by Katie Lowe
Spring
Chapter 11
‘“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost”,’ Professor Malcolm said, his arms outstretched like some poor ham actor.
‘I’m sure many of us in this room can appreciate this sentiment, whether at the midway point of our lives or otherwise.’ A few students offered ironic laughs; Robin raised an eyebrow sharply, and rolled her eyes. I, for my part, stared numbly into the shoulders of the student in front of me, trying to wake up, to blink away another excruciating hangover.
Clouds of silver smoke rising languid from an ashtray in a dank café; the tempered crack of milky tablets from plastic slides; a bird’s tangled corpse, the prickle of sticky bone and beak as Robin crushed it under a heavy boot. My heart, thundering frantic as I slumped over the edge of the bed, watching peeling posters shudder at the corner of my vision; the perpetual feeling of being watched, the thin rip of paper as I pulled them down, faces torn and jagged.
Little children watching, scared, as the four of us rocked on the swings, hands cold on chain, in an empty playground, before the storm began. Running, screaming, through the rain, manic and alive with violent breath.
My hands bruised black with hair dye, Robin’s, then mine; grazed knees, white shreds of skin in the dirt; warm water and cheap wine, straight from the bottle. Nausea. Vomit, marbled with spit, the cool relief of the toilet bowl. Aching bones. Last night’s mascara, in fragments on my cheek. Even now, my memories of the spring break are thus, clouded in the low haze of intoxication.
It says something of our shared state that I, in truth, remember those two weeks only in brief, momentary flashes, detached from their source, uprooted and carried on a breeze.
‘You look like shit,’ Robin hissed, and slid a tiny, rolled-up ball of cling film across the desk. ‘Take one of these. It’ll make you feel better.’
‘What is it?’ I whispered, though of course I knew.
‘Pick-me-up,’ she said, face deadly serious, a web of tiredness under her eyes too. Clearly it wasn’t enough to counteract the effects of the previous night. With a sigh, she placed a palm over the wrap.
‘If you’re not going to take them, at least cover them up,’ she said, eyes now a little fierce, their pupils round and glassy. I shook my head, and the pills disappeared in a single, deft movement. I felt abashed, shrinking a little into my chair as Robin turned abruptly to face the front of the class.
I looked out at the burning red-brick buildings, the cluster of sparrows swooping at crumbs in the grass while the campus lay empty, all students still at home, or trapped in class, and the workmen clearing trees having briefly stopped, air mercifully silent. In the spring sunlight, the stony faces of the figures that peered down from the buildings seemed possessed of a new clarity: it was impossible, walking through the Quad, not to imagine oneself watched by disapproving faces, the cool judgment of the dead.
‘The Divine Comedy, then, represents the journey of the soul towards God, and was an influence not only on Blake, but on Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot, and Beckett, not to mention contemporary writers and artists working today,’ he went on, his voice flat and toneless. ‘It is the Inferno, however, that has most powerfully captured the artistic imagination – primarily thanks to its recognition of sin in its innumerable forms, and Dante’s visionary evocation of his many circles of Hell. As Ciardi’s introduction explains, Dante’s Inferno represents the realm of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellow men. It appeals to the voyeur in all of us – the “what-if” that underpins the temptation of sin, and the schadenfreude inherent in the punishment of others for those crimes we, too, might choose to commit.’
He paused and looked around the room, aware, perhaps, that for the first time he had captured the attention of every member of the class. He lowered his voice to little more than a whisper. ‘“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, the sign says, above the gates of Hell. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” A powerful statement, though one the reader finds strangely enticing – the screams of the eternally damned drawing us in, despite our compulsion to turn our eyes away.
‘This may be why the Inferno has remained such a touchstone of our culture, centuries after its composition. Because who among us can honestly say – or, rather, will be able to honestly say, as we lie on our deathbeds and await our own judgments – that the myriad temptations of lust, of greed, of treachery and violence have not found their way into our own lives? And who among us will be able to resist?’
