The Divines

by Ellie Eaton

  Jürgen squints into the garage, face creased from the pillow, eyes puffy.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asks from the doorway, almost but not quite crossing the line, as if he feels he needs to be invited to come in.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say, sliding the packet of cigarettes into my robe pocket.

  In the video a figure skater makes a perfect “p” with her body and performs what the commentator calls a Biellmann spin.

  “What’s that you’re watching?”

  “Research.”

  As far as Jürgen is concerned I’ve been working on my résumé all these weeks, sending out more pitches.

  “How’s it going?” Jürgen asks.

  “It’s going,” I say, a little too quickly.

  He yawns loudly, stretches, then comes to stand behind me and rubs my shoulders. The quicker you speak, the guiltier you sound. No one ever lies slowly; the tongue runs and runs like it’s racing on thin ice.

  “Come to bed.”

  “I will,” I promise. “Soon; go back to sleep.”

  All I can think about is checking the screen to see if anyone has responded to my question. The skater, dressed in red, crouches on the ice, turning slowly at first, then faster and faster, a blur, furiously spinning. A tornado. Tisiphone, rising from the underworld, come to avenge the dead.

  “Don’t be long,” Jürgen says, kissing the nape of my neck.

  “I won’t,” I say.

  As he leaves he catches sight of the lockbox, sitting on the top of an old packing box. He scratches his chin, as if something about it is familiar, then he yawns again and pads back into the house.

  As soon as the coast is clear I click back to the Old Girls page.

  Comments: One.

  I scramble for my packet of cigarettes, light up, inhale deeply, then read:

  Geraldine Lake? That Fifth Year who fell out of the window? Good lord. As if one could forget.

  A second message appears.

  Oh my god. Gerry Lake! We thought the whole thing was a dare. All part of the pranks. One feels rather awful when you think about it.

  Another and another.

  We spent half our life climbing in and out of windows remember? We used to sit on our ledges and chain smoke. Once we tied our bed sheets together and abseiled down St. Hilda’s. What a hoot.

  Someone else agrees.

  OMG. Yes. Hilarious!

  Gerry Lake didn’t smoke a day in her life, I type. She was an athlete. Amongst other things, she was afraid of heights.

  There is a pause. I imagine these women sitting at large oak desks, in libraries and studies, a Labrador by their feet, surrounded by silver-framed photos of their children.

  Gerry did take her skating terribly seriously, someone remembers. A funny old stick. Lorks, she must have thought we were such heathens! Her year did rather enjoy winding her up. And some of those Fifth Formers were quite terrifying, naming no names, but that one who wore the cardigan, she scared me silly.

  I picture a group of Second Years scurrying to hold a door open for us, darting like fish.

  We mimicked Gerry’s accent, I reply quickly. We rifled through her desk. Hid her skates before training. We called her the Poison Dwarf.

  Outside I can hear one of the raccoons who live beneath the garage, rummaging around in the bins. A bottle smashes.

  Oh, Gerry Lake never could take a joke. Rather a spoilt madam. One has to blame the parents of course for what happened. Awful people. Very pushy. No wonder she jumped.

  I think of Mr. Lake. Almost unrecognizable in the photos in the papers at the time, hollowed cheeks and wispy hair, barely visible next to his lawyer.

  The parents? I write, stubbing out my cigarette.

  I stare out into the darkness, pinching my arm. There’s a whine from the dog standing wait in the house, the Santa Ana winds, palm leaves clattering like bones. I uncurl my fingers.

  Jumped?

  44

  Our parents were called, some arriving as early as that very morning, after which we were summoned to the headmistress’s office in groups of four or five, ashen and unwashed, eggshell and flour still in our hair. The rest of us were confined to the rec room while we waited to be interviewed. No one would tell us what had happened to Gerry. We had no idea if she was alive or dead.

