Hood

by Emma Donoghue

Mr. Wall went back to his beeswaxing. My cramps seemed to have disappeared. I climbed upstairs and began on the bedrooms.

  It’s not that I’m trying to wipe you off the surface of the earth, I told Cara; I’m just clearing myself a bit of room, and if I don’t do it today I may never get around to it.

  Fallen down the back of her stuffed bookshelf, I found my Inter Cert English poetry book. I let the pages fly by between my fingers. How scarred these innocent lyrics had been by the time my bossy pen was finished with them; loops connected every death image or alliterative s. Stern vertical lines of abab ccdd efe reminded the verse of its rhyme scheme. Yellow fluorescent marker, faded to pale orange, determined the lines to be learned ‘off by heart’ – such a euphemism for rote learning, as if the heart had anything to do with it. And how pompously sure I had been in my interpretations at sixteen: theme: man seeks immortality, I had informed my future self, or sad images but triumphant conclusion. Only one wobbling perhaps entire sonnet ironic? suggested that I had left any room for doubt. I watched the round squiggling handwriting of the girl who had never had a woman come in her hand.

  Most of our private notes, Cara’s and mine, had been hastily rubbed out – there were crumbs of rubber in the cracks – but the occasional word was still legible. On the bottom right-hand corner of ‘Kubla Khan’, faint letters spelled out ‘Hello PenUltimate’. I browsed on, the titles stirring my memories. The daffodils were still jocund, gallant Bess was still tied to the bed with the gun to her breast, and the traveller kept on knocking at the moonlit door and asking over and over, ‘Is there anybody there?’

  I tucked the book into the shelf, and opened Cara’s wardrobe. Her house-painting smock with the blue and yellow handprints all over it: I held it in my hands for a minute, and felt loss like a knife between the ribs, but pushed it away. I’d keep the smock. Everything else was too small for me. Thank god we never had a chance to be one of those clone couples who shared each other’s clothes. Except, the odd time, Cara would fold herself up in one of my ever-growing cardigans, and prance about with the wool hanging like bat’s wings, crowing, ‘I’m you, look, I’m you now.’

  I worked on. I found it helped to be objective, as if I was going through a rack of costumes for a play. The wardrobe’s rainbow of fabrics reflected Cara’s uneasy shifts in taste and self-assessment, ranging from an opera cloak to black denim dungarees, from a short red gypsy shirt to a home-dyed combat jacket. (And then there was her anti-objectification phase in the early eighties, when, if anyone remarked that her trousers looked nice, she’d take them off and put on a plainer pair.) The range of T-shirt slogans was bewildering; apart from the ones in German that I couldn’t understand, the prize for oddity went to a hand-painted ‘IF THE TRUTH COULD BE TOLD…’ As I folded them all into a couple of black binliners, I wondered what the Oxfam customers were going to make of this motley collection. I hauled the sacks downstairs, and looked for the blue dungarees to add in, but they were gone from the window-sill; Kate must have taken them home with her.

  I shook open another big bag for Cara’s collection of Agatha Christies and back issues of Spare Rib. Then a sack for the bin: boxes of manifestos, address lists, flyers for marches and fund-raising pub quizzes. Badly typed draft letters for Amnesty International prisoners that all seemed to begin, ‘Dear Most Honourable Grand Minister for Internal Matters, I know how busy you must be’. Stacks of yellow and green T-shirts that never sold, from her year in the printing co-op.

  It was when I was glancing through the choked drawers of the tiny desk that I found her cache of letters. Old paper, softened at the folds like lines on a face. I had no wish to read them, but I couldn’t bear the idea that words she had prized enough to keep should simply be thrown in the bin. I decided that any with addresses on the back of the envelope could be sent back with a note, and if the addresses had changed, well, they would be forwarded. Any with a name on the last line that I recognized could be sent back too. The ones with names that made no sense to me would have to go in the bin. As I sorted through the letters, my eyes could not help catching the occasional line, like snatches of passing conversations as you walked down a street. ‘I think the root of the problem’, I read, and ‘what makes me laugh’ and ‘don’t you sometimes find’, and one rather pathetic ‘we are all well here’. Luckily my eye never caught my own name. I didn’t know what I would have done if it had. My morality had never been tested under circumstances like these.

