by Ellie Eaton
“What?” Gerry asked.
Her jaw was set hard, her lips pinched together. I knew that there was no point trying to dissuade her.
“Nothing,” I said. “Brill.”
We walked in single file along the corridor to Skipper’s dorm room. I hadn’t hung out in Skipper’s dorm or exchanged more than a few words with my former best friend since our exchange in the shower room. Now I’d be arriving with Gerry, the least popular girl in our school, the one person Skipper couldn’t abide. With my nervousness I forgot the code I was meant to use, a series of elaborate knocks. Divines lunged under duvet covers and behind curtains, elbows and feet sticking out, bodies hidden under desks and beds like cadavers.
“It’s just me,” I said.
There was a collective exhalation.
“Bloody hell, Joe,” the Peck twins groaned.
Skipper sat up in bed, her knees tucked under her chin. Her lip curled in distaste when she saw Gerry coming in after me. Her eyebrow arched.
“Marvelous. You brought the Poison Dwarf.”
For a moment Gerry said nothing. Then her fists bunched. She hissed.
“Which one of you cows has my hairpin?”
Skipper let out a loud yawn.
“Oh, lorks, here we go again.”
Gerry scowled. I knew this time she wasn’t going to leave without it. She turned to me and nodded, waiting for me to back her up.
“Go on.”
“Um,” I said.
I remember how the attention of the whole room shifted in that moment. There was the sound of a pipe clanking. The air in my lungs seemed to be pressed out of me, as if there was something standing on my chest. My mouth opened, nothing came out.
“I don’t really know . . .” I started to backtrack.
Gerry stared at me. Her eyes were slits, her mouth pinched together hard.
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Gerry said.
She pushed me backwards, a hard thump in the chest.
“Get out of my way.”
We heard her feet running down the corridor, our room door slamming shut.
The room was silent. I stood in the middle of the group. I squeezed my arm till I could feel it go numb. Skipper began to clap slowly.
“Bravo, Joe.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well done.”
“She followed me out,” I mumbled, the first lie of many I would tell about Gerry.
“Please. From what I hear, you two are quite chummy these days. Best of friends. Skipping arm in arm through town. Very jolly.”
A few girls laughed. The twins sneaked a look at each other. I bit my lip, knotting my fingers together. They must have seen me with Gerry on our way back from the doctor’s and ratted me out to Skipper. Even though they’d been friendly to my face, chatting to me in the art room, smiling at me when Skipper’s back was turned, when it came down to it, their loyalty lay with her, not me. I felt sick; I wished I were dead.
“We were just going to the doctor,” I said.
Skipper rolled her eyes.
“What for, a lobotomy?”
I paused for a moment. I squeezed my arm even harder, pinching my skin.
“The morning-after pill,” I said quietly, my face burning, remembering the lecture from Dr. Hadfield.
“Gerry Lake,” Dickie shrieked. “Gerry?”
I said nothing.
“Oh my god,” another girl yelled. “Who the hell would shag Gerry?”
I could have corrected the mistake but I didn’t.
“Come on, Joe, just tell us.”
I became aware that the mood in the room had shifted. There was an invisible hierarchy at work in which I had been suddenly and dramatically elevated. I noticed the sympathetic smiles, the tendentious outrage my friends seemed to feel on my behalf for the predicament Gerry had put me in by asking me to cover for her.
Slowly I began to describe a middle-aged man, Gerry’s trainer, his hairy arm and thick meaty-looking fingers. Lies tumbled like dominoes, one after another. I alluded to the secretive way Gerry was always dropped by him near the school gates, their late-night assignations, the after-competition rendezvous, the gifts. George Gordon-Warren pretended to gag.
“I knew it. What a slut.”
“Isn’t he, like, a million years old? Rank.”
“Ghastly.”
“Oh my god, you poor thing,” Dave Peck said, offering me a kiss.
Another girl hugged me. I only realized then how ostracized I had felt that term, spending all my time with Lauren, shunned by my peers. Now, I had never felt more popular. The only one not to leap to embrace me was Skipper. She crossed her legs on the top bunk.
