The Divines

by Ellie Eaton

  “Lauren, did you hear me or what?” Kerry said.

  Stuart’s girlfriend walked across and switched off the television. Lauren uncurled her legs and leant along the sofa to offer me a drag from her cigarette.

  “Fuck me,” she said and gagged. “You smell like shit.”

  I looked down at my Jaeger suit. It was a Saturday. There wasn’t any reason for me to still be wearing a suit but I wanted, I think, to impress Lauren with my new outfit, to give the impression I’d been called away from a pressing task. To show her that I was experienced, that I could negotiate the real world, that I was a professional. Now the suit was wrinkled, there was a dark unidentifiable dribble on my sleeve, which I sniffed, and a smear on the leg.

  “Oh my god,” I remembered. “Sue’s bin fell over.”

  Lauren grinned.

  “Nice one.”

  I had almost forgotten about Kerry, who was standing in front of the blank television screen, her hands on her bare hips. I could see an angry red line running along her waistband where they’d cut her baby out of her. I wondered where Stuart was.

  “Are you two fucking deaf or what?” Kerry said.

  Again, the corner of Lauren’s mouth twitched.

  She offered me a chip from her paper.

  “You hungry?” Lauren asked me, continuing the game. “There’s probably some scampi in the kitchen.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was in fact starving. Except for polo mints, I had barely eaten, nervous about the possibility of seeing Stuart. My godmother, thinking I had period pains or was hungover, had even given me a glass of water and some paracetamol the night before and encouraged me to go to bed early.

  “Go on, help yourself.” Lauren shook her chip bag under my nose.

  Kerry’s face was frozen in disbelief. Her tiny body stiffened, kohl eyes narrowing into two thick, black lines. I couldn’t help but think of Gerry Lake, one hand on her hip, a recalcitrant pout. Standing by the shoe tree Gerry had actually spat with anger; a little froth had come out of her mouth and dangled on a thread down her chin.

  I waited to see if Kerry would detonate in the same way.

  She made a sucking noise through her front teeth.

  “You two think this is funny?”

  Lauren stared right through Kerry as if the television was still playing Stars in Their Eyes and began to hum . . . strumming my pain with his fingers. She chewed noisily on a chip.

  “Fugees are right racists,” she announced. “You’ve heard that thing Lauryn Hill said, about she’d rather eat a black baby than a white person bought her record?”

  “Totally,” I agreed, even though I wasn’t sure she’d got the story right exactly.

  Lauren started to belt out the song.

  That did it. I watched Stuart’s girlfriend explode. She smacked the bag of chips out of Lauren’s hand. Screamed, kicked the sofa so hard that it shook.

  “Get the fuck out of my house. You, too, Hooray Henrietta. Now!”

  Lauren laughed loudly, shrugged, and got up slowly, raising her arms above her head. As she stretched I could see the thing in her hand wasn’t a chip fork at all. Gerry’s hairpin. My mouth opened.

  “We didn’t want to kip here anyway, you gypo,” Lauren fired at Kerry. “Did we, Josephine? We’d catch something.”

  Stuart came in and stood on the threshold of the front room looking at his sister and me. His hair was loose, the fringe flopping forward. He ran one hand through it wearily.

  “Don’t start,” Lauren said. She shoved Gerry’s pin in her jeans pocket, ducked under his arm, and walked out of the house.

  “For fuck’s sake, Stu. Are you just going to stand there and let your sister speak to me like that?” Kerry demanded.

  Stuart didn’t have an answer for that. I remember my leather overnight bag was sitting in the corridor and he carried it to the front door for me. He was a gentleman, I could see.

  “You’ll make sure Lauren gets home, yeah?” he said as he passed the bag, hooking it over my shoulder.

  “Okay,” I said. I felt my skin tingle where our hands had touched.

  “But what about your dad?” I remembered.

  “Don’t worry about him. I’ll sort it.”

  Lauren, waiting for me on the street, stuck two middle fingers up at Kerry, who was watching from behind the sitting room curtain.

