The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  “Well, look who’s here,” Paulie said. “Has your creepy boyfriend left you and gone home?”

  “Paulie, are you okay?” I asked. I could hardly breathe. I’d just noticed the bloody razor in the sink.

  “Do I fucking look like I’m okay, Bradford? Do I?”

  “You—you cut yourself.”

  “No. The razor just walked over and did it all by itself,” Paulie said. “Just like the washing on the floor. It fucking decided all by itself to fall off the clothesline.” Paulie sneered. “If you think this is a mess, wait till you see the staff room tomorrow.”

  “Paulie, you’re upset. Let’s go have a smoke,” I said.

  “ ‘Paulie, you’re upset,’ ” she mimicked. “ ‘Let’s go have a smoke.’ ”

  “I know what happened is awful, but maybe you should—well, maybe you should give up on Tory.”

  “Just give up? Is that your answer, Bradford? What about me? Does anybody care about how I feel? All they want to do is interrogate me or keep me locked up in this fucking school. It’s too late. I’ll lose everything if I just fucking give up now.”

  Neither of us had given a thought to Miss Phillips or the other matrons who were still downstairs cleaning up or seeing off the girls, now going to the breakfast parties at day girls’ houses. So when we heard a voice, we nearly jumped out of our skins. Somebody was coming our way, cursing and puffing like an out-of-shape athlete. We both turned to look. For a second I thought I was dreaming. Viola Higgs was pedalling toward us down the corridor, her shoulders hunched in a racing crouch, her long yellowy-white braid hanging down the back of her dark shoulders like a young girl’s. The sight of her powdered face straining with determined energy made my hands and feet go cold. Paulie and I hid behind the door and watched.

  The ghost seemed to be having trouble managing her old bike, and she cursed again as she stood up and heaved her unwieldy machine around the curve in the tower corridor. Then she started down the south hall, and immediately she began picking up speed, as if she were getting used to the tricycle, whose ridiculous headlight flickered against the wall just the way I had seen it in my first dream about her. Now she was no longer pedalling but standing up and coasting—a flying virago whose shadow billowed on the wall behind us like a bat’s, taking the breath out of our lungs and leaving us awed and terrified, like the children we were trying not to be. Then the squeak of wheels died out and she was gone.

  Paulie whistled. “Don’t stand there like a dope,” she hissed. “Let’s go after her.”

  She pointed down a corridor. I should take that one, she said, and she’d take the other. I did as she told me but walked slowly, shuffling my feet, not wanting to be alone but afraid to disobey her.

  No sooner had Paulie rounded the corner than I heard a creepy snapping noise. I tiptoed down the small flight of steps to the fifth-floor landing. The junior school was just below me. Outside, the blizzard was so thick now, I couldn’t see the clock of Kings College or the roofs of the houses just outside the school grounds. I listened again for the noise and then giggled. It was the Union Jack on the roof cracking in the wind. I went back to find Paulie, but now she, too, had disappeared. I checked her room; it was empty. I called her name, but she didn’t answer. For once at old Before Christ I had privacy. And then I saw Paulie’s keys on the dresser—the clump with her master key to all the rooms in the boarding school and the key to her trunk. I didn’t think about it; I just did it. I opened Paulie’s steamer trunk. Inside, I found Ismay’s missing musical scores and the torn-out pages of Morley’s Gray’s Anatomy. It was the section on the penis.

  At the bottom of the page, next to a paragraph subtitled “Surgical Anatomy,” Paulie had written in big block letters, “VERY IMPORTANT.” The section read: “The penis occasionally requires removal for malignant disease.… Sometimes it is requisite to remove the whole organ from its attachment to the rami of the ossa pubis and ischia. The former operation is performed by cutting off the whole of the anterior part of the penis with one sweep of the knife.” The sentence had been underlined with a long wavy line.

  I stared at the pages uneasily. I wondered if she’d taken other things of Morley’s that I hadn’t noticed were missing. That was the moment when I should have put two and two together, but I did no such thing. Worn-out and slightly tipsy from Jack’s gin, I headed off to my room and went to bed.

