Where Everything Seems Double

island? Freda Gray considered this as she sat with her copy of Lord of the Flies on her lap and looked out idly at the summer fields as they sped past the train window in a green blur. She glanced down at the book. It was their summer holiday reading for English and she was halfway through it already, fascinated and horrified both at the same time. She had asked Mum what happened to the boys in the end, but she wouldn’t say, so now she was racing through, and when this was finished she hoped she could lure Granny into a bookshop to restock for the rest of the summer. You could usually trust Granny to buy books; actually, it was hard to stop her.
She did have another book in her bag but she was a bit embarrassed about it. When Granny said they were going to the Lakes, Swallows and Amazons came into her mind. It was too young for her now. She had read it three or four years ago, when Granny had given her the whole set of books and she had binged on them all summer. The first one – Swallows and Amazons itself – had been the best one, and she had decided to bring it with her, even though it was a kids’ book. She had read a bit of it before she packed it, and thought how funny it was that those children were so different from the boys in Lord of the Flies. They were about the same age, she thought. The boys on the island were prep-school boys, so the oldest were twelve or thirteen. Maybe John, who was the oldest of the Swallows, was fourteen. He would have to be for their parents to let him take the others off to camp on their own, wouldn’t he? And the Amazons, Nancy and Peggy, were a bit older, but not at all like the older girls at school, who were all into makeup and hair and boyfriends. Nancy and Peggy wore woolly pirate hats. They seemed more sensible, somehow, but less grown-up, which was odd.
And this brought her back to her original question: would things have gone differently on the island in Lord of the Flies if there had been girls there as well as boys? On the whole, she thought they would. The girls would have looked after the little ones a bit, wouldn’t they? And girls could be bitchy, she knew that well enough, but would they have ended up in armed gangs? And so many girls were vegetarians or vegans; she didn’t think they would have gone mad for the pig meat. She was having a go at being a vegetarian herself, though she hadn’t told Granny that in case there were delicious meat things on the menu at the hotel and she couldn’t resist.
She picked up her book and then put it down and looked out of the window again. There was a persistent churning of anxiety in her stomach; what were the Carnmere teenagers going to be like? Granny had said that there would be ‘lots of young people’, that her friend Eve’s grandsons would be there and they knew a lot of the locals. They were fifteen and thirteen and would look after her, she said, but fifteen-year-old boys were, frankly, scary – huge and loud and taking up lots of space. Supposing all their friends were boys? And even if there were some girls, you couldn’t just fit in to a group who were already friends, she knew that. How were they going to react to an outsider who was only just thirteen? She tugged at her ponytail to get it higher up on her head, which she thought made her look older, and wished that her birthday straightening session had lasted a bit longer. The question, she thought, when it came down to it, was whether Carnmere was going to be more Arthur Ransome or more William Golding.
She put her face to the window and sighed, watching her breath condense on the glass. Friendships, she thought, were difficult even when you were on home ground. It had been so easy at primary school; she and Charlie had been best friends from the start, and that was that. They had rows at times, of course, but they were Charlie and Freddie and always there for each other. When a teacher told them to get into pairs, there they were, and at break times they played with other girls too, but they were always together. When Freda had got a place at the grammar school and Charlie hadn’t, they had promised each other that they would still be friends, and they had been for a while, especially in the holidays, but now Charlie had new friends. Freda saw them sometimes, a little posse, out in the town, and Charlie barely gave her a wave. She had new friends herself, but you never felt safe somehow with friends at school. Everything was competitive, everyone wanted to be friends with the cool people, and Freda was afraid that she wasn’t quite cool. She worked too hard, and she wasn’t that good at sport, and her hair wasn’t straight enough. Girls were friends one minute and then ignored you the next, and she dreaded being ill and off school because when you got back you found that all the friendships had changed. When she talked to Granny about it, she said the girls were practising for flirting with boys. They were like kittens play fighting, she said, which was interesting and quite clever, but not necessarily very useful. What Granny said was quite often like that, she thought.
She turned from the window and surveyed her grandmother. She was looking rather too smart for this kind of holiday, wasn’t she? She was wearing a blue linen jacket that looked new, and she had just had her hair cut, she could tell, and had new highlights. She looked down