Dirty Work

by Gabriel Weston

  My parents wrote to me every week when I was at boarding school. Not just a single letter between them, but one each. But gone are the days when I might search in a pile of mail for something as lovely as a coloured envelope inscribed with my name. The first thing I open is a photocopy of an article Frederick must have thought would be of interest, and which he has asked his secretary to send to me. It’s about teenage pregnancy. Why don’t girls simply avail themselves of our wonderful free contraceptive services? the author enquires. I tire of the theme quickly and put the paper down. I angle my chair so that I am looking, not at the brick wall opposite but up to the left, where someone in a high-up flat has decked their balcony with tubs and pots, and greenery reaches up into the London sky. A woman is sitting out there on a deckchair, painting her nails.

  The fact is, it’s not as simple as that. Seeking out contraception requires some kind of sense of self. And a girl’s identity doesn’t stick fast, does it? It isn’t a case of finders keepers. You don’t get to hang on to your confidence just because you’ve worked hard to earn it.

  I had a nasty shock starting boarding school in England after more than three years of relative educational freedom in the States. For a few months, the world felt topsy-turvy before I righted myself to the view that everything that had been deemed important on that side of the Atlantic was disapproved of on this. Being myself was no longer an important mission. It was time to fit in.

  Quickly I learned that my days of getting dirty were over. My male classmates were given boiler suits to put over their uniforms after class. Get muddy wearing. Put holes through. Ride go-karts in. While the other girls played elastics I studied the boys with envy. In America, I would have been playing alongside them. Within weeks, my expectations had shifted, and my sole hope in watching them was to be watched in return.

  Twice a week, they marshalled us for a shower. A matron blew a tubular whistle, like the ones you get with a policeman’s costume, and we would line up at the dormitory door. Then we followed whichever unenticing Pied Piper was on duty that evening, down two flights of stairs to the subterranean shower room. There we stood in line without talking.

  When you got to the front, you stepped into the shower bay among the other washing girls. You got wet and soaped yourself. All over your body, which I had never done at home, which I had not been taught was imperative. The matron had to approve of how soapy you had made yourself before you were allowed to rinse off and finish your shower. The two baths in the room were only for birthday girls.

  I did okay at keeping clean. The punishments I got were for not being quiet enough. I talked after lights out, and I sniggered during meals. I whispered in chapel and I muttered to myself. For these infractions, I was sent on runs or made to learn psalms. Once, to my secret pleasure, I was instructed to wash and shine all the test tubes in the science labs. Little did they know how much I loved that acrid place, where sunshine caught the angles of metal and glass, where my only companion for the afternoon was the furious axolotl, sitting palely in his tank.

  And then I learned what it is to really talk out of turn. One early summer, in a new dorm with five other girls which looked out on the playing fields, I observed something unusual. After rounders every day, we would change out of our gym clothes back into our uniforms and, since our cupboards were next to the window, this was where we often stood. No boys walked nearby since their games took place on the other side of the school. But, every day, one of the French teachers would take what seemed a long detour from where he taught cricket, to pass right by our window. And at exactly the same point in his walk, coming round a corner, he would look up at us as we undressed.

  We were young, but we noticed. And one day, in high spirits but without thinking, seeing this middle-aged man look up just as three of my friends had removed their Aertex shirts, I opened the window and called out a single word before ducking down behind the radiator out of view. My voice sounded much louder than I had intended. My friends stopped giggling.

  Five minutes later, the head matron appeared at the entrance to our dormitory. Her face was puce. She asked which girl had shouted from the window. With fear’s almost genital lurch, I stepped forward. She took my arm and we walked, in plain view, across the school together. We passed by all the girls’ dormitories. We looped in between ping-pong tables, where boys stopped their play. We went by the chapel and the classrooms and on into the mahogany-panelled part of the school that parents so admired.

