Behind my head is a sequence of very narrow and long stained-glass windows reaching all the way to the beams. What shocks me as I sit there is that—unless I actually sit up and twist my neck to look—I can’t remember what they depict, not even if you put a gun to my head. I spent the entirety of my adolescence facing those windows, staring at them every single morning for close to five years, Saturdays excepted, and don’t remember a single detail, not one saint or disciple or even the big man himself, which only goes to show the astonishing depths of teenage self-obsession. Or maybe, more accurately, it says something about me back then. Or my memory of my school days, selective at best.
As I am sitting on the pew a patient comes out of a booth, her jaw clamped down on wadding, her hand holding her cheek. Unsteady on her high heels, dazed, she is guided to a spot next to me. A dental assistant goes to retrieve something important, a prescription perhaps, and the patient’s eyes roam around the arched ceiling and the fluted ironwork. It is an unnerving setting for a dental practice—the angels and the pulpit and stained glass—perhaps she thinks she is hallucinating. Blood catenates slowly from her empty socket down the gauze in her hand. We are probably the same age. She could have been a King Edmund. She stares vacantly at the neon exit sign as if she is waiting to be collected. Above the vestry door is the Divine school motto carved into a rectangle of wood.
memor amici
Remember friends.
“Ha,” I snort out loud.
The patient slowly turns towards me, medicated, her hand still firmly pressed against her cheek. She blinks.
I try to swallow it down, doubling over, in the grip of the kind of stifled laughter that catches you off guard, leaping up your throat during somber moments: funerals, sermons, your fiancé’s art show opening.
My shoulders shake and the pew judders. The patient stands up suddenly, her handbag falling to the floor, its contents spilling.
“Shit, I’m terribly sorry.” I see her lipstick rolling towards the lectern. “Sorry, sorry.”
I put a fist to my chest and thump it. Swallow.
“Sorry.”
I scramble to pick up her bag, holding it out to her.
“This used to be a school,” I blurt, just to say something. “St. John the Divine.”
The poor woman’s numbed head nods slightly, taking her purse. She looks down at a message illuminated on her phone and then over her shoulder at the door, checking for her lift. I assume she isn’t allowed to drive.
“The private school,” I keep going. “The one that shut down; it was in the papers a long time ago, remember? There was a scandal.”
She stares at my face as if I am slowly coming into focus. Enough years have passed for me not to sound completely Divine. I have lived abroad on and off, my accent is sometimes hard to identify, but still, she looks me up and down and her eyes flash. She knows.
“Yeah,” she says. As she talks her wadding unplugs momentarily, exposing ghoulish bloody gums. “And? My mum worked in the kitchen.” She thumbs behind us in the direction of the old refectory. “Sixteen years scrubbing fucking pans, if you must know.”
The right side of the woman’s lip is drooping; her speech has a drunken slur.
“Bunch of stuck-up fucking toffs.”
She plugs the gauze back in, clamps back down on it, waiting to see what I’ll say next. She’s right, of course. But what does she expect me to do, defend my honor, wrestle her to the floor?
I think about my husband, Jürgen, waiting for me in the pub. Jürgen knows how to let moments like this roll over him. He is a pacifist, not someone who can be easily provoked. Despite the fact he’s the artist in our relationship, things that make me flare up with rage don’t bother him at all. When we met I had just come out of a turbulent, itinerant period of life and, exhausted, I suppose you could say that I found his particular brand of considered quietude seductive. That was what I had fallen in love with. Lately I have been trying hard to adopt some of Jürgen’s sangfroid. Plus we are newlyweds. On our honeymoon. I don’t take the bait.
Thankfully a bald man sticks his head around the chapel door, whistles, and gestures at the woman with his thumb. She departs, her high heels clicking sharply on the tiled floor, marching down the nave, past the vestry, and through the arched door.
memor amici
I wait a decent amount of time, hovering on a Communion step, then I leave as well. My husband—that word feels so exotic—is waiting for me outside, hands in his pockets, resting on the hood of the rental car, chewing slowly. I feel a burst of relief to see him standing there, solid looking and straightforward, not in the least Divine. On our first date he rolled up his sleeves at the sight of the leaking pipe in my kitchen, requesting a wrench. He is a pragmatist, a maker of lists.
“All good?” he checks.
I nod. I turn my back and lean against Jürgen’s chest; he loops his arms around my waist, his chin on my head, and I try to put the incident in the chapel behind me. I should never have come back. I’m embarrassed to have brought him here, to have wasted even an hour of our honeymoon on something so inconsequential. A moment of nostalgia, now gone. We gaze up at the stone statue of King Edmund in the center of the town, close to the bus stop. Five pigeons spar for space on top of his helmet, bobbing and ducking, feather elbows. They flick their shabby gray tails and shit down Edmund’s cloak. An elderly woman tugging a tartan shopping trolley shuffles past us into the market square. Traders hold bananas aloft on hooked fingers, hollering deals. Three old boys in tweed jackets stand outside the bookies smoking. I am acutely aware of how particularly English all this must seem to him, my husband, an Austrian.
Jürgen pulls a piece of fudge from a paper bag and puts it into my mouth.
“Okay. Big drive. Let’s go.”
He checks the fastenings on his bike that is tethered to the boot of our rental car, and as he tugs the frame tight a bald man driving a red Mazda swerves across the road towards us and stops abruptly, blocking traffic. A window hums down, and the woman from the dentist’s leans across the bald man, actually crawling across his lap, the lower half of her face distorted, stiff with pain.
“Hallo there,” my husband says jovially, squatting slightly, “can we help?”
Austrians, particularly country bumpkins like him, are pathologically nice. I’ve seen him dig a car out of the snow for a stranger and drag each of our neighbor’s bins out every week without a word of thanks.
The woman in the Mazda gives him the finger.
She glares at me, her real target, and pokes her swollen head farther out of the window as if there is something urgent she forgot to tell me back there in the chapel, her tongue fat and lisping.
“Cunth.”
“Ha.” I laugh nervously. “Ha ha ha.”
Then she spits at me, her gob landing at my feet, and they speed off.
So, this is the way it is. Fourteen years and nothing has changed. She is a townie. I am Divine.
“My god,” my husband says, “Sephine, who was that?”
Hands on his hips, he looks up the road after the Mazda.
“Was that some kind of joke, my god?”
“Forget it,” I say, humiliated, “let’s go.”
I give him a gentle shove towards the car in case the banshee decides to come back. I don’t want her to jinx our honeymoon. Two days ago we were exchanging vows at the town hall, grinning at each other like imbeciles, euphoric.