by Ellie Eaton
The pony dug its heels in and refused to move.
“It won’t fucking budge.”
“You have to show it who’s boss,” I said.
Something came over me. Without warning I leant down and gave her pony a sharp smack in the hindquarters. It lurched forward in surprise, charging off across the moonlit paddock. Lauren wobbled on top, her long legs flapping, joggling up and down. I remember her long pale hair fluttering against her back and the sound of her laughing hysterically as she was bouncing up and down. Braless, her breasts jiggled under her football shirt. All at once the pony must have decided enough was enough and came to a standstill, then dropped a shoulder, switching directions. The pony went one way, Lauren went the other. She slammed onto the grass, rolling a few times.
“Ow,” she screamed.
“Oh my god,” I yelled, sliding off the thoroughbred. “Are you all right? Don’t move!”
I ran to her, stroking the hair out of her eyes, cleaning grass from her mouth.
“Tell me where it hurts.” I looked for blood. “Is anything broken?” I shouted.
“Yes,” she said and let out a long moan.
I felt sick. I’d done this. This was my fault.
“My bum,” she said, “I think I’ve broken my bloody bum.”
Then she rolled on her side clutching her bottom, laughing so hard she couldn’t speak.
“Oh my god, you bitch,” I screamed. “I thought you were really hurt.”
Lauren howled even louder.
“Seriously,” she gasped, struggling for breath. “You’re going to have to get me up.”
I held out a hand and helped her hobble towards the gate, where she lay on her stomach still laughing. We chain-smoked one cigarette after another, bragging about what we’d just done. I remembered that I had taken a bottle from my godmother’s house and pulled it out of my bag.
“What is this?” Lauren peered at the handwritten label.
“Sloe gin.”
She took a sip and gagged.
“Tastes like cough syrup to me.”
“It’s medicinal.”
She downed the cup I poured. I yawned, got up, dusting down my suit that was probably ruined, a fact I’d have to explain to my mother. I had two mints left in the roll in my pocket. I lined them up on the fence for the horses to find later. I helped Lauren to her feet, hoisted my bag over her shoulder, and offered her my arm to hold. She leant in close to me.
“You’re a right nutjob, you know that?” she said.
She made a pincer with her middle and thumb, sent her cigarette butt arching over the fence.
“Nutter,” she shouted.
The horses were asleep. They snorted, shook their heads, then dozed back into standing slumber. We hobbled back to Lauren’s house, arms around each other, drunk and giggling.
29
Thanks to the number of times we changed dorms—a carousel of rooms and beds and bodies—Divines could sleep anywhere. On our desks, in chapel, through exams and plays and public lectures. But that night, while Lauren snored, I lay awake and stared at the old football stickers and Cabbage Patch cards stuck to the wall. Above me Lauren’s arm dangled down from the top bunk like a vine. My stomach made a series of whining and gurgling noises, akin to a draining sink, and I crawled out of the lower bunk, which had once belonged to Stuart.
“Lauren,” I hissed.
I stood waiting for her to move, shoving the bed so that her arm swayed, but she grunted incoherently, rolled over, went back to sleep facing the wall. Her jeans were lying in a puddle on the floor where she’d shed them before crawling into bed. Silently I patted the pockets for Gerry’s pin but it wasn’t there.
I rattled the bed again.
“Lauren, I’m really hungry,” I pleaded.
No answer.
I made my way gingerly down the stairs, pausing on the bottom step to check there wasn’t anyone home. Joan was staying with her sister after the fight, but who knew about Mr. McKibbin. I had a Hadean view of Lauren’s father. Sullen and inhospitable, he had spoken to me in words of one syllable the few times I had run into him, sometimes just a nod as I came through the front door, flashing the white scar under his chin. I was rather scared of him.
“Hello,” I called out, even though it was the middle of the night.
There was nothing but the sound of a clock from the sitting room ticking. Along the wall running down the stairs were pictures of racehorses and a clip frame of McKibbin family photos. I spent some time examining each of them, picking out Stuart’s face as an adolescent, buried up to his neck in sand, holding a football trophy or one from when he was four or five, all ears and teeth.
