by Morag Joss
26
Lila’s mouth flopped open and slapped shut. She gave a rasping cough and struggled to get up. ‘Is there some water anywhere?’ she said. ‘I’m not well. I need a drink of water, there must be some somewhere.’
Her voice sounded coated, as if she had a mouthful of wet paper. She dragged herself to her feet and turned towards him. It was true she didn’t look well, but how was he supposed to come up with fresh water here, on a beach? She tried to smooth down her clothes; she was in some pink and yellow things that Joe hadn’t taken in before. He didn’t understand her clothes at all. She wasn’t made for this kind of place, or for hard drink either. That wasn’t his fault.
‘Look at the state of you,’ he said, uncorking the bottle again. It was half finished already and that was her fault. He drank greedily, in his mind merely keeping pace, getting even.
‘Please,’ she said, peering hard at him, pushing her hands down her thighs. ‘Isn’t there any water?’
‘There’s only this,’ he said, lifting the bottle and patting the seat. She sat down again, took the bottle and raised it slowly, closing her eyes. Joe watched her mouth open and search and close around the opening. She drank, her lips puckering and licking round for an escaping trickle, and then she gave a sigh and let her head loll back, her eyes still shut and the line of her throat stretched white and bare. Warmth spread through him. He took the bottle from her and set it carefully in the sand. Her closed eyes looked like small fruits, lemon-shaped, the eyelids just thin peel guarding the juicy pulp underneath. He studied her slightly open mouth and let it suggest to him other round, open waiting places in her body. Or in bodies, generally; lips, specifically. All bodies had those. He felt himself starting to get hard. What a surprise she was. It could even be her body he was thinking of, but it didn’t matter. Poor kid, la bella, out of it now, she couldn’t hold on to her stupid little poses anymore, not with a skinful in her and Christ, no more could he. Something unaffected in her was coming to the surface, through her sleep, and it appealed to him. Poor kid. La bella.
He let his hand glide over and touch her hands that were folded together across her lap, pointing down between her legs. She murmured, her eyelids wavered. Joe held his breath, his mind considering in more detail the wet and hidden possibilities under her clothes, ready. She wanted it all right. The thump of heart and whisky and blood was beating in his head and little trembles broke out all over his body, a curiosity of nerves. So did he, all right. No reason why not; George was no reason why not. George might be a reason why he should. His hand skated over hers again, traced a line up her arm and moved across, slipping up under her blouse. Maybe not all the way. He was very hard now. Under the stiff cones of the bra her breasts had subsided into their own velvety swell. He was not familiar with breasts but hers were so soft—too soft and welcoming to be quite foreign. He withdrew his hand and undid the blouse buttons and as he slipped a finger back inside and found the nipple, he moved his other hand down to unzip himself. She was awake. With a tug of her clothes he pulled her breast free and fixed his mouth over it.
‘Joe, oh Joe…oh.’
He sucked, letting the edge of his teeth graze the nipple, then he bit, and without letting go he lifted himself up and lay down alongside her, pushing her into the seat with his knees. He wondered what the moans coming from her meant, what it was she wanted. She moaned as he nibbled some more and freed the other breast and squeezed it hard, and he moaned too; it seemed a courtesy to supply an echo. Now she was rolling around neither resisting nor helping. Perhaps she wanted to make it easier for him, it was hard to tell; she was taking to this in the same way she had to the whisky, as if she needed it so much the question of liking it or not did not come into it. He pushed a knee between her legs and then, in case she should be about to speak, he moved up and planted his mouth on hers. It didn’t matter whether she wanted to stop or encourage him; he simply could not bear to hear her voice. Trying to move his hand slowly, he felt under her skirt. She seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she shoved her tongue into his mouth and his hand pushed inside her knickers and landed on her belly and immediately she spread herself, drawing up one leg and hooking it over the back of the seat. He was so surprised he lifted his head and tried to look at her but she closed her eyes and buried her face in his neck.
