by Ellie Eaton
Another perk of being a Sixth Former, I remember, was unsupervised and unlimited access to the town, on the strict condition that they traveled in groups of two or more. This was due to the long-running grudge between Divines and townies, who tended to think of us all as a stuck-up, supercilious bunch of trust funders (not unfounded) with a pretentious tradition of calling each other by boys’ names. It didn’t help, of course, that so many of the locals were beholden to the school for their financial security—the allowance money we splurged at their corner shops on sweets and cigarettes and magazines, the minicab fares we racked up to the nearby city, the cinema trips and extravagant birthday cakes ordered from their bakeries. Moreover, the school was one of the few remaining employers that offered locals regular work. Townies scrubbed our floors, cleaned our toilets, painted lines on our tennis courts, washed our underwear, served us our meals, and disposed of our scraps. No wonder they loathed us.
A townie could spot a Divine a mile away and vice versa. Shark-eyed girls from the local public school with faces pulled tight by gelled buns, eyes glinting, sucking their teeth at us at the bus stop as we went past. Their gray King Edmund skirts hitched up their thighs, little school ties on elastic, and gold earrings.
“What the fuck you looking at, you posh twat?”
The loathing townies felt for us was visceral. Disgust radiated from these KE girls like white heat. They would spit on our backs the moment we passed, or swarm around us, as in the case of Henry Peck, dragging her behind the White Horse, where they shoved her against redbrick and flicked ash onto her head. When I later relayed this incident to my mother, she shrugged and wafted her hand through the air as if it was nothing. This kind of hostility had gone on for as long as she, or any Divine, could remember, over a hundred years or more. There had been some halfhearted efforts over the years by our respective headmistresses to bring about a cease-fire, which came to nothing. Townies hated Divines. End of story.
By early afternoon the Peck twins had given up on their game of tennis and flopped on the grass beside the rest of us, sweating, red faced. We sat on the ha-ha watching the cars as they arrived, the grown-ups giving one another jovial salutes and hand waves and hello there’s. They looked excited as puppies while, by contrast, their progeny were slumped in the back seat listening to a Walkman, so really, you had to wonder who all this performance was intended for, mothers leaning in to double kiss each other through lowered windows, fathers braying at one another across the grass. Beneath the shoe tree, girls, two at a time, were tugging the contents of their trunks inside and up to their shared dorms via the long-standing Divine technique of using bedding material as a holdall, twisting the ends of their duvet covers and hoisting the cadaver-like weight over their shoulders. A new bed each term, fourteen different dorms in my time as Divine, I calculated out loud, anything from two to eight girls crammed in one room depending on the year, a total of seventy-two different dorm mates since we’d started at the school.
“Not including Gerry Lake,” Dave said, lifting her head up from the grass and grinning at me.
My stomach lurched as if I’d been shoved hard from behind.
“Bloody hell,” I said, groaning.
The others snorted with laughter.
“Bad luck, Joe,” they said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Nightmare.”
Gerry Lake. The Poison Dwarf. The least popular girl in our year—loudmouthed, crude, famously temperamental. Instead of sharing a room as usual with Skipper and the twins, somehow I was stuck on my own with Gerry. After the dorm list had gone up on the board at the end of the previous term I was stunned, trying to work out why Gerry had chosen me, above all the other Divines, to be her roommate. It made no sense. We had barely exchanged more than a few words in her entire time at the school. A serious ice skater, she spent all her time either training or at competitions. But eventually it became obvious that Gerry was just as horrified as I was by our sudden cohabitation, which must have been the brainchild of my housemistress, Miss Graves, or one of her deputies, thinking we would be good for each other. It wasn’t either of us who wrote our respective names on the dorm request slip, that’s for sure. I discovered much later—in those hazy days after the scandal—that Gerry went to visit Miss Graves’s flat in person to request to be moved. She would have happily picked one of the Chinese or Russian girls, though they understandably kept to themselves. Or Kwamboka Mosupa, the African exchange student, who everyone liked, even Skipper, who treated Kwamboka—good-natured, smiling shyly, baffled by the attention—as if she was the classroom pet. But for whatever ill-fated reason, the housemistresses ignored Gerry’s pleas. Skipper shared a room with the Peck twins that term, I was stuck with Gerry Lake. They might as well have put me with a townie.
