by Anna Legat
Rob stared at her. ‘Paula?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘It was only a one-night stand we shared when we were very, very drunk. We were both way too young; we thought that’s how it was done. We didn’t know any better. But that doesn’t change the fact that we were – and are – total strangers. Plus, I am a married man. Even if I wanted to, which I –’
‘You don’t have to pretend in front of me. Please don’t …’ She was cold, serious. This really sounded like a cry for help, like the ‘Please save me!’ she had never uttered to the right audience.
Rob shook off her slight frame and got up from the couch. I sighed with relief. Honestly, for a minute there, he had me worried. ‘Paula, I’m not pretending anything. Let me take you home.’
‘Don’t tell me you forgot,’ irritation was rising in her voice like fog.
‘I didn’t forget, Paula. Of course, I didn’t. You were the first girl I had sex with, but it was … Well, it didn’t mean … ’ he was struggling to find the correct words: words that would say it as it was without hurting my poor sister’s feelings. ‘Well, my marriage to Georgie superseded whatever we may have had … I mean, it was a one-off. I love Georgie. She’s my wife … You are her sister.’
Warm, red blood was again pumping through my ectoplasmic arteries and I felt alive, more alive than I had been in years. But it didn’t last. Paula triumphed in the end.
‘But does she love you? Has she ever? Did she care about being your wife when she was fucking Tony?’
‘Tony?’
‘Tony Sebastian, our … how shall I put it? Our mutual friend: Georgie’s and mine. He and I – we don’t keep any secrets from each other. He told me all about it. A sordid affair if I ever had one myself! They were at it for months fucking like rabbits behind your back. Sorry I had to break it to you like that, but I hate the idea of the husband always being the last one to find out.’
This was the point, the point where I saw Rob’s face, the point where I wished I was really dead.
Rob dropped Paula off at her flat without a word. I don’t think he meant to be rude – he just couldn’t say anything. He was stuck for words. As he reversed, he hit something with the side of his door. Another car – a big four-wheel drive. Its right indicator went crashing to the ground. I noticed that the left one was already smashed. An alarm went off, but Rob drove away without stopping. He didn’t hear it.
I sat next to him silently. I wanted to tell him that Tony and I was a one-off, just like Paula and him. I wanted to tell him our marriage meant more to me than anything because I loved him too and I was his wife. But the words didn’t come. My words were stuck, too.
He drove like a lunatic and missed a couple of red lights. I didn’t know where we were going. We were in an unfamiliar suburb when he finally stopped and turned off the engine. A woman came out from a house beyond a low hedge. Leaving his key in the car, Rob ran towards her. She was the chorizo-fingered Mother Earth from work, Olivia.
‘You said I could come and talk to you any time …’ He was frantic.
‘Yes, come in. You look … terrible!’ Her baby-blue eyes were unbelievably rounded.
Inside, they didn’t talk. Not really. He only told her he had to be close to her or he would go mad. He cried. She held him. There was so much hunger and need in the way he reciprocated her embrace that it stunned me. I didn’t think they would ever let each other go.
‘Can I stay with you tonight?’ Rob asked Olivia, and she nodded. She took him to her bed upstairs. A fat tabby cat was lying on the bed. It hardly acknowledged their arrival. She undressed Rob and took her own clothes off – all of them, down to the sensible knickers. I got a glimpse of her pubes just before she slid under the duvet, next to him. She was a natural blonde. Everything was natural about her: her breasts were full to the point of bursting, but not grotesquely round the way silicon would shape them; there were bulges of fat on her stomach, free-flowing and gelatinous in a puddingy sort of way. She would be considered yummy by some men. Was that how Rob saw her? I couldn’t tell. He was in no state to appreciate her nakedness, and she didn’t offer it to him. They were lying together innocently until he stopped sobbing. She stroked his hair for a while and then fell asleep, too.
It was the first night since my accident that I could not curl up next to my snoring husband. Three would be a crowd.
