‘No, it means …’
I hesitated, not sure how to explain it any more explicitly than I already had. I was having a hard time making an assessment of Bert. I wasn’t sure what she’d be more offended by – the truth of what Jac meant or if I left her thinking she’d got a low score for some reason. The last thing I wanted to do was upset or embarrass the girl when she’d only been at school five minutes. I was annoyed with Jac Dubois. Why did he have to be such an idiot?
‘It just means he’d like to … kiss you,’ I said eventually. ‘He’d like to give you one kiss.’ That would do – not quite as pervy as the truth but at least she’d know she hadn’t done anything wrong.
‘Oh!’ Bert said, blinking. ‘Oh, OK.’ She frowned again but she didn’t say anything else on the subject.
I hoped I’d done the right thing.
5
Bert seemed to find the whole notion of moving from one classroom to another each time we changed lessons a bit baffling. Every time the teacher dismissed us and people began noisily packing up their bags and scraping their chairs back, Bert looked around, her mouth open, as if to say, ‘What, not again, surely?’
When I asked how she was finding that aspect of things – it was true that battling through the crowds every hour was a bit of a pain and perhaps her last school had been smaller, less hectic – she put her head on one side and said, ‘Well, it’s just that it seems ever so inefficient, doesn’t it? To keep spending all this time charging about the place, standing up and sitting down, packing and unpacking. I suppose I’d rather thought the teachers would come to us.’
‘Was that how it was in your old school?’ I asked.
‘Oh no,’ she said, seemingly surprised by the question. ‘I’ve never been to school before.’
So that was a bit of a bombshell.
Annoyingly, Bert delivered it just as we were sitting down to begin a maths test so I couldn’t question her until lunchtime when, as per Mr Hurst’s instructions, I’d planned to help her get to grips with the canteen.
I thought I’d better let Bert eat before I started grilling her on her previous educational experience so we collected our trays and joined the back of the queue.
Bert kept standing on tiptoes, trying to peer over people’s heads to see what was on offer. I had a bad feeling that she was going to be disappointed when she saw the greasy junk she had to choose from. I shouldn’t have worried though. When we got to the front of the queue, Bert surveyed the steaming vats and trays, her eyes shining.
‘Chips!’ she said. ‘Oh how I love chips! And pizza! Oh my, sausage rolls! You know, normally I only get to eat this sort of food on special occasions. Is it always this brilliant?’
‘Uh, yeah. I guess.’
Bert piled her plate very high indeed. A whole dish of chips. A slice of pizza, two sausage rolls, a cheese burger and a flapjack. You don’t like to say anything, do you, about how much someone eats, especially not when you’ve only known them a few hours, so I just waited patiently while she made her selections. When she was done, she headed to a spare table in the corner, walking straight past the till.
‘Uh, Alberta?’ I called after her. ‘You have to … you know. Pay.’
‘Oh!’ Bert looked down at her tray and then over to the till. ‘Oh!’ she said again. ‘I’d rather thought it was … free. You know, like the exercise books and paper and whatnot. I thought it was a sort of … all-inclusive deal, as it were.’
‘Uh … no,’ I said. ‘It’s not.’
I started to panic that Bert wasn’t going to have any money on her and that she’d have to put everything back. She’d be so embarrassed, with people in the queue complaining and tutting. Oh God, I thought, all I’d had to do was explain how the canteen worked and I’d already made a mess of it. And now Bert was going to feel silly on her very first lunchtime and it was all my fault.
It was OK though, in the end. I led her to the till and aside from a little bit of grumbling from the dinner lady when she wanted to pay with a twenty-pound note, we managed to complete the process without any problems.
When we’d finished eating – and much to my surprise Bert managed to clear her whole tray – I decided it was probably OK to carry out a few gentle enquiries about how it could possibly be that this was the first school she’d ever been to.
