She gives a little shiver and rears up with a splash, leaning forward to turn on the hot tap. I take advantage of this pause to shift my position, lifting a bit of skin that was stuck to the back of the bath. I slide down a little lower in the water. The tap runs cold under Cara’s fingers at first – she hisses disapprovingly – then it starts to steam and she lies back, her head on my expanse of belly, water covering her ears. Tentacles of hair stream out behind her.
When it is becoming uncomfortably hot round my calves I give a heave to swirl the hot water upwards. Cara opens her eyes and reaches down with one long foot to twist the tap off. I watch her prehensile toes with admiration, remembering all the things she can do with them. Cara settles back between my breasts. She shakes her head to loose the water from her ears. As she turns her face, her mouth dips to my right nipple, gives it a brief kiss, squeaky with water. I go back to my book.
Later I put it down, take up the white soap and start to lather it, covering in foam Cara’s narrow shoulders and secretive armpits. I can see her eyelashes flutter open for a moment, then she shuts them and sinks back into her dream. I circle her small breasts with the tips of my fingers, first a large circle round the outside, then spiralling to smaller ones, honing in on the nipple. No bumps this month; I say a silent thanks. We are told to do this ourselves, but as Cara says, I know her breasts better than she does, and have more motivation for feeling them.
I reach behind me for the glass jug, scoop up warm water and rinse her with it. The suds flee to cling to where the water edges our bodies. I raise the jug and dowse her from a height, the water falling harder, its stream twisting like that waterfall in Wicklow we climbed once. I focus its fall on her left nipple, which hardens under the pressure, until Cara’s mouth twists up at one corner and she reaches above her head to slap at my nose till I stop.
Later I haul my dripping bulk up and step round her to sit by the taps and wash my hair. Cara steals some shampoo to make a moustache for herself. I lie back between her endless legs; she hooks her heel round to anchor in my fuzz.
Later still, when our lower bodies are prune-like and our upper bodies cold and shiny, Cara stands up. The water runs off her like crystal covering a statue. Diamonds hang on the ringlets between her legs; I reach up with my mouth to catch a drop.
In the early days, perhaps in our first few hundred baths, we used to talk. Nowadays there’s no need.
WEDNESDAY
I was Superwoman the morning of the funeral. In the shower, sheets of water armoured my body.
Still no sign of Grace, but his food dish was empty. I tucked a black silk button-down shirt into black linen trousers; no one was going to guilt-trip me into wearing a skirt today. I strode round the kitchen stacking place-mats and sweeping crumbs into my hand, asking Mr. Wall his opinions on the general election and the chance of rain. He was impeccable in his charcoal suit and tie. The sides of his hair had more streaks of silver than I had ever noticed; I realized that I had no idea how old he was. Was he going to fade to grey before my eyes? I made strong coffee all round, to keep us awake through the service. I was a great black walrus, commanding her herd with each toss of the tusks.
At the last minute I remembered that my maggoty dirty car, bearing the nearest blood relatives, would be expected to lead the cavalcade. I rushed out and turned the garden hose on her. The day was warm and grey, sun hovering behind a veil of cloud. The jet of the hose lashed dust from Minnie’s headlights and blasted her wheels till they gleamed like open mouths. Spray lit on my shirt, moulding it to the curves of elastic. While I was at it I hosed down the black paint of the garage door, and directed the wand of water along the yard which was still streaked with mud from Monday’s flooding. When I was small, and we lived in my gran’s house with no garden but a flower barrel behind the bins, Mammy used to cure our tempers on hot days by taking out the hose and making a fountain for us to run through in our knickers. As we yelped under the spray, the sun split into a flock of rainbows, and the bin lids were transformed into the shining shields of Saladin’s army.
Kate was on the step. I turned off the hose; it dribbled beside my feet. ‘So are you still a regular mass-goer?’ I asked, for something to say.
