by Ellie Eaton
“I’m friends with Lauren.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“My sister gets around these days, doesn’t she? Moving up in the world.”
People were leaving the park by now, shaking out blankets, dusting themselves off, though the footballers played deeper into the dusk, running and pointing, some of the players invisible against the bluing grass, a neon ball flashing between them as if it was levitating. The baby sucked noisily on his pacifier. I supposed he was hungry and was annoyed that I was demanding Stuart’s attention. We both ignored him.
“Shouldn’t you be back in school?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said, and then I remembered the cigarette I had brought with me, crumbling in my shirt pocket. I took it out.
“I’m going to smoke this first, I think.”
I had something to prove, I suppose: I was a rebel, I didn’t play by the Divine rules. I lit up, right there on the street, cupping the end with my hand. Then I held it out to Stuart. My offer took him aback for a moment. Had he been caught smoking with me he would have been in a lot of trouble. But he reached out to take it, keeping his eyes on me the whole time; our hands briefly touched as he inhaled and passed it back.
“Cheers.”
Without saying anything else, he turned and began pushing the baby away down the street.
“If you see her first, tell my sister I’ll drop by on Wednesday for my tea,” he called once over his shoulder; there was a rattling noise of wheels as he crossed the street, the sound of him whistling.
“Will do,” I shouted back but he probably didn’t hear me.
I stood still, holding the cigarette exactly as he’d passed it to me, between my middle finger and thumb. It was damp with our saliva where our two mouths had pressed. I held my forearm, examining the exact place he had touched it, just below the elbow crease, but there was nothing to see. Slowly I upturned the cigarette, still smoldering, kissing it red against my skin.
19
The next few weeks, what became our last as Divine, we were hysterical, riddled with paranoia. Now that the photos were public knowledge, alleged sightings of the pervert ran as high as two or three a week. No one was above suspicion. This included an emergency plumber, a member of the Anglican clergy, and a school inspector. Even though our exams were just around the corner, we memorized license plates, reported townies that lingered near school grounds, crawled around in the undergrowth looking for clues. It was only a matter of time, I felt, before we’d begin to turn upon ourselves.
“It’s got to be someone who knows the school really well,” George Gordon-Warren argued. “An inside job.”
We were in the pottery room, watching Dave work on a sculpture—a large, lifeless bust, Apollo perhaps, or Zeus—whose expression grew increasingly moribund the more she poked and scraped. I was ripping out photos at random from a stack of National Geographic magazines to stick in my portfolio. Neither of us were gifted artists, far from it; I could barely draw a bowl of fruit, but at least, I told myself, it was better than taking drama. Unlike Skipper, who considered herself something of a thespian, the idea of being called on by Padre to read at morning chapel, let alone perform a monologue, made me feel physically sick. At the start of GCSEs I was panic-stricken that Skipper and I hadn’t chosen identical subjects, the first time in four years of friendship our timetables hadn’t been in sync. Lately I found the art room—its loamy smell, the hearthlike warmth radiating from the kiln, the soft scratch of charcoal on paper—one of the few places I could relax. Away from Skipper, my friends forgot they were meant to be giving me the cold shoulder and behaved like their old selves.
George began to make a dick out of surplus clay, a grotesque cartoon replica of the penis in the photos. The art teacher, Mr. Rogowski, a softly spoken Polish man with absolutely no authority, shuffled around the room in a pair of rubber clogs, pretending not to notice.
George leant over and wiggled the penis by my ear.
“Bloody hell,” I shrieked, batting it away with my notebook.
“Girls,” the teacher complained, unconvincingly.
George crossed her arms, her feet up on an empty pottery wheel. She twisted the two ends of the penis like a corkscrew, studying our teacher.
“What about Rogowski?”
Mr. Rogowski was the same age as my father. He wore thick corduroy trousers and home-knitted cardigans. His back was hunched and—the part that revolted us the most—his index finger was half missing, a deformity he used to his advantage, pressing the stump into clay eye sockets or using it to demonstrate a pinch pot.
“Rank,” Dave said, without even looking up.
“For god’s sake, who then?” George said and flung the dick onto the table.