She was perfectly happy to talk about it actually, and by the end of that first lunchtime I’d found out that she’d been home-schooled for the first fifteen years of her life, most of that time spent travelling around the world. Her parents had recently decided to settle back in England and that Bert should go to a proper school for her GCSEs. It was no wonder that I’d thought she looked grown up – she was. Nearly sixteen in fact, when I’d not even been fourteen all that long. Whistle Down was the nearest school to the house they’d just bought, so here she was. She didn’t seem to be at all annoyed about the decision. She didn’t say anything to suggest she’d rather have carried on with the life she was used to. In fact, she seemed quite on board with the whole thing.
‘I think it was time,’ she said. ‘Time to move on from all that business.’
I wasn’t sure what ‘business’ she was referring to and if this could be in any way connected to the ‘difficult time’ Mr Hurst had mentioned, but it seemed rude to probe too much at this stage. I had plenty of time to get to the bottom of that one, I thought. I’d done well for a first day.
When we’d finished eating, I showed Bert how we had to clear our trays away and pile them onto the trolley in the corner. Then she bought a hot chocolate from the machine and I drank a cartoon of apple juice from my bag and we sat back in the corner to kill the last five minutes of the lunch break.
As Bert sipped her drink, she looked about at the people milling around us, that bewildered, overwhelmed look still on her face. Occasionally something that seemed to surprise her would happen – a boy would run in and vault over a table, someone would swear loudly, a Year Eleven would pick up a Year Seven by the back of his collar. Bert would flinch and blink, and then laugh, shaking her head.
Suddenly, she turned to me. ‘You’re going to have to look after me, Frances,’ she said, looking at me hard. ‘Or I don’t know how I will ever fit in here. Promise me you will?’
I nodded and sucked on my straw. ‘Uh, OK. I promise.’
6
What I didn’t point out that first lunchtime was that the idea of me helping someone else to fit in was totally ridiculous. I’d never fitted in anywhere in my whole life. I can still remember one of my first days of school. I’d stood in the playground in my too-big navy tunic, scuffed second-hand shoes and fraying cardigan, all bought by Nan from the British Heart Foundation shop on the high street, and looked around at all the other little kids, some playing football, some with skipping ropes. I spotted two girls sitting in the corner on the steps to the nursery hall and I went over to get a closer look at what they were up to. I saw that they’d got a white chalk from somewhere and they were leaning forward, drawing pictures of flowers on the concrete floor. I thought that looked like something I could get on board with.
‘Hello,’ I said to them.
They both glanced up but didn’t reply. They looked at each other, then put their heads back down and carried on with their project.
I pushed on, undeterred. ‘Please may I play with you please?’ I asked, in my sweetest, most appealing voice.
The girls peered up at me again. The bigger, darker one of the two pushed her mouth into a thin, determined line. She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said simply, and went back to her drawing.
I hadn’t left at once though. I’d stood there watching them, not sure what to do with myself. After a minute, the smaller, ginger girl looked up at me.
‘Sorry.’ She’d shrugged. ‘But you’re not our friend.’
That incident pretty much set the tone for the years that followed. People didn’t give me a hard time. I wasn’t persecuted. I just wasn’t anyone’s friend. So, a
s you can see, the idea of Bert looking to me for support as she tried to work out the complex social rules and customs of the school environment was hilarious really, but it was actually a little bit exciting too. I found myself getting quite into the role.
The thing was, no matter how much of an outcast I might’ve been, socially speaking, I did still know a fair bit about the school and the people in it. I’d been with most of the kids in our year since St Paul’s, after all. I’d been there through it all – the bad haircuts, the missing front teeth, the fallings-out, the makings-up. I’d seen it all from the outside, always as a kind of disinterested spectator, but I had been there nonetheless.
In our first few days together, Bert drilled me for details – about who was friends with whom and who were sworn enemies, about how the school worked and what she should be doing … about everything really. And I was happy to help. It wasn’t often people came to me for advice – it wasn’t often that people spoke to me at all to be honest – and Bert was a very rewarding audience. She’d look at me intently, listening hard and nodding seriously as I imparted my wisdom. On one or two occasions I actually saw her taking notes. It was really quite a responsibility, I realised. Any help I gave Bert in these early days would probably affect her whole school experience and it suddenly became very important to me that I didn’t let her down.
