I slid the Polaroid so the dick was shielded under my thigh.
“If you’re not going to smoke it, I’ll have it,” the KE girl persisted.
Her arms were crossed, one thumb hooked into her fabric bag strap. When she stooped to pick up the cigarette, the pouch flailed towards me and I flinched. I may have even put my hand up to shield my face. I bet she enjoyed that.
The King Edmund held the fag up in front of my nose.
“So, do you still want it or what?”
The top of the cigarette was soggy from lying on wet carpet. What did I care if this girl took it or not; I had an entire carton in my dorm, which I had duped a copassenger into buying for me from duty free.
“It’s wet,” I muttered.
The girl shrugged, snapped off the damp tip, put it in her mouth, and lit the remaining half stump.
“Ta,” she said, triumphant.
She stood there in our den, smoking like a Divine. Practically speaking I couldn’t do a thing about it. I was sitting on the Polaroid. I wasn’t about to show a townie a thing like that; we’d never live it down. If I got up to leave, she’d see the photo. I had no choice but to sit there and wait till she’d gone. Without Skipper or the twins, I felt limbless and exposed. I began to sweat, the dampness spreading down my back.
The King Edmund smiled to herself and smoked with her arms crossed, leaning against the wall, blocking my way out, which felt like an act of aggression in itself. Her school tie was off and her loose hair, very smooth and pale blond, almost reached her buttocks. I forget exactly what she was wearing, probably the standard King Edmund’s gray-white uniform, but I do remember that on her feet were wedge high heels, conspicuous for being particularly un-Divine.
“Chill out, I’m just waiting for my brother,” she explained. “He works here, all right?”
Her brother, I guessed, was one of the muscle hired in for the day to help lug our empty school trunks off the Circle and stack them under the stage in the main hall where they remained till the end of term.
“Oh, well.” I swallowed, feeling the photograph sticking to my thigh, my face growing hotter. “All right then, that’s fine.”
I nodded as if granting her permission.
She rolled her eyes at me. Then, examining the end of her cigarette, she leant back against the wall. She was a little chubby in comparison to the Divine, though not overweight. Her face was round, a cluster of spots at the bottom corner of her lip she must have been picking. I had breakouts once in a while, too, but had had strict instructions from Skipper not to squeeze them. The King Edmund pushed her tongue against the inside of her lower cheek, and absently rubbed her finger over one of the scabs, her eyes moving round the decorations in our den, the wind chimes and the throws, the canopy we’d made to stop the rain coming in.
“Nice,” she said, looking at the evil eye hanging from the branch and nudged it with her finger.
“Thanks.”
“What happened to your face?”
I’d forgotten about the paper cut and put my hand to my cheek. My skin felt clammy, my cheeks flushed.
“Twig”—I pointed to the hedge—“climbing in.”
I watched her cigarette as she brought it to her lips. She made a popping noise as she inhaled deeply. I smoked incessantly but never so professionally as this girl.
“You all right?” She peered down at me. “You look like you’re going to puke or something.”
I was sweating profusely now. My face had a numb and tingly feeling as if I was being drained of blood. Still I didn’t move. These days I’m not someone who embarrasses easily. But back then my threshold was much lower. I craved the approval of my peers, even a King Edmund. The thought that she might somehow catch me ogling a photo of an erect penis made me feel physically sick.
“Head rush.” I nodded at the cigarette, before I remembered I never got round to lighting it myself.
She shrugged.
“So they just let you lot smoke in this place then or what?” the girl asked, gesturing to the can of cigarette butts on the floor.
“No,” I had to admit, though this was something of a gray area.
Getting caught smoking on school property resulted in detention or, for repeat offenders, a gating. Gating was unbearably dull—two to four weeks of mind-numbing lock-down in which we were not permitted to step foot off school property. There were compulsory time-checks on the hour, every hour, from breakfast to lights off, carrying a small fold of paper down our bras for staff to sign. But the truth was that the sprawling shape of the grounds, which spanned the whole of town, including several off-site lacrosse fields and the orchard, made the no-smoking rule a joke, totally unenforceable. In addition, the average waistline of our housemistresses, many of whom were close to obese, meant they couldn’t have squeezed inside our smoking den if they tried. Miss Graves, for example, my Brobdingnagian housemistress of the past five years, rarely left her armchair in the Egg. Typically she delegated the more physical side of our pastoral care to one of her deputies. These women survived no more than a year or two at most at the school, some just a matter of terms, and they were always jumpy-looking spinsters in their late twenties or thirties, whippet thin and lacking the necessary gravitas of a disciplinarian. We ran rings around them.
The teaching staff fared no better. I can only guess the sums of money these women must have been getting paid to work at our school. They were patronized and bullied. They probably thought they were selling their souls to the devil when they left the state sector, but what they got was far worse; it was Divine. If they grew a little tubby, we congratulated them on their pregnancies. We asked the old maids what their boyfriends were called. We splattered their backs with ink. When a teacher asked us to read something out loud or perform a task of some kind, we groaned and procrastinated and spoke in funny voices, or sometimes, such as in The Doll’s House when Nora says, I will brush my muff, we outright laughed in their face.
Because we knew the tuition fees were staggering, we treated members of staff as exactly that. Staff. Under servitude. When we were bored with our lessons, we raised our lids and conversed behind our desks. The only teachers who garnered our respect were the ones that were so eccentric they defied categorization. We had a history teacher who curled her hair into two ram horns either side of her head and when we spoke over the Treaty of Versailles she recited every monarch from 1066 onward until we were stultified into silence. Our maths teacher, Mr. Chambers, one of the few men on staff, refused to learn any of our names and simply called us all Aggie. Desperate tactics, futile in the end, but at least they tried.
It seems amazing to me that more of us weren’t expelled. We drank, we smoked, we snuck out at night through our bedroom windows. Everyone except Gerry Lake, who, afraid of heights, refused to so much as climb a gym rope. On a class trip to an outward-bound center—a day of scrambling around a muddy assault course in the rain, supposedly character building—Gerry had taken one look at the abseiling wall and marched straight back onto the school bus.
Why some of the more talented teachers stayed as long as they did I can’t imagine. If they were hoping they’d encounter a better grade of student at a private school, they were wrong. I had always found academia relatively easy but the majority of Divines weren’t in any way gifted, certainly no Wycombe Abbey or Cheltenham Ladies or Downe House. Our entrance exam was a joke. Some of the girls in my year, Skipper, for example, planned to take just one A-Level next year, something undemanding like Drama Studies or Culinary Science. What the school had always prided itself on was producing a well-bred all-rounder, a glorified finishing school if you will, for ladies. The future wives of politicians and CEOs and chairmen.