Nicola's Privilege

 

Her parents were rich enough to send her to any school but keen to peddle an image of themselves as normal, down to earth folk, they decided that the local comprehensive was good enough for their youngest daughter. Their eldest had gone to grammar school but Nicola failed the entry test. The family’s wealth was self made, they managed musical artists, this was very well paid in the eighties, they were minted but they retained a sense of normality. There was no reason to send Nicola to private school.

 

It was a mix of different factors which made her the girl we all wanted to be. Reasonably good genes, she wasn’t beautiful but she was pretty with good hair and she was fit. Her mother, a skinny, glamorous, blonde, gold sandal wearing fifty year old, insisted on an athletics club for both her daughters. Nicola had access to healthy food and endless holidays in the sun, staying in the part of Spain, ‘where all the footballers stayed’, meant she was permanently tanned with a wardrobe full of fashionable designer clothes.

 

Her house sat behind a pair of white gates, a sprawling red brick characterless rectangle with a triple garage, large lawned garden, tennis court and located on a private estate, far away from the riff raff. The interior was adorned with several enlarged photographs of very famous music stars, alongside her father. She was dropped at school each morning in a Range Rover.

 

We want her to mix with children of all backgrounds, that’s what her parents said.

 

In a private school, Nicola wouldn’t have been special, she would have blended in with all the other rich kids and perhaps even seen herself as poor compared to some of their excesses. But in the large comprehensive school she attended, she stood out from the crowd. The other kids dwelled upon her identity, her privilege, children from all year groups knew her full name and judged her harshly, always primed to jump on the most minor step out of line. 

 

Even the teachers sneered at her. The chemistry teacher once set fire to her skirt during an experiment and then slapped her all over hard to put out the flames. Far fetched I know but I was there and it looked absolutely deliberate.

 

In the year above us there was a particularly fearsome gang of girls who roamed the playground like hyenas, posing and pouting, laughing and intimidating. They were an eclectic bunch of all shapes and sizes, races and faces, some looked much older than their age, others still resembled children. 

 

A few became pregnant, standing in their uniforms with swollen breasts, protruding bellies, disappearing for a few days only to return to school with flat stomachs and a sense of relief. Several months later the process was repeated, a seemingly normal occurrence, casual, nothing to see here. No emotional toll, physical cost, simply a latent form of birth control at their disposal.

 

If they passed close to you then you were careful not to look at them, you acted normal, indifferent. It was unwise to attract attention from this gang of girls, you never wanted them to notice you but they noticed Nicola. One member of the gang, Deb, who looked at least ten years older than her age and was built like a brick wall, announced that she was going to fight Nicola during morning break on a Tuesday.

 

Nicola had few real friends but she had a hanger-on, a wet girl who followed her around like a puppy and relished in her notoriety. She told everyone, Deb is going to fight Nicola at play time. It made perfect sense to us. If anyone deserved it, it was Nicola, she was rich, pretty, slim and tanned, she lived in a massive house, wore trendy clothes and went on nice holidays. She lived in a fairy tale and all the fairy tales we had ever read contained evil forces, it was an essential component of the story. Innocent girls were harmed in fairy tales. It was the natural order of things.

 

It was going to happen outside our form room, in a stretch of playground between the language corridor and the huts. Those shabby huts were reserved for religious studies, a subject our school considered largely irrelevant, it was taught in the form of fuzzy slide shows and never beyond year eight.

 

At break time we all ran to the window to watch. Nicola stood outside gripping her hands tightly together and pushing her lower jaw out so that it jutted beyond her upper jaw like an underbite. I’d noticed her doing this whenever she felt unsure of herself, it made her face ugly. 

 

She looked lost and very alone, not even her wet friend accompanied her, instead watching from the window with all of us. Nobody backed her up or protected her. Even the boys who claimed to fancy her, love her even, grinned and jeered at her, their eyes shining in anticipation of what was about to happen.

 

Deb came striding up with her gang following. She was tall and bore a striking resemblance to the She Devil in The Life and Loves of a She Devil (pre plastic surgery), the novel by Fay Weldon which had recently been adapted for television and we were just old enough to watch it. 

