The Colour of a Streetlight (Part 1)

I posted the first page of this novella a while back, but I've included it in this longer instalment because I've edited it a little since then. Constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated. 

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They always gave us our new names on Sunday evenings.

I don’t know how it was where you were. I’ve heard that some centres rotate names every fortnight, or even every month, but Harigale House was always very vigorous about it. I remember working it out when I was in Class 7, when we were all being taught how to multiply big numbers using written method. 52 weeks in a year, and I’d spent four years, three months at the house so far. 220 names.

People looked forwards to Sundays. There’d always be a lot of guessing and hoping about what kind of names people would get. The girls would bet against one another with paper clips and sweet wrappers, swearing that their next name would be of German origin or begin with the letter B, and there was always a real hissing commotion if someone got it right. I don’t know if there was anything like that in your centre, but the girls in mine took it all deadly seriously - one even risked trying to break into the Mistress’ office on a Saturday evening to find next week’s registers, just so she could be sure to win everything in the betting pool. I’m not sure whether she managed it. Probably not.

We got our new names on little plastic cards with safety pins on the back, so we could tack them onto the breast pockets of our dresses. They had to be on the left side, and we could only take them off when we bathed. I expect it was that way at your house, too.

When I was very young, one of the girls in my handwriting class used to note down all of her weekly names in the back of her exercise book, underlining the ones she liked best and embellishing them with little blotted stars. The seating rotation never had us sit next to one another, and for the most part she never took any notice of me, but there was one week where it was different.

I was called Florence at the time, and she was Edith – a name that, everybody knew, made her suck her teeth and scowl. She was seated two rows in front of me, but she kept craning round to shoot little glances my way, her eyes all beady and furrowed. There was a moment where she stopped me in the corridor only to turn around and flounce off again. I couldn’t make sense of it.

Then, at the end of the week, my name card disappeared.

I never figured out that it was her, but I didn’t have to. After I went wailing and sobbing to the nearest matron, they sent every girl in the house back to her dorm and started tearing through nightstands and rifling through the pockets of every dress and blazer in the place. It didn’t take half an hour before they found my name tag, stuffed down the side of Edith’s bedframe.

“I wanted to be Florence again,” was all she told the matrons.

The name she’d been given eight weeks before. The name she’d adorned with stars and spirals in the back of her exercise book.

They sent her away after that.

-

It wasn’t all that easy to make friends at Harigale, seeing as we were shifted around so much. Class seating plans would change every few days, and handfuls of girls were randomly moved into different dorms every week or so. You never spent more than a month in any one wing of the house, and by the time you were rotated back to it, all of the girls you’d been friendly with would have completely different names, so you’d have a hard time reconnecting with any of them.

Nobody minded too much. It made it easier to talk to each other, in some ways. You could spill your darkest fears to the girl in the bed next to you, and it wouldn’t matter a jot if she spread them about. You’d have a new name by Sunday, and probably be in a completely different part of Harigale. Nobody would be able to trace the comments to you.

You couldn’t have enemies, either. There were no cliques of friends, no alliances, nothing to defend but yourself. Spats might be savage and charged whilst they lasted – there was a great deal of scrapping and slapping, to be sure – but they always burnt out before they could turn into proper rivalry, when the girls involved were rotated to different wings.

The rotations had other advantages, too. Ones that the matrons were less fond of. I’m not sure when the dare competitions started up – they go back as far as my memory does, and were as much a part of the Harigale routine as the lessons, check-ups and mealtimes. The difference was that the matrons mostly didn’t know about them.

They were held on the last Saturday of every month, a few hours after lights out. It was a risky business – that’s why we had to do it right before we were moved to new wings, with different names under our belts. That way, even if the matrons spotted something, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Once we were rotated and retitled, they couldn’t follow their suspicions back to any of us. We were new people.

And so the competitions continued, month after month after month, in a similar fashion each time.

They would go a little like this.

-

Wind back several years. I was seven years old. I’d been at Harigale House for two years and one month. My name was Ellen, and I was on torch duty for the first time.