So far our investigations had already ruled out the small handful of male teaching staff. They were pitifully asexual, neutered by decades of maltreatment at the hands of the Divine. We could hardly imagine they had penises, let alone posed naked with jaunty erections. Except for Stuart, the maintenance men seemed too fat or old, lacking in the necessary imagination. That left a French assistant (almost certainly gay), the baker who delivered our birthday cakes (too lanky), and one of the younger gardeners with learning difficulties who was always smiling and waving at us in class. All this fervent sleuthing worked in my favor because in between preparing for exams I could disappear, as I now frequently did, to smoke with Lauren and no one batted an eye. I saw her almost every day.
But, shortly after our headmistress’s lecture, there were no more photos. We simply stopped finding them. Younger years unbuttoned their blue striped dresses down to their bras, they lay semiclad in the orchard reading, one eye on their books, the other expectantly on the bushes. In May half-term came and went and eventually we had to concede that the danger was gone. Perhaps he’d been scared off by the sight of our deputies doing their rounds or found an easier way to get himself off.
“Maybe he died,” Lauren said.
It was a Saturday afternoon. Lauren and I were sitting on a bench down by the old mill. She had just finished her shift at Woolworths, and her hair was tied back with a bandanna at the nape of her neck.
“Bet he wanked himself to death.”
I had no idea if such a thing was even possible.
“Gross.” We pretended to gag.
I rubbed the cigarette burn on my inner arm out of habit. It had bloomed into a taut yellow bud until it finally popped and was now a shiny pink scar because of my continued prodding and picking and stroking. I wanted to ask Lauren about her brother, but I couldn’t work out how to do so without it being obvious that I was interested in him.
“Want to hear a good one?” I said instead.
“Go on.”
“The Third Form set fire to Penfold.”
“Who’s Penfold?”
“Our lab technician; she sets up our chemistry experiments and stuff.”
“They set her on fire?”
“Well, her skirt.”
“What the fuck did she do to deserve that?”
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
We crushed our cigarettes underfoot and walked along the brook that led past the flour mill, vaguely in the direction of school. I wasn’t sure where Lauren was heading, but as always I followed along. The fact of the matter was that there wasn’t much we could do in town. Other than St. John’s, which could hardly be considered an asset, the place had nothing going for it. A former brewing town, there were almost no jobs anymore. The cinema was on its last legs, and one by one the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s and the fishmonger had closed; all the townies shopped at Iceland. The only opportunities left were at the school: mopping our floors, peeling our potatoes, sweeping the tennis courts. No wonder they hated us.
A man on the path ahead of us sat on a bench with chip paper spread on his legs and a can of beer. Two kids ran back and forward to the bridge, tossing chips to the ducks.
“Oy, you prats,” Lauren shouted
and snagged one by the collar. “They don’t fecking eat chips.”
“Get off,” the boy said, wriggling out of her grip.
The father took a slug from his can, looked up suddenly, and reddened.
“They’ll kill the ducks if they feed them that,” Lauren explained.
“Martin, Alan, get over here now,” he ordered.
The man stood and emptied his entire chip bag over the water. There was a flurry of wings and snapping beaks, the water frothing, brown and green tails upturned.
“Now piss off,” he snapped.
“Wanker,” Lauren muttered; she gave him the finger and walked on. Totally in thrall, I trotted after.
On previous outings we had gone to the graveyard and walked about amongst the tilted headstones smoking; other times we sat in the town museum where there was a cheap café. Once Lauren climbed through the window of the wooden Girl Guide’s hut where KEs supposedly went to lose their virginity, but there wasn’t anything to see. She stole a packet of biscuits and we left again. That afternoon I remember we roamed the upper floors of the library, leafing through magazines while Lauren read her horoscopes. The fact that she was a Virgo, some kind of goddess, was supposedly significant to our friendship.
“When’s your birthday again?” she wanted to know.
I didn’t believe in star signs but I could see she wasn’t going to drop it.
“Twenty-first of April.”
The same, to my embarrassment, as Gerry Lake. It was bad enough I had to share a dorm room with her, let alone a birthday.
