by Tanith Lee
“Little things at first. Why did I do that with my hair? Why not do this? So I’d try it and then she’d wait till we were out somewhere and then she’d put her head on one side and pull a sort of face and say no, it hadn’t worked. Or another shade of lipstick - and no, it didn’t suit me, or my mouth didn’t suit it. And then things I’d been in - like bloody 999, and why had I acted that scene in that pathetic way, it wasn’t convincing. Not the director’s fault, surely? Or my voice was wrong, too prissy. Or I was putting on weight, I ought to watch out, I’d end up too big and no one would give me a part except as some fat old slut. Or - You can imagine. Perhaps you can. Perhaps you think it was nothing. But I’m not that secure. I never was. I act that I am. But it’s a bluff. She was scratching, pulling all the time, all the time, little bits out of the underpinning. Hey! Look at Reenie’s frown lines! Ssh! Don’t make so much noise when you come, you’re deafening me, you put me off. God, you can’t cook, Reenie, can you?”
(Serena’s voice has not livened up, not put on again its panoply of rage. It is the same dead voice, dull even when emphatic, and lacking in timbre.)
“I must have been in love with her, I must. I was. To hate her so much. We started to have diabolical rows. Once I threw something at her - a crystal ashtray I kept for the smokers still among us - and it went straight through the TV screen. She laughed. I said fine, you don’t have to fucking pay for it, do you. And she said, Oh, I’ll pay for it if you want. And next morning - she’d gone by then, she was always going by then - days, whole nights - I found a cheque for three K on the coffee table. She’d written along the bottom Charity Funding to Aid Bad Actors. I tore it up and threw it away. I wanted to push it up her arse with a - no. No. I did try not to go crazy. You won’t believe that, but I did. I asked her if she was seeing someone else. Of course, she said. You don’t think you tick all the boxes, do you? I wanted her to leave and I was petrified she would. I kept getting into stupid rows on the set, I kept being sick - as if she’d made me pregnant. I said, she’d moved in with me, but she hadn’t really - only brought some clothes, make-up, that sort of thing. She had her own flat, but she never said where - or I never asked. But now, as if our arrangement really was a partnership, she started to change the decor of this place. She had a chair recovered in tartan flowers - and horrible additions - a plastic chicken hung on a hook with its head half off and ketchup - I thought it was real. She poured red wine down the loos and left it there like blood. She wrote things over my scripts - crude ugly brainless filth. I was frightened of her. And that poster you found - oh there were lots of things like that. She put one on STD’s in the en suite bathroom,blue-tac’d it to the wall. Revolting, foul, and she’d written on that too. It said Go on, take the risk. We all gotta go, eh?”
(Serena is - serene. Or she looks as if she is a sort of serene. As if heavily sedated, perhaps. She has folded her hands over her empty glass.)
“One day she took off and she was gone about four days and nights, and I began to pray she’d been run over, or pushed under a train. I phoned an abuse line. Do you know what I got? A recorded message. Their lines were busy. If I was in danger I should call the police. She came back at three in the morning - she was drunk and she threw up in here. Over there, actually, where that lamp is. Then she went to sleep in that chair. Yes. The one you’re in, Nicky. In the morning I’d packed her bag - I put all the rubbish in it too, the posters, all of it - and I told her to get out and never come back. I told her if she didn’t I would kill her. You and whose army? she said. No army, I know a hit man. She said, so do I. I said, perhaps it’s the same man. But he and I go back a long way. It’s a family thing. I don’t, obviously, know anyone like that. But she was hung over. She looked really ill. After a bit she got up and peered at me, and said, You know what, Reen, you’re crap. And then - she took her bag and went into the bathroom and then came out and she left. I haven’t seen her since. And then there was Corfu, and about a week - was it? I lost track - a week or ten days after, Laurence disappeared. And then they found Laurence…”
(There is a pause. Serena is crying again, but without any passion now. Like a forgotten, thinly-running tap.)
“I’d tried to make sure she took everything she’d contaminated this place with. But she stuck the poster up again, behind the picture in there, to shock-repel me some day, when I discovered it. God knows, I never might have. You found it, didn’t you. You know, I asked her, that one time, what she meant, what she’d written on it meant - drink up, get lucky… Do you know what she said? She said, Just what it says, babes. Just what it says. Maybe it was her curse - a real one - on me. I’ve felt cursed. I’ve felt - wrong ever since. And - this is awful, but it’s true - I felt that Laurence dying like that was - it was as if the edge of her curse caught him too. Her fucking white-blonde blue-eyed shit of a curse.”
Nick moves in the chair.
“She was called Kitty,” he says. “Or Kit. Right?”
“Yes, yes,” says Serena almost impatiently. She has no idea it seems she did not tell him this.
“And she looked like Claudia.”
