The Artificial Anatomy of Parks Page 14

  “Be good,” he said. “You can always telephone, of course.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  The teacher showing us around smiled encouragingly at me. “You won’t remember to after a while,” she said. “Our students love it here.”

  My father checked his watch. “I’d better be off… Avoid the traffic. You have everything, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  He pulled out slowly. It was weird to see him turn left at the gate and disappear behind the wall, like that was the last time I’d see my old life, and for a moment I almost wanted him to turn around and drive back for me. He didn’t. The teacher raised her eyebrows and gestured for me to follow her inside.

  It was a bell that woke me on the first morning, ringing far off somewhere, and then voices much closer, the sounds of doors slamming and footsteps thundering up and down stairs. My bedroom at home was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, and I was used to waking up to birds, or Mr Tickles yowling to be let in. At the weekends there was the whine of lawnmowers. And always noises in the kitchen directly below me – my mother running the taps or opening the fridge, humming to herself.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and blinked away the film of sleep. I could see creamy-yellow walls, thick orange curtains and a brown carpet. There were three small windows and ivy grew like a green fringe on the outside walls, colouring the light that streamed in. There were five other beds, each with a bedside table and lamp. And four other girls, wrapped in towels, bare legs poking out underneath, hopping from one foot to the other like they were trying to keep warm. They seemed much louder than normal people, pushing each other and screaming. One of them saw me awake and nudged the girl nearest her.

  “Are you Tallulah?” she asked. She looked older than the others. Her hair was long and perfectly straight, and she had dark blue nail polish on her toes. Two plump mounds spilled over the top of the towel. I’d never seen breasts that big on girls our age and I turned my face away, not wanting to be caught staring.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Cressida. You can have my place next in the queue.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I felt embarrassed in my Winnie the Pooh pyjamas, but I didn’t want to take them off while everyone was watching. I rooted around in my suitcase for a towel.

  The door to the bathroom opened and a girl scurried back in, wet red hair dripping around her shoulders.

  “You go,” Cressida said, and pushed me in the right direction.

  The bathroom was freezing and smelt mossy. The plastic shower curtain clung to my limbs when I climbed in, and I hadn’t brought any soap in with me, so I got myself damp all over and stepped out again, wrapped my towel around myself and went back into the dorm.

  I changed quietly in the corner, trying not to draw attention to myself. The red-head sat on her bed, staring at the floor. Her skin was so pale it was almost see-through, except where it was covered by freckles. I vaguely remembered her from the day before. I recognised one of the louder girls too, the one with the blondest hair and a turned-up nose, but I couldn’t remember either of their names.

  “You can sit with us at breakfast,” Cressida called across the room to me. The red-head didn’t look up.

  The breakfast hall was in another building, one long room with a huge ceiling that sloped upwards towards the middle, and tiny, diamond-shaped tiles on the floor. The noise was terrifying; it felt like there were thousands of other children swarming around the room. They all seemed to know each other too. I gripped my tray harder, trying not to panic.

  “All Johnston Housers sit here,” Cressida said.

  “What’s Johnston Houser?”

  “Johnston House. It’s where we sleep,” Cressida said. She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Daddy wanted me to be in Johnston. He said everyone else was nouveau riche.”

  Breakfast was seven-thirty until seven-fifty. We had to be in our form rooms by eight, the girls told me, or we got a Saturday with Ricky Dicks.

  “What’s that?”

  “You have to stay in Saturday night with the Housemistress.”

  “She’s not married,” Cressida said. “But she calls herself Mrs Richard Dickson. Everyone knows she’s a lesbian.”

  The other girls snickered. I didn’t say anything. I’d met our Housemistress the day before. She wore lipstick, which had smeared itself into the wrinkles around her mouth. She’d patted me on the head and called me ‘poor love’. I thought how, for a lesbian, she looked a lot like any other woman.

