Voiceover

This is a voiceover.

The voiceover accompanies the action with some kind of commentary. It could be a bloke talking over the football or the documentary maker explaining what is happening. It could be provided by one of the main characters in the drama or by an unidentified narrator. In classical Greek plays a chorus delivered a collective voiceover to help the audience follow what was going on. Some books are a long voiceover by the author-as-God (not her real name).

There have been voiceovers by hard-bitten private eyes explaining the cracking of a particularly tricky case; voiceovers by the brilliant detective’s more pedestrian sidekick and voiceovers by likeable, strong heroines with or without the excuse of a diary. There have even been voiceovers by the dead, looking back over the events leading to their deaths.

Perhaps you think your thoughts are a voiceover providing a commentary running over the ups and downs of your own life?

In true voiceover fashion I will tell you what a voiceover really does: it anchors the meaning of whatever it is the voiceover is superimposed upon. You are watching something unfold (on the screen or in your imagination) and the voiceover tells you what it is. All the possible meanings and realities of whatever it is are narrowed down to the one prescribed meaning. You are allowed less room for interpretation. There have been newsreel and documentary voiceovers that have blatantly contradicted the images shown under them. However, the audience tends to go with the voiceover.

This is a voiceover.

Spy

Careless talk in the cafés and bars of the ninth arrondissement had alerted Scott Scandole (not his real name) to some of the questions surrounding the Institut Baudrillard.

The building itself was not unusual. It was large with six storeys but so were most of the other buildings in the Parisian street and it was almost identical to its immediate neighbours. A simple brass plaque to the left of the doorway bore the name of the organisation purportedly housed within. Jean Baudrillard had been, Scott knew, some kind of French wise-guy philosopher. So why had the institute named after him been taking delivery of so much heavy plant? Why was entry to the building so tightly controlled? Who were the visitors that were allowed in and why did they usually arrive at night?

Scandole was an Agency man unattached to the embassy. His cover was as a journalist for a prestigious East Coast newspaper. He had all the necessary papers and press passes in case the occasion ever demanded them. He dressed casually to fit the Agency’s idea of how Parisians would expect an American newspaperman to dress: crumpled raincoat over chinos and Ralph Lauren polo shirt. He was of average height and had one of those nondescript faces that enabled him to effortlessly mingle in a crowd without ever attracting attention. His cover was good and it was simply accepted by the patrons of drinking establishments in this part of Paris that the quiet American would snoop around and ask questions.

He had heard snippets of gossip about the building on Rue de la Rochefoucauld but had not paid it any mind until one day he heard some harder intelligence.

It was lunchtime on a cool and windy day in spring. Scandole was in a small unpretentious café. He sat in his preferred position away from the window; his back was against the wall so he had a good view of the whole room. A glass of vin ordinaire was in front of him on the Formica tabletop. The man at the corner table was holding forth and telling the entire bar about his cousin. She, he said employing lots of hand movement to underscore his story, worked for an office cleaning company and had been assigned to the Institut Baudrillard. The security was incredibly tight, she’d said, even for this day and age. The pass she’d been given would only give access to certain floors and rooms. But one night she had seen something. She was cleaning one of the offices as usual but one of the blinds hadn’t been put down properly and through the narrow gap she’d glimpsed the hidden interior space of the building. They must have removed three or four floors and the resulting space was filled with a large machine. Women and men in white coats were busying themselves around it. Gantries allowed access to the upper parts of the machine. She had turned quickly away from the window thinking she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. She didn’t want to get into trouble. Nobody said anything to her but she was never assigned to the Institut Baudrillard again. She suspected she’d been caught peeping through the blind by a hidden camera. When she’d been asked what the machine looked like all she could say was that it reminded her of a big generator “like they have in power stations.”

There was further desultory conversation around the bar about the likely purpose of such a machine hidden, as it was, in an institute in an ordinary Parisian street. Scandole was definitely interested. It was clearly in his country’s interests to find out what the Frenchies were up to. He drank the rest of his red wine eyeing the sediment dubiously. Without saying a word he left the bar. He consulted his street plan and walked the short distance to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld. He found the institute straight away and almost opposite was a museum. It was the studio of some long-dead impressionist expressionist painter. Scandole handed over a few Euros and went inside. From the second floor, a large room full of childish daubs, he had a perfect view of the institute. Taking the attendant’s chair while he was stretching his legs, he positioned himself to watch the building on the opposite side of the road. His view wasn’t perfect as there was a lot of reflection on the glass of the front doors but when they opened he could see the security man on the front desk. He worked out the nature of the entrance procedures. He made a note of shift changes.

