IT DIDN’T TAKE Fatima and me long to find out why the tower was considered to have the best rooms – in fact we worked it out that very first evening. I had returned to our room after watching a film in the common room. Fatima was already there, lying on her bed, writing what looked like a letter on thin airmail paper, her mahogany hair hanging like dark curtains of silk on either side of her face.
She looked up as I came in and yawned, and I saw she was already in her pyjamas – a skimpy vest top and pink flannel shorts. The top rode up as she stretched, showing a strip of flat stomach.
‘Ready for bed?’ she asked, sitting up.
‘Definitely.’ I sat down on the mattress with a squeak of springs and pulled off my shoes. ‘God, I’m shattered. So many new faces …’
‘I know.’ Fatima shook back her hair and folded the letter into her bedside table. ‘I couldn’t face meeting more people after supper so I came back here. Was that awful of me?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s probably what I should have done. I didn’t talk to anyone really anyway – it seemed to be mostly younger girls.’
‘What was the film?’
‘Clueless,’ I said, stifling a yawn of my own, and then I turned my back to start unbuttoning my shirt. I had imagined a cubicle, like in boarding-school stories, with curtains you could pull around, but it turned out that was only for the dormitories. Girls in bedrooms were expected just to give each other privacy when necessary.
I was in my pyjamas, and rummaging in my locker for my sponge bag, when a noise made me stop and look over my shoulder. It had sounded like a knock, but it hadn’t come from the door side of the room.
‘Was that you?’ I asked Fatima.
She shook her head.
‘I was about to ask the same thing. It sounded like it came from the window.’
The curtains were closed, and we both stood, listening, feeling oddly tense and foolish. I was just about to shrug it off with a laugh and a comment about Rapunzel, when the sound came again, louder this time, making us both squeak and then giggle nervously.
It had come, quite definitely this time, from the window closest to my bed and I strode across to it and pulled back the curtain.
I don’t know what I was expecting – but whatever it was, it was not what I saw: a pale face peering through the glass, surrounded by the darkness. For a minute, I just gaped, and then I remembered what I had seen from the minibus as it made its way up the drive: the black wiry tendrils of the fire escapes, twining up the sides of the building and round the towers, and I looked closer. It was Kate.
She grinned, and made a twisting motion with her wrist, and I realised that she wanted me to open the window.
The clasp was rusty and stiff, and I struggled for a moment, before it gave with a screech.
‘Well,’ Kate said. She waved a hand at a rickety black metal structure below her, silhouetted against the paler background of the sea. ‘What are you waiting for?’
I looked back at Fatima, who shrugged and nodded, and then, pulling the blanket off the foot of my bed, I clambered up onto the windowsill and out into the cool autumn darkness.
Outside, the night air was still and calm, and as Fatima and I followed Kate quietly up the shivering metal steps of the fire escape, I could hear the far-off crash of the waves against the shingle shore, and the screech of the gulls wheeling and calling out to sea.
Thea was waiting at the top of the fire escape as we rounded the last curve of the tower. She had on a T-shirt, and it barely skimmed her long, slim thighs.
‘Spread out that blanket,’ she said to me, and I flung it out across the wire mesh and sat down beside her.
‘So now you know,’ Kate said, with a conspiratorial smile. ‘You have our secret in your hands.’
‘And all we can offer in return for your silence,’ Thea drawled, ‘is this –’ she held up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s – ‘and these.’ And she held up a packet of Silk Cut. ‘Do you smoke?’ She tapped the packet and held it out towards us, a single cigarette poking from the top.
Fatima shook her head.
‘No. But I’ll have some of that.’ She nodded at the bourbon, and Kate passed her the bottle. Fatima took a long swig, shuddered, and then wiped her mouth with a grin.
‘Isa?’ Thea said, still holding out the cigarette.
