“I don’t know. That’s not important. Are you going to keep on butting in?”
“Nein, nein.”
I cuff him on his thigh.
“Pass me the whisky.”
My husband rests the bottle on my naked hip. It’s obvious the effect my story is having on him—the teenage girls, the uniforms, the long manes of hair.
“Do it.”
“Do what?”
“The flick.”
“The flick? I don’t remember.”
“Ja, you do.”
He leans forward and pulls the clip from my bun.
“Go on. Show me.”
I pretend to scowl but stand up, catching sight of myself in the sitting room mirror, my naked torso above the fireplace, small white breasts, my nipples mutinous in the cold and hard as bullets. I enjoy looking at my wide, milky colored bottom, more than a handful, slightly dimpled at the edges. So different from how I was fourteen years ago when I was all edges and bone. I rub my hand across my soft belly. Absorbed by my own flesh. I almost forget Jürgen is waiting.
“So,” he prods, “go on.”
I comb my fingers through my knots, flattening my palm, and I do it. It turns out I haven’t forgotten; in fact I perform it perfectly, my hair cartwheeling over, the apotheosis of the flick. I look at Jürgen as I used to look at those Radley boys, head tilted sideways, draped in gold, Hellenic.
“Güt,” he says.
He kneels before me, cupping my breasts in his hands.
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“I do,” he rasps, squeezing a nipple, “I do.”
“Jürgen.”
“Keep going. Tell me about the scandal.”
3
A long-standing Divine tradition was to toss our brown leather lace-ups into the branches of a weeping cedar at the front of the school. My grandmother and mother had both done it, as would I a few weeks later in a moment of post-GCSE exam euphoria. On that first day of summer term I watched as a funeral procession of cars came peeling off the road and up the driveway, looping round the Circle with this shoe tree in the center. Cars paused by the entrance while royal blue school trunks with brass buckles and our names painted on the sides were solemnly heaved onto the grass by the long-suffering maintenance staff, grave as pallbearers, then the parents went gliding on in search of a parking spot beside the boarding house.
St. John the Divine had a campus of two halves, conjoined twins, linked by a large metal bridge. This bridge, an ugly eyesore of a construction, straddled the two splintered parts of our school grounds like some vast metal stick insect. Built at the behest of concerned parents, its intent was to stop Divines having to cross the road below on foot, putting an end to us playing chicken with townies who had been known to accelerate on sight, honking their horns, cutting so close we could hear the snorts of laughter, the spray of puddle water against our calves. Which says something about the civic sentiment back then. Long before the scandal.
We all loathed the bridge. In winter we clung to the frozen banister, bobsledding down the near vertical set of steps. In the summer it radiated an unpleasant tarry heat underfoot, hot enough to burn through white plimsoll. That said, the view from the top was the best in the school. Standing in the middle you could see, to the east, pairs of strung shoes, polished as conkers, spinning at the top of the cedar tree in the center of the Circle and next to that the laundry, sports halls, tennis courts, orchard, and the redbrick boarding houses where we junior years slept—formerly the property of a wealthy Victorian landowner, now renamed after saints, St. Gertrude, St. Hilda, et cetera. These various buildings were spread across the town, like a tumor, partitioned from disapproving locals by an imposing brick wall.
The Other Side was what we called the remainder of the school and included pretty much everything you could see to the west of the bridge: the chapel, classrooms, science labs, refectory, the headmistress’s office and an oval vestibule known as the Egg (a kind of prechamber of the headmistress’s office, where Fat Fran’s henchwomen liked to congregate in large wingback chairs), and finally, the Sixth Form accommodation, Lower and Upper. These Sixth Form dormitories—two modern-looking brick bungalows, once a retirement home for Divine nuns, long dead, though their chalky odor still lingered—had the benefit of being set back from the road, away from the other buildings. This gave the occupants the illusion of privacy. Something Sixth Formers felt rather superior about.
The life of these Sixth Form girls seemed unimaginably sophisticated to us. Gone were the unflattering Edwardian school uniforms (blue tweed skirts, beige shirts, and ankle-length black wool cloaks in winter, striped cotton tunics in the summer months). Gone were the weekly dorm inspections, the endless monitoring of tuck lockers filled with snacks, and mandatory lights-out. Instead these Sixth Form girls wore their own clothes, lounged around the bungalow during free periods, drove their own cars home at half-term, and—the thing we coveted above all others—slept in private bedrooms, some of them rumored to be en suite.
Another perk of being a Sixth Former, I remember, was unsupervised and unlimited access to the town, on the strict condition that they traveled in groups of two or more. This was due to the long-running grudge between Divines and townies, who tended to think of us all as a stuck-up, supercilious bunch of trust funders (not unfounded) with a pretentious tradition of calling each other by boys’ names. It didn’t help, of course, that so many of the locals were beholden to the school for their financial security—the allowance money we splurged at their corner shops on sweets and cigarettes and magazines, the minicab fares we racked up to the nearby city, the cinema trips and extravagant birthday cakes ordered from their bakeries. Moreover, the school was one of the few remaining employers that offered locals regular work. Townies scrubbed our floors, cleaned our toilets, painted lines on our tennis courts, washed our underwear, served us our meals, and disposed of our scraps. No wonder they loathed us.
A townie could spot a Divine a mile away and vice versa. Shark-eyed girls from the local public school with faces pulled tight by gelled buns, eyes glinting, sucking their teeth at us at the bus stop as we went past. Their gray King Edmund skirts hitched up their thighs, little school ties on elastic, and gold earrings.
“What the fuck you looking at, you posh twat?”
The loathing townies felt for us was visceral. Disgust radiated from these KE girls like white heat. They would spit on our backs the moment we passed, or swarm around us, as in the case of Henry Peck, dragging her behind the White Horse, where they shoved her against redbrick and flicked ash onto her head. When I later relayed this incident to my mother, she shrugged and wafted her hand through the air as if it was nothing. This kind of hostility had gone on for as long as she, or any Divine, could remember, over a hundred years or more. There had been some halfhearted efforts over the years by our respective headmistresses to bring about a cease-fire, which came to nothing. Townies hated Divines. End of story.
By early afternoon the Peck twins had given up on their game of tennis and flopped on the grass beside the rest of us, sweating, red faced. We sat on the ha-ha watching the cars as they arrived, the grown-ups giving one another jovial salutes and hand waves and hello there’s. They looked excited as puppies while, by contrast, their progeny were slumped in the back seat listening to a Walkman, so really, you had to wonder who all this performance was intended for, mothers leaning in to double kiss each other through lowered windows, fathers braying at one another across the grass. Beneath the shoe tree, girls, two at a time, were tugging the contents of their trunks inside and up to their shared dorms via the long-standing Divine technique of using bedding material as a holdall, twisting the ends of their duvet covers and hoisting the cadaver-like weight over their shoulders. A new bed each term, fourteen different dorms in my time as Divine, I calculated out loud, anything from two to eight girls crammed in one room depending on the year, a total of seventy-two different dorm mates since we’d started at the school.