Jenni Mills - Crow Stone

I watched Trish. Her long dark hair, enviably straight, hung across her face as she bent over Poppy’s leg, curtaining them in a private tent. She never offered to paint my toenails.

Trish had been my friend first. We got to know each other by accident, rather than choice: we were the only two in our class who hadn’t been at the school right through from juniors. All the rest had known each other since they were seven. They didn’t like Trish because she was called Klein, and they didn’t like me because I was a scholarship girl. None of them realized that the most Jewish thing about Trish was her surname, and the only clever thing about me was my scholarship. For nearly three years, we had been best friends by default.

But late last year, things began to change. Trish suddenly got tall, and I stayed short. Trish–ugly old Trish, with her big nose and wide mouth, just as awkward as me, I’d always thought–started to get looks from boys. Trish had a starter bra and sanitary towels. And Trish had discovered Poppy.

Poppy had arrived in Green Down just after Christmas. Her father worked for the Ministry of Defence and had been posted from Plymouth to Bath. She immediately latched on to Trish and me. I didn’t mind at first. It made me feel like I had a wide circle of friends. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Trish straightened up, popped the brush back into the bottle and screwed down the top. Poppy wiggled her freckled toes, admiring the silvery-pink. ‘Do Katie’s,’ she said to Trish.

‘I’m not going to waste it,’ said Trish.

‘I don’t want mine done,’ I said quickly. Trish was right. I wouldn’t be careful: it would get chipped, and I didn’t have any nail-varnish remover to take it off properly. Still, I’d have liked her to paint my nails silvery-pink.

‘So,’ said Poppy, ‘what are we going to do now?’

They both looked at me. They wanted me to invite them back to my house. But I wanted to stay in the field, with the worn-out cows and the ammonites.

‘Let’s do biology,’ I said, to buy time. Trish looked pleased; this game starred her. She fished in her satchel.

There was no hurry. No one was waiting for us. My dad wouldn’t be back from rewiring someone’s house until half past six. Poppy’s parents were in Scotland that week, where her grandmother was taking her time over dying, so Poppy was staying with Trish. Trish’s mum was always relaxed about the time they came home after school.

My dad had not yet plucked up the courage to tell me the facts of life. He left that to the school, which had been slow getting round to it too. But this term we’d been thrilled to find our new biology textbook was rather more forthcoming on the subject than our teacher.

Trish pushed her hair into a tight little bun on the top of her head, and flared her nostrils in imitation of Miss Millichip. ‘Turn now to page one-nine-four, girls,’ she trilled. Poppy and I, playing dutiful pupils, opened our books. We stared at mysterious illustrations that reminded me of the plumbing schemes and wiring diagrams my father worked on at the kitchen table.

‘Today we are going to study reproduction,’ continued Trish. We’d had a real lesson on it this afternoon, but Miss Millichip had revealed nothing more exciting than the gestation period of a rabbit. ‘What kind of reproduction, Poppy McClaren?’

Poppy giggled. ‘ Human reproduction, miss.’

The diagrams bore no resemblance to any human body I’d seen. Were those coils of pipework really tucked away inside me? On the opposite page there was a diagram of the male reproductive system. Staring at it, I felt an odd sensation. It was grounded somewhere not far from the pipework, but it seemed to swell up through the whole central stem of my body, so even my lips and tongue felt thick and hot and clumsy.

Trish’s mother, more advanced than the average Green Down parent, had explained matters to her daughter more than a year ago, so Trish considered herself an expert. ‘A woman,’ she intoned, ‘has an opening called the regina .’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Poppy. ‘It says here it’s called the va gina.’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Trish, loftily. ‘It’s Latin for “queen”. It must be a misprint in the book.’

Poppy looked sceptical, but neither of us felt brave enough to contradict Trish. Her mother had come from London, and worked as a photographer’s model before marrying Trish’s dad.

‘And the man,’ Trish continued, ‘has an appendage called a penis .’ That did it. We were all off on a fit of giggles.

‘Have you ever seen one?’ asked Poppy, a little later when we had recovered.

‘Of course I have,’ said Trish. ‘I used to have baths with Stephen.’

‘That doesn’t count,’ said Poppy. ‘Your brother’s ten . I meant a grown-up one.’

I could see Trish weighing up whether to lie or not. In spite of her mother’s racy career, her home was probably as modest as the rest of suburban Bath in the 1970s. Fathers and brothers did not wander around naked.

‘No,’ she finally admitted. ‘But I have seen my mother’s fanny. It’s all hairy.’

I decided it was time to make my own contribution to the debate. ‘I have,’ I said.

They looked at me, astonished.

‘Really?’ said Poppy, at the same moment as Trish said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Really I have,’ I said. ‘It was horrible.’

‘Was it a flasher?’ asked Poppy.

‘No, it was my dad’s,’ I said. ‘I was on the toilet, and hadn’t locked the door, and he came in not knowing I was there. It was sticking out of the gap in his pyjama bottoms. It looked like a boiled beef sausage, red and a bit shiny. Except it was more wrinkled, and had this kind of eye-thing at the end, looking at me.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Trish. ‘I would have screamed. I’d have called for my mum.’

She didn’t mean to be unkind–at least, I don’t think she did – but it stung all the same. Poppy saw my face, and jumped in quickly. ‘What did he do?’

‘He went out again,’ I said. ‘Then afterwards, at breakfast, he shouted at me for not locking the bathroom door.’

‘Was it–you know, up?’ asked Trish.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It all happened quite quickly, and what I mostly remember was the eye-thing.’

‘It must have been up if you saw the eye,’ said Trish. ‘Because if it had been down, it would have been pointing to the floor, instead of looking at you.’

‘But if it had been up, it would have been pointing at the ceiling,’ argued Poppy. ‘So it can’t have been up. Anyway, why would it have been up? He can’t have been having sex.’

‘It goes up when a man just thinks about sex,’ said Trish. ‘I expect he must still think about sex, your dad. Maybe it was half-way, on its way up or its way down.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. My hand slid off the book and came to rest on the comforting earth. I wanted to stop this conversation. I felt embarrassed, as if I’d taken a picture of my dad’s penis and shown it to them.

‘You know, men are supposed to think about sex almost every two minutes,’ said Poppy. ‘There was something about it in the Daily Express . Some survey scientists did in America. So I don’t think it has to go up when men just think about sex.’

Trish looked belligerent. ‘My mother said it does. But you might not be able to tell, if they’re wearing trousers.’

‘I think you would be able to tell,’ insisted Poppy. ‘I mean, it gets bigger, doesn’t it? So they’d get a big bump in the front of their trousers.’ That set us off giggling again.

‘In that case Gary Bennett’s jeans might split ,’ said Trish. There was a reverent silence, as we all contemplated this shockingly delicious idea.