  Prisoners, we sat by the window, jostling for space. The maintenance men piled a heap of broken furniture on the lawn, desks and chairs, as if building a pyre. News spread of our disgrace. One by one, the townspeople came—a dog walker, two old women pushing shopping trolleys, the librarian, the pub landlord, a delivery man, the cinema projectionist, the owner of the tea shop, the Woolworths manager, perhaps even Lauren—hands on hips, tutting. Bit by bit they shuffled closer, onto school property, seeing that no one was stopping them. Both curious and vitriolic.

  They crunched over broken glass, shredded books, the plastic bones of a laboratory skeleton. Our faces were pressed against the rec room windows.

  “Shameful,” they said, shaking their heads, at us. “Disgusting. Pack of wild animals. Hooligans. Ungrateful so-and-sos.”

  When the cleaners and the kitchen staff arrived for work, there was a loud rumble of dissent.

  “Forget it,” they said and put their coats back on. They gestured at us. “Let them clean this mess up themselves. Those la-di-das can sort their own breakfast for once, I’ll thank you very much.”

  The Third Years made jam sandwiches, which they delivered to us on brown plastic refectory trays with a glass of milk, dispensed from three gallon jugs. Other years who’d participated in the rebellion had been given brooms and sponges and mops, their hair tied up with handkerchiefs, like the women of the Blitz. Teachers stood watch as they swept and scrubbed. A wartime spirit seemed to prevail—make do and mend. They spent a lot of time arranging the bandannas in their hair. They whistled and sang.

  “This is so unfair,” moaned George, flopping onto a beanbag next to me. “It’s not like we’re criminals.”

  There were mutters of agreement.

  I pressed my thumbnail into the soft skin of my arm and said nothing. Across the rec room Skipper was talking quietly to Henry Peck, their heads pressed together, whispering. She stared at me once, then looked away.

  The townies came and went, their numbers growing minute by minute. There was a loud murmur of excitement whenever a new parent arrived.

  “If one of mine had done all that, I’d beat her black and blue,” they heckled. “I’d wring her blooming neck.”

  Some parents, shocked by the level of destruction, must have made the decision to pull their daughters out of school then, a week before the term ended. The maintenance men tossed trunks into car boots, carelessly swinging. Our friends waved pitifully at us through the rec room window, slid into the back seats of BMWs and Volvos, lying flat as their parents drove round the Circle past the townies.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

  “Buzz off.”

  “Get lost.”

  A gang of King Edmunds leant against our school wall in the spot where Lauren used to wait, giving each car the finger and hurling empty cans of Coke.

  By lunch our numbers had dwindled to just a handful. George sat with her legs wrapped around Henry, plaiting her hair. We slept or grazed from unguarded tuck lockers or doodled in each other’s leavers notebooks. I stared out of the window. It was Dave, or possibly George, who thought to compare the various messages we’d been left by Gerry.

  “Good luck with your GCSEs,” George read first, holding her book up so we could see where Gerry had signed her name with a large G to cover the empty white page.

  “Good luck with your exams,” Dave read out next.

  “Good luck with everything,” Henry said, yawning

  “Good luck,” someone else read out.

  “Good luck.”

  I watched as George went around the rec room comparing notes, every message more or less identical. I nudged my book beneath m
y seat, not wanting them to see where, beneath the large swirling G, Gerry had written her address in bubble letters, doodled round the edges. As if she believed we’d stay in touch over the summer, write to each other, visit. That we were friends.

  George squatted down and retrieved my book from beneath the seat, thumbing through to the end pages.

  “Oh my god,” she said.

  Her face paled. She shuffled with embarrassment.

  “What?”

  When Skipper peered over George’s shoulder to read, her mouth dropped open then quickly snapped shut. She snorted and let out a small, “Ha.”

  “Let me see.” I snatched the notebook.

  The address was gone, painted over with layers of Tipp-Ex.

  Instead, in thick block letters:

  YOU BITCH.

  45

  My mother, I remember, was seated in our headmistress’s office next to Skipper’s parents. Standing behind them, as if posing for a school photo, were the Pecks and the Gordon-Warrens. The school nurse—ghostly looking, painfully thin—hovered in the corner with her arms crossed, there to deal with sudden cases of faintness or hysteria. Divines were famed for their dramatics. Against the wall stood two uniformed policemen.

