GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2021/22

KATIE HALE
‘The Architect; or, Same Old Story’

THERE WAS A RUMOUR GOING AROUND SCHOOL that Nancy Vickers had lost it to her auntie’s bulldog. That could happen, Susanna whispered, balling up her gym knickers and stuffing them deep into her kit bag. The mechanism was the same, after all.

It was the first week back, and the changing room was a garden after rain. A bustle of growth, the low-level buzz of gossip. They followed the topic of Nancy Vickers like heliotropic flowers.

Ellie watched Susanna glance around, pretend not to notice the others listening in, then lean back towards her, ‘Just have to get on all fours and take her knickers off.’

The girls nodded. They’d all seen Nancy Vickers’ auntie waiting by the school gate, made crude jokes about dogs with lipstick.

There was a lull as they hitched up skirts and rolled down socks, tucked laces into the throats of patent shoes. Ellie knew they were all picturing the same thing: Nancy Vickers kneeling on her auntie’s faded rug, fingernails digging at fibres, a web of short white bristles threaded through them. Skirt rucked around her waist, her fleshy thighs exposed to the excited dog behind. All of them wondering how it might feel to be opened by something other than a boy or another girl’s fingers.

Maja giggled and a breeze cleaned through the room, ‘Reckon she’s pregnant with puppies?’

They laughed, carried on packing away their kit.

Ellie didn’t believe the rumours about Nancy Vickers, but it was a good horror story: a natural progression from the ones they used to tell at sleepovers, faces uplit by torches to look haggard and beastly. Tales of ghouls and hauntings, of imaginary friends who were really the ghosts of long-dead children. It made sense that, as they grew more aware of themselves, they exchanged horrors of the mind for horrors of the body.

She felt the same that afternoon, when Mr K told them the story about Catherine the Great – how, being Empress of Russia, she had been able to order a contraption, built to satisfy her lewd desires, how she had lain spread-eagled as her favourite horse was winched onto her, the animal so virile it had ripped the empress apart. The further he got into the story, the faster Mr K spoke, till by the time he finished, there were flecks of white spittle at the corners of his mouth. One of the boys made a joke about being hung like a horse. When Susanna chucked a pencil at him, Mr K sent her from the room.

It was just the same as the story about Nancy Vickers, Ellie thought, but on a big enough scale people had started calling it history. She chewed the ends of her hair. That sounded vaguely deep. If she remembered, she would tell Susanna.

 *

Susanna was waiting for her by the lockers, jiggling her leg, jaw working a piece of gum.

‘I think you were meant to wait outside the room.’

‘He told me to leave. I left.’ She grabbed Ellie’s jacket from her locker, helped her unload books and files into her bag. ‘You want to come over tonight? Lyd’s at a friend’s and Mum’s working late.’

‘Can’t, sorry.’ Ellie flicked through her homework planner to check what else she needed, ‘Mum’s doing Gran’s appointment so I said I’d do tea. Come over if you like?’

‘Your cooking versus a night home alone? No thanks.’

The boy Susanna had hit with the pencil sauntered past, jeering, his gaggle of friends whooping along in chorus.

‘Dickheads,’ Ellie breathed, quiet enough for only Susanna to hear.

Susanna spat out her gum, a silent missile, masticated soft, so it hit the boy on the back of his shoulder. It clung, parasitic, to his blazer. The boys carried on oblivious.

Ellie grinned and turned back to her locker. Susanna unwrapped a new stick of gum.

‘Reckon he has a wife?’

‘Who?’

‘Mr K.’ Susanna started to scratch a star into a locker door with her key. The noise travelled up the length of Ellie’s spine and nestled in her teeth. ‘You heard him. Either he’s married and they sleep in separate bedrooms, or he’s an old bachelor.’

‘So?’

‘Reckon he looks at us?’ Susanna’s eyes were bright pollen spots. ‘Reckon he thinks about us when he’s on his own?’

Ellie looked from Susanna’s eyes to her half-open mouth, to her fingers pressing into the sharp edge of her key, distracted from carving. ‘Reckon you’ve thought about him.’

‘Why would I think about Creepy K?’ Susanna arranged her face into a look of strategic disgust, ‘Plenty of boys I can think about if I want to.’

