The Wicked Girls

Chapter Twenty-two

Amber stands no chance of snatching sleep before her shift begins, so she comes in to work early. She feels restless, uncertain, and wants to be among people, because people are the best way to stop you thinking. Amber never comes to Funnland as a visitor, and finds herself suddenly keen to experience the pump-pump-pump of music, the hyped-up laughter of strangers, the breathless whirl of light and movement, without thinking about the junction boxes and the pistons, the pulleys and the cranes and the smoke and mirrors that bring it all to life.

She comes in through the back gate. Jason Murphy is off, she notices; a thin, solemn black man she doesn’t recognise watches her as she swipes her card and opens her locker. She nods at him and receives a neutral nod – neither friendly nor unfriendly, nor curious nor bored – in return. She dumps her bag, but keeps her jacket on, emptying her keys and cash into the buttoned breast pocket.

She can hear the strains of ‘We Are Family’ coming from the waltzer, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ from the Terror Zone, ‘Echo Beach’ from the Splash Zone; her ear has become so attuned to the repetitive assault to the senses that she can hear each song individually, knows that each will be followed by ‘I Feel for You’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’. Somewhere out there, she knows that Vic and his mate Dave are doing their Sister Sledge dance together, their little bit of showbiz, all manly shoulder-leaning and jazz hands; a little bit of theatre that makes the punters laugh and feel like they’ve witnessed a moment of joyous improvisation. Improvisation that, if they hung around the same spot long enough, they would get to see at eleven minutes past the hour, every hour. In seventeen minutes’ time the students at the roller coaster queue will ‘spontaneously’ become Take That, patting their chests and pointing to their crotches with choreographed abandon.

Automatically, she runs her eye over the punch cards in the rack. Funnland still has a punch-card system, as well as the swipe-keys, so that Suzanne Oddie can tell if any of the staff have been sneaking in for a bit of fun without paying. Few cards have been punched yet: just the early-evening skeleton crew who circle the compound, emptying bins and picking up litter with long-handled tongs. Amber had to fight long and hard to get the tongs: before she did it, the cleaning was an onerous cycle of stoop and stand, stoop and stand, absenteeism through back strain a serious problem. She notices that Jackie has punched in already; wonders why her laziest colleague is suddenly keen. Starts worrying, again, about what she’s going to do about the budget.

Shit, she thinks. I’m not going to get a minute’s peace. If I’m not thinking about what happened this afternoon, I’m going to be worrying about that. I don’t see how I’m going to do it. Could I cut back everyone’s hours, so no one has to go? Christ. And then it would be unfair on everyone.

She realises that she’s been standing here for a full minute, staring at her locker door as though in a fugue, and that the security guard is staring at her, this time with curiosity in his gaze. Pull yourself, together, Amber. Come on.

She shakes her head impatiently and heads out into the park.

The rain has died off and the park smells of damp and doughnuts. Over the babel, beyond the howls from the rollercoaster, Amber can dimly hear the crash and drag of the sea. She walks and pauses, only half aware of the surging crowd, and considers her options. She has been in Whitmouth for years, but has never ridden its famous roller coaster. She was too poor to afford the entrance fee when she first arrived here, and lately familiarity has rendered her almost immune to its existence, beyond the need to scrape and scrub its surfaces clear of chewing-gum.

She shakes her head, like a horse under attack by a fly. It’s not work-time yet. She refuses to allow herself to think about work until her shift begins. It’s intruded enough on her day already and, as days go, anyone would say that it had been a bad one. It was a mistake, facing Jade, thinking she was ever going to get a resolution; she knows that. She sets out to the head of the queue.

The roller coaster is always staffed by teenagers and early-twenty-somethings, a crew employed on the basis of their looks. It’s Funnland’s most prominent attraction, and policy dictates that the showpiece ride should have the showpiece staff. They even dress differently from the rest of the park staff: jewel-like in wasp-yellow Bermuda shorts and skin-tight scarlet T-shirts with the ride’s EXXPLODE!! logo scrawled across the front. She knows them all, of course. Two are the offspring of her own staff and one, a girl called Helen, lives four doors down on Tennyson Way, and is on her way to Manchester Uni and the big wide world in the autumn.

Helen’s on the gate now. Undoes the staff barrier and lets Amber through. ‘Hi, Mrs Gordon,’ she says. ‘How are you?’

‘Good, thanks,’ lies Amber.

‘Is there something up?’ asks Helen with polite concern. Amber is always amused, the way this girl talks to adults as though they were teachers, in an era when even teachers don’t get talked to like teachers. ‘Do we need to suspend?’

‘No, no,’ says Amber. ‘Nothing like that. It just suddenly hit me that I’ve been working here six years and I’ve never once ridden this thing.’

‘Ooh,’ says Helen, and laughs. ‘Ooh, how funny. I rode it about six times a day, the first week I was here.’

‘Yes. Of course, I’m not here when it’s working, most of the time.’

‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I guess not. Anyway. Let’s sort that out.’

She waves a hand at the front boarding gate, where four people – the winners of the queuing system – stand proudly awaiting the next train. ‘Get yourself in the line for car one and you can get on the ride after next.’

