although if Mrs Maclaren had bothered to liaise with any of the dinner ladies, she would have discovered that Pauline had continued to hand in blue tickets. She simply forced the next child in the queue, whether bigger or smaller, to swap a yellow ticket for a blue. It wasn’t the first crime she had committed, and it was one of the few that were undeniably victimless.
PAULINE BRIGHT IS trouble. One of the ways you know she’s trouble is that grown-ups always call her by her full name. ‘Pauline Bright,’ Mrs Maclaren, our teacher, says, ‘stop that and come and sit next to Gemma.’ I am never Gemma Barlow, because I’m not trouble. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to my reports, Gemma is a joy to teach. Pauline Bright isn’t. Once Mrs Maclaren said after a test that she shouldn’t be called Pauline Bright, but Pauline Thick. Everyone laughed extra loud, because Mrs Maclaren doesn’t attempt many jokes, and Pauline got into more trouble because she walloped Neil Johnson who was sitting next to her, guffawing, and the impact she made on the bridge of his blue plastic National Health glasses marked his nose for days.
Pauline Bright can fight. She punches and kicks like a boy. She doesn’t care about fighting boys either, or anyone bigger or older than her. Once when she was seven she went for a ten-year-old who had called her little brother a spaz, and knocked out one of his front teeth. He cried to a teacher, who sent Pauline to stand outside Mr Scott’s office. Everyone said Mr Scott used the strap on her, but she didn’t cry. It didn’t stop her either. Whenever they start shouting ‘scrap’ in the playground, there’s a good chance that the excited crowd is clotting around Pauline Bright, or one of her brothers and sisters.
There are loads of Brights, but Pauline’s the eldest at junior school. The little one, the spaz one, used to wee on the floor in assemblies, and run around in circles in the hall, shouting, as teachers tried to catch him. Everyone says he got sent to a special school for retards. There’s another brother as well, and a sister with a patch over one eye. All of them smell. Pauline Bright smells, and when Mrs Maclaren sends her to sit next to me I try to breathe through my mouth. Dirty clothes. Dirty knickers. The worst is when we have to hold hands, which happens sometimes because we’re close in the alphabet, Barlow and Bright. The only other person I can’t stand holding hands with is a girl called Ella, whose hand is cool and grey and scaly. She can’t help it. I don’t say anything with either her or Pauline, but I pull the cuff of my school blouse over my hand so that the skin can’t touch. Pauline Bright’s hand is small and hot and filthy, with long, black-ringed nails. And the smell. Sometimes Pauline wants to hug up close to you, clamping your hand in both of hers, but sometimes she kicks and tells you to eff off. I’d rather she kicked. If she does, I tell Mrs Maclaren.
‘Miss, Pauline Bright’s kicking me, Miss.’
‘Pauline Bright, do you want me to send you to Mr Scott’s office?’
Mr Scott is the Head, with the strap no one’s ever seen. I imagine something in lavishly tooled leather, like the saddles I saw for sale when we were on holiday in Spain, specially made and ordered by Mr Scott for the punishment of children as troublesome as Pauline Bright.
Whatever I think of Pauline, I don’t ever tell Mrs Maclaren that she has compounded her crime by telling me to eff-word off. ‘Pauline said a rude word’ always begs the question of whether you yourself will be punished for repeating the word, which is desirable for maximum effect, but I’ve noticed that saying it at secondhand tends to produce a rebuke for telling tales. Everyone knows that grown-ups swear. You hear it all the time, in the things they watch on TV and switch over once you appear, in conversations on buses they hurry you past, from shouting drunks they drag you into traffic without looking to avoid. And they must know that we swear as well, although we pretend not to. I don’t swear, but I know all the words. Pauline Bright says them as well, all of them, even the worst ones. Arse. Git. Bloody. Bugger. Willy. Fanny. Bastard. Fuck. Cunt. Every so