by Ellie Eaton
“Gosh, what on earth’s wrong with you?” my mother tuts. “You look like a hamster. Don’t you feel well?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. It’s hot in here.”
I take off my cardigan and drape it around my shoulders.
Everyone here seems older than me by more than a decade except for a small group of women in the corner who whisper to one another and intermittently glance over in my direction. They wear tight, brightly colored jeans, V-neck jumpers, long equestrian-looking leather boots. They gossip amongst themselves for a while, and when my mother drifts off to read a display board, two or three of them stride across to speak to me.
“We had to find out; it’s Joe, isn’t it?”
I give a thin smile. I was so unremarkable at school, I tell them, I find it hard to believe they remember me.
“Oh, my goodness,” one woman says with a snort. “We were all absolutely terrified of you.”
They must have me confused with someone else. Skipper perhaps.
“I really doubt it,” I say.
They all begin to talk at once.
“We thought you were so sophisticated. That thing you did with your hair.”
“Oh my god, totally, and that cardigan she used to wear, remember? We all wanted one just like it.”
I picture the cardigan they’re talking about. Rescued from my mother’s Oxfam pile after the moths had got to it. Gray, down to my knees, holes in the sleeves I poked my thumb through in winter to keep my fingers warm.
They squeal.
“That’s it, we First Years all snipped little holes in our jumpers. That was a whole trend for a while. And that death stare you had. Oh my god, absolutely brutal.”
“Death stare?”
Giggling, they try to replicate the expression. Faces blank as mannequins, utterly vacant, their heads dipped to one side.
“What a hoot.” They laugh and bounce back to life, skipping off to update their friends.
I am dazed by their description of me. I suddenly feel very dizzy. A tray of drinks levitates past me and I switch my empty glass of wine for a new one. The room is unbelievably loud. Cacophonous. Grown women yapping with delight, jumping up and down, hugging and squealing. Worried I might pass out, I signal to Rod that I’m leaving.
“I need some fresh air.”
“Hang on a sec, darling.” She grabs my arm. “Speech.”
A ruddy-looking woman, the chairlady of the Old Girls Association, whistles and stands on a stool to address us. Franella “Frank” Burwood-Carter.
“Hello all.” She claps a few times to get our attention. “Absolutely wonderful to see so many of you here. A big thanks to all the DOGs who pitched in with food. Particularly you, Mike, for supplying the vino.”
I see that we are sticking to our traditional names. No matter what I do, I am Joe again. My mother, Rod.
A few DOGs chortle. The speaker lets out her own chuckle. Frank has wide shoulders, hands that are as big as plates, and a deep androgynous voice whose loudness makes me wince.
“Shh.” My mother puts a finger to her lips when I try to tell her I feel unwell, that this whole thing is pointless, that I urgently need to call Jürgen.
The chairwoman embarks on a speech. A long elegy about girlhood friendships that stand the test of time. I watch this woman’s enormous hands gesticulate as she holds forth. I feel increasingly sick. I tug at the neck of my shirt. But eventually she finishes with a quote—George Eliot: Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending—and wobbles down off her wooden stool.
“We’re off,” my mother says and nudges me.
I’m trapped in the center of the mob, pressed on all sides, as the chairwoman leads the charge into Fat Fran’s office, now a ground-floor studio apartment. The vestibule where Fat Fran’s various blue cassocks once hung has been replaced by a tiny kitchen of glass and chrome. There is a small dining table for one, angled to best see an enormous television, a window at street level, car wheels hissing past behind lace curtains, one small sofa, a single bed, neatly made with a decorative cushion, a few empty photo frames.
“It’s rather sad, isn’t it,” my mother whispers.
She and her peers had once, famously, broken into the headmistress’s office and switched around the furniture piece by piece, and every pen, trophy, and crucifix, to make an exact mirror image.
“Mm,” I murmur.
“Darling, are you all right? You look rather woozy. Sit down.”
I slump onto the bed. DOGs mooch around the small apartment making polite noises, though there is very little to see.