Those first few days with Bert were a bit like finding yourself as a tour guide for an alien being. She was constantly bewildered and completely unfamiliar with normal school behaviour but, at the same time, full of the enthusiasm of a Labrador puppy. It was quite tiring a lot of the time, but quite fun too.
Bert liked to talk and she wasn’t going to hang around and wait for people to come to her. She’d think nothing of marching right up to someone in the corridor – sixth-formers, teachers, it didn’t matter who – and telling them she thought their scarf was ‘exquisite’, or sitting herself down next to someone in the canteen and giving them a detailed account of the summer she’d spent on a cattle ranch in Utah.
I got quite used to wading in and extracting her from those kinds of situations. ‘She’s new,’ I’d explain, giving her ambush victims an apologetic smile. It was a difficult lesson to teach a person – why you couldn’t just sit down and talk to whoever you wanted. Bert would just look hurt when I tried. In the end I gave up, and focused on coming up with distractions instead.
One day in that first week, I lost sight of Bert as we made our way from registration to our French lesson in Yellow Block. We were walking through Red Block – the art department – when I noticed she wasn’t with me.
I scanned the area around me, expecting to find her trying to engage some unsuspecting Year Eight in a conversation about Beethoven. We were running a bit late, so the crowds were thinning as people took their places in their classrooms. I started to panic a bit. She was so unpredictable back then I didn’t know what kind of mischief she might be getting up to. I had visions of her swanning into the staffroom, making herself a cappuccino and putting her feet up with a magazine and a biscuit.
Suddenly I heard her clear voice. ‘Do you have a favourite sculptor? Personally, I just adore Hepworth!’
I turned round and saw her sitting in one of the art rooms. She was at the back, on a table of four. She’d rolled her shirtsleeves up to her elbows and she was getting stuck in with some clay, rolling it into a long sausage and arranging it in a spiral. The group of Year Elevens she was sharing the table with were all busy looking down at their own clay, struggling to hold in their laughter.
‘Alberta!’ I hissed from the doorway.
Bert looked up. Her face broke into a smile. ‘Oh, hi, Frances!’ she called loudly.
‘Shh!’ I said, holding my finger to my lips. ‘Come here!’ I mouthed, beckoning her over with my arm.
She slid out of her seat and trotted over.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ she said, gesturing back to where her clay sausage was sitting on the table. ‘I’m not sure exactly yet. I thought I’d just do something organic. You know, just let the piece take its own shape.’
‘No,’ I said, trying to stay patient. ‘I mean, what are you doing in this classroom? We have French. This is a Year Eleven class. You can’t be here.’
I peered in to see who the teacher was – I couldn’t work out how she’d got away with sitting down even. But I saw my answer – it was a supply teacher. Their normal one must’ve been off sick.
‘Oh, really?’ Bert said, seeming a bit put out. ‘I didn’t really enjoy French the other day to be honest with you, Frances. It was all rather dull, wasn’t it? All those verbs. You know when I lived in Paris we didn’t bother with that sort of thing at all. We’d just, you know, flap our arms about and whatnot and do the right faces and that was much better than worrying about whether a word had an s or a t on the end. So I was thinking, I’ll probably just stop doing that one now. I much prefer art anyway.’
I sighed. ‘You can’t just stop,’ I said.
‘Oh … No?’ she said, perturbed.
‘No. Not just like that anyway. You have to tell Mr Hurst and swap to another language and … oh God, would you just come on? We’re so late!’
Bert looked mournfully over at her clay, but she didn’t argue any more. She collected her bag and blazer, waved goodbye to her new Year Eleven friends and let me lead her to where we needed to be.
7
I felt sorry for Bert as the days went on and her first week turned into her second. She’d started off so full of cheer and enthusiasm, but it seemed to be slowly seeping out of her.
