Ooh, I'm on a roll today....

Whoever coined that maxim about school providing the best years of one’s life must have been either an habitual truant or a character in a particularly fanciful Enid Blyton novel.  Older, allegedly wiser people were fond of telling me that once I left to take my precarious steps into the ‘big bad world,’ I would pine for the womb-like security of Capewell High. 

Au contraire: I found school a thousand times tougher – not because of the work so much as the bullying and derision meted out by back-stabbing girls and didactic, small-minded teachers.

Tina Skidmarks’ hate campaign gathered merciless pace following the humiliating Curtis bombshell. 

It’s odd, thinking and writing about it now, how Tina was the self-elected mouthpiece – spokesbitch, if you like – for our year.  OK, I had been a silly cow, but why was it taken as read that the job of punishing me fell to Tina?  I told a tall story, which at the end of the day harmed nobody but myself, so why did I have to fear how Tina might retaliate?  Why was she afflicted by this compulsion to taunt me on a daily basis?

And why am I sitting here making these earnest attempts to analyse her behaviour?  She was a bully – pure and simple.  Her modus operandi was subtly different to Darren Fisher’s, but as far as I am concerned they belong on the same dunghill: the one on which I mentally throw people who bring unnecessary unpleasantness to my life.

‘I really hope she won’t be at this reunion next week,’ I groaned, all sluggish and vulnerable after too many vodkas in my flat. 

I had cooked my special spaghetti bolognaise for Nadine and Heather to celebrate the new series of Pop Idol – the only programme capable of keeping us in on a Saturday night.  After draining a bottle of Australian red – on which we nearly choked when a contestant hilariously murdered Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger – we were halfway down the Smirnoff. 

It was Heather’s idea to whip the yearbook out – ‘for a giggle’ – thus I was now pointing a wavery finger at Tina’s cruel face.

‘Jeez,’ grimaced Heather, ‘she looks a bit fearsome.’

‘She was, mate.  Believe me, her bite was worse than her bark.’

‘She’s got psycho eyes!’

‘That was her Anne Robinson death stare.  Used to chill me to the bone, I can tell you.’

At this, Heather erupted into inebriated cackles, elbowing me and going ‘You are the weakest link – goodbye!’ in mock sombre tones.  ‘That’s good, that is, Zo – Anne Robinson death stare!  Remind me to use that one in future.’

She laughs at anything when she’s drunk, does our Heath.

‘In some lessons,’ I reminisced, chillingly, ‘she’d just sit there giving me the evil eye for a whole hour.’

‘What a bitch!’

‘Ever since then, you know, I’ve hated it when people stare at me.  It makes me so self-conscious.  You know when you can feel somebody’s eyes on you even when you look away?  Ugh, gives me the creeps!’

Discussing Tina with contemporary friends, having a laugh over a few shots like this, trivialised her and her silly gang.  I guess growing up is all about putting historical woes into perspective, though one should never underestimate the effects of bullying.  It can tear you apart.  My heart goes out to any youngster currently living through the torment I endured for far too long. 

‘What you need to do,’ Nadine jerked her shot glass at me to make the point, ‘if she does turn up on Friday, is stroll in there with this I’m gorgeous attitude, show her how far you’ve come, make her see she can’t push you in the showers anymore.  You’re the one in control now, babe!’

‘I’d love to feel like that.  Oi, Jerry!’   I swatted the cat’s tail away from the vod he was threatening to topple.  ‘Trouble is, I’ve got visions of taking one look at her and cowering off into the loos.’

‘Now don’t you get losing your nerve about this reunion!’

‘I dunno though, Nads, I’ve never been to one before.  What if I automatically revert back to my old teenage persona?  I used to be terrified of her then.’

‘Then don’t be now.  You must be self-confident, invincible.’

Nadine was right.  Tina had nothing to taunt me about now.  Unlike those days when it became almost a game, guessing what facet of my repellent appearance or character she was going to zero in on that day; what line would reduce her flunkies to peals of helpless mirth.

When she was in one of her Let’s Have A Go At Zoe moods, Tina would nudge whatever poor sod happened to be sitting next to her and snarl something like, ‘You know what – I really, really hate her.’  She rarely used my name in these exchanges – the ‘her’ epithet had the same contemptuous effect as Mrs Slattery spitting out my full name in PE lessons – but I knew by the penetrating elevation of her voice that she was referring to me.

If people hate me nowadays, I like to think I’m sufficiently mature and thick-skinned to shrug, consider it their problem, but Tina had this way of making you feel that to be despised by her was to render you unfit to be alive.

‘Why’s that?’ her deskmate always dim-wittedly asked, clearly dizzy with glory that the great Tina Skidmore was condescending not only to speak to them but also enlist them in her anti-Zoe league.

