by Ellie Eaton
“Supper,” Jürgen announces, his fly already arching over the water.
Later, in the cottage’s tiny kitchen, I stand over the sink where Jürgen has been cleaning his catch. I look at their unblinking expressions, the emerald scales like sequins, bellies split, blood dribbling from behind the gills. Jürgen hums to himself. He slices a lemon, then sets the table. I stare and stare. Cunth.
All holiday Jürgen conspicuously avoids any further mention of my teenage years or the woman in the red car, hurling abuse. On our afternoon strolls past the village school he averts his eyes, staring out at sea so intently I have to stop myself giggling at his solemn expression. Finally, our last morning, he takes a final photo of the two of us standing in front of our holiday cottage, our heads pressed together, his arm outstretched, and then, loath to leave, we put the keys on the kitchen table, close the door behind us. I watch in the rearview mirror as the cottage slips from view, my stomach in knots. Cunth. I want to slam on the brakes, live out our days in this remote fishing village. Untouchable, anonymous, hidden from view.
“What are you daydreaming about?” Jürgen asks, touching my cheek.
Startled, the car swerves.
“Nothing,” I say, eyes on the road. “Nothing.”
A week after our honeymoon, I’m in the attic in my mother’s cottage in Surrey, storing some boxes that won’t fit in our London flat. Outside Jürgen helps Rod dig over her vegetable patch. From the low gable window I can see his strong back ripple as he thrusts his spade into the sticky clod, turning it over with ease, as if it is butter. My mother, flustered by Jürgen’s athleticism, reverts back to old habits—flicking her hair, giggling. As far as I know she hasn’t had another partner since my father died nine years ago. She walks along the flower beds pointing something out to Jürgen with a rake. An upturned yogurt pot blows off a cane, and she chases after it like a lacrosse player. I nose through a cabinet, take a file out. Rod, with her rosier view of her days as a Divine, has bundles of my correspondence, covertly rescued from the kitchen bin after I attempted to throw them away in a postuniversity purge. I dump them on the floorboards and sit down, surrounded by the memorabilia of my school days: letters and reports and year photos, a folder of clippings, on the front page of a yellowing newspaper, the headline: night of terror.
From the pages of my old Bible, a letter slips out.
To my darling, my sweetheart, baby, I miss you like crazy, love, forever and eternity. I am shocked by the ardency. A girl whose face I can’t even remember. Pressed flowers taped to the notepaper, pictures of hearts and lipstick kisses.
I stare at an unfamiliar picture of me with my arms draped around two girls from my boarding house. I am wearing a man’s cardigan, black leggings, and my burgundy penny loafers. There is a leather choker around my neck with a blue scarab. My hair flops over half my face. I look conscientiously gloomy; Divines never smiled for photos. Holding the photo up to the window, I squint at the shoe tree in the background and then the tennis courts, and the ivy-clad backdrop of St. Gertrude’s and then—I see for the first time—there in the cross-hatched glass of our old dormitory window, the outline of Gerry Lake’s head. Her snub nose, the jutting chin, the accusatory glare. One hand to her hip, the other giving me the finger.
8
Divines were committed oversharers by nature, the by-product of living cheek by jowl as we did, wearing criminally tight blue gym leotards and showering behind flimsy curtains. We had a school nurse who summoned us to the sanatorium by leaving notes on our year pin board. Each of these memos were torn from a thin papery pad so that key words—acne, discharge, flaky, bleeding, cramps, boil, vaginal, et cetera—could be read by any passing Divine, the overhead strip light perfectly illuminating her block handwriting each time the refectory door swung open.
What I did after I found the Polaroid was, therefore, not at all in the spirit of the Divine. I slid the photo down the back of my leggings and, while my peers were all busy unpacking, I crept into my new dorm, checking if Gerry was back at school, then I hid it before she could see. Who knows what instinct was driving me; I thought I was a little more institutionalized back then, something of a team player. Perhaps not.
When I had found a safe place, stuck to the reverse of a postcard I pinned on my bedroom wall, I finished unpacking and put up a few more posters on my side of the room, then lay on my bed with my Walkman, lights off, even though it was still early and as far as I could tell Gerry Lake hadn’t even signed in yet.