The torches were one of the great mysteries of Harigale. Each dorm took responsibility for one, stowing them under nightstands or inside some poor girl’s duvet cover, but nobody was entirely sure where they had come from in the first place. There were rumours, of course. Tales about senior girls who, some ten years before, had slipped past the matrons and voyaged into the city beyond the gates, returning at dawn laden with armfuls of mementos – the torches being among them. But nobody believed that, as much as they might have wanted to. The boring theory, at least when I was at Harigale, was that the torches had once belonged to some kind of emergency blackout kit, as a means of navigating during a power cut. Something like that.

When I was six years old, however, I knew very little about the history of the torches. I only knew that I had a job to do.

“You get ‘em quick, right?” one of the girls had told me. “You get ‘em quick, stick ‘em down your dress, and get out. The matrons see you, they’ll be narked. Maybe even send you away. So do it right.”

I chanted the words over and over in my head. I tapped my fingers to the mantra. Even with my eyes on the fuzzy TV screen, watching cartoon characters ramble through a script every girl knew by heart, I heard them parroting the advice back to me in their squeaky voices. I was going to do it right.

I was crammed in on the sofa with six other wriggly girls, my hands curled in the fabric of my dress. Other girls covered the floor, lolling on scratchy rugs and against walls, every one of them staring at the television screen. They giggled in all the right places. I copied them.

But my eyes were on the DVD timer.

Two minutes left. A minute and a half.

The ending theme bloomed into life, and the girls bloomed with it, singing along and filling in the parts where the disc skipped. I watched the timer closely, twisting my fingers in my dress, counting under my breath.

“Aren’t you going to sing, Ellen?” said a soft voice at my ear. Matron Pearson.

The hairs on my neck stood up. I sang until the screen turned black.

“Okay, girls,” she called out, clapping her hands. “Back to your dorms now. Lights out in fifteen minutes.”

The girls reared up around me, stretching and chattering, their bodies sprouting like thickets of trees. Now was my chance!

I snatched the television remote from the coffee table, prying at the plastic casing with my scrabbly little nails, and fished the batteries free.

“Ellen? What are you doing?”

I thrust them down my dress. “Just- just sorting my bodice, Matron.”

There was a hard, frowny look in her eyes, but I was on my feet and out of the room before she could accuse me, the batteries cold against my knotted stomach.

-

“You got them?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She stuck her hands straight down my dress, scrabbling around for the batteries and trapping them in her fist.

“Nice one,” she whispered. She rummaged around in her dress pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, pretending to wipe my face and quickly popping a sweet into my mouth as she did so. It was stale and dusty, but I rolled it around my mouth with relish.

I’d already sat through a number of dare contests, so I knew the drill well enough by now. Conversation in the washrooms was to be quiet and trivial – chatter about yesterday’s dinner, the next lot of names, the impending handwriting test. Yet one silly girl, surely new to the house and its unspoken routines, leaned over the sink to ask me if I’d managed to pinch the batteries. I froze up like porcelain, my eyes darting to the bob-haired matron waiting at the door, and gaped like a fish.

The person next to me snatched up the silly one’s toothbrush and snapped it. Then she went straight back to washing her hands.

That was how you learned at Harigale.

Wet-haired and scrubbed, we climbed into flimsy white nighties, then under flimsy white bedsheets reeking of carbolic. No chatter at this stage. Sheets up to the chin, head on pillow, eyes closed. The matron’s footsteps passed once. Twice.

Then, the click of a light switch, the feeling of darkness swarming in all around. The door clunking shut.

After that, hours of silence. In previous months, I’d drifted off to sleep, but not now. My eyes were open in the darkness, watching the pale clock on the wall, always half-lit by the moonlight edging through the window. I waited for movement.

And there it was. Eleven o’clock on the dot, one of the girls crept from her bed and to the little cupboard on the other side of the room. There was shuffling, a clicking of plastic-

-and then light, spilling in an arc across the dorm.

“Dare contest starts now,” she whispered. “Get into place.”

From all around came the shuffling of bedsheets and the shambling of skinny silhouettes, crawling towards the light like insects. We wedged into a wobbly ring at one end of the dorm, knees crammed together and elbows touching, and waited.

The torch-bearer, who sat cross-legged at the centre of the circle, placed the light on the floor.

“So,” she said, her voice hushed. “Who’s the challenger?”

She reached out and span the torch. The beam whizzed around the circle, lighting each face in turn, and settled on a dazed, sleepy-eyed girl named Maritza.

“Okie-dokie,” the torch-bearer said. “And who’s asking?”