I dreaded hearing her reasoning, which could be anything from, ‘Her’s a fat ugly bitch who makes up stories,’ to something absolutely lame like ‘her’s got dandruff, the scratty little tramp,’ followed by a chanting chorus of ‘Danny, Danny, Danny,’ the nickname for those with scalps Head & Shoulders never quite reached.

I waited for one of these girls – they usually were girls – to protest, ‘Now hang on, you’re being a bit mean there, I like Zoe,’ but of course it never happened.  Nobody contradicted Tina Skidmore if they knew what was good for them.  I didn’t blame them actually; in their position, I’d have giggled along like a compliant idiot too.

Also, they had to make the most of their role as her new best mate, knowing full well that tomorrow she’d be snubbing them again.

In retrospect, I’m glad Tina detested me.  The way she played with people made being her friend far more precarious, if anything. 

Although Hayley and Jodie remained her constant back-up band, she sporadically turned them into a quartet by appointing some other girl to be It for the day. 

It was like a tombola, this selection of a temporary crony with whom to sit, link arms, share crisps and bitch about me until half-past three.  Come nine next morning, this poor deluded bint would march buoyantly into school, greet Tina like the friend she now took her for – and be left looking like a total prawn when Tina made no reply other than a brief, curious frown which said, ‘Who is this person and how dare she speak to me?’  At least I permanently knew where I stood with her.

One day, Tina flounced in and declared, ‘Me and Del went up Baggeridge Park on his Honda last night and did it.’  She was aged all of fourteen.  ‘Bet you dunno what that means do yer, Zoe?  Doing it?  ’Cos you’re tight, ain’t yer?  A tight little virgin, pure as the driven snow!  Am I embarrassing you?’

‘No,’ I lied, flushing.

‘Why’ve you gone all red then?  Have I shocked you, diddums?’

‘No!  I couldn’t give a shit what you do.’

Despite feigning a woman-of-the-world air, I was shocked.  I was as naïve as a six-year-old compared to Tina.  To me, sex was still a subject to be giggled about in a lavatorial, Kenny Everett sort of way.  The idea of actually partaking made me rather squeamish. 

 ‘You’re too fat to shag anyhow.  Not like me.  Delroy says I’ve got a body like Demi Moore!  Whereas a bloke’d bang his head on the ceiling trying to climb on top of yow!’

And then Karl surprised everyone by snapping, ‘Belt up, will you, Tina!  Leave the girl alone.’

The world seemed to stop.  I looked across at Karl with amazement and love, though he didn’t return my gaze.  I sensed this was a turning point; another Darren Fisher Moment.  Tina was clearly so stunned to be on the receiving end of an order for once that she actually complied with it.  Not that she stayed belted up for very long.

As I predicted, ‘Curtis’ remained a wonder for slightly more than the proverbial nine days. 

When fifth and sixth formers knew your name, it usually meant:

a) You were a troublemaker, like Tina Skidmore.

b) A troublemaker, like Tina Skidmore, had spread malicious whispers about you.

She wasted no time regaling her upper-school mates about my pretend boyfriend, and throughout the summer term I could barely show my face anywhere around school without being hailed by heckles and mocking gawps.  ‘That’s the girl,’ I could hear them mutter, in the lunch queue; the toilets; the corridors.

Her popularity soared – every schoolkid loves a scandalmonger – whilst mine plummeted to new abysses.  The other girls ostracised me – partly by decree from Tina, but partly because they felt cheated.  I had conned them with my cock-and-bull romance.  It was a horrible sensation, not being trusted, but I deserved it really.

Thank goodness for the constancy of my loyal band of friends: Janine, Claudette, Andrea – and food. 

Ah yes, food: my ally, lover, confidant – and enemy. 

When girls speak of suffering eating disorders as vulnerable teenagers, they generally refer to anorexia or bulimia.  I thought these conditions existed only in scaremongery magazine articles until I saw some of my peers succumb.  The ones who weighed about six stone, but felt they would only know happiness once they had shed another two; the ones who wedged diet books between their Shakespeare study guides, knew precisely how many calories were in everything edible, spent each break and lunch hour in the loos, barfing up the apples and yogurt they lived on, and subsequently took up chain-smoking to suppress their already gnat-sized appetites.

But what I had was a kind of eating disorder too.  I voraciously overate – only, unlike the bulimics, I omitted the throwing up section from this dietary ballet. 

That canteen must have made thousands out of Janine and me over the years.  We were by far the best customers of its nutrition-free snack gems.  As long as their profits were healthy, what did those dinnerladies care if our bodies were the exact opposite?

I was polishing off two burgers a day by now (yeuch – that’s virtually a cow a week!), usually accompanied by mounds of vinegar-steeped chips, and my chocolate cornflake cake fix was up to a monstrous four a day.

I was enmeshed in a vicious circle of comfort eating.  The more I ate, the grosser grew my stomach; the pimplier my complexion; the stringier my hair; the more brutal the mockery; the fiercer my self-hatred. 

The fiercer my self-hatred, the more insistent grew my need for comfort.

