A Girl Called Cat

Even all these years later, I don't remember why she caught my eye. She wasn't outlandishly eye-catching, neither was she remarkably plain. Perhaps it was her hair: red haloed with gold in the sunlight. I caught a glimpse of her as the sea of bodies parted for a moment and it must have been that bright copper hair that captured me. She was standing mutely beside her mother, who was agreeing eagerly with something the severe and impressive Bursar was saying. The girl looked embarrassed, although perhaps the starchy new uniform she fidgeted in was the real cause of her dismay; the summer afternoon was already hot enough to rue the compulsory navy blazers we both wore, bristling with scratchy young wool against our skin.

Every new academic year, Bryanston School holds one of its many long-cherished traditions: the New Girls' Tea. The school staff in their starched uniforms carry long tables out onto the emerald Visitor's Lawns behind Founders' Hall, deck them with snowy white cloths, and spread them with Bryanston's monogrammed china and a cream tea. This event, presided over by the small, round headmistress and the tall, spindly Bursar, requires pupils in their itchy new uniforms and their respective parents (the occasional suit-sporting father amongst the blow-dried heads and kitten-heeled feet of the mothers), to stand around and Get To Know One Another. In my opinion, it's an advanced form of torture.

On that bright day, many years ago now, the girls coming up from the Junior School stood in packs.  The hierarchies were already well-worn after seven years in each others' company, and on the green lawn an entente cordiale was being cooly observed between rival factions. In the thick of the throng, as always, was Sara Snow's posse, enjoying a sweeping view from its dominant position on the stone steps that divided the two tiers of the Visitor's Lawns. Sara and her girls defiantly wore the hemlines of their pinafores four inches (and not the regulation two) above their knees; it was an entry requirement of the group that all sports were played at First team level, and they never missed an opportunity to show off chiselled thighs and sculpted calves, tanned golden by hours of hockey and netball. They had butter-wouldn't-melt smiles, sharp elbows and noses for trouble. Sara, the ringleader and Giver of Names to the rest of the class, had already escaped expulsion twice in preceding years thanks to a wealthy and influential father, who did something high up in local politics. Sara's girls were the Alphas, the ones who had to be first in everything, save for academics; this crown was grudgingly conceded to Theresa and her collective of uber-brains. Stationed at the biscuit end of the tea table, Theresa was deep in conversation with our history teacher while the rest of her group stood close at hand in quiet but fierce debate, probably about third world debt or the HIV crisis. In contrast to the soaring hemlines and glossy ponytails of Sara's posse, the pinafores of Theresa's girls drooped well below their knees and neat braids or bobs were the vogue. Meanwhile, with their usual flair for staging, the Showgirls were artfully clustered around the statue of a deer that eternally quenched its thirst in a fountain on the upper lawn. Their star was Meredith, a loud gamine girl who goofed around in lessons, feigned illness in every sport session, and blossomed in drama classes. Chief amongst her devoted minions was a pre-Raphaelite beauty, Lara, whose only ambition was "to be so famous that people will fight to buy my toenail clippings." The final corner of the limelight-hungry triumvirate who led the gang was shy, strange Sasha, who said violently unsettling things with her paintbrush and was no less savagely ambitious than the rest of her pack, despite her eerie silence.

Unlike the new girls, who stood in watchful silence beside their parents, the old girls were making a loud show of their already-belonging. Their brash, easy laughter was code, formulated to set the nerves of the newcomers jangling. Even I, an inhabitant of the sheltered walls of Bryanston for four years but still rudderless in the social seas thanks to a foreign upbringing and a distaste for cliquishness, heard that laughter scraping like nails down a blackboard. The copper-haired girl clearly did too. Sheltered by bodies in the crowd, I watched her fingernail slip between her teeth before, too late, she caught herself and sheathed the guilty hand in her blazer pocket again.  Her mother, nodding enthusiastically up at the Bursar, pretended not to notice the transgression, but the shift of weight from one hip to the other betrayed her apparent disregard.

The Bursar drifted off and the crowd stirred up and resettled. Those mothers with high hopes for their daughters dragged them over to present them to her, or buzzed around our jovial Head, who was beaming from the centre of a throng of supplicants. I was in a clump of girls on the edge of the lawn that were forced together into a grudging clique because no one else wanted us. In adulthood, we might become powerful, successful, possibly even cool, but now we were the misfits, the strays. We sheltered together out of necessity and no lasting loves or strong allegiances grew between us; mostly we were resigned to be loners. I liked it that way. Sara Snow had christened me the 'White Rabbit' and the moniker had stuck, thanks to my pale skin and my habit of disappearing into a corner of the library with a book at any opportunity. Books were easier to understand than people, and they didn't call you names. Our group also included "Ducky" (not blessed with the longest legs in the world, although perhaps the softest heart), "Bubbles" (who inadvertently snorted her chocolate milk while giggling in the dining hall and was forever after reminded of the fact that she'd once sprouted chocolate bubbles from her nose), "the Pole" (the Polish ambassador's daughter, who shot up like a weed to tower over the teaching staff) and "Tits" (who was dismayed by her own popularity with the boys at inter-school socials, and sought shelter behind thick glasses and even thicker bangs).

