by Ellie Eaton
“Oy, Pauly, pack it in,” the neighbor said.
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. McKibbin,” I said. “I’m Josephine.”
The two women nodded at me. I stood there, pretending to be interested in the baby as Lauren opened the oven door, shook an oven tray with a mitt, and slammed it again. Lauren’s mother was older than mine by a long way. Shockingly so. She had dark wispy hair, gray where her roots were showing. Her dressing gown was faded pink; underneath she wore a bobbled nightdress. Propped against her chair was a cane. There was a lazy Susan in the middle of the table with a china salt-and-pepper shaker set in the shape of two Siamese cats sitting amongst various orange-labeled pharmaceutical containers of varying heights like skyrises. Her mum spun the lazy Susan to reach for her cigarettes. She shook out a packet of Superkings and offered one to the neighbor. Lauren leant over to help herself but her mother slapped her hand.
“Buy your own,” she said.
“Don’t be a cow.” Lauren snaked around her mother’s neck and took the one from her mother’s fingers. “You’ve had your two today anyway.”
“You stopping, Joan?” the neighbor asked.
“Just cutting down,” she answered as I followed Lauren upstairs.
“Oy,” Lauren called back, “that’s not what you told the doctor.”
“Mind your beeswax” came the reply, then the baby began to cry and Lauren waved me into her room.
Her bedroom used to be her brother Stuart’s and was still decorated for an eight-year-old boy. There were rocket ships on the walls and glow stars and a bunk bed with faded Cabbage Patch stickers on it. I looked at a photo of her brother holding a football trophy. I recognized him from the maintenance staff. Sometimes I saw Stuart fixing broken chairs outside the boiler room or flattening our grass tennis courts with a roller. He liked to whistle. There were Lauren’s schoolbooks and a desk for her to work at, but other than that she hadn’t done anything to decorate her bedroom.
“I know, it’s a shithole,” she said, without looking at all bothered.
She kicked some clothes across the room and climbed onto the top bunk. The bottom bunk, which was neater, had a floral pillow and a folded blanket with an eye mask on top.
“Who sleeps down there?”
“My mum. She gets insomnia and nightmares and shit. Sometimes she comes in here to sleep. Or not sleep, I guess.”
I looked at the rocket ships.
“What about your brother?”
“Stuart? He’s got his own place with his girlfriend and her kid. They’re always at each other’s throats. When he’s had an earful, he kips on our sofa.”
Like Gerry Lake, I was an only child and therefore filled with curiosity about what it meant to have a sibling, particularly a brother. My family was a small and remote island. I loved my parents, of course, and didn’t resent them for sending me away to school. They were giving me what they believed to be the best possible start in life, a private education; it’s not like they had thrown me to the wolves. My father was over fifteen years older than my mother and worked in international finance. I knew next to nothing about his office life, other than the gray-and-white pin-striped suits he wore to the bank and the mahogany briefcase he carried like an aegis. Above all, my father valued peace and quiet; he visibly winced when I spoke too loudly at breakfast, retreating into his study during half-terms and school holidays. My mother was the social one—extremely pretty, well bred, Divine—and therefore considered a catch. As far as I could tell my parents were neither demonstrably in love nor out of it. In sixteen years I had never seen them yell or cry or even kiss on the lips. If they argued or—even more improbable to me—were overcome with sudden, violent desire, it was acted out behind their bedroom door, in a series of muffled whispers and coughs and sighs. Occasionally, when my father was in a particularly good mood, he would pat my mother on the hip as he passed her. That was as much romance I saw at home. I had no idea what it was like to live, day in, day out, as part of a real family, one that squabbled and wept and hugged.
I was absorbed for a while in looking at the photos of Stuart in his football kit, hair spiked with gel.
“So what do you want to give me then?” Lauren asked.
I took out the envelope holding the photos and handed it to her. She fingered open the packet and shook her head violently.
“No way. I don’t fucking want them.”
“Just for a bit,” I pleaded. “Just while they’re doing dorm checks.”
