I wait as he splashes his cheeks with water, slurping his cupped palm to sober himself up, then runs his fingers through his hair to slick it back. He appraises himself in the mirror, purses his lips a little. He is not above a little vanity I see. I try not to giggle and give myself away. Then, still naked, he slumps down on the loo. Pecks his penis between his hairless thighs, rests his elbows on his knees, bending forward as if he is on his racer.
Oh my god.
Something about his effeminate posture, sitting to piss like this instead of standing, horrifies me. He tears himself a single square of loo roll as if he is going to wipe himself with that rather than shake.
I’ve seen enough.
I shrink out of sight, press my back to the wall, and slide to the ground. What else don’t we know about each other? I roll myself another cigarette, and when that is done, another. Knees tucked up by my nose on my honeymoon, smoking like a Divine.
5
The smoking den was a narrow burrow between a hedge and the school boiler room, next to the laundry. Neglected over the Easter holidays, the beanbags and the rag rug and the legless sofa we had dragged in there carried a ripe doggy smell. On that first day of the summer term, trying to find someplace quiet to smoke, I flopped down behind my boarding house, sinking into one of the damp beanbags, knees to nose. The other side of the wall maintenance men, taking a break from hauling trunks out of cars and being ordered around by parents, sat on an old church pew, their legs splayed, drinking sweet, milky tea, smoking themselves.
A wave of jet lag came crashing over me, so heady that I could feel myself swaying. It was the middle of the night in Hong Kong. I had probably been awake close to twenty-eight hours. I closed my eyes and my bones began sinking into one another, chin into chest. I picture my mother in her silk sleep mask, the wooden blades of the ceiling fan humming overhead, my father still in his office. Just as I was nodding off there was rustling from behind the hedge, and a click and a flash. My first thought was that it was one of my friends playing a prank on me. The night of our Fifth Form dares was looming—a decades-old St. John tradition that marked the end of exams, when housemistresses appeared to turn a blind eye as girls streaked naked through the rose garden, or glued hymnals to church pews, or snuck out at night to paint the town statue red.
I jumped up and a sharp piece of card came over the fence, catching me on the cheek. Another inch and it would have impaled me in the eye.
“Bloody hell.” I held my face. “That’s not funny.”
I scrambled up on the legless sofa to see who was there but heavy footsteps were already pounding across the adjoining car park and out onto the High Street. Whoever it was wasn’t Divine.
“Bloody hell,” I repeated, my heart thumping. I prodded the scratch on my cheek, not more than a small paper cut, but still, there was some blood. I swore loudly to make myself feel less pathetic, worried that there might be a gang of townie girls—King Edmunds—hidden somewhere I couldn’t see, ready to pounce on me, to claw my skin with their long artificial nails and pull out my hair.
“Piss off,” I shouted, “cows,” then looked down to find whatever is was that had nearly pierced my eye.
A Polaroid photo lay facedown on the rug.
“What the fuck?”
I stooped down, picked it up.
Blank.
Out of the milky patina, I watched a faint pink creep in, a blush so slight I brought it closer to my face, and then held it right back, wiggling it in the air. What was this meant to be, a joke? Out of the creaminess I could make out the crest of a hill, or maybe a hat, or a figure of some kind wearing a hat, it was still impossible to tell. Relieved that there didn’t seem to be a pack of townies waiting in the shadows to ambush me, I stood there, swaying with jet lag, waiting for the picture to develop, wondering what the image could be.
“Oh my god,” I said.
I dropped the Polaroid on the floor, made a squealing noise, my face so scrunched up I could feel my top lip curling up into my gums.
It was a dick.
Actual moose.
I picked it back up to examine it more closely. This was the first erect penis I’d ever seen.
A thumb pinned it down, a fist gripping the stump the way you see animal handlers holding geese or swans by the neck, to stop them flapping. A top-down shot taken in a hurry, trousers pulled down to knees behind the fence, the actual fence I was standing next to. It wasn’t as turgid or pink as a dog, nor as pendulous as a horse (the only two points of reference I had): redder and angrier, the head bruised and shiny, like a boxer’s face postfight.
It was the ugliest thing I’d ever looked at. Hands down. Except, I couldn’t stop staring at the top, which had minute white dots speckling it, and the balls, which were far less hairy than I’d imagined, wispy and near bald in patches, like the ancient stuffed teddy bear Skipper still slept with. All I could think about was that Henry Peck had had one of these in her mouth. In her mouth. It was grotesque. I slumped down on the beanbag and kept holding the photo up close until I forgot that what I was looking at was even a penis and more like a weird fungus you might find in a street market in Hong Kong. I chewed my lip, examining the soft little nick at the top. I had my nose so deep in moose that I didn’t even hear the King Edmund as she snuck into the den and it was too late.
My shoulders lurched up in shock, my head whiplashing back.
“What’s that then?” she asked.
6
Together Divines were indomitable. We strutted around the town during Saturday excursions in groups of five or six, or at the very least a pair, arm in arm, taking up the entire width of the pavement. We flicked our hair, making sly comments about the townies we passed—their makeup, the cheap clothes they bought from the market, their weight—often before they were out of earshot. We couldn’t abide fat people. Also, this was the nineties; townies were clad head to toe in cheap denim while we, governed by our own trends, wore black leggings and large argyle cardigans, which we sourced from a shop on the King’s Road; or we stole pink-striped shirts and V-neck jumpers from our fathers. In winter we wore black biker boots or sometimes cowboy boots before we switched to Docksiders in the summer, the kind of shoe you’d find at a regatta, their leather laces wound into toggles. I had a new pair of penny loafers with a Hong Kong ten-cent coin tucked into the tongue instead of a penny.
Divines were also compulsive thieves. Dickie Balfour in particular, whose parents owned a stately home in Cornwall and gave her a hefty monthly allowance, was always stuffing Pick’n’Mix in her pockets at Woolworths or lifting hoop earrings from the market. Her father was an earl. She could have bought anything she liked but that wasn’t the point. Managers began banning us, or they imposed a strict limit on how many Divines were allowed in their shop at one time. The rest of us prowled around outside, flicking our hair, ululating loudly, our arms chained together. (We were always touching one another, tickling each other’s inner elbows and linking fingers, or sitting around the base of the statue of King Edmund in the market center, resting back between each other’s spread thighs.)
But cut us from the pack and we were nothing.
“You dropped your fag,” the King Edmund said.
She nodded at the floor.