I padded into the kitchen where I unearthed a loaf of Mighty White from a bread bin and chewed two whole slices at once, balling them into my mouth. Then I stood at the fridge and found some Hellmann’s and prewrapped squares of cheese and a jar of strawberry jam and I shook the pink jam on top of the mayo and flattened the cheese right on top of that, which as a combination tasted surprisingly good I remember. At that age I was perpetually hungry, oblivious to calories or fat, desperately trying to grow some hips.
The clock blinked two twenty-one.
Carrying a second sandwich on my palm, I went in search of more photos of Stuart. Hidden in this house where he had grown up were small clues to imbibe, something that would help me unlock him. In reality I expect he wasn’t a particularly complex individual—I don’t know what secrets I imagined he had hidden—but I wanted to know everything about him. Even though he had a girlfriend and they lived together and that girlfriend had a child, Kyle, who wasn’t his, but still, one could argue that he was a parent. Despite all of that, I had decided that the two of us were destined to be together. This was the first genuine crush I had ever had. I had been pawed during school balls, boys cupping my buttocks as we swayed through the slow numbers. And for a short period I was pen pals with an Etonian—the son of my father’s oldest friend—until our parents insisted we get Scottish dancing lessons together one Christmas. Humphrey’s hands were small and clammy, his breath rank, and he dressed, to my horror, in a velvet waistcoat and tartan trousers; we skipped to “The Dashing White Sergeant.” I never wrote to him again. Compared to these boys Stuart was an Adonis—superhuman, a colossus carved from stone. I was obsessed.
I elbowed open the door of what they called their front room, which was extremely neat, barely used since Joan and Lauren watched television in the kitchen and Mr. McKibbin was always at the pub. According to Lauren, the only person to go in there was her brother after he’d had a fight with his girlfriend and needed somewhere to sleep. For that reason I felt like this room belonged to Stuart. There was the floral sofa with white lace doilies on each arm and embroidered cushions where I imagined he laid his head. Light cut through from the streetlamp outside and I lifted up the cushion to look for a strand of his hair or some other sign of him being there. I may, I think, have even sniffed it. Hugging the cushion under one arm, I walked around in the dark, squinting at the nest of three lacquered tables decorated with roses, and an anniversary clock under a glass jar with little balls swinging hypnotically, glinting in the yellow streetlight. Opposite the door was a dresser on which various china ornaments were arranged, mostly animals, mice and hedgehogs, and one blue Dutch-looking milkmaid, though the majority were horses. I weighed a Shire in my hands and stroked his glazed tail, licking my fingers free of jam and mayo before I did so. On the top shelf were racing trophies and faded rosettes, which didn’t interest me much since they were Mr. McKibbin’s, but when I opened up the bottom cupboard I hit the jackpot. Three or four shoeboxes at least, full of yellow Kodak envelopes. Here, surely, was everything I needed to know about Stuart.
As I thumbed open the first packet I left a greasy print on the top photo.
“Oh shit.”
I wiped my palm on my bare leg.
“Naughty, naughty, Goldilocks,” a voice said in the darkness.
I sc
reamed. My arm jerked in fright, photos fanning to the floor like playing cards.
30
We name our daughter after Jürgen’s grandmother. It is not my first or even my second choice. But a week goes by without deciding, then another, and another, and a baby can only go nameless for so long. What I would give to be like Skipper who, at age thirteen, kept a list at the back of her diary: two penciled columns, boys and girls.
From the minute we bring our daughter home everyone comments on how alike she and I look: our pediatrician, our friends, our landlord even, a chain-smoking Armenian man who holds her under one arm like a loaf of matnakash, looking at me and then the baby, wiggling his finger between us.
“Same, same,” he says.
I nod, even though I have no idea what he’s talking about. The baby looks like a baby. Still, Jürgen hangs over the bassinette, examining our daughter’s physiognomy, trying to identify a piece of himself amongst my genetics.
“Fine, Magdalena,” I surrender, feeling sorry for him. “Let’s call her that.”
His face lights up.
“Really?”
It could be worse. There are women in his family called Gerwalta and Valborga and Edeltraud.
“Hallo, Magda,” he tests. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.”
