by Kate Hamer
My mum would give me absolutely anything. She’d give me the teeth out of her head if she thought I could make use of them. God, I miss her. I’m so lucky. I’m just so bloody lucky. How awful would it be to have been dealt a rank bitch like Phoebe’s mum? Mum and me may have our problems but love has always oozed out of every pore of her body, even when she’s been at her very worst. It’s entered my skin and I feel it inside of me, around my heart, in my stomach, like it’s a life-giving chemical that pumps through my veins. So I let Phoebe pour me some more vodka. I take a slice of the pizza dripping with runny cheese. Later, I guess we’ll take the acid and that will fill the evening up and before I know it it’ll be morning. I’ll put up with this for a night because I know the people who I love most, the ones I’d kill or die for, the ones on whose behalf I’d battle demons, will be back with me in such a short while that this turns everything else into nonsense that can be endured; it’s just time to kill.
34
Orla
Phoebe is like a mirage tonight. I have the sense of her fragmenting, falling apart and then re-forming into a myriad different shapes. She’s like a chimera. I get used to one form and then she falls apart like snowflakes.
The vodka burns on the way down my throat into my stomach and it begins to make everything clear for the very first time. It’s like I’m seeing things through the prism of its ice-cold fluid and it shows me the truth like a crystal ball would.
And the truth is – while I was battling about what to do about the baby, Phoebe was off seeing that fucking teacher, getting manipulated by him like some stupid little kid. She wouldn’t have even cared if I’d told her about the baby, about everything. She doesn’t care about me. It would’ve been an inconvenience, another creature that might have the gall to take precedence over her.
Phoebe puts the radio on and starts dancing.
I could’ve been loved a million times more by my own flesh and blood – a true love – than this girl who whirls about me now with her long hands pulling nervously on her clothes, her eyes lit up and giddy.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s all dance. Let’s party.’
Grace snorts and peels off another slice of pizza that’s started to congeal on the breadboard. She doesn’t make a move to join Phoebe and neither do I. It’s pathetic and embarrassing. It’s like this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to Phoebe, us being here and having our horrible girls’ night. Outside, the summer night is still warm and light. It feels absolutely interminable, I think, as I watch her dance, twisting her hips this way and that, her hair flinging over each shoulder as she flips her head, like it’s truly never going to end.
‘Don’t you love me any more?’ she asks me over her shoulder. My reply is silence and tipping another measure of vodka down my throat. Have I wounded her? I can’t see. She’s turned her face away from me, looking at the wall as she dances. I hope I have. I want to see her face hollowed out and pinched with hurt. She turns, looks over her shoulder again with the question still in her eyes.
‘Not really. Not now.’ I don’t want to sound bitter but I know I do. ‘Not since you started seeing that teacher, having your little fling.’
‘What?’ Grace’s ears have pricked up. ‘What teacher? What have you been up to, Phoebe?’
She stops moving and the radio tinkles on in the background. ‘Nothing. Don’t listen to her.’
‘It’s that English teacher,’ I say. ‘You know, the one with a wife and two children.’
‘What, that creepy Swedish guy?’
I nod.
Phoebe is looking bright with tension. ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘It’s nobody’s business. That was supposed to be a secret, Orla.’
‘Wow.’ Grace downs another shot of vodka and clasps her chest as it goes down. ‘Did you fuck him?’
Phoebe appears to go stiff for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘I did and it was wonderful.’ She’s looking at me, trying to rile me up.
‘So you lied then. You think I care? I just think it’s sordid and sad. His family would be devastated if they knew. You can’t go around doing stuff like that. You’ve let yourself be used … Horrible old guy covered with chalk dust who carries a stupid briefcase like it’s the nineteen-seventies. Grim,’ I say, and I refill mine and Grace’s glasses and we chink them together and then drink.
Phoebe grinds her hands together, then shrugs. ‘Whatever you say. It was actually extremely romantic, but what would you know? Come on, let’s go upstairs.’
She bounds off, leaving us.