This was the fray that this copper-haired stranger was wading into, willingly or otherwise...well, from the look of her, not so much wading as being shoved. Until that moment, I'd been too preoccupied with surviving my pre-teens, and the accompanying horrors of social humiliation and physical discombobulation, to have any energy to spare for charitable acts such as rescuing a newcomer from the perils of Bryanston's cliques. But that furtively bitten nail had hooked me. In that second, I saw someone having a worse time of it than me. In a sweet, unexpected moment of joy, I realised I could help. My hard-won knowledge of the lay of the land, while it was too late to save me from relegation to the back benches with the rest of the Uncool, could help this shy girl with the fiery hair navigate the choppy waters to safety. I felt a surge of hope lift my feet. As I navigated the least conspicuous way through the throng - taking special care to route around the choir mistress, who was always on the lookout for new recruits - I was mentally lining up pearls of advice to give as gifts to this intriguing stranger. First, who to avoid: obviously, Sarah's gang was out of the question. The thought that my new friend might end up as one of those sleek, sly girls was too horrible to contemplate. While my horror was no doubt driven chiefly by unacknowledged envy, I did know that, beneath the gloss and the verve, they were bullies, and nasty not only to anyone not fortunate enough to be one of them, but merciless towards each other as well. The tragic spectacle of watching them cut one of their own from the herd was fresh in the class' collective memory (Emma Marchand had been demoted to Under-Prefect and also lost her place as right wing on First Hockey; the following week her underwear had been stolen during gym class and she had been forced to wear her gym shorts for the rest of the day, bulkily visible under her pinafore to vicious merriment amongst the girls she had lately called bosom friends.) If this new girl had any creative talents, the Showgirls would claim her as a matter of course, but there again I knew that was a dead end; a slavish stroking of their high priestess Meredith's ego was the entry fee and began to pall quickly. I knew this from bitter experience as I had briefly been one of them. Tessa and the brains weren't as bad a lot as the rest of them, if she had the academic chops to crack their nod, but once in their midst she would surely lose the lustre she currently possessed and become as drab and eager as they were... None of that seemed right for this shy, flame-headed girl.

 I was halfway through the crowd on the lawn before the awful realisation struck; if she was seen with me, wouldn't she be condemned to Nerdsville before the year had even begun? What was I thinking? She would be tainted with the whiff of my Undesirability before she even stood a chance of acceptance, hobbled in the starting gates before the race had even started. I swerved towards the tea table and made a bad show of selecting a sandwich while I attempted to pull myself back together and regain the glorious certainty that had propelled me across the lawn in the first place; my hand hovered over something I thought was cucumber, veered towards the salmon and cream cheese, nearly selected tuna, before coming back to accidentally brush against the cucumber at which exact moment three things happened: I sneaked a glance at her and discovered she was looking at me, my hand brushed the sandwich and I realised, too late, that it was egg and cucumber. Hateful egg. But I'd touched it now, and had to take it. Foolishly holding the offending sandwich, I risked a smile. Well, a sort of non-committal lifting of the corners of the lips. Just in case she wasn't actually looking at me; I was too vain to wear my glasses after once being called Owl Face by Sara Snow in the fourth grade. She lifted the corners of her lips too. It was like a ray of sunshine penetrated the clouds above me, and warmth flooded my world. I couldn't back out now; the chance had to be seized and if I doomed her to social ostracisation, so be it. Holding the malodorous morsel between two fingers, I walked towards her, certain the entire population of the lawn, if not in fact the whole world, was watching my blushing progress. I would be cool; I would just say, "Hello, I'm Tash, welcome to Bryanston". Nothing embarrassingly effusive, or overly desperate or anything. Just a simple hello.

Up close, she had brown eyes and perfectly pretty white teeth. Her mother smelled of Chanel No.5, the same perfume my grandmother wore. I hid the mortifying sandwich in the folds of my pinafore and drew a breath to say something cool and breezy; what came out was:

 "You're going to be my best friend."

For a tiny, endless moment, we both stood in silence, reeling from the seismic effects of this rash pronouncement. Her face registered something that I read to be either worry or terror, or both. I could barely believe the ground hadn't yet opened and swallowed me. But then she smiled, this time not just an upward kink of the lips that could be retracted or reworked into a sneer, but a genuine smile, so that I saw her perfect little teeth and a dimple nestling its way into her right cheek. She said,

"I'm Catherine."

And I knew instantly that my crazy statement was right.