Up and down the corridor, groups of Fifth Formers were going door to door, screaming, air kissing, spreading holiday gossip, admiring each other’s interior decoration. Divines put a lot of effort into prettifying new dorms, hanging tie-dye sheets in windows, papering the walls floor to ceiling with posters, the content of which notably changed as we aged. First ponies, then pop bands, and finally hunks torn out from magazines—Brad, River, Leonardo, Johnny. Pseudo porn. Oily naked torsos and thumbs tucked into boxer shorts. Whole evenings were spent examining the two lean muscular lines that started either side of Stephen Dorff’s belly button, the inguinal crease, moneymaker, angled slightly together so that, we speculated, they coalesced somewhere close to his pubic hair.
My door banged open, lights switched on. I winced.
Skipper. My best friend since I was eleven years old. Or my former best friend, I wasn’t sure. For the past few months I had fretted endlessly about the status of our friendship. We had begun to drift, progressively hanging out less and less in each other’s dorms or sharing cigarettes or even sitting together at breakfast. The daughter of a Greek shipping magnate and an English mother (also Divine, a contemporary of my own mother), Skipper had spent her four weeks of holiday in Athens. I had spent Easter in my parents’ new house in Hong Kong. She had neither written back to me nor called during the entire break. This was the longest we had ever gone without speaking.
“Anyone home?” She knocked.
Her chestnut hair, of which she had a Botticellian amount, was piled up on the top of her head and fastened with a velvet scrunchie. The rest of her body was oddly hairless. Unlike the rest of us, Skipper never had to shave, not even her armpits. Her tanned legs had an imperceptible, iridescent layer of light fuzz that you could only see when, as on that first day of term, she stood backlit by the corridor light, dressed in nothing but a long Snoopy T-shirt. She was slightly stockier than I was, but her breasts were large and near perfectly round. At that age I was mortified by how underdeveloped I was; the fact that I had pancake tits, bee stings as Skipper once called them, was a constant source of embarrassment to me. It was like they had forgotten to grow.
I raised a hand and gave Skipper a swift nautical salute from the bed, which had once been our greeting of choice, a private joke we had shared since first year, though suddenly the gesture felt juvenile, made more embarrassing when Skipper either didn’t see the prompt or decided not to return it, and instead stood there in the doorway, balancing on one foot. She twisted a stray curl around her index finger. Her retainer clicked in and out of her mouth like a pair of dentures.
I pulled off my headphones.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Jet lag.” I pincered open my eyelids with my fingers. “Can’t stay awake.”
“Oh, right. Bad luck.”
Skipper squinted around to see what I had done in the way of decoration. My half of the room was almost finished and a yin-yang sarong hung above my head. The other side of the room allocated to Gerry was still bare. A few remaining posters of mine were scattered around the desk below my bunk bed, some of them blown across the floor. I cast a look behind me at the postcard where the Polaroid was hidden but decided to wait to hear Skipper’s news before I showed her.
Skipper walked across my room, treading on several clothes spewing from my overnight bag.
“Who’s this?”
She was pointing to an effeminate-looking aftershave model I’d torn out of a magazine on the plane. Wit
hout waiting for an explanation Skipper climbed up on my desk, stepping over me so she could examine each of the new posters I’d carefully blue-tacked to the wall.
“Wicked,” she said, pretending to stroke Matt Dillon’s chest.
Skipper had a deep, rather masculine voice—I can still hear it now—plus all that thick hair, so both sonically and physically she took up a lot of space, which served her well on the lacrosse field where she was by far our best goalie. The ribbed thigh pads, chest protector, mouth guard, and grilled helmet virtually doubled her size. She was loud and quick witted, an expert skier and sailor, very confident. From the time our mothers pushed us together I was always rather in awe of her. Skipper had been the natural mouth of our duo and I the brains, tags that we capitalized on at first but had started to grow tedious as soon as we were teenagers. Reputations for being butch and brainy weren’t going to get us boyfriends.
Skipper’s legs were spread, her nightshirt hitched; I could see all the way up her thighs to her crotch, the only place, aside from her head, where she had any hair. I tried not to stare at the two tufts escaping from either side of her underwear elastic as well as the dangling string of a tampon. Long before I had started menstruating or grown breasts, Skipper had extremely heavy periods. In days gone by it had been my role to check the back of her skirt during the Sunday church service, avoiding the mortifying act of kneeling for Communion with blood seeping through her tights. In exchange I would exhale in her face so she could test for halitosis, bad breath being my own teenage neurosis.
