The KE made an impatient clicking noise with her tongue.
“Josephine,” I conceded.
“See you around then, Josephine. I’m Lauren.”
Laurence, I thought. Larry. Len.
She gave me a finger wave. I couldn’t decide if she was being ironic. My mouth was so dry by then I could feel the corners sticking, and my legs throbbed from being hunched in the beanbag, fetuslike, knees to nose.
“Thanks for the fag. I’ll pay you back.”
“It’s fine,” I told her. It was just one cigarette. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not a scab.”
There was a brusqueness to her voice that made me stop whatever I was going to say next.
“You lot sleep in there, right?” She pointed at St. Gertrude’s.
I nodded.
“Lauren,” her brother yelled, “come on!”
“Well, I know where to find you then, don’t I. I won’t forget.”
There was a flurry of blossoms as she elbowed through the bushes, and I groaned, flopping back limply into the damp beanbag.
“By the way, Josephine”—her head poked back through the hole—“sick photo.”
7
Cunth.
I can’t get it out of my head.
I toss and turn the first night in the cottage, picturing the face of the woman in the red Mazda, lips curled in disgust, teeth bared, ready to spit in my face. I try to remember. To understand what kind of person I was back then. Why they hated us so much. What we were guilty of.
But in the morning Jürgen stands at the bottom of the bed holding a breakfast tray. He promises to never say the word again. Divine.
“Hand aufs Herz,” he says.
Hand on heart.
Jürgen looks so earnest standing there, his hair parted like a Boy Scout, a smile flickers at the corner of my lips. I cover my head with the duvet so he won’t see me laughing. He sets the tray down on the bed. Slips an arm under the covers, to test the water, the rest of him follows. The coffee goes cold, the eggs uneaten.
That afternoon we buy a fishing rod from a shop on the pier and I watch the way my husband whips the rod effortlessly over his shoulder, like a lasso. He’d make a good cowboy: the stubble shadowing his jaw, the denim shirts he likes to wear, his weatherworn hands, his habit of staring into the mid-distance when he’s thinking about his work. When Jürgen catches a mackerel, on his first attempt no less, applause breaks out from a group of hikers on the dock. He unhooks the fish from the line and the mackerel thrashes helplessly on the concrete, wide eyed, sides heaving. I think he’ll toss it back where it came from but, a country boy, Jürgen takes off his boot without a second thought and slams it down hard, once, twice, red spattering the concrete. I gasp, horrified.
“Supper,” Jürgen announces, his fly already arching over the water.
Later, in the cottage’s tiny kitchen, I stand over the sink where Jürgen has been cleaning his catch. I look at their unblinking expressions, the emerald scales like sequins, bellies split, blood dribbling from behind the gills. Jürgen hums to himself. He slices a lemon, then sets the table. I stare and stare. Cunth.
All holiday Jürgen conspicuously avoids any further mention of my teenage years or the woman in the red car, hurling abuse. On our afternoon strolls past the village school he averts his eyes, staring out at sea so intently I have to stop myself giggling at his solemn expression. Finally, our last morning, he takes a final photo of the two of us standing in front of our holiday cottage, our heads pressed together, his arm outstretched, and then, loath to leave, we put the keys on the kitchen table, close the door behind us. I watch in the rearview mirror as the cottage slips from view, my stomach in knots. Cunth. I want to slam on the brakes, live out our days in this remote fishing village. Untouchable, anonymous, hidden from view.
“What are you daydreaming about?” Jürgen asks, touching my cheek.
Startled, the car swerves.
“Nothing,” I say, eyes on the road. “Nothing.”
A week after our honeymoon, I’m in the attic in my mother’s cottage in Surrey, storing some boxes that won’t fit in our London flat. Outside Jürgen helps Rod dig over her vegetable patch. From the low gable window I can see his strong back ripple as he thrusts his spade into the sticky clod, turning it over with ease, as if it is butter. My mother, flustered by Jürgen’s athleticism, reverts back to old habits—flicking her hair, giggling. As far as I know she hasn’t had another partner since my father died nine years ago. She walks along the flower beds pointing something out to Jürgen with a rake. An upturned yogurt pot blows off a cane, and she chases after it like a lacrosse player. I nose through a cabinet, take a file out. Rod, with her rosier view of her days as a Divine, has bundles of my correspondence, covertly rescued from the kitchen bin after I attempted to throw them away in a postuniversity purge. I dump them on the floorboards and sit down, surrounded by the memorabilia of my school days: letters and reports and year photos, a folder of clippings, on the front page of a yellowing newspaper, the headline: night of terror.
From the pages of my old Bible, a letter slips out.
To my darling, my sweetheart, baby, I miss you like crazy, love, forever and eternity. I am shocked by the ardency. A girl whose face I can’t even remember. Pressed flowers taped to the notepaper, pictures of hearts and lipstick kisses.
I stare at an unfamiliar picture of me with my arms draped around two girls from my boarding house. I am wearing a man’s cardigan, black leggings, and my burgundy penny loafers. There is a leather choker around my neck with a blue scarab. My hair flops over half my face. I look conscientiously gloomy; Divines never smiled for photos. Holding the photo up to the window, I squint at the shoe tree in the background and then the tennis courts, and the ivy-clad backdrop of St. Gertrude’s and then—I see for the first time—there in the cross-hatched glass of our old dormitory window, the outline of Gerry Lake’s head. Her snub nose, the jutting chin, the accusatory glare. One hand to her hip, the other giving me the finger.
8
Divines were committed oversharers by nature, the by-product of living cheek by jowl as we did, wearing criminally tight blue gym leotards and showering behind flimsy curtains. We had a school nurse who summoned us to the sanatorium by leaving notes on our year pin board. Each of these memos were torn from a thin papery pad so that key words—acne, discharge, flaky, bleeding, cramps, boil, vaginal, et cetera—could be read by any passing Divine, the overhead strip light perfectly illuminating her block handwriting each time the refectory door swung open.
What I did after I found the Polaroid was, therefore, not at all in the spirit of the Divine. I slid the photo down the back of my leggings and, while my peers were all busy unpacking, I crept into my new dorm, checking if Gerry was back at school, then I hid it before she could see. Who knows what instinct was driving me; I thought I was a little more institutionalized back then, something of a team player. Perhaps not.
When I had found a safe place, stuck to the reverse of a postcard I pinned on my bedroom wall, I finished unpacking and put up a few more posters on my side of the room, then lay on my bed with my Walkman, lights off, even though it was still early and as far as I could tell Gerry Lake hadn’t even signed in yet.