Girl in Profile

by Zillah Bethell

  “Jonah’s here.”

  Ah, yes. Jonah’s grandmother is reversing her black Skoda into a spot on the corner by Ebenezer’s beds. We wait for them to catch up. Jonah might as well be stuck in a friggin’ whale, he takes so long to get out of the car. We pant up the hill together, Jonah telling Roan about a computer character you can plug in like some kind of air freshener, and Roan, who’s barely played a computer game in his life, nods wisely.

  “I’m thinking of giving it a go with the new fella,” Jonah’s grandmother confides. In two years of panting up a hill together I still don’t know her Christian name. “Moving in with him.”

  “Oh, well done you.”

  “Well done you,” Dove parrots on my shoulder, irritatingly.

  “You’re a little cough drop, aren’t you. Trouble is, I don’t know what to do with Woody.”

  Woody is Jonah’s grandmother’s late husband.

  “I’m thinking of putting him in my son’s garden till I see how things pan out.”

  “Why can’t he stay where he is?”

  “I’m letting out the dormer for the summer.”

  “Oh, well, he’ll be safe in your son’s garden won’t he?”

  “I just don’t want him getting knocked over and flying about all over the shop.”

  I try not to laugh at the thought of ashes from a purple urn disseminating, taking root, springing up somewhere like Dove’s dandelion seed hair.

  I affect a cool calm nonchalance at the school gates. I always have. None of the goo-goo Lady Ga-Ga stuff the working mums go in for, leaving lipsticked imprints on their children’s cheeks before leaping back into their massive jeeps because, let’s face it, they have to cross some mountainous terrain before reaching their offices ten minutes away. Most of the mums round here go back to work and the grandparents take over the childcare. The only other full-time mum I know is in hospital with a brain tumour. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about full-time isolating parenting? I never really had a job to go back to. Miss Carmarthen at twenty-two didn’t leave me many career options except getting laid by the best-looking sparkie in town, which happened to be Drew, then getting pregnant, then getting married. I pat Roan on the head like he’s the rescue dog, and he shines back at me. Those teachers’ hearts must fill with fucking joy when they see him coming. God polished him before he came out. Polished till he saw his own face in him.

  “You coming?” Fair play to Jonah’s grandmother, she does try to include me in the geriatric small talk of the playground, especially since Maggie got her brain tumour; but I draw the line with a full stop at an octogenarian zumba class.

  “We’re off to the library,” I explain. “Bounce and Rhyme.”

  Rhys’ grandad limps over on his zebra stick. How he keeps up with that little fucker Rhys, God only knows. He’s a bit of an old perv, Rhys’ grandad, but he’s nice enough. He’s got the oddest way of licking his lips when he speaks, which Dove invariably tries to imitate. The effect is beyond rude.

  “You won’t know what to do with yourself when the – lick lick – littlun goes to school.”

  Dove lick licks back at him, her eyes as innocent as china-blue plates.

  “I’m sure I’ll think of something.” Like having a shit in peace, having a cup of tea in peace, thinking for a microsecond in peace without a child chirruping in my ear like friggin’ Tweety Pie.

  We trudge down the hill at a snail-in-its-shell pace because everything in the world is a mystery to Dove: the worm on the pavement, a lemonade can, some crazy old lava lamp in a window, a lion door knocker. I put on my breathless excitable voice as if I’m seeing the objects for the first time too. Drew thinks it’s weird, but it comes natural to me. To be honest, everything with kids came natural to me. I had perfect pregnancies, perfect births. I didn’t even get a single stretch mark. My friends have stomachs that look like road maps left out in the rain and they want to know my secret. Well, here it is, The Six Million Dollar Man top tip – pumpkin seeds. Eat a handful every day and you won’t get stretch marks. As for the birth – keep active. Scream, shout, kick your partner in the goolies, push like you’re doing a crap. Job done.

  The library’s bustling with old folks, all after the latest large print erotic thriller by the look of it. God almighty. How soon we grow old yet we don’t really change. Still gagging for it, still looking at ourselves in the mirror. Our lives are like fish that slip through our own nets. We never seem to catch them. We sit by the river waiting for them to jump out at us. In the end all we get is an old boot, a clump of weeds. Oh to be wise and mature, having lived a life full of meaning, without regrets.