‘No, only weddings and funerals. Though they’re getting to be regular enough.’ She was crisp in a business suit of pale grey and a cream shirt.
I was a mess. The shirt clung to the slopes of my breasts; I pulled it out of the waistband, flapped it in the humid air, and let it hang. My sensible lace-up shoes, I realized, were both stereotypically dykey and spattered with water. Aunts and family friends would ask who that rather large girl was. No, worse, they would read the signals of clothes and grief, draw their disdainful conclusions, and I would have outed Cara posthumously to her entire clan. At this rate I might as well rear up at her graveside singing ‘Lavender Jane Loves Women’.
Graveside; I tried out the word again, said it several times in my head until I was sure it wouldn’t break me. Water streamed from Minnie’s side as I opened the passenger door for Kate. Then I remembered my handbag – surely that would win me points for respectability? – and went back inside.
I leaned round Mr. Wall to get it. He was standing beside the teapot with an expression of unease. Surely he wasn’t going to crumble right here, before we even got to the church where there was room for such demonstrations? His suit was too big for him; the padded shoulders projected an inch beyond his own, giving a Harlequin tinge to the outfit. He turned with an automated smile. ‘We right, so?’
‘Just have to check I have my keys.’ They were in my pocket, but sometimes I faked an inefficiency to make other people feel better.
The driver’s seat was too far back; Kate must have adjusted it last night. Beside me, her knees were bony against the sheen of overpriced tights. Mr. Wall tucked himself into the back seat. I reached to turn on the radio, then thought better of it. I began backing out, but found a van blocking the way. A man in white overalls leaned in my window: ‘Sign for bags from the hospital?’ he asked.
I scribbled a curt ‘P. O’Grady’ on his clipboard, sweated my way out of the car seat, and picked the black leather suitcase, cracked tote and several plastic bags off the gravel. My brain stayed switched off. I dragged Cara’s luggage along the flagstones half-buried in the lawn, unlocked the front door, carried it upstairs to the back bedroom and shoved it all out of sight under her bed.
I squared my shoulders against the car seat. Just before the church, Mr. Wall cleared his throat and asked, ‘Are your family coming, Pen?’
‘They have to work,’ I said, too quickly.
As I parked near the entrance, the bell began calling the faithful. Kate’s head jerked up at the campanile. ‘I don’t remember them playing little tunes,’ she said.
‘Oh, we went electronic back in the late eighties. It’s all done with time switches.’
‘Nasty.’
We exchanged a grimace in the rear-view mirror. Then I thought Mr. Wall might object to our flippancy. I watched him covertly as we walked up the car park; he seemed to be thinking about something else.
Quite a crowd, edging in the side door of the parish church of St Cecilia. Few of them could have known Cara; it must have been respect for Mr. Wall that brought them, as well as pity for his broken home. A strange kind of neighbourliness, in this suburb of detached hedged-off residences; they wouldn’t pass the time of day with you, but once you died they’d don heavy jackets in a heatwave to nod to your coffin.
Speaking of which, there it was up near the altar on the brass trolley. Weighted down with circles of roses and crosses of gladioli, despite the notice in the paper. Perhaps people forgot; perhaps trekking off to buy wreaths for that poor Wall girl relieved their feelings more than obeying her wishes would. Cara never could bear the idea of cut flowers; if you thought something was beautiful, she asked me once, why would you want to pay for its execution? Discussing our hypothetical deaths, that evening when we sat up giggling over a
baking tray of ginger snaps, I seemed to remember suggesting pot-plants instead of wreaths, so that mourners could take them home afterwards and tend them in one’s memory. Cara had liked that idea, but fretted over just how many pot-plants you could fit on the top of a coffin before one might slip off, scattering soil and brown plastic all over the altar carpet.
As we neared the coffin – Kate walking at, but not on, her father’s elbow, myself a few feet behind – I thanked the Lord that the top had not been left off. Here was nothing to wrench at the eyes. Rich red-brown wood and, beyond the massed flowers, a tiny plaque just as I had ordered, with the vital statistics: Cara Wall, 1963–1992. Such a tiny span of years, from mini-skirts through to the revival of flared trousers, from Kennedy to Clinton.
