Back at school it is so hard to talk to anyone, and, weirdly, everyone wants to talk to me, except Freda, who doesn’t like me to get too near Pansy. I couldn’t care less. I hang out in the loos a lot, and if more than a day passes without me texting Nell and Josh, I get twitchy. I need the connection with home so badly, but I can’t talk to Dad, it makes me too sad.
Josh is great, and we are friends now. He tells me hilarious Staitheley gossip, like this morning’s snippet: ‘Miss Mills isn’t speaking to Mrs Wright from the shop because she heard Mrs Wright describe her dachshund as a piglet in velvet.’
I ask him about his life, but he is vague.
‘Oh well, I might not do A levels. I’d like to work,’ he says, his voice closed to me asking more questions. I can’t imagine facing that choice, and when I talk to him, I’m glad I’m only fourteen and I am separated from those decisions by years of time. As for Harry, when I see him I feel no more than friendship and that is a relief too. I think all my emotion is used up on Jack and my family.
Mum is away again, researching for her work, and I know I have to put up with the cheesy smell of Ali’s cooking and the depressing, crunchy non-taste of bean sprouts for a couple of days at a time while Mum gets herself established. Then, she says, she’ll be here much more.
Sometimes it isn’t easy, though. Today when I got back, Ali had washed all her underwear and some of those awful jumpers she wears. There are pools of water everywhere and horrible grey garments in little sodden lumps on the radiators. I can normally ignore Ali’s nonsense, but today it gets to me, probably because Jessie has come back with me so we can do our revision together. She is the only person at school I have told about Jack dying and she understands everything. Jessie is a real friend now, like Nell.
Jessie and I are gazing, fascinated, at the rags on the kitchen radiator when Ali walks in. She is wearing a baggy man’s singlet and a lot of hair peeps from her armpit. Gross. She pushes her hair back with both hands, giving us a full-on display of her underarm hair.
‘Phew, I’m baking. You create tone in your muscles if you wash your clothes yourself.’
Jessie’s eyebrows are high in surprise. I grit my teeth and try to sound pleasant.
‘But what’s the point of having invented washing machines? It’s called progress, you know,’ I say without even moving my lips.
Jessie and I don’t realize that we are holding our breath, waiting for a reply.
Ali speaks.
‘I don’t like to use machines unless essential, and for washing I think they’re evil. They contain a magnetic force that is at worst cancerous and at best energy-sapping.’ She comes over to move her horrible wet clothes and Jessie and I double up in gales of silent laughter, stopping dead when she turns back to us. ‘And washing your own clothes takes you back to the earth.’
‘Only if you drop them when they’re wet,’ says Jessie, pointing behind Ali to where the porridge-coloured garments have slid off the radiator and on to the dusty floor.
We had been heating water for a Pot Noodle, but something about Ali, the hair and the clothes has completely stopped me being hungry.
‘Come on, Jess, let’s do some bio practice now. Then we can stop to watch the soaps before we try and tackle history.’
Jessie groans and we take our shoes off and slump on the floor in my room, the radio on full volume.
Mum doesn’t actually let me watch TV until I’ve done all my bits of homework, and she hates me listening to the radio while I’m working, but I have to or I can’t concentrate. Anyway, it’s a good thing she isn’t here.
Jessie twists around to make sure the door is shut and stage-whispers, ‘Who is that fruitcake?’
‘Mum’s friend. She stays here when Mum’s away.’
Jessie makes a face. ‘You should watch out, you might catch something from her.’
I giggle. ‘Veganism, you mean. I doubt it.’ But I don’t feel good talking about Ali like this. ‘Mum needs someone to be here with me,’ I add lamely, but Jessie has moved on. Reaching into her bag, she pulls out a bit of paper and waves it in front of me.
‘Look at this. Lascalles gave it to all of us in his tutor group, and guess who has signed up?’
‘What for?’ I arrange myself for maximum comfort, lying on my front on the carpet, a cushion under my chest, another under my biology folder. ‘Let’s do life cycles,’ I suggest.
‘Oh no,’ moans Jessie, ‘I’m so useless at everything to do with outside. Can’t we do eyeballs instead?’
‘Life cycles aren’t necessarily outside.’ I pick up the paper she has dropped next to me. ‘What’s this? Ohmigod, I hoped he’d forgotten about that. Surely it isn’t actually going to happen?’
In Mr Lascalles’s favourite font, as recognizably his as if it were handwriting, he has written:
Pit your wits against nature and come on the Robinson Crusoe Camping weekend in Norfolk, 15–18 July. We will be living on an island, studying the flora and fauna and learning how to survive. Warden Richard Jordan of the North Norfolk Heritage Trust will instruct us on birds and tides. Are you up for a unique opportunity to go wild in the country? If so, sign below before 15 June. Open to Year 10 and above. Only 8 places available.
What a nightmare. What a bad joke it will be. How could Dad agree to it without telling me? I call him to see if we can’t cancel it, but he can’t see what the problem is.
‘What’s wrong, Lola? We’ve had loads of school groups to camp on Salt Head. Why should this be different?’
‘It’s my school,’ I shriek, stamping my feet all over Jessie’s biology revision.
‘Well, that’s the best thing about it,’ he says, very slowly as if talking to a Martian. ‘You will be here with them.’
‘I’m not coming,’ I flash back instantly.
‘Well, your grandmother is looking forward to it, and to meeting some of your new friends, so I hope you change your mind.’ Dad’s voice is so mild and melting, it makes me want to scream.
Jessie looks up when I put the phone down.
‘It’ll be excellent. I’m looking forward to it, and I don’t usually go outside at all if I can avoid it. But this is a novelty. All the exams are over by then. It’ll be a great start to the holidays. We’ll get amazing tans and we can swim naked in that glittery stuff you put in your project. It’ll be fab.’
She has no idea what she is talking about. I try to discourage her.
‘This is Norfolk, not Fiji. It’s most likely to rain, there won’t be any phosphorescence and everyone will be freaked out by not having dry clothes and being covered in mud,’ I mutter. ‘And my dad and probably my whole family will be fussing about, keeping an eye on us.’
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 thought 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 treat 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.