  When I got tired I sat on the bed, shifting back until the curve of my spine was against the wall. All these people, all these letters, the complex relations of a truncated lifetime. What gave me the right to dispose of them? Only the number of times I had woken beside Cara, before the post brought the day’s letters.

  I wake up with touch lust, some summer morning. We are in her room at the back of the house, to avoid the sun. My arms are stuck to my sides, my fingers are aching. I smile at Cara’s sleeping eyelids. I rest my forehead lightly against hers, and reach around her to trace with one thumbnail from the crown of her head, through the damp hair, down the path of her spine. I’ll do this over and over, sometimes sending sharp fingers down the back of her arms, sometimes veering round her ribs or ski-jumping her hip, till she floats to the surface of consciousness. I can tell I’m turning her on already because her nose is itching; she scratches the pointed tip of it confusedly.

  I know where she was last night – here, in the bed we shared – but not the night before. She came home from the Attic with dark bags under her eyes, and I had to tell myself for the thousandth time that if it was anything important, anything that threatened or rivalled what we have, she would tell me. None the less, as her breathing starts to quicken and her shoulder-blades to writhe under the rasp of my nails, I realize that I always have something to prove. Not to Cara so much as to myself. If I am not to be her only lover, then I need to be convinced that I’m the best.

  She twists around, all at once, and wriggles backwards into the bow my body makes, murmuring sounds that are not words in any language I know. Her surfaces cleave to mine. I move her legs to where I want them to be and hold them down. Her surprised breath is punched out once a second, now, as if making room for me in her narrow body. At this point I always question my motives, my greed for power over the ins and outs of her. Is it still love if I am speeding this rhythm not so much for her pleasure as for mine? Cara would laugh at the question, if she could hear it. I move her wider till she starts to make a sound like a sob. I whisper in her ear, ‘No noise. Your dad mightn’t be gone to work yet.’

  It occurs to me now that maybe it is the occasional bloodletting of Cara’s infidelities that has kept us pulling each other’s clothes off, on and off, for thirteen years, when according to so many of her books, lesbians are meant to hit bed death after two. She has told me that no one else could know her body and her body’s mind the way I do, and I believe her. But always, in fear and delight, I have something to prove.

  She is hyperventilating now; I hope she doesn’t faint like she did once. Her whisper when it emerges is salty as old rope. ‘I believe in God.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Right now,’ she pants. ‘Right this minute I do.’

  After the waves throw her, she lies placid as seaweed. Her two tears taste of harbours. Her eyebrows huddle like gulls.

  I shook the memories out of my head and got up, grabbing the pile of envelopes. I’d have to do the rest another day. I simply had to get out of this room or I would be sucked back in time till there was nothing of me left here.

  While the vacuum was on was the only time I liked singing. I moved from the landing into my bedroom now, keening into the roar of the machine:

  but her ghost wheels her barrow

  through streets broad and narrow

  crying cockles and mussels, alive alive-o

  The traditional songs were best for housework. Their rhythms kept my arms moving, like the women doing roughly this kind of work (only longer
and sorer) in all the other centuries.

  with their drums and guns and guns and drums

  the enemy nearly slew you

  my darling dear you look so queer

  och Johnny I hardly knew you

  Why were the death songs the catchiest? The lyrics were cruel, but somehow satisfying.

  you haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg

  you’re an eyeless noseless chickenless egg

  you’ll have to be put in a bowl to beg

  och Johnny I hardly knew you

  Cara would have laughed at that. It was as well that she hit the frame of the car head-on; she would not have wanted to survive as an eyeless noseless chickenless egg. She found the juggling balls of life hard enough to keep in the air, with all her limbs intact.

  When I came downstairs, slapping the dust off my palms, Mr. Wall was bent over the newspaper. ‘I hope the noise didn’t bother you?’ I asked him. ‘I forgot about your head.’