Skipper moved along the top bunk looking at my posters, most of which were new, clicking her retainer against the roof of her mouth. She and I had probably shared twelve or so dorms in our time, our wall space typically split down an imaginary center line. She favored tennis hunks of the day, Andre Agassi and Pat Cash as I remember. I had a rotating collection of magazine front covers, The Face and SKY, most of which were ripped down and replaced each term except, for some reason, a signed photograph I had bought from a stall at Kensington Market, a pre-Bad-Seeds-era Nick Cave in which a very young, cocky Cave smoked and gazed mysteriously upwards through quizzical eyebrows. I don’t know why his furrowed brow and pale skin appealed to me so much. Perhaps I thought it gave me credibility amongst my peers, or more likely a boy I had a crush on said he was a fan, I don’t remember. On the whole, Divines had terrible taste in music. We couldn’t have cared less about the rave scene or feminist punk or the underground. All of that passed us by. The tapes we blasted on our expensive boom boxes were whatever inane pop songs had made the top 10, novelty acts, and the slushy ballads we slow-danced to at school balls. Culturally immune, we wept over Kurt Cobain when he died, not because we liked Nirvana or understood his lyrics, but because a beautiful boy had shot himself in the head.
Skipper was inching closer and closer to the postcard where the photo of the penis was hidden, the thought of which made me let out a nervous snort, like a horse exhaling. I quickly tried to cover it up with a laugh. Skipper looked down at me for a moment, finger curling her hair, as if she was trying to decide something, then she smiled and bounced down onto her bottom next to me.
“Very cool,” Skipper said, twirling her finger at the walls. “I like what you’ve done. Très bon.”
I experienced a huge surge of relief. Whatever faux pas I had made earlier in the year clearly no longer mattered to her or had been forgotten over the Easter break. Probably it had just been my imagination. Riddled with insecurities, I had a propensity to read too much into a situation—if someone forgot to wait for me before crossing the bridge, for example, or if they hadn’t saved me a space at the supper table, I brooded about it for days. I tortured myself over trivial comments, a flippant remark about my clothes or hair, analyzing the exact wording for hidden criticisms, looping it in my head. Perhaps all teenagers live in this state of permanent paranoia, but I anxiously lived in fear of making a fool of myself in front of my peers, terrified I’d say something that would expose me as an imposter. I had persuaded myself that it was simply because our mothers pushed us together in those early years that Skipper and I became best friends. I was constantly expecting Skipper to realize we were only bound to each other by happenstance, that she’d tire of me, to find someone funnier or sportier or more sophisticated to spend her time with, less of a bookworm, always waiting for the sword to fall. When it came down to it I had brains, not beauty, and I felt her loyalty to me was the only thing that saved me from being labeled a nerd.
I watched her waving at people as they put their head around my door, blowing them kisses, calling them darling.
Skipper’s popularity seemed effortless; she just had to walk into a room and people turned to her like sunflowers. In comparison I was stilted and self-conscious, chewing on the inside of my cheek, my hair flopping over one eye. While I should have been jealous of Skipper, the precise opposite was true—in her company I instantly felt wittier and more likable. Take that away and I felt I’d wilt, reverting back to the pale, bookish misfit I believed myself to be, one of those ill-fated girls, like Gerry Lake, who had no one to share a dorm with, were doomed to eat alone, and had to ask a housemistress to order another Divine just to walk to Woolworths with them, some indignant classmate plucked at random from the refectory line or rec room. This was the future that awaited me without Skipper’s friendship, I thought, looking over at Gerry Lake’s empty bed.
I would have done almost anything to protect it.
Sitting on my bunk, Skipper’s hairless legs formed a bridge over my own. There was a prolonged period of silence, unusual for us, which made me nervous. A year ago we had been close as sisters, and we never shut up. I became aware of the sound of my breathing; one of my nostrils was whistling, and I attempted to quiet it by pinching my nose. I mined my brain, trying to think of something clever or amusing to say to keep her interested. It was obvious. The moose. All I had to do was lean back a couple of inches and tug the photograph out of its hiding place. Her reaction would have been seismic. I pictured the high shrieks, first Skipper’s, then other Divines stampeding into my room to find out the gossip, their hands covering their mouths in shock. Suddenly I realized the enormous power I had.