“Stick them in the rubbish then, torch them.”
On the way to her house I’d had the same thought; I had even hovered beside a bin in the town rec grounds, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know why not. Maybe because my photo was the first to be found, and in an odd way I felt chosen. That’s how desperate for male attention I was. At night I sometimes pulled the photos out from their hiding spots once Gerry was asleep and, under the cover of my duvet, studied them with a penlight, one hand between my legs. This had become something of a guilty secret. While Divines shared every detail of their romantic encounters with boys—limited as mine were—the topic of masturbation was strictly off-limits. I had no idea if Skipper and the twins pleasured themselves in the same way, or if the fact that I did made me a pervert. I could have asked Lauren, who wasn’t squeamish in the slightest, but I was too nervous to say anything that I thought might jeopardize our friendship.
The truth was that Lauren and I had very little in common. I didn’t know any of the boys she fancied, or the girls she sat next to at school, or any of her teachers. Her life felt infinitely more eventful than mine, more adult. Lauren had two jobs to help with the bills at home, the warehouse shift and Saturday mornings behind the register at Woolworths. I had never worked a day in my life. Occasionally my father paid me to hose down his car. Lauren’s father was a retired jockey, but she had never ridden and wasn’t remotely interested in horses like I was. Rather, she thought they were a waste of space. We liked some of the same music and books and television programs, but I was always out of step with the latest episodes. Because I was paranoid she’d find me boring, I would save up funny anecdotes from school to tell her while we smoked, details of my ongoing feud with Gerry Lake. (Lauren took a particular interest in Gerry. Had I seen her skate? What about that boyfriend of hers, the older man? Wasn’t he taking advantage?)
But for the most part the Divine life was insular, repetitive, trivial. Gerry and the photos gave me something to talk about. I wasn’t ready to give them up.
“Please.” I pushed them into her hand. “Just for a few days.”
“All right, all right. Fucking hell.” She wedged the envelope under her pillow. “But if my dad finds out, I’ll never hear the fucking end of it.”
Downstairs the front door banged shut.
“Shit,” she said, looking alarmed. “That’s him. Come on.”
Mr. McKibbin stood in the kitchen with the Racing Post rolled under his arm. He surveyed the various women in the room, his wife and neighbor, gripping their empty mugs, then last, Lauren and me as we jogged downstairs and she banged open the oven door and shook out their supper onto three floral plates.
“What is this, the flipping Women’s Institute?” he asked.
He was a short, lean man, with a face that was ruddy and weathered from years of riding, lines radiating around his eyes, deep crescents either side of his mouth, pronounced bags. His eyes were so hooded that it gave the impression he was squinting. There was a white scar under his chin where he’d once been kicked by a horse.
Lauren took the first plate of food and put it on the table in front of her mother. It wasn’t even six o’clock. I had never met a family who ate this early. Sue, the neighbor, hoisted her baby onto her hip and I noticed her squeeze Lauren’s mum on the shoulder as she stood up.
“We’ll be off then, Joan.”
Lauren’s mum reached for her cane, pushed her chair back. It screeched on the floor and the baby began howling.
Without waiting for us to leave, Lauren’s father sat down and began to eat. He leant over his plate, stabbing one chip after another and forking them into his mouth. His leathered forearms were still hard and sinuous from riding. A thin gold disc, St. Christopher, levitated on a chain over his food.
“Thanks so much for having me,” I said. “Lovely to meet you all.”
That was the obsequious way I spoke back then.
No one heard me over the wailing baby.
I raised a palm and left without anyone noticing I was gone.