Again she span it, the torch whirling like a top. It pointed towards a girl called Lin, who smirked and pulled her knees up to her chest.

“Alright,” muttered the torch-bearer. “Round one. What’s your dare, Lin?”

Lin clasped her hands together. “I dare you to lick the cobweb at the corner of the window.”

A few of the girls – the newer ones, most likely – hissed in disgust, but most of us nodded and murmured assent. A good start, I thought. A good warm-up dare.

Maritza got to her feet, swiping the torch and picking her way towards the window. She swept aside the curtain and clambered up onto the ledge. Then, the light full on her face, she stuck out her tongue and licked the wispy cobweb near the edge of the frame. She even swallowed after.

“Next round,” she said, tossing the torch back into the centre of the circle.

Everybody looked at Lin, whose head was cocked to the side, her eyes yellow in the torchlight. The clock ticked.

“I dare you,” she said, “to bite the toenails of the girl next to you.”

Maritza shrugged. “Whatever.”

And on it went. Maritza was dared to pee out of the window, to swallow three pages of notepaper, to hold her thumbnail against the radiator for twenty seconds, and she didn’t falter once. Even with her thumb scarlet and burned, and with tears sparkling in her eyes, she looked Lin dead in the face and stuck her chin out with pride.

“Next round.”

“Next round.”

“Next round.”

Forty minutes passed, and Maritza still didn’t concede. Twenty minutes more, and she would be the winner.

The glee had left Lin’s eyes. Her face was pulled taut like linen, pale and severe, and she kept clenching and unclenching her fingers in a weird little rhythm. She knew she was losing.

“I dare you to eat your own hair.”

“I dare you to run up and down the corridor three times.”

“I dare you to bite your hand until it bleeds.”

The girl next to me clung to my arm like a little monkey, her face buried in my shoulder, unable to watch. It was standard new girl behaviour, so I mostly ignored it, keeping my eyes firmly on the clock. Three minutes left. Two.

“I dare you to change.”

The girl’s grip tightened. A gasp rippled around the circle.

“You what?” Maritza said.

“Change. That’s the dare,” Lin said.

“You can’t- you can’t ask that,” Maritza said. She looked to the torch-bearer, sat stunned and silent a few feet away. “She can’t ask that, can she?”

“There’s no rule says I can’t,” Lin said, folding her arms. “Time’s ticking. Do it or don’t.”

A floorboard creaked. A bird called. Maritza didn’t move.

The clock stuck twelve, and so came the distant chiming of church bells somewhere far off, sounding the end of the contest. Lin reached for her prize – a squashed muffin, filched from the dining area earlier this evening – and sank her teeth into it, sauntering back towards her bed.

Nobody congratulated her that night.

-

Looking back, I don’t think the dare contests were that discreet, but the matrons never stayed long enough to catch on to them. I don’t know what your facility was like, but Harigale House prided itself on having a consistently high staff turnover. Whenever visitors came to tour the place, scratching on clipboards and looking in on us in our classrooms, you’d always hear the Mistress making a big point of it.

“Harigale House is careful to maintain a staff turnover of over ninety percent,” she’d always say, a big, lipsticky smile on her face. “And even in periods where staff replacement becomes difficult, we use a rotation system to maintain inconsistency. It’s most effective.”

It was the same with the matrons. They changed so often that, after spending a year or so at the house, you’d stop bothering to learn their names. At most, they were ‘the one with the mole on her lip’ or ‘the man with the eyebrows’, mentioned maybe once or twice in passing and soon forgotten. Nobody remembered any of them.

No one was totally sure why the staff members had to change so much. It wasn’t a hotly debated topic. A girl might throw the question out occasionally, whilst you were practising handwriting homework in the common room or lounging around in the gardens before dinner, and it might be discussed for a moment or two, but never any longer than that. Just like the changing names, the dorm rotations, and many of the other Harigale routines, you didn’t think too hard about it.

But then Joey arrived at Harigale, and things started to change.

-

The gardeners never seemed to get round to tending all of the Harigale grounds. Visitors would never expect it – they only saw the stretch of land in front of the house, with its clipped hedges and assorted flowerbeds – but the grass turned long and prickly behind the house, sloping up towards an abandoned kitchen garden and a line of ratty, thorny bushes.

