St. Mallory's Forever!

19. XUAN: One of the gang.

Shops, shops, and more shops! Typical teenage girls. Not just the British, either. Paris, Berlin... They're all the same.

I wonder if that is because the shops are all the same nowadays. Go to any high street or shopping centre in any town and it's the same boring old names. The same supermarkets and retail outlets. The same cosmetics shops and electrical good stores. The same godawful clothes.

I mean, seriously, what is the point of spending all your money on clothes anyway?

Admittedly, a part of my aversion to clothes shopping is the limits at airports. Despite flying business class, my father will still not let me take more than one large suitcase, because I always have a cartload of instruments to carry.

Which can be very expensive. By which I don't mean excess baggage. I'm talking extra seats. If you want to cart around your prized violin or cello (I'm sticking to classic western instruments as examples so you'll know what I mean) then you don't want them being thrown into the luggage hold and thrown onto the carousel like some tatty old suitcase. Precious instruments need their own seat and safety belt. And their own oxygen mask in an emergency. I kid thee not!

But I'm wandering off-topic here. So, back to the fateful afternoon out in Brighton. And yes, the girls were exactly as you would expect mid-teen girls to be. Embarrassing doesn't begin to describe it.

While we were in the fifth shoe shop in a row (or was it sixth? It felt like the sixtieth!) Helen and I sat down on one of those squashy stools to chat. And not about shoes. I mean, what is it about girls and shoes anyway? Feet are at the far end of the body for a reason.

Mind you, rather girls' feet than boys' feet!

At my last school I volunteered to help out in the laundry one week for work experience (you know what schools are like — work experience never has any even remote connection to your chosen career) and that was quite an eye opener. Not to mention a nose-closer.

The boys' sports socks were so crusty and glowing with toxic waste products that they had to be handled with protective clothing borrowed from a nuclear power station, and even then we had to nail them down to stop them walking out of their own accord.

Sorry, rambling again. Where was I? Oh yes, me and teacher-junior stuck in Silly-Shoes-R-Us watching the Don, Philippa and Christie totter about doing catwalks down the aisle in impossibly high heels that in any other circumstances would be outlawed as instruments of torture.

Which got me wondering about the female being. I mean what on earth possesses women and girls to want to prance around in heels so high they could double as stilts?

All my shoes are so flat I'm sure I actually get shorter when I wear them. And being Chinese I'm somewhat vertically challenged to start with. Fortunately I'm comfortable with my body just the way it is. No need to spend hours in front of the mirror every day trying to live up to someone else's idea of beauty, or spending a small fortune on clothes you wear once and then stick in a drawer somewhere and forget about... *(insert rest of feminist rant here.)

And speaking of forgetting, I haven't forgotten about Helen. So, there we were, sat on those squashy stools and...

Okay, one last ramble. Squashy stools. I mean, what other language can come close to English for using the same word for entirely different things? Stools, I mean, not squashy.

Being a "forriner" I learned English as a subject, with lists of words and meanings, and the term stool was first introduced to me in its medical context, as a term to denote anal excreta. So you can imagine my shock when I was first told to sit on one.

Anyway, there we were sat on said squashy stools and I asked Helen, "Can I see the Tchaikovsky score? He's one of my favourites."

"Really?" she asked. "Why didn't you say so in Mum's class the other day?"

"I was trying to keep a low profile," I said. "It was pretty obvious only you and I knew what Mrs. Stroud was talking about. Of course, I didn't know she was your mum then, either."

Helen giggled. "No-one did, at first. Not that we deliberately kept it secret or anything. Unlike you, keeping secret how good you are with English."

"It's hardly a secret," I objected. "I hand in history essays which get top marks, yet when it comes to English I'm dragged off to read Topsy & Tim while you guys get to grips with Shakespeare and Dante."

Helen hesitated, like maybe Shakespeare and Dante were the better deal. "Can't you just tell them?" she asked.

Duh! Like I hadn't thought of that? As a matter of fact, I was currently putting into action a secret plan of my own. We has an ESL test looming and I intended to write an essay filled with so many delightful adjectives, obscure verb-forms, complicated sentence structures and grammatical indulgences that they were forced to admit I had beaten them at their own language. Surely then they would surrender?

"I'm trying," I said, deciding not to go into detail. "How about you? Do you speak any other languages?"

Helen shook her head, the edges of her fringe going in her eyes. "I speak music," she said timidly, gesturing to the Nils piece.

I nodded. "Music is like maths. A universal language."

Helen just looked at me blankly. I'd seen how her eyes glazed over during the maths class.

I asked, "Didn't you do a European language in your last school, the Langland?"

"French and German. But it was the same teacher for both of them, and he was useless. Or maybe it was me," Helen admitted. "I just don't seem to get languages. And I must say, I don't seem to speak St Mall's at all!

We both laughed. That was certainly true.

"