I looked away, scanning the crowd for a familiar face. Like a theatre audience at a doom-laden preview, the mourners were sitting as far from each other as possible. Elderly neighbours were sprinkled in the back aisles, and the black jackets near the front had to be relations because some of them were nodding soberly to Mr. Wall as he led us into the third pew. When these people looked at me they could have no idea that I was anything to their missing relative; that I had let her dip her biscuits in my tea, on and off, for thirteen years; that sometimes, in the middle of a conversation on inflation or groceries, she would look down at my hand in sudden wonder and would tell me, her voice hushed as if in church, ‘Oh, I want your hand inside me.’
My mind was hurdling memories, jumping high so as not to trip. My shirt was sticking to the straps on my back. Strange how it was more respectable to show the distinct outline of a bra than the smooth surface of a back. Presumably true feminists all had small breasts and so could afford to burn them. The bras, I meant, not the breasts. That theory about ‘Amazon’ meaning one-breasted, the burning off of one breast in case it would impede archery, being an etymological red herring meant to convince us that along with obedience we would also have to cast off the sweet unnecessary flesh. Last summer when Cara went to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival – I was invited to go along, but didn’t think it my kind of thing – she came back singing the praises of breasts. The sheer difference of them: the nipples that simply shaded in, the ones like raspberries perched on top, the fiercely pointy ones, on all the long and flat and globelike bosoms. Watching thousands of women walk round naked in the woods, what had struck her was not the naturalness of breasts in the human body shape, but the opposite; how, after the logical lines of hips and ribcages and limbs, breasts seemed completely gratuitous.
Cara’s breasts – I saw them for a moment, pale birds startled from sleep – were nesting now behind wood and brass and dying flowers. I bent my neck to the side for a look, quickly, so that no one would see me staring at the coffin and pity me. Most of the flowers were white. Traditional, I supposed, for a young woman, who is still presumed to be somehow innocent and virginal, no matter how she spent her cluster of decades.
I knotted my hands and leaned them on the back of the pew in front. No one was sitting in the first row, though whether from a reluctance to claim the status of primary mourners or the need for a kneeler I was not sure. The organ was persuading the choir into a particularly bleating rendition of ‘Jesus Remember Me’. As soon as the Monsignor began to call us to attention, I allowed my forehead to sink down on to my hands, the thumb knuckles denting my skin. I always liked to pray in this position; it was both uncomfortable and unbecoming, forcing humility.
It was not private enough in this church to have a really good conversation with the Lord – or rather, one of my satisfying monologues – but I did thank him for certain things, the lack of certain expected agonies, and I did ask for some of the strengths I thought I would need to get me to the end of the week. This unreal week, not part of the weave of my life, this set of days in which I was running round thinking and feeling and remembering with all the vivacity of a headless chicken, the bloom of a cut flower. What I dreaded and demanded help with was not so much this week – which had a certain adrenalin, an Amn’t I Doing Well air to it – as the following weeks, months, years, the causeway of low times. I decided not to think about those times. I leaned my head on my hands until the thumb knuckles were digging two neat pits of pain.
A sniff to my right; I glanced at Mr. Wall but he was only wiping his nose with his voluminous handkerchief. I sat back, letting the bar of coat-shined mahogany take the weight of my hot flesh. The bench plaque was to my left, its brass corner under Kate’s elbow. Pray for the parents, relatives and friends of, it began. It was as if we were sitting on the bones of the dead, and this whole building a memorial. If I were to put up a seat to Cara it would not be a pew. (What would the plaque say – best wishes to my beloved housemate, friend, schoolmate, pal? Which words would I be allowed?) Nor would it be one of those rustic benches by a canal on which old folk rest their bones in the spring evenings. I decided it would be a plank across two forks of a tree, so high that only leggy dryads like Cara could climb it. The earthbound, like myself, could stand at the bottom, craning through broken sunlight, ready to catch any fruit thrown down.
