The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

‘And you’re tanned,’ Vicky carried on. She hadn’t finished with Saskia. ‘If I had your legs I wouldn’t be putting them in jeans.’

Saskia sighed and continued to stare out the open window, her hair blowing around her face. She was thinking about the south of France where she’d spent most of July; thinking in particular about her father lying drunk and untidy on a poolside sun lounger while she tried to drag a yellow and white striped umbrella over to him so he wouldn’t get burnt. That’s how she spent most of her time: stopping her father getting burnt—one way or another. At least in France she’d had Ruth for company when Richard Greaves lost consciousness, which he did most afternoons.

She turned her head to look at Ruth, who was sitting beside her, and her eyes caught Tom’s in the rear view mirror. Last summer Saskia had been in love with Tom. She kept a darkly detailed diary noting his every movement, gesture and look, and stole things from his bedroom that she never gave back—a ball of elastic bands, a pair of worn sports socks, a Smurf pencil sharpener, a Radio Mercury sticker, and a library copy of a D.H. Lawrence book he’d spilt aftershave over.

This summer she didn’t love him any more.

Catching her eye now, in the rear-view mirror, Tom felt bad about the hours his university girlfriend Ali and he spent talking and laughing about Saskia’s ‘hingeless passion’—a phrase coined by Ali—and the way he’d just handed Saskia up to Ali, who could be cruel.

‘How’s Ali?’ Saskia said suddenly.

‘She’s in India,’ Vicky put in. ‘Her parents think Tom and her are too close.’

‘And what does Tom think?’ Ruth asked suddenly—loudly, out of shyness.

‘Tom doesn’t think.’

‘Shut up, Vick—’

Ruth kept her eyes on Tom—taking in his thighs, throat and wrists—and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him as the red Volkswagen left behind the retail parks where the good people of Burwood bought pet food and hot tubs, hitting a leggy stretch of road lined by garages, off licences, discount bedding stores, pubs that welcomed families and sold salad in kegs, Indian restaurants—one called Curry Nights had been made infamous a couple of years ago when an Alsatian carcass was found in one of their bins.

‘I went to school there,’ Ruth said, as they passed the primary school where she’d had her hand driven onto a rusty nail by another girl and had to go to hospital to get a tetanus jab.

Nobody said anything.

It was too hot to worry about somebody else’s memories.

They passed the St Catherine’s Hospice and the flat above it rumoured to house Burwood’s only prostitute. Local press refused to comment on the prostitute or the Alsatian carcass in the bins at Curry Nights, and it was the News of the World, in the end, that covered both stories. Burwood also appeared—that same week—in the Financial Times, featuring as one of the ten towns in the UK where men lived longest.

Burwood ranked number four.

Burwood was a good place to live.

From the air, the town looked like an untidy circle surrounded by a band of green separating it from London to the north and Brighton to the south. In other words, it had a lot more going for it than most places viewed via satellite.

Burwood long pre-dated its Domesday Book entry, and was now flourishing and thriving its way into the twenty-first century with an all-pervasive aura of stability and permanence that breathed promise to the world-weary. So saying, Burwood had its fair share of anarchists—the most notable being a poet who, two hundred years ago, published political tracts and distributed them from a hot-air balloon, unsettling everyone before eloping with an underage girl called Harriet. In cases such as this, however, it was town council policy to disinherit—no matter how famous their anarchic sons and daughters later became.

The Hendersons, hugely influenced by the Financial Times article—and the fact that the town’s historic centre already felt familiar, having been used by the BBC on a regular basis to film Jane Austen adaptations—were by no means the first immigrés, and wouldn’t be the last.

Burwood ended now abruptly on its eastern side, which was also its most picturesque. They’d driven through all the rings of the town’s life from its premedieval centre to the helplessly conservative, sprawling suburban villas built with optimism after the Second World War, and with disproportionately small windows behind which a whole generation came to terms with the horrors of war and the legacy of those horrors…perennial-filled borders, trimmed lawns and terrifying stretches of leisure time spent struggling to define the word ‘peace’. They’d passed through the industrial estates and were, finally, beyond the reaches of the executive satellite estates—by products of the post-1986 housing boom. Burwood’s last house was an old brick cottage shared by two octogenarian brothers who had been Conscientious Objectors in the last world war.