  “Give it a rest, Loz,” Stuart said, groaning.

  Pikey, Lauren mouthed.

  Kerry thumped on the window.

  “You can talk, you filthy bitch. I know all about you.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You fuck off, and take your girlfriend with you.”

  A skateboarder on the corner ground to a halt, flipping his board upright. A man squinting into his open car bonnet under the last of the day’s light lifted his head as Lauren steamed past, a long train of obscenities flowing from her mouth. “Slag, tramp, slut, minger.” One or two neighbors came out of their front doors to tut. I chased gracelessly down the road after her in my fitted suit and square wedge heels, my bag thumping my back. Lauren wasn’t wearing any bra, I remember, just one of Stuart’s old football T-shirts tucked into her jeans. But she didn’t care; in fact, I could see she was enjoying it, her breasts jiggling, people staring and heckling. Two men drinking in picnic chairs beside a barbecue wolf whistled.

  When I’d caught up to her, she drooped her arm around my shoulder as if we were Divine, provoking catcalls, one man stamping his boots on the ground with excitement.

  “Fancy a threesome, girls?”

  “In your dreams,” she taunted, “in your dreams.”

  27

  There is nothing divine, I discover, about giving birth. The contractions have barely begun and I puke and shit and swear and am prone to loud, crapulous fits of belching, which I direct at the boys in the flat above. When the real pains start, I lurch around the apartment like a belligerent wino looking for a fight. I rant and rage and drip blood.

  Jürgen ushers me through the early stages of labor as best he can. We don’t mention the fight, that I staggered home clutching my stomach, reeking of beer and peanuts, my trousers sodden. He rubs my shoulders and feeds me a bowl of pasta, and when I am on my knees, cursing and rocking and weeping, he slides aside the furniture as you would for an epileptic to stop them hurting themselves. When the time comes, he drives me to the hospital, bringing with us a copy of our birthing plan, which he hands to a nurse on duty. In this document we have stressed the importance to us of going natural. Old school. This was the way our mothers did it.

  The midwife, on being handed this birthing plan, makes a cursory glance at the header that reads, “PLEASE do NOT offer me any pain medication,” and gives me what I take to be a withering look. Clearly she doesn’t think I am up to it.

  “Don’t let that bitch anywhere near me,” I hiss to Jürgen.

  I am convinced that the whole floor is out to get me. I’m being punished. They put us in a darkened room where I pace in circles for hours, I lose all sense of time, demented, howling in unimaginable agony, speaking gibberish. Eventually, when I am still not dilating, Jürgen leads me out into the corridor where I grip a handrail and stagger up and down like an agoraphobe, gasping in horror whenever a contraction comes on. I am going to die. I actually believe this. When I see an empty gurney in the corridor, I am overcome by an urge to ask for forgiveness, to unburden myself. I cling to Jürgen, sobbing.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  He strokes my hair.

  “For what?”

  And then, just like that, I can’t bear to be touched by him. The nurse is right, I don’t have it in me to endure this much pain. Am I crazy? I summon back the obstetrician.

  “I change my mind, I want the drugs,” I say.

  She looks at Jürgen.

  “Don’t fucking look at him.” I snatch her wrist. “I want the epidural.”

  Jürgen, who hasn’t slept in nearly a day and a half, nods, and when
the anesthetist arrives, my husband backs out of the room guiltily, in search of something to eat. I doze for a while in pain-free serenity, and when the time comes I push and pant and perform all the tricks our birthing instructor has taught us.

  “How now brown cow,” I say.

  The words come out of nowhere.

  “What?” Jürgen’s brow creases.

  “How. Now. Brown. Cow.” I groan.

  The doctor lifts her head up from between my thighs.

  “That’s a new one on me,” she says with a smile. “Okay, I’m going to give you a little cut to help things along.”

  I clench my jaw as if I am trying to shit.

  “How now brown cow. How now brown cow. How now brown cow. How now brown cow.”

  One small flick of the doctor’s knife, one big push, and it’s over.

  A harpy’s wail and . . .

  “Baby girl,” the doctor announces.