And what did I do when I needed comfort?  I ate!

I was grotesque.  I bulged out of my uniform: popping buttons and splitting seams like David Banner during his livid mutation into the Incredible Hulk.  At fourteen, I was a DD cup – something I’d give my eyeteeth to be nowadays.  I was a virgin with the body of a woman who’d given birth to eighteen kids.

My beloved home economics – which was not the housewifely little cookery class my mom imagined – started to feature one or two diet-themed lectures.  I suspect this was because Mrs Longman felt the time was overdue for redressing the profusion of Mavis Cruet lookalikes blobbing through her classroom.

‘You ought to be eating about five pieces of fruit and veg each day,’ she advocated.  I was doing well if I managed that in a week – and then only if I had extra onions on my hot dog.

Illogically, though, the more educated I became, the more obnoxiously I punished my abhorrent body.  I knew all this fried trash was making me fat and nauseous – so I gorged on it because I hated myself.

Not as much as I hated school, though.

When that bell shrieked at half-past three of a Friday, I was cock-a-hoop, euphoric, turning cartwheels down the corridors (in my head, at least), and I adored Saturdays.  Bacon butties in bed, afternoons spent mooching round Merry Hill, then accompanying Dad to fetch the fish and chips for tea.  Bliss!

The Sunday, post-Bullseye lull was when the blues set in with a vengeance.  It was identical every week: Mom called Dad and me in for dinner the minute Jim Bowen said ‘Let’s have a look at what you could have won’ (she couldn’t stand Jim, and pointedly secreted herself in the kitchen with the Antiques Roadshow on while she toiled over the gravy), then I dawdled over my roast beef to delay my pre-Monday toilet of bag-packing, alarm-setting and last-minute homework. 

‘I’ve got a school phobia, Mom,’ I once bleated as I moodily slung stationery and French books into my ruck-sack.  A gallows-bound prisoner could scarcely have been less enthusiastic about their destination.  ‘I can’t go in tomorrow.’

‘Don’t be silly, sweetheart, there’s no such thing.’

‘There is.  It makes me shake – look! – and brings me out in spots.  Honest, Mom!’

‘Nice try!’

A nicer try did hoodwink my dear mother, however.

One Sunday in early June 1989, I drooped into bed, flicked off my light and was engulfed by what at that little age was the nearest thing to despair I had ever known.

‘I can’t face school tomorrow,’ I snivelled into my pillow.  There was no particular reason for this.  No impending maths test.  No preordained scrap with Tina.  I had simply had enough of school.  I wished I could leave straight away – but I had only just selected my GCSE options, the upshot of which was that a further four slow, wretched, gruelling years divided me from the delicious day I could call myself a ‘former Capewell pupil.’

I decided – with world-owes-me-a-living, moody schoolgirl rationale – that I had earned myself a sickie. 

It wasn’t as though I was in the position where I might lose a day’s pay.  I was fond of illogically bemoaning the wageless status of a long-suffering schoolgirl, particularly when Dad launched into a moanathon about his job, at the Goodyear tyre factory in Wolverhampton.

‘At least you get a salary every month,’ I stropped, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are!  Those teachers ought to pay us to go to school!  We certainly suffer enough.’

These sulks provoked heartless responses of the ‘Put a sock in it, eh, our kid’ or ‘Bring on the violins’ variety – which in turn provoked hard-done-by wails of the ‘You don’t understand’ variety.

I deserved a day in bed!  But why simply feign an ailment when, darling, one could truly suffer for one’s art?  I thought of Claudette and her method acting techniques.  ‘I’ve got a sore throat, Mom,’ delivered in a waifish whimper, fingers daintily cupped around my neck for added pathos, would hardly convince and was in fact liable to provoke my mother into employing even greater force than usually necessary to haul me out of bed and into my uniform.

So I dreamed up the artful (for me) yet cringeworthy ruse of falling asleep with my mouth wide open, to lend an authentic dryness to my Black Country vowels.

And it worked!  After a few bites to adjust my sore jaws into a comfortable shut position upon waking, I uttered an experimental ‘Good morning’ to my mirror, and it came out pleasingly guttural.  Yes!  What a clever little hoaxer I was.

When I repeated this greeting as Mom brought my tea and Coco Pops in, she rewarded my Bafta-hungry performance with a wrinkled brow and an ‘Ooh, you don’t half sound rough.  Do you think you’d better stay home today?’

‘Maybe,’ I croaked, with a vague, if-you-insist shrug of my fat shoulders.

I was being careful here.  Too keen an assent might make the hoax look obvious; however, to protest, imply that being deprived of my beloved school would pain me more than the laryngitis, could result in retraction of the offer.

Mom clucked and fussed and force-fed me linctus.  For the first hour at least, my throat genuinely did feel like a sandpaper cavern.  Tiny prices to pay, though, for the privilege of a day of sloth while all those other suckers were reciting French verbs or memorising the periodic table.