A particularly fast group gabble of the liturgy brought me back to my body. I decided that I did not want to be here. Of course mourning rituals were psychologically useful, I remembered that from the first year of teacher training. But I could not see the relevance of mass to Cara, who, in the middle of a sermon on sexual morality back in the early eighties, had got up from her seat – I thought at first that she was just adjusting her tight jeans – and strode down the aisle, her runners squeaking in outrage. It had occurred to me to join her. We had roughly the same opinions. But by the time the thought reached my feet, Cara had burst through the doors into merciful silence, and I could not bear to start up the noise again. Besides, I would not have left Mr. Wall alone there. I seemed to remember that we had bent our heads over the pew, avoiding the stares, and said nothing about it to each other, then or ever. So here was Cara, back in this very church a decade later, because it had not occurred to me or Mr. Wall that there was any other option. And this, after all, was the place where the whole business had begun, water from the granite font streaming over her shock of red hair and screaming new face in the summer of ’63.
The Monsignor was sermonizing now. Little he knew about Cara Wall. He was making her sound like the most respectable of young women, and even if he didn’t know the important fact of her being what in lighter moments she called a pussyeater, someone should have told him about her walking out of mass all those years ago.
I think she missed the church; she was always keeping an eye out for a replacement. I remembered her running home after a New Age Fair to say she was thinking of becoming a Bahá’í. (When I challenged her to spell it, she got the accents wrong, and I felt mean.) She said they promised lack of dogma, the equality of the sexes, world harmony and peace through unity in diversity. I took a quick browse through the leaflet and read aloud the bit about being ‘completely chaste before marriage and totally faithful within it’.
‘Bugger that,’ said Cara disappointedly, and went off to grill some rashers.
The priest’s clichés were turning my stomach; listen out for it, yes, ‘cut off in the bloom of her youth’. Under cover of the heavy drape of hair, I buried my chin in my palms and crammed my fingers into my ears. I used to spend the greater part of each mass in this pious position when I was a youngster, face closed over the most lurid of sexual fantasies. Mass brought out the worst in me that way, especially when I used to try giving up masturbation for Lent, or at least Lenten Sundays. Somehow the attempt always threw me into a frenzy of eroticism, as when someone tells you not to think of a certain word, ‘pineapple’ for instance, and your sentences become haunted by that word, and all you can see for hours is that fruit, prickling across your retinas. Not that I tried those givings-up in order to enhance my solitary sex life; the attempt to quash my lust was genuine, if hopeless. It was just that the church was the perfect environment for what t
hey still called impure thoughts in those days. Perhaps because the body was so limited in its movements, so dulled and contained, that the mind ran riot. Besides, I had always found the most effective fantasy was not to imagine one thing and do something similar, but to imagine one thing while doing something totally different. This did require some mental gymnastics; I had to practise quite a bit before I was able to lie on my back in bed and imagine I was standing against a wall in a dark nightclub, or face-down in a field of daisies. But the effects were wonderful. The body was bewildered, tricked into letting go. On my own or with Cara, I found that a demanding hand could metamorphose into an angelic tongue, or vice versa, and I could float free of the literal. Though always at the last minute Cara managed to hook me back, anchoring my swell to the here and now.
The Monsignor’s regretful homily was over at last, praise be. We all struggled to our feet and chanted our way through the creed. I used to take this very seriously indeed, trying to comprehend and wholly believe each item on the list in the second or two it took to say it. I had them all in hand by the time of my confirmation at the age of eleven, I remembered, except for the resurrection of the body, which was just too silly to believe. At least, until I discovered the big O a few years later. Such rapture made me believe anything of the human body, even that it could rot away to nothing and then be revived in the playing-fields of heaven.
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