Ellie shut her locker with a clang. ‘Like Jonathan Birkett?’

‘Shut up.’

Whenever she thought about Jonathan Birkett, his stubby rugby-player’s body, the rumours he’d had sex with a girl from the year above in the back of her Renault Clio – rumours she was pretty certain he had started – and the way Susanna twirled her hair in his direction during chemistry, Ellie felt something weigh in her stomach like glowing coals. Not looking at Susanna, she shouldered her bag. She led the way down the corridor, out towards the buses.

* 

It was all pretend, she was almost certain. Just like Nancy Vickers. She and Susanna had taught themselves to kiss on the backs of their hands. They had bought the red-cover Mills & Boons from the charity shop and read them in each other’s bedrooms, listened, terrified, for parents’ feet on the stairs. They had lain awake in the electric hours after midnight, wondering aloud what it might feel like to press your body against the length of a naked boy, what it might feel like for him to press his body against yours.

In year eight, Susanna had kissed Maja’s brother in the French room during the end-of-term disco. It was OK, she’d said, till he’d stuck his tongue in her mouth. Like a fat slug all pushed in at once. She’d shoved him into the desks and walked away.

Whether Susanna lay awake thinking of Mr K or Jonathan Birkett or anyone else, Ellie was sure it was only thinking, nothing more. Susanna had confessed, when they’d closeted themselves away from Lyd in the old treehouse at one of Ellie’s parents’ summer barbecues, that she didn’t know how to masturbate.

Ellie had laughed before she realised Susanna was serious.

‘It’s easy for boys,’ Susanna had said, brash-faced on pilfered San Miguel. ‘They can see what they’re doing. Besides, it’s the universal symbol for wanker.’

Unable to stop herself, Ellie had giggled again, a high hoppy laugh that sounded strange.

‘Shh!’

‘Sorry.’

‘So how does it work?’

For the first time, Ellie saw Susanna not bent forward in confidence, but bowed, like a tree forced by prevailing winds, not even dreaming of the sky.

She felt her own face redden, hid it behind another swig of beer.

‘I mean – do girls even do it?’

Ellie thought of her own fidgets under the duvet, and the spare head for the electric toothbrush she kept buried in her sock drawer. Cataloguing her body, laying herself out on her mattress like a cadaver, naked so the smell of her couldn’t weld to her pyjamas. Waking in the middle of the night with that heady tug drawing through her – the first time she had managed to tip herself past the precipice, the simultaneous falling and rising, being pushed and pulled all at once, a boozy cocktail of directions.

She looked at Susanna’s hope and insecurity. She took another gulp of warm beer. ‘No,’ she told her, ‘I don’t think girls really wank.’

* 

The bus dropped her at the bottom of the track. She watched the red jibe of the brake lights as it disappeared around the corner, thought about the girls on the raised dais of the back row, eyes kohl-ringed and hard, and about the boys jostling for attention in the rows in front, catching bared skins with a smart whip of a tie. She thought about anything except Susanna.

A breeze questioned her from across the fell, stooped to run its chill and curious tongue around her uncovered neck, then rose to pester the nervous canopy of a beech tree. Autumn would be here soon. The year rushed back around towards darkness.

The track ribboned up the field away from the road. On wet afternoons, her mum might drive down to collect her, but there was no chance of that today. This was a day for making the most of, her mum either still at the doctor’s with her gran, or off on the fell somewhere with her dad and the dogs, the car’s impatient tick replaced by the thrum of the quad.

Ellie hefted her backpack onto both shoulders, tightroped the cattle grid on the balls of her feet, and started up the hill. Each step made a pact with the hard earth. The sun was a warm hand across her back, and she stopped to untuck her school shirt, knotted it up around the bottom of her ribs. The school day radiated from her, hot and creaturely, a smell of bubbling tarmac, Bunsen burners, the grey thumbed edges of textbooks.

There was the tea to make. She already had homework to do, and the weight of it dragged at her shoulders. Differentiation. A whole sheet of numbers and letters and rates of change to be established – but what was changing exactly? Ellie didn’t understand it in real terms, and when she’d asked, nobody had explained.