  50

  When I awoke, there wasn’t a sound in the tower except for Ismay snoring and the wind moving through the creaking elms outside. It had stopped blizzarding. It was very cold—colder than usual. I crept out of my bedroom past the cubicles of sleeping girls, their bedrooms littered with crinolines and long white gloves, and here and there a ruined pair of dyed cloth high heels, streaked with water stains from walking through the snow. Paulie’s bed was empty. Where was she? Down in the heating tunnel? The door to Mrs. Peddie’s room was unlocked. I peered in. Her bed was empty. I remembered she was going off duty after the dance. I walked around the Heintzman and stood in front of the door to the tunnel. I listened for the noise of the heating pipes. Maybe the Virgin had switched off the plant for the night. That would be just like her—cutting costs. And then I heard the familiar banging clatter of the heat rushing down the pipes. I whispered anxiously, “Paulie! Paulie! Are you in there?”

  I heard somebody panting. Panting hard. Mouse, sharpen up. It’s you, I scolded myself. And only you who is making that sound. I called Paulie’s name again. No answer. The atmosphere felt strange. As if I weren’t alone in Mrs. Peddie’s room. As if something waited for me behind that corniced door. I couldn’t say for sure just what. But something.

  In my mind, I heard Paulie’s voice: Oh, Mouse, you’re just a scaredy-cat. Open the door and go down. I turned the knob, hoping the door was locked. If I opened it, would I see Viola’s ghost again? Or was something more truly horrible than even I could imagine waiting for me at the mouth of the tunnel? Shaking, I descended the stairs slowly, I had to cover my nose so I wouldn’t choke on the dusty air. I was getting good at sneaking around. Once, twice, I stopped and called Paulie, and the sound of my voice reverberated in the gloomy tunnel like the school’s bell ringing underwater.

  The mouth of a new tunnel. A gust of cold blew right into my face. Sharp February wind. I shivered fiercely. Where was it coming from? This tunnel sloped downward and became more zigzaggy, and darker and narrower. It was stacked with extra chairs for the auditorium, so I couldn’t even squeeze up against the wall if I wanted a place to hide. I heard Sal’s voice advocating caution, scolding me for my foolishness. But my own Mouse voice was telling me to go on.

  Up ahead, a beam of light no bigger than a yellow eye was shining on the rusty old pipes hanging above me like tubby worms. I stopped, panting again in fear. And then I noticed Viola’s custom-made tricycle upended on the ground. The light beam streamed up from the antique headlamp on the handlebars. Strewn on the ground around the bike were the contents of the old headmistress’s cycling trunk—mudguards, steering rods, trumpet-shaped horns, and tire glue.

  Paulie was on her knees in the middle of the mess of tools and old bicycle parts. She was holding a box in her hands. When she saw me, she pushed the box back into the shadows.

  “Bradford, is that you?”

  Paulie came over to me and shook my arm. “Something terrible has happened.” Her voice sounded unnaturally earnest, and I felt a little chill.

  “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “It’s not me, it’s Sergeant. He fell against one of the heating pipes.”

  “Sergeant?” I noticed I was gasping.

  “You’ve got to save him—the way you did Tory.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mouth-to-mouth. You know.” Paulie was yanking my arm so hard, she was hurting me. “First-aid.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Farther down the tunnel. Oh, Bradford, hurry. Maybe he’s not dead yet.”

  I clomped down the old passa
geway, trying my best to keep up with Paulie, who was taking giant strides.

  51

  Sergeant’s body was about four hundred yards farther down the tunnel. He lay spread-eagled across a broken flow pipe, still made up as Viola Higgs in a funny black dress with a lace bib. He wasn’t wearing the wig he’d had on when Paulie and I had first seen him up in the tower. It was a little hard to see how hurt he was, because it was very hot and misty in the tunnel and the noise of escaping steam made me feel like I was standing inside a boiling kettle. Light seemed to shoot off in all directions from his small body, and there was an odour I’d never smelt before. I didn’t want to think about where it was coming from, because I knew it was coming from him.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God, Paulie!” I moaned. I bent down over him, trying to be self-assured like Morley, and lifted one of his little hands to feel for his pulse. His arm had been lying across the scalding pipe, and the upper layer of skin came off in my fingers like greasy paper. I dropped his hand and my shoulders heaved, but nothing came out of my mouth. The dwarf’s mouth was open and slightly twisted, as if he were disapproving of something. Both his eyes were open, and his right eye, I noticed, was purplish black and swollen, as if somebody had punched him there.

