by Ellie Eaton
“You dropped your fag,” the King Edmund said.
She nodded at the floor.
I slid the Polaroid so the dick was shielded under my thigh.
“If you’re not going to smoke it, I’ll have it,” the KE girl persisted.
Her arms were crossed, one thumb hooked into her fabric bag strap. When she stooped to pick up the cigarette, the pouch flailed towards me and I flinched. I may have even put my hand up to shield my face. I bet she enjoyed that.
The King Edmund held the fag up in front of my nose.
“So, do you still want it or what?”
The top of the cigarette was soggy from lying on wet carpet. What did I care if this girl took it or not; I had an entire carton in my dorm, which I had duped a copassenger into buying for me from duty free.
“It’s wet,” I muttered.
The girl shrugged, snapped off the damp tip, put it in her mouth, and lit the remaining half stump.
“Ta,” she said, triumphant.
She stood there in our den, smoking like a Divine. Practically speaking I couldn’t do a thing about it. I was sitting on the Polaroid. I wasn’t about to show a townie a thing like that; we’d never live it down. If I got up to leave, she’d see the photo. I had no choice but to sit there and wait till she’d gone. Without Skipper or the twins, I felt limbless and exposed. I began to sweat, the dampness spreading down my back.
The King Edmund smiled to herself and smoked with her arms crossed, leaning against the wall, blocking my way out, which felt like an act of aggression in itself. Her school tie was off and her loose hair, very smooth and pale blond, almost reached her buttocks. I forget exactly what she was wearing, probably the standard King Edmund’s gray-white uniform, but I do remember that on her feet were wedge high heels, conspicuous for being particularly un-Divine.
“Chill out, I’m just waiting for my brother,” she explained. “He works here, all right?”
Her brother, I guessed, was one of the muscle hired in for the day to help lug our empty school trunks off the Circle and stack them under the stage in the main hall where they remained till the end of term.
“Oh, well.” I swallowed, feeling the photograph sticking to my thigh, my face growing hotter. “All right then, that’s fine.”
I nodded as if granting her permission.
She rolled her eyes at me. Then, examining the end of her cigarette, she leant back against the wall. She was a little chubby in comparison to the Divine, though not overweight. Her face was round, a cluster of spots at the bottom corner of her lip she must have been picking. I had breakouts once in a while, too, but had had strict instructions from Skipper not to squeeze them. The King Edmund pushed her tongue against the inside of her lower cheek, and absently rubbed her finger over one of the scabs, her eyes moving round the decorations in our den, the wind chimes and the throws, the canopy we’d made to stop the rain coming in.
“Nice,” she said, looking at the evil eye hanging from the branch and nudged it with her finger.
“Thanks.”
“What happened to your face?”
I’d forgotten about the paper cut and put my hand to my cheek. My skin felt clammy, my cheeks flushed.
“Twig”—I pointed to the hedge—“climbing in.”
I watched her cigarette as she brought it to her lips. She made a popping noise as she inhaled deeply. I smoked incessantly but never so professionally as this girl.
“You all right?” She peered down at me. “You look like you’re going to puke or something.”
I was sweating profusely now. My face had a numb and tingly feeling as if I was being drained of blood. Still I didn’t move. These days I’m not someone who embarrasses easily. But back then my threshold was much lower. I craved the approval of my peers, even a King Edmund. The thought that she might somehow catch me ogling a photo of an erect penis made me feel physically sick.
“Head rush.” I nodded at the cigarette, before I remembered I never got round to lighting it myself.
She shrugged.
“So they just let you lot smoke in this place then or what?” the girl asked, gesturing to the can of cigarette butts on the floor.
“No,” I had to admit, though this was something of a gray area.
