But JJ's bright teeth widened into a grin. "You like to classify things, don't you, Luce?" she said. "Everything in its little box."
"I suppose so." I thought about how good my name sounded in her husky voice.
"Do you classify people, too?"
"Sometimes," I said, trying to sound cheeky, now, rather than obnoxious. "Like, you, for instance, I'd say..." I was bluffing; I tried to think of something she'd like to hear. "I'd say you're someone who's at peace with yourself, I suppose," I told her. "Because you only speak when you've something to say. Unlike someone like me, who rabbits on and on and on all the time." I shut my mouth, then, and covered it with my hand.
The light was behind JJ; I couldn't read her eyes. "That's how you'd describe me, is it, Luce? At peace with myself?"
"Yeah," I said doubtfully.
She put her throat back and roared. Her deep laughter filled the room.
"What's the joke?" asked Rachel, sticking her head in the door, but I just shrugged.
Well, at least JJ found me funny, I told myself. It was better than nothing.
I still hadn't gathered a single clue about her sexual orientation. Some mornings, I woke with the clenched face that told me I'd been grinding my teeth again. To me, the fact that I was a dyke had been clear as glass by my thirteenth birthday, but then, precision was my thing. Maybe JJ was one, too, and didn't know it yet, would never know it till my kiss woke her. Or maybe she was one of those "labels are for clothes" people, who couldn't bear to be categorized. She dressed like a truck driver, but so did half the straight girls nowadays. With anyone else I would have pumped her friends for information, but JJ didn't seem to have any friends in Manchester. She worked long shifts at the Pizza Palace, and she never brought anyone home.
We got on best, I found, when we just talked about day-to-day matters like the colour of the sky. No big questions, no heavy issues. The sweetest times that summer were when she came out to help me with the vegetables. After a long July day we'd each take a hose and water one side of the garden, not speaking till we met at the end by the crab apple tree. Sometimes she brought Victor's cage down from her room for an airing. If Iona—who called him that rodent—wasn't in the garden, JJ would let him out for a run; once I even fed him a crumb from my hand.
We got talking once about why I wanted to do politics at college in the autumn. "I just think it'll be interesting to find out how things work," I said.
"What things?"
"Big things," I said, trying to sound dry and witty. "Countries, information systems, the global economy, that sort of thing. What goes on, and why."
JJ shook her head as if marveling and bent down to rip up some bindweed. I waited to hear what she thought; you couldn't rush her. "I dunno," she said at last, "I find it hard enough to understand what's going on inside me."
I waited, as I trained the hose on the tomato patch, but she didn't say another word.
Some days that summer I had this peculiar sense of waiting, from when I first rolled out of my single bed till long after midnight when I switched off my light; my stomach was tight with it. But nothing momentous ever happened. JJ never told me what I was waiting to hear—whatever that was.
She lavished care on Victor the rat, stroking his coat and scratching behind his ears with a methodical tenderness that softened me like candle wax. But she never touched another human being, that I could see. She wouldn't take or give massages; instead of good-bye hugs, she nodded at people. It was just how JJ was. I knew I shouldn't take it personally, but of course I did.
Iona didn't like her one bit, I could tell. Iona specialized in having enough information to take the piss out of anyone; pinned to her bedroom wall was a sprawling multicoloured diagram of who'd shagged who on the Manchester women's scene since 1990. One evening a few of us were in the living room, and JJ was stroking Victor all the way down his spine with one finger, very slowly and firmly. Iona walked in and said, "I get it! You don't fancy humans at all, just rats."
JJ threw Iona one unreadable look, scooped Victor back into his cage, and disappeared up the stairs.
The room was silent. "Aren't you ever going to give up?" I asked, without looking up from my book.
"Oh, she's probably just another repressed virgin," Iona threw in my direction.
But it didn't even have to be questions about sex that made JJ bolt, I discovered. She was prickly about the slightest things. For instance, one Sunday morning, most of us were lying around in the garden, half naked. JJ was wrapped up in her huge white flannel dressing gown, as usual. Rachel, bored of the newspapers, started teasing me about waxing my moustache off.