It wasn’t exactly unusual to go up there, but most girls stuck to the tamer land around the courtyard. The kitchen garden, at least when I was there, was secret territory, a place away from the adults’ eyes. You might go there to whisper forbidden questions, or kiss a girl you vaguely knew just to see what it was like, or sometimes just to revise for a test. It was quiet. A good place to go to be alone.

The kitchen garden was cordoned off when I was twelve, shortly after two girls were sent away, but the business with Joey happened long before that. It started when I was ten years old. My name was Alesha. I was sitting by the greenhouse with Winnie, a girl from my comprehension class, and we were taking it in turns to read aloud from a textbook.

“No, you aren’t getting the ‘a’s right,” she said, snatching the book away. “It’s a northern accent. They say them shorter. You’re saying it like ‘ah’, like you’re from London.”

“I’m not!” I said.

“Try Scottish,” Winne demanded, turning the page. “‘Can you tell me when the next bus will arrive?’ Say that in a Scottish accent.”

I did my best, which probably wasn’t great. She smacked my head with the book.

“You’re exaggerating it too much! Even teacher could do better than that!”

“You try it, if you’re so good at it.”

It’s a little hazy, what happened right after that. She might have read the question out, or she might have brushed it off and switched to an accent she was confident with. I only remember that halfway through my next turn, as I recited some silly sentence about dustbins, I was interrupted.

“No, no,” somebody said. “You’re more Sheffield, with that voice. Mancunians don’t sound like that. ”

I turned. A young man, curly-haired and brown-skinned, decked out in overalls and holding a pair of shears. Smiling softly.

A gardener. Behind the house. Talking to us.

Winnie closed the textbook with a snap, holding her head up nonchalantly, but I could see the panic in her eyes. “Come on. We need to go.”

My legs wouldn’t move. I fingered the hem of my dress, throwing a tiny glance at the curly-haired man.

A gardener. Talking to us.

“I’m going to stay a little,” I said, folding my arms. “I need to practise more accents.”

“What are you doing?” she hissed, crouching down next to me. Her voice dropped to less than a whisper, warm and urgent in my ear. “We can’t let the grounds staff talk to us. The matrons said so.”

You’re absolutely right, I don’t know what I was thinking, of course I’ll come with you – they’re the words I should’ve said. But what came out instead was: “I just want to practise my accents, Winnie.”

I can still remember the horror on her face, like she’d just seen my take a bite out of a lemon and swallow it. She looked between me and the gardener, and her eyes said you’re absolutely insane but her mouth said nothing. She scuttled back to the house in silence, throwing frightened glances over her shoulder every few steps.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gardener rubbing the back of his neck.

“Sorry, did she- am I not allowed to talk to you guys?” he asked.

No, you’re not – again, the words I should’ve said, but my throat had dried like an old rag. How could he not know? I could count on one hand the number of times a gardener had so much as looked my way. Grounds staff just didn’t do that.

“Winnie’s just being silly,” I said, and even managed to sound righteous about it. “She gets worked up about these things.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m only new here, see. I don’t want to, uh, overstep my bounds or anything.”

He smiled, showing a gap between his front teeth. I was bad at judging age back then, but with hindsight, I’d say he couldn’t have been much older than twenty-two. There was a strange little lilt to his accent as well, which I recognised vaguely from my imitation classes.

“What part of the world are you from?” I asked.

“Harrogate,” he said, moving to sit on a nearby wall. “Do you, um, know where that is?”

“It’s in North Yorkshire,” I said. “But you don’t sound like you’re from there.”

“I’ve spent lots of time in India, too. My mum was born there,” he said. “Do you know where India is?”

“I think so” I said, pulling my knees up to my chin. “We practise the accent sometimes, but nobody can do it properly.” I took a deep breath and did my best imitation of his voice.

He laughed. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

“It isn’t really,” I said. “I can only do English accents really well.”

“You’d fool me. Maybe not my mum, though,” he said, interlinking his fingers. “I’m Joe, by the way. Joey.”

He extended his hand to shake, but I froze up in an instant, balling my hands into fists. Even the teachers didn’t touch us. Only the doctors. He noticed my face and quickly wiped his hand on his overalls, like that was what he meant to do all along.

“Sorry, sorry. Need to get to grips with the rules,” he said. He squinted at my name tag. “Alesha? Is that your name?”

I fiddled with the tag. “Yep. Just until Sunday, though.”