Scandole didn’t do subtlety. He wasn’t going to join a cleaning agency undercover and patiently wait for an assignment in the Institut while keeping a lot of Parisian offices spic and span. He needed to see what was going on inside and report back. As soon as possible he was going to go through the front door posing as one of the people who worked there. He needed someone of a similar stature and who was as unremarkable as himself in appearance. He waited all day in vain and had to leave the museum at closing time. Then he loitered in the street out of the range of the CCTV cameras covering the entrance.

It was well after dark before he saw what he was looking for. The man who left the building was near enough to his height and, even better, was wearing glasses. He was dressed in a dark suit, collar and tie, and carrying a laptop by a shoulder strap. Scandole shadowed him for a couple of blocks until the street was empty. Then he quickly caught him up, hacked at his legs and brought him down. He yanked his head up by the hair and then brought it down hard on the sidewalk. He repeated this several times. Scandole didn’t find it hard to kill a man. But he did find it hard to do so by repeatedly smashing his forehead against the pavement without breaking his glasses.

It was done so quickly the man had not had a chance to cry out. Scandole dragged the body into a small courtyard. He stripped the body and quickly undressed. He put on the man’s shirt and suit. His own clothes he put in a carrier bag to dump elsewhere. He took his knife from the sheath strapped to his ankle and made some adjustments to the body. He took the man’s laptop, glasses and some of his most treasured possessions and strolled away from the murder. Two streets away he checked the man’s pass. The photo looked enough like him to pass muster. Scandole knew that people changed their image often enough these days to make security passes quickly out of date and it was easier for the security guard to wave him through than challenge him. He put on the glasses and walked back towards the Institute. On the way he threw his clothes away. He walked past the front doors on the other side of the road and looked in. A new man was on duty and Scandole decided to go straight away. He strode purposefully towards the entrance.

The doors opened automatically. He flashed the pass at the security man but that was not to be enough. The man held out his hand. Scandole gave him the pass. When the man looked at him he held his gaze. It was all about confidence.

Confidence and preparation. It was the latter that came in handy as the doorman indicated the fingerprint scanner. Scandole used his left hand or, rather, the severed hand of his victim that he was holding up his sleeve. A little green light came on and the man returned his pass and waved him through. The whole thing had been done in silence. He wondered if there was a retinal scan somewhere for an even more secure area. If so, he had the man’s eyeballs in his pocket. It was ironic, Scandole thought as he marched up the corridor: the more difficult they tried to make it to steal a man’s identity the more of the actual man you had to steal.

 

Scott was inside but he knew he had to keep acting as if he knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. He had to assume hidden cameras were watching every corridor and every office but his victim’s glasses were starting to give him a headache so he pushed them up onto his forehead.

He barged his way through a set of double doors. Beyond was another corridor of closed doors but at the end he could see an elevator. He strode down the corridor towards it. Opposite the elevator doors was a row of pegs on which were hung white coats. He put down the stolen laptop and put on the largest coat. The cotton felt rough as his hands passed through the sleeves. He clipped the pass onto the breast pocket and popped the glasses back onto his nose where they seemed heavier than before. He now looked every inch the technician and as he pushed the ‘up’ button the only thing that might have been a sign of nerves was the whiteness of his knuckles as he grasped the shoulder strap of the laptop.

Brushed steel doors slid open with a hiss and were sucked into their rubber grooves. He stared at the interior of the cage and then seemed to pull himself together and stepped inside. Music was playing. He looked at the controls and chose the next to top floor. The doors hissed shut. There was a loud ding.

He felt odd. He removed the stiff’s glasses but that made no difference. He shook his head to try and clear it. He felt a heightened sense of reality reminding him of a drug feeling. He had been given mind-altering psychedelics years ago when the Agency was playing around with them. (They were testing his susceptibility and he’d passed with flying colours.) He recognised this sensation as similar to the onset of a trip and hearing was the first sense to be affected. Sound was amplified and could no longer be located out there but was playing somehow in his head. The easy listening music seemed increasingly complex: a symphony of interweaving melodies and underneath he could hear the winch hauling up the cage. He could hear the cables sing. He reached out and steadied himself against the wall. What was happening to him?

The carpet fabric on the wall of the cage flattened under his palm and yet he could now feel the individual bristles of the pile pushing against the ridges of his fingertips. He could feel his brain slightly squashing against his skull as the elevator ascended. He opened his mouth and licked his lips just as the cage lurched to a stop. There was another loud ding and the doors whooshed open. He was looking at a hall similar to the one he’d left. He stood looking at it, undecided.

