Elementals - A. S. Byatt [53]
Wendy’s gang, at playtime, sat around on the low stone wall round the netball courts and Rachel’s gang met in the bushes, in the sooty Victorian laurel-bushes near the gate into the school grounds.
I think, looking back, that Rachel had leadership qualities, and that Wendy didn’t – she was simply too agreeable, her gang clustered round her because she was a star whose star quality was a perfect normality. Looking back, I think you could call it grace. She did things – things she was asked to do, things she was expected to do, things she mildly liked to do – as well as she could, and was briefly surprised to find that no one else could do them anywhere near as well. Whereas Rachel was moody. You had to be on the right side of her, or she picked on you. No, I can’t remember any instance of her picking on anyone, nothing so precise. Just an atmosphere, a smoke, of possible danger.
There was a fringe of girls, like myself, who hung around the edges of the gangs, not sure if we were admitted as members or not. Because we weren’t sure, we were also uncertain what the gangs did. What was being discussed, in secret whispers, in smuggled notes in Scripture lessons, in the bogs. We thought, if we could be in the inner circle – both gangs had an inner circle of about four or five acolytes and the Leader – we would be part of something that was going on, we would be less bored.
I know now, I know the secret of what was going on. It was nothing at all. Or at least, all that was going on was the self-perpetuation of the structure of the gangs, the inner circles, the outer circles, the tension between Wendy’s gang in the sun and Rachel’s in the shade. We were in a green suburb of an industrial town, and when we crossed the town, on winter afternoons, to go home to tea, we saw real gangs, that is, active gangs, boys with bicycle chains, boys with knives and heavy boots, boys whose doings were reported in the papers, sometimes. We hurried past, looking unfrightened, walking together, safety in numbers. But our gangs were not gangs. Nothing ever happened.
Or at least, I think nothing happened. No, change that, something happened, but I do not remember how.
I had the idea, because I read so many books, that treachery would make the gangs interesting. A girl could betray the secrets of one gang to the other, if she could find any secrets to betray. I think I was interested in treachery because of the charm of Rupert of Hentzau. I hadn’t met that other charmer, Edmund in King Lear, I’m fairly sure. I may have hit on some narrative universal: what is interesting about boring gangs has to be treachery. It was a silly idea, because, as I said, there were no secrets, no plans of battle, no battles, nothing to betray. I watch Lara betraying me with all the inventiveness of her, our, fraught and hyperactive trade, and I look back on the innocent child I was, with my dreams of drama, with a sad pity. Our world is full of a buzz about surveys which have been commissioned which show that one boring commercial can lose the audience for the whole commercial break round it, can even diminish the audience for the television programme into which our break breaks. She is putting it about, in whispers, that another soft-drinks firm has done a survey that shows that both my Spanaranja and my Grenadine films are infecting whole slots with boredom and apathy. I think, myself, she invented not only the findings, but the survey. It was, I have to admit, a resourceful idea, which