18
It was one of those warm spring evenings in England when people suddenly realize summer is around the corner. I should never have been on my own, of course, but, instead of hurrying back to school, I walked from Lauren’s house through the public rec grounds not far from where Gerry Lake had been jeered at by the townies with the pit bull. There were seminaked bodies scattered across the park, absorbing the last of the sun. A group of boys kicked a ball about. In the playground I saw the familiar gelled high ponytails of three KE girls who sat atop a climbing frame, swigging bottles of Hooch. They were drunk and taunting a man pushing a baby on a swing. As I got closer I realized it was Lauren’s brother they were heckling. Wolf whistling, trying to get him to accept a drink. Stuart McKibbin—I recognized him from school—leant against the swing, muscular, tall, totally indifferent to their catcalls. He could have wheeled his girlfriend’s baby elsewhere, but it seemed like all the attention entertained him. He deposited the baby in the sandpit with a bucket and spade and flopped on a bench with his arms spread out, legs splayed, his groin jutting provocatively over the seat. He slid one hand beneath his waistband and rearranged himself. Then he closed his eyes. He wouldn’t have looked twice at someone like me, I knew that, but I felt something tugging, a kind of gravitational pull that made me walk closer to the playground set.
“Stuart, stop taking the piss,” the KE girls yelled.
Rejected, they turned their attention to me, their heads rotating slowly as I passed. White powdered faces and dark shark eyes.
“What she think she’s looking at?”
I said nothing, put my head down, kept on walking.
“Who let the dogs out?” they called.
There was perhaps another three hundred meters or so before the gate. I just had to make it to the other side of the park, then I’d be almost back at school. The three girls swung down from their cage and followed after me slowly, making yapping and howling noises. I cursed myself for coming out alone.
“Oy, we’re talking to you, posh twat.”
My hands were clammy, I tried not to run or look over my shoulder, but they shoved past me and stood blocking the gate so that I had to be granted their permission to leave.
“Excuse me,” I said.
They swigged from their bottles and smirked, swinging forward and back on the kissing gate.
“What’s the magic word?”
“Please, just get off.”
“Orff,” they mimicked my accent. “Get orff.”
“Seriously,” I said.
“Seriously, seriously, seriously.”
One of them held out her drink and then unclasped her grip around its neck, letting the bottle fall. There was a loud crack as it hit the tarmac.
“Look what you gone and done now?”
The others hissed with laughter.
“You owe me for that. You’d better go buy me another. Off you trot.”
Even if I had looked old enough to get served, which I didn’t, I couldn’t have paid them. I emptied out my cardigan pockets to prove I wasn’t carrying my wallet. All I had was the single cigarette I’d put in my pocket earlier. They seemed uncertain what to do next. The taller of the three girls peered down at her trainers where the tongues were sprayed with pink from the dropped bottle.
“They’re ruined.”
The others caught on.
“Yeah, look what she did. She’s properly fucked your shoes up, Jade.”
“Snap, snap.” The leader clicked her fingers and pointed at her feet.
I stood there—utterly pathetic, weak—unsure of what exactly she expected of me. Why were they doing this? I felt a pulse in my throat and an unbelievable urge to urinate. If I wasn’t holding my breath, I thought I’d wet myself. I cast my eyes around desperately, hoping to see another Divine out smoking in the park. I would have taken anyone in that moment, even Gerry Lake. Slowly, I crouched down on one knee and tugged my shirtsleeve over my fist. I began to rub.
“There you go, Princess Di, chop chop.”
“Pack it in, you lot,” I heard.
The KEs’ heads snapped up. Lauren’s brother stood behind us, one hand on the pushchair. I was mortified and relieved in equal measure.
“All right, Stu.” They crossed their arms and pouted, totally impenitent, I remember, unassailable. I took my chance to stand and shuffle back a few steps, trying to make myself invisible.
“Jade, you heard me, get lost.”
“Or what,” she said.
She leant against the gate, rocking back and forth on her elbows. I watched to see what Stuart would do next.
He smiled, shook his head, and stepped in close to her, just millimeters apart, the other girls wolf whistling as though they were going to snog; I felt a stab of envy, but at the last minute he moved his mouth suddenly and whispered something into her ear. This KE, Jade, bit her lip, then she reddened, slammed both her hands into his chest, and detonated.
“You dickhead,” she said, spitting the words at him. “Twat, fucking knob.”