Every one of us seemed for a moment to look inwards, our doubts and guilty moments revealed to us, for a split second, at least. A flutter of tension passed over the class. Professor Malcolm, undone by the pressure, burst into a hacking, smoke-inflected cough, and the spell was broken. Made uncomfortable by the connection, that brief moment of shared intimacy, students shifted in their chairs and flicked lazily through their notes, searching for nothing but escape.
There was a soft knock on the door. The class looked up as one as the Dean peered through; they looked back down at their desks, uninterested. ‘Sorry to disturb,’ he said, his face serious, expressionless. He waved, catching my eye as he did so. ‘I need to borrow one of your students, if you don’t mind.’ I winced at the prospect of finding myself singled out in front of the class; caught, too, beside Robin, both of us bloodshot and pale.
The professor shrugged and turned back to the board. ‘Robin,’ the Dean said. ‘May I borrow you?’
She looked at me, briefly, a sideways glance; I looked at the Dean, who placed both hands in his pockets and leaned back against the door, his face expressionless as he watched her gather her things. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, following him out of the class. A silence fell, for a moment, until the Professor scrawled ‘You were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge’, tall on the blackboard, and resumed his usual, miserable drone.
There was no indication that anything was wrong but for the line of buses parked behind the school, drivers smoking out front, sour-faced at being called in to work in the middle of the day.
The campus was crowded, all students let out of classes at once, gathering in clusters around the boards that closed off most of the Quad, some whispering, others shouting and laughing, voices high on the wind.
Rain began to spit, and we were steered onto buses, heading into the town, where our parents were to meet us. My parent, of course, didn’t; she now phobic of the ringing phone, tucked away safely in a drawer, still connected and occasionally ringing, but always ignored.
I looked around for Robin, for Alex and Grace, elated at an afternoon without classes, not least because I hadn’t done the reading – didn’t know, for that matter, what the assigned text even was. Finding myself alone, however, I jumped on the bus and took a seat beside a girl whose name I didn’t know, and who picked nervously at her nails and refused to meet my eye all the way into the town.
It was only the next day that I found out what had happened, and only then in slivers, gossip caught between radio broadcasts and conversations overheard in the streets.
In the process of cutting down the wych elm, a workman had driven his chainsaw into the trunk, horrified to find the innards of the tree dripping darkly through the cut. Not sap, though it had the same thick, coagulated texture, the same glassy sheen. But the colour was unmistakable. He had crossed himself, and walked away as the first seam of blood rivered over roots and seeped, blackening, into the grass.
Another followed; the tree bled again. He winced, but continued his work, shards of red-tipped bark flying into the mud, upturned like tombstones.
A supervisor passed, and stopped, peering at the seam of blood dripping slowly down the bark of the tree, creeping into rivets, marking the cracks. He steadied himself as he walked a circuit of the tree, resisting the
urge to mutter a prayer beneath his breath. Found a crack in the wood, and another, and another; stuck trembling fingers into the gaps, and pulled. The bark came away in a single block, and beneath, the crumpled body of Emily Frost bent double, peering out through empty eyes, maggots writhing in their place.
When the last bus left campus, the police poured in, each choking, sickened by the rotting sweetness in the air. Some said the pulse of creatures below the skin made it look as though her heart might still be beating; the blood, too, suggested she hadn’t been there long, though at autopsy this was proven to be incorrect, an anomaly nobody could quite explain. The coroner would conclude she’d been there several months, packed in before the onset of rigor mortis made her too stiff to fit. The claw-mark furrows found later led some to speculate she’d been put there, in fact, before she was quite dead.
In the weeks after that night at the cove, a new closeness had settled between the four of us. With the coming of spring, life creeping slowly back and filling the campus with gorgeous, blooming colour, it seemed all possibility and potential was ours, limited only by imagination. We thought, with the reckless, foolhardy faith of adolescence, that our friendship was impenetrable, a permanent, lasting thing.