  His reading glasses glinted as he turned his face up. ‘Oh no, all better now.’

  I made myself a cup of coffee so that I could offer him one without it seeming any trouble. He passed over the Weekend section of the paper; I sat at the opposite end of the table, my eyes meandering through the articles. When I glanced up, the lines in his forehead seemed a centimetre deep. ‘I’ve,’ and I paused to clear my throat, ‘I’ve been reading this book on bereavement my friend Robbie gave me.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  There was no way to say this without sounding rude. ‘It said that if you don’t talk to someone it can sort of fester.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You might think you’re doing all right, but it builds up, and then you get backache and migraines and things.’ Mr. Wall was staring into his coffee cup; I ploughed on. ‘I know friends can be hard to talk to, so I thought maybe someone professional…’

  ‘You want me to see a psychiatrist?’ His tone was odd. I had never seen him angry, so I was not sure I would recognize the symptoms.

  ‘Or a priest,’ I added. ‘They’re meant to be able to give…some comfort.’

  Mr. Wall nodded. ‘But I would be taking it under false pretences.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘I don’t believe,’ he explained. ‘Heaven and hell and all that.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Afraid not,’ said Mr. Wall with polite regret. ‘Not since…1977. Yes, that was the year I lost it.’

  ‘Was that –’ I swallowed. ‘Mrs Wall went that year, didn’t she? And Kate.’

  ‘No, that was the year after.’

  I sat in silence, my teeth closed over the edge of the coffee cup. I took a long slug of it, then remembered something. ‘But I’ve never known you to miss mass, even.’

  ‘Well, in the early days, you see, I wanted to set an example for Cara. And even when she stopped coming along, I had the habit of it. Sense of community, I suppose. Kept an open mind, you know, in case I was wrong.’

  ‘You don’t go to confession?’

  ‘Oh no.’ He cleared his throat in amusement. ‘I’ve no wish to argue morality through a grille with the Monsignor. I do take the host at communion, but it’s really just bread to me.’

  ‘Bread,’ I repeated. ‘So. If you don’t believe any of it…you don’t think you’ll meet Cara again?’ As soon as I had said it, I wished I hadn’t.

  ‘Well, you never know,’ said Mr. Wall tactfully. ‘But no, I imagine we are snuffed out like candles. Little candles,’ he repeated.

  My coffee was lukewarm but I drank it down. I couldn’t meet his eyes, so I traced the pattern of knots on the table.

  ‘Now, Pen,’ he said more briskly, ‘I understand you may have somewhere you want to go.’

  ‘I’ve been shopping already,’ I told him. ‘Did you want a lift somewhere?’

  ‘No.’ He took out a cotton handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘I mean in the more long-term sense. I suppose you will be wanting to move in with friends, or perhaps back to your mother’s house?’

  He wasn’t wasting much time before chasing the wolf from the hearth, was he? My head swung heavily. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I was wondering if you could delay your departure for a little while.’ He coughed softly. ‘Quite a comfort having you here.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Of course.’ His eyes were owlish. ‘I would hardly have thought that needed saying. And if there were any arrangement we could come to that would persuade you to stay –’

  ‘But I’d love to.’

  ‘If you didn’t have other plans.’

  ‘I don’t have any other plans,’ I told him.

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘Well, I thought you were kicking me out.’ My voice was high with embarrassment and relief.

  ‘Quite the opposite.’ Mr. Wall took his glasses off and rubbed at them with a fold of his cardigan. ‘I’m afraid I just presumed there would be other places you would prefer to live. If you have the slightest interest in staying here, you would be most welcome.’

  The air was breathable again. ‘You’re sure I wouldn’t be in the way? My salary does me fine, I could afford somewhere else,’ I gabbled. ‘It’s not like I’m a relative or anything, you’ve no obligation to house and shelter me.’

  ‘You’ve been more than…Like a daughter,’ he concluded, so low I could hardly hear.

  ‘Well.’ I took a long draw of air. ‘That would be great. What rent should I pay?’

  Mr. Wall seemed to remember something. ‘I was wondering if we might come to some terms. Just a second.’

