by Ellie Eaton
Once I knocked on their door with a six-pack and begged them to take their shoes off or turn the television down. They are nice guys, as I say, and went straight over to find the remote. But in a couple of days they’d forgotten again and we were back to putting pillows over our heads, wishing them dead. From what I can deduce all three men are single. When they bring women home, stilettos detonate on the wood above us, chairs scrape, music rattles the walls. We know a great deal about their sexual techniques. The football head goes at it like a jackhammer, in sudden and erratic bursts, interspersed with moments of complete silence during which Jürgen and I lie side by side in the dark, wondering what the hell the man is waiting for. In those seconds I want to go up there with a crowbar, threaten to smash them in the head. Then the drilling takes up again, on off, on off, until it concludes with a loud, satisfied grunt. We all snatch some sleep after that but an hour or so later the security guard’s alarm rings out and he begins showering and the radio turns on and that is that.
This sleeplessness is taking its toll. Jürgen and I are tired all the time, irritable, prone to snapping. Not our best selves. All the vigorous sexual antics that we hear going on overhead are a reminder that our own sex life is in danger of becoming somewhat automated now that we’re trying, but failing, to have a baby. What was once effortless has become stilted and mechanical but we are too tired most nights to do anything to spice it up or make the whole endeavor seem less prosaic. Occasionally I wear the translucent chiffon slip Jürgen gave me on our honeymoon two years ago, and I have even shopped online for a toy, but the vibrating gold ring remains inside my drawer in the velvet display box it came in, like an enormous discarded wedding band.
Every few weeks, when I feel I can’t take the noise any longer, I check myself into a single-floor motel under the pretense of a work trip, somewhere anonymous like Naperville or Joliet. I spend my supper vouchers at the adjoining diner, waited on by a Sally or Kathleen in their frilly aprons, a pen tapping their teeth as I scan the menu. Sometimes I float in my underwear in the Super 8 pool, my river of Lethe, then go back to my room, roll down the blackout blinds, flick through the channels till I find the right kind of porn. Afterwards I sleep like the dead.
This is my dirty little secret.
I look around the room, at the explosion of drawers, copies of old stories I’ve saved for posterity, now upended and scattered on the bed. The Sunday magazine with the gymnast on the cover tossed onto the floor.
“Jürgen, did you find it?” I ask.
“Find it?”
“Your passport.”
“Yes,” he says, nodding. “I found it.”
He rubs his hand over his beard.
“I found a lot of things.”
I look for my laptop but can’t see it. Perhaps he’s uncovered my embarrassing addiction to Facebook, noted the mindless hours I’ve spent nosing through the lives of my former school friends—Skipper, George, the twins—when I should have been working. My fruitless search for old stories about Gerry.
I come closer. Then I see them, the pictures of the erections, all of them lined on the desk, one slightly overlapping the next. I snuck the Polaroids out of my mother’s attic when I was last in England, afraid she might stumble upon them during one of her spring cleans. Why, I curse myself, didn’t I just throw them straight in the rubbish bin? There is also the issue of the motel receipts, which I’ve kept for my tax return. Put them together, hard dicks and hotel beds, I can see what this looks like.
“Oh,” I say. “Those.”
“Ja,” Jürgen says, “those.”
“Wait. I can explain. It’s not what you think.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“It never is.”
“Please, Jürgen.”
I try to think of a logical explanation, something that doesn’t sound crazy.
“It’s just something . . .”
“Don’t say it.” Jürgen groans, head in his hands. “Don’t say it.”
Suddenly I see the corner of his mouth twitching, the smile trying to escape. My husband finds the whole thing hilarious and is having his fun seeing me squirm. He doesn’t for a second think I’m capable of lying and betrayal; if anything, he finds all this unexpected nostalgia endearing. He spins around, his towel drops, he wrestles me, laundry bags and all, down to the floor. Hard against my stomach, he unpeels me from my winter clothes.
“Don’t say it,” he taunts.
I arch my back, pretend to fight him off.
“Don’t say it,” he whispers softly into my ear.
“Don’t say what?” I say, playing along.
“Don’t say it.”
“Divine.”
16
We were summoned to the rec room. So many of us had found photos by then it was just a matter of time. Miss Graves, our housemistress, sat on a chair with her deputy behind her, a lean, fuzzy-haired young woman who knitted her own jumpers and who had inadvertently stumbled across one of the so-called obscenities, perhaps the twelfth or thirteenth that were eventually discovered on school property. The deputy, who had been making her evening patrol of the orchard in an attempt to flush out smokers from the bushes, instead found a group of squealing Divines inspecting the latest arrival.
“Step back,” she ordered.
She covered her hand with a plastic bag, picked the photo up and knotted the evidence like a mound of dog shit, and carried it off to the Egg where she deposited it on the desk of our headmistress.