The red Volkswagen turned off the main road into open country, following a lane that sank beneath banks of hedge and forest where there was sudden shade and the sound of water before rising again in order to cross fading green and yellow fields. The forest was beech and ash and had once stretched from coast to coast, covering the land Burwood now stood on. Deepest darkest forest had been replaced by deepest darkest suburbia, where modern man and woman sought refuge, as their forest-dwelling ancestors had sought it in the forest. Like them, they mistook the shade-dappled depths for a place of innocence where a simple life could be led.

‘I hope they have raspberries,’ Ruth said, to nobody in particular. ‘I told mum I’d get raspberries.’

Vicky stared at her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a conversation about anything —let alone raspberries—with her mother, Sylvia Henderson.

‘Isn’t Grace working at Martha’s Farm?’ Saskia said after a while, trying to pin her hair back with her arm.

Ruth watched Tom suck in his left cheek and move his hands on the steering wheel.

‘I thought she already had a job?’ Vicky said, irritated that she didn’t already know this.

‘Yeah, but this is like a holiday job.’ Saskia let go of her hair again.

‘Why didn’t she say?’

‘Probably thought you already knew.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’ Vicky turned to Ruth. ‘Did you know?’

Ruth shrugged. ‘I kind of lose count of the number of jobs Grace does.’

‘Yeah, well, some people’s parents can’t actually afford to send their children to university so they have to pay for it themselves,’ Tom said from the front.

Ruth, upset, looked away.

‘There are loads of grants and stuff for people like Grace,’ Vicky said, defensive. Upsetting Ruth was her territory.

‘People like Grace?’ Tom cut in, angry.

Ignoring this, Vicky carried on, ‘In fact, she’ll probably be better off by the time she finishes—not like the rest of us, up to our eyes in student-loan debt. Cambridge are offering her a scholarship anyway, so what’s the big deal.’

Saskia said slowly, ‘I thought she was going for that NASA one at Yale?’

Vicky, no longer interested, didn’t respond.

Grace was one of their group, and Vicky was tyrannical about having up-to-date information on all members. She considered the group—her group—a profound social achievement given that she’d only started at Burwood Girls’ in Year 11. First she successfully penetrated an already-established group, then she amputated the excess, re-forming a splinter cell comprising core members only: Grace Cummings, Saskia Greaves and Ruth Dent. She put her rapid rise down to not only getting them into Tom’s university parties but even some London ones as well. Who else on all Satan’s earth could have got them into Lilly Allen’s brother’s eighteenth for fuck’s sake?

They turned right off the lane into Martha’s Fruit Farm and tried looking for a space in the field full of cars. In the end they parked at the top near a ridge of trees where there was a sandpit.

Ruth, worried, said, ‘D’you think they’ll have raspberries?’

‘Will you shut up about raspberries.’ Vicky pulled her skirt off the back of her legs, which were covered in an imprint of the car’s upholstery.

‘I only mentioned them once.’

‘You mentioned them like about a hundred times,’ Vicky said, moving off between the rows of parked cars, the air heavy with the scent of fruit on the turn.

They straggled slowly down the field whose early summer ruts had now been baked hard by the sun. By the time they got to the weighing-in hut at the bottom, all three girls had linked arms, their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.

2 (#ulink_26823adc-dba4-58e5-9af3-2d5dd9b129b8)

Tom stayed in the car with the door open and lit another joint, sucking on it slowly while watching a black Labrador play in the sandpit just beyond the bonnet of the car. Through the windscreen he could see Burwood in the distance, but there was no resonance for him in the view. The Hendersons moved down from London two years ago and he’d only lived there a couple of months before leaving for university. He’d felt more at home in Bolivia than he ever had in Burwood.

An elderly couple—fruit picking veterans—returned to their car, a purple Nissan parked next to Tom’s. Their determined faces were sweating under matching white sun hats with ‘Crete’ embroidered above the visors, and as they lined up their baskets of fruit on the roof of the car, he saw that they were still wearing the surgical gloves they’d bought with them to pick fruit in, now stained purple.

He finished the joint then got out of the car and, without bothering to lock it, followed the others down the field.