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SARAH 1998

The boy jumps over the low wall along the dike and disappears among the beach houses and the beach’s many sun worshippers, running with every ounce of strength in his body. Sarah follows him with her eyes. The farther away he is, the smaller he becomes. Now he’s no bigger than a matchstick.

This morning, while her mother was out shopping, Sarah seized the opportunity to run off, without saying a word and without turning on the alarm system. She did leave a brief note on the table. ‘I’ve gone to the castle. I’m staying there overnight, as we agreed. S.’

MH had called Sarah at home. Yesterday Jules had been sent the keys to Gregory’s vacation house on the Belgian coast by courier. Gregory is Jules’s Swiss acquaintance and Celine Dion’s producer. MH made retching sounds when she uttered the singer’s name, but she and Jules immediately left for the villa on the sea, along with Barend. Xavier stayed home because he was still a little sick. The cook promised to take care of him, but if he was better today Sarah and Suri could bring him along. Sarah had now become aware that Jules was not really the type who could go very long without an entourage. The queen liked to surround herself with a whole swarm of buzzing companions.

Now that Sarah had completed two driving lessons, MH thought she could come with the yellow Bentley, which was languishing away in the castle’s gigantic garage. Just watch what you’re doing, MH had said, because the car isn’t insured. Sarah put on the long leather coat that Suri had picked up in Brussels and from which she had burned out whole pieces by hand. According to one of their vague, half-communistic, half-sectarian rules, Sarah was wearing the jacket now, and next month she’d pass it on to Emily.

As soon as she turned the key in the yellow Bentley’s ignition the engine began roaring like a tormented beast. She was doing something that was forbidden and was taking pleasure in the transgression. If you were young and you were a Lady, then committing misdemeanours was something you just did. Misdemeanours like getting picked up for driving a yellow Bentley without a licence and without insurance looked very good on your CV. It gave pleasure knowing you were breaking the law.

Xavier, alarmed by the roaring engine, came storming out of the castle and jerked the passenger door open, throwing himself onto Suri’s lap. Suri screamed in protest. Xavier was like Emily’s old golden retriever, who thought he was a little lap dog. Sarah laughed herself silly.

With the radio turned up as high as it would go, the ever-present cigarettes in their mouths, and all the windows open, they drove down unknown roadways. It went quite well, as well as can be expected for someone who has just learned how to start a car and how to shift into first and second gear.

Quite by accident they noticed the arrows pointing in the direction of Oostende. From there they made their way to Knokke, when Jules’s brick of a cell phone began ringing from the glove compartment. Suri clamped the antenna between her teeth and pulled on the phone to extend the antenna as far as it would go and create a relatively good connection.

‘Jeez! You’ve only just left? Bring some eggs, would you …?’ and a whole list of other unintelligible orders. Lurching off the highway, they slid under the canopy of a gas station where Sarah noticed a particularly good-looking guy. ‘And don’t forget Xavier!’ MH commanded.

When they got to the gas station pump, the blonde god walked right up to them. He was about twenty years old. He asked for a lift, didn’t matter where to, and crawled into the back seat without waiting for an answer. He pulled out a six pack from his backpack and began passing cans around.

‘Your little brother wants one, right?’

‘No, better not.’

Suri rushed to fill the tank with gas and get back in the car, and, forgetting the Ladies’ cool aloofness, she began showing off. She turned all the way around, facing the back seat, and consumed the boy with her eyes, even though he was clearly flirting with Sarah via the rear-view mirror.

Slowly, and with many stops and starts, the Bentley sputtered through the rush hour traffic toward the coast. Sarah got a wink from the boy and that was good enough for her. Let Suri sweat it out, she thought, let her try to keep up a faltering conversation. Go ahead, toss your hair around and laugh your head off. The boy was bending forward now and hanging between the two front seats. Xavier began to grumble because he had to go to the bathroom, an undertaking that in his case could take quite some time. They stopped at the next gas station.

‘Bring some beer back, will you?’ the boy asked a reluctant Suri.

‘We have plenty of beer,’ Suri protested.

‘And chips.’