I thought back to the second week of term. To celebrate, it was tradition that we congregate in the rec room to sing, crowding around a biscuit cake or tray of iced fingers—Sticky Willies as we called them—ordered from the local bakery. It was only after I had been given the birthday bumps, my peers grabbing me by the limbs, tossing me irreverently up and down in the air like a blanket, that we remembered.
Gerry.
Fuck.
There she was. In the doorway, just back from practice, her skating bag over her shoulder, arms crossed, that sour pout. Her dark hair was pulled back in the usual way. In her bun was a new bauble, a tacky-looking pin in the shape of a forget-me-not heart, a birthday present from her trainer Gerry let slip later. Which made me begin to wonder if there was some truth to the stories after all. Until then I had presumed it was just another rumor, one of many that circulated around Gerry.
A few girls began to sing happy birthday, rather feebly. Someone offered Gerry what was left of the cake. There were only a few crumbs. Gerry scowled, cat eyes, two green slits. If looks could kill, as they say. I felt her icy gaze fall on me. The singing of happy birthday petered out. Why was she singling me out like that? It wasn’t my fault no one had waited. I was her dorm mate, not her mother. She always had to cause a scene.
“You cow,” she had hissed and smacked the cake box to the ground.
“Taurus.” Lauren tapped the pages of the horoscope.
As if that explained everything.
After the library we walked to the end of Mill Street, making a loop of town so that we arrived at the school by the back route, past the laundry where Divines deposited their bags of dirty clothes once a week, tossing their soiled underwear and clothes amongst the other towering piles to be washed, ironed, and folded by our laundry ladies. It being a Saturday, First Years were busy polishing shoes outside St. Hilda’s and holding them out for inspection.
Lauren stood in the shadows, staring up at my large redbrick boarding house with its gables and ivy. There was the steady throb of the washing machines behind us, the soapy tang of detergent. Somewhere near the orchards I could hear clapping and cheering. We looked up at my dorm window on the third floor. It was slightly ajar, which made me think there was a chance Gerry was in there.
“Let’s go,” Lauren ordered.
She frequently invited herself into my boarding house but, except for her very first visit, had stuck to the ground floor.
“Actually, it might not be such a good time,” I stalled.
I gestured to the deputy who sat on a chair outside the boarding house, wearing a drab floral shin-length skirt and a shirt with a knitted vest over the top. Like all the deputies she was a mousy, gaunt-looking woman, probably not more than thirty, but a single woman like that would have appeared to us as washed up, over the hill. We couldn’t have imagined anything more pathetic. The deputy was reading, paying no attention at all to her wards, except for when they presented her with their leather lace-ups and penny loafers, at which point she raised her eyes wearily, gave either a nod or a shake, and went back to her novel. It would have taken no effort at all for Lauren and me to sneak past her. There were also the handful of First and Second Years to worry about, but they would have been too terrified to speak directly to me. There was a strict hierarchical order at play. Unless they were our siblings, we never conversed with these younger years who, in their blue-and-white-striped summer dresses, at least two sizes too large for them, were as amorphous as a shoal. Skinny, knock-kneed, and inane. A few of them attempted to copy the flick; the rest favored enormous quiffs pinioned by Alice bands. They all wore scrunchies and friendship bracelets, which they spent hours weaving, around their wrists. A Fifth Former was God to them. They cowed when we passed, offered us their spot in the lunch queue, scrambled to make way for us in chapel. It was a great insult not to hold a door open for an older girl; I’d once seen a First Year lunge to catch a door with her fingers for Skipper, the new girl moving so fast she was in danger of tripping.
A couple of Second Years looked at us with curiosity as they buffed their shoes and quickly looked away.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Lauren taunted.
“All right, fine.” I gave in. “Follow me and don’t say anything.”
Instantly I knew my mistake. This was the worst possible thing I could have said to someone like Lauren. She let out a derisive snort, curtsied.
“Yes, m’lady.”
Instead of slipping quietly into the boarding house, Lauren tugged off her bandanna, raised her eyebrows, and marched straight towards the teacher.
“Lauren,” I hissed. “Where are you going?”