Scott couldn’t for the life of him remember what he was supposed to be doing. He looked down, frowning with concentration. He had a pair of glasses in one hand and a heavy case hanging off his shoulder. He put it down. He was wearing a white coat. Did he have a white coat? Did he need glasses?

Suddenly Scott felt acute fear. He didn’t like this small box he was in. He wanted to be out in the open air. He looked at the metal panel in the wall and the buttons sticking out from it. Somehow, he thought, these will help me get outside. Each round stud had a mark on it but none of them meant anything to him.

He reached towards the buttons and pushed one of them indiscriminately. Things started to happen. Moving metal panels shut off his view of the hall. The box started to move. Little lights came on but he couldn’t tell from them whether he was going up or down and he could no longer read the sensation in his skull. There were noises with him in the box but he could discern no pattern to them. The music had reverted to mere sounds.

The box stopped with an annoying high-pitched noise. The metal in front of him slid away presenting a view of another space like the one he’d just left. He didn’t know what to do. The decision was taken away from him as a man came round the corner. He was wearing a coat like Scott’s. Scott looked down and felt the material. There was that loud noise again. The stuff in front of him started to move. The man made a loud noise with his mouth but Scott didn’t know what it was. The man put his arm out and stuck it between the things that had been cutting him off from sight. The things sprang back and the man pushed past Scott. He made more mouth movements and sounds. Scott watched the man press a button and after more things happened the box moved again. The man made more noise but Scott stared straight ahead of him at the place where the movable things joined. When they started to move and reveal a different space behind them Scott shouldered them further apart and ran.

Luckily for Scott Scandole he was on the ground floor. He ran down what we would call a corridor and passed the security man on the front desk and into the street. He didn’t stop but continued to run until he couldn’t run any further. Eventually he had to stop and fight for breath. His body had completely taken over and acted on his fear. He had got away but he didn’t know who he was, where he had come from or where he was now. Again, he felt the strange item of clothing he was wearing but he no longer understood “white”. He no longer understood “coat”.

 

Scandole was to see a great deal of white coats in the coming months. The gendarmes picked up the strange man near the banks of the Seine. He did not appear to know who they were and would only make animal cries. As soon as they went through his pockets and found a severed hand and a pair of eyeballs Scandole was looking at the kind of ward with keypads on the doors and plentiful chemical restraints.

It would be a long time before he had even a glimmering of who he was and what had happened to him. His understanding of how anything functioned was very limited. He couldn’t understand what was said to him and could only utter meaningless sounds. He couldn’t join them together to form any kind of human language. Day by day he had to relearn his relationship with the world.

In the meantime the Americans wanted him back. No secret service likes to lose an agent and they badly wanted to know why a previously reliable man had killed and mutilated (what appeared to be) a harmless member of the Sorbonne philosophy faculty. They had made some enquiries of their own and retraced Scandole’s steps through the bars and cafés of Paris. They, too, heard the speculations about the Institut Baudrillard. An attendant in the museum over the road from this Institut was only too happy to tell them about the man who had taken his seat for his entire shift and just looked out of the window. They badly wanted to know what had happened to Agent Scandole. Had he somehow gained access to the mysterious building on the Rue de la Rochefoucauld?

His superiors invented a backstory of perpetrated felonies to justify his extradition but it was still over a year before he was flown back to the U.S. and even longer before he could tell them anything. (You see now the usefulness of the voiceover? Time has just zipped by.) Even after the doctors had managed to build his phonemes into words and eventually sentences, he couldn’t tell them very much. Yes, he had managed to get into the Institut but, no, he hadn’t seen anything.

Nevertheless, a file had been created and that file was covered in red flags. A secret agent of the United States had had his mind taken apart. Like a mechanic might strip down an engine, Scott Scandole had been systematically dismantled.

 

Following the intelligence failures before and after 9/11 the President had set up another top secret agency. The closed circle of Washington insiders knew it as W.A.C.O. (Don’t ask. You won’t be told. It’s all on a need-to-know-basis and you really don’t need to know.) It was headed up by a dependent of the President from his home state and therefore deemed utterly trustworthy by the Oval Office. Keeping tabs on the other agencies was more important than monitoring the Mullahs or eyeballing Ivan.

The ultra clandestine organisation had its headquarters in a D.C. office block shared by many government departments and so was impossible to detect. Here, in a conference room totally protected from bugs and long-reach mikes and electronic intercepts, the Chief (as he liked to be known) was being briefed by his number two.