  Finally, we reached the entrance to the headmaster’s office, with its door that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. Here I waited beneath the portraits of the headmaster’s predecessors. After a while, I was summoned into a long room, which took me ages to compass. The headmaster sat behind his desk, legs crossed, strict as any father but twice the size. On the desk in front of him was a huge dictionary, not one bit like the ones in the English classroom.

  ‘Show me,’ was all he said. He uncrossed his legs. I stepped forward, the tiny print dancing and forming prisms in my eyes. I saw the nefarious word I had called from the dormitory window again and pointed at it. He took the book back from me and, not looking down at it again, spoke. ‘Pervert,’ he said. ‘A person who changes their religious conviction.’

  After leaving the headmaster’s study, I was sent to an empty classroom where I wrote out the definition of the word pervert two hundred times, lest I ever misunderstand its meaning so grossly again.

  I look back at my desk, at the remaining mail. There is a council tax bill, which I put into an empty plastic tray marked ‘To do’. The other bits of post relate to my work. There is a thank-you letter from the organiser of the Battle of Ideas, praising me on the recent talk I gave. There is something from the Pro-choice Alliance and an envelope marked with the Catholics for Choice insignia. A technicolour image of a foetus at about twenty weeks’ gestation announces itself immediately to my seasoned eye as anti-abortion propaganda rather than information on advances in ultrasound imaging. I fold it carefully in two, so that the picture is on the inside, and slot it in between discarded envelopes in my waste-paper basket. Lastly, I pick up the latest issue of Abortion Review, tear it from its thin plastic wrapper and unfold it.

  The woman on the balcony gets up from her chair. She fans her fingers out and blows absently on her nails. Then she looks directly at me. Out of habit, I slide my hands over the front of the journal lying on my desk. I’ve got used to doing this, covering my reading matter, obscuring its identity even in circumstances when someone would need X-ray vision to see what is in front of me. Some might call it shame. And maybe it’s true. Perhaps my operating room is a dreadful place for a person to end up. But what would happen without people like me? What path, I wonder, apart from celibacy, is a girl meant to tread, if she is to avoid catastrophe? How on earth is she to negotiate the minefield of puberty and adolescence?

  Soon after arriving at my English school I started to go out with a boy in my class in whom I had no sexual interest. This was a pity. There was a Nigerian boy in the year below whom I would have loved to wrap myself up in, but he wore Pringle jumpers and had odd friends. By comparison, everyone thought Nick was cool and he liked me, so there was nothing more to be considered. Other than the fact that I was lagging behind most of the self-respecting girls in my class in terms of achieving the milestones of sexual accomplishment. And I needed to address this.

  Nick and I would sit together in lessons, clasping and re-clasping hands under the table. Sometimes we went for walks in break-time or after supper, getting far enough away from the penumbra glare of the school to find a gate or wall that we could lean against for kissing. But it was winter, and dark and perishing. There was nowhere to lie down and teachers roamed the grounds. I had no idea how I was meant to graduate to the expected level of sexual prowess for a girl in my year.

  And then the perfect occasion presented itself. In the Christmas holidays, my friend Lucy’s mother organised a sort of dance, and all the pupils in my year
were invited. My own mother accepted an invitation for me to stay with this family over the weekend of the party and gave my friend’s mother money to take me dress-shopping, with a quite specific brief. Ignorant of it, as usual, I was grateful to be in such safe sartorial hands. As long as I looked exactly the same as everyone else, I would be fine.

  However, I had not bargained for the existence of a shop like Laura Ashley. Lucy and I were led by her mother straight to a railing on which hung a long row of dresses in fruity hues, with fitted bodices and puffy sleeves and sashes. Dresses that already had a shape, which they held on their rails, a shape into which any girl might be pressed, losing her own form, in order to make do. Dresses which looked like girls without heads.

  Lucy seemed quite comfortable. There was no question of looking in any other shop. Her mother even ruled out allowing us to choose black, so we left that place an hour after entering it with matching watered silk girl-gowns in feverish colours, my friend’s a burnt orange, mine magenta.

