by Ellie Eaton
Inside the phone began to ring again.
I shivered, dressed in just my shirt and leggings, and went inside to retrieve my gray cardigan. There was a single cigarette and a lighter in the pocket. Smoking seemed like as good an idea as any. I put on my penny loafers and as I set off to the orchard, I heard the low ominous rumble of thunder. I folded myself into my enormous cardigan and examined the sky. The lights were on in the chapel, I noticed, each of the thin pencil-shaped windows of the sanctuary illuminated, the stained glass glowing brimstone orange. There had to be an evensong service I had forgotten about or some other school gathering. Often there were end-of-year performances by our drama club or motivational speakers or a touring Shakespeare production. If I timed it right, I could join the mass of girls as they were leaving, so that it would appear to the housemistresses as if I’d been there all along. No one would ever know what had happened.
I climbed the bridge, walked through the labyrinth of corridors and swing doors that led towards the school chapel, and waited in the Egg, sitting in one of the empty wingback chairs normally reserved for my housemistress. I heard the same thunderous vibration I’d heard before, the sound of stamping followed by a loud booing, none of which was particularly unusual behavior for the Divine. We were a tough audience to please, prone to heckling and loud theatrical yawns.
“Girls, please, settle down,” I heard Fat Fran shouting. “Sixth Formers, stay in your seats. Girls, I said sit.”
They stormed out of the chapel, arm in arm, utterly defiant. First the older girls in home clothes, then my own year, then the Fourth Form and so on down the ranks. They were swearing, shaking their heads in disbelief, the younger girls near hysterical, ashen, some of them barely able to walk, others running as if from a disaster.
“What happened?” I pulled aside a Third Year. “What’s going on?”
“Oh my god,” she said again and again. “Oh my god. I can’t believe it.”
She was beside herself. In shock. I wondered whether I should slap her.
A calamity had occurred, I realized, the death of a favorite member of staff or a parent. From time to time catastrophes like that befell the school; an older girl was once thrown from a bus on her gap year. Another was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. A group of my own year stumbled past, clinging to one another. I saw Skipper with her arm around the twins, and I pushed through the crowd towards them.
“What’s happened?”
“It’s a fucking joke,” Skipper said.
“What is?”
“The school’s gone down the bloody drain. No more dosh. Fuck, I knew I should have gone to Marlborough.”
“We’re closing?”
“Worse. Merging.”
She named a local boarding school, a long-standing rival of ours with a reputation for producing straitlaced, priggish girls, not at all Divine. Our buildings would go up for sale to generate revenue, and the staff and the few remaining girls would be absorbed by this other school.
It took a while for me to realize the enormity of what she was saying. We had been sold off like cattle. No more morning chapel, no more school dances or end-of-year pranks. I thought of the shoe tree, a hundred-year-old tradition, felled, chopped up for firewood. Our boarding house flattened, our tennis courts turned into a car park or a shopping center. My ears began to ring. I saw Gerry quietly pushing her way through the crowd with a strange determined look on her face, elbowing her way past sobbing girls.
“Where were you all day, anyway?” Skipper asked coldly.
“I was feeling ill,” I bluffed.
I knew she didn’t believe me.
“Well, everyone’s meeting in the orchard to talk about what to do about dares.”
“Brill,” I said.
As Gerry drew closer I held my breath, waiting to see if she would come over to me. I was suddenly filled with panic that she might confront Skipper directly, demand her pin back, so that I would be forced to explain my lies in front of the whole year. Gerry stopped at the edge of our group, staring at Skipper. Her face was a mask—pale and unreadable. I had no idea if she was as shocked about the closure as we were or if she simply thought we had got what we deserved.
“Are you even listening?” Skipper nudged me.
“What? Yes,” I said, keeping my eye on Gerry. “Orchard. Dares.”
“Okay, girls,” Skipper boomed. “Listen, we’d better bloody think of something big, that’s all I can say. Everyone agree? Let’s go out with a bang.”
There were mutterings of agreement all around us. Cheers. Hear! Hear!