“Actually, I’ve got something to show you,” I said, pulling out the photo.
But the door slammed open, thrust violently against my bunk.
“Well, look who it is.” Skipper rolled her eyes, let out a sigh. “The Poison Dwarf.”
9
Gerry Lake. Five feet one in skates, by far the shortest girl in our year, with lean, short limbs, doll-like in her proportions. She had a pert nose that turned slightly at the end, minuscule ears, cat eyes that seemed to be tugged by the severity of her high ponytail into two upwards slants, and a dark mole on her chin, a beauty spot that she covered with makeup. She glared at Skipper sitting on my top bunk, then, without comment, she unzipped the sports jacket she was wearing, made from a slick waterproof material with a number of team badges on it, and tossed it on her bed.
“Geraldine, love,” we heard her father calling down the corridor.
I pushed the Polaroid photo back in place.
Mr. Lake lumbered into our dorm room after his daughter, wheeling a large zippered holdall with the name of Gerry’s skating team on the outside.
“There you are,” he said, and then, startled to catch us dressed in just our nightclothes, flushed with embarrassment.
“Sorry about that, girls. We’ll get unpacked, won’t we, Gerry, then I’ll be out of your hair. This one’s yours, is it, love?” and he gestured at the bed.
Mr. Lake opened Gerry’s wardrobe and began shoveling the contents of the bag onto shelves—sparkly beige tights, leotards, silk skirts. All the while his daughter looked on sullenly, not bothering to help. Her father pulled out a drawer, almost dislocating it completely from its socket, and when it was overflowing with Gerry’s clothes, he bent over and began to pump its contents down with his fist as if he was plunging a bloc
ked sink. To my vexation, girls in the corridor—hearing Mr. Lake’s groaning and the slamming of drawers—came to stick their heads around my door to see what was happening. Mr. Lake was a stout man with a large gut who wore brightly colored suspenders, a manager of some description, something to do with the sale of stationery, I think. Literally, a pen pusher. Each time he reached to pull out another drawer he grunted in discomfort, and when he stood up straight, he let out a loud gasp of breath as if surfacing from a long underwater dive. He placed two photos on Gerry’s desk, one of her with the teammates we had never met—though in months to come we would see their bloodshot eyes and crumpled, puffy faces in all the newspapers—the second a family photo. Mrs. Lake, Gerry’s stepmother, was, in contrast to her husband, a thin tall woman, a nurse who had once, to our amusement and Gerry’s disgust, come to give a sex education talk to our year. Mr. Lake was loud, Mrs. Lake was dour, neither of them at ease amongst the Divine.
Skipper nudged me with her toe and pulled a face at Mr. Lake’s back as he attempted to string his daughter’s ice-skating costumes onto coat hangers, his large fingers working clumsily, stretching the fabric onto hooks. Off body, Gerry’s leotards, bejeweled and sparkling, looked implausibly small. Tiny pelts. Gerry caught Skipper’s look and narrowed her eyes at us, her arms crossed.
Finally Mr. Lake plucked one or two of Gerry’s stuffed toys from the holdall and climbed up the first rung of her bed to rest them on her pillow. He swore in frustration. The bed was stripped and unmade.
“Come on, love, lend a hand,” he said to Gerry. “Daphne’s waiting in the car.”
Gerry’s mouth, I remember, pinched together at the mention of her stepmother. She dumped her folded bedsheets in his arms then picked up her wash bag and pajamas and stomped away in the direction of the bathrooms.
Mr. Lake muttered something under his breath, then he smiled apologetically at Skipper and me. Climbing back up the ladder, he flapped the bedsheet, crawling on all fours over Gerry’s bed, stabbing the corners of the sheet into place with his fingers. It was rare to see parents up in dormitories, let alone clambering around like an orangutan. Divines said their good-byes at the foot of the shoe tree, a curt kiss to each cheek from their parents, a wave from the car window. Gerry, unsurprisingly, had always been babied by her parents. She was, her father would later say to the press, their special girl, their princess, their gem.