Amber quails slightly at the thought of being at the front. Her natural comfort zone would be better served by having some other cars, rather than clear air, in front of her. But she knows she’s being honoured, and concedes. As she takes her place, she is rewarded with the silent, baleful scrutiny the British reserve for queue jumpers.

The train pulls in and the queuers close ranks, as though they expect her to push in. Amber stands back to preserve their blood pressure, turns away and surveys the park.

On the far side of the concourse, the staff gate opens and a knot of people steps through. She recognises one of them as Suzanne Oddie, and sees that she is surrounded by the deep blue and health-and-safety yellow of what can only be police uniforms. She doesn’t think much of it. There have been police in and out of the park since the murder, and there’s the odd copper in here every day, even in the quiet times. She moves to the front of the gate as a new wave of riders is let through from the main queue, sees a sea of disappointed faces as they catch sight of her standing there. There’s hardly ever just one single seat taken on a row. People like to ride in pairs: courage in numbers.

What’s Jade doing now? she wonders. Did she find our little tea as disturbing as I did? My God. I had no idea. All this time I’d thought she’d be like me: trained by fear, squashed by shame, ducking out of harm’s way, keeping her head down. And now I know that everything was different for her, I’ll never be able to forget it. I’ve let the genie out of the bottle. It won’t go back.

It’s not fair. It’s not bloody fair.

A train thunders overhead and her skin tingles with the change of air pressure. It’s been designed that way so that the screams from above will raise adrenalin levels. With three trains on the circuit, you hear this twice while you’re queuing, and, whatever your rational brain tells you, your lizard brain is primed, by the time the safety bars clamp down, to believe that it faces danger. For Amber, accustomed to waiting in the dark for the sound of approaching footsteps, to striving never to attract attention, it’s a disturbing sound. She wants to turn tail and flee. But her train is rumbling to a stop and the passengers behind her are bunching to board, and she knows it’s too late. As the riders before her detrain on to the far platform, she steps with wobbly ankles into the pod and takes her seat.

Shit, what am I doing? she asks herself. This is a crazy, stupid thing. It’s more like punishment than pleasure. But maybe that’s exactly why I’m doing it. I feel bad, so now I’m beating myself up. I’m doing what I was trained to do. After all, in a place like Blackdown Hills, the best they hoped for was that we’d own the blame and learn to take our punishment.

The harness comes down, clunks into place. Pin-down. The people next to her breathe, laugh and throw each other anticipation-filled looks. Amber grips the padded shoulder bars and closes her eyes. Gulps. I hate things like this. That’s the real reason I never go on them. Every other reason is just an excuse. Over and over in my life, I’ve felt like I was falling out of control. There’s no way I’d volunteer to feel like that for fun.

‘Hold tight, here we go,’ bellows the automated announcer, and the wheels lock into place on the track. Oh shit, thinks Amber. There’s nothing I can do to stop it now.

She remembers her first night at Blackdown Hills. Still screaming after the sentence, her throat hoarse but her voice carrying on unbidden. The shower, half cold, the ache of medicated soap, the empty, falling blackness. My mum. She wasn’t even there in court. They hate me. I am their disgrace. She remembers black night through the bars on the windows, the falling silence as she walked, late and damp and frightened, into the mess hall for the first time. Hard, speculating eyes turning to check out the notorious newcomer. Officer Hills pushing her forward by an arm, no sympathy in her demeanour.

They reach the crest of the first climb. There is nothing between her and the track, clear air before the plunge. The train creeps forward, gathers momentum and clunks violently to a halt, throwing her forward against the restraints. She is hanging face-down, a hundred feet of drop before her. She feels her stomach lurch. The woman next to her starts to cackle nervously.

Lying awake. It was at Blackdown Hills that she learned not to sleep. After lights-out was the feral time, when girl gangs stalked the corridors and misfits wept with fear. Bel Oldacre, awake in the dark, ready to claw her way through the walls as, night after night, she listened to the click and scritch of metal as people tried the lock on her barricaded door. Sometimes a muffled cry or the sound of a chase invaded the darkness. They knew who she was. Of course they did. How many twelve-year-olds who talked like the Queen were there in the country’s institutions?

I can’t go back there. It would kill me.

The train lets go. Her heart bounces off her spine and the woman next door lets out a howl of joy and terror. The drizzle hanging in the air is a million pinpricks. She realises that she has bared her teeth in fear. The track disappears in front of her; all she sees is emptiness and, impossibly far away but looming at ever-increasing velocity, the million stones of Whitmouth beach.

Amber screams.

She’s green and weak by the time they trundle into the station. Every limb turned to jelly. Her companions are laughing, savouring the endorphins, shouting brilliant-amazing-fuck-let’sgo-again at each other. And all she feels is sick and feeble. If anyone were to tell her that she had to go round once more, she would die, there on the spot, she knows it.

She wonders once again what Jade is doing. She had a deadline to meet, she knows that, but it’s approaching dusk now, so she must have filed, if she managed it. Is she thinking about me? Or has she just forgotten? Written it off as one of those things, and gone back to her ordered life? Her hands are shaking. Gradually, her hearing lets in more than the sound of the blood pumping in her ears, and she registers the opening strains of ‘Could It Be Magic’. It must be half-eight already.

