by Ellie Eaton
“Girls keep secrets,” I say before I roll over. It’s what we’re good at.
Jürgen tugs the duvet over us, hooking me close.
“Oh Gott,” he says as he kisses my shoulder, “let’s pray we have boys.”
14
She would appear out of nowhere. After swimming, for example, below the bridge as I crossed to the Other Side, a school bag slung over her shoulder, picking at her nail varnish, examining her split ends. Catching sight of Lauren beneath the bridge—her pale skin, her long, almost silver-colored hair, shimmering like a hologram through the railings—my shoulders jolted in surprise. I stopped dead, letting other girls flow around me. Lauren jutted her chin hello and made a V sign in front of her lips, smoking an invisible cigarette, then gestured at the churchyard.
We crawled into some bushes and sat on a grave. I watched how she held the Menthol Light in her fingers as if it was an extension of her hand, how she blew smoke from the corner of her mouth, her habit of continually flicking the butt with her thumbnail.
“You all right then?” she asked.
I nodded. My hair, wet from swimming, dripped down my front, seeping through my striped summer dress, so I was afraid that my bra might be visible—a small, childish crop top I barely needed to wear—and I sat there with my elbows pressed together awkwardly to cover my nonexistent cleavage. I had no idea what she saw in me. Monosyllabic most of the time, I didn’t have a clue what to talk about. We hunched over our cigarettes, hugging our knees. Crammed into a small hole in the bushes, Lauren seemed somehow larger than before. Her school shirt, too tight for her breasts, gaped open at the buttonholes and pinched her under the armpits. Her cheap skirt, bobbled black polyester, was hitched up her legs, the large plain of skin on the inside of her thigh, white and mottled. Catching me staring at her knickers, she stuck out her tongue. My face burned. I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“One of the Sixth Form girls pierced her own belly button,” I said. “And it got infected so they carted her off to hospital.”
Lauren leant forward, interested. These seemed to be the kind of stories she wanted to hear.
“What with?”
“I don’t know, a sewing needle?”
Encouraged, I told Lauren about the time George’s hair caught fire in chemistry and how Dickie snuck her boyfriend into St. Gertrude’s wearing a school cloak. When I ran out of anecdotes I fell silent again, sitting in the graveyard shivering in my damp summer dress. Quickly I scrambled for something to ask her. Had she been up to anything fun? The minute I said it I realized how absurd I sounded—priggish, patronizing, the kind of thing my mother might have asked.
Lauren snorted.
“Up to anything fun?” she mimicked.
I cringed at my plummy choice of words, the wooden way my face seemed to move, the stiff grin carved into my face like a totem.
“Fuck all,” Lauren eventually answered.
She twisted her cigarette out on the name on the headstone on which she was sitting, stood up, and walked off. I waited for a long time in the bushes with the dead bodies and beer cans and cigarette butts before I realized she wasn’t coming back. Then I got up and left too.
Lauren’s visits were like Lauren herself: unpredictable, volatile, disconcerting. On one occasion I heard a rap on my classroom window during prep time. I was reading a textbook, some dull piece of World War history, my cheek lying on my desk. Around me other girls were sleeping or writing letters instead of preparing for exams that were just weeks away. I gasped. Lauren’s mouth sucked the window, her cheeks puffed out like a blowfish, her nostrils pressed sideways. Cackling, she unpeeled her face. There was a kiss on the glass, a greasy smudge where her nose had been. She gave me the finger and was gone. Once I found her waiting for me by the gates, holding her lighter to the corner of our school sign, studying the paint as it blistered and blackened.
