Very creepy, very noir, if domestic New Zealand, circa 1970, can be called noir. The story certainly starts off sweetly enough. Our girl, Justine, is in class, trying to please the new teacher, Mrs Price. Everyone is. Mrs Price is young, new in town, and glamourous. Hot, she’d be called today. She also has a tragic past: a husband and daughter, dead in a car crash. Justine watches as she selects her pets and desperately wants to be the one asked to stay behind to wipe the board, or empty the bins, but these jobs go to the popular kids. Justine, and best friend Amy, are not part of the cool crowd. They go home to each other’s houses, rate the prettiest girls in the class in order: Melissa first, others depending on haircuts and body parts, and then they select each other as fourth. Pretty enough, but not up there. They are kind to each other. They talk about boys, and buying a first bra. There’s nothing creepy here, yet. Just a whiff of foreboding. Chidgey is a clever writer. It’s all good until it isn’t.
Justine is being brought up by her dad. Her mother has died after a long struggle with cancer, and I guess it’s a nod to the times that Justine has taken over her mother’s role in cooking and cleaning the house while her dad drinks, miserably, on the sofa.
Mrs Price learns that Justine suffers from seizures and that her mother has died and she takes her on as a sort of project, her new pet. She drops her home from school one day, and meets her dad, conveniently single and handsome. Being favoured by Mrs Price to ride in her car gives Justine huge social capital. We begin to feel the intensity of emotion of a pre-teen crush.
Mrs Price’s overt interest in her charges is worrying by today’s standards. She has a seemingly perverted interest in their friendships and social lives, invites the girls around to her house and does their make up, asks them about the boys they like, manipulates her favourites like chess pieces. She ingratiates herself with Justine, dates her dad, orchestrates a wedge between Justine and Amy so Justine can become part of the cool gang and friends with Melissa.
There are other kids in the class and we learn who likes whom, who is in and out. It does feel very ’70s – certainly reminds me of school (I was out; I still feel it deeply) and quite bitchy. At one point erstwhile bestie Amy is accused of stealing and her classmates call her a liar. Say they wish she were dead. That she should kill herself. Justine doesn’t rush to defend her as a Gen Z girlfriend might. Bullying didn’t start with social media, we just didn’t know to call it out back then. Even Mrs Price doesn’t call this stuff, just picks on Amy herself, in a disturbingly passive/aggressive way. All of this is described, in first person, by Justine. We are waaay inside that girl’s head. She’s totally self-absorbed and very judgemental. Here’s her view of Melissa’s mum: bulging thighs, clingy shirt, bra cutting into the fat on her back. “That’s Melissa in a few years,” whispers Amy in a classic put down of the cool one. It’s very schoolgirly (again, until it isn’t).
Mrs Price gets weirder. She punishes a boy by making him amputate the pet axolotl’s foot (did every kiwi class have a pet axolotl or just mine and Chidgey’s?). It like those weird psych experiments where people are manipulated to be increasingly cruel, to see how far they will go. Creepy creepy.
The ending gets real. Not once, but twice. It’s not quite as outrageous as Catton’s Birnam Wood crash-and-burn-apocalypse but it’s a hell of an ending. The ‘pet’ story is packaged between two snippets of later life, where Justine, visiting her elderly dad, meets an eerily familiar looking nurse.
Lots of things impressed me in the period detail of this book. One in particular was a scene at the arrivals hall at Wellington airport:
Because of the slope of the ramp, you couldn’t see the passengers properly until they were almost at the swinging doors: first their feet appeared, then their legs, then their bodies, and finally their faces.
Remember that? I’m ten again and waiting for a visit from Uncle Dave. This is not a memory for everyone, obviously, but I felt it very personally. There is so much right about the detail in this book, so grounded in kiwi nostalgia. The authenticity pulled me right in until I almost had false memory syndrome, what with the school bags in the corridor, the crush on the glamourous teacher, the hierarchy of the girls and the axolotl and all. Makes me wonder what I’ve forgotten. I even had one of those pens.
Cristina Sanders' blog 