Phosphorescence

by Raffaella Barker

  Of course, there is no way I can say what I really feel, which is that I can’t cope with my new life and my old life converging. Not even Nell, back home in Norfolk, understands. All she can do is flip through her diary in irritable frustration when I call her to tell her the bad news later that evening.

  ‘Oh, hell. That’s when I’m going on my school field trip to Wales. I won’t be there except for your first night. I wonder if I could be ill and skive to see you? Look, I must go, I’ve got two exams back to back tomorrow, and Jason’s just arrived to help me revise. Bye, darlin,’ catch you later.’

  She presses something on her phone, but it isn’t the disconnect button, and I hear her talking as she crosses the room to Jason.

  ‘Hey, you. I’m not quite ready. Mum says do you want to stay for supper tonight?’

  There is a mumble and then laughter, Nell’s joined with Jason’s, I suppose. I flip my phone away down the side of the bed because I don’t want to hear any more of her happiness.

  The trip is gathering momentum. Mr Lascalles is calling it a field trip and is issuing lists of requirements and endless forms to sign for those who want to go. There is even a consent form for sleeping in a tent, and we have to sign a declaration that girls will share with girls and boys with boys. Dad has added to the mad paper storm by sending information about nature and Salt Head for everyone to read. It is photocopied and pinned on the board next to the list of people who have put their names down.

  It is too weird. Everyone wants to go on the camping trip. There’s a waiting list in case anyone drops out, and Mr Lascalles is drawing the eight names out of a hat, or so everyone says. There are rumours flying, and no one is entirely sure who has made it on to the final list. The only certainty is me, which is ironic, as I definitely don’t want to go. I absolutely can’t believe the popularity of the whole thing.

  ‘Why?’ I ask anyone who will listen. ‘Why do you want to go and freeze your arse off in the North Sea?’

  The thing is, none of them see it like that. Someone has finally learned how to spell ‘Phosphorescence’ and Pansy and Freda look it up on the Internet and find completely different information from the stuff I put in my project. Suddenly ‘Phosphorescence’ is the school buzzword.

  An essay entitled ‘The Phosphorescence of the Night Mushroom’ appears on the general school noticeboard. It is science, but it makes no sense to any of us at all, and is the source of many jokes. Harry paints an extract of the essay in the skateboard park. ‘The lamellae of the pilei are white but emit bluish white light in the dark when they are fresh.’ This becomes a catch phrase around school, only eclipsed when all our e-mail accounts are hit by an attachment called ‘The Palace of Phosphorescence,’ featuring dodgy pictures of a girl in a bikini and a chihuahua sitting on a blue towel on some beach in California. Under it is a poem about teenage suicide which, it is universally agreed, is the most moving thing anyone has ever read. Drippy Dave has the photograph printed on the front of a T-shirt, with the poem on the back, and for a week so many people follow his lead that it looks like we have embraced the notion of a uniform.

  I am convinced that I am immune to any more surprises, but then Freda, who usually avoids me as if I am a toxic but highly luminous mushroom, sidles up to me at break.

  ‘The basketball team have qualified for the National Championships, so Aiden and Tod can’t go camping.’

  What a relief. I have been so freaked out by the possibilities of who might be in the daunting line-up of the trip that I have actually blanked it from my mind.

  Aiden and Tod wouldn’t even fit on the camp beds we use on Salt Head, and imagining Dad in his Scout shorts and knee socks, them in their street-cool clothes, sends huge racking shivers of advance mortification through me.

  Freda hasn’t finished. She licks her thin lips delightedly, like a cat, and purrs on, her voice throbbing with innuendo and pleasure.

  ‘So now it will be a duel over you, because your devoted wheezing admirer Dave is next on the list, along with Handsome Heart-throb Harry. It looks like this is your trip, baby.’

  A challenge sparks in her slanting grey eyes. She is hoping to embarrass me, but I pretend not to notice.

  ‘Great.’ I stretch a big innocent smile and she snorts crossly, and departs, hair swinging right down her back to below her crop top.

