TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Back in those days we boarded at school on weekdays. We ate at the school canteen and took a shower once a week. The shower house was open every Tuesday for the females and every Thursday for the males. It was a stand-alone building next to the canteen. On Tuesday evenings we girls would carry our soap boxes, shampoo bottles and facial cream in our washbasins, as well as plastic bags full of long johns and undies. We would hike, greasy-haired and lightly smelly, across the school field to the shower house. Forty minutes to an hour later we came out to the fresh air, smelling sweet, our hair wet, cheeks pink and tender, warm and delicate as new buns from the oven. 

The shower room was already steamy when Jie and I entered. A long row of shower heads on each side of the room, no curtains or cubicles, the only privacy being the steam. It was busy. Bodies big and small bumped into each other, shoulders brushed. The moment you turned away to apply soap or shampoo, another body would slip under your shower head and take it over, and you would be able to reclaim it when she wasn’t paying attention. All you saw was naked flesh: a chin on the chest, arms up rubbing the bubbles into the hair; a knee lifted, legs open in order to rinse the soap off the thighs. The girls looked more like Degas’s ballerinas stripped of the costume than the classic nudes I saw in the art history book I read in my spare time. 

 Jie and I took turns scrubbing each other’s back, sharing the same shower head. A senior girl standing next to us patted Jie’s bottom and commented with a chuckle: ‘Wow, you’re fat!’ But Jie was not fat. It was true that she had big firm breasts and plump buttocks, but her waist was tiny, her belly flat, and her legs strong and sturdy. She was a shade darker than most of us – wheat-coloured, her skin silky from head to toe. 

A few weeks ago, on our way to the canteen, Jie said she had a secret to tell me. I had to swear I wouldn’t tell anybody. She said a dirty old man peeked at her through a hole in the wall when she was taking a bath at home. After she blocked the hole he found a gap in the curtains. 

She stopped bathing at home and came with me to shower here. Looking at her body I sort of understood what the old man was after. Standing naked next to her, I was an undeveloped child. 

In the changing room Jie brought out a long piece of cloth and wrapped her breasts tightly. She put on a plain loose blue top, long johns under her shapeless pants. Now she looked dumpy. 

Jie and I were inseparable. In the evenings all students had to go back to the classroom to study. We enjoyed the walk from the dorm to the classroom building. We often made excuses – I forgot a textbook in my room or she needed another jumper to keep warm – to go back and forth so that we had more time to chat. We chatted about the actors in TV series that we watched in the weekends and the school holidays, thinking them so much cuter than the unkempt sniffing boys at our school. 

While we strolled arm in arm, boys were always looking at us – at her, that was. We walked past them sitting on a railing or under a tree, chattering and laughing, then they suddenly became quiet. More often it was a lone boy in the shadows, looking in our direction. Sometimes when the study session ended, we came out of the classroom to a boy waiting at the door, he’d ask to speak to Jie. She would ignore him, her body suddenly grew stiff, her grip on my arm painful, a gesture that meant we must hurry away.  

Jie did speak to some boys, out of pity I thought, when they were very polite and looking melancholy: ‘Hi, can I have a word with you, please?’ Before she went away with him into the shadows she turned her large dark eyes to me. Did I see vanity in her face? If we were in a movie, she’d be the female lead whom the male lead would fall in love with, and I, ‘the friend’, a supporting character, a dispensable role. In Dream of a Red Chamber, she’d be one of the beautiful young ladies, and I had to be her maid. 

Or could it be confusion and sadness in those eyes? Or maybe she was asking me for advice and help? Me who had absolutely no experience with boys? Above the eyes were the dark straight brows, slightly knitted. 

But all I felt at the time was awkwardness and a bit of jealousy. When your best friend attracts so many boys and you don’t, how else would you feel?  

My academic work was suffering. It was humiliating to fall from the top of the class to the bottom, a torture when the home room teacher announced the academic ranking. Jie was the bad influence – my teachers and my parents all said that – and her academic work was never good. I was not allowed to be near her, let alone speak to her. She never attempted to contact me, as far as I knew. Sometimes I felt her gaze on me when I walked to the classroom to study in the evening. I pretended not to notice. 

Later that year Jie was expelled from the school for ‘indecency’.   

* 

 I graduated from high school, went through university and obtained my Master’s degree. I had this horrible but also romantic fantasy that Jie had killed herself. She did this not for the boys, not due to the shame of being expelled, not because she would turn out to be a loser. She did this because of me. I imagined she drowned in a river – a clear river, which was rare where we lived, so that I could see her beautiful body, naked as when I saw her in the communal shower. Her loose hair, normally plaited in a thick pigtail or two, now spread out around her head and flowed in the water, a slow tango with waterweeds that joined her.  

Poor Jie had died many times in my imagination. She would be resurrected from death only to kill herself again. When I was on a tall building I refrained myself from the window or the balcony in case of finding her hurling herself down from there. Seeing the flashing lights of a police car at an accident scene I hurried away fearing that she was the victim. I decided I had watched too many movies. 

Yet it was more often the small things that kept coming to my mind – her lashes for example, naturally long and curvy, vividly flattering when she blinked. 

* 

‘So what do you think?’ Years later I asked my husband nervously after telling him about Jie. ‘Do you think I’m weird?’ 

‘You’re gay,’ he sounded serious but then laughed, ‘God, have I married a dyke?’