“Christ - did I say that too?” Serena gapes at him through the water and mist of her pain. She is blanked a moment by surprise at her own over-forthcomingness. But of course she had not told him that either. He simply knew. “Then yes, she did look like her. Like Mum. When she was young. I didn’t see it at first. But later - sometimes I’d look at her and think Christ, is that why I want her? It used to frighten me, Nick. I mean really frighten me. A female Oedipus. Oh,” she laughs in a quick hoarse whinny, “why not. She was half Greek. Or so she said.”
Nick thinks of the madwoman in the road off Harley Street, Jonquil Franks. A Mediterranean, Pond had said, Greek perhaps.
Serena has gone out and come back, starting to wipe her eyes with a bunch of tissues.
“Nick, I’m sorry about earlier. Do you understand, I’m still in a state. Maybe I shouldn’t be. But so much has happened. It’s like that Shakespeare stuff, isn’t it, troubles not coming single spies but in battalions. Let’s…”
“Sit down,” Nick says, “please.”
She sits and gazes at him, her face scrubbed and patchy and about fifteen years of age.
“You,” he says, “had a thing with a blonde, blue-eyed woman, about twenty-eight, called Kit or Kitty, who looked like our mother.”
“I told you…”
“And so did Laurence. And so, if you can call it that, did I. I had sex with her, anyway. As I’m sure Laurence did. Just like you.” Serena’s mouth has fallen open. She does not close it. Nick says, “That seems very odd to me. Doesn’t it to you? All three of us - with her?”
“Nick…”
“But there is even more. She did a great job on you of mind-fuck. She also tried that one on me. As for Laurence, I’ve got, as they say, good reason to believe she also fucked him up very badly. Even to the extent of fucking him up so badly it caused his death.”
Serena lets out a low animal scream. It seems nearly inadvertent, more like one of the old kettles that used to whistle as it came to the boil.
But then she stands up. She has completely changed.
He is unsure into what, exactly.
Gamma
“No, I said stay there. Until I call you.”
“I don’t think this is a great plan. I told you what she was like. Even he was careful, and he was experienced. He knew what not to do.”
“So do I. Stay there. Till I call.”
With a sinking heart he watches her cross the intervening space and go briskly down the steps. The security light has flared on. For a second it has shown Serena’s half-turned face, which she had cleansed quite make-up-less, the skin unflawed save by the faintest pencil marks of lines by her mouth and under her eyes.
He had tried to persuade her not to come here, but the tiredness, he thinks, made him give in. Even made him go with her. Now he stands under the larger of the big bare trees. He has to wait, as in some
sinister infantile game, until she calls. It is crazy. He knows this. But there he is.
Nick had felt he had to tell her about Jonquil Franks. As about Pond, who Serena might have met at Angela’s house. Serena is unsure if she did. She had reckoned anyway Angela had only hired some private dick after Laurence went missing. Nick had elaborated on this theme however, adding the account of what Pond had told him - Laurence’s affairs, the affair with Kitty Price or Andrew.
Serena was - is - convinced. Hence the journey to Marylebone in a cab.
Are the press following them? Nick suspects he will always think now they are everywhere, watching, snapping him. No one had seemed on their tail, yet when a single car moved into the road behind the cab, even when it went on past them, he was aware one more shot of him, and of Serena, might now be off to decorate the tabloids.
Has she knocked on the door of the basement flat? He does not remember hearing her knock. But the security light is stable, burning bright. Quite likely the old woman is out. Or will not answer. Or - has Kitty returned here? - is it Kitty who will undo the door…?
Nick finds he takes a step forward.
Exactly then he hears a screech. It is like the cry of an owl, or more perhaps the cry of the prey of an owl as talons and beak strike home. It freezes him. Or so he thinks, but already again he moves forward.
There is a sort of bang, a collapsing noise. (He recalls the noises on Angela’s phone as she presumably wrenched it from the hands of the girl who had answered him.) Light washes up from the doorway to augment the searchlight eye of the security lamp.
Serena shouts. He identifies it as his name.
He goes on again, with the impelled, dutiful reluctance of the conscripted soldier.
When he is down the steps and has reached the doorway, Serena says in her new hoarse voice, “Is this her?”
“Yes,” he says.
The door of the basement flat is wide open and the overhead electric light turned on, a hard hundred watt bulb. Serena stands sidelong between him and Mrs Jonquil Franks, who is sitting on the floor with her legs stuck out before her like a dropped doll. Her lunatic eyes are wide as any door, coal black and staring with terror.
Nick is astounded at her overthrow. He notes one cheek is red - did Serena hit her? But Serena’s left hand has another sort of red, and lightly drips.
“What did…?”
“She bit me, stupid stinking old bitch. But I had a tetanus jab last month, so I’ll be fine. Unless of course she’s rabid.” Serena glances at Mrs Franks. Serena laughs.
Mrs Franks says nothing.