“The first possibility is they did something to him when he was inside that building. Got some kind of drug into his system to protect their machine, whatever it is. Or, more worryingly, the machine itself messed with his mind. Whatever it was must be pretty powerful. He comes back and has to be retaught his ABC. He still can’t say he saw anything. Much of this is based on whispers picked up in Parisian bars. This brings me to the second possibility.”

“Yes?”

“Scandole might have been drinking too much Absinthe and got confused.”

“Some European mind-rot filled his head with nonsense?”

“And then emptied it. Yes Chief.”

“I don’t buy it but I better interview this guy myself.”

 

The Chief had to be choppered outstate to see the patient who was being kept in the psychiatric wing of the veteran’s hospital in Virginia. It was the same vast facility where he’d been put back together after that car bomb had messed him up. The Chief remembered that the maimed men on his ward hadn’t had much sympathy for the guys in this part of the complex. But he couldn’t help wondering what he’d find as he wheeled down the corridor. He was shown into a private room and left alone with Scandole.

He wasn’t easily shocked but he was taken aback by Agent Scandole’s appearance of skin and bones. He had lost so much weight he was skeletal. He looked like a victim of the camps or famine or extreme anorexia. He couldn’t have been much over 60 pounds. Physically he was snappable, brittle; mentally he was already broken. The Chief had seen what alcohol could do but he doubted even Bohemian booze could do that to a man.

They sat and talked: just the two of them, man to man, the Chief in his wheelchair and the patient sitting on his bed. Scandole could now string whole sentences together:

“I can’t help much, Sir, I’m afraid.”

“Just tell me what happened. We know you staked out the Institut. You followed one of the men from inside and you killed him.”

“Yes.”

“All good so far, Scandole, you were following standard procedure. You got into the building just as you were supposed to. Then what happened?”

“Rode the elevator, Sir, and started to feel wrong. It was like I’d been drugged but nothing passed my lips. I’m sure I wasn’t gassed. I got so scared I had to get out fast. I ran but by that time I didn’t know where or who I was. They did that to me. They did this to me.”

He held the Chief’s gaze. Because his face had caved in (the cheeks were completely gone) his eyes seemed much bigger. In proportion to the shrunken head they were huge, pleading like a toddler’s or a cartoon puppy. The Chief looked away first, moving his whole head to hide the fact that he had a glass eye. He realised he believed him. The French had done something to one of his agents. And whatever it was he wanted it.

 

Back in DC the Chief was busy making plans. He waved his prosthetic left arm expansively.

“We’re gonna have to send a team out there to check it out and see what those Frenchies have got in that so-called Institut.”

His number two’s pen was poised over the notepad.

“Who do you want to send?”

“Black ops. Special Forces. Sneaky Petes. Undercover agents. Subterfugers. Deep-cover commando squads. Clandestiners. You know the kind of thing.”

“Chief.”

“Get Harrison to head it up. She did great work In Georgia.”

“Chief.”

 

Once the Chief had made his decision things moved quickly at the Agency and within the month Maisie Harrison (not her real name) was sitting outside a Parisian café drinking ridiculously tiny coffees. Maisie was enjoying Paris. She could dress up instead of down (Georgia had been a nightmare). She had a severe black bob and wore a bright pink English trench coat and black boots. She surveyed the street through a haze of Gaulois smoke. Most passers-by seemed oblivious to their surroundings – eyes down, engaged with their phones or had their own chosen soundtrack piped into their ears. In that Paris was like everywhere else but Maisie liked the scale of this city and found it easy to get around.

She had strolled past the Institut once but had noticed nothing unusual. She would not go near it again until the actual operation. Her handpicked team were already here. They had all come on separate flights and were yet to meet up.

Maisie was not to know it but her presence in Paris had not gone unnoticed.

 

Semiotician Feyderbrand sat behind his big desk in his private office on the top floor of the Institut Baudrillard. He had covered his desk in signs to indicate he was both a loving heterosexual family man and a hard worker. Both these suppositions were false. The photographs of the “wife” and “kids” were his brother’s. The personal computer was rarely switched on. The desk diary was kept bare. The telephones, all three of them, collected dust. Some of his colleagues on the top floor knew how little work he actually did. There was a joke of sorts going along his corridor: why doesn’t Feyderbrand look out of the window this morning? Answer: because he’s going to look out of it this afternoon.

As if to confound the jokers Feyderbrand swizzled around in his chair to look out at the Rue de la Rouchefoucauld. Below him the zombies were going about their usual business of trying to fend off anxiety through the work – worry – consume – worry cycle. He should be immune from this but he felt stressed himself. Soon action would have to be taken. He stood up abruptly and thrust his hands into the pockets of his lab coat.

