Poster of a Girl - revised

Slowly walking through dense grey winter fog emerges like a spectre saturnine-faced Diane Green, school satchel slung loosely over her left shoulder, her pale slim face protruding through the brown-plumed hood of a large black parka.
Having left the house without breakfast Diane Green found her stomach making all manner of squelching sounds and audibly too.
With only a pound coin in her pocket she had to make a rash decision. Forego lunch or eat breakfast. Another loud churning squelch erupted, her stomach seemed to be making the choice. She proceeded to the local corner store close to the school.
Diane Green with very little thought purchased a packet of ready salted crisps and a Mars bar. She enjoyed the dripping caramel and rich textured waves of chocolate. However, on a freezing cold foggy winter morning, the chocolate bar was found to be rock hard and tasteless.
She had often enjoyed melting chocolate on her bedroom radiator thus appreciating the textures and flavours more. Hard chocolate tasted bland in her opinion.
Back out now into the dense gloom on the final part of the journey to the school gates. Diane had not bothered to wear her black trousers today and felt her pale white legs growing ever numb. She was annoyed by the large cut on her right leg caused by over-exuberantly scraping a blunt razor when shaving her legs. It itched badly. A thin red welt had developed over night and now currently in the process of scabbing over.
First lesson of the day was French. She did not care very much for learning. Je 'm appelle Diane. Je suis Anglais. J' habite. Blah blah blah oui oui oui. Sod the French, she often thought. I'm never going anywhere so what's the point in learning a foreign language?
Last night, Diane Green stared blank faced at her scratched leg, watched with equal fascination and alarm. Intermittently, she gazed at the ceiling, then spent a few minutes with her head pressed against her bedroom window until her entire forehead was numb. She secretly watched neighbours arriving home from work, kids on bicycles riding manically down the street, old men walking old dogs, peered into the house opposite noting a young couple bathed in the soft glow of a television set. She studied her pasty Anglo Saxon features in the bedroom wall-mirror. Flicked hardened balls of snot from her finger into the air and open hearing the crusted projectile hit, guessed where it had landed, awarding herself points for distance travelled. She sat at the edge of her bed admiring a brand new pair brown leather school shoes. Placed her eyes right up to the mirror inspecting the iris, admiring the complexity of the tiny veins of her eyeballs. Pressed pursed lips to her ancient rusted alto saxophone and spat torrents of saliva into the mouth piece, all the while playing hopelessly out of tune and disheartened by the dull out of tune racket she was making.
The portentous school gates of William Beamont High School. Same image everyday. A 1950s storied building made of crude red brick. In these walls, the day went by slowly, methodically and without joy.
Diane Green, like a ghost drifting and haunting empty corridors. Unnoticed and roaming. The clacking echo of her shoes always unsettled her. There was nobody about yet. Arriving to school at always eight-fifteen a.m. on the dot in all weathers was something she did, never knowing or understanding why. She was due her menstrual cycle too and feared those days, especially as she got very ill. Crescendo - decrescendo.
Slouched uncomfortably with arched back, on a hard plastic green chair, outside her form room, Diane Green took out of her school bag the packet of ready salted crisps. Through sheer boredom and waiting, Diane inspected each crisp - noting the varying shapes and textures before placing it in her mouth. Upon the seventh crisp, to her horror, she discovered a golden coloured chip with a light green edge, she instantly spat out the munched pulp from her mouth back into the packet. Diane scrunched the packet into her fist tightly and threw it into the nearby trash receptacle. Sitting back down on the hard plastic green chair, the fear of having consumed a rotten crisp plagued her thoughts. This in turn made her stomach tense. This in turn caused the compulsion to spit saliva everywhere. Fearing the urge to vomit, Diane stood up and headed for the west wing female toilets with hurried pace. Once more the lonely echo of her clanking shoes on the cold hard polished floor caused her to nervously glance back down the corridor as if unseen eyes watched her movements from afar.
The toilets smelled of freshly applied bleach. The dull cold floor was still wet from the cleaner's mop. The girls toilet facility was bedecked with green tiles and decorated in rich blue. It was an odd decor by any standard. Diane placed her right hand on the basin tap. The cold metal shuddered her sensitive fingertips.
She pulled down the right arm of her school jumper over her hand and then turned the tap. A foaming gush of water sprayed hard into the basin and back up in a geyser all over her. She struggled turning the tap off. Although not completely drenched her red school jumper had now darkened considerably.
Approaching the paper towel dispenser she was discovered that they had not been yet replenished. The door of the toilet cubicle swung and clattered loudly against the wall making a tiny dent and a black mark - one of many. Diane Green wrenched a handful of toilet paper from off the roll letting it spin quickly thus sending spirals of it to the full where it folded over and disintegrated on the wet floor. Furiously dabbing and wiping her jumper Diane Green noted the fact the toilet paper was of little use. The jumper would have to dry naturally. She noticed too with considerable disgust a dead fly on the floor. Washed in bleach probably, she thought.
The toilet door swung open and startled Diane Green. Two fellow peers slung their bags on the floor and scowled. One girl pulled out a packet of Benson and Hedges and lit one without offering her friend to take one.
- We'll go halves, she said, blasting out a plume of cigarette smoke from tense thin lips.
They watched Diane Green with little interest. The raw stench of bleach and cigarette smoke made an already ill feeling Diane Green feel worse. The thought of green crisps married with the sharp odour of cleaning fluids and the harsh musty waves of smoke was all too much for her. She rushed back into the toilet cubicle and wretched. A large globule of white spit mixed with miniscule portions of ready salted crisps dangled from her open mouth. It trailed loosely from lower lip to toilet seat. This was followed by another wretch and a large piece of half chewed crisp shot from the back of her throat into the toilet water and floated in a circular motion clockwise.
Diane Green pushed back her shoulder length light brown hair tucking it behind her ears and stood hunched over the toilet bowl...waiting.
Several minutes past without the slightest feeling of sickness. The moment had passed. She checked her watch and noticed it was eight-thirty am and registration commenced in fifteen minutes. Spitting one last time into the toilet bowl, Diane Green wiped her mouth with tissue and left.
- Il ya a un train pour Paris aujourd'hui?, the entire class mouthed in unison. Everybody that is except Diane Green who was lost in daytime reverie and staring dumb-faced at her severely chewed finger nails. Father would be home sleeping after a gruelling nightshift at the tannery. Mother would be at work too. Stacking shelves in the local supermarket.
Diane gazed up to the far left wall of the classroom and studied the map of France and the names of places highlighted in thick bold type and a blue star - Calais, Lille, Metz, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Albertville, Grenoble, Lyon, Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nancy, Le Mans, Cherbourg and Dieppe. She noted the country wasn't at all very far away from England. Tiny blue broken lines accompanied by the red ferry indicated the towns in which one could hop onto a ferry and sail across the channel. There in no time at all. Diane Green lamented the fact that she had never been anywhere other than Manchester and Liverpool in her entire fifteen years. She pondered the map with a degree of interest she had never considered before. However, it was not the urge to travel to foreign lands that amused her, but the idea of those distant shores. In France, they eat horses, snails and frogs or a classmate one day informed her with a clear look of disgust. God only knows what else! The dirty sods, Diane told herself.
Once more the entire class repeated a line Madame Despentes had written on the blackboard in block capitals - 'Je preferer voyager le matin'.
- JER-PREF-ER-RAY-VOY-AG-ER- LAY-MATA', the class repeated in robotic fashion. Automatons. A word Diane liked.
Madame Despentes immediately noticed the young girl sat in the very centre desk of the classroom with the vacant deathlike expression.
- Diane.
- What?