘But I’ve already said that I don’t think anything actually happened with Dr Morgan.’
‘But he had pictures,’ says Dominic. ‘Dirty pictures. Of you. And your hot French friend.’
‘I haven’t seen any pictures.’
‘Well, they’re not exactly going to show them to you, are they?’
‘Why not? Especially if I’m supposed to face what’s happened. I can’t even remember it. Have you seen them?’
‘Do I look like some kind of raging paedophile?’
‘Well, I thought—’
Dominic rolls his eyes. ‘Right. I’ll see what I can do,’ he says. ‘I’ll say we’re not making any progress. Are you sure you want to see the pictures if I can get them?’
Tash nods. ‘I’m just really not sure there are any. The headmaster said he destroyed them, but—’
‘If there aren’t any pictures, then why am I even fucking here?’
Amaryllis Archer comes into Tash’s mind, and she’s beautifully lit, and she says, ‘That’s an extremely good question.’ She winks then, and her electric-blue eyeshadow catches the light and is transcendent, just for a moment.
The girls from the attic dorms wait for their turn to be interviewed by DI Archer. They roll around in her eyeline but she does not bob for them; she does not bite into them. Not yet. They don’t even know if she has sharp teeth. They plan their interrogation outfits, practise their innocent expressions in the mirror. Take selfies to compare. They raise their eyebrows and lower them again and experiment with the sort of make-up that male teachers can never detect but female ones always can. Not because they plan to lie – not at all – even though they have agreed never to mention the incident with Dr Morgan, or say anything about Bianca. At fifteen you have to practise everything you plan to do. Sitting up in bed, for example, the morning after you’ve slept with your boyfriend for the first time. What are the angles? Where is the light? How can you look smaller and more precious but with bigger tits? How can you look cool rather than benignly beautiful, and is an ear-cuff the answer?
That afternoon with Nico by the river, with his sister watching. That hadn’t ever been practised. If it had been practised, perhaps it would not have happened and Tash could feel purer now because purity is everything.
*
The new biology teacher is called Miss White. She is tall and sporty with thick porridgey calves and short blonde hair. She is going to double-up as a lacrosse and athletics coach. Mr Hendrix has been off sick for ages, so Miss White has agreed to cover some of the history classes as well, with the help of Dr Moone, who lollops more frequently across the grounds now, dragging his bad leg like a puppet pulling its own strings. He up-and-downs and side-to-sides himself past the hedges and the bare branches of the trees and into the Dower House, and tells the girls about the bravery of men in wars, and the cunning things their leaders did.
Miss White never wears make-up. She has a rash on her neck. She hangs leaves on little washing lines to measure how they drip, and grows bacteria in petri dishes and tries, without success, to teach the girls how to use a potometer and Visking tubing.
‘Girls,’ she says on a dark Tuesday that is oddly warm for January. ‘Girls, are there any biological things you are interested in? Anything at all? Contraception, for example? Sex? Childbirth? Do you like gory things? Blood? Tropical diseases?’
No one says anything. How to tell her that her predecessor has been found dead in the school lake – well, she probably knows that – but how to tell her that, as a result of this, Becky with the bad hair has stopped eating and got her father to write to Dr Moone and ask for Natasha and Tiffanie to be expelled? How to tell her that biology lessons make them feel vertiginous because it turns out that even the most heartless of the girls actually loved Dr Morgan, although of course no one can love him now that he’s an actual paedophile? Becky does not believe him to be a paedophile: she believes Tash and Tiffanie to be liars. But all Tash and Tiffanie have said is that they don’t think anything happened on the night of the disco. Of course, they’ve mainly said this to Dominic and Tony, who have extrapolated somewhat and the rumours have gone round, like rumours do. Then there’s the question of what actually happened to Bianca. But Bianca was crazy. Bianca probably just walked anorexically past the lake and then slipped anorexically into it.
Poor Dr Morgan. He hasn’t even had a funeral yet. He might not have one at all. What if he actually murdered Bianca, and then killed himself out of remorse?
‘I know,’ says Miss White, clapping her large bony hands together. ‘Why don’t we look at BMI? Body Mass Index. We can design some experiments. I’ll get the scales.’
