Chapters (23)
When the two older girls proposed that the group should continue their meeting outside school, without the teacher, Zoe was so intoxicated – she, Zoe Brock, hanging out with Tara Gill (who had sewn a green thread all the way down the leg of her grey school trousers, and the teachers said nothing about it), Stella Armitage (who said that yes, obviously idolising footballers and film stars was brain-dead), and a boy from the lower sixth (they called him Ravi, to match them, a bilingual false etymology – his given name was Raymond) – that she barely noted the focus of discussions. They went to the tea shop on the high street, where Tara proposed motions, Stella sewed banners with emotive messages about climate change and decimated forests, and Ravi took minutes. It was a while before Zoe had the courage to mention the nature of her father’s job, but when she did, nobody seemed to think badly of her for it, despite all the criticism of the government which went on at these meetings. By then, of course, she was used to people in her everyday life being in awe of her father and his out-of-the-ordinary circle. Ravi’s dad worked on the fish farm. His mum, who was from Turkey, didn’t have a job yet; but was managing the family’s construction, at the weekends, of a wooden kit-home they’d ordered online. In the meantime, they lived in a caravan on the outskirts of Ayrness.
‘My mum just got a grant from Women Entrepreneurs in Work to put on a green roof,’ said Ravi, out of the hearing of Tara and Stella. ‘You should come round and see it, it’s really cool.’
The environment: totally fucked.
By now Zoe knew, of course, how past-life/patriarchal the world beyond the islands was, with its male-dominated throb of tyres on roads, testosterone-fuelled engines broadcasting their smoke into the air, doors slamming through endless streets, planes shrieking overhead. Island living was superior. But during the autumn half-term, when Kath was off to London, Pauline to her cousins’ in Edinburgh, Tara taking the boat to Berwick, and Stella’s family driving to Wales, Zoe (along with a not-inconsiderable proportion of her peers, but still, she felt abandoned) stayed in Ayrness. In the summer, her island-prison was at least enlivened by the tourists, with their unstinting jollity, their interesting-looking beach novels and awe-inspiring dresses. Few were the visitors to the islands in the autumn, however.
Her Uncle George came up to see them. Sitting in the library at her homework desk, she overheard him talking on the phone in a heated way about the woods above the house. She knew he was arguing with Sebastian, her father. (Zoe, the silent ghost of Harcourt House, avidly absorbing grown-up conversation.)