I walked through the maze of gravel towards the car park. A tap on my shoulder. It was Jo, almost unrecognizable in a black dress with a shawl collar. I looked her up and down. ‘Wow. Josephine Butler, I presume.’
‘Ah, don’t talk to me. It was the only respectable garment I could lay hands on that was long enough so I wouldn’t have to shave my legs. With the sunburn on my nose I must look like a Liquorice Allsort.’
‘No, it’s nice, in an odd way.’ I saw Kate approaching, head bent among a cluster of relatives, so I pulled Jo along the path.
She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Are your family here?’
‘My father died when I was eighteen.’
‘And your mother?’
I watched the pebbles disappearing under the scuffed tips of my shoes. ‘Haven’t got around to ringing her.’ Jo was rolling up her flimsy sleeves. Because she said nothing, I wanted to go on. ‘Mammy only knows of Cara as my housemate. They met a couple of times and I don’t think they liked each other.’
‘Did you ever try telling her?’
‘No. Once when I was home for the weekend I thought Mammy was going to bring it up herself. The air went all prickly, so eventually I asked was she worried about something, and she said, “Well, I’ve been thinking, Pen, I don’t suppose you’re” – and then the phone rang. Afterwards it was too late to take up the conversation again.’
Jo pursed her lips. ‘Did she say “I don’t suppose your”, as in “your brother”, or was it “you’re” as in “you’re a raving loony lesbian”?’
‘I couldn’t tell. If she was more middle-class she’d have pronounced the vowels differently.’
‘Would you like her to be?’
‘Not really. I get my fill of gentility with Mr. Wall.’ We walked in silence for a few steps. ‘I did think of ringing Mammy last night, but I couldn’t bear to tell her about this’ – my wave took in the hedge and a marble cherub – ‘till I’m ready to tell her everything.’
‘And when will that be, say the bells of Stepney?’
I watched the gravel subside under my shoes. ‘I don’t see her very often.’
‘Then you’ve nothing to lose, have you?’
‘Yes I do. I know she’s there. She approves of me, generally. I ring her every couple of weeks, and she sounds glad to hear my voice.’
I did not realize how loud and fast the words were coming until Jo interrupted with a whisper of ‘OK, shush, it’s all right.’
We were almost at her empty Volks. I couldn’t face accepting sympathy from the whole gang of them. I patted her briefly on the upper arm and said, ‘Thanks for coming. See you soon, yeah?’
‘Saturday?’
I ignored that.
I was the first back to Minnie. I wanted so much to jump in like a bank robber, foot to the floor and screeching away across the tarmac, slamming through amber lights and…ending up in a coffin beside Cara? Was that what I wanted, to lie there comparing rainbow bruises in the sun-warmed earth?
I put my key in the lock and found it was already open. Getting careless, or maybe my subconscious had thought nobody would rob a car from a funeral. I slid on to the seat, my thighs sticking to my trousers. The windscreen was smeary; its glisten irritated my eyes. I felt behind the gear-stick for the cloth. Across its grimy yellow surface was laid a single hair. About ten inches long, a tiny shred of root at one end, the other just beginning to feather. As I rotated it in the sunlight it caught fire, then faded to brown.
My head was suddenly too heavy to support. I would have leaned it against the steering-wheel except that the passing file of chatting mourners might have seen and – god forbid – tapped on the window to offer succour. Instead, I let my skull sag back against the top of the headrest. I found that I had dropped the cloth; the hair was stretched between my fingers. Apart from a little dust which I blew off, it was clean, sparkling in the sun. When I pulled it between finger and thumb, it made a rich squeak, decreasing in pitch like a passing ambulance. I tried this note various ways, until I could hear nothing else. Could you string a lute with hair? I pulled it taut, then a little bit farther, testing its elasticity. Cara’s hair always hung straight and fine, spraying in the wind, not like my thick shutters. This single strand was beginning to curl from my pullings. Put it away now love before you break it, as my mother used to say.