“Lena,” I say, watching the way her minute bird mouth opens and shuts, her tongue flicking. Hungry. A furious red-faced scowl not unlike Gerry Lake.
“Ja,” Jürgen says. “Lena.”
We are moving again. This time to Los Angeles where Jürgen has been offered free studio space and a teaching job. But instead of packing for California, I sit amongst cardboard boxes in the living room, unable to begin. I pick up one of Lena’s blankets, stare at it, then put it down again. For once she isn’t howling. She’s passed out on her back, arms splayed like a drunk, eyelashes twitching. I should make the most of this lull in the storm—shower, brush my teeth, make supper—but that would require me to get up off the floor. I sit and stare at the front door, trying to remember where Jürgen has gone. The hardware store, the bank, the studio? He told me and I’ve forgotten, have no idea. I picture Jürgen breezing out of the apartment earlier, whistling as if it was nothing, jingling his keys. How I had the overwhelming urge to dive for his ankles, to knock my husband to the floor, fell him like a tree.
My phone vibrates. A message.
Long line. Sorry. How’s the packing?
I get up and hurry into the bedroom throwing clothes into cases without even taking them off their hangers, empty our shoe rack, tip out drawers of underwear. Next I make a pile of toys, presents from my mother that Lena’s clearly too young to play with. A felt shopping basket filled with pretend food, knitted radishes and tomatoes, a cardboard tin of baked beans. warning, the label reads. For play purposes only, no real food inside. Shit. I remember the fridge is empty; I’ve forgotten to buy anything for supper.
I text Jürgen, but by then the baby is already awake. Affronted to find herself alone on the floor, she lets out a series of earsplitting wails. I rush into the room, bra unclipped, and offer her my breast like a courtier. As she sucks on my nipple her small, sharp fingernails dig into my skin. She drains one side, then the other, pushing me away when she’s done. I change her and put her in the middle of the bed while I finish packing up the bedroom. On the top shelf of the cupboard, shoved all the way to the back, the lockbox. I take it down, holding it delicately by the handle as if it’s dangerous, Medusa’s head.
I rest it on the bed, next to Lena.
The baby. The box.
We really don’t have time for this now. I should be packing or entertaining my daughter. Anything but opening the lid. Lena, bored already, starts to whimper. I make faces to stop her frowning, blow a raspberry on her belly. But the truth is Jürgen’s the one who sings as he changes a nappy, alle meine Entchen, making duckling sounds, flapping his wings. I can barely summon the energy for a peekaboo. Lena’s fists tighten, her face scrunches, angrier by the second.
“What do you want?” I ask her. “Seriously, what?”
She’s fed and dry, my tits are empty, I have nothing left to give. My daughter flails her arms and legs. She makes a noise I’ve never heard before, a little growl, in the back of her throat. Like a wolf pup.
“Fine,” I say.
I open the box.
Holding up a copy of the school magazine, I begin to announce, in alphabetical order, the list of prizewinners of 1996. Lena stops wriggling, listens, surprisingly attentive. Next I read aloud the headmistress’s report, chapel notes, and a poem by a First Year entitled “The Lonely Tramp.” Lena gurgles with pleasure. A bedtime story. I turn the page. Lacrosse results, Duke of Edinburgh Awards, an account of a Fourth Year geography field trip to Swanage. And there, I turn the page, a picture of Gerry, the same one they later replicated in all the papers. Chin high, shoulders thrust back, holding up a gold medal. Beneath, a description of her performance. My daughter rubs her eyes. I yawn and curl up next to her on the bed and keep reading. Quieter and more softly, until I’m nothing but a whisper. My arm wilting, the magazine slowly fluttering to the bed.
The front door slams. Lena is howling, her nappy sodden. I must have been asleep. Jürgen stands in the corridor, peering into the bedroom. He sees my waxy pale face, the baby crying, thrashing her arms, perilously close to the end of the bed.
“Sephine, are you sick?”
He scoops Lena up, pressing her to his chest, rushes to check my forehead for a fever. Then he sees the box, open, the pile of letters and a year photo. Confused, he picks up the magazine and looks at the cover.