Feyderbrand didn’t have to wear a lab coat just as he didn’t need to shave his head or wear big glasses and a roll-neck sweater but, more than most he knew the importance of signs. He had studied semiotics under Barthes and worked with Foucault whose “look” he had copied. In those early days before the “breakthrough” he had wanted to change the world. And he had been well placed to do it when the strange alliance of French philosophy, German technology and British venture capital had finally produced the machine in the building below him. He frowned. All the power of the machine had been unable to save his friend André from being killed and mutilated in a back alley by the American.

There was a knock on the door. Feyderbrand shouted, “Come in” and this exchange of signs produced the desired outcome for both parties: the intelligence officer entered the room. He stood before Feyderbrand looking excited.

“They’re here,” he said.

Feyderbrand sighed. “What genre are they in?”

“They’re still in Spy.”

“I thought we’d switched from Spy weeks ago.”

“How shall we respond? Horror?”

“You can read my mind. Better make it localised. Very localised.”

They both smiled. But it was no clever telepathy. Everyone in the building knew Feyderbrand hated the Americans for helping the English win the war of the languages. The intelligence officer also knew how close Feyderbrand had been to the murdered man.

“Sub-genre?” He asked.

“Oh, extreme body horror, I think.” He owed André that much.

“Yes sir. Any comedy?”

Feyderbrand pinched together his thumb and forefinger and his spoken “a little” was totally redundant.

 

 

Extreme body horror with a little comedy

 

Maisie was in a part of Paris she didn’t recognise. She was trying to find the café they had chosen as their rendezvous but something had gone wrong. Maybe she had misread her map and got off at the wrong station on the Metro. Maybe she had used the wrong exit at the station. Maybe she had simply turned left when she should have turned right at the last intersection. Whatever the reason, Maisie had completely lost her bearings.

She looked around her. The street was lined with stores. There was a butcher’s suppliers; a surgical instrument shop; a barbed wire store (“razor wire a speciality”); a fishing tackle shop; a saw mill, a supplier of traps and poisons to the pest extermination trade and a workshop full of acid baths for stripping paint from doors.

Maisie was so busy looking at this unusual array of retail opportunities that she didn’t notice the banana skin. The skid and subsequent stumble took her all the way over the sill and through the door of the wool shop. She just had time to register relief that it wasn’t one of the other stores when she fell face forwards onto the knitting needle display. A 3.5 mm went through her left eyeball and a 4 mm through the right. There were two small “plip” sounds as the points pierced the soft yolks.

Blinded, she stumbled screaming around the shop. (How far had the needles penetrated her brain? How far?) The two elderly shop assistants were too traumatised to come out from behind their counters. Frozen to their respective stations they could not help the poor unfortunate as she lurched towards the crochet hooks. As this was a warm day Maisie had left her trench at the hotel and she was moving fast enough for the hooks to penetrate her dress, her underwear, her skin, her abdominal wall and lodge in her gut. In all five hooks embedded themselves in different stretches of her colon. Each one was attached to different coloured wools. Maisie was weakening. She vaguely tried, but failed, to remove the hooks and continued to blunder around the room bumping into the counters and displays. She spun one way and then another now grasping and tugging at the needles in her eyes. The wools from her insides twisted together producing a multi-coloured umbilical cord linking her inescapably to the bobbins. Eventually the yarns ran out and Maisie stopped her crazy waltz around the store. She was pulled towards the spools where she came to rest in an upright position. Now the body was stationary the shop assistants were released from their trance and managed to start screaming but Maisie was no longer alive to hear them.

 

When the Chief heard the news he pounded the desk with his fists (both real and artificial) and swore using words he’d learnt in the army. His number two stood quietly, buffeted by the storm. When the tirade had finished she put on a face of polite inquiry.

“What shall I tell the family, Chief?” That pulled the Chief up short.

“Tell them she died in the line of duty on a top secret mission. That way we don’t have to release any details. We won’t have to tell them she died knitting a scarf.”

 

Feyderbrand was told a more honest version of Maisie’s sad demise. He was also apprised of the withdrawal of the American team. He smiled – an index of his contentment with the progression of his plans. Then his face darkened. They had got too close: they knew something was going on and next time they would take it more seriously. They would change genre and up the ante. Feyderbrand knew he would have to leave his beloved Paris. He, his team and the machine would have to go into hiding. He opened a desk drawer and took out Contingency Plan A.