The girls exchange glances. Miss White cannot know that the girls have not been allowed to weigh themselves since Bianca’s death: that all the scales in the school have been hidden from them. It turns out that there is a dusty old set in the biology store-cupboard, which is useful to know about. No one is going to tell her, are they? Nope. Because really, how would you? The mood lifts a little as the day darkens further and the last bits of winter sun dissolve into the clouds and die.
The only people who look uncertain are the fat girls. But even they are sort of excited: excited in that way you are when you know something is going to hurt but you feel compelled to do it anyway. The one person who is genuinely not excited is Rachel. She’s recently learned a lot about how to weigh yourself and when. She also knows how it feels if the numbers are even slightly wrong. How damning, how bleak, how painful. How fucking unfair, given everything you’ve done and how hard you’ve worked and how desperately you want it. At home, her mood for the day is dictated by a number. At least here she’s been free of it for a while. What’s she going to do if this number is wrong?
‘But we’ve got our clothes on,’ she says. ‘And it’s the middle of the afternoon.’
But it’s too late. The scales – large, heavy, dusty – have been brought out and put by the window. From somewhere Miss White has produced a box containing pairs of callipers and now she’s demonstrating how you measure someone else’s body fat with them. Most of the callipers are white plastic standard-issue, but one pair is metal, old-fashioned and sharp. This is the pair Miss White uses for her demonstration. You have to get hold of someone else’s muffin-top and basically pinch it, hard, with these metal things …
Is this ethical? Not really. Is it a good idea? No one cares. Miss White has pulled up a table from a Google image search and is displaying it on the biology lab’s state-of-the-art projector screen. According to this table, you have to be under 30 per cent fat to be ‘normal’. Anything over that is ‘obese’. 20–25 per cent is ‘slim’. 15–20 per cent is ‘athletic’. BMI is different. You don’t need callipers for that: you just have to weigh yourself and measure how tall you are and do a simple equation.
Bella puts her hand up.
‘Hasn’t BMI been discredited?’ she says. ‘I mean, don’t all rugby players come out as horribly obese when it’s actually just muscle?’
‘Yes, well, that’s why we also take body-fat percentages,’ says Miss White. ‘That way you get a more accurate picture. It’s not just rugby players coming up as obese in BMI tests; quite thin-looking people can come out as fat using body-composition methods. Right. Pair up,’ she says, ‘but not with the same person as usual. Let’s mix things up a bit. Yes, good, Bella: you go with Tiffanie. I want everyone’s BMI and body-fat percentage entered into this table I’m going to create. Then we can practise using statistics as well.’
Tash ends up with Becky, who sulks the whole time. Her breath is awful from not eating. Is this how her actual insides smell, like rotten egg and antiseptic? When Tash tries to use the callipers on her, Becky simply shakes her off as if she were a stray cat that you have invited in but has started dribbling on you and clawing you too hard.
‘Ow!’ she says. ‘Get off me.’
‘Come on, girls,’ says Miss White. ‘Follow the instructions. You have to release the trigger of the callipers so that the entire force of the jaws is on the skinfold.’
‘Why don’t you go back to Russia?’ Becky says to Tash once Miss White has moved on. ‘And stop ruining everything. Go back to your own people and stop bothering us. Like, you have literally destroyed London, my father says so. And it’s all with dark money, stolen money. You’re basically all criminals.’
Becky refuses to measure Tash, so Tash does the bits she can reach herself, and gets Tiffanie to do the rest. Tiffanie hasn’t been able to get any skinfolds from Bella, who doesn’t really have any. She is basically zero per cent fat, or something close to it: muscle stretched over wide bones. She also has weird stretch marks, and a sort of dry waxy sheen all over, like a boat in a harbour.
The statistics the class produces are quite a shock, although Rachel is quietly pleased with her own numbers. It turns out that there is a thing called ‘skinny fat’. Your BMI might be OK, and that might fool the government, but what if your small body is composed entirely of lard? What if you have literally no muscles, like a veal calf? Tiffanie falls into this category. She has a BMI of 21 but she is 32 per cent fat, which means she is obese.