I’d even felt bold enough to raise the subject of Emily, as Robin and I lay together in bed, each waiting for the other to fall asleep. ‘I just wish they’d find her,’ she’d said. ‘So we can all move on.’
Now, at last, she’d been found. And I felt sick with envy, sick that they had been reunited: our friendship splintered by her return.
Chapter 12
The spring break was extended by a week, school closing after Emily’s body was found, no doubt to prevent hysteria, to give us time to mourn. The town was filled with us, the student body exiled into cafés, lingering on the beach, eating ice creams and ducking gulls as they swooped.
Most students treated it as a holiday, though the drama thickened the air with whispers. Everyone laughed at the warnings given, as instructed by the letter mailed to each of our parents: not to talk to strange men, to be mindful of the dangers of dark alleys and low mist, never to go anywhere alone.
But I was alone.
Robin, Alex, and Grace disappeared, none of them home, or, at least, none of them answering my numerous calls. I had stilted conversations with each of their parents, except Alex’s, whose phone simply rang endlessly, for five, six minutes at a time. I was told each of them was ‘out’, though their parents didn’t know, or, as I became increasingly convinced, chose not to tell me, where.
Emily’s face was inescapable, and I felt myself addicted, buying newspapers and sneaking downstairs to watch the TV news whenever my mother was asleep. I stared at the pages, or into the screen, like Narcissus at his pond, while devastated friends talked of her kindness and beauty.
Nicky made several appearances, offering wide-eyed anecdotes about her friendship with Emily, though from what I could gather they’d never really got along – but who could begrudge her the attention? Reporters, too, spoke of Emily as a good girl, a kind girl, a sweet girl: all the things I had at some point supposed I could be. I wondered: If it were me, would they say the same? And if so, was she ever good, kind, sweet at all?
Those of us left behind whispered amongst ourselves, a chorus led by Nicky, who called daily – I picking up the phone breathless, waiting for the others. She told of hushed calls overheard on extension lines, of theories muttered by mothers after a third or fourth nightcap, daughters listening overhead, poised at the top of the stairs.
There were suggestions of some accident: tree climbing gone somehow wrong, a fall straight into the belly of the tree, covered over by the leaves and left to rot. Nicky shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t find Emily Frost climbing a tree. Her nails were always perfect.’ A deranged father, a mother too terrified to speak, though their faces, flickering through the static of our TV screens, seemed genuine, eyes hollowed out with loss.
Ever more outlandish suggestions appeared, gathering strength with every whisper. A pentagram etched into the wood; a letter stuffed down her throat, ink too blurred to read, rotted away by spit and stomach acid. Ms Boucher’s name came up, from time to time – ‘a witch,’ they said, rolling their eyes and speaking of curses, laughing at the suggestion. We learned things we hadn’t realized we were too young to know, though we responded to them with a studied indifference: how police might test for DNA, spit and semen in intimate places; the cruel flash of luminal, purple shadows of lividity and finger marks on pale arms.
Reporters plucked out song lyrics and video games, wilfully misreading signifiers and contorting them into lurid inducements to steal, fuck, and kill, and, thus, in a situation in which no one knew much beyond the facts, it still seemed to us that the adults knew nothing at all. We cringed for them, a black, wretched humour that soothed the horror of the crime.
When school reopened at last, a shrine to Emily appeared in the middle of the Quad, where all building work had ceased; beneath the half-cut wych elm (wrapped in black with a shroud around the trunk and body now removed) flowers and photographs appeared, candles left to singe the fur of supermarket-bought teddy bears and handwritten notes. A memorial service was planned, all music classes cancelled, replaced by endless rehearsals in the Great Hall, from which chamber music and the choir’s sullen singing echoed in the air outside.
Stares stalked me down corridors, whispers silenced as I entered every room. I knew what they wanted: to know where the girls had gone. But when I told them, they didn’t believe I didn’t know.
