Authors: Noël Cades
"You mean not do law? Your father would kill you," Alice said.
"I mean not that kind of law," Jules said. "I don't know."
"It seems pretty sudden, changing your mind in just one day."
"It wasn't just one day, I've been thinking about it for a while." Jules looked unhappy.
Alice felt a pang of alarm. If Jules suddenly went off the rails and failed her exams it could disrupt their travel plans. Jules’ trip was partly dependent on some money her father had promised her if she got top grades. Alice had saved up enough from her vet job to pay for her own side.
Becky's bedroom had twin beds with frilly valances and a white dressing table with gilded handles. It was the kind of room Alice longed for as a child but had grown out of now. They always flipped a coin to decide whether she or Jules got the mattress on the floor or the other bed. Alice had won that night.
Pillows and sheets and duvets were sorted out and they got ready for bed. Jules was grumbling about ending up with the blow-up mattress.
"You’ll have to get used to that with Leafy," Alice said. "He probably sleeps on the ground."
"They have vans. With proper beds."
"A caravan isn’t my idea of a proper bed. We went caravanning once and it was awful," Becky said. "Really narrow and cramped. But it’s the lavatories that are the worst."
"How does that happen?" Alice asked.
"They bury it. It’s all very clean," Jules told her. Alice imagined trying to dig a trench with a shovel by moonlight. She hoped their backpacking trip wouldn’t involve too much of that.
"Do they sleep in pyjamas?" Becky asked.
"No, I don’t know, maybe." Jules was getting exasperated. "We were up all night so I didn’t really pay much attention to the sleeping arrangements."
"Tie dye pyjamas."
"Crack pipe and slippers."
Jules was getting annoyed now so Alice thought she had better change the subject. "Do you realise it’s just six weeks?"
"Six weeks what?"
"Six weeks until we’re done with Fairmount. Forever."
"It’ll be a bit sad, don’t you think?" Becky said.
"It will be amazing. No more Padlock. No more school food. No more Maddy Pullen." Maddy, Jules’ sworn enemy, was one of the in crowd at school. All the boys liked her, and she her friends were usually bitchy to everyone else.
"I will be glad to see the back of her," Alice agreed.
"In the film, that scene with his girlfriend, was that rape?" Becky asked. She was still thinking about Basic Instinct.
Jules didn't know. "I think it was maybe just more heated. Like in the heat of the moment."
"Do guys like that? I don't think I would," Becky said.
Alice didn't think she had much to worry about with Brett in that regard. He looked more like a puppy dog than a stallion. Her thoughts went to Mr Walker, momentarily casting herself in the scene with him. Given the savage way he had kissed her in the pavilion she could well imagine him doing something like that. Grabbing her from behind and having his way with her. She shivered.
Lying in bed she imagined a different outcome at the barbecue. What if his resolve and faltered and he had ripped her t-shirt off and covered her body with his?
She imagined his hands on her breasts, his rock hard body crushing hers. Would he stand up and take her against the wall, or bend her over like Basic Instinct? Or would he throw her down on the tiles, push her legs apart and make her his?
She wanted him so badly it was nearly painful. Her body felt neglected. She couldn't remember ever having desired anyone else this badly. She'd dated boys before and they'd messed around, but she'd never felt an overwhelming urge to just lose all her inhibitions and better judgement and go all the way.
At least she had a kind of non-school link to him through Becky now, if there were any more group social occasions like that. At some point surely his resistance would break down? Particularly as the end of term approached, removing those concerns.
Alice felt differently at school the next week. Knowing that Mr Walker liked her and was fighting his attraction to her gave her an illicit thrill. Their paths didn't have much occasion to cross, as out of respect to his order she avoided the cricket pitches, but she noticed that he was in Assembly every morning and in lunch every day.
Nearly always she would find him looking at her, then deliberately looking away.
Jules had also finally decided to embrace the situation which made Alice feel better about things. Not that there was a situation, yet anyway, but Alice could feel something drawing them together like a magnet.
