The Sisters Mao

by Gavin McCrea

  An instant then, and she felt a pair of hands trying to pull the knickers down. Blindly — her eyes still closed — she slapped at the hands to stop them, for she had her money, all of the takings, in a pouch tied around her waist and tucked into her underwear, and she did not want it stolen. Instead she prised her knickers to one side as an invitation to whomever it was to proceed that way. Another instant, and she felt a tongue on the rim of her vagina. Then felt it enter, slowly, slowly, then faster, thrusting. And, simultaneously, a finger on her clitoris, rubbing and pinching.

  To begin with, there was nothing. But after a time, by applying herself to the sensations, she brought on something, which slowly built into something more. She arched her back, the crown of her head rocking on the floor, and opened her eyes. The world around her was phasing into ever intenser beauty, ever deeper significance. Which was all right until it got too much to bear. No longer a garden, attractive and thrilling, now it was a massive wave rolling over, and crashing, and crashing, and she could hardly breathe.

  Then nothing. The unremarkable sight of feet and legs. A patch of old wallpaper.

  She turned to look down the length of her own body. Pushed away the woman who was crouched there. Easy. But then the action of rolling onto her side and getting her limbs underneath her consumed most of her energy, leaving her in a state of physical fatigue. She felt overtaken by heaviness and fell back onto the carpet face down. Thoughts came which she was incapable of organising. Her body grew progressively more dense, more tightly packed, until she found herself at last reduced to stone. She could not move.

  This is too much.

  Up, she said to herself. For she had to rise, to surface.

  Up. Up. Up.

  Excruciating moments passed in which she wanted to scream but could not. Motionless, she had an attack of frustration, a tantrum. She wanted to beat her head against the floor and flail her arms about—

  All of a sudden — minutes, hours later — she felt as if she had stood up.

  —I’ve got up, she said, genuinely surprised.

  She made it to the bathroom. Once there, she immediately fell back down, and every time she thought she could stand up, would collapse again, and crash into the washbasin. The safest place, she decided, was on the floor.

  For what seemed like a vast amount of time she gazed without knowing, or even without wishing to know.

  Vomiting was like all of the tension passing out of her body.

  Back in the sitting room, she danced alone. Everyone else was lying about, extinguished by the sugar cubes. The man who had previously been in charge of choosing the music had receded into a corner to rub his back up and down against the wall, and offer an exhaustive commentary on the sensations this yielded, with the result that the same side of a Cream album was being played over and over. When it reached its end, Iris went to the hifi, lifted the stylus and dropped it back to a point near the start.

  At some point came the phenomenon of dawn. Sitting on the couch, bodies scattered around her like so many cushions, she watched the morning light illuminate the thin blue curtain. Feeling once more the aloofness, the separateness, the desire to stay quiet, she stared fixedly at the shadows falling on the folds: stripes of deep blue alternating with stripes of an incandescence like blue fire. In a blink, the colours rose to a higher power and then fell back down. Between one colour and the next, Iris could make out innumerable fine shades of difference.

  If one always saw like this, she thought, one would never want to do anything else but see. There would be no reason to do anything else. The causes for which, at ordinary times, one was prepared to act and suffer, would become uninteresting. Apartheid? Civil rights? The war? Theatre? Art? She would not be bothered about any of that, for the good reason that what she saw directly before her would be enough.

  Time was lengthened out. The night had had twenty-four hours, but now here came the day. Curtains drawn back. And light, hateful light, let in.

  People were moaning and shielding their eyes. Those with jobs had left or had called in their excuses and gone for an afternoon breakfast, the owner of the flat among them. What remained were the scum. The dross. Those who lived without money or ambition, and who saw with different eyes. The brightness had begun to be again: would they be able to see in it?

  She came to understand that she was lying across a beanbag, her head on a man’s lap. The man was caressing her forehead, as a nurse might a patient, or a mother her sleeping child. Blinking up at him, she waited to hear what she would say.

  —Am I—? is what eventually came. Am I—?

  —You’re a fine thing, the man said.

  —No, I mean—

  She shook her epileptic bracelet in front of his eyes:

  —Did you see? Was I—?

  —I know what you mean. You told me. I been over here watching. You’re all good.

  She had no memory of telling this man about her epilepsy or anything else. As far as she was concerned, she had never set eyes on him before. She put her hand under her kaftan. Felt for her purse. Then rubbed her knickers. Sniffed her fingers. There was no smell of piss, which probably meant she had not had a seizure. She usually pissed herself if the seizure was big enough, and the ones that came after a few nights of partying were always big. She had no scientific evidence or anything, but she had a theory that LSD kept the fits at bay, put them off until she had come down and gone to bed to recover. The problem then was, they struck with a vengeance.

  She sat up:

  —The time?

  —Plenty of it, sweets.

  The man was — the fact dawned — a Negro. But not a hip Negro. He did not have a West Indian accent, and if he belonged to the Rastafarians he was not showing it. No dreadlocks. No beard. No beads. Just a loose and uneven afro, isolated bits of stubble, a grubby white t-shirt, and a crumpled pair of trousers with a high waist and a pleat, like those worn by middle-aged men or by boys who thought they were older than themselves.