 

School

 

It is two years later and across the Channel in Northern England. (This voiceover device really is useful. We have just defeated time and space.) More specifically we are in Hull: a city and port on the Humber estuary in East Yorkshire. Even more specifically we are in (sorry about this) a school corridor. We are here to meet one of our main protagonists. She is Sasha Spence and this is her first day at Strive Higher High.

Walking along the main axis of the school Sasha remembered just how much she disliked corridors. But then, who doesn’t? Some architect geezers must like them because here they were again and again, allowing access while maximising floor space without a thought for the poor people who had to use them. If she became an architect when she grew up – which was highly unlikely as she was going into pop, presenting or posing, something with glamour – then she would have one of those atrium things flooded with natural light like a posh hotel. She wouldn’t have corridors with low ceilings and strip lights like this one.

Corridors belonged in institutions and one of the worst kinds of corridor was a school corridor. Doors led off into (shudder) classrooms where unspeakable things happened in the name of education. The walls were covered in dead displays: torn and curling artwork, out of date notices, rules to be disobeyed and exhortations to achieve which had managed to fade even in this miserable light. There were the locker stacks and, worse, clumps of loitering schoolchildren who stared at her as she passed. Sasha knew she was under inspection and could sense a ripple of unease following in her wake. She hid her awkwardness with some exaggerated gum-chewing. She would have much preferred to be smoking but guessed they had some silly rule against it.

She was being led down the thousand mile corridor by a teacher who had been co-opted into showing her to her first lesson.

“Geography,” the teacher said as they passed a door. She still clasped her break time mug of coffee. The mutterings of the kids behind her back was suddenly voiced loud enough for her to hear:

“What the hell has she done to her hair?”  It was a girl’s voice. Sasha flicked a V sign without bothering to turn round.

“English. History.” The teacher tossed the names of the subject departments over her shoulder as they progressed. It was as if the curriculum was unravelling before her very eyes, but behind closed doors. Finally the woman stopped.

“Art,” she said and squinted through the narrow reinforced glass window in the door. She threw the door open with her free hand. Inside the classroom was a boy sitting on his own, drawing.

“What are you doing in here, Joe?”

The boy looked up and brushed his long lank hair from his eyes.

“Miss let’s me come in here before our lesson. And do my art.”

“Well, this is Sasha, Joe. She’s new today. Can you look after her until Mrs Piper gets back?” The boy nodded and the teacher continued, “I’ll leave you in Joe’s very capable hands.” Even as she spoke she was backing out of the door. Sasha could imagine her sprinting back up the corridor to catch the last minutes of break time banter in the staff room.

She looked around the room ignoring Joe completely. He was obviously totally uncool, the kind of boy who would only attract other losers and bullies. His precious break time was spent hiding in a classroom instead of showing off in the school yard. Her critical eye swept over the kid’s artwork on display. Knowledge of the discovery of perspective in the far off olden days had not yet reached Strive Higher High School. Sasha wandered between the desks. The sinks were disgusting. Dirty aprons hung from pegs. Pieces of paper bearing key words were hanging from the ceiling tiles. The plan chests were missing some drawers. Never had Sasha thought that she’d miss her old school but she did now.

She sneaked a look over Joe’s shoulder. To Joe “doing his art” meant copying. He was laboriously copying and scaling up a cartoon figure from a comic book onto cartridge paper. At least, she thought, it was a character from manga not Spiderman or someone equally mainstream. She liked manga herself but didn’t recognise the figure. She was tempted to ask him but immediately thought better of it.

Joe seemed to sense her presence and put down his pencil, turned and looked at her through his fringe. “So, new?” he asked.

“New.”

“Where from?”

“Down south.”

There was a flicker of interest and a shy smile.

“I’m thinking not Somalia.”

“Quite right.” She found herself smiling too before remembering her mother’s advice: be cool. No friends is better that the wrong friends. He saw the smile switch off and picked up his pencil. Sasha moved to the side of the room.

The bell rang and from the corridor came the sound of gathering children. A woman’s voice called them to line up. There was a slight drop in noise level before the door opened and the class came in, fanning out to take their seats. Sasha still stood. This was a critical moment, she knew. Unlike her last school boys and girls here did not sit together and the classroom was soon divided along gender lines. The one spare place was in the boy’s half and was, of course, next to the loser Joe. The teacher was now in the room and saw Sasha. She leant back against her table and folded her arms. She sighed and raised her eyebrows and gestured Sasha to the empty seat, thus managing to convey both disapproval of Sasha and exasperation with a system that foisted a new girl upon her mid-term without prior notice. She pursed her lips and turned this into what she hoped was a smile of welcome and looked around the class noticing that Sasha was attracting the kind of attention that is signified by nudges, frowns and head shaking.

