rumours, you see. Aside from associating me with a leafy vegetable I was also sometimes called G.A.Y. A few months earlier I’d been in the hockey pavilion having a lively chat toute seule and two girls in the Fourth Year had caught me. They’d claimed I was rifling through their gym gear when I was only sitting on it. Very upsetting, it was. Especially since I didn’t ever think about sex, unlike every other girl in my class. They might’ve gone round pinging each other’s trainer bras and pretending to smoke their tampons but I wasn’t bothered with any of that.
Nic wouldn’t let anyone else near the whisky but she made me drink a lot. I gulped back as much as I could, and was feeling queasy by the time she stood up.
‘OK, I’m not playing nanny to you lot anymore. I’m off to have some real fun.’
Real fun meant having sex with someone called Simon, who was 17 and worked at Fruit Export and drove a lime-green Ford Capri. They did it at Jerbourg Point and Pleinmont and Le Gouffre and he was very good with his tongue but his willy had a kink in it. (I have no idea what that means.)
Nic asked us to name our best sex positions. Isabelle suggested doggy-paddle and Vicky collapsed under the weight of her own giggles. I felt I had to say something.
‘If you’re going to do it out-of-doors, don’t go on the cliffs near me. They found evidence of a mass grave left over from the German Occupation.’
Isabelle rolled her eyes and muttered ‘Here we go’, so I swore on Dad’s (more recently) dead body and made everyone embarrassed.
Par le chemin, although I have sometimes made things up, this is rock-solid-Guernsey-granite truth. They were found five years ago, and were believed to date back to the 1940s. Dad said it was obvious they were the bodies of poor foreign slave workers8 who’d been brought over by the Nazis to build their secret bunkers and possible gas chambers but the Guernsey Tourist Board hushed it up because it was in big trouble.9 Of course, Dad hypervented as per THE SHOCKING WHITEWASH and wrote a trillion letters to the newspapers on this very subject, but his letters were never published, which made him hypervent more. (I had a theory that all this hyperventing killed him, but that’s just one of a few.)
Nic liked my little story of shameful lies and death and licked her Boots 17 Cherry Pie-coated lips.
‘Where do you go with your boyfriend then?’
Vicky said I’d never had much luck with lads since I’d always so closely resembled one. (Ha. Ha.)
My supposed-to-be best friend then explained how, on our last outing to Beau Sejour Leisure Complex, I’d been stuck in the turnstiles until someone had given me a push, saying: ‘There you go, young man.’
My hair was Evidently (good word) too short back then. I hate my hair. It’s very fine and straw-like.
Nic chuckled. ‘Some people go for pale and interesting. That’s what you are: pale and interesting.’
She winked at me then, and it felt warm and light, like in photosynthesis.
That was all it took, really: the drink, the smile, the wink. I was different and Nicolette liked different.
Maybe she sensed the cosmic and magnetic connection between us.
Maybe she guessed I was ocean-full of deep-sea depths.
Or maybe she wanted someone fat and frumpy to make her feel better than she already was.
The plain fact is, I didn’t care – it felt better than the Yellow Sash of Excellence, which I’d already worn three terms on the trot – so I decided not to think too much about it. Nic was like the sister I’d never had but always wanted.
And remember: two sisters, like two brothers, can be completely different.
13th December 1965
Tape: 1 (A side) ‘The testimony of C.A. Rozier’
[Transcribed by E.P. Rozier]
P’tit Emile, man buoan fraire. You are my dear and only brother, but how can two brothers be so different, eh? You got the good stuff: the brains, the looks, our mother’s love, whilst I, bian sûr, was poisoned. Nothing is equal between us or ever will be, but I should find some comfort in the fact we do not look alike. 1940 wasn’t a good year for a little blonde boy. They’d started to call me Fritz and would frogmarch around me. I have our mother’s delicate build and colouring, whereas you, Emile, you are more like our father with your steely eyes and wave of coal-black hair.