  “Yeah,” Paulie said. “Ding-dong, pussy’s in the well.”

  “Don’t talk like that! It’s horrible.” I was suddenly shouting. “We’ve got to go and tell somebody!”

  “If we tell, they’ll think we did it.”

  “Are you crazy, Paulie? We’ve got to tell Miss Vaughan. This is a dead man!”

  “So you go and tell,” Paulie said.

  “You don’t seem very upset.”

  Paulie didn’t answer. I grabbed one of his legs. “Let’s move him off the pipe so he doesn’t get more burnt.” Paulie sucked her teeth as if I’d done something unfair, but she picked up his other leg to help. We tried to drag him, but he slid awkwardly out of our hands, as if we were struggling to pull a mattress off a bed. We each grabbed an arm, and this gave us more leverage; we dragged him away from the flow pipe, and his bandy legs trailed easily along behind him. His head rolled on his neck like a heavy cabbage. We laid him down behind the cycling trunk, and I started to cry again as I covered him with a blanket to keep the stray steam from falling on him.

  Paulie pointed toward the far end of the tunnel. “Go get Willy,” she said. “He’s in the garage. I’ll wait here.” And I ran as fast as my shaking legs would carry me off down the tunnel. I found Willy asleep in the room he shared with Sergeant above the garage. He came without arguing, bringing along a shovel, as if he were going to bury Sergeant on the spot or ward off an attacker—I’m not sure which. When we got back, Paulie was gone. I called her name again and again, and then I knew. Slowly, I lifted Sergeant’s skirt.

  Before I felt the nausea, I felt something like awe. Willy, beside me, said something in Czech and crossed himself.

  Between Sergeant’s legs was a gash as long as an appendicitis scar. Inside the gash I could see the walls of fatty red muscle, and I faintly smelled the horrible odour again. The left side of his pelvis was a light-blueberry colour. Postmortem staining, the forensic specialist said in court. But there was almost no blood on his groin and his thighs. Dead men don’t bleed. I learned that in court, too. Bleeding is a vital reaction. The coroner said there was no chance I could have saved him. The first blows with the field-hockey stick had been fatal. By the time I went down the stairs into the tunnel, he was already dead.

  For a few minutes, Willy and I stood by Sergeant’s corpse, like strangers loitering. I felt sick to my stomach again and confused about what to do. Finally, Willy took me to see the Virgin, who was in her housecoat making early-morning tea in her apartment. She seemed annoyed at first, as if she didn’t want to be interrupted, and then she smiled when she saw who it was. And I felt complicit, the way I always felt when I noticed her affection for me. I knew I no longer had to be loyal to Paulie, but the words took a long time to come out.

  52

  During her trial, Paulie sat beside Miss Whitlaw, her lawyer—an older woman whose gravel-pit voice would have put the Virgin’s to shame. She seemed to like Paulie, and I was glad. Sometimes Paulie smiled when the courtroom reporter passed her my notes, but she never read them—not that I could tell. Only crumpled them up and laid them on the bench beside her. And not once did she turn around to look at me. Not once. As far as she was concerned, I was a traitor even though what I told the police helped convince the jury that she was mentally unbalanced and shouldn’t be found guilty of murder. Because I was only thirteen at the time, the school made a deal with the Crown, so I didn’t have to testify. But the court read my statement. I sat three rows behind Paulie every day, staring at the back of her head. She’d cut her hair short now in a Prince Valiant style. It suited her. On the second-to-last day of the trial, the inspector read my statement.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Am I correct in assuming that the accused female before the court, Pauline Lee Sykes, was sixteen years of age at the time of her arrest?

  MR. JOCELYN: Yes, my lord.

  HIS LORDSHIP: And for a number of years Pauline Sykes has wanted to be a boy and has used the name Lewis Sykes.

  MR. JOCELYN: That is correct, my lord.