  I had never bought a dress before so I didn’t realise the occasion was meant to be pleasurable. Still, I was able to suppress my dislike of what I now owned because of my relief that I’d be wearing exactly what I should be. But in the forty-eight hours in between taking the dress back to Lucy’s house and having to put it on, my horror found a more concrete focus. Which was how absolutely disgusting I would look when I arrived at the dance and Nick saw what I was wearing. He who had desired me as I felt I really was, sulking in sundry jeans and old-man-style cardigans.

  Caught in between these two hard facts – the necessity for the magenta dress and my loathing of it as imagined through the eyes of my boyfriend – my teenage brain could compute only one solution: to wear jeans underneath my dress, rolled up just high enough for Lucy’s mother not to spot them at my dimpled ankles. Did I foresee an occasion when, with one upward flourish of a hideous skirt, I could apologise for my false self by revealing my jeaned authenticity to Nick? Or did I just want the reassuring feeling of my own second skin, the softened denim rounding my adolescent butt? Either way, this small subterfuge enabled me to leave my friend’s house, get in the car and go to the party.

  Nick was there when we arrived, standing slightly apart from a group of girls from my year, who, I was relieved to see, were all wearing the same hideous frocks Lucy and I had on. I didn’t feel any particular desire when I saw him, but I liked the way he looked in slim snaky trousers with rebel boots. And his hair was all over the place.

  He gave no sign of recognising my awkwardness, but smiled me over, and straight away scooped from his pocket a handful of Smarties which he half emptied into my palm, saying, ‘Best of five, then?’ He tossed the sweets up in the air one by one and caught them in his mouth, ducking like a footballer leaning to head a ball before tipping his head back to snap the coloured confection he was catching there.

  I followed suit with my Smarties, keeping very still as if to show I could better him in style; in fact not wanting to swirl my pink dress around me, not wanting to reveal the sheer mass of the gaudy drapery, preferring to keep my crocodile-snapping mouth and girl’s gullet the focus of his attention. ‘Five all,’ he concluded cheerfully, and this head-tipping tournament was the only feint we needed before Nick leaned over to say, ‘I’ve got some smokes. Come on.’ No one watched us leave.

  Outside was cold and black and smelled of stars. Nick gave me his jacket and we found somewhere just a little wet to sit. The jacket touched the ground at my sides, its length making gaps between me and it, and this gave me the idea to roll and scrunch my skirt as you do with sheets you are bundling into the dirty laundry. And so I packed away the pink swathes of my dress and positioned the skirts under its flaps. Folding the lapels, I drew them to my neck to cover all sights of pink bodice. I accepted the cigarette that Nick had double-lit with his own, tasting his sweet flob on the filter, just as I beheld myself successfully de-pinked, the denim and dark jacket making me feel quite myself again for the first time that evening.

  Did he sense this thrill I had at seeing myself? Did he interpret my skirt-shifting differently before he saw I only meant to reveal my jeans below? Was it the sight of these jeans or just the fact of sex that made him turn straight to my mouth, so that his smoke soon came from my nose in the dark night, my own cigarette burning in my still hand, an ashy tower rising steadily from its glowing tip?

  It would be wrong to say that kissing was all I wanted. A lie to pretend my mind didn’t beseech his hands to find their way to the warm, soft interior of his jacket where parts of me, at least, were a little grown up by now. We made the best of things, although the bodice of my dress was so tight that Nick couldn’t get his hands into it, and the folds of my dress kept unravelling around my jeans.

  The occasional reappearance of parts of this dress and the dreadful swirling and rummaging in the voluminous pink skirts made it hard for me to enjoy myself, so I decided to just get on with what I had to do. I had to be able to claim I’d done it when I returned to school the following term.

