Tenterhooks. Suzannah Dunn
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us too long in the field and then taken us, in our waterproofs, into Prefab no. 2 for a late Debriefing. When the alarm rang, Mr Stanford announced, cheerfully, ‘Dinner.’
Avril complained, ‘That noise! Can’t we have a gong or something?’
Mr Stanford said, ‘No.’
In the dining-room, we had to queue with various staff and researchers for food, which was served in individual portions on metal trays. According to one of the cooks, the stew was lamb and the vegetable was swede. I asked her, ‘Is there any vegetarian?’
She said, ‘None in Pembrokeshire that I know of.’
I walked carefully to Mr Stanford with my runny portion and said, ‘But I’m vegetarian.’
He said, ‘No you’re not.’
I told him, ‘Yes I am.’
He laughed. ‘No you’re not: humans are omnivorous.’
I ignored this. ‘I’m vegetarian.’
Suddenly humourless again, he said, ‘But if you were vegetarian, you would have thought about this, you would have told me before we came away.’
I had to think quickly. ‘I’ve converted. There has to be a moment of conversion, and mine is now, with this lamb.’
‘Scrag end,’ corrected Trina, coming over, grimly cheerful, with her own tray.
Mr Stanford said, ‘Tough.’
Trina agreed, ‘You can say that again,’ and demonstrated, poking a piece with her knife.
I told him, ‘I’m not touching this, or anything like this; and if I starve, you’re responsible.’
He fizzled into exasperation, hissed to the ceiling, ‘Why are girls so fussy?’ Then he shouted through the hatch, ‘Is there any vegetarian?’
And a voice came back, ‘There’s a banana.’
So I had swede and banana, which I mashed together.
And now we are in our room for the evening; we have all crowded into the room which belongs to me, Rachel, and Susie. Even Lawrence, who was found in the corridor by Trina when she was coming from the room which she shares with Avril. According to her, he was pretending to read the bulletin board which is pinned with local maps and posters of seaweed. She told us this after pulling him into our room and announcing, ‘Look who I’ve found: Loz.’ She always calls him Loz.
We had temporarily overlooked Lawrence, in our self-pity. We apologized profusely and offered him a toddy; we have our own, a toddy but not hot, a quarter bottle of Scotch which Rachel was clever enough to buy from the supermarket on her way to school yesterday. We passed the bottle to Lawrence and he swigged, but appeared not to swallow and has declined all further offers. He is sitting on the end of the bed next to the door, which is mine. His knees are prominent.
Susie left the room ten minutes ago to phone Nathan. We can hear her on the pay phone at the end of our corridor, but her murmurs make no sense to us, they are little question marks to hook and hold his attention. On her pillow is an unfinished letter to him. Rachel, lounging on the floor, has been lying in wait for my gaze which she snares now in a conspiratorial smile.
‘What?’ I ask, wary, my hand pausing in the box of breakfast crunch, which is our only treat because we have already eaten our week’s supply of chocolate.
Holding my gaze, she reclines, suddenly switches her attention to the top sheet of Susie’s letter.
‘Don’t,’ I am serious but I laugh, I am so serious that I have to laugh.
But without taking her eyes from the letter, she raises her eyebrows. ‘Is it folded carefully away, or is it here on her pillow for everyone to see?’ As her eyes move over the words, her teeth come slowly onto her lower lip to hold down a smile.
So that now she has me: ‘What?’ I have to know, to coax her, ‘What does she say?’
The eyes widen to confront me. ‘I’m not breaking Susie’s confidence,’ she complains, mock-indignant.
I tut her away, but then the letter hovers in front of me in Rachel’s hand.
I shake my head.
So she places the letter back onto the pillow and tells me the truth. ‘She says nothing; We arrived here … that kind of stuff.’ And hums a laugh, ‘Or so far, because I stopped before the juicy bits.’
Avril peeps over her crossword puzzle book, ‘Are there juicy bits?’
Rachel turns on her. ‘Don’t you tell her that I read this.’
The door opens, slightly increasing the volume but not the sense of Susie’s words, and Trina hurries into the room. ‘There’s a notice in there,’ she wails, ‘Do not flush away sanitary dressings.’ Looking around us, she emphasizes, ‘Sanitary dressings.’
I wonder, ‘Any relation to salad dressings?’
Her gaze catches momentarily on Lawrence, ‘Oh, sorry, Loz.’
Rachel complains, ‘Shut the door, it’s freezing.’
It is not freezing in here, but our bodies bear the memory of a long cold day on the shore and now shiver in response to the mere opening of doors. If anything, it is too warm in here. The block of dormitories is new, and seems to be built from static.
Shutting the door, Trina complains, ‘It’s so cold that I can’t even face going for a fag.’ We have to go outside to smoke; the building is fitted with smoke detectors. She stomps across the room and thumps the window. ‘Has anyone managed to open this yet?’
Avril says, ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to open, it’s like a porthole. Because of all the water around here.’
We all turn to her. And I check, ‘You think the water comes up to here?’
‘Well, possibly.’
For a moment we listen, and hear something like a tube train far below us.
‘Anyway,’ I tell Trina, ‘those cigarettes are off.’
No one disputes this. The cigarettes are stale. I have never had a stale cigarette before. I have never had very many cigarettes at all; I smoke only when I am under stress and there are no other options, no sugar, no alcohol, no music, no Mike or Jamie, and no laughs from Rachel. The stale cigarettes came from Rachel, who disappeared from the courtyard during the confusion of waterproofs removal. She returned twenty minutes late for dinner. Sliding next to me on the bench, with a wild wrinkle of her nose in the direction of my mashed meal, she nudged my attention to her hidden hands: beneath the table, three packets of cigarettes, sixty; I swallowed a wave of nausea. And interrogated her, ‘Where have you been?’
To keep Mr Stanford’s attention at bay, she faked interest in my plate while she whispered, ‘The local sort of corner shop.’
Local? So there was hope, there was a locality.
‘Where?’
She inclined her head, slightly, ‘About a mile in that direction,’ then laughed briefly, ‘the direction of inland.’
‘So,’ I urged, ‘there’s a village or something?’
‘No, nothing.’ She was wriggling to slot the packets into her pockets. I kept watch on Mr Stanford for her. Which was a mistake: he was carefully in conversation with Janet the Algae, their heads low and close, but when this composure exploded with a laugh, his gaze came quickly to mine. I smiled beautifully, and he looked away.
I returned my attention to Rachel. ‘But you said corner shop.’
‘I said sort of corner shop. It would be a corner shop if there was a corner.’ She winced her apologies, ‘It’s