As far as we know, the Bettencourt Society never compiled another list of homely wenches. The Homely Wenches Society flourished for a time, and then membership dwindled as ensuing generations of female Cantabs saw little need to label themselves or to oppose the Bettencourters (whose numbers remain steady). The activities of the Homely Wench Society mainly come under the banner of “Laughs, Snacks and Cotching,” but in response to advice from Homely Wenches who’ve since graduated, the society produces a termly journal. Mostly for the purpose of posterity; we have no real readership other than ourselves.
So if you want to join, our questions to you are:
Who are the homely wenches of today?
What makes you think you’re one of us?
Your answer is a key that will unlock worlds (yours, ours), so please make it as full and as bigarurre as it can be.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Willa Reid (third-year History of Art, Caius)
Ed Niang (second-year NatSci, Clare)
Theo Ackner (second-year History, Emma)
Hilde Karlsen (third-year HSPS, Girton)
Grainne Molloy, (second-year Law, Peterhouse)
Flordeliza Castillo (first-year CompSci, Trinity)
and
Marie Adoula (third-year MML, King’s)
—
IT TOOK DAYANG SHARIF (second-year Eng. Lit, Queen’s) days to think up an answer that was full and bigarurre. As soon as she read the e-mail she wanted in—actually as soon as she’d met Willa and Hilde on the train she’d wanted in—but as with all groups the membership hurdle wasn’t so much to do with convincing the Wenches that she was one of them as it was to do with convincing herself. She looked the word bigarurre up and found that it meant both “a medley of sundry colors running together” and “a discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another.” “Medley of sundry colors running together” made her think of her Director of Studies, Professor Chaudhry, saying: “I saw you with your Suffolk posse, Dayang. A colorful gang!” She’d looked at him to check what he meant by “colorful” and deciphered from his grin that other definitions included “delightful” and “bloody well made my day.”
—
DAY COMPOSED an answer that centered on the evening she’d met Hilde and Willa. She’d got on at Kings Cross with Pepper, Luca, and Thalia, all four of them covered in sweat and glitter—they’d had their Friday night out in London town and now they were ready to get back to Day’s room and crash. Hilde and Willa sat opposite them sharing a red velvet cupcake. Day remembered trying not to fret about two whole girls afraid to eat a whole cupcake each. She didn’t know them or their fears. She noticed Willa’s long chestnut hair and Hilde’s eyes, which were like big blue almonds. She’d never seen them before but nodded at them, and they nodded back and continued their conversation, which seemed to be a comparison between medieval and modern logistics of kidnapping. Pepper and Luca were attempting to address Thalia’s complaints about art school, and Day was about to throw in her own tuppence worth when five boys who looked about the same age as them came swaying through the carriage singing rugby songs. Actually Day didn’t know anything about rugby so they might not have been rugby songs per se, but the men definitely had rugby player builds. They stared as they passed Day and her friends; Day felt a twanging in her stomach when they walked back a few paces and their song died away. She could see them thinking about starting something, or saying something. If these boys said something Luca would fight, and so would Pepper, and then what were Day and Thalia supposed to do—broker peace? Hardly. Day could punch . . . her parents had only been called into school for emergency meetings about her twice, and both times had been about the punching. Not necessarily the fact of her having punched someone, no, it was the style of it. Day punched hard, and when she did so she gave little to no warning. She punched veins. Aside from being disturbing to witness, the vein punching was extremely distressing for Day’s target; the link between heart, lungs, and brain fizzed and then seemed to snap, then the target’s limbs twitched haphazardly as they tried to recover some notion of gravity. Every now and again Day’s sister requested punching instruction from her, but this wasn’t something Day could teach. She just knew how to do it, that was all. She thought it might be connected to anxiety and the need to be absolutely certain that it was shared. And she really didn’t feel like punching anybody that night. She’d had a good time and just wanted to keep having one . . .