On her first day, when Megan Brebner had called ‘Nice blazer!’ to her, Bert had smiled and said, ‘Thanks! It’s jolly smart isn’t it? Makes me feel like some wonderful old general.’ By the end of her second week, when a Year Nine boy said the same thing to her in the corridor, she’d frowned and looked down, this time aware that she was being made fun of.
As Bert realised that she was getting things wrong – I suppose as she became aware of just how clueless she was – she seemed to need me more than ever. She appeared to get more anxious, less confident about striking out on her own. And it sounds awful I know, but I found I was almost enjoying myself. Of course I didn’t want Bert to feel silly or shy or uncomfortable and I really was trying my absolute hardest to show her the ropes, it was just that, in a way, it was quite nice to be so needed.
The thing is, when you get so used to being ignored it starts to feel like you barely exist at all. It’s almost like you’re one of those film characters who’s actually a ghost but hasn’t realised it yet. And so when someone comes along and takes notice of you – waits for you after classes, wants to partner up in PE, actually wants to hear what you have to say – you start to feel a bit alive again. It’s impossible not to find that just a little bit thrilling. It was just the sheer novelty of it all, I suppose.
It wasn’t just that though, it wasn’t all about my own stupid ego and about me being the centre of someone’s attention. I was starting to realise that I really liked Bert. I can’t say that if I’d been asked to describe my perfect friend that I would’ve come up with Bert – or even anything like her – but now she was here, I loved the way that she was nothing like anyone else at Whistle Down. She was nothing like anyone I’d ever met. She wasn’t like a teenager at all really, I decided. Sometimes she’d be as bouncy and overexcited as a five year old, then other times she’d come out with some strange sentence like, ‘I say, it’s frightfully nippy isn’t it?’ and I’d feel like I was sitting next to an OAP or someone from another era altogether. Even though her quirks had been a bit difficult to manage at first, as the days went on, I grew to really enjoy them.
I just never knew what she was going to come out with next. She had a seemingly endless supply of bonkers travel anecdotes that she’d start up with, quite without warning. ‘Do you know,’ she said one geography lesson when we were meant to be reading a chapter on the Cape Peninsul
a, ‘we once gave a lift to a jewel thief in South Africa. We didn’t know that at the time of course. He was ever such a polite chap. It was only after we’d dropped him off in Pretoria that we found out he’d had a million pounds’ worth of diamonds stuffed into his knickers.’
‘Blimey,’ I’d said, not quite sure how to respond to that kind of story. ‘Must’ve been very uncomfortable.’
‘Yes!’ Bert cried, clapping her hands together in delight. ‘Indeed it must! Oh, Frances, you’re so funny.’
Bert wasn’t one of those people who only talked about themselves though. She was interested in me too, asking me question after question about my life. She didn’t seem to differentiate between polite chit-chat – ‘And do they still work, your grandparents?’ – and the kind of probing, personal questions that most people tend to avoid – ‘Do you feel they resent you? As if your mother’s suicide was your fault, in some way?’
At first it took me by surprise, but when I got used to it I found that I didn’t actually mind answering her questions, even the personal ones. She seemed to find me so fascinating – the fact I’d never really known my mother, that I had no idea who my father might be – that I sometimes found myself over-egging the whole tragic past bit almost without realising. It was just so flattering to have all that attention.
One Friday – I suppose it must’ve been Bert’s second or third week – it was last period and Bert and I were sitting at the back of the science lab waiting for the teacher to turn up. I was doodling a picture of a walrus on the back of my folder and Bert was lying on the desk, her head resting on her arm. She ran her fingers over the spine of my folder, tracing the letters of my name.
‘Frances,’ she read slowly. ‘Frances Bird. It’s a posh name, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said, scrunching my nose up. ‘Hardly. Anyway, you can talk, Alberta Fitzroy-Black the Third, Duchess of England, Princess of all the World.’
Birdy Page 3
