Girls Under Pressure Read online

  “Mmm. I just went a bit dizzy, that’s all. I’m OK now.”

  “You don’t look OK. Are you feeling sick again?”

  “A bit.”

  Sick with hunger, hunger, hunger.

  “Ellie . . .” Anna is staring at me, biting her lip.

  “Look, I can’t keep Magda waiting,” I say, pushing past her.

  I don’t want Anna fussing and finding out how little I’ve been eating. Just because she’s given up on her diet it doesn’t mean I’ve got to. And besides, Anna is skinny as anything anyway.

  “Hi, Magda,” I say into the phone. “It’s a bit early, isn’t it? I was trying to have a lie-in.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t think. I just wanted to talk to you,” says Magda. She sounds unusually subdued.

  “Mags? What’s up?”

  “I don’t want to go into details just now,” says Magda. I can hear music in the background and family noises. “It’s pandemonium here. Can I come round to your place, Ellie?”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “Like . . . now?”

  “Fine.”

  I have a quick shower and shove on some clothes. Anna’s made me tea and toast. She means to be helpful, but I’d much sooner coffee and then I can have it black and not waste calories on milk. And she’s buttered my toast for me, making big yellow puddles, absolutely oozing.

  “Thanks, but I seem to have gone off tea,” I say, trying to be tactful. I gnaw delicately at the crust of my toast and then leap up thankfully when Magda rings the doorbell.

  She looks awful. Her hair’s brushed straight back, she’s got no makeup on at all, and she’s wearing an old gray fleecy thing instead of her beautiful fur coat.

  “Magda? Hey, come in.” I bundle her quickly upstairs to my room so she doesn’t get waylaid by Anna or Dad or Eggs. She doesn’t look in the mood for socializing.

  She sits on the end of my unmade bed. My Patch hot water bottle tumbles out of my duvet. Magda sits it on her lap and strokes it absent mindedly, as if it were a real dog. She looks like a little girl again.

  “Magda?”

  She starts to say something, clears her throat, tries again, fails. She shakes her head impatiently.

  “What’s the matter with me? I’m so desperate to tell you I get you out of bed specially—and yet now I’m here I can’t get started.” She seizes Patch by the ears. “It’s Mick.”

  “Yes. I sort of gathered that.”

  I wait. Magda waits too. If Patch was real he’d be squealing.

  “Didn’t he turn up?” I prompt.

  “Oh, yes. Well, I watched him play his football, didn’t I? Hours I stood there. It’s so cold and it’s so boring and I was dying for a wee but I hung on with my legs crossed and every time he came near the ball I shouted encouragement like a loony.”

  “So? After?”

  “He was ages getting changed, with all his mates. I just hung about. I nearly lost my temper and went home. I mean, I don’t usually lurk outside sweaty dressing rooms for hours. And they were singing utterly infantile songs, you know the sort. But anyway, I hung on in there, and at long last out he comes, still with all the mates. And he did look pretty fabulous, in this black leather jacket, and his hair all floppy and shining because he’d just washed it. It’s so unfair, how can such a creep look so drop-dead gorgeous?”

  “He’s a creep?”

  “The lowest of the low. Because . . . well, we wandered off to the park.”

  “You and Mick?”

  “And all the mates. I mean, I know most of them, Jamie’s OK, and I went out with Larry that time. They all seemed in a good mood, larking about, making a bit of a fuss of me, you know.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Not personally. But I’ve seen the way all the boys act when they’re around you. Flies. Honeypot.”

  “I certainly started to feel sticky. They had all these cans of lager—and after a while they got a bit silly. One or two of these guys started kind of mauling me about. But I thought it was all just a bit of fun. Nothing heavy. And anyway, I was sure we’d be shot of them all soon enough. I suggested to Mick that we go off for a meal. He said, “Come on, guys, Magda’s hungry, let’s all go to McDonald’s.” I didn’t think this sounded very romantic and I wanted to get rid of all the mates, so I asked if we could go to a proper restaurant, just him and me. He says, “Oooh, Magda can’t wait to get me on her own,” in this stupid nudge-nudge wink-wink way. Larry and all the rest fall about laughing and I’m starting to get seriously pissed off by all this and so I start walking off by myself. Mick can see I’m serious and he puts his arm round me and suddenly starts to be so sweet. He apologizes and asks me where I want to go, saying we’ll eat anywhere, so I suggest going to the Ruby—you know that lovely Indian restaurant with the marble elephants? I always thought it would be dead romantic to eat there on a proper date. He goes ‘OK, for you, Magda, anything, but let’s hope you’re worth it’ . . . and I still didn’t twig what this was all about. Oh, God.” Magda bends her head over Patch, trying not to cry.

  I sit on the bed beside her and put my arm round her. I can feel her quivering.

  “What happened, Mags?”

  “I—they––”

  “They didn’t rape you?”

  “No! No, I’m just making this stupid fuss over nothing. They’re nothing. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I should have just laughed in their faces. Anyway. We went to the Ruby, Mick and me. The others were still hanging around the park so I thought everything was fine. Mick was . . . he was really sweet, he said all this stuff . . . It makes me feel sick now, but I liked it at the time, I liked him, I thought—I thought this was really it. True Love. Oh, God. So, we had a couple of beers, Mick told the waiter we were eighteen, and we had a curry. Well, we shared one. It was a bit embarrassing, the waiter wasn’t happy about it, but I thought maybe Mick doesn’t have much cash. I started to feel mean for suggesting the Ruby. I decided I’d offer to pay myself, doing it ever so discreetly so he wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  “It was getting hard to think straight. I’m not really used to beer. I slipped out to the ladies’ and splashed my face with cold water, and I started making all these stupid kissy-kissy faces in the mirror, thinking of Mick—and then when I came out of the ladies’ there he was, right in front of me, waiting for me. He kissed me and it was just amazing to start with, the way I’d imagined it would be, better, and he said he’d paid and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here,” and he took me round the back to the place where people park their cars and I thought this was a bit crazy because Mick doesn’t have a car and I started to tell him this but he wasn’t listening, he just had hold of me practically under the arm so he could shove me along, and he got me to these trees right at the back and then—well, at first I didn’t mind, he was just kissing me, I liked it, though I was a bit worried about my shoes because we were standing in all this leaf mold and mud, so I said couldn’t we get out of the mud and he didn’t understand, he took off his jacket and said I could lie on that. I said, “What do you mean, I’m not lying down,” and he said, “OK, OK, standing up, fine by me,” and then he pressed me back against this tree and . . . Well, I just thought he was trying it on at first, and I told him to stop it, but he didn’t, and his hands started going all over the place, and then he got to my jeans and I started to get mad and told him to cut it out, what sort of girl did he think I was, and he said . . . he said, ‘Everyone knows what sort of girl you are, Magda, so stop acting hard to get, right?’ and he started getting really rough then, and I got scared he really might rape me. I slapped his face but it just seemed to make him madder so I sort of twisted round and suddenly jammed my knee up hard and he practically fell over, grunting and groaning.”

  “Good for you, Magda!”

  “But then when I started running away from him and got back to the cars there were all these cheers and his mates all bobbed up and one of them said, “It’s our turn now, Magda,” and then Mick staggered out of th