I didn’t smoke. I had tried it once or twice at my school in London, and hadn’t enjoyed it. And more than that, I knew that my parents would hate me smoking, particularly my father, who had smoked himself as a younger man and had periodic relapses into self-hatred and cigars.
But here … here I was someone else … someone new.
Here I was not the conscientious schoolgirl who always got her homework in on time, and did the vacuuming before she went out with her friends.
Here I could be anyone I wanted. Here I could be someone completely different.
‘Thanks,’ I said. I took the cigarette from Thea’s outstretched packet and when Kate flicked her Bic lighter, I leaned in towards the flame-filled cup made by her hands, my hair falling across her honey-brown arm like a caress, and I took a cautious puff, blinking against the sting in my eyes, and hoping I wouldn’t choke.
‘Thanks for earlier,’ Thea said. ‘The smoking I mean. You … you really saved my bacon. I don’t know what would happen if I got expelled again. I seriously think Dad might get me locked up.’
‘It was nothing.’ I breathed out, watching the thread of smoke float up, past the rooftops of the school, towards a glorious white moon, just a shade off full. ‘But listen, what did you mean, that thing you said at dinner? About the points?’
‘It’s how we keep track,’ Kate said. ‘Ten points for suckering someone completely. Five for an inspired story or for making another player corpse. Fifteen points for taking down someone really snooty. But the points don’t count for anything important, it’s just … I don’t know. To make it more fun.’
‘It’s a version of a game they used to play at one of my old schools,’ Thea said. She took a languid puff of her cigarette. ‘They did it to new girls. The idea was to get them to do something stupid – you know, tell them that it was tradition for all students to take their bath towel to evening prep to make it faster for evening showers, or persuade them first years could only walk clockwise round the quad. Pathetic stuff. Anyway, when I came here I was the new girl all over again, and I thought, fuck them. I’ll be the one who lies this time. And this time I’ll make it count. I won’t pick on the new girls, the ones who can’t defend themselves. I’ll do it to the ones in charge – the teachers, the popular girls. The ones who think they’re above it all.’ She blew out a plume of smoke. ‘Only, the first time I lied to Kate, she didn’t hit the roof and threaten to have me ostracised, she just laughed. And that’s when I knew. She wasn’t one of them.’
‘And neither are you,’ Kate said conspiratorially. ‘Right?’
‘Right,’ Fatima said. She took another swig from the bottle and grinned.
I only nodded. I brought the cigarette up to my lips and puffed again, inhaling deeply this time, feeling the smoke going down into my lungs, and filtering through my blood. My head swam, and the hand holding the cigarette shook as I put it down to rest on the meshed wire of the fire-escape platform, but I said nothing, hoping only that the others hadn’t noticed the sudden head rush.
I felt Thea watching me, and I had the strangest conviction that in spite of my composure, she was not deceived and knew exactly what was passing through my mind, and the struggle I was having to pretend that I was used to this, but she didn’t tease me about it, she just held out the bottle.
‘Drink up,’ she said, her vowels sharp as glass, and then, as if recognising her own imperiousness she grinned, softening the haughtiness of the command. ‘You need something to take the edge off the first day.’
I thought of my mother, asleep under a sheet in hospital, poison trickling into her veins, my brother alone in his new room at Charterhouse, my father driving back through the night to our empty house in London … my nerves sang, tight as violin strings, and I nodded, and reached out with my free hand.
When the whiskey hit my mouth it burned like fire, and I had to fight the urge to choke and cough, but I swallowed it down, feeling it scald my gullet all the way to my stomach, feeling the tight fibres of my core relax, just a little. Then held the bottle out towards Kate.
Kate took it and put it to her lips, and when she drank, it wasn’t a cautious swig like the ones Fatima and I had taken, but two, three full-on gulps, without pausing, or even flinching; she might have been drinking milk.
When she had finished, she wiped her mouth, her eyes glinting in the darkness.
‘Here’s to us,’ she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. ‘May we never grow old.’