Will bit her lip hard. She thought, Courage, chook. She could taste blood, and cold air, and bewilderment.
“Please answer me, Wilhelmina. You’ll try your very best to fit in, won’t you, my dear?”
Will couldn’t say she would fit in. Fitting was what lids did to jam jars. Instead she said, “Could I go and find my suitcase? Please, ja? It’s got my scarf in it.” She held out her hands, which were blue at the tips. “I’m very cold.”
Mrs. Robinson sucked in her breath. Will said more quietly, “Can I go? Ja? Please?”
“I suppose so. Off you pop, then. And welcome, my dear, to Leewood.”
ANOTHER PREFECT—IDENTICAL TO THE FIRST: tall, pretty, and apparently painfully bored by Will—led her through more corridors, up two winding staircases, through more corridors. (The buildings were a maze of corridors. If you’d stretched them out, she reckoned you could’ve gotten halfway across Harare.) A third prefect—this one plumper and darker than the other two—appeared from the library and led Will on, up to the residency. It was a square building, like a tobacco barn at home, Will thought, but with a slate roof instead of tin.
The girl said, “This is where we sleep. But the toilets are all in the main block. It gives you good bladder control.” She smiled. Will tried to smile back, but she knew it must have been a failed attempt, because the girl sighed. “Come on. They left your suitcase at the bottom of the main stairs.” She tried to take Will’s hand, but Will shook her head and held it in a fist behind her back. When they reached Will’s suitcase, Will tugged Lucian’s scarf from it, and clutching the wool close to her chest, followed (more corridors, more smell of cleaning fluid, more staring girls) to the dining hall.
“You just take whatever you want on a tray—there, from that pile; and cutlery’s over there—and go and sit with your form. That’s them. In the corner. See?” The girl seemed eager to get away. “You’ll be all right from here? Why are you staring? You don’t need looking after, do you?”
Will shook her head. She’d never been looked after in her life. She edged past the gangs of bigger girls; past a forest of green skirts; and stopped, stock-still, gaping with the strangeness of it. She’d never seen so much food in one place. There was a sweating woman ladling stew and rice onto plates. There was fruit, peeled and sliced into pieces, swimming in syrup; she’d never seen anything like that. At home, fruit just came off branches into your hand. Peter, who was fussy, used Will’s pocketknife to chop out the bad bits; the others ate round them or spat them out. Will ran from one side of the counter to the other. Here there were plastic pots with Fromage Frais printed on the side—Will decided not to risk those—and glass bowls of chocolate whipped into brown fluff, with sprinkles and whipped cream. At home chocolate came in thick bars, and she hesitated. It was so pretty that she wasn’t sure if it could be edible. She dipped a finger into one and whispered, “Sha.” It was like a chocolate cloud. She took two more bowls, and then, as she went by on a second circuit, a fourth. She was starving.
The sea of faces turned toward Will as she approached the table. She couldn’t meet anyone’s eye, but she could feel the whisperings rising like a tide as she sat down. Will could not block her ears and eat at the same time, so she wrapped her right hand over her head and ate with her left.
There was a wave of laughter, and gasps.
“Excuse me, my dear!”
Will looked up from her stew. The teacher sitting at the end on the table had nostrils that were white and thin and clenched; Will braced herself to run. She knew she must have done something terrible.
“We eat with our forks here, please, dear, or we don’t eat at all. We’re not savages, are we, now?” said the woman. She looked more closely at Will. “Are you new, dear? What’s your name? We haven’t seen you before, have we?”
Will’s ball of rice had dropped from her fingers. She tried to cover it with her arm as she said, “Will. I’m Will, ja. I—”
“Oh, dear! Get a cloth and wipe that up, Will. And I’d like you to wash your hands and face, please, before you come back.”
Will turned away from the snortings and spittings of laughter as she pushed back her chair.
“My God! Did you smell her?” Will did smell, she knew—of woodsmoke and Kezia and grass. Her boot connected with the girl’s chair leg as she passed, but then her chest burned and flushed with shame and she latched her fingers into a knot so they couldn’t strike out. Will only fought her equals.