 

Nicola didn’t run away, she seemed resigned to her fate, whatever it was about to be. It was as if she knew that she somehow deserved it, the girl gang were just trying to restore the balance of fairness.

 

It started with gentle pushing. Deb placed her hands on Nicola’s slender shoulders and gave her a restrained push so that she stepped backwards a few feet. The boys from the year above who all fancied Nicola, stood and watched, laughing and delighting in her predicament, her resigned innaction, her passiveness. Perhaps they indulged in a private fantasy about her apparent willingness to be dominated, controlled.

 

Her mother, likely at home sipping coffee or peddling on her exercise bike in the home gym, blissfully unaware of her daughter’s fate.

 

The pushing became harsher, more violent so that Nicola’s head was thrown back and her backward steps more rapid to balance herself and avoid the humiliation of falling. The other girls from the gang watched, their faces hard, determined that this action was taken. It was what they wanted. A display of their power in school politics. How dare somebody like Nicola attend their school.

 

The pushing progressed to light punches, a clenched fat fist, collected, controlled, colliding with the area between Nicola’s chest and neck. Among the spectators, a few let out whoahs and aahs, excited laughter, others looked concerned about how far things might go and what they the consequences might be of trying to stop it.

 

Deb looked dead behind the eyes as she continued with her controlled attack. She didn’t even make eye contact with Nicola, instead her black, eye-lined gaze searching beyond her prey towards the trees in the sports field. All the time Nicola stared at her, part resigned, part pleading silently for her to stop and just leave her alone. She didn’t run away though, somehow she knew that this would make things worse, she had to own her privilege and take responsibility for it. 

 

She had to pay the tax for being rich and pretty, for getting attention from boys and garnering feelings of envy from girls, in whatever form this happened to be doled out. 

 

The pushes and punches continued with controlled pauses between them. Deb began to look bored, she kept glancing up at the rest of the gang of hyenas as if waiting for a prompt. They still stood, a few meters away with raised eyebrows, hands on hips, silently enforcing the laws of the school hierarchy.

 

Suddenly a flustered looking older male teacher in a brown suit came striding into the picture and shouted something at Deb who dropped her arms and softened her body language, rolled her eyes as she stood back. He asked Nicola a question and she shrugged, shook her head and walked away. A few minutes later she returned to our classroom with flushed cheeks, she didn’t cry but she was very quiet. Some pupils asked her if she was okay and she insisted she was fine.

 

Deb and the rest of the hyenas continued with their patrols. I don’t remember anybody getting suspended, a letter home to Deb’s parents perhaps but I imagine she scared the hell out of them too. 

 

After the ‘fight’, Nicola continued as normal. She started to say, hi, to the hyenas when she bumped into them in the corridors. It was as if she’d been through a sort of initiation ceremony and now they were all okay with each other, not friendly but there were no more debts to pay.

 

She was later the first girl to get a proper boyfriend, she found herself the other rich kid in the school and they got together. Their parents paid for them to go to a new luxury holiday destination on their own for the weekend, called Centre Parks. We’d never heard of it.

The hyenas all left school at sixteen. Individually each one of them had a slightly scared look in their eyes as they went out into the world, they were nothing without their pack.

 

A couple of them decided to keep their latest pregnancies, going to full term and becoming young mothers. Deb got herself a job in an art gallery. There was something artful about her, a sort of inner conflict, her ‘she devil’ features and giant figure, her calm demeanor and willingness to fight on demand. She was fascinating in her hideousness.

 

Nicola’s ‘it girl’ status faded beyond the school gates, her glow vanished. She achieved poor exam results and had no particular talent as such. Athletics club was dropped without the influence of her mother. She went into the beauty industry, backed up financially with her parents' cushion of security. 

 

The bullying at that school continues I’m sure. It doesn’t matter whether you’re poor, rich, ugly, whatever your difference but bullying based upon apparent privilege never garnered any sympathy, at least not when we were kids.