  “Shall we start with ‘Twinkle Twinkle’?” the librarian asks.

  Why not, we always do. The grandparents start to croak. I start to croak. A young mum – I try to check my excitement – starts to sing. Actually sing. I look at her with suspicion. This can’t be right. She can’t be a full-time mum after all. She must be on maternity leave. Knowing it will all end soon she’s loving every minute of it. Look at those hand gestures to “The Wheels on the Bus”. Those aren’t the hand gestures of a full-time mum, I can tell you. They’re far too vigorous. My heart goes down on me like a dirty old man would if I let him – fast, rough, slobbering. My suspicions are confirmed when we stop for a tea break and she asks for a cup of hot water, no biscuit. Gracie’s grandad and I exchange a look of pure bafflement. What kind of creation is this? He’s bereft even of gardening tips. We’ve been up since the bum crack of dawn. We accept anything we’re offered – antiseptic throat lozenge, chewing gum, cream cracker. Say the words ‘chicken casserole with dumplings’ and a full-time parent’s liable to wet themselves.

  “Is that some new trend?” Sydney’s great-grandmother asks, shocked and shaky.

  “Oh, no. I just want to feel like me again for when I go back to work. I’m a project manager, you see.”

  I see. My heart is a submarine. When did I ever feel like me? I dunk my digestive, Dove appropriates the librarian’s mug even though it’s got the librarian’s name on it. There was a small power struggle for a couple of weeks which Dove eventually won. She usually does. She could bring a grown giant on stilts to his knees, that one. Gracie’s grandad gives me some ideas on crocuses. Sydney nearly chokes on a deseeded, deskinned grape. A guy comes in with a trolley full of books. He stares at me just to add to my paper clip of stares. I’m a magnet for them to be honest. He’s not bad looking. I imagine him taking me against the library wall – hard, fast, intense. Then I think of Drew lying on the mat in the children’s room so that he can comfort them easily when they wake from a nightmare. Guilt is eternal, not love. Dove and I choose a book about a girl with a magic paintbrush. Everything she paints becomes real. The keys to escape from jail, the horse to ride away on… Lucky fucker. We step out into the sunshine and I rally car myself for the journey home, which will involve many mysteries, distractions, detours…

  “Listen to the birds, Mummy.” Dove tilts a pixie ear to catch the birdsong.

  How loud it is. Surprisingly loud. And persistent. Like the birds have had too much to drink and are getting shouty with each other. The young guy comes out of the library with an empty trolley and winks at me. So sure of himself. I flick my pixie crop – to match Dove’s pixie ears – gone long and smile.

  “What do you think they’re singing about?” I ask her.

  “Anything.” Like I’m an idiot. “They’re just happy.”

  How clever she is.

  Elizabeth

  Pathos and Bathos

  Peter Pan sits on the wicker chair beside the window and reads to me. His profile against the ultramarine blue of the sea is pale and sharp as a cliff, and his hands hover like gulls about to swoop on a chip over the pages of Crickets of Great Britain and Ireland. He’ll read anything he can lay his hands on, anything those gulls can snaffle from the mobile library each week. It’s a substitute for eating. He gobbles syntax, devours the parts of speech, hoards met
aphors under his pillow for when he gets the midnight munchies.

  “The scaly cricket is wingless and therefore silent. They use their wings to sing, you see. Without wings there is no song.”

  I think of the wings I stitched laboriously for my daughter’s ballet classes, my son’s plays. The roots I dug, the wings I stitched so they might fly, so they might sing. Instead of me. Resentment swells up in me like a stale old fart. What did I do with my amazing beauty, my verve, my vitality? I gave them away to one husband, two children and a dog. And for what? The dog’s long gone to a land of sniffs and smells, husband’s raced off down the autobahn, and the children have flown so high and sung so loud they don’t deign to see me anymore, they don’t deign to hear me.

  “We are merely groundhoppers. Eating liverwort.”

  I lobotomised my own life for them. Willingly. Eagerly even. That is the extraordinary thing. I wanted to do it. I stayed at home, kept my eyes on kinder and kirche, didn’t take my chances, passed the open windows, ignored the innuendoes from the men who might have.

  “When I was young…”

  “You were never young, Peter. You were born immediately old like one of those peculiar lizards.”

