Sex and Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido Page B

alongside her and holding her hand.
    ‘Since you’re so fond of that, I’ll give it to you one day, when you’re good,’ Gran said, but Zoe was always good and Gran never gave it to her, so eventually, one day when she was a lot younger, she stole it. But then she felt so much like a thief that she had to keep it hidden in a box under her bed all the time, and she never had any fun with it.
     
    The French boy’s name is Gérard. Zoe knows this because on both sides of the Channel the children have had to spend a double language period writing letters to their partners, each in the other’s language. They have had to introduce themselves to their partners and say things about themselves and their families and their hobbies. By the look of the letters, they have all been written with heavy dependence on the dictionary. Zoe knows that her own letter was crap, but she’s pretty sure it wasn’t quite as crap as Gérard’s. And at least hers was quite a bit longer.
     
    Dear Zoe
    I am a tall merry fellow with brown hairs. The hairs, which are curled, are also short. I have twelve years and my sister has sixteen years. She is Véronique. She likes much the music pop but I like much to make the hunt with my father and with my dog also, which is called Mimi. I like also much the football and also much the football player Zinédine Zidane, which is called Zizou. Indeed to you.
    I am your friend, Gérard.
     
    The Tall Merry Fellow has sent Mattie and Maggs into fits.
    ‘He sounds like a stilt walker in a stripy top hat,’ Mattie says.
    ‘He sounds like a total nerd,’ Zoe says, secretly wondering if Mattie and Maggs’s insides are also turning to jelly over the French exchange, or if it’s only her. ‘And I bet his sister’s a cow,’ she says.
    Caroline, as well as getting the maps, has gone to the trouble of buying Zoe a torch the size of a cigarette and she’s soon made that list of ‘useful phrases’, which she pastes to the inside of Zoe’s little backpack. Zoe wishes her mother wouldn’t always be so keen to enter into the spirit of school trips and outings, like the way, when they walked the Ridgeway, e.g., her mum went and bought her Puck of Pook’s Hill because it had Wayland’s Smithy in it. And then, whenever Zoe gets home from anything ‘educational’, she always wants to know about it. Like when they went to Cirencester on the coach, to look at the Roman ruins, and all Zoe could really remember about it was how she and Maggs and Mattie had got the giggles because there was a used condom in the amphitheatre, as well as lots of old crisp packets. It always ends up leaving Zoe feeling a bit stupid and inadequate, like she was letting Caroline down.
     
    The class goes to France by coach, leaving at 7 a.m. with all the mothers to wave them off. Zoe wishes her dad was there so that at least she could say goodbye to him because she knows he’s going off to a conference in three days’ time. It’s in South Africa, and then he’ll be away for nearly a whole month, so there’ll be no sense in trying to phone home to ask him to rescue her from the Tall Merry Fellow and his sister Véronique. Anyway, she hasn’t got a mobile phone and she won’t understand how to use the call boxes, even though Caroline has taped the code for the UK inside her backpack along with all the useful phrases and she’s got Zoe some phone cards as well.
    But Zoe knows that if she tries to use the cards there’ll be a recorded voice talking to her in French that she won’t understand, because that’s exactly what happened when they went on a school day-trip to Boulogne to practise ‘shopping’ in French. In the event, everywhere was self-service, so you never had to ask for anything. You just put your things on the counter and handed over whatever money it said you owed on the screen.
    Zoe is always the last to get stuff like a mobile phone and she hasn’t even got a personal stereo, because Caroline thinks it’s not