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‘I’m only sniffing.’ She draws the cigarette along the length of her smile, and lingers on the tip, where she inhales dramatically.
Then we both join in with Bowie for, ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …’
When we have finished this, our favourite line, there is silence; this is a hard line to follow, and anyway there is nothing new to say.
After a while, I ask around the room, ‘Do any of us need to do marine biology?’
Trina mutters, ‘Like fuck.’
Avril agrees, ‘Never ever.’
Rachel adds, ‘And I think that we can speak for Susie, too.’
Susie is taking biology because she wants to be a nurse. Trina wants to be a physio: manhandling rugby players, she tells us and we do not know if she is serious. No one knows what Avril wants to do. Rachel’s reasons for biology are the same as mine. We became friends through biology, on the back bench in O level, from where we would counter Mr Bennett’s descriptions of flawless function with questions about diseases and their cures.
Suddenly phlegm whinnies in Lawrence’s throat. ‘Well …’ his voice, in our room, sounds odd; seems to sound odd to him, too, because he blinks convulsively, his eyes like moths, and his mouth thins but falls short of a smile. He tries again, rushes, ‘I want to be a vet, so I have to study animals, but not …’ and he fades.
‘Not whelks,’ Rachel says for him, turning to him.
‘No.’ His eyes fix on her, seem to implore.
‘Of course not whelks,’ she reassures him, before returning to the rest of us to announce, ‘so, the Nobel Prize for marine biology is awarded to Trina.’
Trina struggles up onto her elbows and whines a quizzical, ‘My arse.’
Rachel explains, ‘Nautical Night’: Trina’s favourite club, once a month on a boat on the Thames.
Day Three, and Jim has finished our Briefing, has told us what we have to do today: we have to mark square metres on a rock face and note the distribution of barnacles within this grid. He did not apologize; on the contrary, he seemed to think that his little exercise would appeal to us, that this would seem like a good way to spend a day. Yesterday, when we were supposed to be probing rock pools, I wandered and came across Lawrence. He was crouched behind a boulder, lighting a new cigarette from the previous one. When he was dabbing the old stub onto a barnacle, he saw me. His mouth was so busy with the second cigarette that he could only manage to hoist his eyebrows in greeting. I was so shocked that I could think of nothing to say but a sympathetic, ‘They’re stale.’
He exhaled, sighed smokily, ‘They’re better than nothing.’
I bumped and tottered back over the rocks to Rachel and asked her, ‘Did you give Lawrence some of those horrid cigarettes?’
She looked up from her rock pool, and raked through her wind-whipped and salt-stiffened hair. ‘Yes, a few, although he tried to say no.’ Her frown meshed with the streaks of her hair. ‘Why?’ Breathless with the sea breeze, I laughed helplessly as I informed her, ‘He’s behaving appallingly, up there: smoking, and burning barnacles.’
She stood up, grinned slowly, and reached into her mouth for a limpet of chewing gum which she dropped into the rock pool before she murmured appreciatively, ‘Loz unleashed.’
Now Jim is slamming through the swing door into the courtyard, keen to lead us down to the shore for another day of excitement. But every day we are allowed a few minutes before we leave, in which to zip and Velcro ourselves into our layers and to fetch anything that we have forgotten. Then Jim will bark, ‘Notebooks?’ Because according to him, the notebook is the indispensable tool of the marine biologist: a pocket stiff notebook, in his words. A pocket stiff, in ours. As we leave the bench to follow him, my pocket stiff falls open onto the floor. Bending down, I scan the displayed page, the words which, on our first day, we had been told to copy from Jim’s blackboard: Supplementary fauna key: Limpets; if no groove, look into shell mouth; if mother-of-pearl, then top-shell, if no mother-of-pearl, then winkle. Beneath this I had scrawled, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, Trina’s favourite Bowie track, which she sang for hours 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 only truth is science, that truth is proof and proof is science. You’re always telling us to believe nothing unless we have proof. Now you have a hypothesis, that we don’t all have our periods today. So, where’s your proof?’
Faced with this challenge, Mr Stanford stamps away down the corridor and slams the door. The sound wave crashes into our silence.
Trina whispers, ‘Temper, temper,’ and we scurry into our room.
Rachel is sitting on her bed with her pillow held hard to her stomach. Suddenly she is struck, ‘Lawrence.’
Trina echoes with, ‘Loz.’
We turn to see him drowning in the darkness of the corridor, flapping away our concern. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’
I am horrified, ‘It is not okay.’ We overlooked him because everything happened so quickly.
Susie appeals to him, ‘Come in here, for God’s sake.’
Trina calls, ‘You can say that you have prostate trouble.’ She seems serious.
He stops.
Rachel worries her lower lip with a sharp tooth. ‘We could try saying that we need you here to look after us.’
Avril wants to know, ‘But what is wrong with us?’