I saw the corner of Gerry Lake’s mouth flicker. She raised two pistol fingers, aiming them through the crowd at Skipper. Our eyes met across the room. Her lips parted.
Bang, she mouthed.
37
Jürgen and Lena go to Costco to buy nappies and come back with a dog. My husband opens the door of our bungalow and Lena—muscular like her father, even at two and a half—pushes the dog in a plastic carrier over the threshold as if it is a shopping trolley, her back hunched.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Puppy,” Lena says, “puppy, puppy, puppy.”
Jürgen jogs in from the street carrying a new dog bed and bowl and before I can make eye contact, he runs back down the steps to the car, returning with a sack of dry food on his shoulder.
“A dog?”
He gives me a sheepish look and unlatches the door of the cage. The dog tumbles free, paws splayed on the wooden floor. It is incredibly ugly, no discernible breeding—half this, half that—with the face of an imbecile. When its tongue lolls out, I think of Mrs. Myrtle and her Yorkie.
“Jesus, Jürgen, you’re going to Venice next week. What am I meant to do with a dog?”
“I know, I know,” he admits. “The timing’s not great. But he was sitting there in the pen, right outside the store. No one wanted to even pet him. Look at him.”
We study the dog—the wrinkled pink snout, the curled tongue, the large bat ears, hair that is greasy and lank. Those animal shelter people know a soft touch when they meet one. Only Jürgen could fall for a dog like that.
Jürgen thumbs in the direction of Lena’s bedroom.
“You should see them together.”
Lena reappears wearing bumblebee wings and carrying a tray of colored plastic teacups.
“What are you doing?”
“Tea party,” she says and is gone again for extra provisions.
Jürgen beams.
“See.”
I say nothing.
I picture the Turtle and her Yorkie sharing a slice of Battenberg from the same plate.
“Look, the people from the shelter said that if you really, really don’t like him, or if it isn’t a good fit, then, you know, then we can always take him back.”
“Like a pair of shoes?”
“Ja, exactly.” Jürgen gets down on his hands and knees. I can see how happy he is. The dog licks his face; he actually lets it slobber on his chin and cheeks and even, I notice, curl its brown tongue up inside one of his nostrils. I grimace. I am no Mrs. Myrtle.
“He’ll keep Lena busy,” Jürgen calls after me as I head out to the car to get the rest of the shopping. “You’ll finally get some work done. She’ll play with him all the time. All the time.”
At this point I have been underemployed for over two years. Occasionally I pitch an article to a former colleague, a man I used to consider a peer, now the editor of a magazine. I volunteer at Lena’s preschool, do some copywriting for my friend Audrey, a brand director, tutor the occasional student, but the cost of childcare makes a mockery of the term freelance. I know what I’ve become. Domesticated. Humdrum. Utterly Divine.
I stare into the black mouth of the car boot for a while, thinking about this, then I shoulder a box of nappies and a giant vessel of olive oil and head back into the house.
“All right,” I agree. “The dog can stay.”
The next morning I set my alarm as if
I am on a deadline. I sleepwalk to the kitchen, switch the light on, and let out a scream. Yellow puddles leach across the floor, paw prints track over a new sofa, shredded cushions, feathers. The dog thrashes his tail and curls his lips in pleasure, overjoyed to see me. His purple tongue lolls from the corner of his mouth; he gives my ankle a rough lick. I stare around me in disbelief. Undeterred, I drag the dog into his metal jail and move the cage, dog and all, outside onto the porch.
He lets out a series of pathetic yaps.
“Shussh,” I hush him. “Shut the fuck up.”