Now that she considered me her friend, Lauren marched straight into my boarding house to look for me, despite the obvious death stares from my peers and mutterings of disapproval from Skipper in particular. Lauren’s brother had recently been hired full-time as a maintenance man at the school and so there was something proprietary about the way she came and went that unsettled people. Like she thought she was Divine. Watching her roam around amongst us, I felt as if I’d let a wild animal out of its cage. Feline looking, she prowled the corridors of St. Gertrude’s until she came to a stop at our rec room door where, barred from leaving the boarding house after prep, we sat around doing nothing, sprawled across uncomfortable vinyl chairs, resting our heads in each other’s laps, slumped on beanbags like golden retrievers. Despite the extortionate fees we paid, our boarding house had the feel of a hospital waiting room. It was tatty and utilitarian, scattered with debris from our tuck lockers and the crushed remains of biscuits we ate at elevenses, crisp wrappers and instant noodle packets wedged down the sides of our seats. Even before Divines began whispering and frowning, I knew Lauren was there, staring intently at me to get my attention. A tingle ran up the back of my neck. She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled.
“Oy, Josephine.”
“For god’s sake,” Skipper said, outraged that a townie had the gall to come into our rec room, let alone whistle at us like we were dogs.
Ignoring her, I scrambled to my feet obediently and followed after Lauren.
Occasionally on these visits Lauren seemed sullen and bored, her arms crossed, barely staying more than a few minutes, as if she resented being there at all. Other times she clowned around in our smoking den till her brother finished work or the bell rang for supper. As a friend she was surprisingly generous. Often she brought me a present—a bag of crisps, a slice of her neighbor’s birthday cake—which we ate together, hunched behind the boiler room, puffing on our cigarettes. Once she made me a bead necklace out of letters and shoelace. Another time she brought me a 3-D poster for my dorm—clusters of dots you had to stare at like the static on a television screen—the corners torn where she’d tugged it down from her brother’s wall.
“Won’t Stuart be cross?” I asked.
Lauren clicked her tongue. She unrolled the poster, spreading it wide between her arms.
“Go on then, you see it?”
I tried to relax, to make my vision go blurry, but I was too self-conscious to go cross-eyed in front of anyone, let alone Lauren.
A few days a week she had a job after school, repetitive factory work of some kind, and on those evenings, she told me, I could call her once her shift was over.
“Call you?” I checked. “At home?”
“No, at the fucking zoo, you div.” She crossed her eyes.
She took out a Biro and tattooed her number on the inside of my arm.
The phone booth, a flimsy plyboard box the size of a coffin with holes drilled in the side, sat in the entrance hall of our boarding house. The door was padlocked during the daytime to avoid distraction, except for a few hours each evening when our housemistress appeared after prep, plodding along the corridor with keys jangling at her hip like a prison warden. A crowd of girls stood around the booth, waiting to make calls. At times the phone would ring when the door was still locked, sad and unanswered. We’d press our nose to the glass, rattling the door, groaning about the love interest trying his luck out of hours, though it just as easily could have been our parents. Later, during the scandal, this padlocked pay phone became the focus of an investigation, the papers suggesting that there had been a critical delay in any girls alerting the emergency services to what had happened to Gerry (it was true that amid the drunken chaos of school dares Divines struggled to find an unlocked booth).
When it came to using the phone, priority was given to the handful of Divines, like Henry Peck, who had serious boyfriends. These girls were demigods. Through the strip of glass on the door we could see Henry sitting with her knees tucked neatly under her chin, knotting the cable around her finger as she giggled at the Moose, who she was still calling
long distance, murmuring indecipherably into the receiver, a string of yeses and nos and mmms, sometimes lifting her shoulders at us and shrugging, so that we could only guess at the X-rated words her tennis coach was whispering down the line—erotic poetry, pledges, declarations of love, heavy breathing. Inexperienced as I was, I had no clue what dirty talk entailed. Perhaps in the end they were only discussing her backswing.
Next in the pecking order were girls with brothers and cousins at nearby boarding schools: Radley, Pangbourne, Harrow, Charterhouse, Eton, Stowe; it didn’t matter, any boy would do. Begrudgingly the brother hollered for his friends, classmates procured at random, boys we’d met in passing at a rugby match, say, or the Henley regatta, or who we’d exchanged salivary kisses with at a winter ball. They grunted monosyllabic answers to our questions, we tittered and attempted to flirt, several of us crammed into the small wooden box at once, passing around the receiver like a baton until our charge cards ran out.