‘You’ll be all right with me out all day, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’  Ooh, it was great now Mom worked!  It meant on sick days and holidays, the house was mine.  Mine to roam; read all the books; sprawl across the sofa (with my feet up on the seat – an act so frowned upon by my parents, I half expected lightning to strike the first time I clandestinely attempted it); ransack the fridge; pee with the door open.

‘Give me a ring at the shop if you need anything.’

‘Mmm.’  Just go will you, Mother!

‘Now just because you’re not very well doesn’t mean you should neglect your swotting.  You’ll do some homework, won’t you?’

‘Sure, Mom.’

Did I heck! 

That telly was on before her little Nova had chugged into second gear.  I spent the day in bed, munching crisps and flicking between the lunchtime instalments of Neighbours and its new ITV rival for the low-budget, high-drama Australian soap crown, Home and Away, contemplating which one I preferred.  (It was a pretty close call, but I have to say Neighbours had the edge – due in a large part to the presence of Jason Donovan.) 

Once or twice, that icy guilt nugget of old threatened to spoil my glorious day by putting in an appearance.  Rising up through my abdomen like a bile-flavoured lolly, until I defiantly crushed it with an avalanche of pop and crisps.

It wasn’t fair.  Why should I be saddled with a conscience when Tina bloody Skidmore prospered merrily enough without one?  That girl was the reason I could no longer bear school, so why should I be made to feel guilty for having the sickie to which I believed she had driven me, while she went around bullying kids remorseless?

My trouble now was that the more time I had off, the more I wanted.  The ‘lady of leisure’ lifestyle was an addictive one.  Come Monday night, the ‘I can’t go in tomorrow’ Sunday despair was back.  So I once again fell asleep with gob agape and once again woke up husky.

I could do this every day, I thought, glugging tea and leaning luxuriously against my puffed-up pillow after managing to wangle Tuesday off also.  I could feign sore throats every morning for the next four years, and never have to set foot inside that evil school again.

‘Some visitors for you, love.’  Mom, still in her Argos livery, opened my door to admit Janine, Andie and Claudette around teatime.

‘Hiya!’  In my joy at seeing them, I forgot to wheeze.

‘That throat’s sounding a lot better, isn’t it?  You’ll be fit enough to go back tomorrow.’

Bugger!

‘Yes, Mom,’ I answered with apparent buoyancy but throwing a conspiratorial grimace at my mates as she slid out of the room.

‘So how’s school been then?’

‘Shite, as usual,’ Janine huffed, plonking herself on the bed, ‘you ain’t missed nothing.’

‘Good.’

Claudette narrowed her eyes at me with amused suspicion.

‘Are you really ill, Zo?’

‘I’m at death’s door, Claud.’  I squeezed my neck and made exaggerated gagging sounds.

‘Zoe Taylor, have you been wagging?’

‘Ssh – don’t let Mom hear!  I’m sick to death of that place.  Everyone does it anyway.’

‘I know,’ moped Claudette.  ‘Wish I could bunk off.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

Janine smiled naughtily.

‘Hey, why don’t we all do it?’

‘Yeah, tomorrow!’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Why not?’

‘Yeah!  We’ll put our uniforms on and go off in the morning…’

‘…meet on the corner like we normally do, but instead of going to school, we’ll…’

‘…spend the day up Baggeridge Park, in the sun.  We’ll sunbathe  - it’s gunna be hot tomorrow, you know – and read magazines and do each other’s hair…’

‘…and have a picnic!  Tek plenty of sarnies and crisps and sweets.’

‘Yeah!  Oh, we’m gunna ’ave the best day of our lives!’

It is possibly the most wayward, devious scheme I have ever had a part in devising.  Mine is not a criminal mind.  The four of us were not Bad Girls.  Ours was not the kind of government-statistic truancy that constituted the first step on a rocky road to glue-sniffing, drug-taking and gymslip pregnancy.  We were just pathetically jaded teenagers playing at being rebellious.  This would be our sole foray into Getting Into Trouble territory. 

The fact that we didn’t imagine the simultaneous absence of four best friends might arouse teacher suspicion spoke volumes about our naivety.

I remember that day, The Day We Bunked Off, so distinctly.  The air when I awoke smelled hot and expectant, calling to mind the West Side Story number Something’s Coming.  (The previous autumn, Claudette was in the school production of this musical, which I went to see three nights running in a display of posse loyalty, hence my familiarity with its libretto.)

I went about my routine: breakfasting; catlicking; dressing without the aid of a mirror; treating my limp duvet to a lacklustre shake (my idea of ‘making the bed’), only everything had a Different feel to it.  I might have been about to commit a murder on that suburban morning, or run away from home, or in some other way mirror one of those soap opera characters who ‘led double lives.’