“Fine. But how do we know your little chum won’t blab?”
She pointed at the pile of supplies in the middle of the dorm room.
“She won’t,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I have the pin,” I confessed. “The one he gave to her.”
This part at least was true.
“Who?”
“The trainer. Her boyfriend.”
“Oh my god,” snorted George Gordon-Warren. “You’ve got it?”
I nodded.
“We could use it as a ransom,” I suggested.
“Hats off,” George said.
Skipper finally seemed placated. Impressed even. She tapped her fingers to her forehead and gave me a salute.
Someone made space next to her on the bed so I could climb up on the top bunk. I hugged my knees, then after a while Skipper rested her head on my shoulder. She tickled my arm in the old way. I was forgiven. A bottle of peach schnapps circulated. Someone told a joke. Skipper laughed so hard the whole bed shook. We shushed her, batted her with a pillow. In the end her laughter spluttered out like a car engine. She wiped her eyes.
“Remember that time we got busted at the rec grounds?”
We all nodded. There came a flurry of stories: boys we’d snogged, the detentions, the expulsions. We interrupted each other, finished each other’s sentences, doubled in hysterics.
“What about the pervert?” someone squealed, as if this was something that had happened decades ago, and not a matter of weeks.
“Oh my god, the photos!”
Some of us were crying with laughter, we realized, while others by then were crying for real. Suddenly we were somber. Divines could be cruel, conceited, arcane, but we were faithful to the end. We sobbed and hugged one another. Forever, we promised, always. Nothing could break us apart, proving in the end how much we underestimated Gerry. We swore on our lives. We crossed our hearts.
39
Gerry Lake got up at dawn. This was not unusual for her on the morning of an important competition. Instead of doing her exercises she knocked on Miss Graves’s door and didn’t come out till breakfast. The last some of us would see of her. After chapel—from which Gerry was notably absent—Padre instructed the Fifth Form to remain in our seats. He smiled at us regretfully, rocking in the pulpit. Along the back wall we noticed a line of teachers like riot police, instructed to prevent us leaving.
“Outrageous,” we shouted.
We threatened to call our parents and our parents’ lawyers.
“You can’t do this. It’s against the law,” we cried, citing the Children Act.
Meanwhile Fat Fran, with a number of deputies, ruthlessly tore apart our dorms—upturning mattresses, shaking out laundry bags, ransacking our tuck lockers—until the vast mountain of supplies we had accrued had been uncovered. A team of maintenance men were sent in to bag the evidence, hoisting it over their shoulders and tossing it into a dumpster.
When the raid was over we were escorted from the school chapel to the Circle, walking like convicts in crocodile formation. Fat Fran awaited us flanked by our housemistress and deputy. Gerry Lake was nowhere to be seen. Fat Fran held a bottle of vodka in one hand, a packet of Marlboroughs in the other. First she upturned the bottle, then she crushed the cigarettes in her large, hammerlike fist and emptied them on
the ground, crushing the remains underfoot.
“If even half of what I understand you had planned is true, well, it’s beyond words. Flabbergasting, in fact. No better than animals. Animals! When I think of everything you girls have been given, the kind of opportunities you’ve had. You disgust me.”
We stared at the vodka as it bubbled into the earth, the tobacco flattened under Fat Fran’s heel.
“I’m going to kill bloody Gerry Lake,” Skipper hissed.
“Enough. Let this be the end of it,” Fat Fran added. “Or else.”
Or else what?
This was a question she hadn’t thought of.
“Quiet,” shouted Fat Fran. “Think of your poor mothers.”
In trying to humiliate us, she inadvertently provoked just the opposite effect.
Who were we if not our mothers’ daughters?
We linked arms, flicked our hair, marched away in unison across the lawn.
40
Lena likes to dress the dog in the frilly knickers that belong to her doll, and when it shreds them to pieces, she gives it a ferocious scowl and squats on stout legs, her heels flat to the floor.
“Bad baby.”