Frank claps her hands and I think I can make an escape but my mother, who is excited now to be back amongst the Divine, is already off, following our leader, who holds a printed sign above her head bearing our old crest. We troop, two by two, out onto the street in the autumn drizzle and back through the dentist’s, which used to be our chapel. Everyone stares up at the domed ceiling and the organ. The last time I was here it was my honeymoon six years ago and someone called me a cunt. It would be nice, I think, to sit down on one of the pews and get my bearings, but a disgruntled receptionist asks us to make way for patients.
Now Frank is on the move again. Umbrellas open. She marches up the road towards St. Gertrude, our former junior boarding house. Swimming pool gone, sports hall flattened, the bridge long since dismantled. An ugly low-cost housing scheme, which has swallowed up the heart of our old school, triggers a round of scandalized muttering—hideous, shocking, terribly naff—until finally, Frank’s pièce de résistance, she turns an abrupt left into a modern cul-de-sac in the center of which still stands, we can’t believe it, our shoe tree.
There is a collective gasp.
“How extraordinary,” my mother says.
We circle around the trunk like a pack of hyenas.
On the upper branches of the tree remain, unbelievably, a few pairs of our leather lace-ups, tongues stiff and weathered, dry as pelts. We crane to look at them, heads tipped back, openmouthed. Suddenly there is an outburst of noise. Across the grass comes a handful of stray DOGs, hooting with laughter and apologizing dramatically for their lateness. Frank has her hands on her hips, huffing and puffing, handing out badges and striking their names off her list.
“Sorry, sorry,” they cry.
“Oh look, it’s Charlotte.” My mother’s face breaks into a huge smile as she waves her arms. “Thank god. Charlie, over here.”
“Rod,” they cheer.
I watch as my mother dashes towards her friends with surprising athleticism, four or five women, all in their late sixties, air-kissing, squeezing hands. They genuinely love one another.
“Josephine, darling, look who it is.”
“Hi, Charlie.” I wave. “Good to see you.”
“No, no.” My mother beams.
She has arranged a surprise for me.
“Look!” she says.
Out from behind her mother steps Skipper.
55
We face each other across a pub table, my former best friend and I, with two pints of shandy, lemon crescents floating up and down in the bubbles like dead fish. We contemplate our drinks awkwardly, nothing to say. Skipper looks around with bemusement at the White Horse, at the cracked leather seats and polished brass.
“God, it feels small, doesn’t it?”
“Hmm, yes.”
We fall silent again. I try to remember what it was we used to talk about all those nights in our dorms for hours and hours. It’s hard to believe this is the same girl that used to tickle me on the arm, leave me funny notes under my pillow, wrap my hair with colored threads while I sat nestled between her thighs. I see two old men standing outside, puffing in the drizzle. When I ask Skipper if she has any cigarettes, she looks at me aghast.
“Oh, I haven’t done that in years.”
I go up to the bar and order a bag of peanuts and some Scampi Fries. There is a guy at the bar, young looking, in a paint-splattered T-shirt and work boots.
&nbs
p; “Cheers,” he says to no one in particular and takes one long thirsty tug on his beer, then wipes his chin with his arm.
When I get back to the table, I rip both snacks open and spread them on the table. Skipper wrinkles her nose.
“Can you believe we used to live on this kind of junk. We were so skinny back then we never cared about what was in our tuck lockers, all that lacrosse and tennis. Now I just have to look at a crisp and I go up a dress size.”
It is true, she is stockier than I remember her, certainly much more weathered looking than the photos she posts online. She is wearing an unforgiving pair of navy trousers and a striped shirt that gapes open at the breasts whenever she reaches for her drink. Her jaw is square, a thick layer of foundation spread across her face. She has a matronly way of folding her arms that I don’t recognize, her shawl resting neatly across her knee. I notice she has her handbag next to her on the floor with the strap looped around her ankle in case of pickpockets. Only her hair is unchanged, enormously curly and untamable; a few strands of gray but that is it.