The four of us were curiously mute as we convened on ‘the corner’ (our habitual meeting place, the junction where Capewell Road met Gospel End Road) and marched to the park with ‘I’m bricking it but it’s too late to back out now’ military decisiveness.  After so deliciously planning this assignation, it now seemed as though our respective consciences had amalgamated to form not an iceberg but a giant cat that had got our tongues.  But we possessed too much pride to admit this to one other.

It was a scorching morning, the joyous June sunshine already lending the Sedgley fields and hedgerows an aesthetic gleam.  Our collective mood lightened drastically the minute we felt grass and daises, as opposed to pavement, beneath our sandalled feet.  The swarming towns of Dudley and Wolverhampton flanked Baggeridge Country Park, yet anything urban could have been a million miles away from this pastoral expanse. 

There is something liberating about the countryside.  Whenever I’m in it, I harbour feral urges to run barefoot through meadows with my hair sailing in the breeze.  I’m exactly the same with beaches. 

We all felt liberated now.  And naughty.  This park, developed in the early 80s on a disused colliery site, was the scene of many a petty misdemeanour (including numerous cherry-poppings – not just Tina’s).  We were merely maintaining local traditions.

For the first hour – or ‘first period,’ in timetable-speak – we lay on our blazers, enjoying the baking rays on our chalky legs.

‘Maths is just starting,’ I observed lazily, squinting at the smiley ten-past-ten position of my watch hands.  My skin and brain were already melting as though waxen.  It would be cruel, I told myself, to be incarcerated in school on such a day.

‘And we’re not there to join in the fun – damn!’ said Claudette sarcastically.

 ‘This is idyllic,’ breathed Andie, our resident romantic and fount of polysyllables.  Id-yll-ic – I’d have to store that one in my mental dictionary of words to drop into essays and cerebral conversation.  ‘I’m going to write a poem about this experience.’  She reached into her canvas bag, pulled out a notebook and silver pen and sat there, all ethereal and rustic, composing in complete silence for the next two hours.

In fact, we all spent that morning in manners befitting of our respective characters and interests. 

Claudette practised her ballet kicks and stretches, a handy tree trunk serving as a makeshift barre. 

Janine brought her friendship braid-making kit and wove us a woolly bracelet each, in lurid colour combinations of our choice. 

I read magazines and ate all the crisps.

After lunch (sausage rolls, jam tarts and limeade purchased earlier from Doug’s Mini Mart), Andie recited the poem in her little reedy voice, with a typical faraway look in her gold-green eyes.

‘I shall write this out for each of you.  So when we’re old ladies, dribbling into our cocoa, we can look back and remember this moment.’

My copy of this ode will not, regrettably, make it with me to old lady-hood – although it did stay with me for ten years, until I mislaid it whilst moving house.  I can’t recall a word now, save for its title, which was the rather inventive Time Off For Good Behaviour.

I still have Janine’s braid, though haven’t worn it since I ceased to be a student and thus ceased being able to wear grungy accessories with any credibility.  These days, the green and red thread coils meekly in the bottom of my jewellery box, like an anorexic worm amid a pool of trinkets.  But it didn’t leave my wrist through my latter school years; that era when friendship bracelets were ties which couldn't be broken.

‘Read us the stars then, our Zo.’  Janine rolled on to her cushiony belly after presenting us with these customised cords.  ‘Let’s see if we’m all gunna meet rich men.’

I flicked to the Jackie horoscope column, which we scanned raptly each week then pooh-poohed the week after when its euphoric predictions proved wide of the mark.

‘Taurus – ooh, Janine, on Sunday help arrives from an unexpected source.  Your lucky colour is yellow, your lucky number – ’

‘All right, girlssh.  Having fun, are we?’

As one, we yelped and recoiled like eels as first the yobby voice startled us and then, to our horror, its fag-smoking, ale-swigging owner plonked himself down beside us. 

For four hours, only we had existed; private, invulnerable.  We actually forgot we were in a public place; that all kinds of oddballs could at any moment gatecrash our little sylvan party. 

This guy was the vilest kind of gatecrasher.  A Stranger – as in Say No To Strangers, a slogan drummed into us since reception class but never hitherto put into practice in our cotton wool-wrapped worlds.  To be honest, I hadn’t been convinced such characters existed outside public information films which uniformly depicted them as donkey jacket-clad Dennis Waterman lookalikes who pulled up in Cortinas and offered to show you their Hornby train sets. 

But we weren’t four years old anymore, and I absolutely dreaded to think what this creature intended showing us.

Our Stranger had the classic ‘oddball’ physique: extremely tall – six foot four at least – and weedy, with long, orang-utany arms and the most angular features I had ever seen.  His face could have been carved from granite and was capped by black hair greased with so much Brylcreem, you could have fried chips on his head.  He wore a stain-encrusted Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt, and the sallow hands with which he alternately smoked and swigged were branded with ‘LOVE’ and ‘PEACE’: one blue letter tattooed on each knuckle.