  My mother sighed loudly as we filed in to the headmistress’s office and raised her eyebrows at the other parents. Disgruntled, they considered this whole process pointless, unnecessarily heavy-handed. Rod, in particular, seemed notably put out. My mother had arrived from Hong Kong a week earlier to visit old friends, her various lunches and dinner plans now disrupted. More than once that day I saw her check her watch or yawn, giving a sense of what she must have been like as a student. Her eyes roamed over the bookshelf, visibly flinching at the Bible and prayer books. She, like most parents, considered Fat Fran intolerably pious.

  “A very silly woman,” I overheard her once saying. “Not at all Divine.”

  “Isn’t this rather a waste of everybody’s time?” one of the fathers grumbled.

  The policemen glanced at one another. Townies.

  “All the same,” the taller of them said.

  “Girls,” Fat Fran instructed. “Sit down.”

  There was a prolonged silence. The large oak bureau on which she wrote all her sermons was notably missing, replaced by a flimsy folding table. Likewise her portrait had been removed, a picture light illuminating a blank wall. The carpet, cleaned of glue and feathers, was still tacky underfoot. Fat Fran herself wore a look of smug self-satisfaction, her chin resting atop her interlinked fingers. All the crimes she had long suspected us of—snobbery, cruelty, a propensity for violence—had proven to be true.

  “For goodness’ sake,” my mother said. “Let’s get this over with. Darling, just tell them whatever it is they want to know.”

  One of the policemen kept his hands in his pockets, studying the five of us. The other rocked from foot to foot.

  “What I know,” I echoed.

  “About Geraldine Lake,” the more serious policeman clarified. “Friends, boyfriends, unusual behavior. Anything that seemed out of the ordinary.”

  The school nurse looked at me. I slid my hands inside my cloak and gripped Gerry’s broken pin, which I had picked up from the grass. Skipper’s knee began to jiggle, her heel drumming the floor as she was prone to do in moments of pressure: school exams for example, speech days, the sidelines of a lacrosse match. A single feather drifted down from the top of a bookshelf.

  “Girls?” Fat Fran pressed her hands together and tilted forward.

  I watched the feather fall, rocking to and fro.

  The twins and George glanced at Skipper, then me.

  They shook their heads.

  “Nothing,” they agreed.

  What were Divine if not loyal?

  My mother stood up and dusted down her skirt, notably relieved.

  “There we have it.”

  She tapped me on the shoulder and I got up and followed her out.

  “Absolutely ridiculous,” she muttered under her breath.

  In the tea shop in town she instructed me to order whatever I wanted.

  “Special treat,” she said. As if in some way I’d earned it.

  A surly waitress did her best to ignore my mother’s attempts to get her attention, a finger raised in the air. When our food arrived, the teapot and cake were dumped on our table without ceremony, our cutlery dropped in a pile. The Victoria sponge was dry and crumbly. The waitress scowled the entirety of the meal—or perhaps I was imagining this—and eyeballed me accusingly from her seat at the counter. My mother ate nothing as usual, sipping a cup of black tea.

  “You’re looking rather pale, darling.”

  I pushed the cake around the plate, pressing the slice with the back of my fork, jam oozing, congealing on the prongs. For the first time, my mother seemed concerned. She moved aside her teapot and the vase of plastic flowers on the table and bent towards me.

  “One mustn’t let it get you down,” she said.

  These were, it struck me, the same words she’d uttered shortly before the kennelman put a bullet through the brain of my first pony—an ancient, much loved Dartmoor—and fed him to the hounds.

  I nodded, trying not to cry in the coffee shop, my head cradled in my hands, staring down at the white tablecloth. I felt Gerry’s hairpin burning in my pocket. My mother reached out and for a moment it seemed she was about to stroke my cheek. I willed her to cradle me in her arms, to rub my back, smooth my hair, to tell me everything was going to be all right. But she wasn’t that kind of mother.

