Free You Must Be Sisters by Deborah Moggach Page B

looked at the jars, smug in their Sunday night routine. She knew the place so well, the people, the food. Nothing held tremor or excitement.
    ‘It’s such a lovely place,’ said her mother.
    Yes, and her saying that made it so boring.

eight
    CLAIRE ENJOYED GIVING exams simply because, after a lifetime of taking them, it was a pleasure to sit back and watch other people doing the work. Relaxed in her chair, she gazed across at the classroom with its twenty bent heads and its twenty hands that scribbled, hesitated, then scribbled again.
    It was February and mock C.S.E. time. These rows of fifteen-year-olds she knew well; each had a name, each had a face, she’d taught them for many months now, but just for three hours all were silenced into twenty busy brains and twenty busy hands. There remained small signs of individuality – Joyce’s cheerful butterfly hairslide, Dave’s alarming two-tone boots with their stacked heels, Elaine’s chain bracelet that tinkled as she wrote and became silent as she thought – but so oblivious were their owners that such things were no more than emblems; poignant badges of personalities that, at twelve noon sharp, would return to them.
    Another reason for her enjoyment was a letter from Laura. There had been no time to read it at breakfast, and no space on the bus (for Laura had the car this term), but now, with those bent heads in front of her, she had two whole hours.
    Wait for it. Tomorrow I move out of Hall! Before you collapse with shock I’ll tell you all. You know how I’ve been getting fed up with all its petty rules and things?
    Claire, amazed, read on. Apparently Laura knew a girl who was fed up with her digs and wanted to move into a Hall. So Laura had gone out and found an advertisement in a newsagent’s window – a bedsit. This other girl was going to pay the remainder of the Hall fees; a straight swop.
    Dead simple. It’ll be really easy moving, too, what with the car. Address: 18 Jacob’s Crescent, Bristol. And it’s furnished so I needn’t buy any stuff. Longing for you to see it! It’s a gorgeous room with its own little bathroom and an incredible view over the city. Hardly time to think of anything else, I’m so excited
.
    Claire put the letter down and gazed at the rows of bent heads. What on earth were her parents going to say to all this? She, Claire, would have to explain it to them. They’d think Laura had gone absolutely mad.
    And they wouldn’t be one hundred per cent wrong. Fancy Laura moving out of that satisfying little room! With only a term and a half to go, why didn’t she stay? She was so very impulsive, that was her trouble. Suggestible too. If someone she admired like that rather feeble specimen in the overcoat – Andy, was it? – said something, then she’d go right ahead and do it. He was the one who had brought up the subject of Hall in the first place.
    Somewhere where I can be myself
, Laura had said that day. It hadn’t sounded like her voice at all.
Be myself
; perhaps that was the trouble. Perhaps, when one had always been considered interesting and rebellious, to be suddenly plonked down amongst thousands of other interesting and rebellious people made one feel watered-down. Just one of a mass instead of one in particular; everyone the same, the same denim skirt, the same row of Penguin Classics on their shelves. So she goes and does something completely different. Mad.
    ‘Of course,’ boomed the lecturer’s voice, ‘the deprived child and the child of so-called low ability is often said, by and large, to have been given insufficient love by its mother. Mothers who handle their babies from an early age generate a security, through physical contact, with their offspring. A fulfilled and healthily-reciprocated physical relationship prepares the child, we are told, for a balanced and neurosis-free relationship with the opposite sex.
But!
’ He paused, stared at them, then thundered, ‘
It this true?
Can we take this so