If my description seems rather thorough, it’s because at that moment a horrifying scene flashed into my head where a kind-faced policeman asked me to ‘help us draw up a photofit of the man who attacked you, Miss,’ so I wanted to commit his features to memory.  I’d been watching too much Crimewatch.

‘Relax, girlssh, I’m not a copper,’ he slurred, seeing and deliberately misconstruing our panicked expressions, ‘I won’t snitch on you for playing hooky.  In fact, I like wenches who live on the wild side.  I reckon us lot could have some real fun together.’

‘We’ve got to get going actually.’  I jerked myself to my feet, resigned to the fact that any escape would have to be initiated by me.  I loved my mates dearly, but they had this irksome tendency to sit back – literally, in this case – and let me play Mother.

‘Don’t be such a killjoy.’  He wagged his brown ale bottle at me in a mock teachery fashion.  ‘Your friendssh would like to stay, wouldn’t you?  Bet you’d like to share a little drinky with me, eh blondie?’

He lunged at Andrea, who happened to be closest to him, and gripped her in a terrifying hug.  At least it made her move.

‘Gerroff!’  She hurled his elastic arms away with a strength I, and probably she, didn’t know she possessed, and then we all legged it, leaving our gangly sex fiend cursing unintelligibly to the daisies. 

‘Let’s go to my house,’ I panted, ‘it’s empty.  Mom and Dad are both out at work.’

‘Right-o, Zo.’

Running there was no mean feat.  Claudette was lithe, but the rest of us required hospital treatment after running for a bus.  We didn’t dare slacken or turn round, though.  We just carried on heaving our jaded, shapeless bodies through the infinite streets between Baggeridge Park and the Taylor front door.  My heart pummelled against my chest as though demanding to be set free, and I was so breathless I sounded more like the pervert.

In retrospect, I doubt he followed us – or progressed very far if he tried to – but we took no chances.  I was convinced we were about to be raped and mutilated, our bodies thereafter consigned to hell by a priest as punishment for not going to school.

We all collapsed against the nearest solid object – Mom’s car – panting frantically, our paltry energy reserves spent.

Only when I regained my breath did it register that the Nova ought not to be outside our house at all.  Its customary position at quarter-to-two on a Wednesday afternoon was in a car park in Dudley, where it waited devotedly for its owner to finish work.  So what was my mother doing home?

The front door whipped open before I could process these thoughts or voice them to the others.  My mom’s kindly features had turned all purple and ugly, like an angry damson.  (There I go again – even in distress and disgrace, food was never far from my mind!)

‘So there you are!  I’ve been worried sick about you, my girl.  Your teacher phoned me at the shop to tell me none of you had turned up this morning.  My boss had to send me home because I was so bloody frantic wondering where the hell you’d got to.’

When Val Taylor swears, things are not good.  To this day, she only resorts to profanities in emergencies.

‘I’m sorry,’ I squeaked.  Never mind a cat – a mouse had got my tongue now!

She didn’t acknowledge the apology, but nodded coldly over my head to the cowering girls.

‘I think you three had better go home.  Your mothers’ll be going out of their minds too, I expect.’

‘See you tomorrow, mate.’  They dissolved away and I followed Mom into the house, trembling. 

‘I’m sorry,’ I reiterated, and touched her arm: a beseeching, childlike gesture that rather than melting her marble heart, aggravated her even more.  She shrugged me off with such force my whole arm stung.

‘Ow!’  I yelped, childishly indignant.

I wanted to screech at her that I was traumatised, having just escaped from a pervert.  Didn’t the stupid woman notice I was scarlet and panting?  Didn’t she feel the smallest smidgen of sympathy or curiosity?  Probably not.  Certainly no on the sympathy count.  So I didn’t screech.  To do so would only provide Mom with a cue for a lecture on how I was a wicked child and deserved my near-rape experience.

‘You should be damn well sorry!  What do you think you’re playing at, skipping school?  You’re at a very important stage in your education.  Don’t you want to pass your GCSEs?  Are these girls a bad influence on you?’

‘No!’

‘Because if they are, I shall stop you seeing them.  You never used to be like this, Zoe.’

‘Today was my idea, honest!’

‘Was it now?  That makes it worse then.’

‘I can’t win, can I?’

‘Let’s see what your father has to say about this when he gets home!’

She set my teeth on edge when she said ‘your father,’ in that formal, Dad-and-I-are-ganging-up-on-you tone.  It was another thing she only did when she was irate, and it never failed to rouse my petulant, sarcastic side.

‘You’re not going to tell him, are you?’

‘I certainly am, though I haven’t yet.  I didn’t want to burden him at work – no point the both of us being worried to death about you all day.’

‘Then why worry him now?  I’m home now, aren’t I?  I won’t do it again and I don’t particularly want another telling off tonight, if it’s all the same to you.  Would it kill you to just keep this secret between us and forget about it?’

‘We’re husband and wife, we have no secrets between us.’

Mom sounded so hatefully priggish and devoted that it infuriated me.