I pick up the pile of half-chewed letters and spray the floor with disinfectant to mask the smell, tossing newspaper to soak up the puddles for Jürgen to clear up later. His dog, his mess. Then I make a desk for myself in the corner of the sitting room, brew some coffee, and get to work. I research four or five pitches to send to a magazine, but none of them interest me much. Anyway, it will probably cost me more in babysitting fees than I’ll get paid for each one. I search through some job listings, consider an internship in a cactus shop, text my friend Audrey about asking for more work, flip back to my blank page. Outside the puppy claws at the lock, throwing itself against the metal cell walls. I put a pair of headphones on. Still nothing. I make another pot of coffee and stare at the empty screen. Eventually, out of desperation, I sift through the pile of mail. Car insurance, credit card statements, a second or third reminder from the gynecologist, and last, a thick embossed envelope forwarded by my mother, heavier than all the others, edged in gold. I slice it open with my thumbnail.
Dear Alumni.
Twenty years since we burned our books, tore our dresses to shreds, flung our shoes into a tree. Since Gerry made headline news.
I prop the invitation against the wall. Then I open my browser and trawl the internet again for Divines, clicking from follower to follower. Some are blonder, some leaner or ruddier, others unaccountably unchanged. Wedding photos, Labradors, shoots in Scotland, christenings, memorials. In these photos, my old friends hook their arms together like days of yore, flicking their hair for the camera. Even now, decades older, indisputably Divine.
I read and read, hunched over the keyboard, in a trance, barely aware of my own body. The dog gives up whining and goes to sleep. I don’t even notice Jürgen is awake until he pads into the kitchen, dressed in just his towel, his arm covering his nose.
“Wah! Mein Gott, what happened? Where’s the dog?”
“Outside,” I say, quickly snapping shut the computer screen.
“You’re working,” Jürgen says, delighted.
He leans over my shoulder, dripping, kisses me on the neck.
“See?”
38
In the days after the announcement of the school’s merger we became completely intractable. We ignored our teachers, skipped our lessons, were even more haughty and rude. When a heat wave set in, we insisted our classes be moved outside. At first the staff, stunned as us by the news, were often seen whispering to one another in nervous clusters about who would stay and who would go, fanning themselves with our unmarked prep. But then, as the shock wore off, they became increasingly Laodicean about the whole thing, even jolly, particularly the younger teachers. What did they care in the end what happened to the Divine?
They’d shoulder their handbags and escort us outside. No one did any work, of course. Our exams were over. All we did was sunbathe. When Gerry skipped out of class early to go to practice, the teachers shrugged phlegmatically at one another across the rose garden. We could, as it turned out, get away with murder. Before a lesson was over, we stood in unison, dusted off our legs, and drifted off across the grass.
We waved our fingers, toodlepip. They could hardly expel us.
We were above punishment. Untouchable. Immortal.
The only thing anyone really cared about now was the planning of school dares. While these end-of-year pranks had always been good-natured—food fights and stink bombs, the kind of lighthearted tomfoolery that our teachers found funny, though they couldn’t admit it—our nightly meetings held under torchlight had the zealous enthusiasm of a terrorist cell. Anger consumed us like a fever. Fat Fran had betrayed us all, it was agreed, sold us down the river, and had to pay. Gradually the stunts we planned slipped from comic, to absurd, and then to outright malicious. We would, Skipper announced, shred all the Bibles in the school, burn them on the tennis courts or set fire to them in our headmistress’s office. We’d strut around like strippers in Fat Fran’s vestments, the cassocks and stoles, pen a fake letter of resignation to the diocese. Finally we agreed we’d bundle our headmistress into the back of a van with a sack over her head and hold her ransom. Tie her to a chair, interrogate her until she confessed to what she had done, until she broke down and wept. But the logistics of kidnap—the lack of a getaway vehicle, Fat Fran’s gargantuan weight, the location of a safe house—proved too complex a stunt for us to pull off.
“We could put laxatives in the altar wine,” someone offered as an alternative.
“Yawn,” said Skipper, who seemed to take the closure of the school more personally than the rest of us. The head girl that never was. “Next.”
As dares night grew closer Skipper issued us each a shopping list of supplies, divided up dorm room by dorm room to make it less obvious to the school staff and shopkeepers what we were up to. Paint, glue, clocks, balls of string and lighter fluid, surgical gloves, vast quantities of sugar. Alcohol and cigarettes of course.