"What are you talking about?"
"I saw your little box of wax strips in the bathroom, Luce. Trying to get all respectable before you start college, are you?"
JJ lurched out of her deck chair so fast she knocked it over. She stomped off into the house, her dressing gown enveloping her like a ghostly monk. We all stared at each other.
"Which particular sore point was that?" snapped Rachel.
I shrugged uncertainly. "Maybe the wax is hers."
"Who cares if it is?" Iona butted in. "I've got pubes down to my knees, for god's sake!"
Di spoke from behind her magazine. "Hands up who didn't need to know that."
Di, Kay, and I put our hands in the air. Maura let out a yelp of laughter.
"Well, one reason I moved in here," growled Iona, "was to get away from that crap about what should and shouldn't be talked about. Nothing's unmentionable!"
"Yeah, well you can mention what you like as long as you leave JJ alone." That came out more loudly than I meant it to. I kept my eyes on the article on permaculture I was skimming. In the silence I could almost hear the others exchange amused glances. Nothing was ever private in the Welcome.
It troubled me that JJ would be so embarrassed about something petty like having a slight, faint moustache. Hadn't anybody ever told her what a handsome face she had? Now I came to think about it, she couldn't bear praise. "Seriously cute," I'd let myself say once when she'd come in wearing a new pair of combat trousers—that was all, two words—and she'd glanced down as if she'd never seen herself before and froze up. Could it be that she didn't like her body—the solid, glorious bulk that I let myself think of only last thing at night, in the dark?
Di was doing the pressure points in my neck one night during the news; she said I felt like old rope.
"Sleek and flexible?"
"No, all hard with salt and knotted round itself."
I stared glumly at the TV pictures.
"Jesus, Luce," asked Di out of nowhere, "why her?"
My head whipped round.
Di pushed it back into place gently. "And don't say 'who?' You're so obvious. Whenever JJ's in the room you sit with your limbs sort of parted at her."
My face scalded. "No I don't."
"Even Kay's noticed, and Kay wouldn't register the fall of a nuclear bomb."
I hid my face in my hand.
"Of all people to fall for!" said Di crossly.
"What's wrong with her?" I asked.
"JJ's an untouchable, honey."
I flinched at the word.
"You know it's true. That rat is the only one let into her bed. You'll never get anywhere with her in a million years. Don't take it personally; nobody could get past that force field."
"I think she cares about me," I said, very low. "When I had bad cramps, last month," I added in what I knew was a pathetic voice, "she left a tulip outside my door."
"Of course she cares about you," said Di pityingly. "Leave it at that."
But she didn't know how it was. JJ and I stayed up late sometimes; after the others had all gone to bed, we raided the fruit bowl and watched any old rubbish that was on television. Once, in the middle of a rerun of Some Like It Hot, my hand was lying on the couch about half an inch from hers, but no matter what I told myself, I couldn't bring myself to close the gap. JJ stared at the flickering screen, quite u
naware.
I couldn't sleep, too many nights like that one, wondering what it would be like. Just the back of her hand against mine, that's all I imagined. I had a feeling it would be hot enough to burn.
August came in hot and cloudy. The tomatoes hung fat but green in the humid garden. Di and I were peeling carrots one morning. She was looking baggy-eyed after a bad shift in the emergency room. "Your problem is, Luce," she began out of nowhere, "you're too picky. You'll never find everything you're looking for in one woman."
"What if I already have?" I muttered, mutinous.
She let out a heavy sigh to show what she thought of that.
I knew I shouldn't push it, but I couldn't stop. "What if JJ's my ideal woman?"
"Your ideal fantasy, you mean. Listen, next time try picking someone who's willing to sleep with you. Call me old-fashioned, but it's a big plus!"
Irritated, I gave my finger a bad scrape on the peeler.
"You should have copped off with someone your first week in this house," said Di.
"With whom, exactly?" I asked, sucking the blood off my knuckle.