—
A COUPLE of the rugby boys were black. They both caught Pepper’s eye, and all three looked apologetic for staring. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t going to be a fight. So Day, T, Pepper, and Luca tensed up. Day saw something interesting: Chestnut Hair and Blue Almond Eyes were no longer eating cake and had tensed up too. Not the way you tense up when you’re about to run away, but the way you tense up when you’re not about to have any nonsense. And actually, looking around, Day saw that Chestnut Hair and Blue Almond Eyes weren’t the only ones. Others scattered across the carriage had become alert too, looking up from the screens of their phones, some even rolling their sleeves up. “Jog on, lads,” a barrel-chested man advised, and the boys seemed to reflect on numbers, then left and took their thoughts of starting something with them. When they’d gone Chestnut Hair leaned across the table and said, “I’m Willa.” Blue Almond Eyes introduced herself as Hilde and said, apropos of nothing: “When we were little we had chicken pox together.”
“Ah,” Luca said, sagely. “So you two are close.”
Willa rubbed her nose. “Oh, but we didn’t do it on purpose . . .”
Willa was seriously posh. She tried to sound estuary but couldn’t go all the way. At the station Hilde turned to them and asked: “Are you students here?”
T, Pepper, and Luca talked over each other: As if! Yeah right . . . and all three pointed at Day: “There she is, Miss Establishment . . .”
“Please just live your hate-filled lives happily, guys,” Day said.
Willa took Day’s e-mail address and said she’d be in touch. “We should all cotch sometime.”
Cotch? Pepper thought that sounded sexual. Luca said: “Maybe something to do with horse riding? That one blatantly rides horses.” Thalia just giggled.
—
THE MEETING on the train sort of answered the question of what made Day think she could be a Homely Wench, but it didn’t answer the question of who a Homely Wench is. Second year was a year of conscientious study for Day; she couldn’t have another exam result fiasco like last year (too much time spent visiting Pepper at Oxford Brookes), so she could only return to her questions of wenchness after she’d done as much work toward her degree as was possible, all the reading and note-taking and following up on references that she could do in a day. Queen’s was in Day’s blood, since it was her father’s college too. In his day he’d flown thousands of miles specifically to enroll, whereas she’d come in from Suffolk. Her college library was at its best late at night. At night the stained-glass figures in the windows seemed to slumber, and the lamps on each desk gently rolled orange light along the floors until it formed one great globe that bounced along every twist and turn of the staircase to the upper levels. When she surveyed the entire scene it seemed to be one that the stained-glass figures were dreaming. And she was there too, living what was dreamed. She stretched, sighed. Well, I’m a fanciful wench, but am I a homely one? Her sister Aisha was gunning for Murray Edwards, their mother’s college.
—
DAY HADN’T SIGHED quietly enough: A few desks away Hercules Demetriou (first-year Law) looked over at her and smiled. She looked away. She didn’t think he was evil or anything, but he was a problem. The issue was all hers for fancying him even though he’d already been elected to the Bettencourt Society. The boy was tall and well built and had wavy hair, excellent teeth, and unshakable equilibrium. Up close you saw smatterings of acne but that was n
o comfort. His skin tone lent him enough ethnic ambiguity for small children whose parents had a taste for vintage Disney to run up to him and ask: “Are you Aladdin?” He’d flash them a dazzling smile and answer: “Nah, I’m Hercules.”
Hercules of Stockwell. So full of himself. This was not an attraction that Day could ever confess to anybody. Hercules talked to her, though. He’d say, “See you in the bar, yeah?” as he and his friends walked past her and her friends. Then Mike or Dara or Jiro would turn to her and say things like, “So will you see him in the bar? Or his bed, for that matter?” Horrible. When Hercules Demetriou spoke to Day her heart beat loudly and her loins acted as if they didn’t know what the rest of her knew about him. What was he after? Day didn’t actually think she was unattractive: Her appearance was mostly passable, and sometimes even exceeded that. Two things that were not in her favor were her spectacles, which often led people (including herself) to incorrectly anticipate a sexy librarian effect. You know . . . the glasses come off, the hair tumbles down, and there she is. Nope. She had unreasonably large feet too. She’d never walk on moonbeams. Why would the perfectly proportioned Hercules Demetriou keep trying to befriend her? It made no sense. Unless the slimy Bettencourters were compiling another List after all.