  “Well, I was actually, as a matter of a fact. Once upon a time I was young, and when I was young I set more store by the apprehension of things than the things themselves. D’you know what I mean?”

  I think I do. Like the alternative life I lived in my head complete with soundtrack, frantic sex, high-speed car chases, mysterious assignations, passionate illuminations… And now it is all constipation and colostomy bags and Satie coming from the Blue Room. Sad, faltering, slow. Like the tick-tock of Wendy’s heart that beats like a metronome. When the music stops so will she. We don’t stand a fucking chance, do we.

  “Now I want to immerse myself in the things themselves. Feel the thinginess of things, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I think it is a premonition of death when we dissolve into all things, into each particular thing.”

  “Hamburgers for lunch,” Nurse Tinkerbell announces from the exit door.

  Is that bathos or pathos? I’m not really sure, but the gulls wheel away, screeching, over the waves of Peter’s hair, and the little book on crickets slides to the floor.

  “Oh, and Elizabeth, you have a visitor.”

  My heart leapfrogs over all the other little children’s hearts. It must be Minnie.

  “Doctor Kharana wants a word.”

  A word. In the beginning was the word. What word will I end with? I need to learn the anagrams of life. Heart is an anagram of earth my late husband used to say. Never a linguist, poor man. Stumpy little tongue. Never a cunnilinguist either for that matter. The secret is to spell out the alphabet with your tongue. Most women have a favourite letter. Mine was m I seem to remember. The most curvaceous letter in the alphabet. Mmmm.

  Gwen

  Bousculé par le Monde

  Dear Gwen Marie,

  Your letters are very touching, ma cherie. If you are so sad in your room you must change the apartment. I will gladly send money for this. I have always thought your atelier to be a little damp – damp enough for champignons in my opinion and not good for someone of your constitution. You must regain equilibrium of mind and body. Immodesty is not charming in a woman. Leave Paris for a while. Visit the countryside, look at the flowers and the starlings. Take a deep breath of nature and she will pay you later in blossom. I am bousculé par le monde as always. I must curtail everything in order to work. The promenade of one evening and I am debauched. You, as an artist, can understand that. Fundamentally I am a private man, a silent man, like a great moon that looks over an unknown empty sea where few ships pass. But I will visit you again, one day soon.

  Your affectionate friend, A.R.

  The twice weekly trip to market, nightly bed, daily meal, midday cup of tea when the houses opposite cast great shadows like dirty old tramps peering in at me. Ida sends a concoction of honey and coriander for my throat – it is bad again – and Dorelia sends a silver brooch. They are in the south of France, bathing their children in sea water to cure them of freckles. Ida is square as a box and mad as a lemon squeezer, so she says. The baby is due soon, just to add to the collection. They pop out whole and splendid as dolphins, her boys, leaving her shrivelled as seaweed. My brother is a satyr. Does he sleep with Ida one week, Dorelia the next? Do they take alternate shifts in bed, creeping into the soft contours of the one that has left? Do all men need more than one woman to be happy?

  One day soon. My heart tries to leap like a rabbit in the dilapidated gardens of the Hotel Biron, but I grab it by the neck with my tiny wee hands. Aha, little rabbit, you can strain, kick your legs, bulge the whites of your eyes at me, but I’ve got a good hold on you. Little darting heart that you are. He is bousculé par le monde as always. He is every e-acute you care to imagine: enrhumé, bousculé, agité, âgé. E-acute is a chronic condition with him. He is unrepentant, admits nothing. Am I to love flowers and cats for the rest of my life like a sad old spinster? Is that all I’m good for? I would not take a sou from him. I would rather wear my crimson faille through the winter, survive on one lump of coal a day, sit in a fairy ring of champignons with Edgar by my side. I shall work for L’Homme Femme, sit for her every day, maybe find a model of my own and put the energy of loving into drawing. I will paint her in this room, emaciated, etiolated by spiritual anguish and love, and I will present it to him with the words: This is what you did to me, Monsieur Rodin, this is what you did to me.