Getting caught smoking on school property resulted in detention or, for repeat offenders, a gating. Gating was unbearably dull—two to four weeks of mind-numbing lock-down in which we were not permitted to step foot off school property. There were compulsory time-checks on the hour, every hour, from breakfast to lights off, carrying a small fold of paper down our bras for staff to sign. But the truth was that the sprawling shape of the grounds, which spanned the whole of town, including several off-site lacrosse fields and the orchard, made the no-smoking rule a joke, totally unenforceable. In addition, the average waistline of our housemistresses, many of whom were close to obese, meant they couldn’t have squeezed inside our smoking den if they tried. Miss Graves, for example, my Brobdingnagian housemistress of the past five years, rarely left her armchair in the Egg. Typically she delegated the more physical side of our pastoral care to one of her deputies. These women survived no more than a year or two at most at the school, some just a matter of terms, and they were always jumpy-looking spinsters in their late twenties or thirties, whippet thin and lacking the necessary gravitas of a disciplinarian. We ran rings around them.
The teaching staff fared no better. I can only guess the sums of money these women must have been getting paid to work at our school. They were patronized and bullied. They probably thought they were selling their souls to the devil when they left the state sector, but what they got was far worse; it was Divine. If they grew a little tubby, we congratulated them on their pregnancies. We asked the old maids what their boyfriends were called. We splattered their backs with ink. When a teacher asked us to read something out loud or perform a task of some kind, we groaned and procrastinated and spoke in funny voices, or sometimes, such as in The Doll’s House when Nora says, I will brush my muff, we outright laughed in their face.
Because we knew the tuition fees were staggering, we treated members of staff as exactly that. Staff. Under servitude. When we were bored with our lessons, we raised our lids and conversed behind our desks. The only teachers who garnered our respect were the ones that were so eccentric they defied categorization. We had a history teacher who curled her hair into two ram horns either side of her head and when we spoke over the Treaty of Versailles she recited every monarch from 1066 onward until we were stultified into silence. Our maths teacher, Mr. Chambers, one of the few men on staff, refused to learn any of our names and simply called us all Aggie. Desperate tactics, futile in the end, but at least they tried.
It seems amazing to me that more of us weren’t expelled. We drank, we smoked, we snuck out at night through our bedroom windows. Everyone except Gerry Lake, who, afraid of heights, refused to so much as climb a gym rope. On a class trip to an outward-bound center—a day of scrambling around a muddy assault course in the rain, supposedly character building—Gerry had taken one look at the abseiling wall and marched straight back onto the school bus.
Why some of the more talented teachers stayed as long as they did I can’t imagine. If they were hoping they’d encounter a better grade of student at a private school, they were wrong. I had always found academia relatively easy but the majority of Divines weren’t in any way gifted, certainly no Wycombe Abbey or Cheltenham Ladies or Downe House. Our entrance exam was a joke. Some of the girls in my year, Skipper, for example, planned to take just one A-Level next year, something undemanding like Drama Studies or Culinary Science. What the school had always prided itself on was producing a well-bred all-rounder, a glorified finishing school if you will, for ladies. The future wives of politicians and CEOs and chairmen.
The KE continued her interrogation.
“So you can smoke but you can’t watch telly?”
“No. Yes,” I said, suspicious now. This was the first proper co
nversation I’d ever had with a King Edmund, other than the insults they spat at us from the far side of the school wall. Why, I wondered, was a KE so interested in our rules? What did she want?
“And no, like, computers or Game Boys or Sega or anything?” she kept on.
“No.”
“That’s retarded.” The KE stared at what was left of her fag.
I shrugged.
This lack of modern technology at St. John’s was another immovable fact of being Divine. In one classroom there was a row of ancient word processors where we learnt to type, deemed an essential skill for young ladies, yet we handwrote all our essays with fountain pens. We had restricted access to the single coin-fed phone installed in a booth in the middle of a corridor outside our rec room, the least private of all places. Outside of a few short hours in the evenings it was padlocked, to ensure that we didn’t fritter our days speaking to boys. There were no mobile phones at all, though we briefly carried black pagers, which we clipped to our tweed skirts like emergency room physicians, until Fat Fran realized what they were and put a stop to it. We had no access to chatrooms. Facebook didn’t exist, no likes or dislikes, no Google, Wiki, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or Gmail. Total radio silence. Television was permitted at weekends in strictly policed portions, Miss Graves tugging the plugs from the walls as the allotted time expired, often midprogram, swinging the cables in her hand like a baton. The kind of programs we were permitted to watch were infantile, mindless drivel—Blossom, Jerry Springer, Gladiators, Ricki Lake.