She looked over her shoulder at me, wiggling her fingers.
“Wait,” I said, panicking, and I sprinted to catch up, skidding to a halt in front of the entrance.
To my relief the deputy barely looked up from her book.
Perhaps she thought Lauren was a sister who was visiting or one of the Sixth Formers coming to deliver a note on the behest of a housemistress.
Lauren coughed.
“Good afternoon,” she said, putting on a cut-glass accent not unlike my mother’s. I winced. Did we really speak like that?
“Hello, girls,” the deputy said flatly. “Don’t forget to sign in.”
I slipped one hand under Lauren’s arm and tried to usher her away, but she shrugged me off.
“Okay, ya,” Lauren mocked, swishing her hair over to one side. “Absolutely, will do.”
This, at last, got the deputy’s attention. She lowered her novel, trying to place the house to which Lauren belonged. Lauren’s shoulder blades pulled back, her lips pinched into a fake smile, chin held high to express the kind of haughty disdain we were loathed for, her best impression of the Divine. For a moment I was struck by the brilliance of Lauren’s transformation, the nymphlike way she could shape-shift, a better actress than Skipper by far.
The deputy frowned, flustered.
“Why aren’t you girls at the match?”
That afternoon was the mother-daughter rounders game, a Fifth Form tradition that had been going almost as long as the school. Our mothers—most of them Old Girls—strode onto the pitch wielding bats or headed out to field and, hoisting their skirts above their knees, apologizing for their rusty backswing, hooting with laughter as they swung for the ball, dashed like spaniels around our freshly mown lawn.
“I’m just getting my mother her
hat,” I told the deputy. A lie. My mother was six thousand miles away. At the yacht club, I guessed, on her second gin and tonic.
“Yes,” Lauren chipped in. “Got to dash. Mummy’s waiting.”
The deputy squinted again at Lauren, her head tilted.
I held my breath, pressed my thumbnail into the burn mark on my arm.
“And who . . . ,” the deputy began to question, but just at that moment a Second Year thrust a pair of newly polished shoes under her nose.
“Come on,” I hissed.
I pulled Lauren by the arm, up the steps and into the house. We took the curved oak staircase two at a time, along the corridor, ignoring a miserable-looking First Year who was wandering the corridor like a stray cat, and slammed into my dorm room.
“Oh my god,” I said, utterly in awe, chest heaving, giddy with relief. I couldn’t believe we’d got away with it. “That was amazing.”
Lauren flicked her hair, hand on one hip, still Divine.
“Ya,” she said. “Bloody marvelous.”
20
By Christmas I am pregnant and the matter of the Polaroid photos long forgotten. Jürgen sees them for what they are, distant relics, mementos of the Divine.
My metamorphic body is a source of unexpected eroticism for us both. My breasts grow first; finally I have the boobs I had dreamt about in school. Plump, speckled brown areola, and nipples that react to the smallest of titillations: a tongue, the fridge, the vibration of the “L” train as I’m circling the Loop. I am always wet. I ooze. I am constantly changing my underwear and can come at the drop of the hat. This from someone who, no fault of any of my bedfellows, orgasmed once or twice a year at best. My labia is fat and juicy as a honeydew, its folds dark and voluptuous. I examine it by straddling my makeup mirror while Jürgen is in the studio. My vulva is, I discover, positively O’Keeffe.
By summer I walk around our apartment with no clothes on, emailing my editor copy while rubbing ice cubes behind my neck and soaking my feet in buckets of cold water. The white scar on my inner arm inexplicably begins to itch, turning a dark shade of purple. My enormous stomach, however, eclipses all thought of the Divine, of Gerry Lake. I give up googling her name, looking for old stories. Instead I masturbate two or three times a day, impatient for Jürgen to come home, my stomach hardening into a pyramid with each tingling spasm. I have grown so large I become impossible for him to scale. Instead I prop myself against the pillows and bring myself to climax just by watching him. I find it incredibly erotic. The way his dick nods gently against his pelvis, his fist oscillating, thighs spread, a pose that replicates, not unintentionally, one or two of those old familiar photos.