  A team of nurses move into action, bustling around the room, weighing and measuring, then they deposit the baby on my chest.

  “Girl,” I repeat, dazed.

  I look down at my daughter.

  Purple faced, fists like a boxer, head thrust back, screaming bloody murder.

  28

  That night Lauren dragged me around the town for a long time, furious, looking for trouble. When she got to the rec grounds the gates were locked, and Lauren shook the chain and kicked the wall and for a moment I thought she might start to cry again, or even hit me.

  “Let’s just go back to yours,” I said.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  But before we got to her road, Lauren took a sudden left turn up a mud track towards my school sports fields, towing me after her. I was hobbling in my new wedge heels to keep up, my bag banging against my thigh.

  “I thought we were going home.”

  “Shortcut.”

  “I’m really hungry,” I moaned.

  “Don’t be a pussy,” she said.

  She swung a leg over the five-bar fence with the Private Property notice bearing our school crest and ran off into the dark.

  “Lauren, wait.”

  I tossed my bag over, tugged up the legs of my suit, and, after hesitating for a moment, followed after her.

  The lacrosse fields, I remember, had been mown and rolled and lined into an athletics track ready for Sports Day by Stuart and the other maintenance men. There was a chalky white triangle marked on the ground for throwing shot put and an area we used for the long jump where Lauren now stood in the moonlight, kicking the sand with her jeans rolled up, like she was at the beach. I wanted to ask for Gerry’s pin back. Instead I stooped to pick up one of the gray balls, tucked it under my chin, turned, and swung. Such was my upper body strength back then it thudded a few pathetic meters into the dark.

  “Nice one,” Lauren snorted.

  Divines were famous for their athletic underachievement, consistently bottom of every interschool competition. Other, more accomplished schools—Ascot or Calne or Cheltenham Ladies’ College—actually cheered when they saw our blue bus rattling up their leafy driveways. We simply didn’t take competition seriously or have the focus or determination required to foster a sense of rivalry. During the annual cross-country race we set off at a sprint, then slowed to a trot once we were out of sight, clambering through the hedge looking for places we could smoke. Henry Peck, it was true, had been a first-rate tennis player. She could hold her own at a county level. But after the Moose relocated to Brunei, she spent less time on court. When he stopped replying to her letters that term, her serve grew sloppier, she barely made any effort to run for the ball, and her returns limped over the net. Out of sympathy we had stopped using the word moose.

  “This is shit,” Lauren said. “Come on.”

  She stepped over a wooden stile, onto the public footpath. In a paddock two horses stood under a tree, nose to flank. Their shadows stretched, stilt legged, across the path. One was a thoroughbred, the other a smaller pony. Lauren climbed up on the fence near a streetlamp, studying them, her jaw set hard. She lit up a cigarette. The pony flicked its ears, interested, watching the flame. I rested my arms on the top rung, wondering what Lauren was up to. I didn’t like the way she was staring at the animals, chewing her lip, her shoulders hunched. It occurred to me that she might try to hurt them in some way. I thought of the time she’d melted the school sign with her lighter, watching it blister and burn.

  “I’m actually pretty tired,” I said. “Let’s go back.”

  “In a bit,” she hushed me and made a clicking noise with her tongue.

  “Here, boy.”

  The pony came first, docile looking and round as a barrel. She flattened her hand and it took nips of her empty palm. Disappointed, it plodded over to me and tried the same trick, nudging my arm and leaving a trail of green saliva on my shoulder. I pulled a clump of long grass from the path and fed it that.

  “Seriously, Lauren,” I tried again. “I’m starving.”

  My voice kicked up high.

  “Seriously?” Lauren mimicked, using one of her voices.

  She slid off the fence and walked over to the gate where two headcollars were hooked over a fence post.

  “Lauren, what are you doing?” I hissed.

  She took one headcollar in her hand, swung it in a circle like a hammer thrower, then launched it into the bushes. Then she did the same with the second, startling the horses.

  “Ha ha,” she sniggered.