If I sit down and have a coffee, she thinks, maybe I can find someone I know to chat to; reassure myself with the familiar. At least I won’t feel like this, trying to stay upright on legs that don’t want to hold me.

The crowd has cleared from the platform now, and she’s the only person left. She feels her way along the wall until she finds the stairs and staggers down, gripping tightly on to the rail.

Her route to the café takes her past the shooting arcade, the ghost train, the kids’ merry-go-round – still occupied, despite the hour – and the dodgems. She half expects to see Vic there, then remembers that he and Dave have swapped on to the waltzer tonight, for a change. Instead she runs into Suzanne Oddie, frowning as best she can through her botox as she peers around in search of someone. Standing a pace behind her are three police constables and another whose uniform places him higher up the food chain.

‘Ah!’ says Suzanne, spotting Amber. ‘You’ll know.’

Amber recognises the senior policeman. He was the one who came with her and Jackie – accompanied them, she thinks in police-speak, and smiles for the first time today – down to the station the night she found Hannah Hardy. He smiles and greets her by name. Suzanne looks surprised, then suspicious, then ploughs on.

‘Ms Gordon knows everyone,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘I’d noticed.’

‘Is there anyone in particular you were looking for?’ asks Amber.

‘Yes,’ says Suzanne. ‘Victor Cantrell. He’s meant to work on the dodgems. Would you recognise him?’

Amber feels once more as though she is falling.

3.30 p.m.

Jade crawls through the hole in the hedge and lands up in a patch of stinging nettles. Swears loudly, because she knows that Chloe will find a way to roll in them, however much she tries to beat them out of the way. She’s beginning to really, really hate this kid. She’s a walking damage magnet. And every time she falls over, that squealing wail starts up: a noise as annoying and invasive as a police siren, reverberating in her skull like a dentist’s drill. And now it’s going to be stinging nettles.

‘I told you we should’ve gone along the road,’ she snarls.

‘No you didn’t,’ snaps Bel. ‘It was you that said it was quicker this way. I asked if there was a footpath!’

It’s the dog days of summer and the ground is hard. All three of them are bruised and scratched from falls and climbs and brambles, and now Jade’s hands and knees are coming up in a white, leaky rash where she’s crawled on the nettles. Her mouth is parched; she can feel the dryness creeping down her throat, feels like her eyelids are lined with sandpaper. Her temper is rising to match Bel’s. Their brains boil with heat and resentment.

‘Come on,’ she snaps back. ‘Mind. There’s nettles.’

Bel pushes Chloe forward. They’ve learned, over the last hour, that she has to go in the middle everywhere. She’s too young and stupid to lead the way, and if they both go first she hangs back until someone has to crawl or climb or push their way back to get her. I’m never having children, Bel thinks. Not if there’s a chance they’ll turn out like this one. She looks at the purple face – the cheeks streaked, the chin a spongy mass of tears – and feels a surge of contempt. The kid reminds her of Miranda – spoiled, useless, favoured Miranda – and the contempt turns to rage. They always blame me. Every time anything goes wrong, they blame me. It’s not fair.

‘Don’t be so bloody pathetic,’ she says. ‘Go on.’

Chloe lost a shoe somewhere back in the mud at Proctor’s Pond, and her white socks are filthy. She squats and looks at the hole in the hedge, and starts to whimper again. Then she gets down on hands and knees and begins, slowly, to crawl. God, thinks Bel, she’s got a bum the size of an elephant. How can someone that small have such a big bum?

Experimentally, she gives the bum a shove with her foot. Chloe pops through the hole like a champagne cork; lands flat out, face down, in the nettle bed. There’s silence for a moment, as she takes in her situation, then the howling starts up. ‘Waaah. Waaaaaaaah. Wah-ooooooow!’

Jade puts her hands over her ears. I can’t stand this, she thinks. How come nobody ever puts a gag on her?

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’

Chloe’s face, hands and thighs are covered in welts. She stares down at her palms and starts to scream. They must be able to hear this all the way over at Banbury. Jade feels her eardrums begin to rattle. Grabs the child by the arm and hauls her upright. ‘Shut up,’ she shrieks, ‘or I’ll give you something to cry about!’

Jade’s the youngest in her family. Has spent many happy hours in the charge of resentful elder siblings, has never had to take charge of a younger one. She does what Tamara and Steph and Gary have all done to her many times to deal with tantrums: she whacks her across the cheek.

Chloe shuts up, double quick.

‘I’ll put a bloody gag on you if you start that again,’ Jade threatens. She doesn’t really understand why she’s in such a temper. Doesn’t know about dehydration and overheating and blood sugar; just knows that Chloe is a burden she never asked for and doesn’t want. ‘We’ll find some dock leaves,’ she tells her. ‘They’ll sort it out.’

‘I want to go home!’ wails Chloe. ‘I want my mum!’

Bel crawls through the hole and stands up. This afternoon seems to be going on for ever.