by Patrick Gale
As she turned to retrace her steps, one of her soles squeaked on a flagstone and she saw them springing apart. They seemed almost as frightened as she was. She froze again till she was certain they were blinded by the deeper darkness around her. She had started to back away in slow motion when Mortimer said, ‘Shit,’ very clearly.
Then she heard Lucas tell him, ‘It’ll be Sophie. It’s Cullen.’
‘Cullen!’ Mortimer hissed. ‘Wait! Sophie?’ But now she was running.
She didn’t turn until she was halfway up the Daughters’ Staircase, safely past Nurse’s rooms. There she paused on a landing to peer out through a window across the quad. Mortimer was standing in the mouth of the Slipe, beneath its yellowish light, looking straight back at her. His expression was unreadable at such a distance. There was no sign of Lucas, naturally.
As she lay on her bed, mouth sour because she hadn’t dared brush her teeth for fear of waking someone, she lived the scene repeatedly, helpless before her mercilessly exact recollection. The thing that set her free to cry at last, to release the tension and let her sleep, wasn’t the kissing or the tender touch or the fear of the chase but the small, keen betrayal implicit in hearing Lucas, alone with somebody he loved, call her by her surname.
She wasn’t naïve about such matters. Homosexuality was as inevitable in a largely male boarding school as in prison and she heard semi-coded or blatant references to it every day, mostly defensive or mocking. She saw graffiti too. On one of the pews in the gallery someone had scored ‘Bailey is Gilks’ little man’ and someone else, Gilks possibly, had scored out ‘Gilks’ and carved ‘Everybody’s’. She had yet to hear it acknowledged by the Daughters but it was impossible to ignore. Inferences and outright accusations pinged over their heads like so many bullets. But the words always seemed playful, or not entirely serious, like the endless crude references the boys made to farts and masturbation.
What she had glimpsed in the cloisters was different: serious, exclusive.
Staring up at the sunlit curtains, tuning out the usual round of complaints about the girl who had talked in her sleep and had to have things thrown at her, Sophie aimed at the sense of betrayal she had felt in the night and fell short. Sunlight had brought with it sense. He had never lied to her. Never, if she was honest with herself, offered her more than friendship. But she had been a convenience to him, she perceived, and for that she felt used and angry. She was mortified too at first, until she realized that no one need know unless she blabbed.
She could not avoid Mortimer for long, of course, because bells had to be rung before matins, but she contrived to arrive and leave in a group with Bunsen and the others and found she could meet his eye with equanimity. When she looked, he was the one that looked away and she felt an unfamiliar flicker of power.
Matins finished earlier than usual too so she was also able to give Lucas the slip. In case he tried to find her, she hid in the best way she could imagine, by trailing Kimiko for a change and spending the rest of the morning at the Christian Union meeting.
This was convened every Sunday morning after Chapel by a youngish maths teacher, Dr Liphook. Most weeks there was a guest speaker. Every week there was a discussion group. Coffee and biscuits were served. There was no talk of farts or masturbation or little men. There were about thirty boys and ten girls of all ages and she was surprised to see so many familiar faces. She was welcomed in a nice, polite way that did not draw attention. The guest was a white-haired American man who spoke about continence and the way it enhanced ‘the vision thing’. Sophie was baffled until she saw the fierce blushes about the room and realized he was talking about sex.
Over coffee an amazingly clean and vital boy introduced himself as Ali. He was a sixth-former but appeared to have found a way to pass through puberty without a glimmer of unease. He asked her when she had been confirmed and she lied with abandon.
‘I was very young,’ she told him. ‘Too young, probably.’
‘And you lapsed,’ he supplied.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘For a bit.’
‘Well it’s good to have you back,’ he said. ‘If ever you have any questions about anything, don’t bother with the Chaplain, just ask Tony, Dr Liphook. He’s amazing.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I will,’ and she caught Kimiko watching her from across the room and beaming.