Miserable, I changed the subject.
“Anyone coming for a fag?”
George, the girl whose thumb I had once sucked, leant over and exhaled so I could smell her Tic-Tac and tobacco breath.
“We’ve just been.”
“Sorry, Joe.”
You rarely see teenagers smoking now, not on the streets where I live at least, but Divines were notorious chain smokers. I squinted up at the orchard where we normally smoked, eyes thick with jet lag. I estimated that there were too many parents arriving by then, I’d have to go elsewhere. A father walked past us towards the trees with an arm draped around his daughter, a final mournful lap before he surrendered her to the Divine.
“Chin up, angel,” we heard him say, “not long.”
“Sod it.” I took my time sliding off the ha-ha and into the grass ditch below. “I’m going.”
4
“Townies,” Jürgen says slowly to himself after I have finished.
It is as if he is learning a new word.
“Townies?”
“Yes.”
He scratches his stubble. I feel, as I often do, chastened by Jürgen’s overwhelming decency. He is the sort of man who can’t tell a lie. He won’t look at my emails if I leave my laptop open, not even a glance, or read a postcard that comes through the letterbox if it isn’t addressed to him. A postcard, for god’s sake. I, on the other hand, have been known to steal his phone when he takes a shower, strumming down his list of made and received calls, looking for signs of ex-girlfriends. I check his unopened email then quickly flag it as unread, flinging it across the bed, ashamed to have given in to my old bad habits, the insecurity and paranoia. Jürgen, on the other hand, finds my jealousy entertaining, endearing even. If I asked him—and I haven’t—he’d delete every one of his exes from his telephone without a second thought. Jürgen isn’t always a saint—of course, he has his shortcomings—but he has an inner moral compass that is finely tuned, the kind of person who leaves notes on car dashboards if he reverses into them. I am hit and run.
“Townies,” my husband repeats.
“Jürgen, stop saying it.”
“It just sounds so funny. You know. Like commoners. Very feudal. What did you call yourself? Divine, walking amongst us mortals?”
My cheeks begin to burn. Jürgen, who has always admired my independence, sees me now in this new light: spoon-fed, entitled, Divine.
“Whose side are you on?” I say defensively, even though I know how silly it is to pick a fight about something so trivial, overreacting about something I haven’t thought about for years.
“What side?” he teases.
“Exactly.”
I scramble about looking for something to cover myself.
“Sephine, it’s a joke.”
I’m drunk. We should never have started this. Jürgen twists his legs around mine to stop me rolling over.
“Sorry, sorry, come here. I was kidding, don’t go. You still haven’t told me what happened to that girl, Gerry Lake.”
Flustered, I tug a checked blanket from the sofa and wrap it around my shoulders. Flailing about, I scramble underneath the chair to retrieve my tobacco, not caring what I look like with my white arse raised in the air, legs sp
read, unzipped, everything on show. We are married; he can take it or leave it.
“Sephine, stop.”
“I need a smoke,” I say.
I pull the blanket around me like a toga and stick my feet in Jürgen’s enormous cycling shoes as I march outside, aware how clownish I must seem. I sit on top of a picnic bench. It is dark. Inside the croft house I can see a light come on in the tiny kitchen. Jürgen peers out, stooped over, knocking on the window with his knuckle, mouthing platitudes.
“Come inside, mein Gott. Are you crazy? The bugs?”