“Like a savage. Do you think she bites?”
“Is that the new girl? I thought it was the cleaner’s daughter.”
“Looks like she belongs in a zoo.”
“I thought Samantha was exaggerating!”
“I told you so!” That was Samantha.
“Did you see her shoes?”
“Is she wearing shorts? In winter?”
“Did you see what she was eating? Four chocolate puddings. She’ll get fatter than Sofia.”
“And did you see her hair? She could have a nest of rats in there.”
“Bet she doesn’t wash.”
“Bet she’s got nits.” Will tried to run, but her laces were tangled and she tripped.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Do you think she’s mad?”
“Do you think she’s dangerous?”
“Hold your breath. She’s coming.” One made gagging noises.
Will couldn’t bear it. She put her hands over her ears and hurtled down along the last tables of girls and out into the playground.
It was drizzling and deserted, and the asphalt was cruel and icy when she sat on it. She struggled to force back the embarrassment, but it insisted on rising up from her chest and out through her eyes. The captain had insisted on forks, but her father had not. Tears worked their way into her mouth, and she sniffed. The teacher had been wrong to talk about savages: Simon and Lazarus never used forks, and neither did Shumba or Kezia or Will.
The rain fell more heavily. Will crouched, African style, with her back against the wall and her chin on her knees, breathing quick, shallow breaths. Her chest felt hollow, and she had never been this kind of frightened before—shocked and shy and bewildered. This was not the marvelous-mad-adrenaline fear of snakes, or the rollicking fear of an unruly horse. It was something else.
Will wasn’t sure how long she squatted there, alone in the wet. She could feel she was on the brink of falling into miserable sleep in the rain, when an alarm sounded, high and shrill across the playground. Like a cat Will was up, ready to run if the alarm meant fire or raiders or flood. The bell kept ringing. Oddly, there were no screams.
A girl appeared, one of the twins Will had seen at the other end of the table. She stared at Will’s dripping taut face. “Hello. You’re Will, aren’t you?”
“Ja.” Will pulled herself to her feet.
“Hi. My name’s Hannah. They said I had to fetch you for math. The bell’s just gone.”
“Oh.” Will unclenched her fists. “Oh.” There were purple ridges along her palms where her nails had bitten her skin.
Hannah appeared to be embarrassed about something. “Will? I don’t want to be rude—but, did you know you’ve got stew in your hair?”
“Oh. Ja. I did.” Will lied. She put her hands to her face, but she was drenched and shivering, and her fingers were numb, and she could have had a three-course meal on her head and not have felt it. Will smiled, a little, at the thought, and the girl must have thought it was aimed at her, because she smiled back, showing metal on her teeth.
“Are you going to wash it out?”
“Ja, of course. I do wash. Sometimes. But there’s not time now, is there?”
“No, I suppose not. Wait a second, though. Hold still.” Will saw the girl was taking out a brush from her backpack, and without thinking, Will backed away and let out a little cry. She couldn’t bear strange hands now.
Hannah looked astonished. “I wasn’t going to hurt you!” She turned and headed toward the clas
srooms.
Will had no idea what to do. She said, “Oh. I— Wait—I didn’t mean . . .”
Hannah didn’t turn round. “Come on. It’s fine. If you want to be called a savage, that’s not my business.”
In the classroom Will was given a desk with a fake wood top, a plastic pen, and a book. The teacher sat at the head of the room. If, Will thought, she could spend the day reading, not talking to anyone, it wouldn’t be so heart-numbingly bad. With rising hope, she opened the book.
It was a mess of numbers.
Will said several forbidden words under her breath. “Oh, penga.”
The girl next to her was staring. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing. I— No, nothing.”
“Really?” The girl turned round in her desk to make expressive faces at the girls behind. “Right. We’re not really supposed to talk, you know.”
Will could add and subtract, and she knew, in theory, about multiplying. But there were letters here, mixed up with the numbers; it made no sense. She forced herself not to panic. She rubbed the paper between her fingers. It didn’t become clearer. She scratched it with her thumbnail. She smelled it. It was still incomprehensible.