‘You pathetic cow!’ I yelped.

The world stopped.

There was a tingling in my head, where those three words – which were then the unkindest I had ever spat at her – echoed and buzzed.  I was immediately ashamed.  I wished I could thrust my tongue out and swallow the insult, like a frog catching a fly.

I really thought she might slap me then, this damson-faced harridan who used to be my mother, but she never did.  Never has. 

‘Get to your room!  You’ll stay up there until your father comes home, and in the meantime I hope you’ll have a damn good think about what you’ve put me through today.’

I didn’t say sorry that time: I was too mulish, and sick of repeating the word anyway.  I just dribbled upstairs (I hadn’t the heart to stomp), all emotional after my near-pervy encounter, the exertion of the run, and now this.

Dad, my pal as ever, displayed more compassion when he summoned me to the kitchen after my contrite afternoon of bedroom-bound moping.  Having psyched myself up for paternal fury, I was greeted by a look of such concerned disappointment that I wanted to hug him.

He sat me down.  ‘This isn’t like you, chick.  What’s happening?’

I sensed my parents had ‘had words’ about how best to handle their wayward child, and Dad’s soft tactics had overruled.  Mom, the bad cop, was now showing her disapproval by flouncing about, flapping her oven gloves and clanking pans.  I detested her in this mood.  This ‘no-one’s on my side but I’m going to damn well make my presence felt’ martyrdom which I know, aggravatingly, that I have inherited.

Entirely for her benefit, I retorted: ‘I’m being bloody bullied, that’s what!’  Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it, Mother!  At least it stopped her flouncing.  It started me off sobbing, though.  The events of today had been altogether too much for me. 

‘Bullied?’

‘Really bullied?’

‘No, Mother, unreally bullied!’  Well, I told you I was in a sarky temper.  But in a few bitter sentences, I finally told my parents about Tina.

‘Would you like me to phone up and have a word with the head?  Or I could go into the school and see him?’

‘No way!  Mom, I would never live it down if the others saw you marching into Mr Moss’s office to dob Tina in.  The bullying would just get worse.’

‘Isn’t there a teacher you could confide in then?  Mr Spencer – you like him, don’t you?’

‘Not anymore.  The teachers aren’t interested in helping people like me.  It’s too much hassle for them.  They just turn a blind eye to anything that gives their precious school a bad name.  They’ll punish us four for bunking off because that’s easy, we’re small and we won’t tell them to eff off like Tina would – yet they’ve been turning a blind eye to her activities for years.’

This perceptive statement took even me aback – and was unfortunately borne out on Thursday morning when ‘Frank’ Spencer kept the four of us behind after registration.  I had drastically gone off him since the first year, and by now despised the bloke.

‘You will all do lunchtime detention for the rest of this week and spend your morning breaktimes picking up litter from the playing field.  Frankly,’ despite myself, I had to suppress an ironic giggle at his unintentional pun, ‘I’m surprised at you four.  You were seen heading in the direction of the park yesterday morning.  You should know that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable here at Capewell.  I will see you back here at ten-past-eleven to collect a bin bag each.’

This must be as demeaning as it gets, I thought as I indignantly tossed dewy crisp packets into my allotted bag and tried to ignore the pitying stares from goody-goody classmates.  But then I used to pity the litter-pickers too, and feel the same ‘thank God I’ll never be punished like that’ self-righteousness.  Well, my granny used to say pride came before a fall.

I grinned across the field in empathy at Janine as I gathered up squashy fag packets from the most secluded corner of the sports hall, a traditional third year cigarette break venue.

I paused, mid-pick, as something more than fumes began to waft through the June air.  A most interesting dialogue, in fact.

‘That was a bit mean of you to grass ’em up, Hayls.’

Oh, that voice!  That Black Country husk that still had the power to stab me in soft places.

I heard the contented exhale of a dedicated smoker next to him, and pictured the incredulous sneer its magenta lips would be forming as they spat out the question, ‘Yow what?’

‘So what if you saw them go up the park?  It was none of your business.  They’ve never done you any harm, but now they’ve ended up stuck in detention because of you.’

‘Shouldn’t have bunked off then, should they?’ said Hayley indifferently.

‘It’s not like you’re an angel yourself, though, is it?’

‘You don’t mind that normally, Karly-babes.’

Now I pictured her clutching his blazer labels, fluttering lashes, licking lips – time-honoured sex kitten techniques.  But this made me feel like vomiting, so I liked to think he flicked her flirty hands away as he answered, in the same adult, impatient tone he had used on Darren: ‘Yeah, but you go too far.  I mean, it was you lot who picked on them in the first place.  That Tina’s a bitch and a half.’

‘Don’t you slag off my mates!’

‘Well she is.  She’s always having a pop at Zoe and her friends.  And you are!  Quite honestly, I can’t blame them for not wanting to come to school.’

You go, Karl!