I had some unfinished business with Paula. From the perspective of time I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve by going back to her place. I couldn’t haunt her – only her conscience could do that and she didn’t have one. I couldn’t confront her – she would’ve welcomed a chance to flaunt her theatrical superiority by delivering the final punchline. And she would’ve found a way of blaming me. After all, I had been bonking Tony like a mad rabbit. That much was true. Bizarrely, that may have been the first thing Paula didn’t have to fabricate in order to destroy me.
In a strange twist of fate, I didn’t find her celebrating. She was slumped on the floor amongst the piles of old family photographs – the ones with me and Rob, Mother and Dad, all sporting moustaches and round spectacles Paula had drawn for her personal entertainment.
Her pose was that of a rag doll: legs stretched wide apart, one shoe on, one shoe off; back bowed, head hanging down, every body part seemingly disjointed. She was holding a large pair of florist’s scissors, or rather secateurs, and for a moment, instinctively, I felt that pang of anxiety that she was going to hurt herself – stab herself with those bloody scissors. But soon I realised my mistake. She wasn’t going to harm herself, not before she had finally disposed of every memory of me and everyone else she cared about. So there she was: on the floor, like a twisted alter ego of Edward Scissorhands, shredding those photographs, cutting across our faces and torsos, decapitating us, amputating our legs and arms. Snippets of glossy paper tumbled from under her fingers. And she was wailing. Sobs shook her small, wretched body like a dog would shake a rag doll. The rag doll that Paula was.
‘No one’s in the house, wait!’ Emma sprang out of the front door and ran towards the battered old Kia. Brandon had just started the engine. ‘Wait!’
He smiled at her and wound down the window. His face bore traces of a flour explosion: it was in his eyebrows and his hair, making him look like a Santa apprentice. ‘You don’t want to kiss me in this state?’
‘No one’s in the house. Even the dodgy aunt’s gone. I don’t want to be alone. Can I come with you?’
‘No, Emma. I promised your father I’d bring you back tonight.’
‘And you did, but Dad isn’t here. Do you really think he’d notice if I was here or not?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Em. Of course he would. He’s a decent bloke.’
‘But he isn’t here!’
Brandon killed the engine and stepped out of the car. He didn’t bother locking the door. ‘I’ll wait with you until he comes back, all right? Do you think he’d mind if I had a shower? It feels like I’ve got flour in the crack of my arse.’
With a small towel wrapped around his hips and his skin sweating droplets of water, Brandon was back to his Adonis self. Emma dried his hair with another towel. Wet wisps fell on his forehead. She kissed it, ruffled his hair, and kissed it again. She did all the things I used to do to her when she was a small child: I’d always towel-dry her short curls, kiss her forehead, ruffle the hair so it would fall back into its old, familiar places – a few locks over the eyes, longer streaks to the back of the head, and I would kiss it again, inhaling the clean smell of Johnson’s baby shampoo. Now, Emma was doing it to this Brandon creature. She was even sniffing his hair. Did she love him as much I loved her? Was she capable yet – at this tender age – of loving, or was she just reliving a ritual which she knew should mean love? Or, perhaps, she was simply getting what she wanted – veni, vidi, vici – getting it her way. And her way she would get it! I could see the first signs of surrender on his part. He has already capitulated, realising all resistance would be
futile. What else could a red-blooded twenty-two-year-old do?
They were in Emma’s girly-Goth bedroom with its fluffy cushions bearing skulls with bleeding eyeholes, pictures of cats in thick black frames like obituaries, and a bed with a crumpled duvet the colour of menstrual blood. Brandon was sitting on the bed and Emma stood over him, drying and kissing his hair. He put his arms around her hips and drew her close so that his face was pressed against her tummy. His voice was muffled, as if coming from a drum, when he said, ‘It’s such a good feeling to be home.’
‘This home? My home?’ Emma asked.
‘Any home – just home. That dump where I kip – that’s not home. That’s just a crap bedsitter, that’s what it is … It feels like ages since I was home.’
‘Don’t you ever go back home? Like, to visit your family and all?’
