Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane

Author:Fiona McFarlane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPERONE

(1995)

Even if Sister Mary Placid had known this trip was going to go wrong, that this would be the last time she’d take a sixth form Ancient History class to Rome, she couldn’t have prayed over it more than she already had. Prayer was simply the medium in which she moved. So she prayed to the Virgin over every preparation, and she prayed to the Virgin on the early bus to Heathrow as the girls slept in the seats around her. She prayed—mirror of justice, seat of wisdom—at the airport as the girls, who had well and truly woken up, ran about screaming with the joy and fright of the trip: four days in Rome with only one teacher and one mother as chaperones. The girls bought vast quantities of chocolate, they went continually to the bathrooms in shifting groups of two or three, and there were so many of them! Only nine, in reality, but they seemed to multiply once they were out of uniform, so that every sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl Mary Placid spied might be a member of her class, and therefore her concern.

The chaperoning mother, Charlotte Gibson, occupied herself before the flight by sniffing every perfume in the duty-free shop beside the gate. She had volunteered for the trip because she and her husband were in the process of divorcing, and Charlotte thought it best to keep ahead of any disapproval from the school. According to Tess, Charlotte’s daughter, the nuns had been known to penalise girls with divorced parents, and Tess’s offer from Cambridge required an A in history. Charlotte, browsing the perfumes, had always thought of herself as preferring a light, floral scent; now, as she raised each bottle to her nose, she wondered if she might in fact enjoy something spicy, which would sit waiting on her skin and intrude at unpredictable moments, welling up to announce the rich existence of her body.

Tess Gibson sat in the part of the gate that was furthest from her mother’s duty-free browsing. She hunched over her Discman, which she was sharing with her friend Grace Reed: one bud of a headphone in Tess’s left ear, one in Grace’s right, tethered by wire to a song with which Tess felt, each time she heard it, reunited, as if her body was the song’s beloved instrument. Her blood surged with the singer’s exhausted gasps, the unexpected silences, the sudden distorted explosions of guitar. Tess smiled at Grace, a little shy in her ecstasy. Grace smiled back, but she was bored with the song, which seemed fuzzy to her, shapeless and imprecise, like stars seen without glasses, and the androgynous voice of the singer wailed with self-pity. Grace, too, was full of self-pity, not least because she didn’t own a Discman; but Grace would never sing about it.

Mary Placid prayed—cause of our joy, spiritual vessel—on the plane while the girls threw objects at one another across the narrow aisles and screamed with laughter at senseless repeated phrases. They requested,

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