Tenterhooks. Suzannah Dunn
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her point.
Reluctantly, I smiled. ‘Yes, but you’ll starve.’
She shrugged this off, ‘We have that box of crunchy mix.’
I did not say, Why no chocolate? Why sixty cigarettes and no Aero? Because she was right, she did the right thing: the final disastrous touch to the week would be a few extra inches on our hips.
Now Trina is crashing back across our brittle, smoke-free room. ‘Well, if the ciggies are off …’ Her boots crunch our spillages of cereal. She leaves the door open as she hurries into her own room. Returning, she asks, ‘Want one?’ but immediately turns away to close our door very firmly. There is a plain brown envelope in one hand, a few pinhead pills slipping down over the flap into the palm of her other hand. They line up like beads of mercury in the main crease, the main channel of her palm.
I want to know, ‘What are they?’
She extracts one in a pincer of index finger and thumb, and pushes it between her lips. ‘Anti-depressants,’ the reply comes slightly sticky, ‘my mum’s.’
Rachel sits taller. ‘What do they do?’
The pills slam back down onto one another in the envelope, and Tina heads for Susie’s vacant bed. ‘Cure depression, I suppose.’ Reclining, she holds the envelope high, keeping open the offer.
Avril doubts, ‘One of them will cure depression?’
Lawrence looks exactly how he looks in class: interested, but in facts rather than fun.
‘Well, no,’ Trina wails her irritation with Avril. ‘But they can’t make me feel worse than how I feel now.’
Rachel stretches to the volume control on the tape recorder because the tape has reached ‘Changes’, her favourite track. ‘So why do you have them?’ she shouts over David Bowie, her voice further strained by her stretch.
Trina’s eyes slot towards her. ‘I nicked them, of course.’
Rachel dismisses this with a shake of her head. ‘No, I mean, won’t she notice?’
Trina gives up, chucks the envelope on to the floor. ‘My mum notices nothing,’ she tells the ceiling.
Rachel’s eyes slide to me on a smile. ‘Wouldn’t I love to have that kind of mum.’
I tell her, ‘Do you know that Jamie has tried some heroin?’
Apparently too weary to speak, she widens her eyes, Really?
‘Sniffed,’ I inform her, ‘not injected.’ And therefore not addictive, or so he told me. ‘Says it was like lying in a warm bath.’
‘A warm bath,’ she repeats, and seems to breathe in as she speaks, her eyes misting.
Avril says, ‘The showers on Mr Stanford’s corridor are better than ours: I went to explore. No mould on his wall.’
Rachel coughs a laugh. ‘He’d love some mould, Av, it’s biology.’
Trina tells us, ‘H is for losers.’
Avril’s incomprehension tightens into a frown, which she tries to feel her way through, begins by mouthing, ‘H …’
Rachel flips back the top of the cigarette packet, and muses, ‘You hang around with the wrong kind of people, Jennifer Jordan.’
‘So do you.’
‘I’m older.’ This is our joke, because she is twenty-two days older than me. ‘And one day you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble,’ which is another joke of ours because it is our teachers’ and parents’ favourite declaration. A declaration that is intended for Rachel, primarily, but which seems to reach me by osmosis.
I indicate the packet in her hands: ‘Not in here,’ I remind her, ‘the smoke alarm.’
‘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: