Tenterhooks. Suzannah Dunn
in the minibus. I pick up the book by the cover and the pages spin to today’s copied words, the chart on which we are supposed to record the distribution of barnacles: on bare rock, on weeded rock, in rock pools, in crevices, on pebbles, under boulders, on plants, on animals. Across the top of this chart I have written ‘Suffragette City’, which is my own favourite.
I am going to check on Rachel. When I came into the Briefing and told Mr Stanford that she was too ill to leave her bed, he turned from me without a word and hurried across the courtyard to our dormitory block. That was five minutes ago, and he has not yet returned. During the night, I woke twice, briefly, barely, to see Rachel away from her bed. The first time, she was standing by the window, stooped over something in her hands. She was pearly in the overspill of floodlight from the courtyard. Her T-shirt, the hem flopped on the tops of her thighs, turned her into a child’s drawing of a girl in a dress: the triangular dress and long lines for legs. But no colour: all of her was pearly, even her eyes. And the earrings: the show of earrings reduced to nothing, to polite pearls. She was drooping, and then came the sound that told me what she was doing: the smash of a pill through a membrane of silver foil.
I asked, ‘You okay?’
She seemed unsurprised to hear me, but this apparent calm could have been simply the careful slowness of her turn towards me. A small sound came despite her closed mouth; not quite a groan. Then she made an effort to elaborate: ‘I’m having a baby.’
Period pain. In reply, I made a similar sound, but lower and heavier: the appropriate show of sympathy. Then sleep must have washed up over me again and pulled me away.
The second time I opened my eyes, she was coming into the room; and behind her, the corridor buzzed with the far away roar of water into a toilet bowl.
‘You okay?’ I checked again.
But by now she was more resigned, throwing me an almost tuneful, ‘Uh-huh,’ as she crossed the room to her bed. I heard the rasp of drawn bedclothes, then the wince of bedsprings beneath her.
This morning she lay in bed while we moved around her. She moved only her eyes, which were no longer pearls but dry pink petals. I was followed by them as I rushed around the room, finding my clothes and throwing back questions. ‘So what do I tell Mr Stanford?’
‘That I’m ill.’
‘Yes, but do I say with what?’
‘Up to you.’
‘Have you had any painkillers this morning?’
‘Three.’
‘Will you be okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
Mr Stanford had not seemed to want to know the details, had said nothing before he turned and hurried away. But now, as I come through the door to the dormitory block, the corridor is full of his voice, a voice which washes over the walls, ‘Well, I simply do not believe that an aspirin or two won’t fix you.’
Rachel’s voice burns into his. ‘How would you know? And I’ve had an-aspirin-or-two, in fact I’ve had three.’
Turning the corner, I see them in the doorway to my room: they mirror each other across the threshold, propping up the doorframe, arms folded hard. There are squeaks from Mr Stanford’s buttercup-yellow waterproofs. Rachel has draped a cardigan over the T-shirt which emphasizes the knot of her arms.
Mr Stanford creaks taller, ready to move away. ‘Fresh air will help.’
Rachel bends fiercely into the fold of her arms: ‘I can’t, okay?’ she bellows after him, even though he has moved no more than half an inch, has swayed rather than moved. ‘I can’t go clambering over rocks all day with a swollen endometrium.’
Endometrium is impressive; I wish that I could see Mr Stanford’s appreciation. The tone of his reply, however, is studiously bland: ‘I can’t have you lounging around here all day. So I’ll expect you to join us in five minutes.’
I am close to his shiny back, now, but he does not know that I am here, nor, apparently, does Rachel, because her eyes do not move from his face. Behind me, I can hear someone bumping through the door.
I try to appeal, ‘Mr Stanford …’
But Rachel finishes, ‘You’re a pathetic wanker,’ and flops away.
Mr Stanford swings deep into the room, silver eddies on his waterproofs, to yell, ‘I’ll have you for that, no one speaks like that to staff, you’ll be in a lot of trouble when we go back to school.’
‘Oh yes?’ her voice comes weary and muffled from the depths. ‘And who’ll believe you?’
His hands rise, then slap back onto the doorframe: dismay, then emphasis, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But I see the nervous flutter of his glue-yellow fingernails on the white-painted wood. ‘In any case,’ he swells, ‘I have witnesses.’ And his face slides around to me.
I have to stand my ground, to tell him, ‘I don’t think that you do.’
So his eyes widen to latch onto Lawrence. I know that it is Lawrence who has come up behind me because I can hear him wheeze, the rhythmic twang of his bronchioles. I turn and see the splayed hands of the shrug with which he places himself beyond Mr Stanford’s reach, Sorry, mate, I heard nothing. Three pairs of eyes bob behind Lawrence: Susie, Trina and Avril have arrived. Trina says, ‘In fact, none of us is feeling too good, all of us are having our periods.’
Before I can laugh, Mr Stanford roars at us, ‘Stop it,’ the command spurting from a faceful of loathing.
Suddenly Rachel is in the doorway again, hands high on the frame, tiny wings of cotton in her armpits. ‘It happens,’ she says to his back, and when he turns, her head inclines to one side, ‘or didn’t you know? Happens in girls’ boarding schools and nunneries, or wherever women live together in close confines; we fall into sync, our hormones mix in the air or something.’
‘True,’ adds Trina, who would not have known; she knows very little biology.
Mr Stanford flings his reply around all of us, ‘Of course I know that,’ but his puffing face is squashed by a frown.
Susie announces, ‘Mine is so bad that I need to lie down,’ and swishes on his waterproof on her way into our room. She trails her own waterproof, which whispers from the floor.
I cannot believe that this will work.
Mr Stanford’s gaze hops around us, from face to face, sharp, looking for a weak link; but in the meantime, he tries to seem to move towards conciliation, ‘Oh come on, girls.’
Rachel unwinds her mouth, but this is not quite a smile. ‘Looks like you’re five girls short of an expedition.’
He coughs up a laugh, forces himself one step further from conciliation to good humour. ‘Girls, don’t be silly.’
‘Oh, but we are silly, because of those silly hormones of ours,’ Rachel lowers her head so far that it comes close to her shoulder, ‘but of course, it’s part of our charm.’
‘Avril?’ he asks, suddenly; he has decided that she is the weak link.
She shivers to attention. ‘What?’
He bullies her, ‘You can’t tell me that you and all your friends here are indisposed?’
She manages a faint echo, ‘Indisposed.’ How much of this has she missed? Someone elbows her, and with a wobble she adds, ‘Oh, yes, I’m always indisposed.’
Trina whoops, ‘Never a truer word!’
Rachel folds down from the doorframe, slowly, calmly, and says to Mr Stanford, ‘You’re always telling us that the