  Having thought it couldn’t get worse, I then contemplate going home to Staitheley with Harry, whom I can’t deny I have still got a crush on, and Dave, who can’t look at me without blinking soppily. Mortifying. Maybe I could give my place up to one of Pansy’s other acolytes? I doubt they’ll want it now that the basketball players aren’t coming. I know that Pansy is signed up, of course, but maybe she and Freda will drop out now. Oh, honestly, who gives a monkey’s anyway? I might just have to eat a cyanide pill the day before – or what about a phosphorescent mushroom?

  I find Jessie just as the bell goes for geography, and tell her the news. She can’t stop giggling over Dave coming. I want to tell her how I dread going home to Staitheley and Jack not being there, but I can’t.

  I want to tell her because I don’t have anyone else to talk to. Mum is back from her trip, but she is never at home. We communicate by the kitchen blackboard.

  On Saturday morning I rub out her message from yesterday, which says, ‘How was last exam? Eat the chicken casserole if you can face it and I’ll see you for catching up tomorrow.’

  I didn’t eat the casserole. I had an amazingly delicious supper of potato waffles, bacon and maple syrup with no healthiness, to punish my absent mother. And I ate it in her bed in front of her TV and I felt truly self-sufficient and not at all self-pitying. Today, though, I could really do with seeing her. But she is obviously knackered from her work and is still asleep, even though it is ten o’clock and some of us have been up for hours and even hung up the laundry as instructed by Mum’s message a few days ago.

  I am writing, ‘Gone BY MYSELF to Camden to buy kitchen sink etc. for camping,’ when a man with rumpled hair walks out of Mum’s bedroom wearing jeans, a T-shirt and bare feet. He is incredibly good-looking.

  ‘Are you the plumber?’ I ask cautiously, as for all I know this is a bloody burglar creeping about. But we have been hoping for a plumber to come for some weeks now.

  ‘Er, no. I’m not.’ He turns the tap on at the sink, and peers at the flowing water intently, as if a plumber might come out of it. ‘I’m not the plumber,’ he repeats, and looks desperately towards Mum’s bedroom door.

  I think my mouth is hanging open in astonishment, because he smiles placatingly at me, and turns off the tap, having filled the kettle.

  The door to Mum’s room opens again, and blow me if Mum doesn’t come out wearing a pale blue silk dressing gown I’ve never seen before. Her hair is rumpled too, and she has a mad smirk on her face.

  ‘I see you’ve met,’ she simpers, and slides on to one of the tall stools we have in the kitchen.

  ‘No. We haven’t actually.’ My voice is as crisp as Miss Blessup’s in the school library. This is so weird and so confusing I could scream. I feel like I am the grown-up in the room, with these two looking at me nervously and edging closer to one another.

  ‘I know you want me to make it easy for you, Mum, but I’m not going to. Who is this man and why was he in your bedroom?’

  Obviously, all the body language is screaming at me, but Mum should have told me she had a boyfriend. In fact, I should have guessed.

  ‘Bloody hell, Mum. You could have said.’ I manage to blurt these words out before the heat in my face explodes and I rush to my room and hurl myself on the bed.

  I know teenagers are meant to feel misunderstood, but this is ridiculous. After a while, I realize that I’m much more upset that she hasn’t told me about the boyfriend than I am that he exists.

  ‘Lola? I’m sorry. I’ve mishandled this badly.’ Mum is dressed. I hear the door to the flat clicking shut behind the boyfriend. I turn on my back and look at her. ‘I th
ought he was the plumber.’

  There is an uncertain silence, then we both burst out laughing.

  Everyone on the trip has to meet on Monday after assembly to talk about kit, so we will see who is actually coming at last. My shopping trip with Mum was hugely successful. First we went to a cafe and drank iced coffee while she told me about meeting Marcus. I never imagined sitting chatting with my mum about boys on a Saturday morning in the High Street, but now I’ve done it and it was good. She didn’t say anything impossible for me to hear like, ‘I love him.’ She just said, ‘He’s a kind, gentle man and being around him makes me happy.’ I think I can cope with that for now. Anyway, we bought a frying pan at the charity shop, an inflatable mattress from the camping shop and a kind of torch that looks like glasses and is usually for mechanics mending cars. She also bought me a really cool swimming costume which cost a fortune and made me look like a person with a waist, which I am not.