All around her, the farm was caught in its own wilting change. The hedgerows had washed off their paintbox array of wildflowers. The lambs were already bulky with winter wool, and everywhere she looked, Ellie saw things ending, disappearing. A rush like a mountain ghyll to its inevitable conclusion. It lodged in the corner of her eye, this collapse, this entropy. A dust speck she tried to rub away.

Halfway home, she left the track and struck out for the shade of the copse. Tea was mostly just a microwave job, whatever she had told Susanna, and differentiation could wait.

A sheep looked up as she approached, bleated once in fright, then squatted out a stream of pee. She ignored it. She watched as the Mountain Rescue helicopter guttered towards the Lakes and the end of the tourist season. The quiet left in its wake was filled by the panic of birdsong, a fly bothering the sweat at the back of her neck, a distant dissatisfied cow.

She skirted the dim-lit copse for her secret hideaway around the other side. It wasn’t really a secret. Her parents knew she came here – it was just that neither of them would bother to disturb her. Between the farm and her grandparents, they had enough to keep them occupied, and she suspected things like dens and copses lost their appeal as you got older. As for her, she couldn’t fathom falling out of love with this place, its fat boulders like a fortress, long grass tufted into thick cushions underneath them, hidden from the track by the trees – and, if she raised her head above the parapet, the whole wilderness of the fells before her.

It was a false wilderness, this majestic and crumpled terrain. Her dad had taught her enough about land management to understand that. Bare fields in place of trees. A rugged deforested stretch. Sometimes, she liked to imagine it wooded, how it must have been thousands of years ago, furtive with wolves and lynx, the sunlight stripped and filtered before it ever touched the ground. If she let herself think about this for too long, she could let it scare her, the wildness a toxin bleeding through her.

She was more at home in her own bare landscape. She understood it – the copse her own pretence at wildness. The first time she shaved her legs, she had felt the same, the unpredictable fur sliced away to reveal the shape of her body underneath. All day she had found herself running her palms along her shins, astonishing herself with their sleekness, as though they were the legs of a woman much older, much more at home with desire – though what she had enjoyed most was the startling accident of hair she had missed with the razor, a bristle of it just below her left knee, a thrill of something real and secret nobody else would notice. She had worried at it all day with her fingers when she thought nobody was looking.

Ellie pulled out a half-eaten packet of cheese and onion crisps, then lay back on the grass, rucksack stuffed under her head as a pillow. She let thoughts of Susanna and Jonathan Birkett drift and scatter like dandelion seeds, to go and root themselves elsewhere.

The sky was too bright, so Ellie shut her eyes, fed bits of crisps to herself blind, slurped the flavour from her fingers between each mouthful. When she finished, she upended the crumbs into her mouth, and a gauze of salt and crisp dust trickled onto her upturned face. She left it there. On the insides of her eyelids, the light was fuchsia, yellow, a rhubarb-and-custard swirl. The sun leaked like bathwater across her bare stomach.

It was the insects that alerted her to him – the drone of flies and bees she hadn’t been aware of until they stopped. In their place they left a silence so vast and deep that Ellie jolted as though she’d fallen into it. She opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was the sun’s squint across his shoulder, straws of light, fiery raiment cascading from him. Everything else was silhouette. She thought of black holes drowning whole galaxies in their gravitational lure.

‘Mind if I join you?’ His voice was a dust-road whisper. It ran through her body, sandpapered her spine. She jolted up.

He folded himself onto the tufted grass beside her, limbs angled in on themselves like safety pins. His legs and arms were pipe cleaner thin, as though someone had constructed him out of the long reaching shadows at the end of the day, as if he might suddenly slip from existence.

She balled her fists into the long grass. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’

He smiled.

Ellie had often heard her mum say her dad’s smile went all the way to his eyes. When the stranger smiled, his eyes filled with teeth. His gaze become carnivorous, and if she looked deep enough she thought she could see the pitch of a throat on the other side. She swallowed.

‘Beautiful day,’ he said.

She said nothing, struggled to fit the movements of his lips to the words that came from them.

‘Do you live around here?’

Across an intervening decade, she remembered a lesson in primary school: never tell a stranger where you live. But then, she didn’t want to suggest she was too far from home either. She didn’t want him to think she had nowhere else to go. ‘Pretty close,’ she said, indicating a non-committal direction behind her.

