“Not including Gerry Lake,” Dave said, lifting her head up from the grass and grinning at me.
My stomach lurched as if I’d been shoved hard from behind.
“Bloody hell,” I said, groaning.
The others snorted with laughter.
“Bad luck, Joe,” they said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Nightmare.”
Gerry Lake. The Poison Dwarf. The least popular girl in our year—loudmouthed, crude, famously temperamental. Instead of sharing a room as usual with Skipper and the twins, somehow I was stuck on my own with Gerry. After the dorm list had gone up on the board at the end of the previous term I was stunned, trying to work out why Gerry had chosen me, above all the other Divines, to be her roommate. It made no sense. We had barely exchanged more than a few words in her entire time at the school. A serious ice skater, she spent all her time either training or at competitions. But eventually it became obvious that Gerry was just as horrified as I was by our sudden cohabitation, which must have been the brainchild of my housemistress, Miss Graves, or one of her deputies, thinking we would be good for each other. It wasn’t either of us who wrote our respective names on the dorm request slip, that’s for sure. I discovered much later—in those hazy days after the scandal—that Gerry went to visit Miss Graves’s flat in person to request to be moved. She would have happily picked one of the Chinese or Russian girls, though they understandably kept to themselves. Or Kwamboka Mosupa, the African exchange student, who everyone liked, even Skipper, who treated Kwamboka—good-natured, smiling shyly, baffled by the attention—as if she was the classroom pet. But for whatever ill-fated reason, the housemistresses ignored Gerry’s pleas. Skipper shared a room with the Peck twins that term, I was stuck with Gerry Lake. They might as well have put me with a townie.
Miserable, I changed the subject.
“Anyone coming for a fag?”
George, the girl whose thumb I had once sucked, leant over and exhaled so I could smell her Tic-Tac and tobacco breath.
“We’ve just been.”
“Sorry, Joe.”
You rarely see teenagers smoking now, not on the streets where I live at least, but Divines were notorious chain smokers. I squinted up at the orchard where we normally smoked, eyes thick with jet lag. I estimated that there were too many parents arriving by then, I’d have to go elsewhere. A father walked past us towards the trees with an arm draped around his daughter, a final mournful lap before he surrendered her to the Divine.
“Chin up, angel,” we heard him say, “not long.”
“Sod it.” I took my time sliding off the ha-ha and into the grass ditch below. “I’m going.”
4
“Townies,” Jürgen says slowly to himself after I have finished.
It is as if he is learning a new word.
“Townies?”
“Yes.”
He scratches his stubble. I feel, as I often do, chastened by Jürgen’s overwhelming decency. He is the sort of man who can’t tell a lie. He won’t look at my emails if I leave my laptop open, not even a glance, or read a postcard that comes through the letterbox if it isn’t addressed to him. A postcard, for god’s sake. I, on the other hand, have been known to steal his phone when he takes a shower, strumming down his list of made and received calls, looking for signs of ex-girlfriends. I check his unopened email then quickly flag it as unread, flinging it across the bed, ashamed to have given in to my old bad habits, the insecurity and paranoia. Jürgen, on the other hand, finds my jealousy entertaining, endearing even. If I asked him—and I haven’t—he’d delete every one of his exes from his telephone without a second thought. Jürgen isn’t always a saint—of course, he has his shortcomings—but he has an inner moral compass that is finely tuned, the kind of person who leaves notes on car dashboards if he reverses into them. I am hit and run.
“Townies,” my husband repeats.
“Jürgen, stop saying it.”
“It just sounds so funny. You know. Like commoners. Very feudal. What did you call yourself? Divine, walking amongst us mortals?”
My cheeks begin to burn. Jürgen, who has always admired my independence, sees me now in this new light: spoon-fed, entitled, Divine.
“Whose side are you on?” I say defensively, even though I know how silly it is to pick a fight about something so trivial, overreacting about something I haven’t thought about for years.
“What side?” he teases.
“Exactly.”
I scramble about looking for something to cover myself.
“Sephine, it’s a joke.”
I’m drunk. We should never have started this. Jürgen twists his legs around mine to stop me rolling over.
“Sorry, sorry, come here. I was kidding, don’t go. You still haven’t told me what happened to that girl, Gerry Lake.”
Flustered, I tug a checked blanket from the sofa and wrap it around my shoulders. Flailing about, I scramble underneath the chair to retrieve my tobacco, not caring what I look like with my white arse raised in the air, legs spread, unzipped, everything on show. We are married; he can take it or leave it.
“Sephine, stop.”
“I need a smoke,” I say.
I pull the blanket around me like a toga and stick my feet in Jürgen’s enormous cycling shoes as I march outside, aware how clownish I must seem. I sit on top of a picnic bench. It is dark. Inside the croft house I can see a light come on in the tiny kitchen. Jürgen peers out, stooped over, knocking on the window with his knuckle, mouthing platitudes.
“Come inside, mein Gott. Are you crazy? The bugs?”
I pretend to be squinting intently at the waves. It is too dark to see a thing. The blanket is itchy and, to be honest, I had forgotten about the gnats. Still, I stubbornly roll myself a cigarette, and I listen to the waves slapping against each other out there in the night, gulls squabbling. I am drunk enough that the first cigarette is a clumsy, loose effort, it gives me head spins. Not unlike my very first time, crouching in a smoking den with Skipper and the twins, a butt passing from hand to hand round the circle, the whispered secrecy of a séance. This might be what gives me the idea. I hitch up the blanket and inspect the back of the cottage where the property runs alongside a dank mossy wall. There is enough crawl space to sidestep if I hold my cigarette aloft, so I inch along the wall, one hand in the air, clumsily making my way with the cycle shoes on my feet like clogs. There are empty flower containers I trip on, a spade, a cracked shower door, and some plastic garden chairs. I wedge myself between a drain and the chairs. It is perfect, just like old times. When I look up, the cottage walls seem to lean towards me amicably.
A light.
There are no bathroom curtains in the cottage, no need, the window looks out onto moss and stones. I see Jürgen gaze at himself in the mirror above the sink. He grasps his chin and pulls down on his bristles, pondering whether I need more space or if he should come out and make peace. I feel a rush of love. Gut churning, nauseating almost. He is, and will always be, an extremely handsome man. Perhaps a little too pale for some people’s tastes, his clear blue eyes and the white nape of his neck that he keeps closely shaven, with the rest of his hair grown long on top and sun bleached. He has a cyclist’s thighs, thick with muscle, brawny knees as sturdy as ham hocks, a sharp suntan line two inches above his patella where his Lycra shorts end. He rides multiple times a week, sometimes for four or five hours at a time when he needs a break from the studio. His shoulders are hunched from bending over his bike handles, his stomach almost concave. He is too good looking for me by a long stretch. The best person I know. I feel idiotic, lurking out here in the dark. Licking my wounds.