  Marcus came back in the evening and took us out to supper. He gave me a solar-powered torch, so now I’ve got two, and he managed to do it without making a big deal. I think I like him. I think I like Mum with him. When added to my sleeping bag, a water carrier, a pillow, spare clothes, and a towel, my new camping stuff fills a reasonable-sized rucksack. I am a bit anxious that Mr Lascalles will make me take stuff out to make room for the food. I needn’t have worried.

  Our meeting is in the geography block in Mr Lascalles’s classroom. It has a perfectly normal door, but in its frame Patsy and Freda are wedged like two beetles, their rucksacks and their armloads of belongings having locked together in such a way that neither of them can go out or in. The others – Jessie, Harry, Dave and two techno music heads called Carl and Pete – are inside. Not my first choice of companions but then I would rather have no one.

  ‘It’s a bit like one of those Chinese puzzles.’ Harry is standing on a chair inside the classroom. He peers down at me over the girls and their rucksacks. I am suddenly so pleased that he will be coming. ‘You have to find the keystone. Maybe it’s Pansy’s mobile phone.’ Harry leans over and pulls the tiny silver phone from Pansy’s pocket. Unsurprisingly, this does not help.

  ‘Give that back!’ commands Pansy between gritted teeth. ‘Can’t someone just take this battery charger and these CDs and then I can move.’

  Leaving my rucksack against the wall, I crawl between Pansy’s legs and try to extract the things she has in her right hand.

  ‘I can’t believe how much stuff you two have got,’ I marvel.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Lola,’ hisses Freda, slumping suddenly as she is released by the removal of one of Pansy’s many bags. But the heap around the two of them is truly extraordinary.

  ‘Mmm, yes. I think a little judicious editing is called for.’

  It is lucky Mr Lascalles didn’t arrive sooner or he wouldn’t have been able to get in. Now, though, he helps Pansy drag her rucksack into the room, and places his own small canvas bag on a chair.

  ‘Right, let’s write a list of essentials,’ he says, stabbing one finger in the air. ‘And I mean essentials.’

  I rack my brains to think of anything at all that might be essential, and eventually come up with a short list:

  First aid kit

  Water

  Food

  Sleeping bag

  Matches

  Firewood

  Spare clothes

  Emergency flares

  Next to me Freda is hard at work, biting the end of her pencil in concentration. Pansy’s small writing flows across her page until Mr Lascalles picks up her paper with a flourish.

  ‘Thank you, everyone. Pansy’s list is the longest, so shall we all check where we coincide with her?’

  Taking silence as acquiescence, he begins to read:

  Make-up

  Make-up remover

  Minor

  Shampoo

  Whole wash bag actually

  Electric toothbrush charger

  Nail kit including nail clippers

  Electric toothbrush

  Two skirts

  Three sundresses

  Two pairs of jeans

  One pair cut-off shorts

  Six bikinis

  Ski clothes for emergency weather

  Four towels

  Hairdryer . . .

  Mr Lascalles stops and screws up his face, taking off his glasses before addressing her despairingly.

  ‘Forgive me, Pansy. Is this your list for camping?’

  Pansy looks affronted.

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t even got to the tent and all the sleeping bags and stuff yet, although I have got one.’ She points to the pink and purple flowery roll tied to the bottom of her rucksack. ‘Dad got it for me in Woodstock and had it sent back to be here in time. It’s the best, isn’t it?’

  Freda is no better, although her preoccupation is keeping her clothes clean. To this end she has packed three different washing powders, a washing-up bowl and rubber gloves.

  By the time the bell releases us, Mr Lascalles, looking grimly determined, and somewhat worried, has halved the size of both Pansy’s and Freda’s piles of belongings and removed several items from everyone else’s bags.

  ‘This is more acceptable,’ he mutters, then, voicing my own thoughts, ‘I wonder what the warden is going to make of you lot.’ He laughs drily and gets out a map of the North Norfolk coast. ‘I think it’s worth looking carefully at where we are going. This may be Britain, but we are staying on an island.’

  He points to Salt Head on his map. Carl and Dave look up from their rucksacks, but no one else is paying any attention.