That evening Fat Fran stood center stage, though I also recall that Padre and our school nurse, in charge of our spiritual and physical well-being, respectively, hovered close to the door, ready and waiting. Padre smiled at us sympathetically as we walked into the rec room in single file. He was one of the few members of staff we actually respected. We weren’t religious in the slightest but that didn’t seem to matter to him. He listened to our petty troubles and tolerated our bad language and, unlike our other teachers, seemed to think us rather fun. Even when we went through our occult phase and tried to summon Gerry Lake’s mother from the dead. (We weren’t targeting Gerry in particular, at least not as far as I remember. Gerry was the only one of us who had suffered a close family bereavement, her mother having died when Gerry was eight or nine.)
Next to Padre was a member of the local police holding a series of brochures that we were handed before being ushered into our seats. We fanned ourselves and held our collective breath waiting for the first adult to say the word penis. Someone sniggered. Miss Graves glared at us.
“Girls,” Fat Fran began, “I’m extremely disappointed.”
Our headmistress had recently been ordained, one of the first women to enter the Anglican clergy, something of a pioneer, and she always had her fingers at her throat, straightening her new dog collar. Fat Fran was an unusually tall woman, even allowing for the exaggeration of memory over time, well over six feet. She was a mystery to us since she was heavily preoccupied with church matters and spent her days cloistered in her office, working, we presumed, on her Sunday sermons or other diocese business and had very little to do with the day-to-day life of the Divine other than our religious education (Fat Fran had made religious studies a mandatory part of our curriculum). She wore plain blue shirts and nondescript plaid skirts, tentlike in their structure due to her girth, beneath which her large feet splayed sideways. She was extremely fleshy. At her neckline several folds of jowl rippled over her dog collar. There was a flap of skin under her chin, like a pelican’s, which hung to her throat.
That day I sat on a windowsill at the rear of the rec room, watching the curious way her gular pouch quavered as she waited for complete silence. She looked frazzled, her shoulders hunched with exhaustion. Like a blimp, partially deflated. Without question this was her annus horribilis, even before Gerry Lake. First of all there was the recently published OFSTED report, a damning assessment that had detailed the extent of St. John’s academic failings. The school inspectors insinuated that Fat Fr
an’s staff were not in control, unable to confirm the whereabouts of pupils half the time, with girls scattered across the campus, smoking in bushes. To add to her woes there was the unfortunate matter of Chuck, a Sixth Former who had run off in the middle of the autumn term, with a man we knew as Disco Dave, the mobile DJ who performed at all our school dances.
As a consequence, intake had slowed radically at St. John’s—some alarmed parents even going so far as to remove their daughters—the bursar, a former army man, wringing his hands as our numbers swiftly dwindled, there being only fourteen new First Years that autumn instead of the usual fifty. Fourteen! Not enough to even play a decent game of lacrosse. There were rumors of mergers with another nearby private school or selling off some of our sacred sports grounds to a local developer to raise funds or, more horrifyingly, opening our doors to day girls. As my mother had commented more than once, the Divine were not what they once were.
Fat Fran, on the brink of disaster, stood in front of our entire year and prepared to deliver her lecture.
“My understanding is that several of you girls have already come across a number of lewd photos on our school property.”
She held a bag aloft, the same plastic shopping bag our deputy had carried the photograph in.
“And that you attempted to conceal these”—she paused in disgust—“items from the staff, thereby endangering not just yourselves, but every single girl in this school.”
The thought we might have been putting ourselves in jeopardy had never occurred to us until then. We didn’t know anything about grooming or rings or sexual predators, even the word pedophile wasn’t one we used, though we might have said perverts and flashers. We rarely read the newspaper or watched the news. We lived in an ivory tower, so when it came to men, we really had no sense of danger. Divines were boy crazy, and the thought of being assaulted simply never crossed our minds; if anything, we felt that they, the men, were the ones under threat. We ogled the gardeners and the delivery boys; hungry for attention, some of us even made eyes at Padre. Gerry Lake, if you believed the stories that circulated that term, had had several assignations with her trainer, the middle-aged man who we speculated was her boyfriend.
“I presume that all the photographs in question have now been handed in to either Miss Graves or another member of staff. If I have reason to believe otherwise, I will have no choice but to instruct Miss Graves to conduct daily dorm checks.”
We let out a collective moan of discontent. A few Divines leant forward to whisper up and down the rows, elbowing one another and exchanging meaningful looks. I sat extremely still, chewing my cheek. Gerry Lake, as usual, sat bolt upright. She barely moved.
“Quiet,” ordered Miss Graves. “You are Fifth Formers now. Some of you will be prefects next year, one of you will become head girl. I shouldn’t have to remind you what it means to be Divine.”
Memor amici.
