We dressed in record time, though my fingers were shaking with a mix of fear and hangover as I tried to button my top. There was no time for a shower, but both Fatima and I splashed water on our faces and brushed our teeth, me hoping to mask the worst of the cigarettes on my breath, trying not to retch as the brush slipped in my trembling fingers, making me gag.
At last, after what felt like an impossibly long time, we were ready, and we slipped out of our bedroom. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that for a moment I almost didn’t hear the footsteps from above. Thea was hurrying down the stairs, her face white, her nails bitten to blood.
‘Weatherby?’ she asked, and Fatima nodded, her eyes dark pools of fear. ‘What d’you –’ Thea began.
But we were on the landing now, and a passing crowd of first years looked at us curiously, wondering perhaps what we were doing up so early with our pale faces and trembling hands.
Fatima shook her head, a kind of sickness in her expression, and we hurried on, the clock in the main hallway striking nine just as we reached Miss Weatherby’s office door.
We should have got our stories straight, I thought desperately, but there was no time now. Even though none of us had knocked, it was exactly ten minutes since we’d been summoned, and we could hear noises coming from behind the door – Miss Weatherby gathering up her pens, pushing back her chair …
My hands were cold and shaking with adrenaline, and beside me I could see Fatima looking as if she was about to be sick – or pass out.
Thea had a look of grim determination, like someone going into battle.
‘Volunteer nothing,’ she hissed as the door handle began to turn. ‘Understand? Yes/no answers. We know nothing about Am—’
And then the door swung open and we were ushered inside.
‘WELL?’
One word, just that. We sat, ranged opposite Miss Weatherby, and I felt my cheeks burn with something that was not quite shame, but close to it. Beside me, to my left, I could see Thea, looking out of the window. Her face was pale and bored, for all the world like she’d been called in to discuss name tags and lost hockey sticks, but I could see her fingers moving restlessly beneath the cover of her shirt cuffs, picking, picking relentlessly at the dry skin around her nails.
Fatima, to my right, was making no pretence at coolness. She looked as shocked as I felt, slumped down in her chair as though she could make herself shrink down to nothing. Her hair had fallen across her face as though trying to hide her fear, and she kept her eyes firmly fixed on her lap, refusing to meet Miss Weatherby’s gaze.
‘Well?’ Miss Weatherby said again, something like anger in her tone, and she gestured contemptuously at one of the papers on the desk.
My eyes flickered to the others, waiting for them to speak, but they didn’t and I swallowed.
‘We’ve – we’ve done nothing wrong,’ I said, but my voice cracked on the last word, because we had, it was just not this.
They were pictures – pictures of me, of Thea, of Fatima, of Kate, spread out across the polished wood in a way that made me feel naked and exposed as I never had when Ambrose drew us.
There was Thea, swimming in the Reach, lying on her back, her arms stretched lazily above her head. There was Kate, poised to dive from the jetty, a long slim streak of flesh, pale against the azure splash of watercolour sea. There was Luc, sunbathing naked on the jetty, his eyes closed, a lazy smile on his lips. There were all five of us, skinny-dipping in the moonlight, a tangle of limbs and laughter, all pencil shadows and bright moonlit splashes …
My eyes went from one to the next, and with each sketch the scenes came back to me, leaping off the paper into my mind’s eye as clear and fresh as when we were there – feeling the cool of the water, the heat of the sun on my skin …
The last one, the one closest to Miss Weatherby’s hand, was me.
I felt my throat close and my cheeks burn.
‘Well?’ Miss Weatherby said again, and her voice shook.
They had been chosen, that much was clear. Out of all of the hundreds of drawings Ambrose had done of us curled on the sofa in pyjamas, or eating toast in dressing gowns at his table, or stomping in boots and mittens across a frost-flecked field, whoever sent these had picked out the most incriminating examples – the ones where we were naked, or seemed to be.
I looked at the one of myself, bent over, painting my toenails, at the curve of my spine, the ridges drawn with such care that it seemed as if you could reach out and touch them, feel the knots. I had been wearing a halter neck that day, in fact. I remembered it – the heat on my spine, the knot of the top digging into my neck, the acrid smell of the pink polish in my nostrils as I stroked on the lacquer.
But in the drawing I was seated with my back to the viewer, with the hair on my neck hiding the strings of the top. It had been picked not for what it was, but for what it looked like. It had been chosen with care.
Who had done this? Who would want to destroy Ambrose like this, and us along with him?
You don’t understand, I wanted to say. I knew what she thought – what anyone would think, seeing those drawings, but she was wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.
It wasn’t like that, I wanted to sob.
But we said nothing. We said nothing while Miss Weatherby railed at us about personal responsibility and the conduct of a Salten girl, and asked us again and again and again for a name.
And we said nothing.
She must have known. There was no one who could draw like that, except maybe Kate. But Ambrose rarely signed his rough sketches and perhaps she thought that if she could just get us to say the words out loud …
‘Very well then; where were you last night?’ she said at last.
We said nothing.
‘You had no permission to leave the school and yet you broke out of bounds. You were seen, you know.’
We said nothing. We only sat, ranged together, taking our refuge in muteness. Miss Weatherby folded her arms and as the painful silence stretched, I felt Fatima and Thea exchange a quick glance at my side, and I knew what they were wondering. What did it all mean, and how long could we keep this up?
A knock at the door broke into the hush, making all us jump, and all our heads turned, as the door opened and Miss Rourke came into the room, a box in her hands.
She nodded at Miss Weatherby, and then tipped the contents onto the table in front of us, and it was then that Thea broke her silence, her voice high with fury.
‘You searched our rooms! You bitches.’
‘Thea!’ Miss Weatherby thundered. But it was too late. All the pathetic contraband – Thea’s hip flask, my cigarettes and lighter and Kate’s wrap of weed, the half-bottle of whiskey Fatima had kept under her mattress, a packet of condoms, the copy of The Story of O and the rest of it – they all lay spilled over the desk, accusing us.
‘I have no choice,’ Miss Weatherby said heavily. ‘I will be taking this to Miss Armitage. And given a large proportion of this was found in her locker, where is Kate Atagon?’
Silence.
‘Where is Kate Atagon?’ Miss Weatherby shouted, so that I blinked, and felt tears start.