‘It’s all right! Do it. Go on, do it,’ she whispered. ‘Do it, do it if you want.’
He had no idea what he wanted. His hand was resting on what felt like a nest of warm straw. Her skin tasted a little sour but with a memory of sweetness, not exactly meat or fruit but something that had come from an animal or had been lately growing, like buttermilk, or overblown flowers. Was that what he wanted? She lifted herself and pushed hard against his hand and then he felt it under his fingers, the bold nub as slippery as syrup, a little peeled strawberry. She was holding her breath, raising herself; he thrust a finger inside and heaved himself on top of her, fumbling, and as the second finger went in hard she cried Oh! He had not got rid of enough clothes yet. He squeezed himself with his free hand and tried to hold back but just as he was about to push in, the warm spilling began, smearing her thighs and wiry hair and stomach and his fingers, slipping into the creases of their clothes and raising its usual raw, sad, wasted smell. He collapsed away from her and lay with his head turned to the side, allowing dismay to settle, feeling emptied of any further point in being here.
She didn’t seem to realise. After they had lain for a while she sighed in a way he found annoying, as if she’d been enlightened, shown the sacred mysteries or something. He reached over for the whisky bottle and drank. He didn’t offer her any and she didn’t notice that, either.
‘I don’t mind it happened,’ she said. ‘I’m glad. I thought we wouldn’t before…I mean it’s supposed to be better to wait, sometimes. But with us it’s different.’
‘How come, diff’rent? B’fore what?’ Joe said. Half out of malice, he wanted to know just how cock-eyed it was, her idea of what was going on.
‘Oh, Joe! You know,’ she said. ‘You know, you…You know, before…’ She obviously thought she had bestowed upon him something priceless. ‘Before the opera. Before it’s all official, when I get to sixteen.’
‘Look, I told you,’ he said, ‘I’m not doing the opera. I can’t. Far as I’m concerned it’s not happening.’ He turned onto his back, perching uncomfortably on the edge of the seat. He pushed himself, cool and sticky, back into his clothes and zipped up. ‘There is not going to be no fucking opera. I told you.’
Lila struggled to sit up. ‘You can’t say that now,’ she cried. ‘You can’t!’ She grabbed his shoulder. ‘Not now we’re…’
‘Not now we’re what.’
‘Well, not after…not now we’re everything to each other!’
‘Aw, Jesus.’
‘We are! We’re in it together. How can I go back now? What am I supposed to tell them?’
‘You don’t need to tell them anything. You mustn’t tell them anything.’ Joe tried to smile at her. He tidied a strand of hair from her face. ‘It’s our secret, okay?’
‘And I’m not well, either,’ she stated wearily, settling back, aware of stinging between her legs. Feeling bad was all she was really sure of. ‘I think I’m getting tonsillitis again. You’ll probably get it too, now,’ she added miserably, and began to cry. ‘Still, that won’t matter if you’re not going to sing, will it,’ she sobbed. ‘I’ll never get to London. I’m all packed and ready and everything and I’ll never get to go.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Joe said, and let his voice trail away. He patted her leg. ‘Come on. London’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’
He got to his feet and handed her the whisky bottle. ‘Here,’ he said jovially. ‘Thirsty work, eh?’
Lila took the bottle, drank and coughed. She said, ‘Is it because you think I’m too young? Sixteen’s too young to get engaged? I wouldn’t mind waiting. Are you thinking we should wait a bit longer?’
Joe sta
red at her. ‘That’s not what I’m thinking at all,’ he said. Was that what she was on about, was she really that naïve? Had it really not occurred to her that she was under age? Not that it had actually happened—not properly—but she seemed to think it had. She could say anything.
Lila swallowed. ‘I don’t think my voice works anymore.’ She sat up and sang a scratchy scale and then she sang another, stronger and clearer. ‘Well, Liù,’ she said. ‘She’s still here, anyway.’