Something tickled against her shin: a small black fly crawling up it. The stranger unfolded his long arm, reached across till she thought he might put his hand on her knee, and squashed the fly against her leg. It left an ugly smear on her skin and the pad of his thumb.

‘Thanks.’

He put the thumb to his lips and sucked. He put his tongue to her gleaming calf and licked the smear away.

Ellie held herself as still as she could, as if by not moving she could freeze the moment, and perhaps freeze the stranger inside it. It felt more like a finger than a tongue, firm and deliberate, like he was drawing a line up her leg with a marker pen, preparing her for surgery.

He folded himself back on his haunches. Ellie’s skirt had pushed itself up around her waist. The far fells were like mirages and she couldn’t focus on them. The fields swelled and dipped like an ocean, their waves always drifting her back to the stranger, his slender arms, his fingers like pins on a mechanical loom, a constant weaving between one another as if he were spinning his own existence from the air.

She tried to tug at her skirt without looking like she was tugging at her skirt. ‘I have to go.’

He lifted her wrist to check her watch, his touch thin and whispery on her arm.

‘I’ve got to get my dad’s tea.’

He said nothing.

She stood up, picked up her bag. She could feel him watching her as she walked away. She counted her steps till she was out of sight. Once the dim bristle of the copse was between them, she ran.

 *

The next day it rained. She sat on the kitchen rug with her back to the range cooker, watching the drops bounce off the patio. She was supposed to be summarising The Tempest. She tapped her pen against her leg, a quick jitter that matched the patter of the rain outside.

* 

On Friday afternoon, the weekend prostrated itself before her. Two whole days, wide enough for all the homework, fear and regrets she might need to fill them with. She wasn’t a child. She could handle this. She went back to the copse.

It was still drizzling, a fine curtain of water that swayed across the field in grey drifts. By the time she reached the trees, her hair stuck flat against her skull, her shirt and blazer collar were damp and clammy, and her feet squelched from trudging through the long grass.

He arrived a few moments later. They stood in the dark under the trees, listening to the rush and rustle of water flirting with the leaves, watching the far peaks clear and disappear with the rain. Her breath came heavy, but when she held it, she could hear his: light, almost absent, secretive as a boxed heart.

Her phone buzzed in her blazer pocket like a trapped wasp. Susanna was the only person who ever called instead of texting. Ellie ignored it. She scuffed at the twigs and leaf mulch with her toes, felt herself calming, growing more confident. She waited till her breathing had gone back to normal. Then, after a few minutes, she left.

 *

The third time, she asked him to kiss her. She was perched on a tuft of grass, coat spread under her like a picnic blanket against the damp. The sky was the grey of old bed sheets and she shivered.

He told her he wanted to be an architect. It hadn’t occurred to Ellie that he would have desires like these. After all, wasn’t that what real adulthood was – the achievement of your dreams? But the way he spoke about it – such practical surety – made Ellie thrill as if she’d been offered champagne.

‘To design and build things. To bring them into being, create something out of nothing – isn’t that miraculous?’

‘I don’t believe in miracles.’

‘No, but miraculous… It’s something different.’ He fidgeted as he spoke, thumb over finger over thumb, a repetitive spell.

Ellie watched, hypnotised. ‘How d’you mean?’

‘Things that make your heartbeat sound louder in your head.’ His voice was a single strand of silk, reeling her in. ‘Things that make the world feel stronger, more infinite.’

The fells were strafed with sunlight, bold and close, as if they’d laid themselves out especially for her. It was how she imagined it might feel to be grown-up and to take a lover. To come home early from work in some passionate foreign city – Paris, maybe, or Rome – and find your lover stretched out on the bed, waiting for you, beautiful and naked beneath a thin white sheet.

The architect said, ‘Shapes and angles are miraculous. It’s the exquisite geometry of the universe.’

The word geometry made Ellie think of set squares and protractors, of Miss Buckley’s squeaking attempts to make herself heard over the boys at the back, thwacking each other’s knuckles with their rulers.