‘For God’s sake,’ Grace mutters, but all the same she stands up unsteadily and follows after, knocking over Phoebe’s glass on the way without realising. Vodka crawls thickly across the table top, dribbling into the gaps between the planks of timber. Phoebe’s mother would go crazy if she saw it gathering up crumbs as it spreads across the beautiful golden grain of the wood, probably leaving its track marks etched into the wax. I stand up too, without even attempting to clear it up. Phoebe can deal with it. It’s her house.
Phoebe is waiting impatiently on the stairs. Bang! I can see she’s changed again. She folds her arms along the banister and rests her pointed chin on the backs of her hands, staring down at us, catlike now.
‘Come on. Time for the rest of the night now. Time to fly.’ She turns and starts up the stairs and I see her differently again. From behind she is a tiny figure in her oversized blue fisherman’s jumper, her red skirt gathering around the backs of her knees. She’s like a thin, lonely princess rattling around in her vast palace full of echoes, with doors that are barred and chained. I get the sense she’ll never escape this place. That she’s doomed to stay the same forever.
Grace stumbles on the step on her way up.
‘Wait,’ she calls up. ‘I don’t remember the way. I don’t want to be on my own here.’
I know what she means. It makes me scurry after them. When I get to Phoebe’s room, the breath stinging in my chest from the effort, she’s already cross-legged on the floor next to the tablecloth, her knees pointing sharply outwards and her ankles crossed neatly over each other. She reminds me of a chipmunk now, chattering and giggling in secret behind her hands, and my hate ratchets up another notch. Grace goes to sit but her foot whooshes away under her body and she ends up on her back with her knees up to her chest on the perfectly sanded and varnished floorboards, laughing lopsidedly at the ceiling.
It’s been years since I’ve been here and I take a moment to look about. The walls of Phoebe’s room are painted plain cream. There’s not a single poster of a band with curling corners on the walls or even one of the more sugary Victorian artworks anywhere. The open door of the wardrobe shows clothes hanging with great gaps between them. I think of my own stuffed wardrobe at home, clothes belching out of it so that they pool on the floor below; the plenty of it all. Where’s all the girlhood glitter here? The mess of feathers and scarves and adolescence? On the windowsill is a bottle of bath stuff and underneath an exercise book with orange covers, the kind we used as kids in primary school. The arrangement strikes me as sparse and altar-like.
Grace is still on her back. ‘This is such fun, Phoebe,’ she says. ‘Who’d have thought it, that we could have such a fun wild time at yours.’
Phoebe’s hands fly to around her eyes; she’s not laughing any more and part of me can’t bear the dimple of pain that appears at the corner of her mouth that she tries to iron out straight away, because Grace’s mockery might be loose and drunken – not something she’d say sober – but it’s still plainly there. Phoebe hunkers down in herself and the coiled knitting of her collar comes up over her chin so it looks like a blue snake circling.
That brief dimple causes an unexpected correlating hole in my heart. I’ve missed her so much, I think, despite myself, my puppy-dog familiar self bounding out of the toughness I felt downstairs. I hope desperately that this is a mere glow of the embers before the fire goes out. I need to expunge it straight away. I pick up
my own little dainty rose-sprigged cup of poison and peer inside, fish the tab out and put it on my tongue.
Grace jackknifes up to sitting and picks up a teacup, licks her index finger, then dabbles with her finger inside until the tab sticks to its tip. Phoebe’s head bobs out of the coil and her long hands splay into forks each side of her as she whoops encouragement. ‘Go on, do it,’ Phoebe caws as Grace sticks her finger into her mouth and sucks the tab in. Then Grace rolls onto her back again and lifts her behind so she can extract the pouch of tobacco from her back pocket. She throws it, twisted and moulded from her body heat, in among the leaves that are wilting in their jug, their tips touching the ground.
‘Why not?’ asks Grace, slurring. ‘We’re all off the leash tonight.’
‘We’ll have to stick our heads out of the window.’ Phoebe’s voice has a high taint of anxiety. ‘And we’ll have to lean really, really far out. That stuff stinks for days. It gets into everything.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Grace lunges for the green and gold plastic pouch. I’ve never seen her like this, so off guard. ‘You’re a brilliant housekeeper. Remember?’