  Elizabeth

  Cuckoo’s Nest

  Doctor Kharana looks at me like butter wouldn’t sizzle, but I know better, the randy bastard. Saw him pinching Nurse Tinkerbell’s bottom in the corridor only this morning. They think I don’t notice, they think I’m just a dot-to-dot old bint reading my book about Italy and the vineyard and the skeleton of the whale they’ve just found beneath the vines and poor old Chiara, whose husband is a philanderer. She’s a common little darter, Nurse Tinkerbell; Peter Pan’s read up on her in his dragonfly book. He knows the language of dragonflies. And crickets. And toadstools. My son is a globe skimmer apparently, and I’m a banded demoiselle – that’s right, a banded demoiselle. I’ve lived most of my life underwater as a nympho from what I can gather.

  “Are you happy here, Elizabeth, at High View House?”

  Hell yes, wouldn’t you be? Three meals a day, shit when I need to, stephanotis who’s swallowed a clock, and an emaciated stink for company. Pen pal on death row for murdering his girlfriend, husband who fucked off down the autobahn just sitting in his chair, children who behave like Icarus without the scorch marks and the downward descent, and a granddaughter in some old Etonian mess and a view of Caldey Island and the sea. Yippee. Lucky me. Lucky old effervescent-vitamin-C-to-perk-you-up-a-bit me.

  “Do you get confused sometimes between what is real and what is not?”

  Heavens, yes, of course I do. I don’t even know where I lived my life. Was it out there in the streets and the suburbs, in the rain, in little rooms? Or was it here in the hippocampus of my head complete with safari tent and gear? Does it really matter anymore? My life still goes on like a television set, I take my KitKat tea breaks in the synapses of my brain.

  “It’s quite normal at your age to get confused, to have one or two aches and pains,” he smiles, though his eyes are cold as Dairylea straight from the fridge, and even though it’s spreadable it still rucks up the bread. “Now that you’re in your twilight years.”

  Twilight, yes, when you can barely see or be seen. When you flit home from one lit window to the next until you reach your very own. When we’re not quite light yet not quite dark, not quite lit yet not quite extinguished. Crepuscular, in fact, like Nurse Tinkerbell’s face at the exit door as Doctor Kharana shakes his head and announces for the benefit of my twilight ears, “She hasn’t said a word.”

  I shout suddenly, red and blustering as a bare-cheeked gale, “I’m fine, Doctor Kharana, absolutely fine
. Why don’t you check on Peter and his calorific intake instead. Have you seen him recently? He’s shrivelled as a pea.”

  Nobody says a word. The birds outside are louder than us. They have a bit of song left in them. I slump, and guilt engulfs me with my pillow. Oh, to be smothered by Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to follow him out, out through the broken window, the open window, the hippo decamped for good.

  Gwen

  Rape

  I paint Fenella in my room. She’s vulnerable in the waning light like a fawn that lingers too long by the edge of the lake, like Leda half dreading, half anticipating her rape. I start with slow smudges of curl, delicate feathery strokes from mid-air, building up skin, pigment, flesh on canvas. Her shoulders are bare, sloping, angular. My paintbrush undresses her further, unties the black sash from about her waist, lets the pretty white Romany dress slip to her knees. I have to catch my breath as it runs away from my body. I curve a breast into place, reveal another, lick an areola star into being. She is pale and thin as a fairy grown by the light of fireflies. She was meant for the shadows. I lengthen her limbs, deepen her, take her to extremes. Her left hand curls in mild protest. I tauten a sinew in her neck like tuning a violin string. She flinches. I show the whites of her heavy, lidded eyes, force her to look at me directly as I look at her. Not a particle of her body escapes my gaze, my touch.

  Her mouth opens in defiance. When will it be over? Soon, my dear, soon, I lie. I take my time over the torment in her face, the bewilderment, discomfort. My breath is shallow, hoarse as a dog on a chain. The world diminishes, contracts, becomes grey and meaningless. Only her body shines, enticing me, provoking me. I gouge a belly button, hollow a collarbone, shadow the inner side of her thigh. I scratch her irises out through pity then scratch them in before slitting her downy plum in half, until vermilion juices trickle down my wrist, my chin. She sobs. I’ve gone too far. I paint out quickly, cover the mess with the pretty white Romany dress, give her a pendant as a token of my regard. Her long neck droops under the weight of it. She’s wilting out of the canvas, acquiescent at last. The light dies. She is mine. (She lingered too long by the side of the lake.) I take over where the light left off. I paint my desire into her, my frustration into her, the whole of my sick and debauched little soul into her. This is what I did to her, God help me, this is what I did to her. And this is what you did to me.