This was unusual as the school had a constantly changing roll and new pupils were arriving all the time and usually treated by old hands with an arrogant disinterest. It wasn’t as if Sasha was flouting the school uniform policy with outlandish garb or slavishly adhering to it like a teacher’s pet. She had the black blazer and trousers, white shirt and school tie. A closer look at her uniform revealed subtle deviations from both policy and conventional usage. The school shirt had a buttoned-down collar and she wore the tie neatly tied and not hanging loose with the huge knot favoured by most of her contemporaries. She wore Doc Marten boots which just fell within regulations as they weren’t trainers. None of this was enough to excite comment. Even the new girl’s septum piercing was fairly standard. No, what was getting her noticed was her hair.

This wasn’t one of those schools that sent pupils home for bizarre stylings. It couldn’t afford to. Within this art class were several dodgy dye-jobs, two kids sporting cornrows and even a mohican. Still, Sasha’s hair marked her out. The back and crown of her head had been shaved to a number one but she had kept long hair on each side of her head in front of her ears and she had a straight fringe over her eyebrows. This feathercut/shave with the boots and the shirt marked her out as a member of a very retro and distinctive subculture. Strive Higher High had its first skinhead girl and the other groups, the Plastics, the Goths, the Indie Kids, etc., could only sit and stare.

And draw and paint. Sasha liked art. It was one of her favourite subjects but here the still life she was asked to produce was like something she’d done in Year 8 in her school down south. She looked over at Joe who was still copying his manga character. She still couldn’t identify it. For some reason Joe had special dispensation and didn’t have to draw the bowl of fruit. She could hardly believe that Joe was the class wildman who could do as he wished as long as he wasn’t throwing furniture. A piece of paper reading: “Vanishing Point” fluttered above his head.

Around her representations of the fruit bowl were being created to varying degrees of verisimilitude. The dye-job sitting on the other side of her from Joe (who she already thought of as Leopard Head Ted) had chosen to go abstract. Amongst their artistic endeavours the Plastics were busy flicking their hair and making eyes at what passed for Jocks around here and the other subgroups were playing up to their stereotypes. Oblivious, Joe concentrated on his manga and Sasha was refining her cross-hatching to suggest three dimensions.

 

Of course we don’t actually have to sit through a lesson and can catch up with Sasha who is walking back to school. She got a passout for lunch. There was no way she was going to face the social and gastronomic nightmare of the canteen. She wandered along Road until she found a cheap looking café. She blew her dinner money on the “Manager’s Choice” which made her question the firm’s staffing policy.

After a string of shuttered-up shops and Polish supermarkets she crossed the road and was back at school in time for the first afternoon lesson: geography.

Again, she found herself next to Joe and, again, was surprised by the levels of ignorance on display. No one seemed to know much about the outside world but she’d already realised that Hull was so parochial that if you said you’d meet someone “on road” they’d know exactly which road you meant.

Joe excelled himself by asking Sir why Kentucky was named after a type of cooked chicken. After the class derision had been quashed he looked at her sideways and she wondered for the first time if he might be operating on another level and making her, the new girl, complicit in his impudence. Joe rose marginally in her estimation. Despite knowing obvious answers to easy questions Sasha’s hand remained down.

The last lesson of the afternoon was maths. There was no messing about here. The teacher was in total control. The Plastics frowned in concentration. The tongue of Leopard Head Ted peeped out between his lips. Joe worked his way through the same exercises as everyone else. This was Old-School.

On the last bell she walked home totally unmolested. Straight away her mother asked her: “How did it go?”

And she said: “Like a dream.”

 

Fast forward a month and Sasha has learnt who is who. Leopard Head Ted turned out to be called Jake Lupasco. A sexy name and, she thought, a sexy boy if only he would do something with his hair. He had ditched the animal-print dye-job two weeks previously but now sported swirling patterns in his hair which she found too elaborate. She discovered that Paige somebody-or-other was the queen bee of the Plastics and a manipulative nasty piece of work. She had clearly modelled herself on that horrid girl in Mean Girls – a film Sasha suspected Paige has watched way too many times on creepy sleepovers with her lesser Plastics, Pippa and Melodi. Her boyfriend was “cock of the school” and named Todd. Again, she guessed that on date nights they watched American High School movies to pick up advanced bullying techniques but dozed off before the comeuppances of the last act. They were a couple to be avoided.