  HIS LORDSHIP: And that she became friendly with a girl whose name is Victoria Quinn, also sixteen years of age.

  MR. JOCELYN: Yes, my lord. They went steady for about a year, and all during their relationship Paulie led Victoria to believe she was a boy named Lewis Sykes.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Did no one else know of this special relationship?

  MR. JOCELYN: Only one other, my lord: a student at the school who roomed with the accused.

  HIS LORDSHIP: You don’t mean to tell me that the accused was able to get away with being a boy from the inside of a girls’ dormitory? [Noises in the courtroom]

  MR. JOCELYN: Yes, my lord.

  HIS LORDSHIP: And you have the statement of the student who knew about the relationship of the accused with Victoria Quinn?

  MR. JOCELYN: Yes, my lord. This is the statement of Mary Beatrice Bradford:

  “In the fall of 1963, I roomed with Pauline Sykes. I had no reason to consider her insane—”

  MISS WHITLAW: Objection, my lord. The stress that he puts on that line is inappropriate, since the statement by Miss Bradford concludes with the remark that the accused was, and I quote, “often out of her head.”

  HIS LORDSHIP: Thank you, Miss Whitlaw. Go on, Mr. Jocelyn.

  MR. JOCELYN: “It was Pauline Sykes who tutored me in masculine behaviour—”

  MISS WHITLAW: Objection, my lord. In what Pauline Sykes believed was expected of boys.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Thank you, Miss Whitlaw. Please continue, Mr. Jocelyn.

  MR. JOCELYN: “On the instructions of Pauline Sykes, I performed a series of tests. These included whipping the accused and letting Pauline Sykes whip me; walking along the ramparts of the school tower blindfolded—”

  HIS LORDSHIP: These young girls actually whipped each other?

  MR. JOCELYN: Yes, my lord. They also tormented animals together.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Bed-wetting, cat-getting, fire-setting—aren’t these the early symptoms of a disordered mind?

  MR. JOCELYN: That is the Macdonald triad, my lord, used to predict violence in young males. Only the student, Mary Beatrice Bradford, appeared to have feelings of remorse for what they did, while the accused did not.

  HIS LORDSHIP: The accused had considerable influence over the Bradford girl, then?

  MR. JOCELYN: Oh, considerable, my lord. She said, and I am quoting from her statement now, “It was necessary for me to win the approval of Paulie—ah, Pauline Sykes because I wasn’t well-liked at school.”

  HIS LORDSHIP: I see. She has a physical handicap, this girl?

  MR. JOCELYN: A slightly hunched shoulder, my lord. I believe her condition has been improving under the medical care initiated by the school nurse.

  HIS LORDSHI
P: NOW, Inspector George, will you read us the statement of the person you met in the ravine near Wilbury Hollow on the night of February 23, 1964.

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: Yes, my lord. I asked, “Where do you live?” She replied, “Bath Ladies College.” I then asked, “What is your telephone number?” She replied, “Six-nine-two, one-one-one-one.” I asked, “What do you do there?” She replied, “I am a gardener.” I then said, “Pauline, I must warn you that you are arrested on a charge of murder. Do you wish to say anything in answer to the charge? You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say may be taken down in writing and used in evidence against you. Do you understand?” She said yes. She then asked me what was going to happen to her, and I said I was taking her to the station and we could talk there.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Can you summarize some of this, Inspector?

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: Of course, my lord. At the station, Constable Jocelyn asked her if she knew what she’d done. She said, “I killed a guy, he was a homo.” She smiled in a pleased way and finished eating a bag of potato chips.

  HIS LORDSHIP: We are not interested in her diet at this point, Inspector.

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: Yes, my lord. We asked her why she did it. And she replied that her girlfriend’s family had found out she wasn’t a boy, so she killed a man to get his penis, my lord.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Can you read us the brother’s statement, Sergeant?

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: Yes, my lord. Begging your pardon, my lord. This is the statement of Richard Quinn, the brother of Victoria Quinn.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Inspector George, I assume the defendant knew this boy?

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: Yes, my lord. He disapproved of her relationship with his sister and challenged the defendant to prove she was a male, so she killed the school janitor to get his genitals.