The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls
It's hard to keep a secret when the secret just keeps on getting bigger….Four teenage girls - Grace, Vicky, Ruth and Saskia - all at the same school; all with the same secret.October. Burwood. The corridors of Burwood Girls School are once more full of oestrogen; Platform number one at Burwood Station is packed with commuters waiting for delayed trains to London; the gym at Oasis Leisure centre is full of fading tans while leaves fall and pile up on lawns ripe for raking. Just like any other October. Until life gets turned inside out in this affluent South-eastern town when not one but four teenage girls fall pregnant.As the media descends on Burwood with unprecedented ferocity, headlines such as:WHO ARE THE BABIES' FATHERS?DO ALL FOUR BABIES SHARE THE SAME FATHER?GIRLS REVEAL PREGNANCIES WEREN'T ACCIDENTAL…ARE THE BURWOOD GIRLS PART OF A TEENAGE PREGNANCY CULT?…at first seem to corrupt this small, leafy, affluent community until we realise that the corruption was there all along, bubbling just beneath the surface.Before things get better, they're going to get much, much worse. But then, at the end of the day, the last thing anyone in Burwood wants is life to return to normal.
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The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls
Sarah May
For Gabriel
Table of Contents
—summer—
Summer was shimmering and at its height as Tom Henderson drove his piebald red Volkswagen out of town with three seventeen-year-old virgins in the back. It was Ruth who—sitting in the middle between Vicky and Saskia—suggested fruit picking.
Tom said he’d drive them.
He had just about enough petrol to get there and back.
The windows were down and there was a Led Zeppelin CD playing that jumped when they went over potholes or when they braked suddenly like Tom was braking now, at a set of red lights. As soon as the car stopped, the 32ºC with humidity that had been forecast regained its full weight.
‘Jump them,’ Vicky Henderson ordered her brother. ‘It’s, like, B-Movie empty—there’s nobody around.’
‘The lights are red.’ Tom exhaled, uninterested.
‘This is fucking unbearable.’ Vicky groaned and turned irritably to Saskia, slumped against the opposite door, her face obscured by her hair, which had settled there when the car stopped. ‘Why are you wearing jeans? Aren’t you like melting?’
Saskia, high, was staring through the open doors of the Baptist Church they’d drawn level with—at an outsize flower display looming white in the shade of the vestibule. She looked down slowly at her denimclad legs and shrugged.
‘Yeah—’
The lights changed at last. They left the Baptist Church behind and a hot breeze started blowing through the car again.
There were a lot of churches in Burwood. In fact, they still built churches in Burwood. The newest was completed only six months ago—at around the same time as the North Heath housing estate, whose population it had been built to serve. There was a pub next to the church, clad in the same bright sandstone, serving western-style BBQ ribs to the hungry faithful.
‘And you’re tanned,’ Vicky carried on. She hadn’t finished with Saskia. ‘If I had your legs I wouldn’t be putting them in jeans.’
Saskia sighed and continued to stare out the open window, her hair blowing around her face. She was thinking about the south of France where she’d spent most of July; thinking in particular about her father lying drunk and untidy on a poolside sun lounger while she tried to drag a yellow and white striped umbrella over to him so he wouldn’t get burnt. That’s how she spent most of her time: stopping her father getting burnt—one way or another. At least in France she’d had Ruth for company when Richard Greaves lost consciousness, which he did most afternoons.
She turned her head to look at Ruth, who was sitting beside her, and her eyes caught Tom’s in the rear view mirror. Last summer Saskia had been in love with Tom. She kept a darkly detailed diary noting his every movement, gesture and look, and stole things from his bedroom that she never gave back—a ball of elastic bands, a pair of worn sports socks, a Smurf pencil sharpener, a Radio Mercury sticker, and a library copy of a D.H. Lawrence book he’d spilt aftershave over.
This summer she didn’t love him any more.
Catching her eye now, in the rear-view mirror, Tom felt bad about the hours his university girlfriend Ali and he spent talking and laughing about Saskia’s ‘hingeless passion’—a phrase coined by Ali—and the way he’d just handed Saskia up to Ali, who could be cruel.
‘How’s Ali?’ Saskia said suddenly.
‘She’s in India,’ Vicky put in. ‘Her parents think Tom and her are too close.’
‘And what does Tom think?’ Ruth asked suddenly—loudly, out of shyness.
‘Tom doesn’t think.’
‘Shut up, Vick—’
Ruth kept her eyes on Tom—taking in his thighs, throat and wrists—and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him as the red Volkswagen left behind the retail parks where the good people of Burwood bought pet food and hot tubs, hitting a leggy stretch of road lined by garages, off licences, discount bedding stores, pubs that welcomed families and sold salad in kegs, Indian restaurants—one called Curry Nights had been made infamous a couple of years ago when an Alsatian carcass was found in one of their bins.
‘I went to school there,’ Ruth said, as they passed the primary school where she’d had her hand driven onto a rusty nail by another girl and had to go to hospital to get a tetanus jab.
