chocolate!” called Mrs Hobson.
Another dash for the classroom. This time they almost ran into the school caretaker, Mr Bartok, who was screwing a bracket into the wall over the main entrance. “Mind my ladder!” he warned and teetered bulkily at the top.
Since Christmas the school had sprouted a ring of CCTV cameras. To keep out Undesirables, Mrs Watt had said, and a good thing too. But when Mardy saw Mr Shute, the headteacher, looking out over the playground from his first-floor office, she wondered. Perhaps it was the pupils, rather than any intruder, who were his main concern. She did not think she had ever been nearer to Mr Shute than the thirty feet separating them at the weekly assemblies, where he swept in, exhorted them and left. For all she knew Mr Shute might be a robot, or a hologram, or – or – anything …
Throughout assembly, Mardy kept looking up and down the hall, wondering who, if anyone, might have been mistaken for her. Perhaps, as Mrs Hobson had said, she really did have a double – or something close enough to fool the shopkeeper, who was shortsighted and always had her nose in the paper. Rows and rows of children surrounded her, short, tall, thin and fat, white, black and brown. From awkward Year 7s like herself to the willowy grandeur of Year 13, hundreds of girls in that room wore the Bellevue School sweatshirt. On hundreds of chests the same school logo was embroidered: a ship in full sail that actually looked more like a kitten being run over by a milk float.
Mardy couldn’t decide which struck her more: how very different everyone was or (in another way) how very much the same. They were all standing with their bored assembly expressions, as the head ran through arrangements for the Year 8 trip to the Science Museum. The same expressions persisted as he launched into the statutory hymn and warned them about the litter problem in the streets outside the school. But none of them, Mardy decided, looked enough like her to deceive Mrs Hobson.
Except, possibly, Rachel. But even Rachel was so much thinner, with her long blanched, moon face and coal-black eyes, that Mrs Hobson would have had to be blind not to see the difference. Rachel Fludd probably hadn’t eaten a Nut Krunch Bar in her life.
It might not have been so bad if Rachel hadn’t been writing in her notebook again at wet play that day. The children were kept in their classrooms, bored and out of temper. In the corner of Mardy’s class Mrs Yarrow sipped away at a mug of coffee, clearly wishing she could be in the staffroom instead. Hal and his chess-playing friends found a set and retired to the corner. The room was as sweaty as a boxer’s sock. Mardy, swinging her legs idly as she sat on the edge of a table, found without surprise that she and Rachel were the only two girls who had not attached themselves to some group or other.
Looking down at her own legs, she compared them with Rachel’s. Fat Tuesday. String Bean Sally. Rachel must be as far under the perfect weight as Mardy was above it. There must be some perfect girl of whom they were both just freakish reflections. Certainly, something seemed to tie the two of them together. In the weeks since Rachel’s arrival they had hardly ever spoken; yet Rachel seemed to fill a bigger place in her life than anyone else except Hal and her own family.
The battered leather notebook in which Rachel was writing was much less plush than the diary Mardy kept at home, but even that seemed another unwelcome link between them. And how furtively Rachel wrote! As if she were an enemy spy …
Despite herself, Mardy was curious to know what so absorbed Rachel. She got down from the table and made her way to Rachel’s desk – not directly but by a route as aimless as possible. First, she stopped to check Hal’s progress on the chessboard: he had just castled and was preparing to do something devastating with his rook. His eyes for once were narrowed, his lip bitten white with controlled ferocity. Mardy moved on, exchanging pleasantries with Kylie and Susannah at the expense of their friend Michelle, who was off that day with a cold. And so (under the flickering eye of Mrs Yarrow, who was probably itching for a cigarette) she arrived just behind Rachel. Rachel had not seen her approach or she would certainly have put the notebook into her pocket at once. Even so, Mardy could not see what she was writing because Rachel had crooked her arm round protectively and she hung her head low over the paper with her hair falling raggedly around it.
So Mardy took a long shot.
“Who is he, then, Rachel?” she asked out loud. “Who are you writing love poems to?”
Rachel twisted round in alarm, blushed and hurriedly shut the notebook. A moment later it was not there – though Mardy didn’t quite see which pocket she had put it in. All this happened in an instant, during which Mardy found herself backing off from Rachel’s desk as though a hand had pushed her roughly away.
“Keep your nose out of it, Mardi Gras!”
Mardy staggered back to her seat. She was breathless and a little frightened at the fury she had managed to provoke in quiet, unobtrusive Rachel. But she was smiling too, because she had won some kind of victory. For Rachel to be made angry, she must have been touched at last. And Rachel did not like to be touched.
It didn’t take long for the news that Rachel was in love to spread to the Bluecoat girls. The rest of the morning Mardy watched them prodding her like a spider in a jar. English, where they were reading Romeo and Juliet, presented almost too many opportunities to be true. Biology was just as good. Rachel had to wait until the maths lesson after lunch for the teasing to die down. Even then, the mystery of Rachel’s boyfriend threatened to break out in unpredictable ways: an equation here, a co-ordinate there.
“And who are you co-ordinating with, Rachel?”
Mardy said nothing. She knew from her days as Queen of Fairlawn Primary just how little work was needed to start a rumour. Once the process was begun, any class would unite in the chase. Beyond Rachel herself, no one would suspect that Mardy was behind it at all.
Except Hal, of course. “Up to your old tricks, Mardy?” he said to her as they made their way down the corridor after maths. They were being buffeted like channel swimmers in a rough sea and it was with difficulty that Mardy managed to toss her head disdainfully and say: “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” said Hal, with his terrier face on. “I’m your friend, remember? I know the way you work.”
“Oh shut up, Jiminy Cricket! When I need a conscience I’ll advertise.”
“You’ve got one already,” retorted Hal between buffets. “Remember Theresa Greystoke?”
“Oh, her!” Buffet. Buffet. “I just felt sorry for the little squirt.”
Mardy shifted herself so that she was separated from Hal beyond talking distance. She didn’t care to be reminded of Theresa Greystoke.
For a brief time Theresa had been Mardy’s rival at Fairlawn Primary. Beautiful, clever, an expert juggler and the owner of two ponies, Theresa had arrived from the north in her last year. For a while she had charmed everyone and Mardy had felt her own star beginning to lose some of its glitter.
But then a rumour started – and no one knew how – that Theresa Greystoke had had plastic surgery on her nose and ears. That those dazzling white teeth were dentures. That one of her bright blue eyes was actually made of glass. It was whispered too that Theresa Greystoke’s father had bribed the headteacher to get good test results. Overnight, and without realising what had happened to her, popular Theresa Greystoke became an outcast.
Very little of this had come from Mardy directly. She had started the first rumour – only half expecting to be believed – then watched, in growing wonder, as the torrent had swept her rival from sight. In the end, she had rescued her. “Theresa Greystoke is