He traced the line of her arm, from her wrist, up over her crooked elbow, to her shoulder, her neck. He traced from her ankle to the underside of her bent knee. ‘If you look at in the right way,’ he said, ‘the whole world is angles.’

That was when she said, ‘Do you want to kiss me?’ And she tilted her head, hoping the angle between her jawline and her collarbone might be exquisite and miraculous.

He levered himself towards her, bridged her with his arching limbs till he was everywhere, the entire span of her existence. His mouth was centimetres from hers, a dragonfly wing stuck to his top lip like a layer of onion skin. She licked it away. It tasted of nothing.

The kiss was different to the ones she had fumbled through with Davey at school, or with the youngest Harrison boy on the outward bound residential – different to the brazen snogs playing Spin the Bottle at Maja’s fifteenth, drunk on vodka from her brother’s hip flask. The architect’s kisses were light, like single strands of hair drawn across her mouth, each one urging her in, spinning her closer till she felt the whole weightless length of him strung along her own body, her knees bent up to tug him to her.

She stopped. She expected to be breathless, the way the women always were in books, but she felt steady, her breathing and heartbeat regular as drumbeats. Only her skin felt different, pulled, as though caught on the tiny burrs on plant leaves. She understood now why people talked about their skin singing – like stinging, but lighter, more drawn out, higher pitched.

‘Too much?’

The question hit her as an odd one, as though he was a bucket of water suspended above her head, or a meal she had gorged on. As though he were a pain threshold, testing her limits.

She kissed him again.

 *

It became a habit, meeting the architect after school. Not every day – she had homework and chores, and she liked the fact it was down to her, that she could choose to go or not and had no obligation to tell him. Sometimes she wondered whether he went there every afternoon, whether he stood alone in the tree-shadow, counting the minutes until he knew she wouldn’t appear. She liked to think he did. Once, she asked him where he lived, and he gestured vaguely towards the next valley, as though he might have a cottage there, as though he might fold himself into an armchair of an evening, might read a book beside the fire. She didn’t believe him. He belonged to the copse. Her copse. He always arrived moments after she did, dropping soundlessly into view as though her being there had somehow conjured him.

A few times, she almost told Susanna. The words hovered, ant-like on their hind legs, on the tip of her tongue. But each time something caught them, pulled them back, as if they were fastened to a thread anchored in the lining of her stomach.

So the two of them sat next to one another in class, like people in neighbouring flats, each looking out on the same view, each entirely separate from the other. That was the thing about all their classrooms, she realised. They encouraged them to look forwards individually, rather than turning to each other for help. In each lesson, Ellie focused quietly on her work. Beside her, Susanna did the same.

 *

Breaking from the rows of desks to the jumble of the school bus was like water sprayed from a burst pipe. The neat pairings suggested by the coach company were gloriously disregarded. Students leaned over the backs of headrests to swap stories with those behind, or to stick gum in haphazard constellations on the window, the old ones hardened, dangling like egg sacs. Where seats had been ripped out, boys sat backwards. The girls who wore trousers joined them, crotches wide, legs spread through the gaps. It was their own rebellion, wedged in the breach between school and home. A place for pretending at adulthood the way Victorian hothouses pretended at being jungles.

Ellie didn’t mind the steamy enclosed air, the mushroomy smell of pent bodies crammed all day inside polyester uniforms. She liked how the journey spread, briefly, like a waxy leaf, equal parts venomous and lush.

She squashed into a double seat with Susanna and her little sister, Lyd. Ellie’s stop was first, but it was Lyd who was pushed to the aisle edge. Lyd who got nudged off the end whenever the bus took a tight corner at speed, or whenever Susanna, in the middle, got bored. Ellie sat by the window, watching the rise and dip of the drystone walls through the window, the patchwork of the fields. Everyone had been calling this one of the last good days of the year, a bonus day, dropped like a spare penny from the height of August into the beginning of October. The skin of her upper arms stuck against the plastic walls of the bus. On her other side, her thigh and calf rubbed like plucked meat against Susanna’s. She felt like a ball of cling film, unable to separate herself from anything around her.

She would go to the copse this afternoon. She wanted the views of broad lifting spaces, the wide sky to counteract the hours of dim classrooms. The day’s heat bubbled insider her and she wanted to add the architect to the mix.