"I don't know," she said, "someone old and wise and relaxed who wouldn't have put you through any of this angst. Someone like me," she added, lopping off a carrot top.
I stared at her through my sweaty fringe. "You're not serious," I told her.
"Well, no," said Di with one of her dirty laughs. There was a pause. "But I might have been, two years ago," she added lightly, "when you were all fresh and tempting."
"It's a bit bloody late to tell me now!" My voice was shrill with confusion.
"Oh, chop your carrots, child."
We worked on. I thought about Di and about her current boyfriend, Theo, quite a witty guy who remembered to put the seat down and, judging by the retreats he ran, which involved sitting cross-legged on a mat for six hours a day and Understanding the Pain, he seemed to have more staying power than her others. "Besides," I said at last, getting my thoughts in order, "you're straight."
She laughed again and did her Star Trek voice. "Classification Error Alert!"
I was sad then, and Di could tell.
"Don't worry about it, Luce," she said gently, shoveling the chopped carrots into the pot. "In the long run, you know, if two people matter to each other, it doesn't make much difference whether they've ever actually done the business or not."
She meant her and me, but in the weeks that followed I tried applying her words to me and JJ. I repeated them to myself whenever JJ left the room. If it was love, it should be enough on its own.
On the August bank holiday the weather was so sticky I felt like my skin was crawling. It was too unpleasant to work in the garden, even. JJ was at the Pizza Palace all day; I just hoped they were paying her time and a half. I sat in the shady living room and did a cryptic crossword with 108 clues. Whenever any of the others wandered by they offered to help, but they only gave stupid answers.
At ten that evening, Carola came downstairs to watch some grim documentary about child abuse. I kept on struggling with the crossword. JJ walked in at half ten, limp, with her uniform still on. I offered her cold mint tea from my herb patch; she grinned and said she'd love some, after her shower. I decided it was going to be a good night after all.
It still would have been, if Iona hadn't been such a maladjusted bollocks. She and her latest, Lynn, were sitting round on the balcony drinking beer. They came downstairs just as JJ was emerging from the bathroom, swaddled in her white dressing gown as usual. She looked cool and serene now; there were tiny flecks of water caught in her dreadlocks. She stood back against the wall to let Iona and Lynn go by; that was the kind of person she was, gentlemanly.
But Iona caught her by the lapel of her dressing gown and said, "Hey, Lynn, have you met JJ? She's the house prude!"
JJ didn't smile. She just kept a tight hold of the neck of her thick robe.
Lynn was giggling, and Iona wouldn't leave it at that. She wasn't even drunk, she was just showing off. "Jesus, woman," she said in JJ's face, "how hot does it have to get before you'll show a little flesh?" She put on a parodic games-mistress voice: "We're all gells here, y'know!" As she spoke she hauled on the dressing gown, and it fell open, and the next thing I knew Iona was on the floor, clutching her face.
JJ, knotted into her robe again, had backed against the door.
"She hit me," howled Iona. "The bitch hit me in the eye!"
The next hour was the most awful I'd known in the Welcome. Rachel left her curry on high in the kitchen and ran in with the naturopathic first aid kit. After dabbing Iona's eyelid with arnica, she wanted to take her off to a hospital to have it checked out, "in case the co-op's legally liable," but Di told her not to be such a fuckwit. Every time one of the housemates came down to ask what all the noise was about, this time of night, the story had to be told all over again, in its various competing versions. JJ just sat on the edge of the couch with her face hidden in her hands, except when she was muttering, "Sorry, I overreacted, I'm so sorry," over and over again.
But Carola was the worst. It was as if, for the five years she'd been attending co-op meetings and volunteering to go off to weekend workshops, she'd been in training for this. She got the Policy Book out of the kitchen drawer and read out clause 13 about "unreasonable and unacceptable behaviour."
"Behaviour means longer than half a second," I spat at her.
"Violence is unacceptable no matter how long it lasts," she said smoothly.
Kay burst into tears and said she'd come to this co-op to escape male aggression (which was the first any of us had heard of it). "I thought I'd be safe with women," she snuffled.