—
THE YOUNG HERO was still looking over. Day took her glasses off, cleaned them, put them back on, and then typed a couple of paragraphs.
—
WHO IS A HOMELY wench? Is a girl who exhaustively screens every man her mother contemplates seeing a homely wench? Leaving these things to Aisha meant just letting it all go to hell. How about a girl who sometimes finds it easier to talk to her dad’s boyfriend than she does to her dad—what manner of wench is she? Day’s dad still fasted at Ramadan even though he didn’t go to mosque anymore, and from time to time he flared up at signs of Day and Aisha’s “secular disrespect,” which he was almost sure they were learning from their mum. (They weren’t. If anything they were learning it from Dad’s boyfriend, Anton.) But apart from being less hung up on manners, Anton was less sensitive than Dad. Day had once mentioned being envious of her friend Zoe for having two mums—she’d been talking about the miracle of having two mums who were both so cool, but her dad had taken her words to mean that she didn’t want all the family she had, and he’d looked so crestfallen that she’d spent ages explaining her original comment and making it sound even more dismissive of him and Anton until he’d had to laugh.
—
A GIRL at the desk next to Hercules’—Lakmini, Day thought her name was—wrote him a note; must have been a hot note because he fanned himself with it. But Miss Dayang Sharif couldn’t have cared less what the note said, no way.
—
WHO ARE THE Homely Wenches of today?
—
SHE WROTE about her first boyfriend, Michael, her first and only boyfriend to date. She’d been in love with him and they broke up but the love didn’t. In fact the love got—not truer, just better. Their friend Maisie’s parents were away on the same weekend as the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final so Maisie opened up her house to “all my Eurovision bitches,” which turned out to be not that many. Just Maisie, Day, and Aisha, until Michael showed up, with two friends, Luca and Thalia. A taxi pulled up outside of Maisie’s house and Michael, Luca, and Thalia got out, the three of them dressed in silk sheaths—real, heavy silk. Maisie rushed to the front door: “What? Who are they? Are the Supremes really about to come in right now? I must have saved a nation in a past life . . .”
—
IT TOOK DAY A COUPLE of hours to get around to talking to Thalia and Luca. She only had eyes for Michael. For the first time she was seeing that he had everything she coveted from pre-Technicolor Hollywood. Hip-swinging walk, lips that tell cruel lies and sweet truths with a single smile, eyelashes that touch outer space. If Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth had had a Caribbean love child, that child would be Michael just as he was that night. They hugged for a long time, and later they talked on the balcony outside. “Thank God for the Internet,” he said. “I wouldn’t have found Luca and T without it. All sorts of nutters out there, but mine found me . . .”
He settled on the name Pepper. Day remembered the rest of that night in stop-motion—galloping, shimmying, the speakers turned up so loud that the singing shook the air and the beat of the music was like being knocked on the head. The backbeat was a hammock you fell into. Ring a ring o’roses, pan flutes, trumpets, and yodeling—Day was holding hands with Luca, who held hands with Aisha, who held hands with Maisie, who held hands with Pepper, who held hands with her, dancing around in a circle with bags and coats stacked in the center, cheering for the countries whose stage performances made the most effort or projected the most bizarre aura. Luca and Thalia became Day’s too. “For life, yeah? Not just for Eurovision . . .”
Thalia didn’t even like Eurovision. She said she’d come along to meet Day. “This one’s always going on about you,” she said, gesturing toward Pepper.
—
DAY’S STEPDAD, Anton, who’d had trouble remembering Michael’s name, hailed Pepper with joy, even as he teased Day about the times she’d said Michael was the one. Day just shrugged. Pepper wasn’t always on the surface, but whether she was with Pepper as Pepper or Pepper as Michael, Day had found the one she’d always be young with, eating Cornettos on roller coasters, forever honing their ability to combine screams with ice cream.
—
SO . . . WHO is a Homely Wench?
