Crawlers

7:21pm

Goswell Road, EC1. A London bus, route number 153, approaching the Barbican from the north.

An explosion of sound resolved into beats. There was a bar of keyboard intro, made thin and tinny by a mobile phone's built-in speaker. Then Samantha Jackson and Lauren Wallace started to sing. 

'OOOOOOOH baby babe . . .' they crooned, grinning at each other as everyone on the bus turned to stare at them. 

Ms Gresham, their teacher, gave them a weary look. 'Stop that, you two.' 

'OOOOOOOH baby babe,' Samantha and Lauren sang, louder, 'I'm a slave to your love!' 

Jasmine Ashworth rested her head against the cool glass of the bus window and sighed. 

The Swatham Academy for Girls was a comprehensive in east London. Jasmine, Samantha and Lauren had been students there since they were eleven. Having no minibus was among the least of Swatham's problems: government inspectors had recently put the Academy on what they called 'special measures'. Officially described as 'inadequate' in the inspectors' report, the school had been given one year to show drastic improvement or it would be closed. 

'Samantha and Lauren, turn that music off right now,' said Ms Gresham. 

Ms Gresham was a supply teacher, recently drafted in to Swatham as part of the improvement drive. Jasmine liked her. She was young for a teacher, and with her chic, boyish bob and her smart grey trouser suits she looked good too. Also, unlike some teachers Jasmine could name, Ms Gresham was passionate about her subject - English literature - hence tonight's outing to the theatre. Ms Gresham had a black belt in aikido. She had crossed America on a Harley-Davidson. She had done things with her life. None of that made the slightest difference to Samantha and Lauren. 

'Why?' Samantha asked as the tinny beats continued. 

'Yeah, miss, what we got to turn it off for?' said Lauren. 

'Two reasons,' said Ms Gresham. 'First, you're disturbing the other passengers on this bus. And second, because if you don't, then on Monday you'll both get two hours' detention.' 

Jasmine lifted her head from the glass and watched what happened next in the reflection against the darkness outside. 

Lauren was pouting - which in Jasmine's opinion was never a good look for her: with Lauren's chubby cheeks, big forehead and squashed nose it tended to make her look even more like a sulky pug dog than she did already. But Lauren wasn't the reason Jasmine didn't want to turn round yet. 

Samantha was looking Ms Gresham dead in the eye. 

In the three years since they'd all started at Swatham, Samantha had made herself quite a reputation. She had been suspended for fighting no less than three times - once, most memorably, for grabbing another girl by the hair and slamming her face into the edge of a hand basin in the toilets, breaking the girl's nose. To avoid outright expulsion for this incident Samantha had claimed she'd acted in self-defence. Her victim - understandably wary of making Samantha angry again - had backed up her story. Jasmine, and almost everyone else at Swatham, had used the same caution around Samantha ever since. 

'I'm not kidding, Samantha,' said Ms Gresham, looking straight back. 'Turn that music off or you'll be sorry.' 

Like Jasmine, Samantha was nearly fourteen. Her hard blue eyes and prominent cheekbones gave her a face a narrow, pinched look. Slowly she touched a finger to a loose strand of her bottle-blonde hair, tucking it behind her ear. Then, once she'd made it clear she wasn't being rushed, she dropped her eyes to her phone. The music cut out. 

'Miss,' she said, rolling her eyes, 'it's boring on this bus, innit.' 

'Yeah, miss,' chorused Lauren. 'We've been on here for ages!' 

'It's not far now,' said Ms Gresham (though Jasmine thought she sounded every bit as impatient to get there as Samantha and Lauren). 'The curtain goes up at seven forty-five. We should arrive just in time to get to our seats. But right now, we'll just have to pass the time with a little conversation. What shall we talk about?' 

No answer. 

'How about what you're all going to do when you're older?' said Ms Gresham brightly but with obvious desperation. 'Well? Who wants to start?' 

Now Jasmine had another reason to keep looking out of the window. She knew exactly what she wanted to do when she was older. But she wasn't about to mention it now. 

Jasmine was an only child. Her mother worked shifts at their local supermarket; her father, a musician, had left before Jasmine was born. Jasmine's mum wanted Jasmine to leave school at sixteen, get herself a paying job to help support them both - 'start pulling her weight', as she put it. Obtaining her permission to come to the play tonight had been bad enough; when Jasmine had told her mum about her real ambitions, there had been a row. Her mother had called Jasmine 'a dreaming good-for-nothing like your dad'. But Jasmine knew she wasn't a dreamer. She had plans. 

She was going to get the best exam results - not just the best her school had learned to tolerate from its pupils but the best results it was possible to get. Then she was going to go to the best university, where she would study Earth Sciences. Jasmine would graduate with a top-class degree and soon after that she would realize her ultimate goal: she would become an environmentalist, using her skills and knowledge to change destructive behaviours of governments and industry all over the world. 

Jasmine knew what she wanted out of her life. But talking about things like that - even to Ms Gresham - just wasn't what you did around Samantha and Lauren. So she kept looking out of the window, avoiding Ms Gresham's eye. 

As she did so, however, Jasmine felt a small pang of guilt. Because if she didn't answer, and Samantha and Lauren stayed silent, then the only person left was...

'Lisa,' said Ms Gresham, rounding on the fourth of the students she was taking to the theatre that night. 'What do you want to be?' 

Through the curtain of lank, mouse-brown hair that she kept over her face at all times, Lisa Staunton darted her teacher a pleading glance. But Ms Gresham was implacable. 

'Come on, Lisa,' she coaxed. 'You can tell us.' 

'Yeah, Lisa,' said Samantha. 'We're all friends here.' Samantha's voice was sincere. Only the smirk she gave Lauren when Ms Gresham wasn't looking told the truth. 

Jasmine turned to watch. 

Lisa Staunton was a mystery to her. Ever since their first day at Swatham Lisa had slipped instantly into the role of school victim and underdog - and stayed there. Samantha and Lauren barely bothered to mock Lisa to her face any more. Instead, she had become a kind of Swatham catchphrase: if, say, an elbow of your school blazer was wearing through, you could say it had 'gone a bit Lisa' and everyone would know what you meant. Lisa's much-mended clothes were the stuff of school legend, together with her spots, her overbite, her total lack of friends and a host of other attributes, real and imagined. 

But despite the fact that Lisa was treated so cruelly, Jasmine sometimes wondered if she didn't secretly somehow like it that way. She did nothing to defend herself. Her default reaction to everything was simply to sit there, shoulders hunched, hair over her face, silent, passive. She was doing it now. 

'What were your ambitions when you were little?' asked Ms Gresham. 'What would you most love to do, Lisa? What are your dreams?' 

For another moment Lisa didn't answer - just quivered slightly like a cornered animal. She blinked her watery eyes very rapidly several times, then, to everyone's astonishment, said: 'I used to want to be a ballerina.' 

The four girls and their teacher shared a short silence. Then Samantha and Lauren burst into hoots of laughter. 

'What's so funny, you two?' asked Ms Gresham, annoyed. 

Jasmine sighed. It was going to be a long evening.