  I leaned my forehead on my crossed arms for a minute while he was gone.

  He returned with a coverless pamphlet in his hand. ‘I came across this a while back,’ he said, ‘and it was most convincing. These women argue about the economic value of all work, you see.’

  I took it from his eager hand. It was an early seventies publication of the Wages for Housework Campaign; Cara and I had got it in with a job-lot of trashy lezzie novels when the Alternative Bookshop had a clear-out. I wanted to laugh but held it back.

  ‘It strikes me,’ he rushed on, ‘that you do all these jobs that family members often do for each other; you cook almost all the meals, do more than your share of the cleaning, you drive me around in your car and…well, generally contribute to the quality of domestic life. So really you are earning your rent already.’

  ‘That seems far too generous,’ I told him.

  ‘Well, leave the details for now. You could tot it all up yourself later and see what’s fair.’ He buttoned up his cardigan. ‘I should be getting on with things,’ he muttered, and went off to his room.

  I stared around me, at the white walls, the curve of grass held in the window, back at the long sweep of table. No goodbyes, then. Did Cara’s father have any idea what kind of woman he was giving the keys to the castle? I felt a stab of guilt at the prospect of taking free lodging from a man whose daughter I had seduced in just about every room of this house while he was out at the library. But I supposed he liked my company. Like a daughter, he said.

  There were a dozen chores left to do, but instead I was going to make biscuits. I shoved Reward Women’s Work Now and various books and papers out of the way, to clear a circle on the kitchen table. The sleeves of my baggy flannel shirt wouldn’t stay above my elbows, so I found a couple of elastic bands in the back of the drawer. I remembered another occasion on which I had countered depression with biscuit-making and left the sugar out by mistake, creating what Cara, returning from another lengthy weekend in Bruges, had christened Chocolate Charcoal. But this time I would get it right. I’d use honey instead of sugar; honey was less forgettable.

  The flour fell through the sieve into the shape of a sand dune. Resting a slab of butter on my palm – I had never held with measurements – I cut it in chunks that fell noiselessly into the flour. Rubbing in was irksome, but once I had overcome my resistance to getting my fingernails full of glue, and found a rhythm for my fin
gers it was satisfying. It took just enough thought – where to rub hardest, when to swirl the loose flour round – to keep the bogeys from my mind. Grace leaped up on the table with his curious look on, but I gently slid him off with my elbow.

  The strangest thing about this week was how little I had cooked. The few meals I’d pulled together had been done on autopilot. Not that grief had cut my appetite much, but it did seem to make me consume in a more mechanical way. Eating a packet of cheap biscuits demanded nothing of me, whereas baking my own made me live in the here and now.

  When I was a child my mother only let me bake on special occasions, because of the expense of ingredients. But as soon as I paired up with Cara, who despaired of ever being able to grow a decent curve anywhere, I invented and ate all the desserts I wanted. It fascinated her, how heat metamorphosed such staples as flour and eggs into something quite different, and how my figure blossomed over the years into this extravagant shape.

  Mr. Wall walked by; I could see him through the glass panels of the door into the hall, as he paused with his fingers on the handle, then seemed to remember something and sloped off again. Funny man.

  I remembered the honey this time. I also remembered the ground almonds, scoop of semolina for crunchiness, sprinkle of salt, baking powder, spice. I pounded the dough into a wide sausage and sliced it into rounds, laying them on a blackened tray greased with the butter paper. I did everything Mammy taught me, with the speed that had always characterized her culinary movements at ten to six on a weekday. Then, looking at their dull leavened surfaces, I decided to jazz them up. To the first I added two raisins for eyes, and half a roasted cashew nut for a smile. (It occurred to me to use a sliver of glace cherry instead, but that would be just too femme.) The biscuit looked rather like Cara when she was smirking at something. I did the next one with the cashew turned down in a groan, then continued round the tray, giving each a slightly different expression. Amazing how anthropomorphic was the human eye, that it needed only two raisins and half a cashew nut to conjure up a human face, so desperate were we for company in this wide world.