The Drying Rooms - Chapter Twelve
The Dare
Listen to the audio version of Chapter Twelve here
After being ‘taken out’ for the weekend, the moment of re-entry into G-Block was homesickness reactivated full blast.
She can still plug into the helplessness of it. Biting the inside of her cheeks as her parents’ car receded down the school drive and disappeared from sight. Re-entering the smell of the school; the raw floods inside her being replaced by an inexorable, dismal endurance.
Pushing through the glass-mesh swing doors that led into G-Block. Entering the dorm. The familiar beds. The familiar faces.
The crucial faces.
Friendship. Deep inmate friendship
And she remembers slap-bang-in-the-moment fun.
The zipwire was fun. The thrill of it! The danger of it! There was no safety net. It was way up, strung between high trees. Falling would have caused broken bones, or death. Despite the edges of the memory leaching into Cruel Matron’s face at the window, the zipwire was high speed, wind-rushing, wild abandon.
She remembers the fun of farts. Sonorous trombone farts, squeaky clarinet farts, the sudden pong and subsequent hilarity of SBD (silent-but-deadly) farts. She remembers belching competitions, breath-holding competitions, unblinking into each other’s eyes, face-contorting giggle-control competitions.
Helpless, pant-wetting giggling. On the sticky backing in an old photo album, there are two photos cut from a strip. It’s of her and M larking about in a photo-booth. She can feel the deliciousness of the moment. She can hear it. She guesses it was taken on a weekend out with M’s parents. She guesses they cut the strip of four photos in half. Two for her, two for M. Oh, how she loved giggling with M! She hasn’t seen M since school, but she contacted her about the photograph. M said it’s fine for it to be used. M said it was lovely to see their ‘silly happiness’. That’s just what it felt like. ‘Silly’ in the mouths of grown-ups is often used for admonishing children – ‘Don’t be so silly!’ — but for children, the silly happiness of friendship can be life at its best.
But those intense, 24-hour a day friendships were made of much more than fun and silliness. The quality of camaraderie still lingers in her memory. They muddled their way through the parentless realm on G-Block, sharing fear, sharing their aloneness, sharing an instinctive resistance to total subjugation.
She remembers the defiance and thrill of dares. Often to do with food. Raiding the tuck cupboard when Cruel Matron forgot to lock it. Really? Yes, really: she can see her hand frantically rummaging in a box of liquorice sticks.
And she remembers the excitement of midnight feasts. Knocking her fist against her head twelve times to ensure she would wake up.
In Maudie, her children’s novel, the midnight feast scene is pure Enid Blyton.
“It worked!” whispered Maudie, addressing the other four beds in the dorm. “It’s exactly midnight!” Maudie was proud of herself. She had taught the others her human alarm clock technique and it had worked.
“Well, it didn’t work for Susan,” whispered Buzz.
Stifled giggles erupted from all the beds, except for Susan’s.
Susan was still fast asleep, with Blue Rabbit’s ear in her mouth.
In reality it was never Enid Blyton. She has tricked herself into a trope memory. She doesn’t remember midnight feasts as pure excitement. That’s wrong. It’s too glib. Because every time she embarks on this paragraph, another feeling creeps in — something a bit desolate, dispiriting, a bit tired, and fearful.
She remembers the shivery laying out of spoils on moonlit floorboards: sherbet fountains, custard creams, disappointing wine gums.
The groggy tang of twiglets.
The hard shininess of aniseed balls the size of peas.
The muffled floor-rolling hysteria at cheeks deformed by the bulge of gobstoppers.
The whispering of love-heart messages before they dissolved on tongues.
But, always present, the possibility of being caught. A footfall in the corridor. Prickles of fear rushing through her body. The dorm holding its breath. Then, relief. Phew! False alarm. The coast is clear.
In the dormitory overlooking the kale field, the dares got bolder. The dares included shoplifting in Woolworths in Miseryfield, the local town. And the dares began to involve boys. Missions beyond the glass-mesh doors of G-Block.
She was in thrall to those older girls in the kale field dorm. She tried confidently to claim cool-kid membership for herself but a part of her hovered unctuously on the edge, exposing the neediness of her status in the group: she was the squit. And, of course, her bed-wetting was her Achilles Heel, ripe for piercing.
