Sarah May - The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

Burwood ended now abruptly on its eastern side, which was also its most picturesque. They’d driven through all the rings of the town’s life from its premedieval centre to the helplessly conservative, sprawling suburban villas built with optimism after the Second World War, and with disproportionately small windows behind which a whole generation came to terms with the horrors of war and the legacy of those horrors…perennial-filled borders, trimmed lawns and terrifying stretches of leisure time spent struggling to define the word ‘peace’. They’d passed through the industrial estates and were, finally, beyond the reaches of the executive satellite estates—by products of the post-1986 housing boom. Burwood’s last house was an old brick cottage shared by two octogenarian brothers who had been Conscientious Objectors in the last world war.

The red Volkswagen turned off the main road into open country, following a lane that sank beneath banks of hedge and forest where there was sudden shade and the sound of water before rising again in order to cross fading green and yellow fields. The forest was beech and ash and had once stretched from coast to coast, covering the land Burwood now stood on. Deepest darkest forest had been replaced by deepest darkest suburbia, where modern man and woman sought refuge, as their forest-dwelling ancestors had sought it in the forest. Like them, they mistook the shade-dappled depths for a place of innocence where a simple life could be led.

‘I hope they have raspberries,’ Ruth said, to nobody in particular. ‘I told mum I’d get raspberries.’

Vicky stared at her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a conversation about anything —let alone raspberries—with her mother, Sylvia Henderson.

‘Isn’t Grace working at Martha’s Farm?’ Saskia said after a while, trying to pin her hair back with her arm.

Ruth watched Tom suck in his left cheek and move his hands on the steering wheel.

‘I thought she already had a job?’ Vicky said, irritated that she didn’t already know this.

‘Yeah, but this is like a holiday job.’ Saskia let go of her hair again.

‘Why didn’t she say?’

‘Probably thought you already knew.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’ Vicky turned to Ruth. ‘Did you know?’

Ruth shrugged. ‘I kind of lose count of the number of jobs Grace does.’

‘Yeah, well, some people’s parents can’t actually afford to send their children to university so they have to pay for it themselves,’ Tom said from the front.

Ruth, upset, looked away.

‘There are loads of grants and stuff for people like Grace,’ Vicky said, defensive. Upsetting Ruth was her territory.

‘People like Grace?’ Tom cut in, angry.

Ignoring this, Vicky carried on, ‘In fact, she’ll probably be better off by the time she finishes—not like the rest of us, up to our eyes in student-loan debt. Cambridge are offering her a scholarship anyway, so what’s the big deal.’

Saskia said slowly, ‘I thought she was going for that NASA one at Yale?’

Vicky, no longer interested, didn’t respond.

Grace was one of their group, and Vicky was tyrannical about having up-to-date information on all members. She considered the group— her group—a profound social achievement given that she’d only started at Burwood Girls’ in Year 11. First she successfully penetrated an already-established group, then she amputated the excess, re-forming a splinter cell comprising core members only: Grace Cummings, Saskia Greaves and Ruth Dent. She put her rapid rise down to not only getting them into Tom’s university parties but even some London ones as well. Who else on all Satan’s earth could have got them into Lilly Allen’s brother’s eighteenth for fuck’s sake?

They turned right off the lane into Martha’s Fruit Farm and tried looking for a space in the field full of cars. In the end they parked at the top near a ridge of trees where there was a sandpit.

Ruth, worried, said, ‘D’you think they’ll have raspberries?’

‘Will you shut up about raspberries.’ Vicky pulled her skirt off the back of her legs, which were covered in an imprint of the car’s upholstery.

‘I only mentioned them once.’

‘You mentioned them like about a hundred times,’ Vicky said, moving off between the rows of parked cars, the air heavy with the scent of fruit on the turn.

They straggled slowly down the field whose early summer ruts had now been baked hard by the sun. By the time they got to the weighing-in hut at the bottom, all three girls had linked arms, their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.

Tom stayed in the car with the door open and lit another joint, sucking on it slowly while watching a black Labrador play in the sandpit just beyond the bonnet of the car. Through the windscreen he could see Burwood in the distance, but there was no resonance for him in the view. The Hendersons moved down from London two years ago and he’d only lived there a couple of months before leaving for university. He’d felt more at home in Bolivia than he ever had in Burwood.

An elderly couple—fruit picking veterans—returned to their car, a purple Nissan parked next to Tom’s. Their determined faces were sweating under matching white sun hats with ‘Crete’ embroidered above the visors, and as they lined up their baskets of fruit on the roof of the car, he saw that they were still wearing the surgical gloves they’d bought with them to pick fruit in, now stained purple.

He finished the joint then got out of the car and, without bothering to lock it, followed the others down the field.

There was a crowd of people round the weighing-in shed and a woman inside was barking at them to get into a queue, but people were too hot and laden with fruit to comply.

As the crowd shuffled forward, broke up then reformed, Tom caught sight, briefly, of his old black and silver racing bike leaning against the side of the shed; the one he told his mum he’d sold to Grace last summer—only he never sold it to her, he gave it to her.

He remembered clearly riding it round to Grace’s house and Grace answering the door in a dressing gown, holding one of her sister Dixie’s dolls. Up until then he’d never realised Burwood even had a council estate. He’d rung the doorbell and while he waited, staring at a patch of wall next to the drainpipe where a lump of pebble-dash had fallen off, he’d decided that he was going to give Grace the bike.

Grace, in her dressing gown, stared at him.

He prompted her. ‘The bike?’

She carried on staring at him before switching her gaze to the bike. ‘The bike—shit. Sorry. Just a minute.’ She disappeared back indoors.

Too late, Tom realised that she was getting the forty pounds they’d talked about on the phone the day before.

‘Wait—’ he called out, wanting to follow her, but just then there was the slap of wet feet on pavement and Grace’s nine-year-old sister, Dixie, appeared round the side of the house leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her. She stood on the corner in a pink polka dot bikini with bows at the side, water glistening on her legs, watching him through a pair of goggles and wearing a smile that was missing two bottom teeth.

They took to each other immediately.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Tom.’ He held out his hand and Dixie shook it wetly in hers.

‘Yeah, but who are you?’

‘A friend of your sister’s.’

‘Like a boyfriend?’

‘No, just a friend.’

Dixie contemplated him. ‘I never saw you before.’ She paused. ‘I’m having a sleepover tonight.’

Before Tom had time to respond to this, Grace reappeared at the front door and Dixie ran off up the side passage and into the back garden again.