steps, as if it could hardly be bothered to go to a juicier patch. Here, under the tree, the grass grew more sparsely, and my fingers were idly picking at bare soil, feeling for stones.
Green Down, where we lived, was a suburb that was almost a village, built on one of the hills that surround Bath, and it didn’t take long to reach open countryside. Heavy lorries rumbled up the lane to the quarries scooped out of the slope, but the fields in the valley bottom were peaceful. If I dug here I would find something, I knew it. The fields and hills held secrets: hidden valleys, mysterious embankments and ridges marking where Roman villas had once stood, or where the Saxon Wansdyke marched across the fields.
None of this interested Poppy and Trish. But I was always hopeful.
‘There are ammonites in this field,’ I said.
Poppy was gazing at the sky and chewing strands of her bobbed reddish hair. When they dried, her split ends would fan out like fuse wire.
‘No, really,’ I said, as if someone had bothered to reply. ‘If I borrowed your nail file, Trish, I bet I’d dig one up in a jiff.’
They didn’t have to ask me what ammonites were. I’d told them, plenty of times. ‘They had shells like big coiled-up snakes,’ I explained, at every possible opportunity. ‘They lived at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago.’
If anyone was so daft as to enquire, ‘What are they doing here, then?’ I would go on to enthuse about how the hills round Bath were once the bed of a shallow sea, where dead creatures fell and fossilized. My friends’ eyes glazed over, as unresponsive as the ammonites.
‘Look,’ I went on, trying to get my fingers under a big lump of stone embedded in the soil. ‘I bet there’s a fossil in this.’
Trish began to paint Poppy’s toenails with the silvery-pink varnish.
Sometimes I couldn’t believe how little they noticed. Trish lived in an old Georgian rectory in Midcombe, where there was an ammonite built into the garden wall. It was enormous, more than a foot across, with deep corrugated ridges on its coils. You couldn’t miss it. But they did. ‘Oh, is that one?’ Trish asked, when I pointed it out to her. She couldn’t have cared less. I’d have given my left arm to bag a fossil that big. You could find little ones easily, right on the surface, early in the year when the fields were freshly ploughed. Sometimes there was only the imprint in rock, but often the ammonites themselves seemed to have crawled up from the sticky earth, fragments broken by the plough, occasionally nearly whole stone spirals. I had quite a collection in my bedroom. They looked like catherine wheels. My father said they reminded him of very stale Danish pastries. I thought they were beautiful.
I watched Trish. Her long dark hair, enviably straight, hung across her face as she bent over Poppy’s leg, curtaining them in a private tent. She never offered to paint my toenails.
Trish had been my friend first. We got to know each other by accident, rather than choice: we were the only two in our class who hadn’t been at the school right through from juniors. All the rest had known each other since they were seven. They didn’t like Trish because she was called Klein, and they didn’t like me because I was a scholarship girl. None of them realized that the most Jewish thing about Trish was her surname, and the only clever thing about me was my scholarship. For nearly three years, we had been best friends by default.
But late last year, things began to change. Trish suddenly got tall, and I stayed short. Trish–ugly old Trish, with her big nose and wide mouth, just as awkward as me, I’d always thought–started to get looks from boys. Trish had a starter bra and sanitary towels. And Trish had discovered Poppy.
Poppy had arrived in Green Down just after Christmas. Her father worked for the Ministry of Defence and had been posted from Plymouth to Bath. She immediately latched on to Trish and me. I didn’t mind at first. It made me feel like I had a wide circle of friends. Now I wasn’t so sure.
Trish straightened up, popped the brush back into the bottle and screwed down the top. Poppy wiggled her freckled toes, admiring the silvery-pink. ‘Do Katie’s,’ she said to Trish.
‘I’m not going to waste it,’ said Trish.
‘I don’t want mine done,’ I said quickly. Trish was right. I wouldn’t be careful: it would get chipped, and I didn’t have any nail-varnish remover to take it off properly. Still, I’d have liked her to paint my nails silvery-pink.
‘So,’ said Poppy, ‘what are we going to do now?’
They both looked at me. They wanted me to invite them back to my house. But I wanted to stay in the field, with the worn-out cows and the ammonites.
‘Let’s do biology,’ I said, to buy time. Trish looked pleased; this game starred her. She fished in her satchel.
There was no hurry. No one was waiting for us. My dad wouldn’t be back from rewiring someone’s house until half past six. Poppy’s parents were in Scotland that week, where her grandmother was taking her time over dying, so Poppy was staying with Trish. Trish’s mum was always relaxed about the time they came home after school.
My dad had not yet plucked up the courage to tell me the facts of life. He left that to the school, which had been slow getting round to it too. But this term we’d been thrilled to find our new biology textbook was rather more forthcoming on the subject than our teacher.
Trish pushed her hair into a tight little bun on the top of her head, and flared her nostrils in imitation of Miss Millichip. ‘Turn now to page one-nine-four, girls,’ she trilled. Poppy and I, playing dutiful pupils, opened our books. We stared at mysterious illustrations that reminded me of the plumbing schemes and wiring diagrams my father worked on at the kitchen table.
‘Today we are going to study reproduction,’ continued Trish. We’d had a real lesson on it this afternoon, but Miss Millichip had revealed nothing more exciting than the gestation period of a rabbit. ‘What kind of reproduction, Poppy McClaren?’
Poppy giggled. ‘Human reproduction, miss.’
The diagrams bore no resemblance to any human body I’d seen. Were those coils of pipework really tucked away inside me? On the opposite page there was a diagram of the male reproductive system. Staring at it, I felt an odd sensation. It was grounded somewhere not far from the pipework, but it seemed to swell up through the whole central stem of my body, so even my lips and tongue felt thick and hot and clumsy.
Trish’s mother, more advanced than the average Green Down parent, had explained matters to her daughter more than a year ago, so Trish considered herself an expert. ‘A woman,’ she intoned, ‘has an opening called the regina.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Poppy. ‘It says here it’s called the vagina.’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Trish, loftily. ‘It’s Latin for “queen”. It must be a misprint in the book.’
Poppy looked sceptical, but neither of us felt brave enough to contradict Trish. Her mother had come from London, and worked as a photographer’s model before marrying Trish’s dad.
‘And the man,’ Trish continued, ‘has an appendage called a penis.’ That did it. We were all off on a fit of giggles.
‘Have you ever seen one?’ asked Poppy, a little later when we had recovered.
‘Of course I have,’ said Trish. ‘I used to have baths with Stephen.’
‘That doesn’t count,’ said Poppy. ‘Your brother’s ten. I meant a grown-up one.’
I could see Trish weighing up whether to lie or not. In spite of her mother’s racy career, her home was probably as modest as the rest of suburban Bath in the 1970s. Fathers and brothers did not wander around naked.
‘No,’ she finally admitted. ‘But I have seen my mother’s fanny. It’s all hairy.’
I decided it was time to make my own contribution to the debate. ‘I have,’ I said.