  I caught a glimpse of Starr as we were leaving the hall and she gave me a wave. I turned my face away from her – if Starr and Aunt Vivienne couldn’t be bothered to come to my mother’s funeral, I didn’t have to bother to be friends now.

  “You know her?” Cressida asked me.

  “She’s my cousin.”

  “She’s the year above us. That’s so cool,” Cressida said. The other girls nodded.

  There were even more students in the main school building and I had a sudden urge to cry, although I didn’t know if it was because everything was huge and unfamiliar or because it was sinking in that this was going to be my home from now on.

  Cressida gave me a hug at my form room door. “We know about your mum,” she said. She stood back and waited for me to say something.

  “Yeah?” I muttered.

  “You can be in our gang,” Cressida said, and everyone nodded again. “We think you’re really brave.”

  I didn’t say anything. My stomach felt cold and I couldn’t look at them.

  The blonde girl opened the door for me. “Look after her,” Cressida said, and the blonde girl put her arm around my waist and steered me in.

  “Let’s sit together,” she said. “I’m Abi, remember?” She smiled at me and I noticed the whites of her eyes were slightly blue, just tinged that way, and she had a blonde moustache that caught the light.

  We walked towards the back of the classroom, and she tossed her plait over her shoulder as we went. “I’m so glad you’re here now. I was stuck in this form all by myself. Cressida tried to get the teachers to swap me, but they said they couldn’t.”

  “What’s wrong with the other kids?”

  “Edith – the girl from our dorm – is really geeky.” She lowered her voice. “Then there’s these twins, brother and sister. They’re day-schoolers and they always hold each other’s hands.” She giggled. “They have identical packed lunches too. Cressida says they probably share a bed at home, or something.”

  Abi kept talking and I zoned out. Slowly the other seats started to fill up, then the teacher arrived and made me come to the front and introduce myself.

  “We didn’t do this properly yesterday,” she said. “But this is Tallulah, a new student. Tallulah, why don’t you tell us something about yourself.”

  Abi smiled encouragingly at me; my mind went blank.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like your favourite food. Where you live. Anything like that.”

  “I’m from London.”

  “Okay… That’s good. Edith’s from London too, aren’t you Edith?”

  “I’m from Kingston,” Edith said.

  “Anywhere near you?” the teacher asked.

  “I don’t know where that is,” I said.

  “Oh well, never mind.” She smiled at me. She had big blue eyes and curly blonde hair tied up in a ponytail and away from a high forehead. She looked young, almost younger than Cressida. “I’m Miss Rochard. I’ll be your form tutor for the next year or so, and my favourite colour is gold.” She lowered her voice, “And Tallulah, if you need to talk to someone, you can come to me anytime.”

  I wiped my palms on my skirt. For some reason they were hot and sweaty.

  “You can go and sit down now.”

  I slunk back to my place.

  “Don’t worry,” Abi whispered. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t try to pair you up with Edith.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to shut everything out of m
y brain. Abi was still whispering next to me. I wished I was in my old school. I wished Kathy was next to me instead of Abi. I wished I had Mr Tickles to curl up on my feet tonight. I wished I could see my mother again.

  The word had spread at school about my mother, and, at first, girls brought me little offerings – lipstick, fizzy cola bottles, chewing gum. The boys ignored me, which was the nicest thing they could think of doing.

  A couple of times I heard Starr call out my name when I was in the corridor between classes, but I always pretended I was busy talking to someone else. Once she was coming up the main staircase as I was going down, and I hid behind two girls who had their arms linked together; she didn’t see me, and I felt victorious, but also disappointed in a weird way, like I’d actually wanted her to notice me after all.