I pretend to be squinting intently at the waves. It is too dark to see a thing. The blanket is itchy and, to be honest, I had forgotten about the gnats. Still, I stubbornly roll myself a cigarette, and I listen to the waves slapping against each other out there in the night, gulls squabbling. I am drunk enough that the first cigarette is a clumsy, loose effort, it gives me head spins. Not unlike my very first time, crouching in a smoking den with Skipper and the twins, a butt passing from hand to hand round the circle, the whispered secrecy of a séance. This might be what gives me the idea. I hitch up the blanket and inspect the back of the cottage where the property runs alongside a dank mossy wall. There is enough crawl space to sidestep if I hold my cigarette aloft, so I inch along the wall, one hand in the air, clumsily making my way with the cycle shoes on my feet like clogs. There are empty flower containers I trip on, a spade, a cracked shower door, and some plastic garden chairs. I wedge myself between a drain and the chairs. It is perfect, just like old times. When I look up, the cottage walls seem to lean towards me amicably.
A light.
There are no bathroom curtains in the cottage, no need, the window looks out onto moss and stones. I see Jürgen gaze at himself in the mirror above the sink. He grasps his chin and pulls down on his bristles, pondering whether I need more space or if he should come out and make peace. I feel a rush of love. Gut churning, nauseating almost. He is, and will always be, an extremely handsome man. Perhaps a little too pale for some people’s tastes, his clear blue eyes and the white nape of his neck that he keeps closely shaven, with the rest of his hair grown long on top and sun bleached. He has a cyclist’s thighs, thick with muscle, brawny knees as sturdy as ham hocks, a sharp suntan line two inches above his patella where his Lycra shorts end. He rides multiple times a week, sometimes for four or five hours at a time when he needs a break from the studio. His shoulders are hunched from bending over his bike handles, his stomach almost concave. He is too good looking for me by a long stretch. The best person I know. I feel idiotic, lurking out here in the dark. Licking my wounds.
I wait as he splashes his cheeks with water, slurping his cupped palm to sober himself up, then runs his fingers through his hair to slick it back. He appraises himself in the mirror, purses his lips a little. He is not above a little vanity I see. I try not to giggle and give myself away. Then, still naked, he slumps down on the loo. Pecks his penis between his hairless thighs, rests his elbows on his knees, bending forward as if he is on his racer.
Oh my god.
Something about his effeminate posture, sitting to piss like this instead of standing, horrifies me. He tears himself a single square of loo roll as if he is going to wipe himself with that rather than shake.
I’ve seen enough.
I shrink out of sight, press my back to the wall, and slide to the ground. What else don’t we know about each other? I roll myself another cigarette, and when that is done, another. Knees tucked up by my nose on my honeymoon, smoking like a Divine.
5
The smoking den was a narrow burrow between a hedge and the school boiler room, next to the laundry. Neglected over the Easter holidays, the beanbags and the rag rug and the legless sofa we had dragged in there carried a ripe doggy smell. On that first day of the summer term, trying to find someplace quiet to smoke, I flopped down behind my boarding house, sinking into one of the damp beanbags, knees to nose. The other side of the wall maintenance men, taking a break from hauling trunks out of cars and being ordered around by parents, sat on an old church pew, their legs splayed, drinking sweet, milky tea, smoking themselves.
A wave of jet lag came crashing over me, so heady that I could feel myself swaying. It was the middle of the night in Hong Kong. I had probably been awake close to twenty-eight hours. I closed my eyes and my bones began sinking into one another, chin into chest. I picture my mother in her silk sleep mask, the wooden blades of the ceiling fan humming overhead, my father still in his office. Just as I was nodding off there was rustling from behind the hedge, and a click and a flash. My first thought was that it was one of my friends playing a prank on me. The night of our Fifth Form dares was looming—a decades-old St. John tradition that marked the end of exams, when housemistresses appeared to turn a blind eye as girls streaked naked through the rose garden, or glued hymnals to church pews, or snuck out at night to paint the town statue red.
I jumped up and a sharp piece of card came over the fence, catching me on the cheek. Another inch and it would have impaled me in the eye.
“Bloody hell.” I held my face. “That’s not funny.”
I scrambled up on the legless sofa to see who was there but heavy footsteps were already pounding across the adjoining car park and out onto the High Street. Whoever it was wasn’t Divine.
