them into Poppy’s hair. Poppy sighed a little, and pretended to collapse back into Trish’s lap. A worm of envy turned in my gut.
‘I found a copy of Lady Chatterley in the back of my mother’s knitting cupboard,’ said Trish to Poppy, ‘and you’ll never guess where the gamekeeper put the daisies.’
My heart was in my throat. It pushed the words out from where they usually hid. ‘My dad hit me last night.’
There. Now I had their attention.
For the rest of the day, Trish couldn’t leave the subject alone. ‘How often does he hit you?’
‘Not often.’
We were on our way to the science labs for double biology. Rumour had it the rabbit’s reproductive system was the only spark of sauciness we were going to get this term; we would now move on to the sheep’s lung. Poppy had talked to one of the girls in the year above, who warned her that the specimen was none too well preserved.
‘Exactly how many times not often?’ Trish persisted. Our shoes squeaked on the polished floor as we turned the corner towards the stairs. Two pairs of shoes: the third pair, Poppy’s, was a way down the corridor, trying to catch up.
‘Maybe … once every three or four weeks.’
‘The last time Dad hit me I was seven and I’d stolen from Mummy’s purse. He spanked my hand with a ruler.’
‘Daddy’s never hit me,’ chirped Poppy, breathlessly, from behind, having run most of the way down the corridor, at risk of detention. Trish ignored her.
‘I mean, it’s not like you’d done anything wrong.’
‘It’s when something happens to upset him,’ I explained. ‘He just gets mad and flips. Then it’s OK again. He doesn’t really mean it.’
Trish chewed her lip. ‘But how did we upset him? We weren’t doing anything.’
No, unless you counted spying on the house across the road through binoculars in the hope of seeing Gary Bennett’s willy.
‘He doesn’t like anyone going into that room.’
‘But it’s your spare room. It’s not like he sleeps in there.’
‘No.’ I couldn’t explain. Trish’s family was easy and friendly. They were in and out of each other’s rooms whenever they felt like it.
We started climbing the stairs, Poppy panting behind us. She stumbled as we went round the turn and dropped her books, but Trish didn’t stop to help her pick them up.
‘It’s an awful bruise.’
‘It’s not much.’ My legs ached with going so fast up the stairs. I regretted telling them now.
‘He could have fractured your skull.’
‘It wasn’t that hard.’
We reached the biology lab. I sighed with relief.
Half-way through biology, Miss Millichip divided us into pairs to do an experiment on breathing. The sheep’s lung had yet to make an appearance, although there was a whiff of something clinging to Miss Millichip’s lab coat that suggested it wasn’t far away. I hated doing experiments in pairs, because there was always a chance Poppy would beat me to it and team up with Trish, and I would be left on my own. But I needn’t have worried. Trish swiftly claimed me.
‘So what’s the worst thing he did to you?’
‘Really, not much more than the odd bruise. Honestly. Blow into this.’
Trish blew a long puff of air into the bell jar. ‘What are we supposed to do with this now? Hasn’t he ever hit you where it shows?’
‘We have to measure how far the water level’s dropped. Once he did knock my shoulder out. But he did medical training in his national service and he knew how to put it back into its socket.’
‘One point four inches. Did it hurt?’
I winced. ‘Like … hell.’ The words felt strange in my mouth. I couldn’t really remember how it had felt.
‘You ought to tell someone.’
‘No.’
Trish shrugged. ‘Well, it’s your fault, then, if it keeps on happening. Your turn to blow.’
I blew into the flask as hard as if I wanted to burst it.
Miss Millichip wore a gold cross round her neck, and what Mrs Owen would have called ‘sensible’ skirts with concertina pleats. You could see them peeping out under her white lab coat. When we had finished the breathing experiment, she called us to gather round the big desk at the front.
Trish elbowed her way into the front row. I followed, then wished I hadn’t. On the desk lay something pinkish-grey, wrinkled like hands that have been in water too long, a pouch with a macaroni tube poking out of one end. It smelt foul, coppery, sickly. No, more than sickly–dead, and for a long time too.
Miss Millichip pointed to the diagram behind her on the blackboard. She could draw beautifully, and she’d chalked a picture of the lungs in three different colours, labelled with neat capitals.
‘As you can see, this is one of a pair. The tube at the top–what’s it called, Trish Klein?’
Trish squinted at the blackboard. ‘The bronch… bronchius?’
‘Hard ch. Like a k. Bron-kus. No i. The bronchus here …’ Miss Millichip poked the floppy macaroni with a blunt, unvarnished fingernail ‘… is one of a pair of tubes leading from the windpipe into the top of the lungs. When the diaphragm–where’s your diaphragm, Pauline Jagger?’ Pauline pointed vaguely to her abdomen. ‘Not bad, but up a bit. Here …’ Miss Millichip poked Pauline with the same finger she’d used on the macaroni tube. ‘When the diaphragm flattens out, it creates a space for the lungs to expand and air is pulled down the bronchus, inflating the lung–so …’ She inserted a bright yellow drinking straw into the macaroni tube, then bent forward and blew hard down it. The wrinkled grey pouch filled like a sad old balloon. A fetid smell, ammoniac and somehow familiar, wafted across the desk. It suddenly seemed very warm in the room. There were beads of sweat behind my ears.
‘The oxygen molecules pass through the walls of the tiny tubes inside the lungs–the what, Katie Carter?’
‘Bronchioles, Miss Millichip.’ My voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far outside me.
‘– and into the bloodstream, where they are exchanged for carbon dioxide, which passes back through into the bronchioles. The abdominal muscles contract to push the diaphragm back into a dome shape, the intercostal muscles collapse the ribcage, and the air is pushed out of the lungs–so!’ She pressed down with the heel of her hand on the horrid smelly thing and a puff of foul air shot out of the macaroni tube straight into my nostrils. Sweat burst out of every pore and someone sprinkled black confetti in front of my eyes.
I came to on the floor. Miss Millichip was fanning my