  ‘Hey, there’s a lighthouse,’ says Carl, looking at the northern end of Salt Head.

  ‘Yes, and beyond it is Seal Point, where the currents are phenomenally dangerous.’ I interrupt because I know Dad would want me to tell them this. ‘We don’t swim there, we go round to the beach above the burial ground.’

  ‘How far is that from the hut?’ Mr Lascalles is making notes in a small pad.

  ‘Oh, not far. Nothing is far on Salt Head. It only takes about twenty minutes to walk from one side to the other, but there are dunes in the middle, so you can’t see everything at once. There used to be a house on it years ago, but now there’s nothing left except the burial ground.’

  Pansy looks up from lacing up her rucksack.

  ‘That sounds scary,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘How do we escape if we want to?’

  ‘With a boat when there is enough tide, or by waiting until it is at its lowest and wading. The currents are too strong to swim.’

  I could tell them all this in my sleep, it is so familiar. Mr Lascalles slaps shut his notebook as the bell goes.

  ‘Right, we will all have to act sensibly and carefully,’ he says, staring around at the eight of us. ‘I expect exemplary behaviour at all times.’

  He doesn’t actually click his heels together but he may as well have done.

  ‘I’ll distribute notes later in the week,’ he says and walks off down the corridor, his own small bag bobbing by his side.

  ‘He is going to be a nightmare,’ predicts Harry, retrieving his mini-disc player and separate speakers and stuffing them back into his rucksack. Dave folds his pyjamas back into the side pocket of his bag, wrapping them around a bottle of what I thought was water but according to Freda’s excited whisper is actually vodka.

  ‘He won’t look at the stuff again. Anyway, I’m just going to say this pocket is full of my asthma medicine.’

  Sitting on my own bag to keep it invisible so no one notices that I have not been searched, I am determined not to imagine my Dad’s face when we arrive in Staitheley and start trying to stash all this ridiculous stuff on the boat to get over to Salt Head Island.

  Dad is so easygoing it’s absurd, but not when it comes to nature conservation. Then he turns into a tinpot dictator. That was Mum’s joke, anyway, and probably what made her so keen to get back to the pavements and pollution of London. In Dad’s world you must trea
t nature with respect. No short cuts, no flip attitudes. Ideally, he would like everyone who sets foot on Salt Head to be wearing a uniform of his choosing and carrying a prescribed (by him) list of essentials. Everything else, including my Elvis T-shirt, is subject to snorts of derision and worse. I’ve seen him chuck whole bags full of bedding into the mud when he feels people have brought more than they need. And if he is picking the group up, and they have too many rubbish bags, he makes them carry them back on foot, wading across to Salt, the nearest village, a good hour away, because he won’t take it on the boat.

  ‘Fascist,’ is actually what Mum used to say. ‘Bloody fascist.’ That was years ago when he tried to stop us taking streamers over there for my seventh birthday party, a beach picnic with the seals. But I know now, from that and a hundred other experiences on Salt Head Island, that everything you take must be useful and it must be working properly. I have never been over there without a life jacket and an emergency flare, but Dad is so careful I’ve never needed either. I don’t know what he’ll say about the Flower Power tent, but I can guess. I wish I hadn’t seen that vodka, and I pray that Dad doesn’t. I can’t stop glooming out now. I know this trip is not going to work.

  Chapter 12

  Despite my purchase of a special Romanian spell doll from the charity shop and willing the camping trip to be abandoned, the day of reckoning dawns. Mum and Marcus both take me to school, which would be embarrassing normally, but I have too much else to worry about to be concerned that I look like a juvenile delinquent being marched into care by undercover police officers.

  Mum hugs me.

  ‘Have fun, and be careful, remember these are London children. They won’t have a clue about tides,’ she says, pressing a tide table into my hand.

  I roll my eyes.

  ‘Honestly, Mum, are you expecting me to get them to learn this on the way up?’

  But I grin and kiss her. Marcus gives me twenty quid and a BT phonecard.

  ‘This weekend is going to be like one of those challenging TV programmes where you’ve got to see how far you can go with these two items,’ he says, winking at me. ‘I hope you will be able to get home from Staitheley.’