  Oh God. One of those.

  Once again in control of her voluntary system, she got up with only a minimum of hesitation.

  —Where you off to? the Negro said.

  —Blowing, she said.

  —For?

  —For the good of my health.

  She went into the bedroom. Paused briefly to survey the mess, then waded through it to the wardrobe, in which she found a pair of jeans. She pulled them on. Too big. But they stayed up when she tucked her kaftan into them and used her headscarf as a belt. Thus protected against the day, she left.

  The Negro’s voice came after her down the stairs:

  —Iris, hold it—

  —Sorry, mate, she called back. Gotta split, yeah?

  Out on the street, she remembered that she was in Notting Hill. Significance had obviously returned to its everyday level, for Notting Hill was once again the pits.

  —I was only asking where you’re off to.

  She jumped. The Negro was beside her.

  —Jesus. Home, man. Where d’you think?

  —Home?

  —Da-ding. Double your money.

  She started to walk. A wind blew in her face. Cold for May. The last of the market stalls were packing up. Bits of fruit and veg littered the ground. Mentally she mapped out the route to King’s Cross. She always felt like a god after going through a trip, for she had seen what ordinary mortals could not, so although it was a fair distance, she decided to go on foot. She was hungry and foolishly had left the flat without drinking anything, but then again she was divine — her spirit, she had once been told, had the power of nine cows and two tigers — so, if she met with no aggro, she would make it.

  —You got anything to eat at home? the Negro said.

  —You read my mind, she said.

  —Nice one.

  He said this in the tone of someone who presumed he was coming w
ith her. And in point of fact he was coming with her. She stopped. He stopped.

  —Wait a sec, she said. Did w—?

  —Chill, miss thing. Nothing happened.

  Feeling a cold panic rise up her legs, she stared into the black spaces of her memory.

  —On your honour?

  The Negro lay his palm over his heart:

  —Don’t be fretting. I made sure you was protected.

  She believed him because she so gravely had to. The sensation, then, was not so much relief as a temporary freezing of the inevitable self-disgust.

  —Yeah? she said. Well, thanks for that.

  The Negro laughed:

  —In return, you said we’d go for grub. Your treat.

  —Chancer.

  —Only telling you what you said.

  —Wasn’t there anything to eat up there? Did you check the cupboards?

  —Cobwebs.

  —Where you living? D’you have a room?

  —If you can call it that. Down Ladbroke Grove.

  —That’s just around the corner. Don’t you have a can of something you can open?

  —All out till my dole on Thursday.

  —I’m sorry about that, mate. I am. I’d like to help you out, but I live in King’s Cross. You won’t want to go all that way just for a bit of toast.

  —King’s Cross?

  He thought for a second.

  —Don’t have any better offers.

  —Aw, mate, don’t be—

  —What?

  —The coloured caffs, what about them? That one on Westbourne Park Road, the Rio?

  He laughed:

  —You know the Rio?

  —Yeah, I know the Rio. I’ve been out with some spades. No one there who’d shout you some foo-foo?

  He laughed again, shaking his head:

  —No one shouting me nothing at the Rio.

  —Oh, well, that’s got to change, my friend. That’s your community there. Not cool not to be plugged in.

  She took off again.

  He caught up right away.

  Flick and fuck: a sticker.

  They walked in silence for a while. With her head turned slightly towards the road, she tried to remain oblivious to him, but a slap-slapping sound eventually drew her attention to his feet. He was wearing flip-flops. His toes were filthy. His nails long and black.

  —Where’re you from? she said.

  —Been in London for years, too long probably.

  —And before that?

  —Grew up in Portsmouth.

  —No, I mean originally.

  —Oh, originally? Portsmouth.

  She nodded down at his feet:

  —Is this what they’re wearing these days in Portsmouth?

  He curled his toes upwards so that he walked like a penguin for a few steps.

  —Friend of mine gave me these.

  —Aren’t you cold?

  —What’s it to you?

  She did not quite know what it was to her — but it was something. She herself did not like to change her clothes. She rarely washed and did not brush her teeth. After a childhood spent under supervision because of her epilepsy, scrubbed regularly with carbon soap to remove the stink of piss, instilled with impeccable manners in preparation for those times when she would have to apologise to the world for disturbing it, she was now going on the offensive, displaying a fabulous neglect of personal hygiene. Let the world smell me. Let them be disturbed. Perhaps she was experiencing this Negro’s displays of grossness, so similar to her own, as a sort of test. Was he the genuine article? Most people on the scene were just fashionable fakes with their own self-interest at heart. Only a few, a very few had abandoned it all to live the real underground life. Which camp did this Negro belong to? She would give herself till Paddington to find out.

  As they walked, passers-by greeted them with a variety of disapproving looks. Crossing a road, a little girl pointed at the Negro and said to her mother:

  —Look, Mummy, a blackie.

