“Oh my god,” I say, looking out at the bugs creeping all over the window frame, trying to find a way in. I try to make a joke about it but it falls flat. Jürgen is still furious with me, his new wife, for keeping secrets. He sits with the map spread on the floor, his precious road bike propped up against the wall. I open the bottle of single malt I bought on the mainland. I may have taken a few swigs already on the crossing. Dutch courage.
My throat warm, I place the whisky dead in the middle of his map. Jürgen barely looks up. I take off my clothes—it is our honeymoon, after all—and straddle Loch Hourn. Legs spread shamelessly. Afterwards, we lie on the floor and drink the rest of the bottle, picking midges from each other’s skin.
“Please, Sephine,” Jürgen begs. “Remember something. For me.”
“Why are you so interested all of a sudden?”
“That woman, she hated you. She called you a cunt.”
“So?”
“I want to know. I want to know about you back then.”
“No, you don’t.”
I curl under his armpit, press against his warm ribs.
“Liebchen”—he circles the birthmark on my shoulder—“please.”
I think of the elderly couple at the bed-and-breakfast. Be kind.
“Fine,” I mutter. I believe, or so I tell myself, in the apotropaic power of marriage. That witch hasn’t jinxed us, we are invincible. Golden even. What harm can it do?
“Memor amici,” I begin.
Remember friends.
2
We sat, some of us early birds, on the ha-ha, legs dangling above the grass ditch, watching the Peck twins, Dave and Henry, play a so-called friendly game of tennis. It was mid-April or around then. The first day of the summer term, my fifth year at the school. What would turn out to be our last as Divine. A few weeks before the Gerry Lake scandal.
Dave Peck wiped her wristband over her top lip where she was pooling sweat, squatting slightly, shifting from foot to foot in a slow, hypnotic rock, waiting for the serve. Henry, the prettier and leggier of the Peck twins, at least according to my memory, tossed the ball high. She jumped, her racket arm primed, so that it looked for a moment like she was suspended in the air, levitating, truly divine. Then she plummeted down on top of the ball, which her sister somehow managed to return, firing it into the distant corner, just inside the line. Henry frowned and picked up a new ball without saying a word to her twin. The Peck sisters were in the midst of a spat. Henry had spent the Easter holidays giving blow jobs to their private tennis coach in the swimming pool changing hut of their Hampshire house, leaving Dave alone on court to practice with a ball machine.
“What happened to the Moose?” I asked the group.
This was the name we’d given the much-talked-about coach, a former pro, whose real name was something exotic sounding to us, like Moussa. By then the phrase “the Moose” had already morphed amongst Divines into a code word for blow jobs and big dicks, and eventually just dicks in general.
“Monaco,” someone said. “The Moose went to Monaco.”
“Or, like, Abu Dhabi?”
“Au revoir, the Moose.”
“Yeah, no more moose.”
“Brunei,” Henry corrected, taking a break as the sisters switched ends, leaning against the court fence, the flesh on her shoulder squeezing through the mesh of small diamonds so that she looked vaguely upholstered.
“Hi, Joe,” she said to me. “How was Hong Kong?”
My father was a banker; my parents had recently moved for his work.
“It was passable. Sorry about the Moose.”
“Thanks, I mean, I don’t know.” She bounced her racket against her heel. “We’re going to write to each other and stuff, it’ll be cool. I’ll see him at half term.”
The Moose had it made. St. John the Divine, a private boarding school, was staffed almost entirely by women, with the exception of Padre, our school chaplain, and a couple of ancient art and maths teachers; the Moose had had zero competition. The chances of us giving out blow jobs during the eighty-four days of that summer term, not counting exeats (weekend leaves) and a half-term holiday, were highly unlikely. Sebastian Moussa was probably thirty-two or -three, drove a convertible, and had a French accent. He was a god. We knew nothing about his life off court. This was preinternet, remember; no one could google anyone. For all we knew he could have been married with six children. The man was an enigma.
I remember that whenever I thought about Sebastian Moussa, who had the muscular knees of a long-distance runner and hard, dark brown thighs, I always started to feel my palms clam up and had to rub them across my school tights before anyone noticed because, at sixteen, I had never actually seen in the flesh or touched, let alone sucked, any moose. In this respect I was somewhat behind my peers. Divines were known for being sexually precocious. I had an extremely vivid imagination but couldn’t for the life of me visualize having a part of someone else, especially not that part, in my mouth, or what I’d do with it once it was there. (In Second Year I was dared by my best friend, Skipper, to suck another Divine’s thumb and, despite still being a resolute thumb sucker myself at that age, remember the repulsive, alien sensation of George Gordon-Warren’s knuckle jammed against my lower teeth, her long nail nipping my roof cavity, so retch-worthy an experience that soon after I gave up the habit. If George’s thumb made me gag, how, I wondered, could I possibly manage a penis?)
Which isn’t to say I was frigid—an accusation we used to toss around back then—or unattractive, not a total disaster at least. True, I didn’t have much in the way of breasts and had something of a mousy, forgettable face, but I had grown my hair long to master the flick, a single swipe of the hand, our signature move, that folded one’s hair into a side quiff. We never tied our hair up back then unless it was for sports and were constantly tossing our heads from one side to another throughout the day. I’m surprised we didn’t get whiplash. I had the same slippery fine hair I have now, which made this style hard to maintain and so I got in the habit of tilting my head to one side, inadvertently giving me a Princess Diana kind of coyness. Not exactly a coquette like Henry Peck, but still, it seemed to appeal to the boys. At least the kind of boarding school boys we knew back then: Harovians, Etonians, Radleians, Stowics. Except that by the Fifth Form the closest I’d come to sex was some cack-handed fumbling through a tuxedo zipper at a school dance. Skipper, one of the most popular girls in our year, a safe bet for head girl, knew this, as did the other Divines and so all this moose talk back then made me feel vaguely fraudulent, as I often did during that period of my life, riddled with insecurity. Still, I continued to smile at Henry Peck that day as if I was in on the moose joke, kicking my legs against the crumbling stone wall of the ha-ha, and changed the subject before Henry returned to the question of my Easter holidays. No moose then, either.
Jürgen lifts his head to interrupt my story.
“Coquette?”
“Jane Eyre was one of our set texts, we were fifteen and sixteen years old, we knew all about coquettes.”
“Okay,” Jürgen concedes. “Go on.”
He lies back down.
“Wait, the Peck twins, where are they now?”