Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

‘Margo,’ she whispered, and now that the silence had been broken, so had the paralysing spell.

‘Hmm?’

‘Can I tell you a secret?’

‘Please do.’

‘You’ve got to swear not to tell,’ said Bettina, ‘because otherwise I’ll be in the absolute worst trouble.’

‘Come off it,’ said Margo. ‘I’ve just let you in on my family’s most guarded, ugly secret. Well, one of them.’

‘The thing is, my friend Bart – you remember Bart, I’ve told you all about him. Last week he sent me a bottle of brandy and a case of cigarettes and I’ve got them hidden in the boiler room.’

Margo sat up with a jerk, dislodging Bettina’s head. ‘Bettina! You dark horse!’

‘Well, Bart is the dark horse really. It was him who—’

‘How did it get past The Barren One?’

The Barren One was Miss Cameron, the house mistress (so called because she was so averse to children that it was highly conceivable she ovulated sand). It was rumoured that she checked all packages the girls received. So as to avoid precisely this sort of thing. Probably not true, Bettina thought, but you never knew – some of the women here at St Vincent’s were complete psychopaths.

She shook her head, bewildered. ‘Maybe she was too busy sacrificing tiny infants to—’

Margo bounded off the bed with explosive excitement. ‘Well, why are we wasting our time here, stuffing sweets and gossiping like a pair of ole fishwives?’

‘You want to – now?’

‘Does the Pope wear a hat?’

Bettina stared at Margo’s face, trying to think of a witty comeback. But she could think of nothing, and besides, the opportunity had passed, so she got off the bed, took her friend’s hand and together they left the room and began the exhilarating slow creep through the school’s narrow passages.

The boiler room had a dark, heavy air, even when brightly lit. Black mould spread up the whitewashed walls, forming curious patterns, and the last time Bettina had been down here, to hide the drink and cigs, she’d sat on an old wonky piano stool, chin in hands and elbows on knees, trying to find shapes in the mould as one finds shapes in clouds (it was always dragons, continents and old men’s faces).

When, at thirteen, she’d first started at St Vincent’s (reluctantly, of course, and only because her father refused to submit to her year-long campaign of passive-aggressive resistance), the older students – all bitches – gleefully passed down the inevitable ghost stories, claiming that St Vincent’s was well-known to be haunted, had in fact attracted spiritualists and macabre loners from all over the world on thrill-seeking and fact-gathering pilgrimages. The boiler room, they said, was the most malignant place in the whole building, the source of all the paranormal energy and telekinetic phenomena (Bettina had no idea what ‘telekinetic’ meant, and wasn’t about to ask), and home to the Black Nun. The Black Nun had died in a fire in the boiler room some ninety years ago, back when the school was a sanatorium for the criminally insane (it never was, Monty told her later – it had been a great manor house belonging to a Norwegian whoremonger who frittered away his whole estate on opium, tarts and lavish orgies), and some nights, even now, her ghost could be seen gliding silently and footlessly along the corridors.

Only now did she understand the reason for this story. The necessity of it.

When she crept down to the boiler room that first time after receiving Bart’s package there were countless traces of previous visitations – chocolate wrappers, pen ink, lipstick-kissed napkins, even a discarded pair of woollen knickers with dried blood on them. This was the place, she realised, where the older girls went to escape the oppressive prim cloud that hung over them; a place of cautious freedom. In one corner, concealed behind a dusty pile of broken musical instruments (on top of which a stringless, scratched harp was placed, leaning precariously) was an empty wine bottle – a dessert wine of the sort her parents served with plum pudding – and poked into the cracks of the wall’s plaster next to the hot boiler tank were a few squashed cigarette ends.

She hid her own items with neurotic care. She also collected the cigarette stubs and various other leftovers and dropped them inside the tubed hollow of a rolled-up rug.

‘Rather funky smelling in here,’ said Margo, pulling a face like a fine lady wandering through a fish market.

‘My most humble apologies,’ said Bettina. ‘Would you rather I set out a chaise longue for you in the headmaster’s office, on which you can enjoy our contraband items?’

‘Oh, shush,’ said Margot, smiling. ‘I am merely making a comment . I wasn’t expecting the Ritz.’

There was a dented violin missing three strings in the pile of broken instruments. Bettina gently lifted it so as not to disturb the intricate structure, and there underneath was the bottle and cigarettes Bart had sent. She presented them to Margo with a self-conscious ‘ta-da!’ and Margo clapped her hands.

‘My father has this,’ she said, looking at the bottle. ‘It’s supposed to be good.’

‘Have you ever tried it?’ said Bettina.

‘No. I’ve never had the inclination.’

‘You mean you’ve never drunk?’

‘Of course I have. Wine and port and so forth at dinner parties. In moderation, bien entendu . But never men’s drink. I imagine it’s ghastly.’

‘It is.’

‘Well, I don’t care. Right now it seems like just the ticket.’

Bettina nodded, bringing a lit match towards the cigarette between her lips, aware that Margo was watching her with reserved awe. She inhaled, tilted her head and let out the smoke through her nostrils. ‘Bart is always making me drink spirits. He delights in getting me drunk.’

‘You’d better watch out for him then!’

‘Oh, I do, he’s a perfect scoundrel. Listen – don’t you think we ought to be very careful? Suppose someone smells it on us at supper.’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Margo opened the bottle and sniffed, pulling a face, before taking a sip and wincing. ‘Acha vee!’ She handed the bottle to Bettina, who took a huge swallow, fighting the urge to grimace. A man would never grimace. ‘We’ll have our little party,’ said Margo, ‘and then we’ll immediately brush our teeth and take ourselves to bed with hot water bottles. We’ve already a great cover story after all – you’ve got the curse and I’m an asthmatic weakling.’

‘And if I fall over I can always blame it on an iron deficiency.’

Margo took the bottle back. ‘Exactly.’ She pinched her nose with one hand and tilted the bottle into her mouth, draining an inch.

‘Steady on, girl,’ said Bettina, in a voice she didn’t recognise.

‘“Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, Night, has flown!”’ Margo had one chubby leg up on the piano stool, her skirt hoiked up to reveal the stays of her stockings, like a bawdy cabaret performer. She was singing in a ridiculous man’s tenor. ‘“Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.”’

‘Oh God, you’re not going to sing the whole thing, are—’

Margo lifted a finger to shush her. ‘“And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, and the musk of the roses blown.”’ She lifted the hem of her skirt and, flapping it, said, in a shrill cockney accent, ‘How’s the musk of my rose, dear?’

‘Shhh!’ said Bettina, before collapsing over in a fit of giggles.

Margo brought her leg off the stool and attempted to kick it away, but missed, lost her balance and fell onto her hands and knees. She looked up at Bettina, her back arched and her eyes pure carnival. Shrieking with laughter, Bettina rushed over and helped her up. Margo fell against her. She snatched the cigarette out of Bettina’s mouth and, awkwardly tweezering it between her fingers, took a tiny puff. Her other hand lay just above Bettina’s breasts, the hot palm pressing into the bony ridge of her chest. It was unnecessary, that hand, and it lingered.