A Desirable Residence - By Madeleine Wickham Page 0,21
front of the television, so that any free moments between writing or working out problems could be spent looking at something interesting, not just the wall.
Besides, only the real losers did what they were supposed to and went to the library. A gaggle from her year spent all their free periods behind the trees at the end of the rounders pitch, sitting on the leaves and whispering and smoking. Another lot would bunk off and go to the nearest McDonald’s. They’d already once been frogmarched back to school by a teacher, but they still went. A few people went to the music study room, where you could listen to compact discs through earphones. They were supposed to be classical, but no one ever checked.
As Alice queued up for lunch with her tray, she considered each of these options. But none appealed. It wasn’t so much doing those things, it was doing them with the people who did them. Alice pictured herself sitting on the leaves with Fiona Langdon flicking her hair everywhere, and shuddered. She would really have liked to hang out with a couple of girls who were in her English set. She didn’t know them very well, because they were in the other form. But they seemed OK.
As she sat down with a plate of lasagne, an apple, and a glass of water, one of them, Charlotte, walked past.
‘Hey, Charlotte,’ said Alice, ‘are you free after lunch?’
‘No fear,’ said Charlotte. ‘Bloody double biology. Dissecting the worm.’
‘Gross,’ said Alice. Charlotte walked off to find a place, and Alice dug disconsolately into her lasagne with her knife.
She stared ahead, and munched, and eventually supposed that what she was feeling was lonely. I’m lonely, she thought to herself, with a certain gratification at having identified the experience. It had always surprised her that people gave names to feelings so easily. How did they know everyone felt the same?
She could remember once sitting in the back of the car on the way to a birthday party with jitters in her tummy, and saying, ‘What’s it called when you’re not looking forward to something and you think it’s going to be awful? What do you feel?’ ‘Depressed,’ her mother had replied. So Alice had said, ‘I feel depressed.’ But of course she had meant she felt nervous. And for ages after that, whenever she felt nervous, she’d said, ‘I feel depressed.’ She couldn’t remember when she’d discovered her mistake, but she must have done sometime.
And now she definitely felt lonely. She prodded around her feelings. Not bad enough to want to cry, but heavy-making around her head and eyes. What she felt like doing was curling up in front of the television, or better still in bed, with a cup of hot chocolate. Her thoughts circled comfortably around images of pampered cosiness at home, taking her briefly out of the school canteen clatter and bustle, into the sitting-room with a fire burning and a good film on the telly.
Then she realized her mistake. Stupid. She’d been thinking of twelve Russell Street. But that wasn’t home any more. Home was the Silchester Tutorial College. She pictured in her mind the small, dark, uninviting sitting-room in the flat above the tutorial school. Her grotty little bedroom, still cluttered with boxes of stuff. And all those awful classrooms downstairs.
She’d already made the mistake last week of going home during the day to pick up some music she’d forgotten. As she’d gone through the gate, she’d suddenly realized that the tutorial college would be in action, and they’d be having lessons everywhere. Before that, she’d only ever seen the classrooms empty, full of a musty holiday smell and posters peeling off the walls. But as she stealthily turned her key in the lock of the front door, she could hear voices and sense people everywhere. Behind the frosted glass of classroom doors, she could see blurred faces; from one she heard her own father’s voice, intoning some Latin phrase. She had run quickly, quietly, and with a mounting sense of panic, up the stairs to the flat and into her own room, irrationally terrified of being spotted by someone, of having to explain her presence. Even though this was her own house.
Now she had taken to leaving the house in plenty of time every morning, so that she didn’t risk overlapping with the arrival of any of the students or teachers. And in the afternoons she dawdled home, usually stopping off for a cigarette or two. Draining