  My teachers were nice to me too. Miss Rochard was very friendly, although she made me feel uncomfortable – she was always taking my hand in hers, or squeezing my shoulder and saying positive things. I preferred my science teacher, who never bothered me. He had a big white moustache, and wore the same red jumper and green corduroy trousers every day. Then there was Mr Hicks, the head of art. The art studio always smelled like incense, which he burned in little holders. Sometimes during lessons he would give a student some money to run to the tuck shop and get us all chocolate. Mr Hicks was tall; he had good skin and dark hair and brown eyes, and all the female teachers laughed whenever he made a joke, especially Miss Rochard. Once, I saw them standing at the back of the assembly hall together, during a fire safety talk; Mr Hicks was leaning towards her, whispering into her ear and her eyes were even bigger than normal.

  From the beginning I found it hard to keep up with lessons. I’d never learned French or German before and I didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. Mostly I thought about my mother instead. I tried to remember what her favourite colour was, and I realised I’d never known. My favourite colours on her had been pink and peach. When I was younger she’d read a book to me called Each, Peach, Pear, Plum, and in my two-year-old mind the two of them had been mixed up, so that I thought my mother was made of fruit, like the flush of peach on her cheeks, or the plum colour she went when she was upset. If you peeled away a layer of her skin, I thought, she’d be sweet and firm underneath, like a peach itself. After the accident though, the few glimpses I’d caught of her had proven me wrong.

  “Ma mère est une professeur,” we chanted in French. “Mon père est un avocat.”

  She was wearing dark blue the day she died, a sleeveless dress that always reminded me of sailors because it had a big white collar and a white anchor pattern.

  “Elle est professeur.”

  Somehow, when they buried her, she was wearing a green dress that I hadn’t remembered seeing before. I wondered who’d chosen it. No one had asked me.

  “Il est avocat.”

  I thought about my father too, about whether he would send for me. Maybe he would suddenly change his mind and want me around. I didn’t think he would.

  Some teachers drew me aside to ask me if I was struggling during classes. They went through my homework patiently with me, explaining where I’d gone wrong.

  “You really are paying attention, aren’t you?” Miss Rochard said. “In all your lessons?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  I kept thinking about the accident, instead of listening in class. I wondered if she’d known about the car at the last second, if she’d seen the driver trying to brake, what she’d heard. And if my father hadn’t pushed her, had he not saved her? Could he have stretched out a hand to pull her back to safety?

  “Was it an accident?” I said, once, when I forgot where I was. Abi gave me a weird look, but nothing else happened.

  I spoke to my father once in that first term. The Housemistress had to come and find me in my dorm room, so he’d been waiting for a while on the other end by the time I got to the telephone.

  “I won’t be able to be on much longer,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. The Housemistress was hovering over me. I turned away, blocking her with my back.

  “No, it’s not your fault.” He cleared his throat.

  I asked about Mr Tickles, clutching at something we could talk about. He asked about the weather and my teachers.

  “They’re fine.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go now – this was just a quick break. You’re doing well in class?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good. Well, I’m sure we’ll speak soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye Tallulah.” He cleared his throat again. “All my love.”

  “That was quick,” the Housemistress said, when I handed the receiver back to her.

  I didn’t want to go back up to the dorm room straightaway. It felt weird to hear my father use the word ‘love’. I couldn’t remember him using it for a while, with me or my mother. Now I wondered if he’d ever told us he loved us. Maybe he hadn’t, and I only noticed after he got so grumpy. Maybe he didn’t think of me as his daughter, and that’s why he didn’t love me. I didn’t look anything like him, but I hadn’t looked like my mother, either. I leaned my forehead against the cool of the staircase wall. Which part of me was her, and which part was him? It was hard to believe I’d come from either of them, that I’d grown inside her, even. And now I was left with whatever hidden part of my mother that was in me. Or did it die when she died?

  Cressida and Abi tried to ask me about my mother, but it felt wrong to talk about her with them. Sometimes, I wondered if Cressida thought it was romantic that she’d died so young. “At least your mum will never get old and wrinkly,” she said.