Afterwards, when we’d drifted back to our dorm rooms, the phone was open to the rest of the year—homesick internationals like the Russians, two brooding girls, oligarchs’ daughters, who wore cherry-colored lipstick to lessons, trying their utmost to get expelled. Gerry Lake, though, as far as I could tell, couldn’t have cared less about speaking to boys. The only calls she made were the rare times she spoke to her stepmother, Daphne Lake, who caused such a fuss when she hadn’t heard from Gerry for more than two weeks that our housemistress escorted her from our dormitory to the booth herself. Gerry pouted through the conversation, hand on her hip, a foot on pointe as if she was on ice, not even bothering to close the door.
“Fine,” she told her stepmother. “No. Yes. Stop asking that. I’ve got to go. You said that already, Daphne. Bye.”
I waited until one of the Russian girls shuffled out of the phone box in house slippers, and while the rest of my year were brushing their teeth and scuttling between rooms, I slipped into the empty telephone box. I sat on the ripped waiting-room chair, leaning my head against the perforated wooden wall, sharp beams of light coming through the holes like a confessional. I felt strangely nervous, the handset slippery in my palm. What if Lauren had only been joking when she told me I could ring her? What if we had nothing to say? A man answered and I hung up. The next time I called, a woman picked up.
“Loz!” her mother shouted. “Phone.”
I heard feet thumping downstairs.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Oh, right.”
There was the grumble of a television set in the background, the clack of Lauren fiddling with her own shoelace necklace, sliding the lettered beads along the leather lace, rattling them like dice. She waited for me to talk. I felt blood pulsing in my neck, my throat tightening. I had a story prepared to tell Lauren, some derogatory anecdote about the Divine I thought she might find funny. Lauren’s favorite pastime now was to hear about the senseless rituals that constituted the life of the Divine—the end-of-year dares we had already planned, the school motto, the boys’ names, the hair flicking, the way we turned our Sunday chapel service into a fashion show, strutting down the aisle to take Communion as if it was a catwalk—she ate it up like celebrity gossip, sucking her teeth, snorting sarcastically. Now that I had her attention, the anecdote I had meant to tell her completely evaporated.
“How was work?” I blurted instead.
“Shit.”
I didn’t know the first thing about the factory floor, or assembly lines or packaging; I’d never had a paid job in my life. Silent, I stared at the doodles on the wall, the Biro hearts and boys’ names, a cartoon of Fat Fran, with pendulous breasts and a Bible. One of us had written something about Gerry Lake and then scribbled it out.
“I saw you and your mate today,” Lauren said. “The little one.”
“What? Gerry? When?” I sat up.
“Down by the duck pond.”
It was a Wednesday, my afternoon with the Turtle and Gerry. The thought that Lauren had seen us without me knowing was horrific. One of my greatest anxieties at that age was being caught in the act of doing something unflattering, picking a spot or sniffing my armpit or huffing into my palm to check for bad breath. Anything, in other words, that flashed open the curtain of adolescence to expose the awful ugliness of the person I thought I really was.
“Your mate looked like she had a right hump on,” Lauren said.
“She’s not my mate,” I corrected her. The last thing I wanted was for Lauren to think I was friends with someone like Gerry. “We just share a room. We don’t even speak to each other.”
“Yeah?” Lauren’s voice lifted with interest.
There was nothing she enjoyed more, I was beginning to learn, than to hear about our petty disagreements, the bitchy quarrels we entangled ourselves in, the cold shouldering and wrangling for popularity. I, on the other hand, knew next to nothing about her friends at King Edmunds. If I asked Lauren what KE girls talked about, what they did after school, what they ate for lunch, she never gave me an answer, deflecting the question or changing the subject. When I probed her about what KE boy she liked best, she sucked her teeth.
“Those prats. As if,” she said, and, like now, turned the conversation back around to me.
“How come you share a room with that Gerry girl then?”