Susanna’s clammy arm heckled at hers as she brushed a sweat-lick of hair from her forehead. ‘What’s up, Ells?’

Ellie shrugged. The sticky friction of it scraped her shoulder against the bus wall.

‘Tell me.’

It could have been a request or a demand. Ellie heard it as a demand. ‘Fuck off.’

‘What the hell?’

Lyd leant forward to lever her way into the argument, ‘Leave her be, Suse. It’s too hot.’

Susanna rounded on her sister, so fast that Lyd had to plant her feet and grab at the headrest in front. ‘What’s it to do with you?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Lyd said. She wiped at the back of her neck. ‘I’ve got to listen.’

‘You don’t, actually.’ Susanna turned back to Ellie. ‘You gonna tell me or what?’

The words were there again. They scuttled to the edge of Ellie’s mouth and she wrenched them back. Even if she wanted to tell Susanna, she wouldn’t do it in front of Lyd.

‘God’s sake, let her have her secrets. Not like you’ve not got any.’

‘Butt out, Lyd.’

Ellie watched the bickering sisters. She yawned. Whatever secrets Susanna had, Ellie was sure she already knew them.  

‘You treat me like I know shit all.’

‘You don’t know shit all.’

Lyd’s breath caught. She looked at Ellie. Her face filled and held like she was being kept back from something, like a bowling ball carried to the top of a hill. Then she set it loose. ‘Suse snuck out last night to meet Jonathan Birkett and when she came back she didn’t have her knickers.’

Susanna froze. In the middle of the raucous bus noise was their own astonished silence.

Lyd pushed it home: ‘Watched you from my bedroom window. And I saw your minge when you climbed back over the fence.’

‘Suse?’

Susanna shoved hard at her sister as the bus swung off the A-road. She shoved as if the entire force of her life were behind it, sent Lyd sprawling into the aisle. Lyd landed hard on her back, skirt flung to knicker-level. Yellow, Ellie noticed, the fake silk bow at the top of them half unravelled.

A chorus of applause flew up like startled grouse from the surrounding seats.

‘Bitch.’ Lyd clambered up and pulled at her skirt. She muscled her way through the knees in the aisle to stand away further down the bus.

‘Suse,’ Ellie said again.

‘What?’

‘Did you?’

Susanna looked carefully at a cigarette burn on the back of the headrest in front. She started to pick at it. Her fingernail made a small scraping sound against the melted fabric. ‘I was gonna tell you.’

‘When?’

Susanna shrugged.

In her head, Ellie said: You should’ve told me already. Out loud, she said, ‘What happened?’

Bits of ancient yellow stuffing fluttered like dandruff from the hole as Susanna picked at it, ‘We were just texting like normal.’

‘How long’ve you been texting?’

‘A bit.’

Ellie fought the urge to grab her by the chin, to force her head around.

‘He said he was out, and, I don’t know, mum was asleep already, so I figured, why not?’

‘And she never heard you?’

‘She still sleeps with the telly on.’

‘So what did you do?’ The question came out on the tail end of her breath, as if she’d been stowing it in the depths of her lungs, a buoy unanchored from the murk of a harbour bed.

‘It’s nearly your stop.’

‘Oh come on!’

Susanna half looked at her, then looked away again. ‘Stuff,’ she said, ‘Just stuff. Not, you know, that. Other stuff.’

‘Without your knickers, though.’

The bus was slowing. Ellie could see the cattle grid at her track end coming into view, and Susanna slid her knees into the aisle to let her pass. Ellie hoiked her bag from the footwell. As she edged out, the bus braked, and she tumbled, hard, against Susanna. They both flung out their arms to brace themselves, and suddenly their faces were close. In Susanna’s, Ellie could see something pleading, a pair of clasped hands behind her eyes like a caged creature – not something fierce and deadly, but the sort of animal families slide idly past at the zoo, something aware of its own mediocrity. She looked away before Susanna could see this spiteful thought looking back at her.

* 

The track pounded under her feet. Ellie hummed with sweat but still she barrelled up the hill, letting her breath rip through her. Her back was slick under her school bag. The sun was an assault on her uncovered head.