‘Shouldn’t be so touchy, should they?  We’re only havin’ a laugh.’

‘Well they don’t find it very funny.  And nor do I actually.  It’s dead unfair the way poor Zoe’s ended up getting punished by that prat Spencer, yet you lot get away with picking on her just ’cos he’s scared to death of Tina and ’cos Jodie sent him a Valentine.’

Legend says ears burn when their owners are the subject of conversation.  My entire face was currently a fire of delight; I looked like a crimson statue.  I wished I could somehow mutely communicate my joy to Janine, crouched all miserable and oblivious on the other side of the field, but she wouldn’t look up from her litter.

I adored the way he said ‘poor Zoe’ – it evoked damsel-in-distress images – and knew Hayley would hate it.  I knew she would be tightening her spiteful mouth and dilating her black-rimmed eyes in ‘how dare you contradict me’ astonishment.

‘Am yow teckin’ their side against me?  Them four twats!’

‘I suppose I am, Hayley.’

Yes!!

‘Then in that case me and you am finished, Karl Corbett!’

Double yes!!

‘Suits me!  I was thinking of chucking you anyway.’

There was nothing then but a sob and the retreating clip-clop of stilettos.

I braced myself for the sound of Karl undergoing a change of heart, dramatically yelling ‘Come back, Hayley, I’m sorry’ – but it never came.

I couldn’t help enjoying the post-breaktime sight of Hayley sobbing mascara all down the front of Tina’s shirt.

‘See what you’ve done, yer bastard!’ Tina hollered at Karl, exaggeratedly cuddling Hayley and stroking her hair.  ‘It’s OK, Hay, you’m back with your mates now.  That’s it, don’t worry about me shirt.’

Our surreal science master, ‘Sully’ Sullivan, took my quartet to one side after his lesson that afternoon.

‘I have been informed that one or two young ladies are giving you something of a hard time at the moment.’

I exchanged glances and winks with the other three, whom I had naturally wasted no time acquainting with my dynamite gossip.  We all knew Karl must be Sully’s informant. 

‘That’s right, sir,’ I answered.

‘I shall not name names, but we all know who we’re talking about here, and believe me you are neither the first nor last to complain about these individuals.  I shall be having a word with your form tutor later today.  Between you, me and the gatepost, blind eyes have been turned for too long.  But their conduct will not be tolerated for much longer, believe me.’

He dismissed us with a floppy-haired nod and a kindly smile.

‘Thank you, Sul – I mean, Mr Sullivan.’

Things changed.  Mr Spencer was finally forced to get his arse in gear.  On Friday morning, looking deeply irked at being undermined by a meddlesome science teacher, he sent the Skiddies to the headmaster’s office.  Mr Moss suspended Tina for a week.  Hayley and Jodie, as mere accomplices, got the detention-and-litter treatment.

I dithered up to Karl in the corridor later, scarlet-faced and twiddling my cardigan button.

‘Thanks, Karl, for…you know – ’

Déjà vu alert!  It was the second time in three years I had thanked him for coming to my rescue, and the second time I had made an inept, stuttering hash of the act, but he took it in his nonchalant stride.

‘Any time, mate.’

Mate!  I’d have preferred darling, but mate would do.  For now.

Behind, a door slammed and slutty footsteps slapped along the tiles towards us. 

‘You’m grassers, you am,’ snarled Tina, as usual demonstrating her superb command of the English language, ‘grassers, the pair of yer!  Betcha think you’re so clever gerrin me suspended.’

‘Get stuffed, Tina,’ Karl responded dismissively. 

She pouted and strutted as usual, but I could tell already her power was gone.  I recognised this as a last-ditch stab at being hard before her enforced absence.  But it didn’t work; she just looked withered.  Even her famous glare had lost its intensity.

Hayley and Jodie were crying behind her with their arms round each other, of no assistance to their leader this time.  Without her posse, she was nothing.  One could almost feel sorry for the girl.

Tina’s week off was beatifically peaceful.  The sun shone every day, and the school as a whole seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.  It was extraordinary.  Hayley and Jodie were subdued in the extreme – ‘Like dummies without their ventriloquist,’ as Andie pithily put it – and Tina’s other supposed friends and sycophants spent the week rejoicing in her absence and comeuppance.  It was a lesson in just how popular the school Queen Bee really was.

Karl was my saviour once again – and what a beautiful feeling it was. 

Tina returned a week later to a hero’s welcome from her two flunkies, but from nobody else.

‘She looks such a sad old bag now, doesn’t she?’ Karl observed as she scuffed past, scowling as usual but without hurling so much as an F-word in our direction.

He and I were friends for the first time in two years – only friends, alas, but there was plenty of time to work on him (with help from my loyal life and love counsellors Janine, Claudette and Andrea).

Karl was remarkable.  He was the most powerful piece of armour that ever protected me.  With him on my side, I was untouchable, bully-proof.  The Skiddies never so much as spoke to me again.