According to the name at the top of her worksheet, the girl next to her was called Joanna. She had red hair and very small eyes. She looked over Will’s arm at her blank page and laughed.
Will said, “What?” She allowed herself to half-smile. “Ja? What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“You! You can’t do basic algebra.”
“Oh.” Will sat on her hands. “Is this algebra?”
“Very basic algebra. We don’t do proper algebra until year nine. Can’t you even do long division?”
Will said nothing; she fought hard not to jab her pen into Joanna’s face.
Joanna said, “Do you know quadratic equations? I do.”
“What’re they?”
Joanna smirked. Will did not roll up her exercise book and force it up Joanna’s nose. She whispered instead, soft, behind her hair: “Truth, hey, dear heart, and courage.” It did not work.
“Oh, God!” said Joanna. “You needn’t cry. Just because you don’t even know your times tables.”
“I’m not crying,” Will said, “and ja, I do, actually.” It was a lie. Could other people tell if you were lying? “I do know my times tables.”
But in fact, as the day went on, it became obvious to Will that she knew nothing. At every lesson they made her sit at the front, in the middle of the row—“Just until you settle in, Wilhelmina”—and the girl they had forced to sit next to her would edge away and make expressive faces at her friends and then sigh and say, “Miss Smith!” or “Mrs. Robinson!” or “Miss Macintosh! Will can’t do the work.”
In that gray blur of a first day, Will learned many things. She discovered that times tables had nothing to do with time, nor, in fact, with tables; that history was not (as Lazarus had said, and she’d believed him) a thousand stories building up into the colossal, strange, heart-stoppingly beautiful tower of the present; that knowing about cows and snake bites and birth and umbilical cords was irrelevant in science class. She learned also that her shorts were wrong and she had gypsy hair and she wasn’t funny, wasn’t clever, and looked like a mad tramp in her thick socks and muddy boots.
They happened upon Will after dinner, her crouching on a toilet lid and eating a hot chicken breast with her fingers. Samantha called the others, Joanna and Louisa and Bex, to watch. They were pretty even when they jeered.
“I hate them,” whispered Will. The hair on her arms stood up when they came near.
IT WAS TERRIBLE TOO AT night.
Miss Blake, the headmistress, escorted Will to her bedroom personally that first day—an honor, though Will didn’t know it. Mrs. Robinson walked on her other side, like a prison guard, Will told herself.
“This will be your room, Will; and that’s your bed.” Miss Blake had dark hair and lips the color of a flame lily. She was the only colorful thing in the room, Will thought. “You should be pretty comfortable, I hope, once you get used to the detergent smell. I don’t suppose you had Persil in Africa. Beds are like shoes, Will. They need wearing in.”
Will wasn’t listening; she was looking. The room was tiny and dark. There were burglar bars on the window. Somewhere above her head, Mrs. Robinson was saying something about lights-out at nine and not wasting water. The room smelled foul—of eggs and feet and the eternal indoors. It was the smell of English. She edged to the window and looked out. There was a parking lot, a potato chip bag, and a very flat pigeon. Two of the three beds were surrounded by photographs of men and women and blond girls torn from magazines. Will touched a photo. They all had careful smiles and odd, fake-looking skin.
“Wilhelmina! Please don’t touch other people’s belongings.” Mrs. Robinson’s voice was sharp. “We need to have rules, Wilhelmina, and respect for others is one of the most important. Come here and unpack. I see you’re nice and snug in the corner.”
The third bed had her suitcase on it, and a bedspread that was probably meant to be a calming shade of nothing. It was the color of a rat’s tail.
Miss Blake smiled from the doorway. “You’ll share this with Samantha and Louisa; Mrs. Robinson thought, as you met them first, that would be easiest. Take your time unpacking. There’s no hurry.”
“Ja.”
“And you must tell us if there’s anything you need. We’re delighted to have you, Will.”
Will tried to reply, but by the time she had untangled her brain enough to talk, Miss Blake was gone. Desperate, Will caught Mrs. Robinson by the sleeve as she went out. “Please, ma’am . . .”