Muttering, Suri accepted the assignment and went into the gas station shop with Xavier. She moved forward with heavy steps, Xavier leading the way. The boy sat down in the passenger’s seat and talked nonstop about his wanderings through the country as he carelessly stroked Sarah’s arm. She held her breath. As soon as Suri and Xavier were in sight, she shook her arm loose. Suri came up and stood at the door on the passenger’s side, where he was sitting. Her eyes flashed.

The boy quickly jumped out of the car and crawled back into the back seat. For the rest of the ride Suri refused to say a word. She picked morosely on the lip of her beer can and used the butt of her cigarette to light the next one. All Sarah could do was smile broadly, tingling from head to toe. When they got to the sea she parked the car amateurishly on the dike, taking up two spaces. Although it was still early in the year, it was a beautiful, warm day.

The boy took his leave rather abruptly. He jumped over the low wall along the dike and disappeared among the beach houses and the beach’s many sun worshippers, running with every ounce of strength in his body. Sarah followed him with her eyes.

Warm and tipsy, and with all the time in the world at her disposal, Sarah keeps replaying the scene of the good-looking boy’s departure as she lies on a beach chair listening to MH’s Discman. It’s three in the afternoon. They’re in no rush to go to the villa and be with MH. Serge Gainsbourg starts panting into Sarah’s ear, as if he might plop down in the sand with them at any second, aviator sunglasses flashing, cigarette in his mouth, threadbare jeans, denim shirt unbuttoned.

The question is how to hold onto this happiness with both hands. This is the life that suits her, not that succession of cheerless days and nights of which she’s had too many, endlessly shuttling between the house on the mountain and school. No one can keep that up. Even her mother has taken to stacking the magazines up on the coffee table instead of fanning them out for display. After spending an afternoon with her little club, her mother has been known to serve lasagne from the supermarket catering service. As if a whole salt cellar had fallen into it is her mother’s standard reaction, a fanatic follower of the salt-free diet.

Squinting her eyes, Sarah can just make out her father lying on a beach chair, licking an ice cream cone. What a shock. It’s no surprise to see him eating an ice cream cone because he does have a sweet tooth, but lying on a beach chair at the seashore is simply out of the question. He would never have the patience to lie on a beach chair without having anything to do but lick an ice cream cone and stare at a view that makes him close his eyes: hundreds of half-naked bodies on a long stretch of sand. Yet she recognizes how stiffly the man is lying on the deck chair, not completely at ease. His pale white face letting itself be comforted by the sun and his hand shooting up into the air for a second to push his sunglasses back up his sharp, Jewish nose—these are the unadulterated characteristics of her father.

Xavier comes tearing out of the cold water, dragging a tangle of seaweed behind him. In one fierce move he throws the wet tendrils over Sarah and Suri, lashing their deck chairs and dumping them over. In itself this would be funny if he wasn’t so strong. But he’s torn off Suri’s bra and destroyed it and almost obliterated a beach chair, and now he’s pulling Sarah by the arm to invite her to play. She’s startled by the sudden contact between his warm, moist arm and her body. She hasn’t had anything to eat since that one bowl of Cocoa Krispies with skim milk. The only drinks she’s had have been coffee and beer, and she’s smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Her head is spinning. She clutches onto Xavier and leans heavily on his massive body. His warm breath blows against her cheek with the power of a hairdryer. Like a Madame Bovary swooning for the umpteenth time, she collapses. The light of the sun above her darkens for just a moment, the bulb is replaced, and the sun goes back to shining in the sky at full strength. By the time Sarah decides to walk over to her father she notices that the beach chair is empty. Fortunately she didn’t go up to the man; it could never have been her father.

A man carrying a pair of black shiny shoes, socks in a knot, comes walking up to them through the sand and says the taxi is here. He’s come to pick them up and take them to the villa.

The taxi takes them to the spacious vacation house half a mile down the beach, nestled among the dunes in a rare wisp of untouched nature on the hideous Belgian coast. The utter pointlessness of driving that half mile in the taxi is the loveliest thing Sarah can think of. When she has oceans of money, not just the inheritance from her parents but mostly money she has earned herself by making music, she’s going to take great pleasure in thinking up ways to spend her money as pointlessly as possible every day.