‘Je suis pas obese,’ she growls, when her stats are pulled off the table as an example. But she looks startled in a way no one has ever seen before. Imagine Tiffanie, with her perfect brown-and-rose body, actually counting as obese. Imagine her now weighing more than Rachel! Later, Miss White will tell some of the other teachers about the class and Madame Vincent will get her to repeat this part again and again and it will give her some small comfort in these dark days after what happened with Dr Morgan.
On the smooth white table in the biology lab, the metal callipers gleam like the hard wet teeth of a praying mantis.
*
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the ballet class is almost over. Miss Annabel has left the room, just for a moment. Occasionally, if the girls have pleased her, she returns from these sorties with an old metal tea-tray holding plastic cups of cold lemonade. But mostly when she leaves the room the girls stop what they’re doing and wait to hear the faint squall of water weakly hitting water, and then the long heave of the toilet chain. Miss Annabel pees all the time now. The girls wonder if she is going to die. Today when she goes she accidentally leaves the ballet CD playing, and it somehow gets stuck on a sequence of jumps. They’ve just done 64 changements and some girls – the lazy, obese ones – are now lounging damply by the barre hoping for lemonade. But the more dedicated girls want to keep jumping, and so they do. They jump and jump and the music changes and they bound and scurry for a while and then carry on jumping, this time doing entrechat quatres. There was a joke, a long time ago, perhaps even in Year 10, that these jumps, where one calf beats against another four times, were called ‘enter shot cats’. Someone remembers this now, and someone else giggles, and the jumping gets wilder, less controlled, and soon the last three girls are staggering around the room, with fingers for guns and/or ears, and they are leaping and dying and meowing and baring their tiny pointed teeth like—
‘Girls, for heaven’s sake!’
And off they trundle again to the headmaster’s office: Tash, Tiffanie and Rachel. Rachel is looking thinner now and people are worried. The headmaster is especially worried, and so he asks her to go to his house, alone, the next day. But for now he simply reads them some more from Great Expectations while they breathe in the old-carpet-and-polish smells that are both comforting and hopeless.
*
It has come to the teachers’ attention that anorexia is on the rampage again, despite everyone’s best efforts and the programme of talks. Even Becky with the bad hair has succumbed. Her hipbones have started jutting out of her skirt like a cowboy’s thumbs, and she doesn’t even seem to care about being Head Girl any more. No one eats anything, at least not in public. Those who must eat follow Rachel, who only eats fish and vegetables. Rachel has started photocopying sheets of exercises and her rules for ‘clean eating’ and selling them to the crushlets for £1 each. You can do triceps dips on the big enamel baths, and press-ups on the bathroom floor. You can lock yourself in and do twenty-one minutes’ worth of plyometrics when other people think you’re doing a poo. If you do it right you’ll only need to poo every three days, and you won’t have periods either, which is handy in a boarding school. Tiffanie has stopped eating carbs and is losing some of her fat, but it doesn’t suit her to be so pinched and wrinkled. Her hair is less shiny. She’s like a pedigree dog with worms, or an apple that someone left in the sun and then forgot to eat.
It’s all becoming a bit much for the teachers. The scales are hidden yet again. The callipers are removed. The headmaster gives Miss White a talking-to about what an appropriate biology lesson should be. At supper the Year 11 girls are split up. Surely there can be no more competitive non-eating if they cannot see each other. So Tash is next to Sin-Jin, who has tea-stained teeth and frequently eats with her mouth open. The meatsmell from the teachers’ plates is disgusting. All Tash wants to smell are flowers and perfumes and English cigarette smoke. The rest of the dining hall is thick with the stench of fat and treacle and Miss Annabel’s bunion cream and the haemorrhoid gel that Madame Vincent no doubt uses. Often in the mornings the headmaster’s study smells of dark coffee and tobacco, and that has become the scent of Estella. Pip would not eat custard like this, or love someone who did. Estella does not eat in the entire book and she does not die, because she is glorious, and she can live on Pip’s love. She certainly never eats treacle tart.