Trina despairs, ‘I’d like to know what is wrong with you.’
But suddenly we are knocked back into silence by the thump of the far door.
Frozen, we listen to the approach of Mr Stanford’s steps, but they stop short of our doorway.
‘Why don’t you walk around down on the shore,’ he says, presumably to Lawrence, ‘see what you can find in the rock pools, do much the same as you did yesterday.’ His voice is low, is a display of kindness and a play for conspiracy: he is wary of Lawrence, now, but has to try to win him over. The implication of this plan for Lawrence is that he can go alone to the shore, which means that he will not have to go, or not for very long.
Suddenly there are two more steps and Mr Stanford looms close to our doorway, but remains in the corridor, from where he addresses us en masse: ‘You lot have a bug,’ these words spat and orchestrated by jabs of his index finger. And now he is gone.
When the far door crashes, Rachel flops sideways onto her bed and whines into her pillow, ‘A bug, that’s pathetic, he’s pathetic.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ I tell her, ‘this could cause trouble for those caterers.’
The end of Day Four, which is the end of the trip: Day Five requires us only to Depart.
We have had dinner and now we are in the library. This is our first visit to the library, which was discovered half an hour ago by Trina who had decided to wander around the building rather than face a dish of shepherd’s pie, which she had nicknamed sheep worrier’s pie. We stayed, but as we trooped from the canteen, she called to us from the top of a short flight of stairs. When we reached her, she enthused, ‘Get a load of this!’ then lunged to open one of the doors with a fanfare, ‘Da da!’
We hurried inside to claim one of the long tables and six of the chairs which are almost armchairs. No one else came in here after dinner, and now the old stone building holds a deep hush crumpled only slightly and rarely by cymbals in the kitchens below. We are sprawled, heads on arms, our talk sliding over the shiny surface. The table is warmed by an avenue of lamps with jade shades. The wax is cooking, smells to me like a mixture of butter and honey. Which mixes in turn with the trace of soap dried into the crook of my arm. I feel warm and clean for the first time in five days. The wood of this table could have been made from chestnuts hammered smooth; occasionally I feel that I am slipping on the surface, even though I am as low as I can go. From here, the rain sounds dry, like the hiss of seeds in a shaken pod, and looks wonderful, the luminous streamers and their stray raindrops clean and intricately linked on our black windows.
Yesterday we had our day off, but today we had to work much harder than usual. Jim and Mr Stanford goaded us, yelling through the fizzy spray for us to Take it easy but ensuring that this was impossible. They chose a particularly steep and exposed stretch of shore for the belated barnacle head count. Then we were allowed twenty minutes for lunch, rather than forty: Lots to do. And at the end of the day we were not allowed to leave the shore until three quarters of an hour later than usual.
Our day off had been like a Sunday but better, with gossip and tapes, face packs and make-up. Lawrence had dawdled on the beach for a while, luminous in his waterproofs, shrunk to a toddler far below our window. We saw him throwing sticks and stones across the water. No one else ventured from our room, until we had to go to dinner because we had finished our own supplies. In the canteen, Mr Stanford had tittered, ‘Hello, girls, are you better?’ as if there was a joke which he was in on. Then he said nothing more to us until he came to our main door unnecessarily early this morning, sometime before seven o’clock, to scream, ‘Wakey wakey, wakey wakey!’
I sparked awake to see Rachel, to see her wake. Her face lagged behind her, filled with sleep. Disgusted, she muttered, ‘Wanky wanky, in his case.’
Now, in the library, the muscles in my back and legs are hot and heavy from the long, hard day. For the last half an hour, we have talked of nothing else but the injustice of this week, our exile to this peninsula, this enforced biology. All of us except Lawrence, but his eyes follow the conversation, rippling his sagged brow like a dog’s. One of us is kicking a table leg, has been doing so for quite a while; a slack kick, but these aimless prods have been knocking through our tender bones and building up in our bloodstream. Slumped here, in one another’s warmth, our faces are droopy and darkening.
‘We’ve lost a week of our lives,’ Rachel moans into the blurred reflection of her lips.
‘I wish that we had lost it,’ Susie sighs through a stray strand of hair. ‘It’s been the worst week of my life.’
‘Worst and utterly pointless,’ I remind her.
Trina snarls, ‘This place should be burned down. With Jim inside.’
‘And Mr Stanford,’ adds Rachel.
‘Well of course Mr Stanford.’
Rachel hauls her eyes to Trina’s face, then smiles. ‘He’s the kindling.’
Trina looks worried, ‘Sounds too nice, for him,’ and turns on one of her pockets. ‘We could burn it down,’ she chucks the box of matches high above us, the little yellow and black box a big square bee which drops dead into the palm of her hand. All the matches click simultaneously on the bottom of the box. It is hard to know if she is serious.
