Tenterhooks

The door opens, slightly increasing the volume but not the sense of Susie’s words, and Trina hurries into the room. ‘There’s a notice in there,’ she wails, ‘Do not flush away sanitary dressings.’ Looking around us, she emphasizes, ‘Sanitary dressings.’

I wonder, ‘Any relation to salad dressings?’

Her gaze catches momentarily on Lawrence, ‘Oh, sorry, Loz.’

Rachel complains, ‘Shut the door, it’s freezing.’

It is not freezing in here, but our bodies bear the memory of a long cold day on the shore and now shiver in response to the mere opening of doors. If anything, it is too warm in here. The block of dormitories is new, and seems to be built from static.

Shutting the door, Trina complains, ‘It’s so cold that I can’t even face going for a fag.’ We have to go outside to smoke; the building is fitted with smoke detectors. She stomps across the room and thumps the window. ‘Has anyone managed to open this yet?’

Avril says, ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to open, it’s like a porthole. Because of all the water around here.’

We all turn to her. And I check, ‘You think the water comes up to here?’

‘Well, possibly.’

For a moment we listen, and hear something like a tube train far below us.

‘Anyway,’ I tell Trina, ‘those cigarettes are off.’

No one disputes this. The cigarettes are stale. I have never had a stale cigarette before. I have never had very many cigarettes at all; I smoke only when I am under stress and there are no other options, no sugar, no alcohol, no music, no Mike or Jamie, and no laughs from Rachel. The stale cigarettes came from Rachel, who disappeared from the courtyard during the confusion of waterproofs removal. She returned twenty minutes late for dinner. Sliding next to me on the bench, with a wild wrinkle of her nose in the direction of my mashed meal, she nudged my attention to her hidden hands: beneath the table, three packets of cigarettes, sixty; I swallowed a wave of nausea. And interrogated her, ‘Where have you been?’

To keep Mr Stanford’s attention at bay, she faked interest in my plate while she whispered, ‘The local sort of corner shop.’

Local? So there was hope, there was a locality.

‘Where?’

She inclined her head, slightly, ‘About a mile in that direction,’ then laughed briefly, ‘the direction of inland.’

‘So,’ I urged, ‘there’s a village or something?’

‘No, nothing.’ She was wriggling to slot the packets into her pockets. I kept watch on Mr Stanford for her. Which was a mistake: he was carefully in conversation with Janet the Algae, their heads low and close, but when this composure exploded with a laugh, his gaze came quickly to mine. I smiled beautifully, and he looked away.

I returned my attention to Rachel. ‘But you said corner shop.’

‘I said sort of corner shop. It would be a corner shop if there was a corner.’ She winced her apologies, ‘It’s just a shop, Jenny.’

I thrashed my meal with my fork. ‘And you’ve missed dinner.’

She frowned down into the sticky mess, then looked up into my despondent face and widened her eyes to make her point.

Reluctantly, I smiled. ‘Yes, but you’ll starve.’

She shrugged this off, ‘We have that box of crunchy mix.’

I did not say, Why no chocolate? Why sixty cigarettes and no Aero? Because she was right, she did the right thing: the final disastrous touch to the week would be a few extra inches on our hips.

Now Trina is crashing back across our brittle, smoke-free room. ‘Well, if the ciggies are off …’ Her boots crunch our spillages of cereal. She leaves the door open as she hurries into her own room. Returning, she asks, ‘Want one?’ but immediately turns away to close our door very firmly. There is a plain brown envelope in one hand, a few pinhead pills slipping down over the flap into the palm of her other hand. They line up like beads of mercury in the main crease, the main channel of her palm.

I want to know, ‘What are they?’

She extracts one in a pincer of index finger and thumb, and pushes it between her lips. ‘Anti-depressants,’ the reply comes slightly sticky, ‘my mum’s.’

Rachel sits taller. ‘What do they do?’

The pills slam back down onto one another in the envelope, and Tina heads for Susie’s vacant bed. ‘Cure depression, I suppose.’ Reclining, she holds the envelope high, keeping open the offer.

Avril doubts, ‘One of them will cure depression?’

Lawrence looks exactly how he looks in class: interested, but in facts rather than fun.

‘Well, no,’ Trina wails her irritation with Avril. ‘But they can’t make me feel worse than how I feel now.’

Rachel stretches to the volume control on the tape recorder because the tape has reached ‘Changes’, her favourite track. ‘So why do you have them?’ she shouts over David Bowie, her voice further strained by her stretch.

Trina’s eyes slot towards her. ‘I nicked them, of course.’

Rachel dismisses this with a shake of her head. ‘No, I mean, won’t she notice?’

Trina gives up, chucks the envelope on to the floor. ‘My mum notices nothing,’ she tells the ceiling.

Rachel’s eyes slide to me on a smile. ‘Wouldn’t I love to have that kind of mum.’

I tell her, ‘Do you know that Jamie has tried some heroin?’

Apparently too weary to speak, she widens her eyes, Really?

‘Sniffed,’ I inform her, ‘not injected.’ And therefore not addictive, or so he told me. ‘Says it was like lying in a warm bath.’

‘A warm bath,’ she repeats, and seems to breathe in as she speaks, her eyes misting.

Avril says, ‘The showers on Mr Stanford’s corridor are better than ours: I went to explore. No mould on his wall.’

Rachel coughs a laugh. ‘He’d love some mould, Av, it’s biology.’

Trina tells us, ‘H is for losers.’

Avril’s incomprehension tightens into a frown, which she tries to feel her way through, begins by mouthing, ‘H …’

Rachel flips back the top of the cigarette packet, and muses, ‘You hang around with the wrong kind of people, Jennifer Jordan.’

‘So do you.’

‘I’m older.’ This is our joke, because she is twenty-two days older than me. ‘And one day you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble,’ which is another joke of ours because it is our teachers’ and parents’ favourite declaration. A declaration that is intended for Rachel, primarily, but which seems to reach me by osmosis.

I indicate the packet in her hands: ‘Not in here,’ I remind her, ‘the smoke alarm.’