I picked at the synthetic padding of the chair through the rip, gouging little balls from the yellow foam, rolling them between my fingers and dropping them on the floor. I didn’t reply. I pictured Gerry upstairs, sitting on her bunk bed, po-faced, massaging ointment into her dry ankles, disgusted by the thought of her mutated feet, the mangled toes, gnarled and twisted from years of skating. Or worse, the looks my peers gave each other as they passed our dorm room—or was I just imagining it?—the whispers and giggling.
“Well, she looked like a moody cow if you ask me,” Lauren tried again. “She got a stick shoved up her bum or what?”
“Yes,” I burst out. “I hate her.”
I meant it. I had never loathed anyone as much in my life as Gerry Lake.
On the other end of the telephone line there was silence. I heard Lauren rattling her necklace. Her voice lowered to a whisper.
“I can sort the bitch out for you if you want?”
A chill ran down my spine. I sat motionless in the booth, staring at the graffiti on the wall. Gerry Lake’s name struck through with black felt-tip.
There was a sudden sharp click on the end of the line. A man’s voice.
“Lauren, get off the bloody phone.”
I yelped in surprise.
Lauren swore loudly at her brother, then she began to cackle.
“Oh my god, Josephine, you’re so gullible.”
“Oh,” I exhaled.
“You two, stop fucking about, will you,” her brother ordered, still on the line.
How long had he been listening to us?
“Nighty night, Josephine,” Lauren said, still laughing.
The phone clicked dead.
15
January in Chicago and my husband is dressed in only his bath towel. I am wearing my quilted coat, hood still zipped up to my ears, fingers numb from carrying the plastic bags of damp laundry, still hanging from my hands. Melting ice trickles with uncertain, stop-start progress from my shoulders to my elbows, then patters onto the floor. The little tapping noise of my thawing arms is the only sound in our apartment.
“Jürgen? Jürgen, what happened?”
I gaze around the study.
Instead of packing for his trip, an art fair in Miami, he is leaning over my desk. My books lie strewn around my study in various stages of undress, their pages spread, jackets cast off. My desk drawers are wide open. The lights are dim. He stands in the eye of the storm, totally still. My first thought is that we have been robbed.
“Jürgen?” I repeat.
“Ja,” he says, as if he’s forgotten I am here.
“What the hell happened?”
He is silen
t for a while.
Then he answers.
“I was looking for my passport.”
I believe him. Jürgen isn’t someone who snoops through my drawers or goes looking for secrets. He isn’t that kind of man. Outside I hear heavy boots crunching through salt up the front steps of our Chicago brownstone. A door slams overhead and there is the familiar elephantine thumping of one of the three men who occupy the top-floor apartment. Their television switches on immediately, after which comes a brief silence, which signals that their gaming system is loading. I hear the sound of the fridge being opened and slammed; what follows is the boom of bombs dropping, gun fire, apocalyptic screams, the thup, thup, thup of heavyweight artillery, which often goes on into the early hours. It is deeply unsettling. We live in a Chicago neighborhood where kids ride around on their bikes with real handguns down their backs.
Our neighbors are currently the cause of a lot of tension. They are nice enough guys I’m sure, but one of them works downtown in security and his alarm wakes us at 5 a.m., and the other two flatmates tend bar. Collectively, therefore, they never sleep. At night, when they finish their various shifts, I hear the slam of the apartment door and immediately press a pillow over my head as I once did sharing a room with Gerry Lake. I listen to their cumbrous footsteps stomping overhead, a heavy clunking that sounds to me like they are pressing weights and then a repetitive mechanical whir as if they’d switched, for no reason at all, to shredding paper. Some nights I stand on a chair naked, muttering curses, trying to decipher the sounds. It has become an obsession. The man who has the room directly above our bedroom has a head shaped like a football; he is brawny with a huge buffalo-shaped back and an unbelievably thick neck. I wouldn’t put it past him to bench-press in the early hours. But the shredding noise is a mystery.