I looked at the white root, where the cells had begun building their painstaking chain from Cara’s scalp. I imagined her leaning over one day to struggle with Minnie’s old-fashioned seat-belt or find a fifty-pee coin for the tollbridge, her bob sliding against her face, one particular hair already hanging loose in the curtain that her hand was now lifting to brush back. It must have clung to her knuckles for a moment before falling in slow motion down the gap between the seats to land on the yellow cloth. It must have lain still for weeks before I found it. Months, now I came to think of it, because Cara had got a shorter cut some weeks before she went on holiday. None of the hairs on the body they had buried was as long as this one.
I wanted to laugh; Cara was playing tricks. We thought we’d seen the last of her today, but here she was shedding over everything as usual. I folded the hair around my finger and tucked it in my breast-pocket for safety.
The engine started on the first try. There were Kate and Mr. Wall at the passenger side, the door opening and letting in their voices halfway through some sentence about the Boston climate.
On the way home the atmosphere was limp, like a school bus coming back from a long day’s outing. We stopped for Mr. Wall to buy bread and the paper, just like any other lunchtime, except that we hadn’t a word to say between the three of us. While we were waiting for him, I looked back over my seat-belt and told Kate I’d give her a lift to the airport for her four o’clock plane. She thanked me absent-mindedly. I stared forward again.
None of us was hungry, I suspected, but each felt it would be attention-seeking behaviour to refuse to eat. Mr. Wall scrambled three eggs and walked down the garden for some aged parsley to sprinkle on top. I buttered and bit into two slices of Vienna roll until I felt bandaged from the inside out. The tea tasted metallic. That was how my mother knew she was pregnant, the second time; it was the only thing that made her go off the taste of tea.
A rest would be a good idea. Take the day in stages. As I climbed up to my room, I could hear Kate dialling a long number. She sounded more East Coast the minute she began talking; evidently it didn’t take her half an hour to click back into business mode.
I lay down on the duvet. After a minute I used my toes to push at my heels, straining at the laces, until my shoes squeezed off one by one and dropped heavily on the carpet. It took more effort than unlacing them would have, but it satisfied me more. Finally I sat up, pulled the silk shirt over my head, wriggled my trousers off, and draped them across the desk chair. When I crawled under the sheets, they were wonderfully cold against my calves and shoulders.
I was falling into a daze when there was a tap at the door. ‘Come in,’ I called, my irritation much too loud.
Kate’s face blended into the dull paintwork of the door; only her dark halo stood out. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize you were in bed.’
Why had I not noticed the heavy shadows under her eyes? ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Just tired,’ she said with a faint grin. ‘I’ve had one of those mystery viruses recently.’
‘Yuppie flu?’ I suggested, without much malice.
‘Whatever.’
I leaned up on one elbow, folding my other arm around the duvet. It looked dreadfully naked, this river of flesh bridged by a beige strap at the crest of the shoulder.
Kate’s eyes returned from the window-sill. ‘Anyway, what I came to say was, I’ve managed to beg a few more days from my boss so I could get a proper rest, and I’ve changed my flight. So I’ll be staying till Saturday morning – unless that’ll put you out too much?’
‘No, no,’ I said, and was surprised to find that I meant it.
There was a long pause; I kept expecting her to go. Her gaze angled and drifted around the room like a paper plane. Her eyes seemed to be focused on the mules stuck in the pockets of my dressing-gown when she said, ‘You were a couple, weren’t you?’
‘What, me and Cara, you mean?’
She nodded warily.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course we were.’
Kate rested on the very end of the bed and crossed her legs. I was heartened to see that her skirt, like anyone’s, got creased from sitting. ‘I kind of wondered, when I realized you’d been living here for years,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t absolutely sure till I saw you at the grave, looking sort of weighty.’
‘I always look weighty,’ I told her with a diva’s smile.