“So, you’re basically in prison,” the KE mused.
She took one last drag on the cigarette then scratched it against the fence to put it out, tossed the butt into the can by my feet. It made a hiss as it hit damp tin.
“Actually”—she changed her mind—“my cousin Steve, he’s banged up, and he has a telly in his cell.”
I didn’t believe her. I dabbed my sleeve on my sweaty top lip when she wasn’t looking.
“What for?”
“To watch Corrie,” she said, and fluttered her eyelids at her joke, which she thought was hysterical. Her eyelashes were as pale as her hair, almost invisible, which made her eyes seem watery and borderless.
“I meant, what’s he in prison for?”
“This and that.”
“Fine. Whatever,” I said, trying to act as if I didn’t care, though I’d never met anyone before with a relative in jail.
“You lot probably eat better food, though,” she pondered.
I raised an eyebrow. Divines survived on fruit shoelaces, squeezable cheese, instant noodles, and other kinds of high-salt, high-sugar, tuck locker trash. It was amazing we had the bone density to walk. The exception was my dorm mate that term, Gerry Lake, who, due to the demands of a rigorous training schedule, ate like a pig, refectory food and all. Three times a week a beige Ford Escort made a brief stop in the Circle so that Gerry could jump into the rear seat where a middle-aged man wearing a red cap, possibly a trainer or a manager of some kind, drove her away to a nearby ice rink. Judging by the attention she paid to her clothes, the makeup she wore, we all assumed that Gerry had some sort of crush on this driver, a man old enough to be her father, that he was even her boyfriend. The same person deposited her back on school grounds four hours later in time for supper. After which she was allowed to skip the line, fill up her tray, and scoff down plates piled with chicken vol-au-vent, cheese and crackers, chocolate pudding with a skin on its surrounding custard that was thick as a tectonic plate. The dinner ladies, sensing that she was more one of them than Divine, typically saved the coveted corner sections just for Gerry.
“So what do you do then”—the KE circled a finger in the direction of the boarding house across the road—“at weekends, or whatever?”
I turned my head, feeling where my shirt was slow to unpeel from my back, tacky with sweat. I was sure somehow she’d discover the photo, or worse, that one of my peers would catch me there alone, talking to a King Edmund. My feet were beginning to go numb. But I still didn’t stand up. When was she going to leave?
“Isn’t your brother waiting for you?” I asked pointedly.
“Nah.” The KE shrugged. “So go on, what do you lot get up to?”
I felt it was an idiotic question. What did anyone our age actually do? We made mix tapes for each other and swapped clothes. We examined our underwhelming bodies in the narrow strip of mirror above each dorm door handle, standing on our desks and contorting our necks, or pressing our faces up against the speckled glass to probe at blackheads under magnification, pores craterous and oily as a tar pit. We smoked, of course, pierced each other’s upper ears with a needle and cork, talked about moose, daydreamt about crossing over to the Other Side, bitched about other girls we knew, some of them former Divines who’d left for one reason or another and now attended day schools or co-eds where, the way we pictured it, there were boys on tap. Prolific letter writers, we spent hours crafting ten-, fifteen-, twenty-page shared missives to our pen pals, passing them from dorm to dorm like a religious scroll. These letters were a roll call of who had lost their virginity, or was about to.
“Not a lot really,” I told the King Edmund.
“Shit.” The KE adjusted her bag strap as if she was leaving finally. “No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
An all-girls school, we knew what the townies accused us of getting up to at night.
The KE girl stared intently at me, arms crossed, one thumb still running across the spotty patch on her lip. I was unconsciously pressing my finger into the sharp point of the Polaroid, spiking it into my skin. Just then we heard a voice yelling from the maintenance shed, a car horn chirped, then footsteps.