  Cressida and the others talked all the time, about boys and lipstick and where they were going skiing over Christmas. I had nothing to add to those conversations. I still wasn’t interested in boys, and the way girls fluttered their eyes at them, or found excuses to touch them seemed boring to me. Cressida was obsessed with one boy in particular, Toby Gates, who was two years above us. I’d seen him around school. He had dark hair and green eyes and played rugby. Cressida wrote ‘Cressida Gates’ all over her school planner and drew up ideas for their wedding, which was going to have white doves and be on a Mexican beach. Cressida liked to plan things. She came up with a secret handshake we all had to practise too, and a password to gain entry to our secret meetings. She wanted to start a relief fund for starving children in Africa, which she said was the most important issue of our time. She said we should memorise facts about all the different countries in Africa and decide which one needed our help the most.

  Abi had been bought an encyclopaedia for her birthday, and Cressida made us study it in turn, writing crib sheets on countries she picked for us. Mine were Egypt and Tanzania and Lesotho, which I assumed was pronounced Le-soth-oh. We had to give presentations on our countries and when all the presentations were given, we would vote for our favourite. Abi put a lot of effort into her presentation on Malawi, sticking photos and glitter onto coloured sheets of card, and drawing big red hearts in the margins. I voted for her.

  “Are you sure you want to vote for Malawi?” Cressida asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  She turned her face away pointedly. Cressida won with South Africa, and Abi threw her cards away. Even though everyone else had voted for her presentation, Cressida seemed put out. I waited to be told how we were going to help the children of South Africa, but in the end nothing happened.

  When I’d started at boarding school they’d made me go see the school counsellor, Dr Epstein. He had one long eyebrow hair, like an antennae. “Tell me what’s bothering you the most,” he said.

  I tried to describe how out of control everything seemed, but he misunderstood. He thought I was saying that my mother had protected me, and now I had to grow up too quickly. But no one was making me feel like I was growing up – not my father, not my teachers; even Cressida told me what to do.

  I practised reading his handwriting upside d
own. After a few sessions I was able to make out the words disturbed.

  “Are you sleeping?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  I woke up every night, my face wet, although I had no tears during the day. A couple of times I’d tried to stay awake all night, because the worst was the morning, just after opening my eyes, before I realised where I was. Sometimes, for a split second, I didn’t remember about my mother, or going to boarding school, and then I had a feeling like I’d been punched me in the gut when I saw the other girls, and knew everything again.

  When I wasn’t sleeping, everything went slowly, when the other girls’ heavy breathing meant I couldn’t turn a light on and read. My pyjamas and sheets felt sticky after all my tossing and turning, and the ticking of Edith’s alarm clock, and the wind slapping the windows were so loud it made me think I’d go crazy.

  I’d push my face into my pillow. My mother loved me – that thought was the one thing I could cling to. She used to surprise me after school with little presents that she’d found in junk shops. Little toys or books or trinkets for charm bracelets. Lying in bed, listening to the other girls breathing heavily, and the creak of their beds, I’d think about the times that my mother had stopped me at the front door to our house, her hands behind her back, saying that she’d found something very special for me. I wondered if I’d ever been grateful enough.

  I was in pain all the time, but it was a slow pain I’d never felt before. My whole body ached, thinking about my mother. All I wanted was to feel her again, touch her. I wanted her skin pressing against my skin when she hugged me, or her chin resting on my hair. I wanted the pressure of her fingertips on my shoulder, as she held me back at a busy road when I wasn’t looking where I was going. I wanted the coldness of her toes. She used to slip her feet underneath my bottom as I sat on the sofa, to warm them up, and I would wriggle away from her. It was these moments that I missed the most; my body was crying out for them. It was like a layer had fallen away from me and left me exposed.

  The insomnia was taking its toll. I dragged myself to classes and sat there like a zombie. My head was pounding and my body felt like it was losing power. Everything my brain told it to do, it tried then gave up. I put my head down on my arms and closed my eyes.