She shook her head slightly, like a horse bothered by flies. ‘No, I mean responsible. Like, widowed.’ The word created a little pool of silence round it. ‘I should have picked up on it before…’ Kate’s voice trailed off. She recrossed her legs and anchored her hands around her knees. ‘My job keeps me so busy. I never really wondered about Cara’s life; she was just the kid sister back in Ireland, you know? We talked on the phone couple times a year, Christmas Day, but her voice always sounded just the same.’
‘It doesn’t affect the vocal cords, you know.’
‘What doesn’t?’
I let the consonants roll. ‘Lesbianism.’
Kate looked me in the eyes and tried to laugh. ‘Guess not.’ When the pause was growing too long, she added, ‘I can see that it must have been good for Cara to have you around.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. I tugged the duvet a little higher, but her weight was holding it down. I longed for a shawl.
‘Does Dad have any idea?’
‘I don’t think so. We thought he’d prefer not to.’
She considered it with pursed lips. ‘Probably right.’ After a minute, ‘So when did you two first…’
I let her wriggle on the hook for a few seconds, then relented. ‘We got together the year after you left.’
‘At school? Jesus.’
‘And we’ve been actually living together for the last four years.’
Kate nodded soberly. ‘That must have been great.’
‘It has its moments.’
‘I mean, to be sure enough to move in together,’ she stumbled on. ‘I’ve never met a guy yet I’d want to share my apartment with.’
My mouth twitched slightly. Cara and I had a running joke about straight women: any time you came out to one she’d managed to register heterosexuality by mentioning boyfriends within the first five minutes.
But Kate’s eyes were unguarded. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘did you, did you love her a lot?’
What an unlikely question, from this grey-suited executive. And where was the yardstick? I sat up and leaned against the chilly wallpaper, tucking the quilt around me. ‘Mmm,’ I said.
She nodded, and made a little movement as if to get up.
‘I wasn’t obsessive about Cara,’ I added, to keep her there. ‘I never wrote out her signature over and over, or sank to the pits of identifying with Beatles lyrics.’
That won a small smile.
‘It was all very ordinary,’ I told her, hugging my knees. ‘I liked to do stuff like brushing the fluff off her jacket, but that’s not what you call a grand passion, is it?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Kate. ‘I wouldn’t know what a grand passion was if I found it in my french fries.’ She stared at her knees as if she had only just noticed them.
‘So,’ I said after a minute, my voice lifting, ‘it’s nice that you’ve got a few days more here. Are you wanting to sightsee at all?’
Her face was blank. ‘What sights are there I didn’t see when I lived here?’
Damn the woman, no sooner had she seduced me into conversation than she always had to shut down. She yawned as she stood up, and shut the door tightly behind her. I let myself slide down the wall until I was curled up halfway along the bed, the duvet arching over my face.
In my dream I am face-down on this bed, leaning up on my elbows. My white chest is bright with sweat, scattered with hairs and crumbs and bits of red thread from my shirt. Cara’s mouth comes angling round my neck to reach my mouth; she kisses, bites my lips, pauses to take a bit of fluff out of her mouth and laughs throatily. Then her face disappears, and she is at my back again, tracing my spine with a rasping tongue till I flinch over and over, chewing on my shoulders to make them squirm.
I try to roll over but Cara won’t let me; the whole weight of her is pressed down on my back. Her fuzz brushes the cleft at the base of my spine, then shoves me deep into the mattress. It surprises me that such a skinny girl can weigh down so heavily, can ride me until the pleasure begins to knife its way through the bed. I arch back like a boat about to splinter. Cara is clasping my curves between her legs, wearing my thighs and back like a saddle in this trickling rodeo. She jolts against me and I wonder if my back will break. She grinds my hips into the fine dust of pleasure.
‘I can’t come this way,’ I hiss. And then of course I roar like a woman in labour (into three pillows, so the sound won’t carry down to Mr. Wall’s room) and I do, I do, I do.
Afterwards Cara lies flat and heavy, growing into me like a sod of grass. ‘Sometimes I fancy others more,’ she whispers to the back of my ear, ‘but you take me farther.’