‘There’s no home in Chester anymore. They lost it when they divorced. They don’t even live in the same city. Since I was thirteen they played this ping-pong with me: three days at Mum’s, two days at Dad’s. Then she remarried – new daddy couldn’t stand the sight of me. And old daddy emigrated to Canada. No more ping-pong – no one wanted me, not even for three days. He paid for my uni, just to keep me put, so I wouldn’t follow him. Whatever! I don’t give a shit.’
Emma bent over him and lowered her face into his hair. She whispered, ‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll have our home here.’
He lifted his head, ‘What, here? In your bedroom?’
‘No, not in my bedroom! You’re pulling my leg! Again!’ She pushed him onto the bed. He went into a freefall, his arms wide opened, laughing. Emma shouted: ‘Here – where we are! Wherever we are, silly!’
When I saw the towel unravelling from his hips and revealing the magnitude of his erection, I knew there was no going back. Neither the depth of their conversation nor his traumatic memories of a family breakup had stopped the flow of blood to his manhood. Men are like that; I knew it and Emma would soon find out: their brains are detached from their dicks. They have a life of their own.
Brandon pulled her to him and she lay next to him on her blood-red bed.
‘Let’s do it now,’ my silly daughter said.
They were facing each other; he was scrutinising her, thinking. ‘What? Without the virgin white sheets?’ There was excitement in his eyes: he had made up his mind to do it.
‘Sod the sheets.’
He was undoing the buttons of her shirt from the top and she from the bottom. She lifted her arms so that he could slide the shirt and her bra off her. She became more impassive. Her fingers dug into the fabric of the duvet.
‘You’re not sixteen yet …’
‘What difference do a few days make? I want to do it. Let’s do it!’
Vici!
I thought I ought to want to stop them. But I didn’t. I was watching, and even that alone felt wrong. I shouldn’t be here. This was their life, not mine; their memory, that only they could share. And here I was, gawping.
‘I’ll try,’ he was struggling with her skirt’s zip. ‘I never told you, and maybe I shouldn’t be telling you, but this is my first time, too.’
I decided this would be a good time to visit Mother and her stale biscuit.
I was almost disappointed to see the biscuit gone, with only a few crumbs remaining on the plate by her bedside table. I had become used to that biscuit. Another surprise was Mother: she was in bed, sleeping. She was wearing a net cap on her head, all her hair tucked neatly under it. It came back to me how she would always wear that cap even when Paula and I were girls, except back then she would have rollers like green caterpillars in her hair. Her hands lay demurely on top of the sheets. Her mind was busily at work: she was dreaming. It was quite a discovery to find out that in the dimmest depths of dementia people’s brains still ticked away with great determination, even if the mechanism was outwardly shot.
In her dream Mother was about the same age as when she had seduced Dad, perhaps a little younger: her hair was shorter and bouncier, her step too was bouncier, the spark in her eye was still tomboyish and full of the same vigour as in those days when she climbed trees and dived head first into shallow brooks. She was at work, slaving away at her desk, making phone calls, and jotting down notes, which she would put inside brown manila folders bearing case numbers written in ink over a rubber stamp imprint. The folders were piled up on her desk in a neat column. She was the only woman in a large office bustling with the activity of background police work. Yet she didn’t look out of place. She was a girl who had been born to be a man, and was hell-bent on living her life accordingly. I had often wondered what made her give up that life; Dad somehow didn’t seem big enough to fill the vacuum, but then perhaps people – women – loved differently in those days. They were prepared to self-sacrifice in order to cook, hoover, change bedsheets, and darn socks.
A plain-clothes policeman of a respectable age and with a very good tailor stopped at Mother’s desk. He leaned on it heavily, his face levelled with Mother’s. Mother held his gaze. ‘Sir?’
