You’ll have noticed them on the roads, minibuses, full of schoolgirls, being driven by harassed teachers to some country location where the girls will be put through end-of-term, healthy outdoor activities, protesting all the way. Among any group of eight 13-year-olds there’ll be a victim, a loner, a leader, and so on – it’s been the stuff of many a novel since Lord of the Flies, but it is Bella Bathurst’s considerable achievement to bring to this scenario something contemporary and fresh.
Right from the beginning, there is a ferocious undertone to this story. Anyone familiar with modern teenage girls will recognise the authenticity of the dialogue – brutal, vulgar, full of jeers and sneers understood only by themselves. It zips along at a terrific rate, especially between Caz, Jules and Hen, the three central characters. They smoke, they yearn for sex, they are foul-mouthed, and yet at the same time they are touching, each so desperate to be ‘special’, not to have a dull life ahead of them. They are forceful, making Ali (the loner, and by far the most interesting character) read to them books ‘as filthy as the frigid school library could provide’. They make Izzy (the victim) wretched with their cruel taunts about her scratching (she has eczema). But in careful passages interspersed among the ever-rolling dialogue the anguish each of the girls feels about her unsatisfactory self is exposed.
The plot, such as it is, revolves round Jules’s jealousy of Caz, whom she reckons is ‘first class’ to her ‘economy’. She craves Caz’s beauty, her strength and her popularity. The two girls are meant to be best friends, but in the way of 13-year-old best friends there is as much rivalry in the relationship as loyalty.
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