The Girls Read Free

lights switched on, curtains pulled shut, everyone sealed up and internalised. The garden itself dark and shabby; lines of bare-branched trees, dead-faced backs of houses, pale gravelled paths covered in the last of autumn’s leaves; an air of desolation, melancholic whistle of wind through leafless tendrils of weeping willows, cats sitting listlessly on garden walls.
    ‘I wonder where those girls go to school,’ she muttered mainly to herself. The girls’ school up by the Heath, maybe? Or maybe even the hothouse place on the other side of the main road? She tried to work out whether they had money or not. You couldn’t assume anything in this community. Half these houses were owned by a charitable trust and the mansion blocks at either end were affordable housing for service workers. There was even a halfway house on the terrace, home to an endless succession of recently released female offenders and their children, its back garden cemented over and sprouting weeds, with a never-used solitary plastic rocking dog.
    There was no single type of person who lived here. No neat social demographic catchment. Everyone lived here. TV presenters, taxi drivers, artists, teachers, drug addicts. That was the joy of it.
    ‘You’re starting to look a bit creepy there, Del.’
    She jumped slightly.
    ‘Those girls will be going: Mum , have you seen that weird woman over there who keeps staring at us?’
    Adele turned and smiled at Leo. ‘They can’t see me,’ she said, ‘not in this light.’
    ‘Well, that makes it even worse! Mum , there’s a ghostly shape in that window over there, I don’t like it!’
    ‘OK.’
    Adele turned one last time, before moving away from the window.

Two
Dear Daddy,
How are you? When can we see you? I miss you so much. Well, we’ve been here for ten days now. Granny came for lunch on Sunday. She made lots of weird faces. I don’t think she liked it very much. She said that Mum shouldn’t let us out in the garden on our own, that there might be murderers and paedophiles hiding in the bushes! She said she’d heard a story about a young girl being found dead in a garden like ours a long time ago. And that everyone would be looking in our back windows all the time. She’s so silly sometimes!
We went for a walk around the garden after she left and me and Grace mucked around on the swings and stuff. There was nobody out there. But then yesterday after school I could hear voices in the garden. Children’s voices. And I looked out the window and I could see kids running about, some others on bikes.
Anyway, me and Grace went out, just to look. We stood under the tree outside our house so that nobody could see us and we spied on them. They were kind of our age, I think. Mainly girls. Some of the girls looked a bit strange, wearing really weird clothes, patterned things, one had really really long hair, literally down to her bum, another one had shaved off bits and another one had dreadlocks. There was another girl who was much smaller than the others but she acted like she was probably the boss of the gang. She was really pretty with silky blond hair that looked like it had been straightened because it was so shiny. She was wearing normal clothes, jeans and stuff. And then a boy. Mixed-race. Kind of good-looking.
This is what they look like:

They weren’t really doing much. The smaller girl was on rollerblades. The boy was on a bike. The other three girls were just kind of hanging about and then one of them got on to the back bit of the boy’s bike and they were cycling around and I said to Grace, Let’s go to the playground. Let’s go on the swings. Because I really wanted to get closer to them all and see them properly. But she said, I’m going indoors. I hate it out here. It’s cliquey and full of stuck-up kids.
But I don’t think they are stuck-up really. I think they’re just all different kinds of kids, that’s all. And they probably think the same about us. Stuck-up girls! Hiding under