“Bloody hell,” I repeated, my heart thumping. I prodded the scratch on my cheek, not more than a small paper cut, but still, there was some blood. I swore loudly to make myself feel less pathetic, worried that there might be a gang of townie girls—King Edmunds—hidden somewhere I couldn’t see, ready to pounce on me, to claw my skin with their long artificial nails and pull out my hair.
“Piss off,” I shouted, “cows,” then looked down to find whatever is was that had nearly pierced my eye.
A Polaroid photo lay facedown on the rug.
“What the fuck?”
I stooped down, picked it up.
Blank.
Out of the milky patina, I watched a faint pink creep in, a blush so slight I brought it closer to my face, and then held it right back, wiggling it in the air. What was this meant to be, a joke? Out of the creaminess I could make out the crest of a hill, or maybe a hat, or a figure of some kind wearing a hat, it was still impossible to tell. Relieved that there didn’t seem to be a pack of townies waiting in the shadows to ambush me, I stood there, swaying with jet lag, waiting for the picture to develop, wondering what the image could be.
“Oh my god,” I said.
I dropped the Polaroid on the floor, made a squealing noise, my face so scrunched up I could feel my top lip curling up into my gums.
It was a dick.
Actual moose.
I picked it back up to examine it more closely. This was the first erect penis I’d ever seen.
A thumb pinned it down, a fist gripping the stump the way you see animal handlers holding geese or swans by the neck, to stop them flapping. A top-down shot taken in a hurry, trousers pulled down to knees behind the fence, the actual fence I was standing next to. It wasn’t as turgid or pink as a dog, nor as pendulous as a horse (the only two points of reference I had): redder and angrier, the head bruised and shiny, like a boxer’s face postfight.
It was the ugliest thing I’d ever looked at. Hands down. Except, I couldn’t stop staring at the top, which had minute white dots speckling it, and the balls, which were far less hairy than I’d imagined, wispy and near bald in patches, like the ancient stuffed teddy bear Skipper still slept with. All I could think about was that Henry Peck had had one of these in her mouth. In her mouth. It was grotesque. I slumped down on the beanbag and kept holding the photo up close until I forgot that what I was looking at was even a penis and more like a weird fungus you might find in a street market in Hong Kong. I chewed my lip, examining the soft little nick at the top. I had my nose so deep in moose that I didn’t even hear the King Edmund as she snuck into the den and it was too late.
My shoulders lurched up in shock, my head whipla
shing back.
“What’s that then?” she asked.
6
Together Divines were indomitable. We strutted around the town during Saturday excursions in groups of five or six, or at the very least a pair, arm in arm, taking up the entire width of the pavement. We flicked our hair, making sly comments about the townies we passed—their makeup, the cheap clothes they bought from the market, their weight—often before they were out of earshot. We couldn’t abide fat people. Also, this was the nineties; townies were clad head to toe in cheap denim while we, governed by our own trends, wore black leggings and large argyle cardigans, which we sourced from a shop on the King’s Road; or we stole pink-striped shirts and V-neck jumpers from our fathers. In winter we wore black biker boots or sometimes cowboy boots before we switched to Docksiders in the summer, the kind of shoe you’d find at a regatta, their leather laces wound into toggles. I had a new pair of penny loafers with a Hong Kong ten-cent coin tucked into the tongue instead of a penny.
Divines were also compulsive thieves. Dickie Balfour in particular, whose parents owned a stately home in Cornwall and gave her a hefty monthly allowance, was always stuffing Pick’n’Mix in her pockets at Woolworths or lifting hoop earrings from the market. Her father was an earl. She could have bought anything she liked but that wasn’t the point. Managers began banning us, or they imposed a strict limit on how many Divines were allowed in their shop at one time. The rest of us prowled around outside, flicking our hair, ululating loudly, our arms chained together. (We were always touching one another, tickling each other’s inner elbows and linking fingers, or sitting around the base of the statue of King Edmund in the market center, resting back between each other’s spread thighs.)
But cut us from the pack and we were nothing.