Barend is sitting at the overcrowded kitchen table drawing enlarged doodles, while an English boy, who introduces himself as Mike, is bent over the stove. He’s slowly stirring melted butter in a pan, which he will use in making a space cake.

‘Did you remember the eggs?’ asks Barend. Of course, they’ve brought a dozen eggs.

There are many subjects that The Lady Di’s never tire of talking about in the studio: David Bowie, their demo, weed butter, clothes by Stilus in Brussels, whether to put Maltesers or M&M’s on their rider when they go on tour. But when boys are around the conversations stagnate more quickly, opinions change without warning, and the average IQ of the Ladies drops by half. Suddenly they act like toddlers who don’t know a thing. It makes Sarah sick to her stomach. She takes her notebook and goes outside.

The evening blows its surprisingly warm spring breath between the villas. The seasons are all discombobulated. Suri says they can tell that the year 2000 is coming soon. Sarah’s father will be happy to hear that a small minority are not entirely brushing aside his warnings of a major crisis. Humming as she works, Suri paints Japanese characters and a bleeding ‘2000’ in red paint on a large sheet that will serve as the background for their performances. She’s in a phase in which she finds Miro hideous and hackneyed, yet she incorporates a suspiciously large number of elements from his work into hers.

Suri and Sarah are a perfect twosome. She could actually live with Suri. Next year Suri is going to study fashion at the prestigious La Cambre in Brussels. Sarah herself doesn’t yet know what she wants to do. When they were small, Emily and Sarah swore they’d go to college together, live in the same house, and always tell each other everything. Sarah can’t help it, but Emily has been making her very nervous lately when she says things like: you never would have said that before, or: would you really do that now?, even though she herself is going to horse camp, for crying out loud. Sarah writes all sorts of unrelated ideas in her notebook, the raw materials for new songs. She uses metaphors—I’m yesterday’s news when you’re gone—in the hope that someone in the crowd will pick up on it and apply it to their own experience, like a blanket with just the right dimensions.

‘You guys hungry?’ Barend comes to ask. Sarah and Suri barely look up.

‘There’s no way you can’t be hungry,’ MH snarls, and she and Barend go out to the kitchen. Suri has an insatiable hunger for candy, but other than that she has a dormant metabolism that doesn’t seem to have any cravings at all, except for her own humming, her gumdrops, and more kitschy candy. Arms laden with food, Barend and MH come back outside and sit cross-legged on the patio.

‘Hey, Sarah, want to try one of these?’ MH holds up a pack of cookies in a Scottish tartan wrapper. ‘Jules brought them all the way from London.’ MH reads the label on the package out loud: ‘A hundred twenty calories per cookie. Times eighteen. That’s almost two thousand two hundred calories. Shit, I can’t eat anything else today or tomorrow. Now I know for sure: I’m pregnant. And if I’m not pregnant, I have bulimia. Even my tongue is fat,’ MH complains. ‘Say, there are still a couple of cookies left. You guys take them. Come on, Sarah.’

‘No, I really don’t want any,’ Sarah says. She’s chewing on the end of her pen.

‘They eat so little because they have no love life,’ says Barend guardedly.

‘Or they have no love life because they eat so little.’

‘Isn’t it time for you two to have sex?’

‘Good idea. Come on, Barend, let’s go burn some calories.’

Half an hour later they’re back, red-scrubbed cheeks, providing audible commentary on Suri’s brightly coloured designs.

At ten o’clock that night it suddenly occurs to Suri that she hasn’t yet called her parents. ‘I can’t really say when I’ll be back,’ she says nonchalantly over the phone. ‘At least before Sunday, I think.’ Sarah has definitely decided not to call her parents. They’ve agreed that she’s going to spend the night at the castle. They just have to trust her. If she were to tell them now that she’s actually out on the coast, the sparks would fly through the phone. Thanks but no thanks. Now it’s up to her to educate her parents and to teach them that they have no longer have any hold over her with their bourgeois habits.