  The large mare leaped forward from the shadows, her tail held high, then came to a sudden stop, ears upright. I still had no idea what Lauren was doing. She had told me her father had connections from his racing days and that on the side he sometimes worked with yearlings and horses with bad habits, training them for their owners. Maybe the expensive-looking horse was one of these and Lauren was trying to punish her father. Or maybe it was any old horse, I couldn’t say; a meaningless act of vandalism wouldn’t have been out of character for Lauren. Something completely pointless.

  “Very funny, Loz,” I said. “I’m bored. Can we please go?”

  She looked at me, her arms crossed defensively, chewing on her lip.

  “Sorry. I thought you were well into horses and that,” she said. “That photo in your room.”

  It dawned on me then that the whole moment—bringing me to the paddock, showing me the thoroughbred, hiding the headcollars—was all for my benefit. The idea that Lauren might want to impress me as much as I did her had never occurred to me until then. Realizing this, I forgave her everything.

  “I am. I love to ride.”

  I walked right into it. Lauren’s expression instantly changed, her pout was gone, she grinned at me.

  “Well, what are you waiting for then?”

  Confused, I looked at the pony. It was grazing calmly by then, taking small steps, nibbling the ground.

  “No, you twat.” She pointed at the thoroughbred. “That one.”

  “No way,” I spluttered.

  “Why not?”

  I giggled with nerves. The horse was over fifteen hands, we didn’t know anything about it, there was no tack. She couldn’t honestly expect me to ride it—I could break my neck. Lauren continued to stare at me, a silent challenge, her head tilted to the side, her thumbs hooked in her waistline. Our whole friendship seemed to hang on this one idiotic act.

  “Okay.” I gave in. “Fine.”

  I put down my bag, climbed over the fence, and began walking towards the trough where the mare was drinking. She eyed me with suspicion, water dripping from her bristled chin, the whites of her eyes rolling. I remembered the polo mints I had in my pocket and held a few in my palm, making a kissing noise. The mare hesitated, then craned forward, neck stretched.

  “Not so fast,” I said.

  I made her come to me, then I uncurled my fist and fed her one. After that I stroked down her neck and leant my weight against her shoulder, like the boys at our school discos. She sidestepped two or three paces, close eno
ugh to the water trough that I thought I might be able to use it as a mounting block. I fed her a second mint.

  “Good girl,” I said.

  I took a fist of mane, stepped on the trough, and slowly, bit by bit, winched myself upwards, gradually putting more weight on her back. She pirouetted, her rump swung suddenly around but by then I was already on.

  “All right, all right, all right,” I shushed.

  She gave a small jolt, as if electrocuted. I twisted my fingers into her mane. As her hindquarters went up a second time my pubic bone slammed down into the withers, ramming the hard rocky ridge at the base of her mane. I gasped and slid heavily to one side.

  “Jesus,” I heard Lauren shout. “Watch yourself.”

  The mare began to reverse like a dumper truck, fast, tail tucked under. I could feel my chest tightening, a dull white hiss in my ears. At any moment she could throw me off, snap my bones on the hard ground, trample me underfoot. I began to talk to the horse, whispering up her neck, telling her how beautiful she was, what a good job she was doing. Please, please, please, I begged. All of a sudden the mare stopped crab stepping and bucking and stood there listening to me. Her ears, which had been pinned tightly against her head, started to flicker as she relaxed. She let out one last, disgruntled snort and the fight was over. I couldn’t believe it, I’d done it. My fingers, knotted with fright, began to come back to life. The ringing in my head quieted. I started to laugh, a form of nervous hysteria, and I looked over at Lauren, who was grinning back, hands clapping.

  “Fuck me, Josephine. I thought you were a goner,” she shouted, impressed.

  “Me too.”

  “My turn,” Lauren said and she marched towards me where the pony was chomping long grass around the trough. Before the pony knew what had happened, Lauren had vaulted up off the ground and swung a leg over its back. Her feet dangled ridiculously either side of his wide, barreled stomach.

  “Giddy-up,” she ordered. “Go.”