Mortimer cornered her after lunch, catching up with her on the stairs coming down from Hall. ‘We should talk,’ he began. He looked stricken. She wondered if he had slept at all.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t what you …’
‘Really,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
She found she was smiling quite kindly at him. There were shadows under his eyes, bristles on his chin and his hair needed a wash. He was the image of sinful humanity.
‘You won’t …?’
‘I won’t tell,’ she said.
‘But you must let me –’ he began
‘What?’ A few people came past, two steps at a time. Sunday lunches were quiet affairs when the usual hierarchy sagged because most people were out with parents or friends and those left behind were seated at random on two or three tables. ‘What?’ she asked when they were alone again.
‘What do you need?’ he asked.
She saw that, despite her promised discretion, he needed to be able to do something for her so as to pay off a debt of gratitude and let his seniority and the usual order reassert itself. Or perhaps to bind her in a pledge. She thought hard; granted wishes could prove malignant.
‘I like swimming,’ she said, ‘but I hate all the other stuff and I hate the whole ekker book thing.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Just fill it in with whatever you like and bring it to me to sign each week then the duty prefect can’t touch you.’
‘Thanks,’ she said and added, ‘is Lucas worried I’ll tell people?’
Mortimer was staring across Flint Quad, scowling at some boys who were using the space between two buttresses as an improvised fives court. He glanced back at her and she saw the pledge was already wound about them. ‘Sorry, Cullen. I don’t know what you mean,’ he said and sauntered off.
It was unlikely Lucas would show up now but, just in case, she spent the afternoon working with Kimiko in the rose garden. She was gaining confidence in Greek by now and was starting to enjoy it as unreservedly as Kimiko enjoyed maths, as much for the pleasure of forming the letters, of filling a page in her exercise book with their neat, strange shapes as for the ancient meanings they whispered to her. She liked the fact that her name was Greek and could be rendered in Greek letters with no call for crude transliteration. In the back of a notebook she had begun to list the Graeco-English words with her name hidden inside them. Her favourites thus far were pansophy, the pretension to universal knowledge, deipnosophist, one learned in the arts of dining and helicosophy, the geometry of spirals. She liked the way fairly simple Greek words were giving her confidence in understanding and using complex ones in English.
As though responding to a relief in pressure or to a decision to start afresh in a new direction, her first period began that evening. She was embarrassed and disgusted at first and tried stuffing her knickers with folded layers of the absorbent lavatory paper that was one of the luxuries peculiar to the Daughters’ Staircase. But this soon proved untenable and she was obliged to present herself to Nurse.
Resentful at being taken away from Songs of Praise, Nurse made an entry in a little red diary on her desk, opened a drawer and wearily presented her with a small packet of Aspirin, a Dr White’s sanitary belt and a handful of neatly packaged paper towels to go with it. There was also an oddly unhelpful diagrammatic instruction sheet about how the belt and towels fitted together.
Sophie shut herself in a bathroom to do the necessary, missing Margaret keenly for the first time that term. She was appalled. The belt thing tickled, looked repellent and, scariest of all, didn’t seem to fit very c
losely. As for the so-called towels, wearing one soon felt like having a sizeable dead hamster tucked between her legs. She understood now why Daughters having what Nurse called the Curse were obliged to be off games for the duration. It was all she could do to walk upstairs to bed.
She coincided in several Monday lessons with Lucas and had worried he would come after her the way Mortimer had, to apologize or force a discussion. They had already established a routine of coolness, sitting well apart, walking and talking with others in between classes, however, so she realized it took little exaggeration to avoid close contact with him altogether.
He seemed as uncomfortable as she was, avoiding her eye or seeking out company he did not normally choose. Perhaps he was angry at her for not coming home with him on Sunday.
‘He seemed ashamed,’ Kimiko said.
Sophie took her into her confidence. She hit on a way of explaining that at once choked further questions from one quarter and raised Lucas’s reputation in another.