Mike is greeted with loud cheers when he appears on the patio with the space cake. Sarah nibbles at a piece cautiously; after recent experiences she’s just about had it with drugs and their little friends. She decides to go get the Bentley, which is still taking up those two parking spaces. At eleven o’clock at night the chilly sea air is a godsend to her slightly burnt face. The black sea is doing its best to creep up on the land. A melody is resonating in Sarah’s head, an unfinished song that she allows to undulate, up and down.

When she arrives at the Bentley, she sees the good-looking hitchhiker from this afternoon sitting on the bench next to the car. He comes ambling up to her. Without saying a word he pulls her to him. His warm hands free her, easily and full of trust, from her leaden suit of armour. He asks for the keys, opens the door, and invites Sarah to get in. They snuggle up together on the back seat. She has no idea what is expected of her. The boy strokes her face and kisses her passionately on the mouth. It’s so unreal, there in the Bentley parked on the beach, but it’s also so real when she feels how wet she’s getting. He slowly inserts one finger inside her. She lets it happen. It’s the first time she’s given a stranger permission to touch her. All resistance drains out of her. He moves her hand to his crotch, and for the first time in her life she feels the hard bump that MH is always talking about. For a moment she recoils. She has to talk herself into taking the next step. You can’t go through the rest of your life as an idiotic virgin. Do it now, get it over with, then you won’t have to think about it anymore. ‘Help me,’ he asks, breathing heavily. She opens his pants and strokes the beast rising in her hand. He throws his arms around her waist and pulls her onto his lap. She entwines her body with his to close the awkward distance between them. His enterprising hands put her at her ease; she’s being lusted after by someone who knows what he’s doing. This is the world where only the two of them exist, two bodies exploring each other’s contours, two bodies that fit together, although not with the greatest ease in the world. Gaining experience demands physical pain, but triumph outclasses everything. Now my life can begin.

After it’s over the boy promises to write to her: ‘7 Nightingale Lane, I won’t forget that.’ She barely hears him. It’s happened, she rejoices inside. He gives her one last kiss and disappears into the night. Sarah knows full well that she’s never going to hear from the boy again, but she doesn’t care. She starts the Bentley and drives back to the villa.

Still in a jubilant mood, she goes inside. Everyone but Jules is asleep. Jules is typing a letter on her desktop. Even though she’s completely exhausted, Sarah doesn’t want to go to bed yet. She doesn’t want this day to end; she wants days with more than twenty-four hours.

‘Why does everything have to be so clearly defined?’ Sarah asks Jules, who’s sitting bent over the computer keyboard. Jules turns around to face her.

‘Nothing is defined in and of itself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Definitions only exist because there are people who need them, who wouldn’t know what to do with their lives without them. A definition gives structure to life, a kind of rhythm. But fuck the rules. We have our own rhythm.’

Jules talks and talks. It might be due to the sickly sweet space cake, to her no-longer-a-virgin status, or to the late hour, but Sarah senses exactly what Jules means, even though she only hears half her words. Yet they help her understand why she so often has the feeling that she jumped into the air when she was born and came down right next to where she was supposed to be.

Jules comes over and sits down on the arm of the chair, next to Sarah.

‘I know about that life on the mountain. I know how things work there. The only control mechanism parents have to keep their adult kids in line, the only means of blackmailing them emotionally, is money. You get it in dribs and drabs, but only on the condition that you behave yourself, that you go to college like a good girl, and that you take their place later on. Most people stay in that little matchbox world and think up all kinds of rules to keep from bumping into each other all the time. You have more going on upstairs than that.’

Jules bends forward. She puts a finger under Sarah’s chin pulls her face toward her.

‘Get rid of those idiotic rules,’ Jules says softly. ‘Real life is bigger than a matchbox.’

She takes Sarah’s head in her hands and kisses her. To give wings to her prophetic counsel, because there are so many different kinds of love, or for no reason at all?

Sarah falls asleep curled up in the chair, her notebook in her hand and a guitar at her feet. That night in the house on the sea, she dreams of an endless trail of sleepwalking children, dressed in their pyjamas, their hands on each other’s shoulders, marching along the water line. The whales that have been washed ashore want to return to the sea, but they don’t dare break through the line of children. Sarah runs up to the children to wake them. She taps one of them on the shoulder. The child turns his head toward her. The face that looks up at her is the face of her father.