“Well,” Serena says to Mrs Franks, “Kit told me something about you. You brought her up, did you?” (Mrs Franks still says nothing and does little. She only stares from one of them to the other, with her enormous eyes.) “That would account for Kit’s fucking awful accent. And her mental instability. You did a great job.”
Nick is becoming afraid the old woman will have a stroke or heart-attack. Or even worried his sister may abruptly turn and kick her in the ribs or the head - Serena’s winter boots are smart but serviceable.
What had Serena done anyway? Grabbed Mrs Franks, slapped her and thrown her over? Conversely he is uncertain if Mrs Franks is entirely subdued. He recalls her bravado with Pond and himself. Bring it on, she had said. It comes to him maybe she is fearless with men, despising them, whereas she respects her own gender far more, and so has surrendered.
Serena does convey her own feral power. He can now recollect flashes of this, in childhood, even once or twice in roles he has seen her act when he was a teenager.
She reaches towards Nick suddenly and pulls him into the hall. She pushes the front door shut.
Outside the security light dies.
The light inside is incredibly harsh. It makes both women now look like cut-outs, with their pallid skins and black or black and grey hair. Both their mouths are brightly red, but the old woman’s, due to lipstick, is smeared. How sharp her teeth however, to have bitten Serena’s hand so impressively.
Serena says, “All right, you old bat. Now I want to know where your cunt grandchild is, your kitty-cat. That’s all.”
“Why I should know?” Mrs Franks has spoken. But her voice is quiet.
“You know. She will have told you.”
“She tells me nothing never. She got her own life.”
“She tells you. You tell me.”
Mrs Franks whimpers. “What you want me t’do? Don’t know, know nothing. I’m a poor old lady. Y’leave me be.”
Serena bends towards Mrs Franks and screams into her face, “You’re old and ugly, sure. But you’re not poor - she sees to that. And you’re fucking not a lady. Now fucking tell me!” And slaps her swift as a striking snake again across the face.
“Reenie…” Nick says, “don’t…”
“I call them policy men,” blurts Mrs Franks.
“So call them. Go on.”
Mrs Franks begins to weep. Huge drops break from her eyes. Otherwise even now she does not move.
Nick sees in the ancient savage face, quite abruptly, all the masks of an eldritch Greek drama. He thinks of a gorgon.
He walks carefully past Serena and crouches down by Mrs Franks. “Why did Kitty want us? Why did she come after us?” he says. “I think you do know, about Laurence, and me, and our sister. Why?”
“I don’t know nothing what she do. She do what she want.”
“Where is she?” Nick asks, softly, as if trying not to let Serena hear.
Mrs Franks says nothing.
Then Serena pushes Nick away and he springs up before he loses his balance. In utter horror he then watches as Serena drags Mrs Franks bodily to her feet - the thought of those, yellow old bones manhandled, splintering under their carapace… “Stop this now,” Serena hisses. “Or I will tear this dump apart until I find the answer.” Is she acting? Nick thinks she is not. Probably she never has ‘acted’: simply lets this creature from her inner self -
Mrs Franks says, “Where you think she go?”
“I’m asking you.”
Nick sees the glitter of cunning cross the weeping eyes. Before he can do anything, Mrs Franks’s splinterless bone-hard fist has punched Serena in the abdomen.
Serena retches, folds over and spills geneva and coffee on to the floor.
Nick tries to grab the old woman but she scuttles past him with another raw screech. She is gone into what he sees is a bathroom, just before the door slams and the bolt is shot.
Serena bends above the sink and spits. Then she runs water and drinks it from her cupped hand. Apparently she does not want to contaminate herself with any of the kitchen crockery, though it looks to him quite clean where it rests in the plastic drainer.
The kitchen is of medium size, its walls painted fierce blue (a hot Mediterranean sky?) with dark wood units and tiled surfaces. The stainless steel sink shone before water splashed on it. Most of the appliances look modern. There is no dishwasher, but there are a washing-machine, a tall fridge-freezer, a can-opener, even a coffee-maker to rival Serena’s own. On the windowsill some herbs rise from plastic pots, but they are not homegrown.
Serena seems recovered.
She looks at him and says contemptuously, “We can’t break in the door. I haven’t got the weight and you’re not strong enough. She’s probably blockaded it with something anyway.”
“Yes.”
Serena scans the kitchen. Then she pulls wide the oven door and hauls out a large baking tray.
“Nick - find some newspapers - or paper towels if there aren’t any.”
He does not question her, only opens cupboards. He finds inside them the debris most people seem to accumulate (he does not) including many frying pans and other utensils, old jars, plastic bowls. Then he locates a stack of magazines - Hello, Vogue, Grazia. “Will these do?”
“Fine. Tear out pages. Screw them up.” She has filled the baking tray with most of a bottle of olive oil. As the pages are prepared, she seizes and
crams them into the oil. She looks like a child again, very absorbed in this eccentric task.