She wrapped her arms round herself and tucked her hands under her arms. ‘You’ve got to sing,’ she said fiercely and suddenly. ‘You’ve got to. Otherwise I might as well kill myself. Otherwise…’
‘Aw, Jesus.’ Joe’s head throbbed. He was too drunk to weigh up his chances accurately; perhaps he could get away right now and that would be an end of it, but what if she talked? George peeved and jealous anyway, plus George’s underage niece interfered with would mean real trouble.
‘You’ve got to. I mean it. If you don’t I’ll kill myself, and then you’ll be sorry.’
‘Aw, stop that, will you?’ Joe got up and stood facing the sea, steadying himself. He turned to her. She was sitting bolt upright, her eyes glittering. ‘Look, I’ll think about it. I need to think. I need to see how I feel.’
‘There isn’t time. We have to go back and get ready. You’ve got to come now.’
Joe sighed heavily. ‘Jesus! Look. Suppose I go back. I’ll go back, but no promises, okay? I’ll…I’ll go back to the house and see how I feel, okay?’
‘We can go back together.’
‘No! Don’t you see, if anyone sees us together they might start wondering where we’ve been. They might ask what we’ve been up to. See? I’ll go first.’
‘And we keep this a secret?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Until?’
‘Until…until later. Till afterwards, till we don’t have to anymore.’
‘And you promise you’ll go straight back. You really promise.’
‘Okay, I promise.’
‘And you will sing.’
‘I promise I’ll go back to the house.’
‘You’ve got to sing! You’ve got to!’
‘Okay, okay! Jesus. Okay, for fuck’s sake, I’ll sing. You stay here a bit longer and then you follow, okay?’
‘Okay, Joe. I trust you. You do promise?’
‘See you, then.’
‘See you on stage,’ Lila said. ‘See you, Calaf.’
She lay back and closed her eyes and when she opened them again Joe and the holdall had gone. Sunlight cut a sparkling path through the water, sliced low across the beach and into her face. A translucent snip of moon hung high in the sky, miles above the salty whisper of the tide. She stood up on rigid legs, arranged a fold of her skirt like a bandage over her hand, picked up the parcel and set off back towards the dunes, too absorbed by the task of walking straight and protecting her hands to think very hard about anything.
steve’s got a point, Christine says, banging cushions together and setting them back diamond-fashion into the chairs. I’ve given her permission to do what she calls a quick once-round before the funeral but it doesn’t seem to me either quick or once. We’re arguing about clearing away papers and so on, and I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.
She keeps saying, about this and that and the next thing, that it’s only decent to do it right. You only get one go vis-à-vis a funeral, she adds.
(That’s why, since midday, the coffin has been sitting on trestles in the music room. By rights he shouldn’t go from the undertakers’, he ought to leave from his own home, Christine says. It’s more fitting. So I let her arrange it that way. I wanted to remark on her being surprisingly old-fashioned for one so young but I’m wrong about that. It’s only the young into whom death strikes such awe.)
I mean Steve has got an important point, she says again. All that mess out there. Still there, cluttering up all the front, right up against the window near enough, I don’t know what folk’ll say. He’d have got it shifted for you before today, he’d have been only too pleased to get the garden nice. You’d only to say. For a nice send-off. Fitting.
And it washes over me that after eighty-five years of life and most of them spent in 5 Seaview Villas my father finally leaves this house for the last time and the garden’s a mess when his coffin goes past, and it’s not good enough. Again I fail him. Very little grows here in the sandy ground and salt wind but can’t one flower open, might not a single bloom rise from the place where he sat his life out, cultivating his philosophy of not expecting too much, making a virtue out of being overlooked? Och, Lizzie, I’m happy enough, he used to say. Yet again the right thing to do evades me or doesn’t come until too late.
But if we are to mark his passing in sausage rolls, I’m on top of it. Sheena of Party Fayre arrives. She’s come early to get on so that she’ll be ready for when we come back from the service. She pokes her head out of the kitchen at us.
You’ll no mind, she tells me, you’ll no mind only I’ve got my mum coming later to give me a hand?
She disappears to get her microwave in from the van.