Beyond that, revision occupied most of their time. They mainly studied different subjects, only sharing a few subjects and none between all three of them. Alice had Economics with Jules so they revised together. She had Biology with Becky, who in turn had History with Jules.
On Wednesday the lizard and its owner were back at the vet, to Alice's relief it looked much better. She got to hold it this time, feeling the soft, dry warmth of its belly compared to the hard tough scales on its back. Reptiles would be an interesting area of practice.
On Thursday afternoon they had tennis and were once again in their micro skirts, aimlessly hitting balls over the net.
"What's the point of this?" said Jules. "None of us are on the tennis team, we leave forever in a matter of weeks, and we could use this time so much better for revision."
The games mistress gave some pat response about healthy bodies and healthy minds.
Jules was also annoyed because she’d had to partner with Maddy Pullen.
"I can vote, marry, drive a car and even join the army yet I'm still forced to play tennis twice a week." What Jules actually wanted to do was slip off that afternoon because there was a fair in town and Leafy would be there.
"Why would he be at a fair?" Becky asked.
"It's the fairground workers moving from place to place, it's like a travelling market."
Becky was confused. "You can't buy anything there except candyfloss and stuffed toys."
"Yes you can, if you know what you're buying," Jules told her.
Alice was staying as sober as possible that term, trying to drink less and avoid recreational substances. As tempting as it was to take her mind off all the exam stress, it probably wouldn’t help her results.
She was worried about the influence of Kate and her friends on Jules. Kate had plans to do something like art or fashion and had half-heartedly applied to St Martins and a few other places but didn't have many offers. She was considering travelling for a year. Not backpacking like Alice and Jules intended, but joining the travelling community in the UK for a while.
Jules’ parents would freak out, Alice thought, if she abandoned her plans to do law. She was also concerned that Jules might change her mind about backpacking in Asia with her and go travelling with Kate and some convoy of crusties instead. But there wasn’t a lot she could do if Jules did decide that.
After tennis they lazed about under the trees for a while as the weather was so good. No one felt like dusty classrooms and books.
"It's such a waste having exams in the summer term. They should be in winter when there's nothing to do except stay indoors and study," Alice said.
She stood up and grasped onto the branch of a tree, hanging off it for a moment and enjoying the stretch through her body.
"That's making your skirt ride up showing your knickers," Becky said.
Alice dropped down, not really caring until she looked across and saw Mr Walker about ten yards away. He would have clearly seen everything. She went scarlet.
"Nice one, putting on a show for your man," Jules said.
"Do you think he saw?"
"I shouldn’t think so. Assuming he’s registered blind, and shut his eyes, and was facing the other way."
Alice buried her face in her hands.
"He just looked over again," Becky told her. "I think he was smiling."
* * *
Alice was looking after her younger brothers on Friday night because Richard and her mother were going out to a dinner party. They never expected her to babysit but she was usually happy to. They were good little boys. She sometimes wished she had a sibling nearer her own age but that was just one of the many dreams ended by her father’s death.
She sat in her mother’s bedroom, looking at the photos of him in the dressing table drawer while her mother chose earrings and finished her make up.
"Do you still think about him often?"
"Every day, when I see you. You have his eyes."
Alice felt bad but her mother reassured her.
"It’s not a sad feeling any more, the way it used to be," she continued. "Of course it is sad, if I think about it in a certain way, but mainly I think about how proud of you he would have been. It’s not the loss of him that hurts now but what he lost by never knowing you. And what you’ve lost."
"I feel guilty that I don’t feel it," Alice said. "I try to, but it’s like it happened to someone else."
"You weren’t even born darling. You couldn’t be expected to feel it in the same way as if you had known him."
Her mother was deciding between some diamanté drops and some pearls. "The pearls," Alice said. She liked that her mother’s jewellery was discreet and elegant. She was never embarrassed by her mother like some girls were by theirs. She remembered an unfortunate classmate whose newly divorced mother had turned up blind drunk to the school concert and had flung herself at the chemistry teacher.