  In the loamy dark, it was not Nick that guided my hand to his penis, but my own strong sense of social duty. Nor did he make me continue once I realised what hard work it was. He did not suggest it, any more than anyone at my new school had told me the things I had later found to be crucial: that I might save myself from near-inevitable social exile by coming back from the Christmas holidays with the right trainers. That it would help if I could sing along to David Bowie instead of Supertramp. That I should learn how to inhale a cigarette. That I should own clothes that someone else might want to borrow. That I should have the boldness that comes from these things.

  When Nick removed his hand from my pants that night and put it over mine to help me with what I couldn’t manage myself, I was simply grateful to him. And when, for the first time in my life, I saw sperm, on Nick, on me, in the air, all over the quiet folds of my darkened dress, I was only partly concerned about how I would clean myself up; mainly I was relieved that this pursuit was finally over. We picked our barely smoked fags off the ground next to us and as I relit mine I noticed the faint bitterness in its taste.

  I have no job to go to, and snow falls on London. It stops, only to start up again. I lie in bed well past six, looking up into the sky, thinking of my patient. Anxious that the slow-falling processes in her body, the drifts of electrolytes across cell membranes, the sweep of inflammatory mediators and catecholamines, the piling up of work on vital organs should go in her favour and not against her. To bear her towards life and not death. And there is nothing I can do.

  I wander to the corner shop for bread and milk each morning. Everyone is caught up in the weather. The radio says we should all stay at home. The pretty lady on morning TV continues to sit on her red sofa in lovely dresses. And it is as if the world has stopped for my patient, has gone stock-still for me in my vigil. I go home with provisions and revise my anatomy, to try and improve myself. I relearn venous drainage of the pelvis, innervation of the pudendum, lymphatics of the lower limb. I study the blood supply to the uterus and so anatomise my own failure, reminding myself of where all that blood I spilled came from. From the uterine artery, the arcuate and azygos vessels. Leaching on to hands and legs and floor and drapes and around everything.

  Halfway through this first week off work, I wake knowing I cannot lie around any more. I realise I’m not allowed into the hospital, that this is what it means to be suspended from my work. But, nonetheless, I long to be near my sick patient. I should be there to look after her, whatever has gone wrong. I kick the duvet off my legs and put on black tracksuit bottoms and a jumper. I hang my ID badge, on its tiny baubled chain, around my neck and zip my coat on top of it. I put my rucksack on my back and grab the bicycle lights from where they have lain untouched for a week, on their shelf below the telephone.

  I take the lift to the ground floor, and walk along the deserted communal corridor to the exit. I step out into the cold dawn. I hear the quiet bitching of the trees, an
d see the stain of night around the square, and feel the scrutiny of blank-windowed cars. Only the smell of damp tarmac, always my mother’s favourite, reassures me that this is not really the witching hour, but morning coming, just around the corner.

  Cycling fast, I reach the hospital in no time. Snow ices the roofs of houseboats in the wharf and, under a mauve sky, the river runs green beside me as I go. I lock my bike as usual on the second bar from the right. I ascend the steps towards the towering main doors of the hospital, within which two normal-size doors have been cut. I step, with utter gladness, from the cold blue day into the warm city of the hospital’s interior, with its welcome view of multicoloured signage and light-glare and hospital shopfront and gleaming floor and the static prickle of central heating on full. I head straight for the Intensive Care Unit, where all my thoughts lie with my ailing patient. I know I am not allowed to go to her, so do the next-best thing and find the closest bench I can to sit on. The woman I have harmed cannot be more than a few metres away from me. I feel my heart beat hard in my chest, and I think of her heart. I pray for it.

  A thin patient with a jaundiced face and bright yellow eyes wheels his drip stand past me, on his way to the smoking area. A man rolls a trolley of newspapers past me towards the hospital shop. A young black man, his face heavy with disappointment, clanks sanitary towel bins out of the women’s loo at the top of a small ramp near where I sit. Waste pokes from the top of the bins and bloodstains are visible against the grey plastic. He stops and turns to me, but I look away.