I couldn’t help but look at Skipper, whom people often referred to as head girl material, sitting on the windowsill across from me. Recently we’d barely spoken. Just as I’d feared, the unalterable fact that I was stuck in a double with Gerry Lake while Skipper was sharing a triple room with the twins meant that I was being kept at arm’s length from my closest friends, no longer party to their dorm room jokes, the whispered details of their latest crushes, the elaborate plans they had made for our end-of-year dares. Skipper, who was the nominal leader of this sacred Fifth Form tradition, seemed to be constantly huddled in furtive discussion with groups of girls, issuing instructions, arranging the purchase of the supplies we would need to carry out our pranks and where to hide them. (It was beholden to each successive Fifth Form to outdo the previous year’s theatrics, the ritual growing increasingly more elaborate as the decades passed.) Since Gerry Lake had already made it clear that she wasn’t remotely interested in the business of dares night, people grew increasingly suspicious of her motives, accusing her of leaking information to younger years or worse, sabotaging the whole endeavor by ratting us out to our headmistress (who had long threatened to put an end to the tradition for good). Whenever Gerry walked into the rec room, conversations would peter out to silence, Skipper and her attendants crossing their arms or pretending to discuss the most unlikely of subjects, GCSE exams. Once, I remember, Skipper was in the sports hall, bitching about Gerry and her refusal to take part in our dares, which she took as a personal attack. During this long vituperation she mimicked Gerry’s accent perfectly—the dropped aitches and flattened vowels that made her sound so like a townie—before we realized Gerry was standing just a few feet away, getting undressed behind a nearby locker.
“Oh, hi there, Gerry,” Skipper said with a fake smile. “You have something on your face.”
She pointed at the dark mole on Gerry’s chin.
Gerry made a hissing noise through her teeth and, seeming to single me out in particular, raised her middle finger and stormed out of the changing room.
“God, she’s frightful,” Skipper said, the first words she had spoken directly to me in days. “I don’t know how you put up with it.”
Watching Skipper, I was barely listening to our headmistress’s lecture anymore.
“Should you come across anything like this in the future,” she droned on, “or see anyone unusual or suspicious on or near school property, you are obligated to report it to a member of staff immediately.”
Fat Fran held up a finger. The wattle on her upper arms fluttered.
“Immediately.”
This time it was Skipper’s turn to look at me. She raised an eyebrow, her standard I-told-you-so gesture. I pretended not to see, but as soon as we were dismissed I sidestepped past Padre and the nurse, trying not to draw attention to myself. First I went to my dorm and took out all the photos I had collected over the past few weeks, some four or five by then. I put them down the back of my underwear, pulled out one of my cigarettes, and waited by the pay phone. Gerry was in the cubicle, muttering into the phone, her lips pinched, twisting the cord around her finger. When she saw me, she flushed red and slammed down the phone, barging past me as she left the booth. What did I care who she was talking to?
Lauren picked up after the second or third try. She sounded out of breath.
“I was in the tub,” she said.
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Depends.”
“I need you to look after something for me?”
“I don’t know, what it is?”
“Please,” I begged.
“Go on. You’ll have to bring it here, though. I’ve got to cook our tea.”
17
Lauren lived in a council house a short walk from the school, within sight of our lacrosse fields, and so had grown up with the sound of our hard rubber spikes clattering up and down the road as Divines marched past her window. A long army wielding sticks like bayonets, colored bibs flapping across our chests, flicking our hair, our plumy voices carried in the breeze from the pitch, chanting and cheering. It must have been jarring.
I checked the address she’d given me. Hers was third in a long row of yellow brick houses. There was a narrow path between the gate and the front door with a low wall between her and each of her neighbors. In the tiny front gardens either side were broken plastic toys, a couple of abandoned scooters, bikes, bins, barbecues, dumbbells, a damp mattress sagging against the back wall. Three windows along an England flag doubled as a bedroom curtain.
She’d been watching for me and opened the door before my finger could press the bell. She was wearing a tracksuit, the bottoms slung low on her hips. She pulled the door behind her and leant against the wall. Across the street an older man walking past shouted all right to her and she replied with an all right back, sheepish, as if she was embarrassed about me.
“You took your time,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I’ve got to eat and get ready for work, I can’t hang about.”
It was a Saturday afternoon. At the weekend she di
d an evening shift in a warehouse where she pressed small plastic letters and numbers into a frame, which had something to do with the side panel of a car. She pocketed fistfuls of these letters and made them into jewelry at home, including the shoelace necklace with my initials on it that I wore wrapped around my wrist.
“Oh, okay. Sorry.”
I was always apologizing for something or other back then.
“You’re all right. What’s so important?”
I was about to pull the envelope of photos out of my bag when a voice yelled from far back in the house.
“Who’s that, Lauren love?”
“No one, Mum,” Lauren called over her shoulder. “Just a friend.”
“That’s not no one, Loz. Don’t make her stand out on the road.”
“Fuck,” I heard Lauren mutter, “you’d better come in then.”
Lauren pulled the door open so that I could come into a corridor, flicked it shut behind me with her bare heel, and I followed her down a carpeted hall to the back of the house. Her father used to be a jockey and on the papered walls were framed pictures of racehorses but I wasn’t given time to look. In a small kitchen her mum was sitting at a table, her hands knitted round a mug of tea. She wore a dressing gown and slippers. Next to her was a woman holding a baby, and a toddler was crawling across the linoleum floor. The two women stopped midsentence and inspected me. I was wearing black leggings and penny loafers with a long shirt that belonged to my father. My hair was flipped over to one side.
“This is my mum,” said Lauren. “And that’s Sue. She lives next door.”
Lauren gestured to the baby and then a toddler who was sitting by the back door, drumming the cat flap with a wooden spoon.
“Those two are Josh and Paul.”
These were the owners of the toy trucks strewn around the adjoining front yard.