She picks up a peanut and sucks on it like a mint. I check my phone for messages from Jürgen or the babysitter. Skipper does the same.
“Husband?” I ask.
“Yes. Number two actually. The first was a bit of a shit.”
“Kids?”
“Three. All boys, for my sins. The oldest goes off to Harrow next year. You?”
“One girl. Lena. She doesn’t start school for another year.”
A neighborhood school, despite my mother’s protestations, a short walk from our house, close enough I can hear the bell at recess. A collection of small pink buildings with a chain-link fence. No hymns, no prayers, no morning sermons. All the same, when I imagine Lena in kindergarten—the stifling classrooms, the spelling tests and homework, the mean girls on the playground, the picking of teams, being left on the sideline—it’s as if I’m being slowly strangled.
“A daughter?” Skipper smiles. “That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“You hated babies. You used to glower at them in Woolworths to try and scare them. It was hysterical.”
Did I?
“The rest of us just wanted to get married and pop out sprogs—none of us were terribly ambitious I suppose—except for you. You had that whole thing about it being cruel to bring a child into the world. You were rather right on back then, weren’t you? A real feminist,” she says, dabbing quotation marks in the air with her fingers.
I can’t remember any of this. I don’t think I expressed a strong opinion about children one way or another back then, at least, no more or less than any other teenage girl with a healthy fear of falling pregnant. They were about as interesting to me as a cat or a dog.
“Was I?”
“Oh, it was probably just a stage. We always had some fad or other, didn’t we?”
I pry free a peanut from the roof of my mouth with my tongue, trying to decide which fad Skipper is talking about. Was it our occult phase, when we spoke to the dead on a Ouija board, claiming to have summoned Gerry Lake’s mother? Or the time, out of boredom, we pierced each other’s ear cartilage with sewing needles? Or our brief flirtation with drugs?
“Drugs?” Skipper lets out an incredulous snort and shakes her head when I remind her of the time at the rec grounds. “I don’t think so. That must have been someone else. I’m a bit of a prude when it comes to that sort of thing.”
Why would she forget this? She was the instigator—stop being such a gayer—the rest of us following her lead. I try to jog her memory.
“Poppers. You got them from your cousin Milo I think.”
“Milo? How strange. He and George Gordon-Warren got married, did you hear? Super wedding.”
It annoys me that she is trying to change the subject.
“They live in Putney. He works for some bank or other. She has a rather nice gallery in Holland Park.”
I vaguely remember my mother telling me that she’d been up to London for an art opening, but I’m not prepared to let go of the previous conversation.
“Skipper, seriously, I can’t believe you don’t remember that day at the rec grounds.”
I can hear the shrill tone of my voice as it grows more pedantic.
“We had splitting headaches? Henry Peck had to lie down in our dorm with a cold flannel on her head?”
Skipper’s shoulders rise and drop in embarrassment. She gives a noncommittal shake of the head, a little laugh.
“I don’t think I was ever that worldly; I don’t know the first thing about drugs. I mean, we were rather in our little bubble at school, weren’t we? I don’t know if I read one newspaper the whole time I was Divine. We smoked like chimneys, of course.”
She admits to that at least. I pick up a handful of peanuts. Fire them into my mouth, one after the other. Now that Skipper has begun reminiscing it’s as if she can’t stop, recounting the names of boys we kissed, the class outings and school plays, the secret trips to the pub, the gating and suspensions, every little misdemeanor.
“Oh god, remember when Freddy threw up during Communion, right into the chalice? Probably still blotto from the night before. All that incense wafting about didn’t help. Padre did like his bells and smells.”
“Freddy who?” I say.
I have no memory of this person. But Skipper’s already moved on.
“Such a shame we never made it to the Other Side. You’d have been head girl, of course.”
“Me?” I say, incredulous, spitting out my shandy.
“Without a doubt,” Skipper says. “Who else?”
She smooths straight the cashmere shawl on her lap, stroking it like a cat.