“St. John?” His face tilts to one side. “Sephine?”
Blinking, still half asleep, I shrug defensively, like an alcoholic caught with a bottle.
“But I don’t get it. This place. You hated it. Why do you still have all this stuff? You’re obsessed.”
“I’m not obsessed,” I say, defensively. “I was just . . .”
Unable to explain myself, I scratch at my inner arm, just below the elbow crease.
Jürgen sits down on the bed next to me, trying to understand.
“They were awful, right? Those girls. Why keep digging it up? It’s not healthy.”
He gazes at the state of the bedroom—the unpacked boxes, the curdled milk bottles on the side, the dirty breast pump left out since the morning, the bucket overflowing with nappies.
What am I supposed to tell him? That, since becoming a mother, I exist in a state of perpetual unease. That the world seems to me overwhelmingly dangerous and chaotic. How of all the multitudinous threats posed to him and the baby—earthquakes, rising sea levels, drunk drivers, melanomas, pandemics, zealots with semiautomatics—it’s something else I’m most afraid of. The past, slowly coiling around us, the snake in the crib.
“No more, okay?” he says and flips shut the lid of the box. “Enough.”
“I was just clearing it out,” I lie. “It’s going in the bin.”
“Good,” he says.
He tugs me towards him, swaying side to side to stop the baby crying, making the clicking noise with his tongue that Lena likes.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
31
Naughty, naughty, Goldilocks.
Stuart McKibbin was sitting out of sight, hidden behind the open door.
“Oh my god,” I said, tugging down on my nightgown, paralyzed with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, I was just . . .”
I remembered how I’d sniffed the cushion and wanted to die.
“Yes?” Stuart asked and raised both eyebrows. The way he spoke, I remember, was very cold, almost mechanical. His head was tilted to one side, his hair falling in a smooth curtain, his jaw set hard, a dangerous expression on his face, arms crossed. He was a townie. I was Divine.
My heart was pounding. I could barely breathe. He leant back, nodding, waiting for me to explain myself.
“Go on. I’m listening. You were just . . .”
“I . . .”
Then with a loud explosion of laughter, rocking forward and back, he slapped the side of the sofa he was sitting on.
“Ha, ha, ha! Loz said you were an easy touch. Jesus, look at the face on you. I’m just winding you up.”
I exhaled, my heart still thumping. My body went slack with relief, arms dropping to my sides like a puppet. Stuart wiped his eyes, still hooting.
“Fuck me,” he chuckled, patting his pockets clumsily as if he was looking for something, and took out a pouch of tobacco and some papers and held them up. I saw now there was a beer can between his thighs, another couple of empties on the floor.
“You want one?”
I couldn’t speak.
There was a click and a hiss as he opened the can. He slid over to make space on the sofa beside him and rolled a cigarette.
“Come on, Goldilocks. Don’t get the hump. Sit down.”
Stuart thrust his hips upwards to raise his bottom and fished a Zippo from his back pocket. He lit one cigarette and passed it to me, and then rolled another for himself, spilling tobacco everywhere, brushing down his thigh afterwards. I sat on the sofa, pulling my nightie down over my knees.
“Good one,” Stuart said as he chuckled, elbowing me. “I had you there.”
Stuart’s breath smelt of lager. I realized he was incredibly drunk. Probably he’d been down the pub with his friends and come back to Joan’s to sleep it off. Or maybe he’d been waiting up for his father, standing guard, protecting Lauren and me. When he inhaled, I stole a look at the small indent in his top lip, the slope of his nose, the way his hair fell forward from behind his ears, the shaved undercut.
“Nice pajamas,” Stuart said.
I felt naked. Poking out from under the hem of my Garfield nightie, my legs looked pale and veined, shapeless as garden canes. To my horror I noticed my nipples needled through the thin T-shirt material. I crossed one arm across my breasts. I was so flat-chested I doubt Stuart even noticed. He had closed his eyes and was rubbing his face. I wondered what he was thinking about. Perhaps he was worried about his parents, or he had another fight with Kerry? Or maybe he was just drunk and tired and he wasn’t thinking of anything. All he wanted was his sofa to sleep on.