—
DAY WROTE about Luca, muscular and much-pierced Luca, and how that first Eurovision they spent together his hair was the same shade of pastel mint as the dress he wore. He and Thalia were a bit older, in their early twenties. By day he sold high-fashion pieces: “Everyone wants to fly away from here but not everyone can make their own wings . . . so they buy them from me . . .” By night he was an unstoppable bon vivant, deciding what kind of buzz was right for that night and mixing the pharmaceutical cocktail that had the least tortuous hangover attached. He’d had nights so rough he could hardly believe he was still alive: “But this can’t be the afterlife. Ugh, it can’t be.” Luca laughs long and loud and his body shakes as he does so. He’s better at forgetting than forgiving; he says this is the only thing about himself that scares him. Speaking of him Day’s father says, “So . . . vulnerable,” at the same time as her stepdad says, “Brazen!” Neither is quite right. When Luca was younger he got kicked out of his parents’ house for a while; they’d hoped it’d make him less brazen, but it didn’t—he stayed with friends and got brasher, and when he came home it was like he took his family back into his heart rather than the other way around. Day knew Pepper and Luca were together. She’d also heard that Luca liked to pursue straight men. Thalia referred to this tendency as “Luca’s danger sport.” Pepper said Luca’d be fine. “He’s got us.”
—
OH, AND THALIA—DAY had to talk about T. Thalia’s aesthetic was the most civilian (Pepper had learned the most from her YouTube makeup tutorials) and Thalia was her full-time name. She was composed, reserved, she lived with an older man none of her friends had met; the only reason her friends even knew about the older man was because of a week when T had been ecstatic because she’d sold five triptychs and received a really considered, insightful note about them from the buyer. But then she found out the buyer was her boyfriend, so she was furious for a couple of days, and then the fury mingled with elation again. Luca argued that the boyfriend was merely investing in an artist who’d be famous one day, and whenever Thalia heard this she said, “Care,” to indicate that she didn’t. Thalia painted scenes onto mirrors, dramatic televisual two-shots from stories that had only ever been screened in Thalia’s mind. Her mirror paintings left gaps where the facial features of the characters would normally be, so that your face could more easily become theirs. T’s brushstrokes are thin, translucent, and mercurial in their placement; they swi
rl into one other. Her colors are white and silver. Around the images Thalia paints a few words from the script: an alphabet frame. Day’s favorite was a voiceover:
The poison taster is feeling a bit ill. He’s well paid but he hates his master so much that today, the day he finally tasted poison, he’s eaten a lot and is managing to keep a normal expression on his face until his master has eaten at least as much as he has. Eat heartily, boss, don’t stop now . . .
Who’s a homely wench? Luca is, and Day is, and so are Pepper and Thalia and Hilde and Willa and anyone who is not just content to accept an invitation but wants more people to join the party, more and more and more. Day can just hear Pepper and Luca climbing up onto a tabletop at such a party and screaming out (they’d have to scream through megaphones, as she’s envisioning a gathering that’d fill Rome’s Coliseum many times over): Hello everyone, it’s great to see you all, you homely beasts and wenches.
Send.
—
THE HOMELY WENCHES have no fixed headquarters, and all the members agree that this keeps them humble, relying as they do on the soft furnishings and snack-based offerings of whichever member is host to Wench meetings for the month. February was Day’s month for hosting meetings, and this particular meeting had been called to discuss articles for the Lent term edition of The Wench. There were to be two interviews: one with a bank robber who’d turned down a place at Cambridge and now half regretted it. Marie was covering that story; she had a feeling for bittersweet regret and mercenary women. The other interview was with Myrna Semyonova, author of a novel, Sob Story, which she’d written to make her girlfriend laugh, consisting as it does of a long, whisky-soaked celebration of all the mistakes two male poets (one young, one middle-aged) had made and were making in their lives. The narrator of the novel was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski. Willa was covering that, and her reaction to Sob Story’s being taken so seriously was the same as that of Semyonova’s girlfriend: It made the joke twice as funny. Ed was working on a piece about hierarchies of knowledge for female love interests in the early issues of her favorite comic books; how very odd it must be to operate within a story where you’re capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. “Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can’t get just can’t see ‘the real you,’ no?”
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 16