“You,” I say, stating the obvious.
“Oh god, no. Hardly. I was far too immature. You were the one everyone looked up to. Such poise. So self-assured compared to the rest of us. And all the teachers loved you, naturally. Brain box.”
Poise? Self-assured?
Who is she talking about? Nothing about her description of me is familiar at all.
Disoriented, not even bothering to correct her, I stare at myself in the pub mirror, hollow eyed from lack of sleep, greasy skin and frizzy hair, sweaty looking and disheveled. In the reflection I see that the young workman at the bar has been joined by another much older man, his grandfather perhaps. The grandfather is skinny, bowlegged, wearing a tweed coat. He carries a paper under his arm. He pats his pockets looking for his lighter, then the two of them, one tall, the other very short, leave their drinks on the bar and go outside to smoke.
I would kill, I realize, for a cigarette and stare at the space on the pub wall where a vending machine used to be.
“Should I ask someone for a fag?” I suggest.
“Oh god,” Skipper says, groaning. “My husband would murder me. He’s a surgical oncologist.”
She goes on to bore me about the details of her husband’s job, the women he has treated, the lives saved. All the time she speaks I stare at the men outside with longing. I slip my hand into my pocket and press Gerry’s pin into my thumb.
“Look, it’s stopped raining,” I interrupt Skipper abruptly. “We could take a walk around town before we go back?”
“Top idea,” Skipper says, oblivious to how Divine she still sounds. “See some old haunts.”
She wraps herself in a shawl. I put on the winter coat I have borrowed from my mother. I’m not used to the English autumn, the damp chill, pewter skies. I feel amazed that we used to run around in winter in just our pleated lacrosse skirts. Or is that another thing I’ve made up?
“One sec,” I say to Skipper as we step outside. I approach the two men smoking.
“Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, do either of you have a spare cigarette we could have?”
The men look at each other. The younger of them, the grandson, holds out a packet of tobacco for me to roll my own.
“Put that shite away, Kyle. I’ve got one, love,” the elderly man says as he hands his grandson his n
ewspaper and begins patting his sides again. It takes a long time for him to find his cigarettes, but eventually he passes me a packet and a flimsy pack of matches.
“Keep the matches,” he says.
The old man lifts his head and I see the white scar under his chin—a lightning bolt running through his stubble—and I know exactly who he is. Mr. McKibbin. He gives me a watery stare. His face is extremely wrinkled, deep pouches under each eye. There is an unkempt look about his clothes, a missing button on his shirt, a crust at the corner of his mouth, the musty smell of wood shavings or hay. Around his neck the same thin gold chain he always wore.
“Thank you,” I mumble.
I stare at him and then the grandson. The boy, sullen looking, wants to get back inside to his drink. Kyle, I think, Kerry’s son, all grown up.
“How’s Lauren?” I say. But the old man doesn’t hear me and raises a hand to his ear.
“Come again?”
“Never mind. Thank you for the cigarette.”
As I walk back towards Skipper, a third man passes me coming up the road. Head down against the cold, hands in his pockets. But I would recognize the walk anywhere, even now. A certain swagger. Jack the Lad. His blond hair is shorter, the curtains gone, the gold stud he wore in one ear removed. He’s more solid than I remember, almost thickset, his skin unseasonably tanned. Creased at the neck, older but just as cocky, whistling to himself as he always used to. Stuart gives me the once-over as he goes by and my skin prickles. No flicker of recognition. Not even a smile. Brushing right past me.
“All right, Dad,” Kyle says. It’s hard to believe he’s the baby from the park.
“Who’s that you were chatting up?” I hear Stuart ask, ruffling Kyle on the head. “Bit old for you, isn’t she, son?”
“Her? No one, just some posh bird who wanted a ciggie.”
“You coming in then?”
“Yeah.”
They stamp on their butts, thump each other on the back, make a joke. And as he follows after them, he can’t help himself, Stuart steals a final look at Skipper and me over his shoulder.