I bend my arm and reach behind to find her hip, her fuzz, the folds I have so often frisked for secrets. She leans up on her knees to make room for me. This is what I imagine parachuting to be like: as the white silk of her skin rushes through my fingers, she flaps open and we are saved.
I woke and found that my feet had gone to sleep. Though my dream body was wet and spasmodic, my waking body lay dull and dry. I reached out for Cara, searching the sheets with my hand.
Then I remembered and felt sick to my stomach. How dared I lie here feeling, thinking, desiring, when she was in a box underground? What made me want to be alive more than I wanted to be with her? Always when I had been laid waste by pleasure, when I felt helpless as a beached whale, I restored myself by reaching out to Cara. It was a matter of finding the balance of power, riding the seesaw between dignity and abandon. I could only hand it all over because I knew that ten minutes or three days later she would trust herself equally to me. If sometimes I felt like nothing but a creature of pleasure, a poem made flesh, then at other times I was all creator.
That was another loss, it occurred to me now. The skills I had honed over the years for making love to her body had become redundant. No doubt I could use the basic techniques on someone else, but not all the little nuances, not my inch-by-inch knowledge of what Cara liked. It was as if I had spent thirteen years specializing in a certain language, only to discover that all its speakers had scattered and renounced their native tongue. No, worse than that, because at least dead languages could be studied. This was as if I had spent my life learning to play a certain unique instrument, only to see some crazed vandal smash it to pieces.
Not an image I wanted to dwell on. I hauled myself out of bed.
Standing by the kitchen window, blowing dimples on my coffee, I caught sight of Kate disappearing behind the garage. The cat-flap opened and Grace wriggled in, pinching his tail on the plastic. ‘Hey, pusscat, where’ve you been?’ I murmured, going down on my hunkers and holding out my hands. But he didn’t want to lick them today. He glanced at his replenished bowl and slunk into the hall.
I went outside, not caring how shabby my orange dressing-gown looked to any neighbours peering over the trellis littered with yellow roses. Kate didn’t notice me as I looked into the passage between garage and hedge. Her hand was on the elephantine trunk of the sycamore that blocked the end. I picked a late nasturtium and nibbled on it. ‘What are you doing?’
She spun around, her face more enlivened than I had ever seen it. ‘I planted this.’
‘You did?’ The flower was hot and peppery. One afternoon years ago, C
ara had tucked nasturtiums under my arms, between my knees, in every crevice she could find, then ate them all off me. How had her tongue stood it? I struggled now to bring my attention back to her sister.
‘I’ve just remembered digging a hole for a sycamore key behind the garage, when I was a kid,’ she said.
I waited.
‘It’s grown so tall,’ said Kate, her voice muffled as she turned her gaze up into its branches.
‘Too tall,’ I told her, dropping the rest of the nasturtium. And then I embroidered: ‘It’s for the chop, one of these days. If it fell it could smash the roof.’
‘Really?’ A pointed leaf came off in her hand; she put it in the pocket of her jacket. When she turned, her face had set back into its accustomed lines.
I went back inside, and tried to flush away the taste of the flower with my cooling coffee. It was Cara who planted that tree, she told me so. She loved to catch sight of it tossing and head-banging in the breeze above the garage roof. She would never let it be cut down. I drained the coffee to the dregs, then rinsed my mouth with cold water. No matter who had planted the sycamore, there was no excuse for venting my miscellaneous rage on a woman who had never knowingly done me any harm.
After getting back into the same clothes, I came downstairs and switched on Children’s Newsround. It had always been my last resort for getting out of a sulk after bad days at school, killing time while waiting for Mammy to come home with the bread. Somehow Newsround’s alternating stories of world crises and clever pets put my own problems in perspective. Once Cara and I were watching it together, and the Zee-brugge ferry disaster came on. The tears ran on to her cheese on toast. I went on eating mine. She looked at me, and looked away again.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Cara.
‘Look,’ I said gruffly, ‘what good will tears do them? They’re wet enough.’
‘It’s not to do them any good,’ she said, ‘it’s because I can’t help it.’
I put down my toast. ‘I’m rationing.’
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