He should be used to it by now, but the dog cowers in alarm, bug-eyed. He wears the same doleful expression no matter what you say or do. It is the sort of animal you’re always tripping over. Whenever I go near him his tail thrashes uncontrollably with pleasure, and he writhes and curls up his gums as if he is trying to smile. He pisses with excitement all over my feet.
“Darling!” I shout. “No.”
Jürgen is lying on his back doing exercises his physiotherapist prescribed for a bad back. He lifts one leg in the air slowly and lowers it. Then the other. Craning them up and down.
“My god,” he complains. “Darling. I still can’t believe we let her name him that. It’s ridiculous.”
“You were the one who said Lena could call the dog whatever she wanted.”
I give him my best I-told-you-so expression.
“True.”
I sit on the arm of the sofa watching Jürgen as he embarks on a sequence of crunches, his arms tugging on a resistance band as if he is rowing a boat. Each time his chest rises up from the ground he grimaces. He has gained a little weight since he’s been off his bike, an accident on the way back from the studio, yet Jürgen is more attractive than ever. Same chiseled chin, perfectly straight nose, muscular buttocks. A Grecian statue—Achilles—toppled to the floor.
“Sephine, stop staring at my paunch,” he says and sits up.
“Fat belly, fat belly, fat belly,” Lena cries, running towards her father, body slamming him back to the ground.
“Ouch,” Jürgen grunts.
Outside Darling begins yapping. I get out the leash and the roll of poop bags.
“We’re going to meet Audrey at the lake,” I tell him. “I’ll take the dog.”
“Have fun,” Jürgen shouts after us. “Darling.”
At the park I take Darling off the lead and watch him scuttle from tree to tree, cocking his bowlegs and nose-diving the man who sells plastic children’s toys laid out on a blanket.
“I need to go potty.” Lena suddenly grabs her crotch, twisting one leg around the other.
“To the loo,” I correct without thinking. “We say, loo.”
“I’m going to go, I’m going to go,” Lena screams.
I pick her up and carry her behind one of the trees, hoist her under her armpits as she squats, a spray of yellow froth soaking her underwear and my feet.
“I peed on you.” Lena giggles.
“I can see that, thank you.” I strip her of her knickers and put them into one of the blue plastic poop bags.
“Swing,” Lena suddenly shouts and dashes across the playground barefoot while I wash off our sandals in the water fountain, calling for the dog.
“Darling,” I bellow. “Darling, Darling, Darling,” yelling louder and louder.
Other parents in the park look alarmed on my behalf. I shrug and sit on one of the concrete benches, waiting for Audrey to arrive. She’s the only friend I made at Lena’s weekly playgroup, which, to my relief, we’ve long since given up. A tall, redheaded New Yorker, Audrey arrives bent over her double pushchair. Her eldest son is technically too old to ride in it, but she crams the two boys in together to avoid any unnecessary dawdling on trips to the park. There is a takeout coffee cup in each of the pockets. Reaching the playground, her youngest, Theo, escapes the pushchair as fast as he can and clambers the wrong way up the slide to the climbing frame where Lena, at the top, sits cross-legged, claiming ownership of the tower. She is wearing no knickers, I suddenly remember, her naked bottom pressed, like a fetishist, through the rope floor.
“Lena,” I call up to her. “Cover your . . .”
Here I get stuck. Jürgen and I have struggled to find a word for our daughter’s genitalia that doesn’t sound utterly ridiculous.
“Fanny,” I say.
Audrey turns around on the bench slowly, both hands cast in the air.
“You’re kidding me, right?” she asks. “You Brits. What the fuck is wrong with you? It’s a vagina. Call it a vagina.”
“Vagina,” I repeat, trying not to wrinkle my face, thinking of Daphne Lake.
“Jesus Christ, yes, repeat after me, penis, vagina. Stop looking like you ate a lemon.”
“Vagina,” I try again, forcing myself to say it out loud.
“That’s better, here, drink your coffee.”
She sits with her long legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, her eyes eclipsed by large circular sunglasses. She has wide shoulders and a solid jaw, her hair tied back in a tight bun with a crisp side parting. In all our school plays she would have been cast as a man.
“So what’s new?” Audrey asks.