"With Richard, did it worry you that he was older?" she asked.
Alice’s mother laughed. "Hardly. He was only in his forties and I was a grown woman with a child. If anything I felt very lucky that he felt that such a nice man had feelings for me. Enough men his age were casting their wives aside for a secretary half their age."
Alice, who considered her mother to be very beautiful, personally thought that Richard had got the better end of the deal but didn’t say so. Although she liked Richard very much he wasn’t an obvious Casanova. Or Lothario. Or whatever the men that went off with their secretaries were supposed to be.
"If I ended up with an older boy - a man - would you be very worried?" she asked.
"I’d be very upset if I thought someone was taking advantage of you. But if you met a nice man, and he was kind to you, then a few years difference wouldn’t matter. I hope you’ll finish your studies first though."
"I hope I won’t be single for the next six years," Alice said.
"I mean in terms of settling down. You have so much time ahead of you." Her mother had finished blotting her lipstick and was getting up to leave.
"But you wouldn’t mind if there was someone?"
"As long as you respect yourself and others, and be safe and careful, then you’ll be alright." Her mother probably thought she was talking about her trip with Jules.
The boys were wildly excited as usual to have a night alone with Alice. She always spoiled them. They had already had their supper and bath early but she always let them have ice cream and stay up later than usual watching cartoons. The day would come soon enough when they would be awkward adolescents and not sweet little boys any more, she thought.
Alice envied them their companionship. Perhaps they’d fight later on, but for now they were like a little team, the best of friends. After they had gone to bed following extra stories and tucking in she felt lonely. She knew Jules was out with Leafy again but Becky was probably in. She rang her.
"I’m babysitting the boys. Do you want to come over?"
Becky was only a few minutes drive away. She was keen to see Alice so she could analyse and scrutinise how things were going with Brett. Jules had been a bit dismissive recently.
It was an interesting thing, being in a threesome of best friends. In such a group normally one person always got left out but somehow they made it work. There was a different type of glue for each of them. Alice and Jules were more academically similar: higher achieving and more ambitious, and had both lost parents. While their families were quite different, both were stepfamilies.
Jules and Becky had known each other since they were at playschool and their mothers had been friends. There was something that the two of them shared that felt alien to Alice but she could never put her finger on what it was. It didn’t matter, it was just that on the surface of it Jules and Becky were the most different of all of them, with Jules being outspoken and confrontational and Becky being much quieter and more timid and conventional. One might expect Alice to get caught in between them but she rarely did.
Maybe the differences were the very thing that connected them. Becky grounded Jules while Jules pushed Becky out of her fear zone.
Alice and Becky both planned to work in medical fields and were less confrontational than Jules. They were the laid back ones, the ones who shared an eye roll when Jules once again got fired up about something.
Though recently Alice found herself feeling more rebellious and impatient, more like she thought Jules must feel. Everything felt like they were in limbo, they were hovering, waiting for something. She wanted it to come to fruition, whatever it was. Yet she feared even more that it might not do so, that she might have to chart her own course out of this and there would be no clear guides to point the way.
Becky arrived and as there was nothing on TV they made brownies. Becky was the most domestic of them and was a competent cook. Alice and Jules, fearing starvation if they went to university with no culinary skills, had started working their way through a "Cheap Meals for Students" recipe book that Jules’ stepmother had given her. Every other recipe seemed to involve canned tuna, rice, beans or a combination of them.
"How did you pick all this up?" Alice asked Becky, licking the spoon while they waited for the brownies to cook.
"Mum taught me. We just always did it, since we were small. Even my brother."
"It makes me feel useless, I can barely boil potatoes," Alice said. She’d also burnt potatoes several times, letting them boil dry while she got distracted doing something else. "So how are things with Brett?" she asked, being generous as she knew Becky would want to talk her ear off.