Arms flailing, the other two had to drag her off him. Stuart held out an arm to keep her flapping at a distance and it seemed like she weighed nothing, a gnat or a fly.
“You’re full of shit, Stuart McKibbin. Your mum’s going to wind up in a fucking wheelchair, yeah, a spaz, you know,” she yelled as the other two girls tugged her away. “I hope she shits herself.”
“Nighty night, Jade.” Stuart wiggled his fingers.
The girl was still screaming insults at him from the other side of the playground, fainter by now, snagged in the melody of the park, the radios and football games and the ice cream truck, so that we only caught every other word.
“Girlfriend . . . sister . . . slag . . . lezzer.”
Then they were gone, down the lane towards the duck pond, and it was just the two of us. Three, actually. The baby, ignored in the excitement, thrashed its legs violently, demanding attention. It tossed a sunhat on the ground.
“Here,” Stuart said, “do us a favor and hold Kyle, will you.”
He was talking to me, I realized. Shocked, I took the baby under its hot, fat arms. Stuart hoisted the pushchair easily over the fence and we crossed through the kissing gate, one at a time, where I stood on the pavement, watching as he strapped the baby back down and plugged its angry mouth with a pacifier.
“You all right, yeah?” he asked, touching my arm.
I nodded. My hair fell, tenting my face, and without thinking I raised my hand and flicked.
“I’d stay out the park for a bit if I was you.”
“Thanks very much,” I eventually said, grimacing at how Divine I sounded, my voice particularly high.
He was facing into the last of the day’s sun, his eyes squinting slightly so that I was reminded of his father, though they didn’t particularly look alike. Nor did he bear much resemblance to Lauren, really, other than the color of his hair, which was jaw length and shaved in an undercut at the back. He was his own man, I decided. Quite beautiful, very raw. Nothing like the boys I knew. I must have given the impression I was about to say something more because he raised his hand to his brow, waiting for me to speak.
I froze.
I had absolutely no idea how to talk to men. They might as well have been aliens. At our school dances, the only place we officially socialized with the opposite sex, Divines stood i
n tight clusters around the gym while boys pogo danced to the Prodigy and the Orb, thrashing violently, butting against one another, then came tumbling into us, unsubtle as peacocks. The darkened gym was dank with the sweat that sprayed from their floppy hair. There was no alcohol allowed, naturally, but by then we were already long drunk, downing bottles of Archers in our dorms as we wriggled into crushed velvet sheaths that barely skimmed our buttocks. Black chokers like girdles around our pale necks. We waited nervously under the shoe tree as batches of Harrovians or Amplefordians, transported to us in school coaches, meat wagons if you will, rolled off the bus equally legless, their bow ties loose and shirts unbuttoned. When the slow dances played, there seemed to be some omnipotent force that arranged us into pairs, matching like for like on the unspoken scale of desirability and status. All except for Gerry Lake, who stood on the side with the teachers, her arms crossed. She had no interest in getting drunk or being groped. Without speaking a word these Henrys, Ruperts, Hugos clasped our lower backs to Meatloaf and pressed their chests against our nipples, shirts drenched, breathing heavily. When the staff weren’t looking, couples peeled off into the darkness, crawled behind hedges, pressed against walls. Ears ringing from the music, we let their tongues circle our mouths. Once every fifteen minutes a deputy went from bush to bush with a cane, thrashing the undergrowth like a beater at a shoot. Undeterred, sweaty hands crawled under the waistbands of our tights, fingers inserted hastily. All this without sharing a single word. When the music stopped, we were finally flushed from the shrubbery, some of us draped in dinner jackets. Gerry sat on a gym bench with the teachers, her legs crossed primly. We snogged our conquests once more in front of our peers and sent them on their way.
I stared up at Stuart, my head tipped to one side in that ludicrous flick, unbearably coy, growing more self-conscious by the second. I knew I had to say something.
“Sorry about what they said about your mother.”
I knew from Lauren that Joan had MS. And then, because I had started and wasn’t skilled enough to know where to stop, I held out my wrist with the shoelace bracelet on it.