‘The nerve of it!’ Kimiko hissed.
‘He wanted to,’ Sophie sighed. ‘When we went home to his parents’. It’s a big house. It would have been perfectly easy. But I … I didn’t feel ready for that.’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ Kimiko said, trembling slightly at the thrill of being so confided in. ‘We should pray for him.’
‘If you like. But it’s not just him. I was, you know … tempted.’
Kimiko’s pretty eyes grew wider. More than ever, her companionship became a sort of force-field in which Sophie could travel safely from class to class.
Kimiko confided that she had been tempted too, once, in Osaka, where the son of her father’s driver had shared his cigarette with her by breathing the smoke into her mouth. ‘We kissed for hours,’ she admitted. ‘I wouldn’t do it now, of course.’
‘Of course not. But …’
‘But it was amazing. My lips got really hard. And my earlobes and my …’ She glanced down at her chest by way of illustration. Kimiko’s chest was almost as flat as Sophie’s still but her mother bought her things called training bras which at least allowed a rehearsal for maturity. Margaret regarded these in the same scornful light she did infant bikinis and kept Sophie in vests, telling her to enjoy the freedom while she could. This was all very well in midwinter but now the days had heated up, Sophie hated the extra layer of cotton under her shirts. Even more, she hated the contortionist’s trick she felt obliged to perform whenever changing before a swim.
She remained queasy about the whole breast thing. She wanted them, but only in order to be like everyone else. And now that she was having her first period, she suspected they too would prove more penalty than reward. There were girls with magnificent breasts, like Weatherall, which apparently gave them the power to unsettle and excite a group of boys merely by entering the room. But Sophie had noticed that the excitement was about the breasts to the exclusion of their owner’s other characteristics. Blessed with breasts they risked becoming nothing but. And yet there was a power to them, and not just over men. Breasts seemed the source of Margaret’s calm assurance and Nurse’s worldly wisdom.
For all the stinks, bangs and Bunsen burners in chemistry, biology was far more popular among the boys for the simple reason that most of its teachers were women, whose breasts, rustling beneath their white coats, caught a class’s attention more consistently than anything Mr Otterbourne could do with a puddle of mercury.
For the rest of the term, Sophie’s flat-chestedness along with the regular indignities of dead hamster syndrome and her secret knowledge of the thing between Lucas and Mortimer constantly checked her enjoyment of the summer. Compared to how she had been, she felt overcast, reluctant, prickly. When she could have been lolling with friends under the plane trees or enjoying banana milkshakes and chips at the cricket pavilion café, she shut herself away with her books, determined that one area of her life, at least, should be without blemish. But this merely introduced another anxiety into her waking hours and another dark element to her dreams. Until she had begun to study so hard, the possibility of failure had occurred to her but now it was joined by the possibility of mediocrity, which seemed almost worse.
Worrying so, she developed hot, bumpy patches of eczema behind her knees and inside her elbows, which she scratched in a delirious fury until she drew blood. The sight of blood would shame and check her for a while but then her clothes or bed sheets would stick to the tiny scabs, dragging on them, rubbing in tiny traces of laundry soap, making them itch the more. Her scalp itched constantly too but in a different, oily way. She used ferociously medicated shampoo that stank of hot tarmac and caused temporary, agonizing blindness when it trickled into her eyes, but even though she used it every day, where she had previously only had to wash her hair once or twice a week, her questing fingernails still found great scales and bumps on her scalp from which, sooner or later, she would start teasing out flakes of dead skin that was often orange with dried blood and matter.
All these sufferings she now found she could offer to Jesus. Religion started to work, she discovered, once you had a big enough problem to drop in the collection bag. When Old Testament readings spoke of blood sacrifices, she no longer thought with disgust of bleating ewes and the ripe steam from slaughtered heifers but of Dr White’s clotted hamsters, the hot itch where she pressed the back of her knees against the pew and of the hair she hardly dared comb for fear of the shaming flakes other girls shrank from and pretended were infectious.