‘It may be your lucky day, Philips. I need a woman to interview a potential witness. It’s a delicate matter. I can’t call the woman into the station – she’s already given her account with her solicitor present, you see? You will have to go and see her under a pretext: a minor, unrelated detail. An unofficial visit – just you. Have a nice, friendly chat with her. Gloria Rilke –’
They’d never get away with it these days. Mother’s face nearly broke into a grin, but she managed to restrain herself by biting her lower lip. ‘Rilke’s case, sir?’ she said.
‘Yes. She’s his only alibi but he’s treading on shaky ground. I know she’s hiding something, but she’s also having doubts,’ he tapped the side of his nose. ‘I want you to probe her a bit, see what you can get. No direct questions, just a girlie heart-to-heart. Any discrepancies you can find, understand? Here’s the file.’ He threw another manila folder on Mother’s desk.
‘I’ve read it, sir, cover to cover!’ She was trying to keep her voice as low as possible, which sounded rather comical, like she had a speech impairment.
‘That’s my girl! Go and get her! This’ll be your break into real detective work – if you do it right.’
In her dream – in her glorious recollection – Mother said, ‘Sir!’, and at last let that eager grin flash across her face, but in her bed she was scowling. And she was fighting the memory. I could tell by how her body stiffened and she shook her head, mumbling a distorted ‘No’.
To no avail. She was in an empty house. The lights were off. She was feeling her way along a dark corridor. ‘Mrs Rilke? Mrs Rilke!’ There was a shuffling and a muffled noise at the end of the passage, perhaps in the room with an open door. ‘Mrs Rilke? My name is Celia Philips, Sergeant Celia Philips.’ Deliberately, Mother omitted that little qualifying W for woman before her rank of police sergeant. She would’ve considered it a slight every time she heard it. In her job, the fact that she was a woman was neither here nor there. It was a man’s job that she was doing, and yet she knew she was better at it than any man. Why split hairs over gender?
She banged on the door with her fist – man-like. ‘May I have a word? Are you there?’
A figure: slim, tall, dark – dark and blurred like everything else in that black tunnel – burst out of that room. It pushed by Mother; she tripped but found support against the open door. She glimpsed inside the room. A red light from neon across the street illuminated the body of a woman sprawled across a double bed, staring back at her with dead eyes. Mother forced herself to breathe; the figure shot out of the back door.
‘Stop! Police!’ Mother shouted, and took after the man.
She ran across the kitchen, into the utility room, bumping into the barrelled body of a washing machine. Out in the back garden, she was pushing white sheets that were drying on the line away from her face. She couldn’t see the man anymore, but there was a gate, and it was swaying. She dived into the narrow lane behind it. A
hundred yards or so away someone had run into metal bins; they tumbled to the ground; someone swore. She followed the clanking noises.
In her dream, she was twisting and, like a mute, trying to utter sounds that would not be said. I wished she would wake up, for her sake, but the memory wouldn’t have it. It went on. She was at the back of a busy and noisy place – a dance club perhaps. A slim shaft of light saturated with cigarette smoke streamed out of a slightly ajar back door. Mother seemed to have lost her prey. Panting hard, she scanned the concreted yard.
‘Looking for me?’ A voice came from a black corner, swiftly followed by the looming bulk of a man. He had no face – it was obscured by the night. Two others were with him; one tall and slim, just like the one she had been pursuing, but she wouldn’t be able to swear to it. The dark kept them all faceless.
Mother recoiled. She took a few steps back into the arms of someone behind her.
‘A nice little birdie looking for action?’
‘One at a time, boys, one at a time …’
Mother was going berserk in her bed. She threw off her sheets; she was kicking hard, mumbling, dribbling from her toothless mouth. The dream was cut into pieces, but I could still see the highlights: two men holding her pinned down, and the other one … one at a time.
At last, mercifully, Mother woke up. The horror – for one split second – registered in her eyes, and then she went blank. She tried to pull her duvet back over her shivering body, but it kept slipping. She reached for her cardigan, which was on the back of a chair by her bed. Her fingers got hold of it; she yanked it off the chair and, as best as she could, covered her lower body with it, pressing with both hands against her stomach. She closed her eyes. There was nothing there. The dream was gone.