  A minute later, a well-dressed man reeled off a string of swear words in a mumbling undertone. Another man, no more than ten paces on, said:

  —Ain’t natural.

  And then louder from behind:

  —Stay away from our women!

  Iris was accustomed to gaining a certain kind of attention in public, on account of her clothes and her hennaed hair that went down to her waist, but there was a quality to these reproaches that was new, directed not at the way one chose to live but at the way one was born, which struck her as especially stupid. Wanting to show defiance, she dropped her hand and allowed it to brush against the Negro’s, so that if he wished he would be able to take it, but he did not.

  —You don’t remember my name, do you? he said instead.

  He showed no signs of having heard the insults, but being here, beside her, he must have, and they must have cut.

  —It’s Keith.

  —I knew that.

  —No, you never asked.

  They walked in silence for another minute. Then she said:

  —I’m not ignorant, you know.

  —Oh no?

  —No. In school they don’t tell you anything about it, but my parents were communists, serious ones, so they taught me.

  —Communists?

  —S’right. Full-on Russia lovers. Right up to the end. The last to leave the Party, out of all of their friends. And even then they only left because they were forced to, because it got to the point where they couldn’t ignore the evidence any more.

  —The evidence?

  —The gulags, mate.

  Keith looked at her vacantly.

  She shook her head and sighed. It hurt her, somewhere, that the scene cats did not have a clue about what was happening in the world.

  —Don’t worry about it. All I’m saying is, my folks were commies. Into oppression with a big O. Which meant they spent a lot of time educating us about, you know, you. And I’m not just talking about To Kill a fucking Mockingbird. I’m talking about history lessons and lectures and photographic exhibitions, the whole jingbang.

  —That right? Your folks sound cool.

  —Communism isn’t cool mate. It fucks you up. Kills the spirit. Allows no space for people like you and me.

  —Like me?

  —I’m not talking about Negros now, I’m talking about people who want to cop out and to do their own thing. Individuals. Freaks.

  —Right.

  —That said, what my parents have become since isn’t any better. My mother’s gone full circle and openly votes Tory. My father calls himself a Christian. Did you hear what I said? A Christian. They’re more fucked up now than they ever were, if that makes you feel better.

  —Feel better about what?

  Nonplussed, she examined Keith’s face. The truth was that for her, as for her parents, Negroes were more a concept than a reality. A highly approved concept but a concept nonetheless. The difference with this Negro was, he was actually here and not making any sign of disappearing.

  —I’m in no way a racialist but you spades can be—

  —What?

  She was going to say prickly but she went for:

  —Pushy. You don’t take no, do you?

  —That’s funny, he said. Pushy is what we think you are. Politely getting your way all the time.

  —Nah, we’re just afraid. If you were white, I’d have told you to fuck off ages ago.

  —Are you going to tell me to fuck off now? Cause I will if you want.

  She filled her cheeks with air and looked up and down the road. In friendships she had the truth or nothing, and Keith was showing himself to be equal to that, at least. But he was asking too much to expect her not to feel that he was asking too much.

  —
All right, she said, exhaling loudly. Fuck it.

  —Fuck what?

  —Come on. Back to mine. I’m not saying no because inside I’m feeling a yes — well, actually a maybe verging on a yes. But any funny business, any, you know, tomfuckery, and I’ll scream and say you did this.

  She pulled up her sleeve and showed him old bruises from past seizures.

  —Jesus, he said.

  —Ahuhn, she said, yanking her sleeve back down. And you should know something else. Where I live, it’s a group. There’s a few of us.

  —You squatting?

  —Yeah, man.

  It took a few seconds for this lie to make itself felt in her system.

  —Scratch that, she said then. I don’t know why I—. We’re not really squatting. The building belongs to my mother. We’re an urban commune, sort of. An art and performance collective.

  —Porno and that, he laughed. Swingers. I get it.

  —You wish. There won’t be any of that caper. We’re performers all right. But we do street theatre. Happenings. That sort of shit.

  —Right on.

  —And, look, I apologise in advance for my sister, Eva. She’s a politico and, I mean, the antithesis of laid back.

  —No stress. I’ve handled my share of politicos. What’s her trip?

  —She’s a commie.

  —Like your parents?

  —Don’t say that to her, she’ll take your head off you. Her whole deal is, she’s trying to show them where they went wrong. The problem isn’t communism itself, it’s communism as practised in Russia. That’s what she says. Russia fucked it up, and now it’s too late to fix it there. So if the workers’ paradise is going to materialise, it has to be somewhere else. She’s putting her money on China.

  —China the place?

  —Of course the fucking place. You know Mao?

  —Mo? Don’t think I do. Where’s he jive?

  Iris laughed:

  —Whatever, man. All you need to know is, my sister’s a Maoist, which means she’s a fucking pain. The commune isn’t supposed to have a leader, everything is meant to be like this joint effort, but let’s face the facts, she’s the leader. She’ll probably make you chip in and do something for your dinner. Some fixing up or something. That’s the way it works.