Prologue
Gerry Lake looked like a bird with a broken wing—something small and green and feathered, lying there in the middle of the lawn—a budgerigar. One of her knees was bent, the back of her hand cast across her brow in the closing moment of a routine. Very dramatic. Typical Gerry. Her tights were ripped, her plumes ruffled, sequins scattered, her ice skates landed beside her on the grass.
The younger years thought it was part of our dares. A joke. A prank.
“Marvelous,” they called out, clapping.
They hung out of dorm windows in pajamas and smoked, waiting for the punch line.
After a while we crawled from our various hiding places: the bushes, the boiler house, the ha-ha, the groundskeeper’s shed, the vestry, the orchard, the gym. Cloaked and hooded, as tradition dictated, our dresses slashed at the seam, barefoot.
We formed a circle around Gerry like a coven.
Gerry was in her leotard, of course, her ponytail still rolled in its neatly gelled bun. Hand across her forehead in that pantomime pose. Woe is me! Playing dead. By then we were sick of the endless tantrums and sulking, her door-slamming histrionics, the crying wolf.
No one thought to call an ambulance or alert our housemistress.
In our defense, there wasn’t a drop of blood.
“Very funny, Geraldine,” we said, arms crossed beneath our cloaks, our voices high and clipped.
We looked at her doll-like limbs, her tiny feet and small nose, flicking up at the end like a ski jump. The blue and gold glitter she wore in the rink, smudged down each cheek. Damp confetti. Instead of the sullen pout we’d come to expect from Gerry, her mouth was an open hole. She stared up at her window, uncharacteristically quiet. A budgie who’d flown into glass. Near her skates was a hairpin, a good luck charm she wore during competitions, a forget-me-not sprig made from fake sapphires, cheap and gaudy, snapped in half.
Later, when Gerry was front-page news, journalists hiding in all the bushes, some of us speculated she’d done it on purpose. Out of spite. To spoil our fun. All that time on the ice had given her a thirst for the spotlight. It was just like Gerry to cause a scene. She was an attention seeker, a spoilt brat, prone to telling tales. Gerry’s nickname back then, one of many, was the Poison Dwarf.
We rolled our eyes, yawned loudly.
Feathers fluttered in the breeze.
Some of us noticed, for the first time, the clump of ivy in her fist.
The unusual bend to one knee.
The dark circle that had surfaced between her thighs like ink on our blotters, creeping slowly across her leotard gusset.
“For goodness’ sake. Get up,” we said, less confident now.
We nudged her with bare feet. Giggled self-consciously.
“Gerry?”
Our cloaks—thick black wool—were suddenly heavy. Our torn summer dresses, tattered and thin. Toes numb with cold. Our brown lace-ups, strung from the weeping cedar, twisted in the wind, clacking their heels. Strange what one remembers, even now, after all this time. Our housemistress, for example, careening across the lawn, bellowing like a cow. The blue flashing lights, the backboard, the neck brace. The handful of hostile locals already standing watch by the gate. The way, sheepishly, we picked up Gerry’s broken hairpin from the grass and hovered near the gurney, despite the obvious annoyance of the paramedics, one of them a man in a turban, who stared frostily at our shredded uniforms, the cloaks, the hoods. How, as they wheeled her away, a cortege of us filed behind the stretcher carrying her good luck charm. Some of the small gold leaves were bent, a gem lost during the fall.
“Here,” we said.
Gerry’s hands and shoulders were strapped to a board, her chin jutting up above a thick white cervical collar, a chorister’s ruff, beatific looking, completely quiet.
How her body stiffened.
Her nostrils flared.
“All right, girls, that’s enough.”
We shuffled back, still holding the pin.
And finally, our last memory of Gerry Lake, so unlike the pictures in the Sunday papers—Gerry beaming on the ice, hugging a trophy, a plastic doll with a beauty pageant smile—our last glimpse as the ambulance doors swung shut. Her fists crumpled into small white balls, her face distorted, lips pulled tight, exposing the fangs she normally tried to hide.
1
I am Divine.
My mother was Divine and her mother before that, which isn’t uncommon. Though that was at a time when being Divine meant something; it had cachet, as my mother still likes to brag; it opened doors, got you places. Though it’s hard to see specifically where being Divine ever got her, other than married. Perhaps I’m missing the point.
I haven’t spoken to another Divine for fourteen years, maybe more, despite there being ample online opportunities these days to reconnect with my former peers should I so wish. I don’t. Every Christmas and Easter I fly back to England to visit my mother, who, in her sixties now, keeps backdated copies of our Old Girls’ newsletter for me in her downstairs loo, next to Country Living. Births, deaths, marriages, the rare athletic achievement, horses for sale, and, of course, reunions. Endless reunions. Not one of which I have attended. Until, as a newlywed, I take my husband on an impromptu detour from our honeymoon destination, veering off the dual carriageway so unexpectedly at the road sign that he thinks for a heart-stopping moment I might have morning sickness.
“Just to have a look,” I say. “It won’t take long.”
A trip down memory lane, then we’ll be on our way.
I crawl our rental car round the Oxfordshire town, circling closer to where I remember my former school once stood, folding forward over the steering wheel, trying to get my bearings. This is harder than I think it will be. Nothing is as I remember it. Most of the grounds have been flattened. The gym is gone, the maths block, the redbrick science labs, everything except those buildings deemed to hold significant historic value—the Old Hall and a couple of boarding houses, subdivided into flats for young professionals. I park outside the chapel, which is now, by the looks of things, a private dental practice. My husband of two days is bemused. Keen to get some miles under our belt on the long drive to Scotland, he hadn’t factored this pit stop into his calculations.
“This is it?”
“Give me half an hour,” I say, squeezing his hand.
I point him in the direction of the White Horse. When he is gone, I walk into the dentist’s, slipping past a young receptionist into the sanctuary-cum-waiting room, repainted a minty orthodontic green. I sit for some time listening to the ominous clinks and skirls and high metallic whines of the hygienist at work. Along the nave, cubicles have been fashioned from low movable walls decorated with huge toothy faces of smiling children. The wooden bench I am sitting on looks like, perhaps even is, the exact pew that the robed altar servers slumped on during our Sunday service, obscured by puffs of incense. The organ pipes are still in situ, way back up in the balcony behind the choir stalls, which seem quite small, barely room for a handful of girls. On the immovable stone pulpit where Fat Fran, my headmistress of six years, made her daily proclamations, a series of dental brochures, women’s magazines, food and lifestyle glossies have been stacked, some of which, at one time or another over my career, I have contributed to. I rest my head against stone and look up at the arched ceiling. It is very surreal, the dental nurses padding in and out of the vestry in their soft-soled shoes like nuns. Everything so familiar yet nothing quite as it was.