“Not much,” I say.
Audrey is one of the few people I don’t bother to inflate my depressingly nonexistent career to.
“I started getting up early in the morning to work.”
“On what?”
“Nothing really. Some pitches. They’re all shit.”
“Please. What about that story you wrote about the gymnasts? I read that, it was great.”
It’s true my article had attracted a lot of attention when it was first published—thousands of shares and comments—but over time the story has been eclipsed by even bigger scandals. Decades of abuse. Hundreds of girls. Gyms, pools, Scout troops, ice rinks, Sunday school classrooms. How, everyone wants to know, could we have let this happen right under our noses? I think of Gerry Lake, the Polaroids, the beige Ford Escort.
Audrey fishes her phone out of the pushchair pocket, finds my article, and holds the screen up to me as proof.
“That was years ago,” I mumble. “Before Lena. I’ve forgotten how to write.”
Audrey turns her whole body now to look at me sternly, one eyebrow raised, incredulous. She was back at work three weeks after she gave birth to Theo. She finds the notion of baby brain insulting.
“Seriously, it took me an hour to reply to a school reunion the other day,” I confess. “An hour!”
“God, those things are awful,” she says. “You’re not going, are you?”
I scratch my inner arm. Despite Rod’s constant nagging, I’ve been procrastinating for months, the RSVP still on my desk, waiting to be mailed. Who would fly five thousand miles to be with a group of people you’ve spent twenty years avoiding?
“My mother’s giving me a guilt trip about not going. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to her all year.”
I describe the Divine, making light of the whole business—our ridiculous uniforms, the rituals, the pageantry—turning it into a joke.
“Boarding school?” Audrey says slowly, sliding her sunglasses down her nose. “Wow.”
“All girls.” I cringe.
“Urgh,” Audrey says, giving a ghoulish judder. “I’m so glad I had boys. Girls are vicious. No offense.”
&n
bsp; I look at Lena balancing at the crest of the slide, knees tucked under her chin, rocking on her heels like Gerry Lake on the windowsill.
“Yes,” I say.
I scratch my arm.
“Vicious.”
41
We dressed in silence, black school cloaks and school stockings tugged over our heads, the empty legs dangling behind us like the ears of cartoon rabbits.
Our first stop was the chapel where we tiptoed between pews, laying traps. Next we broke into the vestry and stole one of Padre’s outfits—a black cassock, a surplice, and a stole—which we draped over the head of the body we’d hidden beneath the altar, a large and busty scarecrow, sewn from pillowcases and pieces of old clothing, limb by limb, like Frankenstein’s monster.
Between us we carried the effigy we had made to the top of the bridge, heaving it over the railing. This was quite a challenge, dressed as Fat Fran was, in a dog collar and vestments, a gym rope looped around her neck. For a moment her enormous padded feet kicked girlishly in the evening breeze. Then the seam along her chest split open and handfuls of shredded paper and cotton wool spewed like innards onto the road below. Cars honked their horns. A man came with a disposable camera and took several grainy photos of us clinging from the rail and whooping, which he later sold to the tabloids.
Night of Terror.
The Belles of St. Jo.
Blue Murder.
The spark that had been lit inside each of us began to smolder. We walked about the school, cloaks flapping, looking for trouble. Stripped of our arsenal of supplies, we fashioned homemade ammunition from what was lying around: art room paint, laundry detergent, sanitary towels. First we drenched the Egg in honey, then we sprinkled it with cornflakes. Fat Fran’s office was doused in glue and a Hitler mustache added to her portrait. The bloody contents of a bathroom bin we upended on her large oak desk, where soiled tampons and clumps of hair stuck to her Sunday sermon. A number of Fifth Formers broke into the swimming pool and dive-bombed each other in the dark. A flour fight began in the refectory, spilling out into classrooms and corridors, a white cumulous of dust that billowed into the Circle. We went from doorknob to doorknob, smearing them with Vaseline. Growing increasingly reckless, we screamed and whooped and tore apart the staff room, spitting in the teachers’ instant coffee, smoking their cigarettes, nosing through their private belongings.