There were many other cliques, subcultures and friendship groups to be identified. There was even a group of non-group loners which included Joe, who she still sat next to in many classes, a quiet pale girl called Fliss and Pavandeep Toor. Fliss rebuffed her every advance and Pavandeep, although friendly enough in school found excuses not to meet up outside it. Sasha never got to know her well enough to ask if this was some kind of “cultural thing.”

The school had many Poles and other Eastern Europeans, many more than her last school. She soon learnt their precise nationalities because getting them wrong could earn her an earful. Call any of them Russian and they could kick off big-style.

The Somalis stuck together and ignored her completely. After all she was new here. Nevertheless she always said hello and was at pains to demonstrate that she wasn’t one of those racist skinheads that they had back in the day.

So, a month later and Sasha hasn’t been bullied but she hasn’t exactly been accepted either. She has survived the period of maximum vulnerability in a new school and continued to be a skingirl. Her mother helped her with the hair: shaving the back and trimming her fringe and the longer side bits. She was the only skinhead in town but liked the idea of gradually fitting in by deliberately not fitting in. She got involved with skinhead communities online, steering well clear of any hint of politics, and gradually extended her wardrobe by buying on ebay. She has grown to like the image and that people look at her in the street. She liked the feel of the breeze on the shaved part of her head, so unlike when she had long hair.

She had come to the school because her mother had found work in Hull. Neither of them had been “up North” before and so far neither of them was particularly impressed. The one thing that was in Hull’s favour was the cheapness. They had always rented and continued the practice here but now had a whole house whereas before they had only been able to afford pokey flats. It was a three-bedroom ex-council house on an estate which someone had snapped up as a buy-to-let. It wasn’t far to walk to school once she’d mastered the labyrinthine layout of the Streets and Closes. It was called the Fountain Road estate but of a fountain there was no sign.

The neighbours were nice. Nearly all the kids around here went to her school and they tended to leave her alone although the ones who lived closest to her did start saying hello and calling her by her name.

She knew it was a cliché to say that northerners were friendlier but it did seem to be the case. On buses complete strangers would strike up conversations. In shops customers would chat away to each other and the assistants. Staff on the check-outs seemed genuinely cheerful and polite.

And that is where we find her now, in a queue for a check-out in Aldi. She was running an errand for her mum and only had a few items but she was waiting behind two couples who were both unloading full trolleys onto the belt.

It was a warm day in May and Sasha was wearing her summer weekend skingirl outfit: bovver boots and braces, polo shirt, short skirt and black tights. The contents of her basket looked meagre next to the mounds of produce building up on the belt in front of her “next customer, please” sign.

Suddenly she heard a shout in a sort of high-pitched exaggerated girly voice: “Hey, barber, you missed a bit.” She looked up and saw Melodi and Pippa in the queue for the next check-out. Melodi was pointing right at her as Pippa joined in: “Yeah, like the whole front of it,” and made a circle with her forefinger.

“Or did you run out of money half way through?” said Melodi.

“Where’d you get it cut? Dinsdales?” Pippa again.

Sasha knew this was a reference to a joke shop in town. She didn’t know why the two girls had decided to get into some public slagging off until she saw Paige and Todd waiting at the other side of the check-outs with big grins on their faces. Pippa and Melodi were showing off. Many nearby shoppers were smiling too. The check-out staff had paused in their work and were looking up. She muttered something under her breath.

“Are you chewing a brick or talkin’ to me ‘cos either way you’re gonna get your teeth smashed in,” said Melodi, looking serious.

Some kind of ritual response seems to be required but she had no idea what it might be. She just stood there, frozen, when a voice came from behind her: “Have you heard you?”

She turned. It was Jake Lupasco with what she took to be his younger sister and now he was a skinhead too with checked short-sleeve shirt, red braces, turned up jeans and DMs. The hair dye and the patterns had gone to be replaced by a regulation number one. Involuntarily she returned his smile. The Plastics had also seen his outfit and Paige herself shouted at him: “Hey look, it’s Tabasco and he’s joined a girl gang. It’s becoming This is England in here.”

But this film and TV reference does not really work in Aldi, Beverley Road, at 11:45 on a Saturday morning in May 2016 and the Plastic’s banter was clearly running out of steam. The queues move on and the tills bleep faster. The Plastics met up and vacated the shop. Sasha paid for her essentials and also left but she waited outside and Jake soon joined her.

“Hello Jake,” she said.

“Now then,” he said.

“Chippy?” said the younger sister.