‘Don’t you love me any more?’ Phoebe asks again quickly, saying it so lightly I hardly hear and glancing over the tangle between us. It’s beginning to worry her, beginning to sink in something’s amiss now; her giddy nervousness is changing. She needs to reel me back in and know I’m secure, my teeth biting firmly on the same pointed hook that’s going to kill me in a slow and painful death.
I shrug, relishing the idea that I’m capable of giving her pain. Something tilts in my brain. I don’t know what it is, the acid, the vodka or seeing her like this, so trapped and needy. Then she flips again. She’s a scorpion. She’d do anything to protect herself. She has no feelings for anyone else, not even that teacher.
I did it for her, I realise. I went to that clinic and I got rid of that baby, and it was all for her because I thought she wouldn’t want me any more if I had it. I nurse the thought and it begins to bloom and grow so there isn’t room for anything else. Knowing this gets stronger and stronger the more I drink. How did I not see all this before?
I gave you my baby, I see it now. I took it out of me because I imagined it would disgust you – me becoming a mother and baby like that. I thought it would stop you wanting me. But you don’t want me anyway, not really, and I could’ve had something that I loved more than all the world and that loved me. I’m overwhelmed with longing for my wishing bowl desire that arrived as that scrap, that flesh that was my flesh too. I’m hopeless with the unbearable ache for it.
The acid seems to kick in to yet another level. Everything goes a little slant. Phoebe’s teeth grow sharper in her mouth.
Grace’s hands are deft at rolling the joint, despite her slurred speech. She proffers a perfectly rolled joint at us. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Don’t ever tell me I don’t have artistic talents.’
Quickly, as if acting on a stray impulse, Phoebe strips off the fisherman’s jumper, leans over to pluck the joint from Grace’s fingers and sticks it in her mouth.
‘For God’s sake, Phoebe. Put your clothes back on.’ My cheeks are burning. What’s she up to? She knows she’s lost the advantage. She began sensing it downstairs, that my love is fraying and becoming undone. This is a demonstration of her power – the fan of ribs like two open wings either side of her, her neat white breasts in the white bra. I’m supposed to quake before it.
‘It’s hot,’ she says.
‘Put your fucking jumper back on,’ I say. Christ, this place with its eternal summer evening outside. I’m hating it more and more by the minute.
She grimaces at me so the joint sticks up in the air and she quickly palms the lighter from where it lies in a fold of cloth.
‘I’m warning you …’
What am I warning her? She springs up, trailing her jumper after her, and makes for the door. And at that very moment I realise, the stripping off, the diversion, the grabbing of the joint was nothing to do with me. It was so Grace couldn’t get to light it in the bedroom and leave the accusing smell to seep into the curtains. It was this that was troubling her more than anything. She couldn’t forget about it.
The tiny cup is still in my hand. I want to shatter. I want to destroy. I try to prise it apart with my hands but it seems unbreakable, like some little potent haunting object of a dream that can never be made to go away and that appears over many nights and in a hundred different scenarios. I bear down on it with both thumbs straining on either side but it stays stubbornly intact.
‘What you doing?’ One of Grace’s eyes is half closed.
I fling the cup down and it bounces. ‘Nothing. I want to break this cup.’
‘Stamp on it,’ she says, nodding.
The pain goes through the arch of my foot when I jump on it. I want to scream out loud. Ignoring the pain that leaps up my calf now, I use my heel over and over until finally there is a crack and the cup lies there in three pieces.
Grace scoots over on her hands and knees. ‘Fuck, you’ve left a right dint in these floorboards. Mama’s not going to be a happy bunny. She’s going to go mental.’ She laughs suddenly at the idea, her eyes springing wide open.
I need to get out. I need to breathe normal air. This house is suffocating me. I limp out of the bedroom. It’s dark on the landing outside. It feels like there are spiders’ webs above me, just out of reach, and they’re growing down and threaten any minute to grow all over and engulf me. I shudder and try to get a grip. The rosy lips on the tab have opened but inside there seems only a black maw waiting. I wonder if it’s the same for Grace. I need to change that, to change the track of this trip before it’s too late. I startle. There’s a cough in the darkness. The light slits through a crack in the door of the next bedroom down the corridor. In it is a scrim of luminous skin.