“Lauren,” someone shouted.
“Yeah, what?”
A man pushed through the branches. He was dressed in the blue overalls of our maintenance men, folded down at the waist. Like the pinups that papered our dormitory walls that year—Brad and Leo and Johnny—his hair was a curtain, parted down the middle.
“Hurry the fuck up will you,” he said, then stopped dead.
He looked me up and down—the baggy men’s shirt I was wearing, a castoff from my father, the shoes my mother had forced me to polish—and his jaw stiffened. I sat awkwardly on the beanbag, hugging my knees.
“Lauren. Move it,” he ordered.
Then he was gone.
Lauren rolled her eyes. She pulled her bag over her shoulder, her white hair swinging down her back.
“That’s my brother, Stuart. See you around . . . what’s your name?”
“Joe.”
The townie rolled her eyes once again.
“Seriously, what’s your actual name?”
Our habit of using boys’ names was one of the peculiarities of the Divine that was to be heavily reported in the press later that summer. The tabloids in particular dedicated an entire page to the subject of our nicknames, lingering on the fact that in the three years Gerry spent at our school she never received nor gave herself an alternative moniker, pointing, or so they said, to social ostracism. The truth of the matter was Gerry already had a boyish name; she was one letter away from being a Jerry. Unlike my mother, say, whose Divine chums affectionately still call her Rod, it wouldn’t have taken much for Gerry to play the game. But that was typical of her.
The KE made an impatient clicking noise with her tongue.
“Josephine,” I conceded.
“See you around then, Josephine. I’m Lauren.”
Laurence, I thought. Larry. Len.
She gave me a finger wave. I couldn’t decide if she was being ironic. My mouth was so dry by then I could feel the corners sticking, and my legs throbbed from being hunched in the beanbag, fetuslike, knees to nose.
“Thanks for the fag. I’ll pay you back.”
“It’s fine,” I told her. It was just one cigarette. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not a scab.”
There was a brusqueness to her voice that ma
de me stop whatever I was going to say next.
“You lot sleep in there, right?” She pointed at St. Gertrude’s.
I nodded.
“Lauren,” her brother yelled, “come on!”
“Well, I know where to find you then, don’t I. I won’t forget.”
There was a flurry of blossoms as she elbowed through the bushes, and I groaned, flopping back limply into the damp beanbag.
“By the way, Josephine”—her head poked back through the hole—“sick photo.”
7
Cunth.
I can’t get it out of my head.
I toss and turn the first night in the cottage, picturing the face of the woman in the red Mazda, lips curled in disgust, teeth bared, ready to spit in my face. I try to remember. To understand what kind of person I was back then. Why they hated us so much. What we were guilty of.
But in the morning Jürgen stands at the bottom of the bed holding a breakfast tray. He promises to never say the word again. Divine.
“Hand aufs Herz,” he says.
Hand on heart.
Jürgen looks so earnest standing there, his hair parted like a Boy Scout, a smile flickers at the corner of my lips. I cover my head with the duvet so he won’t see me laughing. He sets the tray down on the bed. Slips an arm under the covers, to test the water, the rest of him follows. The coffee goes cold, the eggs uneaten.
That afternoon we buy a fishing rod from a shop on the pier and I watch the way my husband whips the rod effortlessly over his shoulder, like a lasso. He’d make a good cowboy: the stubble shadowing his jaw, the denim shirts he likes to wear, his weatherworn hands, his habit of staring into the mid-distance when he’s thinking about his work. When Jürgen catches a mackerel, on his first attempt no less, applause breaks out from a group of hikers on the dock. He unhooks the fish from the line and the mackerel thrashes helplessly on the concrete, wide eyed, sides heaving. I think he’ll toss it back where it came from but, a country boy, Jürgen takes off his boot without a second thought and slams it down hard, once, twice, red spattering the concrete. I gasp, horrified.