Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

But she missed Lucille and eventually turned up at her house with flowers and a bottle of her best claret, and Lucille had clearly missed her in return because she only made her grovel for two hours. ‘I know you didn’t mean that awful thing about Bart. After all, Bettina and my Barty are the same in nature, so to call him a brat’ – a sly look over her wine glass – ‘is to call your own daughter a brat.’

Lucille and Venetia mostly played gin rummy and cribbage. Lucille had a croquet lawn in her garden but they never used it because Venetia was a terrible shot and always ended up tossing her mallet into the flowerbeds and returning to her patio chair in a sulk. They ate cakes practically on the hour. On Sundays they chose to start drinking after lunch and got slowly sozzled on whatever drink suited their mood, smoking incessantly. Sometimes they gossiped about trivialities, such as the impossibility of finding a good butcher, or mean-spirited things – Sybil Palmer’s eyes were too close together and she just had this look about her, like she’d do it with anyone , even the blessed gardener. Other times they discussed the suffrage movement or the ‘situation in India’ (‘Bit of a pickle, I hear’), lolling back in their chairs, using unimaginative language and taking unoriginal viewpoints because they were close and comfortable friends who had no need to impress each other.

Once, after a whole afternoon of cribbage and fizz, they’d retired to the sitting room; Bettina had pressed her ear to the door and heard raucous, naked laughter, and one word had leapt out of the fragmented chatter – ‘fuck’ – and her ears heated up like steamed cockles. She caught a partial sentence, from Lucille: ‘… his hands squeezing my throat, just so, it was quite delicious’.

‘You’re loitering,’ her mother said now. She took her eyes from her cards and looked up at Bettina. ‘Let me get this right: you’ve talked to your father and didn’t hear quite what you wanted to hear.’

‘Correct,’ said Bettina.

‘And you think I can change his mind?’

‘I know you can.’

Venetia put her cards down. ‘Darling, I really can’t. Not about this. Every year you do this, and every year he doesn’t budge an inch.’

‘Got his heels in the stirrups,’ added Lucille, blasting thick smoke from the side of her mouth.

‘He really does,’ said her mother, her brows tilted in apology. ‘This is something he feels awfully strongly about. And he is a benefactor. What would it look like if his own daughter dropped out?’

Bettina’s body slumped and she rolled her head back. ‘But they’re all such horrible bitches!’

‘Well, of course they are, darling. They’re sixteen-year-old girls.’

‘You’re not being helpful.’

‘I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Isn’t there at least one nice one you can be friends with?’ asked Lucille.

‘No! Not one!’Actually, Bettina did have one ‘nice’ friend in school. But it was like finding one pearl in a field of sheep droppings. The pearl is lovely, but look – there’s still all this sheep shit and one can’t help but step in it.

‘Perhaps the world is trying to tell you something,’ said Lucille, raising an eyebrow.

‘Oh, do be quiet, Lolly,’ said Venetia, shooting her a cross look. She stood up and took Bettina by the arms – her hands were cold and digging. ‘Look, lovey, it’s only another two years and then you can come back home. Two years really isn’t a terribly long time and you’ve already got through the worst of it. My father made me go to finishing school when I was your age, and what a dreadful bore that was.’

Lucille knocked back the last of her sherry. ‘And just be thankful you’re not a boy,’ she said, dabbing the corner of her lips with her finger. ‘From what I hear, it’s all buggery, buggery, buggery—’

‘Shut up, Lolly!’

‘Please don’t tell me to shut up, Neesh – I’m simply pointing out the positives.’

Bettina stared at the powder clinging to her mother’s downy chin. The skin was soft, like an old woman’s earlobe. She should be thankful she wasn’t a boy, and she was reminded of this every bloody day, from the black armbanded women gusting into Our Lady of the Angels, the leftover mothers, wives, sisters – in fact she’d passed by them just this morning on her way to St Mark’s, watching through the cab screen with blank eyes but a swirling dark mischief in her stomach. And inside her own church it was all the same, just with nicer hats and better teeth.

She didn’t even have to leave the house for a reminder of how thankful she should be: there, across the dining-room table, sat her older brother Jonathan every mealtime, struggling one-armed with his cutlery, face pale, proud and pinched as the broad beans or new potatoes rolled around on his plate or flew across the table. She should be supremely grateful. She should be kissing the trench-blackened feet of every young man in Great Britain, she should be worshipping their mangled stumps before skipping off to her prestigious, wonderful boarding school at the end of every holiday, because she was so privileged, so fortunate, skipping, skipping, white teeth shining, singing to the finches and marvelling over butterflies! Instead she mewled and scratched like a fat, spoiled housecat. She knew it. And she felt guilty about it. And guilt was a boring waste of time.

They really were such dreadful bitches, those girls.

October 1922, Winchester College

Bart hung his head over the toilet, a thick white nausea in the foreground of his senses, and considered his options.

Actually, he didn’t have any.

His diaphragm tensed with a jolt and more brown sick burst up and out, spattering the porcelain basin and leaving dots of coagulated matter like brown stars. It was the kippers, most likely. What a turd this ‘fine institution’ had turned out to be. The food wasn’t fit for a cockroach – yesterday there’d been a fingernail clipping in his porridge. He felt a spasm in his bowel and quickly stumbled to his feet and yanked his trousers down, dropping to the toilet just in time. He groaned, fog blasting out of his mouth.

No – certainly he had no options.

In forty minutes he was supposed to enter the cricket field, leading his team against Repton. It was an especially important match. Last February a few Repton fellows had sneaked into the dormitory in the early hours, kidnapped their best batsman, taken him to the cricket field, stripped him entirely naked and shaved off his eyebrows. Bart and his teammates had found the poor boy the next morning, pale and shivering, his penis so shrunken by the cold (and possibly genetics) that it had burrowed up inside his pubic mound and resembled a vulva.

Bart’s fag, Roger, entered the room with clean towels draped over his arm like a tiny waiter.

‘I don’t mean to be impertinent, sir, but it does appear that you mightn’t be well enough to play today.’ Spoken in such a stilted way that the little turd had probably rehearsed it.

Bart looked up with wretched eyes. ‘Well observed, genius.’ He wiped some drool from his chin and leaned back against the toilet. ‘It’s coming out of me like water, Rodge. I don’t dare get off the pot.’

Roger nodded sympathetically. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

Bart groaned again, his head rolling around on his shoulders. ‘No. Just try not to irritate me. Oh fuck, here it comes.’ He hunched over, elbows on his knees, hands covering his face as another cramp fist-squeezed his bowels and more liquid gushed out. ‘Don’t fucking look at me!’ he cried, weakly, and then his face slackened and lost all its colour – the little that was left – and he quickly parted his thighs and aimed a stream of bile into the gap. Another groan, this one longer and lower, like the cry of a mare suffering a breech birth. He had sick all over his pubic hair. Roger averted his eyes – breathing through his mouth, he stared at the white wall over the washbasin, listening to the drip of the tap which acted as a percussive metronome for the melodic score of Bart’s tortured moans.