‘Violet!’ the Dean said, as I entered, his tone grimly cheerful; too much, as usual. Since the night we’d discussed the girls, he’d been overly pleasant. He’d chosen not to mention what followed, a kindness I was grateful for, though the fact of it still lingered in the air between us.
The rest of the faculty, by contrast, had turned sombre, remote. Annabel had cancelled our extra classes entirely, a good thing, I supposed, since I was currently her only student, and Professor Malcolm had delivered a lecture on grief so unbearably dull that it made each of us consider our dearly departed the lucky ones.
The Dean, however, had remained cheery – a necessity, I imagined, given his role as the school’s main counsellor, though additional, temporary ones had been brought in to assist with the process. The vast majority of students used these, taking every opportunity to drop this fact into conversation – turning grieving into a competitive sport.
‘How’s my favourite student?’ he said, leaning back in his chair. A tall, grey-eyed girl sat on the desk, blonde hair in a high ponytail, feet on the chair below; she smiled, dimly, as our eyes met.
‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. He looked back at her, warmly, an intimate smile. ‘Do you want me to come back later?’
‘Oh no, no need,’ he said, slapping a hand on her knee. She flinched. ‘Violet, this is my daughter, Sophie. She’s joining our fine institution next year,’ he said, adding a rough pat on the back. She burned red hot with shame; I gave a sympathetic smile, though I still felt a strange envy at daughters embarrassed by their fathers, a desire to shake them, to offer them some kind of trade.
‘Oh really?’ I said, feigning interest. ‘Where are you now?’
‘I’ve been studying in the States,’ she said, a gloss of pride in her tone, a coolness rehearsed. ‘But my mum’s moving to Beijing, so it’s there or back here again.’
‘Oh.’ I looked around, hopelessly, for a reason to leave. On the rare occasions my students, now, see us – teachers – as beings capable of failed relationships and personal affairs, it seems they fall apart; in the moment, my reaction was much the same.
He placed his hand on Sophie’s shoulder. ‘Maybe you girls will end up being friends, hmm?’ She and I both knew, instinctively, that this would never happen – she was tall, sophisticated, beautiful; I very much the opposite.
We were from different circles; would pass in corridors without so much as a glance, as though
this conversation had never taken place. I see it now, among the girls I teach: the oil-and-water separation of types, hard to define and yet instinctively known. It’s a power one learns as a girl, and never forgets: the ability to place one’s peers in their hierarchy with little more than a glance. Impressive, I suppose, in its own, cruel way.
She slid off the desk, ran her hands down the back of her skirt. Too short, I thought. ‘Well, I’m going to go get my stuff. See you in September, Dad,’ she added, picking up her coat.
He stood, pulled her back, and placed a kiss on her head. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said. I avoided Sophie’s eyes, each of us mortified for the other. She shook him off, and headed for the door.
‘Feed Poppet before you go!’ he added, shouting after her as she disappeared, the click of her heels echoing in the hallway outside. He turned to me. ‘The cat,’ he said, smiling. ‘So – where were we?’
It seemed the Dean was further still from finding any link between them; the names I knew were mingled among those I didn’t, and seemed to have no link to our society, or its past.
It gave me a cool sense of satisfaction, knowing my secrets were the ones he sought. Sometimes I made my own little amendments to the cards as I copied them out, usually further obscuring them from his research, though occasionally – for reasons I can barely explain but for the fact it seemed like a kind of tease, a showing off I imagined he’d never see – I’d add tiny details that were, in fact, true, a filling in of missing things that meant nothing to anyone but us.
I didn’t tell the girls any of this, of course – though sometimes I would toy with the idea, usually after Alex had made some coldly patronizing remark, or Robin had joked about a secret I’d never know, apparently out of spite – a way of reminding me that their friendship would always have existed without me: fundamentally and forever an outsider, no matter how close I got. I could have shown them all I knew – but to do so would be to give up my secret link, the only thing about Elm Hollow that was mine, and mine alone.