Now she feels a time-warp tender protectiveness for the girls who had this powerful hold over her. Now, she sees them for what they were: children. Just like her.
She has a vision. A crack squad of old women bursting on to G-block, overpowering Cruel Matron, locking her in the stone-sink surgery, before triumphantly marching — not creeping! — down the striplight corridor; a buoyant marching, breaking the fearful silence after lights out. The old women burst into the dorm overlooking the kale field. Time stops. The girls in the dorm freeze, like musical statues. All eyes on the door, on their rescuers from the Future.
She had the same feeling of squitness, of needy hovering, when she was eighteen and in love with a boy who was casually, then coldly, not in love with her. It was a feeling of exclusion. She longed to be included, to be liked, especially by his Bohemian writer mother who was everything she wanted to be.
Something is happening. A thread is loosening. She works on easing it free from the tightly-packed cluster of knots inside her. It is leading her back to the hay parties: sunshine, a haystack, a field, jumping. Cruel Matron joining in. Smiling. Her weathered bare legs jumping off the haystacks with them. An unpredictable reprieve from the ur-bully. A moment of inclusion. A moment of being liked. And there are flashes of almost home-like intimacy. The intimacy of Cruel Matron’s face being the truly known face. The intimacy of Cruel Matron’s authority over her small, naked body. The intimacy of her succour being all that was available in times of sickness.
Cruel Matron, our proxy mother, was not Miss Trunchball. Cruel Matron, with her twinkly eyes was mercurial — the giver of scraps of fun and even kindness.
But there was nothing kind about the punishment Cruel Matron dispensed for the dare that still looms as an agony of regret and loss.
Oh. There’s that gentle familiar tug! It’s you, little one. I thought you’d gone. Yes, all right, I know. You want to come with me. We can retrace the dare together. If we put it in Maudie, it will be a nail-biting chapter, ending on a cliffhanger. In real life it was shit.
I still wish I hadn’t done that dare.
Come, let’s do it together, darling. Sorry, I don’t have the energy to give it pace. It went like this. Hold my hand. This is what we have to do. A few hours after lights out, we have to leave G-Block. Well, you know the way –
along the striplight corridor past Cruel Matron’s door avoid the creaky floorboard out the glass-mesh doors careful don’t let them bang! tiptoe along the corridor past the common room past the buzz of the ice-cream freezer turn right into the next empty corridor past the empty birthday dining room into the dark empty hall where I wet my pants in front of the music master and instead of going into the main dining room we take the sweeping wooden staircase on our left up to B-Block the boys’ dorms
At the top is a creaky dimly lit corridor. Do you see how everything is older and darker here, including the floorboards and the light bulbs? Because this is in the old, original building, and it smells of hidden spaces and history.
We go past the sitting room where the boys’ matron, Kind Matron, gouged out my verruca and …
And what? Hang on a minute. Just pause with me.
I can’t remember!
What was the dare exactly? Was it just to enter a boys’ dormitory? Yes, maybe, that was it – just to ease open a dormitory door and glimpse eight beds in the thin- curtained moonlight – eight little boys sleeping peacefully in striped flannel pyjamas.
No, that wasn’t it. What about the washrooms on G-block? Oh God! A limbic rush in the heart and gut. Then nothing. A deadness.
I’m sorry, little one, you’re so patient, so trusting … but this is no good. I have no enthusiasm for it.
Let’s just leave this sleeping boys’ dormitory that I may or may not have entered; leave it and go straight back. I can’t be bothered to go over the route. You know it so well now. I’ve lost my energy. Sometimes this thing is just grim, you know. It’s just grim. So, come on, let’s go back the way we came, down the stairs, across the hall, along the corridors, through the glass-mesh swing doors and down the cold stone stairs into the girls’ washrooms and … yes! I’m getting to the point!
We got caught. That’s the point. The snap of a switch. Light flooding the washrooms. Cruel Matron in the doorway.
I loved this chapter. The variations of pace, tone, inward, outward detail work so well and kept me emotionally involved and anxious to find out what happens next. I particularly like the way you describe the almost tangible process of unpicking memories and then delving into them so honestly. I also always like the linking of your child self to your adult/present self.
Like others I loved this chapter and I think it worked well to explore boarding school tropes by comparing the Maudie novel (where the children will triumph over adversity) to the reality - the children were powerless inevitably damaged. Bravo once again Emma.