"You are safe," said Di coldly. "Nothing's happened to you. You were upstairs watering your plants till ten minutes ago."
"And besides," I said incoherently, "what about Iona's aggression? She started it. She tried to rip JJ's dressing gown off."
"I did not," growled Iona from behind the bag of frozen peas Lynn was holding to her face.
"You did so. You're the most aggressive person I've ever met, male or female," I bawled at her.
At which point Di tried to calm us all down. "OK, OK," she said, "let's agree that Iona ... violated JJ's bodily integrity"—I could see her mouth twitch with laughter at the phrase—"and that JJ..."
"Made a totally inappropriate response." Carola was icy.
"Oh come on." I was pleading with her now. "Who's to say what's an appropriate response? These things happen. You can't make rules for everything."
But I was wrong, apparently. Carola had the Policy Book open to another page, and she was reading aloud. "Step one, a formal letter of caution will be sent to Member B to instruct her to cease the offending behaviour—"
"She has ceased!" I looked over at JJ, who was bent over on the couch as if she had cramps.
"Or not to repeat it."
There was a long pause. I drew breath. Well, who cared about a formal letter anyway? It would all blow over. We'd be laughing at this by next weekend.
"We don't know that she won't repeat the behaviour," said Kay, quavering.
JJ stood up, then. Her hands hung heavy by her sides. "That's right," she said hoarsely. "You all don't know the first thing about anything."
The silence was broken by Carola, reading from the Policy Book again. "In the case of an act of violence, the co-op may proceed directly to step three, eviction."
Everyone stared at her. None of us had noticed the smell, till then, or the smoke fingering its way along the corridor. Only when the alarm began to squeal did we come to our senses.
In the kitchen the cork notice-board over Rachel's curry pot had gone up in flames. Di threw a bowl of water at it, putting out the fire and soaking Kay's pajamas. The smell was hideous. Phone messages, recycling schedules, minutes of meetings, a postcard from an ex-housemate in Java, and a pop-up card I'd got for my eighteenth birthday were all black and curled as feathers.
The eviction clause was never put to the test. JJ ga
ve her notice the next day.
I was so full of rage I couldn't uncurl my fingers. "You could have stayed," I told her in her bedroom, not bothering to keep my voice down. "Why do the petty bureaucrats always have to win? It's Iona we should have kicked out, or Carola. All you did was defend yourself for half a second. Why is physical violence so much worse than the emotional kind, anyway?"
JJ said nothing, just carried on stowing away her rolled-up socks in the bottom of her backpack.
"My father hit my mother once," I told her, "and you know what?"
That made her look up.
"She deserved it. The things my mother used to say, I should have hit her myself." Now the tears were snaking down my face.
"Ah, Luce," said JJ. "Don't cry."
I sobbed like a child.
"I'd like to have stayed," she told me. "But I just don't feel welcome anymore."
"You are! Welcome to me, anyway," I choked, ungrammatically.
JJ came over to hug me then. I didn't quite believe she was going to do it. She hunched, a little, as if her back was hurting her. She took me by the shoulders and warily laid her heavy head on my neck. I could feel her hot breath. She smelt of jasmine.
A mad idea came to me then. "Well, I'll move out, too," I said brightly. "We can find a flat to share."
I could see her answer in her face, even before she shook her head.
My ribs felt cold and leaden. "Where are you going, though? You don't have anywhere else to go. Listen, why don't I ring round some of the letting agencies for you? I've nearly a thousand pounds in my account. You can have it."
Her head kept gently swinging from side to side, saying no to everything. "I'll be OK," she whispered.
And then I saw in the back of her dark eyes that she did have somewhere to go, she just wasn't telling me. So I took a step backwards and put my hands by my sides.
The taxi took her away." 'Keep in touch," I shouted—a meaningless phrase, because JJ and I had never touched in our lives except for about five seconds, just before she left.
I didn't stay long at the Welcome myself, as it happened. Once I started college in the autumn, it seemed to make more sense to live in a student residence so I wouldn't have to trek across town.
Touchy Subjects: Stories Page 18