“Yes, Wilhelmina? You know, you don’t need to say ‘ma’am.’ Call me Mrs. Robinson.”
“It’s just . . . they promised, at the farm, ja? That I’d be able to sleep where I liked. Outside, Cynthia Vincy said. She promised. I’ll . . . I can’t . . .” To her fury Will found she hadn’t words. The room was so small; and with those windows, it was a cage. It would be like sleeping in a nightmare. “Can I have a bed by myself? Outside? I could make a tent? Please? Or even I could sleep in a tree, with my blankets? Please? I won’t sleep in this room.”
“Wilhelmina! Please, my dear, have a little sense!” Will watched, desperate, as Mrs. Robinson’s glasses misted with amusement.
“Please.”
“Can you hear that, Wilhelmina? It’s hailing.”
“I wouldn’t care, ja. I could buy an umbrella.”
Mrs. Robinson laughed. Her laugh, Will thought, was extraordinary. It involved none of her facial muscles. “I’m afraid that’s just not practical, my sweet.” She paused in the doorway. “This is England, my dear! This is the land of common sense.”
Will had nightmares that first night. Samantha and Louisa took from under their pillows cotton suits patterned with rosebuds. Will watched from her corner, fascinated.
Until Samantha said, “What are you staring at? Don’t you have pajamas?”
“Pajamas?” Will stopped with her T-shirt half over her head.
“What do you sleep in in Africa?” said Louisa.
“In—in my underpants.” Will could feel her face flaming.
“That’s disgusting.” That was Samantha.
“Yeah. That’s disgusting, Will.” That was Louisa, Samantha’s echo.
“You can’t sleep in your underpants here. It’s against the rules.”
“Is it? Are you sure?” Will couldn’t remember it being on the list stuck to the door.
“I said it is, didn’t I? You can’t sleep like that, all right? You don’t want me to have to put glue on your flannel.”
Will said nothing. Every finger and every muscle was trembling with exhaustion. She put back on her damp socks, her too-small sweater. She laced up her boots and lay stock-still on the bed.
“Is she wearing her boots?”
“D’you think she’s contagious? Can
you catch madness?”
Will put her hands over her ears. She could still hear them.
“Savage.”
“Tramp. Filthy little tramp.”
“Freak.”
“Midget. Midget freak. Dirty savage.”
She fell asleep with their voices jabbing at her heart, and dreamed of being chased through the bush by a pack of wolves, with sleek ponytails and rosebud pajamas.
EVERY NIGHT WILL FELT SHE couldn’t face another day. Every day she felt she couldn’t face another night. Inexplicably, her body refused to die of a broken heart.
It was unrelentingly bad. Daily, Will added to her collection of rebukes. In lessons the teachers sighed and smiled and looked pitying. The girls stared, giggled, stared again. Will realized she’d never been so watched before. Her days had been her most precious secret. But it was impossible here to be alone. And everything she did was wrong.
“Sit up straight, please, Wilhelmina!”
“Will! Second warning! Feet off your chair!”
“Don’t chew your ruler, please, Will. That’s better. Show some respect for school property.”
“This is a group exercise, Will.” Miss Blake, who took them for English once a week, smiled her kindest smile. “No thoughts at all to share with us?” Will’s chest was full of hot humiliation and claws and crows’ beaks on those days, and her face set into an awkward frown.
And then there was, “Don’t doodle, Will. Just do the work, please,” though she had no idea where to start. She would, she thought, rather catch a water scorpion with her bare hands than struggle, blushing with shame, through double math. After a week, they began to lose patience. “Do try not to daydream, Will. Your desk is not your bed.” And once, sharply, “Keep your eyes on your own work, Wilhelmina! This is a test.” And Will flushed with shame—at being caught; at the hissing laughter from the back row; at the unhappy shock of the twin next to her, who shielded her paper with her arm and looked away; worst of all, at what her father would have said. She sat on her hands and whispered, Penga. Penga, booraguma. Wildcats do not cheat.
Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms Page 8