Susanna had once told her that she hated being on her own. Away from people for too long, she got jittery, she said, her mind spinning tight circles like buzzards riding an updraft. She lived in a house full of open doors, where one person’s personal space spilled into another’s, where there were always friends or neighbours perched on the arms of sofas, gossiping or consoling, helping themselves to cups of tea. She belonged in groups, a pack animal. Ellie knew Susanna had been thinking of wolves, but she’d thought instead of insects in a swarm. The kind she’d expect to see descending on crops in a documentary about the Plagues of Egypt, enough to piss off a whole country, that let itself be guided by the greater will of the group. No wonder Susanna had plumped for some unlit ginnel with Jonathan Birkett.

* 

For the first time, the architect was there when she arrived. She flung down her school bag, kicked off her shoes to let her toes breathe in the grass. She knew her feet must be thick with the full stench of the day. She didn’t care.

‘Everything alright?’

‘Shut up.’ She yanked his face to hers. His lips were like gossamer. She kissed him harder, slammed her mouth against his. She split his lip with her teeth. His blood tasted caustic, like the smell of burning plastic. She kneaded his body with her hands, pulled him to the ground. The earth had dried in the sun and the long grass scratched and prodded under her skirt.

When he pulled back, his silken breathing had grown loud and jagged as a death rattle. When he arched his eyebrow, it lifted him so his whole body arched with it. She pushed herself up to fill the space underneath, kissed him again. She lost track of limbs. Hers. His. She thought of Susanna and Jonathan Birkett, her letting his fingers inside her, then shinning back over the gate, flaunting her bare cunt to the world.

She felt him harden against her, felt herself jemmied open till her body roared. She made herself remember the animated videos they’d had to watch in sex education, wheeled in on the box-like television: the two-dimensional diagram slotting into place, all clean lines and floating hairless genitalia. Instead, it felt rough and ritualistic, her body sore and ungiving, a fractured sliver of flint.

She wondered if this was how Susanna had felt, as though the walls between her inside and her outside had been crumbled.

The ground was hard under her back. His body smelled of heather and salt, leaf mulch, something chlorinated. When it was over, she wiped herself with a dock leaf and left without speaking, left him curled in on himself on the tufted grass. She didn’t go to the copse again.

* 

She was in biology when the pains started: steep abdominal cramps that turned her body in on itself. Excused, she stumbled from the science block towards the main building. Rain drove into her face and a slew of wet leaves slapped and pawed at her ankles. She tried to run but her body had become uncontrollable, a breaker collapsing against the shallow floor of each lengthening hurt.

She was almost there when she felt something slip out of her, felt it caught between her and her knickers, cushioned against her like a wad of toilet roll.

Mid-lesson, the toilet block was empty. Without the usual reek of wet coats and bodies, it was all peach body spray, and underneath that, Dettol and scented sanitary towels. It was a smell that pushed its fingers into Ellie’s throat and made her gag.

She locked herself in the end cubicle and pulled down her knickers. Hammocked in the gusset were strands of thin silvery silk like an old lady’s hair, which caught in her own dark pubic curls – and, in the cradle of the fabric, an off-white globe, round as ten pence coin. It was soft to the touch. Fluffy, almost. Its tightly woven strands caught in the webs of her fingerprints. When she balanced it in her palm and held herself still, so still she didn’t breathe, she imagined she could feel it moving, a hundred miniature bodies crowded and squirming. If she looked hard enough, she could almost picture it having the architect’s face, his arched surety, his ability to cling to her skin.

She sat there till break time. The toilets filled with chatter, with the sound of taps being run to hide the noise of peeing, tinny music from somebody’s phone. The soft globe in Ellie’s palm was a pulse of quiet at the heart of it.

‘Ellie? You in here?’ Susanna’s voice pulled everything up, an old strip light flickering on.

‘Here!’

‘I brought your bag over for you.’ Through the gap under the door, she could see the toes of Susanna’s shoes: two scuffed way-markers pointing in her direction. ‘You ok?’

Ellie looked again at the small cloud in her palm, its potential gathering storm. She stood, dropped it into the bowl. It clung for a sliver of a moment to her palm, then fell, hit the water with the quietest protest. She shoved some toilet roll in after it, then flushed, and unlocked the door.