“Don’t get busted,” Skipper ordered as she handed them out. We tucked the lists inside our underwear.
Later that afternoon, as instructed, I went to town with the twins, where we bought bottles of bleach, an alarm clock, and a liter of vodka from the man at the corner shop who had been selling us our contraband for years. He slid our fake IDs across the counter without looking up from his newspaper and signaled to us with his eyes to take our alcohol and go. We walked back to school together through the town square. Either side of me the twins were bickering about something. I wasn’t paying attention. Nervous, I stayed in the middle of them and kept my head down, eyes on the cobbles in case I saw one of the McKibbins. Out of habit, the twins and I linked arms, and I felt the comforting sensation of their bodies walking in step with mine, our hips pressed together. Since Fat Fran’s announcement I had noticed a gradual shift in my friends’ behavior towards me. A thawing. The school was in jeopardy after all, under attack; we were in this together.
Lauren had telephoned every day since I’d slept at her house a week ago. Each time I made an excuse to not come to the phone, dreading whatever it was she had to say. Skipper looked at me curiously, but made no snide, sarcastic comment.
At the sight of a pair of blue overalls coming down the corridor at school I held my breath until the maintenance men had passed, staring at my shoes. Whenever I thought of Stuart, I felt crippled by shame, turned inside out. I replayed what we had done over and over. How he couldn’t even look at me in the morning, how he rushed me out the door, let it slam in my face. Once I ran into him as he was standing outside the boiler room, laughing with a couple of other workmen. I saw his body stiffen as I walked by, worried I might cause a scene, embarrass him in front of his colleagues, try to get him in trouble. His hand moving through his hair, he turned his back to me, carried on talking as if I was invisible. Humiliated, I scrambled into the smoking den, sobbing.
Back in my dorm Gerry Lake scowled at the bags of supplies I was carrying. I tucked them under my bed and then, when there was no more room in my cupboards, I asked her to let me hide some of it on her side of the room.
“No fucking way.”
“It’s just for a couple of days,” I pleaded. “Please, Gerry.”
She stood with her arms crossed in the old way, her chin jutting out, on the brink of a tantrum. Gerry had made it clear that she found the tradition of dares—the covert meetings, the codes, the cloaks and hoods—utterly puerile. She was right, of course. But if you stripped the Divine of its
rituals, took away the shoe tree or the hair flicking, one had to wonder, like the Queen or the pope, what you’d have left.
“Pretty please,” I tried again, pressing my palms together.
No one had ever begged her for anything or even asked for a favor. I watched her surprised expression, the strange backwards bend of her arm as she pulled on her elbow. Her face, I thought, began to soften.
“Fine,” Gerry said, giving in. “Whatever.”
That evening I climbed out of my bunk and pressed my ear to the door, listening for the sound of our housemistress doing her rounds. Gerry was on her bunk, writing in my leavers book. After GCSEs it was customary for Divines to buy a blank book that our friends inscribed with sentimental notes, reminiscences about the past five years, as well as parting messages from those who were moving on to other schools for A-Levels. Pages garnished with Xs and Os. We cut strands of our hair and stuck them to the paper, we sliced our fingers and signed our names in blood. To my darling, my sweet, I’ll never forget, masses and masses of love, forever and a day. No one, I knew, would write in Gerry’s leavers book, except Kwamboka, who was equally kind to everyone. I stood with the door cracked open. I watched Gerry doodle.
“It’s the last meeting,” I said. “So . . .”
Gerry’s pencil hovered over the page.
“So what?”
“You should come.”
Her chin snapped up, she squinted at me, shocked.
I blushed, embarrassed. The offer wasn’t genuine. Even as I said it I knew that Gerry wouldn’t accept. She had a competition the next day; her green feathered costume was hanging from the edge of her bunk, her skates zippered inside her boot bag, the blades tightened, the leather polished.
“Never mind,” I quickly said, obviously relieved.
Gerry scowled.
“Fine.” She set my leavers book to one side and climbed off her bunk. “If it’s such a big deal, I’ll come.”
“Oh.”
It was too late to take it back.