She began to receive communion. She would ring the bells with the others, then, while they read comics and played chess in the ringing-chamber, go to her pew in the gallery and take part. She sang the hymns, her small voice drowned out by the din of the organ above her. She joined in the prayers, making herself think about what they were saying. When the Chaplain summoned them to the altar, she hurried out, through the ringing-chamber, down the spiral staircase and in at the back of Chapel. She appreciated the fact that this meant she was always at the back of the queue, a woman of Samaria, picking up crumbs, she liked to think, from under His table. The wine and the wafer, the forgiveness, the small, sweet rush of alcohol then the real coffee and biscuits and bright-eyed zeal of the Christian Unionists brought her a peace that lasted a few precious hours. Like the tar shampoo, however, its effects wore off once she regained the privacy to scratch.
She gave Mortimer her ekker book to sign each week, but largely because it made things even and easier between them. A discreet word from him to Nurse saw her spared the horrors of the athletics track as it no doubt would the hockey pitch. But she had no trouble fulfilling her weekly exercise quota because the daily luxury she allowed herself was an hour-long swim. After the brief, cynical idleness her friendship with Lucas had fostered, she rediscovered the release of swimming lengths until her legs were almost too tired to kick and her arms began to tremble when she allowed them to rest at her sides.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
(fourteen years, six months)
Summer holidays felt even longer to Wakefield House children than they did for most because there was no trip away, no holiday within a holiday to break the eight weeks into intervals of expectation, excitement and winding-down. Kieran organized long, heat-frazzled daytrips in the minibus, to Stonehenge, to the seaside, to a funfair, but otherwise the children and teenagers had to make their own amusement. Some of the older ones found pitifully paid holiday jobs, serving in coffee shops or delivering Sunday papers but, unlike some parents Sophie was now hearing of, Margaret put no pressure on them to do this.
‘Time enough for work when you’re older,’ she would say. ‘Time enough for everything.’
Wilf was out all day running errands and making tea at a firm of lorry mechanics where he hoped for an apprenticeship when he left school and in the evenings was still bewitched by Jackie so was rarely around. On her first few days home, Sophie had sat in his room a bit, playing with his things, surprised to be missing him so cruelly. Then, inspired by Kimiko
if not directly by Jesus, she aspired to be good. She found a certain pleasure in becoming one of the house’s ‘big girls’. She took smaller children swimming in the town baths. She rallied them into playing board games or splashing in the padding pool or larking under the garden hose. She helped Margaret in the kitchen.
Glad to have her back, appreciating the support perhaps, Margaret took her to the GP for some powerful steroid cream for the eczema. Sophie was defensive when Margaret tried to winkle out of her what might be the worry behind it and hid behind a story she had heard that most eczema was caused by laundry bleach or the new biological washing powders everyone was using.
‘There’s no point you sticking at that place if it makes you unhappy,’ Margaret said. ‘Just say the word and we’ll move you out of there and into the girls’ grammar in time for the autumn.’
‘No!’ Sophie said, horrified. ‘It’s not making me unhappy. I’m fine. I’ve just got itchy legs and stuff.’
She wasn’t meant to apply the cream anywhere her skin was broken but as soon as she saw how fast it worked, she spread it even where her nails had recently lifted scabs, wanting only to be whole again.
When she admitted to her scalp problem, Margaret gave her a head massage, which didn’t help the itching much but relaxed Sophie enough for her to mention Nurse and the Dr White’s belt. Margaret roared with laughter, apologized, hugged her, kissed her itchy head and showed her a Tupperware box on the top of the first-aid cupboard which she said was always kept well stocked with all sizes of tampons. Dr White’s, she explained, were favoured by the sort of mothers who thought ignorance was bliss and masturbation a sin. ‘And I’m the nearest you have to a mother and I’m not like that so you’re to come and see me if there’s anything you want to know. Anything at all, Soph.’