Tenterhooks. Suzannah Dunn
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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.
Avril chips in, ‘Or at least smash it up a bit.’
I see four heads jerk, and in the corner of my eye I detect one smile, Lawrence’s smile, so secret that even he lowers his own eyes.
Rachel laughs, ‘Well, don’t let us stop you, Av, if you feel so strongly,’ but suddenly she is serious: ‘I do think that we should do something; I do think that something should be done.’ She stops to look around us, to check that she is speaking for all of us.
I have to point out, ‘Not something that will put us in a similar correctional institution, but for a lot longer than a week.’
She slots her hair down behind her ears, a decisive movement, the opposite of a shrug, to imply that she had already thought of this; and pointedly says nothing, Goes without saying.
I stand up and take a few paces to stretch my legs, to uncoil the blood that is sunk deep in them. The blood moves so slowly that it feels granular. I stroll down a wall of books. The spines are slotted so tightly together that I cannot imagine how any of them are ever taken away from the others. Many of them are ringed with combinations of various leathers, coloured from yellow to mahogany, and finished with a chain of gold letters. But, oddly, I am drawn to the pamphlets which are placed here and there in the impressive display. Their spines are too thin for the labels of their catalogue numbers, which are wrapped