I reach for the wall. ‘Who is it? Who is it?’
A delicate cough again. Phoebe steps forward. Her bare shoulders shine. ‘Is it true?’ she whispers. ‘Is it really true you don’t love me any more?’
The joint is slack in her fingers. In her other hand the jumper still trails to the floor. Her eyes are dark hollows. Her hair pools on her neck either side. ‘Because,’ she goes on, ‘I don’t think I could bear it if that was true.’
I pull my lips back. They’re sticking so gummily to my teeth I have to tear them away. My tongue is heavy.
‘It’s more than that.’ I’d like to smash her delicate white bones up like I did the teacup. ‘I hate you.’ My words fill up the dark space like hot gas. ‘I really, really hate you. You are …’ I search for the word I want to use, ‘… abhorrent to me.’
She crumples in front of me.
‘What?’
‘I said I hate you, Phoebe.’
I hear a stifled sob in the darkness, then a scuffle and the place where she once stood is a pulsing cavern of darkness. Something pierces my heart. What have I done? What have I done? Remorse strikes through me. She didn’t know, I tell myself. She didn’t even know about the baby. Why are you blaming her? And there she was not just a minute ago standing in front of you, white and shimmering. ‘Phoebe,’ I call, using my fingers to feel along the corridor. ‘Come back. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’
I’m tumbled into this new old feeling, of loving her, and it’s pain and it’s relief too – because it’s so familiar. I’ve not escaped from it. I’ve bumped around full circle and it’s still there. It is her I love. I would give anything for her. I gave her my baby and I wanted to. I’m a ball on a board that’s been careering around but I’ve fallen back into the hollow meant for me; struggle as much as I like, I’ll never be able to pop out of it.
So I carry on inching and inching down this corridor that feels eternal. At the end of it are a few bands of light but they are curved and it’s impossible to make out where it might be coming from. I cry out to myself but no one hears. I cry, ‘Mum,’ and ‘Dad,’ as if they could hear, and swoop in and rescue me from this
never-ending place. Under my fingers the wall takes on the texture of jelly and I cry out again and recoil and run, stumbling towards the bands of light, knocking into a wall and swinging round it to find myself blinking, whimpering, my eyes stinging in the brightness, and I run – down endless stairs, following Phoebe, until I’m at the top of the very last bit that leads to the ground floor.
Golden dust motes fall in a shower in the shaft of light from the window. The staircase is a red puzzle above and below. I have the sensation of the step as if I’m standing on a swing so I sit down abruptly. Downstairs there’s a murmuring voice. I peer between the dark wood of the banister and see the top of her head from above. She’s put her jumper back on and she paces back and forth, talking quietly into her phone. I steal a little further down to see if I can hear. By now I’m close enough to hear a word or two. ‘Unbearable.’ ‘Never before.’ ‘Urgent.’ ‘The place where no one goes.’ At one point she yells down the phone, ‘It’s too late for that.’
Phoebe has told me more than once that her mother spies on her. That she suspects her of coming into her room at night to look at her sleeping. That she takes things away and without asking. That she examines in detail the dirty clothes Phoebe leaves in the washing basket, and when Phoebe tries to do her own laundry will point-blank refuse to let her. That Phoebe, in turn, listens to her mother, her sister, her father talking on the phone or mumbling to himself as he makes a sandwich. I didn’t take much notice, if truth be told, but now, being here, I know she wasn’t lying. This is a house of spies. Everybody spies on everybody. There are so many mirrors, so many hidden corners and polished surfaces. Conversations are monitored. I’m doing it myself now. I can sense how it’s normal here – it’s like they’ve grown into each other to form one big interweaving web. That even your thoughts wouldn’t be your own. That being captured by the mirror is enough to make you shudder because the image in there would get stuck, waiting to be retrieved and then interrogated at any moment.