  “Elbows,” my mother said, tapping me on the arm instead, raising an eyebrow at the offending body parts till I removed them from the table.

  “The school has rather been on the rocks. Nothing one can do about it now. All that money we donated to the new sports hall though. Your father will have a fit.”

  This was what Rod cared about, the school merger.

  On the subject of Gerry Lake herself, who she knew not to be part of my inner circle, she said almost nothing, resorting in the end to schoolgirl French.

  “Tant pis,” she said with a sigh as she drank from her teacup. Too bad.

  Then she signaled for the bill.

  We walked back to my mother’s car, parked underneath the shoe tree, and got in. I watched as she reached across the seat and, to my surprise, took out a packet of Marlboroughs from the glove compartment. Using the red coil from the car lighter, she lit it, sank back into the driving seat, and sighed with pleasure.

  Seeing my expression, she offered me the packet.

  This was the first time I had ever smoked in front of an adult.

  “Go on. You’ve had a rough night, I suppose. Just don’t tell your father.”

  I took one and wound down my window.

  The cleanup was still under way. Maintenance men, including Stuart McKibbin, were carting broken laboratory equipment towards the skips. Stools, a microscope, specimen jars. I saw him make a crude gesture with a preserved sheep head, thrusting it at his groin, laughing coarsely. I slid down in my seat out of view.

  “Oh god, I remember him,” my mother said of the sheep, as if discussing an old friend.

  The men tossed a human skeleton into the container. At the sight of the body, a bag of bones hanging limply over the side of the skip, my teeth began to chatter. A feeling of dread flooded through me. My heart began to pound. My eyes stung. I thought I might vomit. I threw the cigarette out of the window.

  “Please, Mummy, can’t I just come with you now?” I begged. There was only a week left until the end of term, exams were over, what was the point, I argued, in me staying.

  My mother, who never believed in pandering to homesickness, patted me a few times on the knee. The chapel bell rang. A line of First Years climbed the bridge like ants, followed by the older years. I saw Skipper and the twins hovering underneath the shoe tree, watching our car. Feeling increasingly desperate, I imagined holding the sharp end of Gerry’s pin that was still in my pocket
to my mother’s neck, ordering her to drive. But that was the kind of thing Lauren would do, someone spontaneous and plucky, not a coward like me.

  “Chin up, angel,” my mother said, oblivious, and she gave me a kiss on the head and stretched across me to open the car door. She smelt, I remember, of smoke and mothballs. “See you in a week.”

  In chapel that afternoon the other girls, older and younger, craned their necks to look at us, their heads hung upside down from the choir stalls. They whispered behind their hymnbooks, watching as one by one we slid grimly along the wooden pews and waited for an announcement.

  “Girls, I am sad to report that last night . . .” Fat Fran began, but she was interrupted by the chime of an alarm clock.

  “Oh fuck,” said George.

  We knew what was happening but were powerless to stop it. We didn’t even try. Fat Fran ignored the bell and continued.

  “I have some . . .”

  Another chime began. A chirp from the small Braun clock we’d hidden the previous night beneath the white folds of the altar, timed to go off during evensong. Fat Fran frowned, looked briefly over her shoulder, and began again.

  “As you know, one of our Fifth Year . . .”

  A third alarm went off, louder this time, this one coming from underneath a pew. Girls began to giggle. Fat Fran gripped the pulpit, tilted forward a little, and raised her voice.

  “Last night I was informed by . . .”

  The fourth clock sounded somewhere in the sanctuary, then a fifth up by the organ, then a sixth, then a seventh, then an eighth in near perfect succession, pealing like church bells. Appalled, Fat Fran’s mouth fell open, the many folds in her neck buckled.

  “Whoever is . . . ,” she tried to shout, but by then it was impossible to hear anything above the incessant ringing. How many had we hidden, tens, hundreds, we couldn’t remember. At first we sat, our heads slightly bowed, some of us wincing with embarrassment or chewing our nails, pretending we couldn’t hear it. How could we have predicted what was going to happen to Gerry?