Anyway, Christine says, turning her attention to me, look at you, where in God’s name have you been now? Have you been down the shore? It’s time you were getting ready. Goodness sake.
I lie in a bath that she runs for me and I feel that there is a smudge in me that I shall fail to wash away before this afternoon’s performance of the funeral; the purpose of this bath is not to cleanse but to obliterate myself, smudge and all. I dress carefully. The clothes Christine has kindly cleaned and pressed are costume. I have not worn makeup for days and it does me good to paint some pride back on my face, to dab over my consternation with a subtle, daytime, all-over base tone for the maturer complexion. Since I have not managed since I came here either to wash or to sleep away my stained self, it helps me to hide. I must hide in broad daylight, in the guise of his blameless daughter. I want to step out of this room at least looking like a worthy mourner of the last of my gentle, immaculate ghosts.
But this last funeral, my father’s, goes off with more than a touch of grace. Odd how the most fugitive quality in a person may be the one that asserts itself just as he is leaving, when it’s too late for speeches because you might choke on all you should have said long ago. At the Evangelical Lutherans’ hall there is a sombre courtesy present among us that withstands the falling and swooping of Luke’s voice and the furrowing and lifting of his brow. We let him tell us there is no emotion inapplicable and no response inappropriate ‘at this time’ and that we may share ‘all that is in our hearts’. There may be a moment when I almost believe it. Whatever we feel, Luke will flush it from us and wring it out, he will hang it up to dry and bless it. We are to look back with gratitude, smile beaming smiles for my father’s remembered quirks and nod with nostalgic respect for the dutiful, stoic times he represents. And take our tears to Jesus. Nobody seems to notice that there is no music. The part with the prayers and the box is over soon and before I know it we’re back here at Seaview Villas, right about where I started. Luke seems satisfied. We accept, we trivialise and we wipe our eyes.
Today must be the first day since the Turandot meeting that the house has been full. I stand in the hall and listen to the decorous sway of conversation in the music room where for so long the air has been still. Luke and Christine and Mrs Foley and Dr Chowdry are here, plus two couples from Seaview Villas, perfect strangers whom Christine tells me I have met. They came to pay respects some days ago only I was not just at my best, one of them says. There are others, a few pew-fillers, Luke’s church mainstays, but also quiet old gents who say they always held my father in high regard. One says they very seldom spoke but they used to nod to each other at the surgery.
A party of fifteen or twenty or so will have its lapses into silence; there are pauses in conversation while people get tea and a dram down them, not to mention the finger sandwiches. The place is ripe with the sm
ell of elderly bodies in winter clothes and the whiff of toasted cheese from Sheena’s pizza bites. She comes and goes from the kitchen with plates and cups, and through the open door I see her mother stationed at the sink with her back to the gathering. Sheena’s five-year-old is here too, for reasons that were apologetically explained and I have forgotten. Her name is Jordan. She and Paris have been stuffing themselves and are now sugar-fuelled, snickering and hyperactive, running around groups of people and poking out tongues stained bright pink from the muck they’ve been eating. Jordan crashes into my legs, looks up and gasps; her breath smells like hot plastic and raspberries. I turn her round and steer her back up the hall.
I observe a general absence of solemnity. It is not the presence of the children that dispels it. Funerals used to be what they were meant to be, drab and frugal. People would take a dram like a tonic to bring them round after an unpleasantness, but they don’t anymore; they propose quiet toasts, eyes already tracking the whereabouts of the bottle, working out how long till the next snootful. They raise and clink glasses in a display of enjoyment that once the dead had the power to constrain. Not even for the afternoon of their disposal may the dear departed be anything but celebrated. Mourning may no longer show. It has joined grief in grief’s true place, weeping and pacing an empty room in the small hours, face hidden in the hands. We may not even say dear departed anymore, it’s all first names now. But I don’t feel like celebrating. The obligation is being foisted on me, as if I’m a child given a flag on a stick and commanded to wave it while something she doesn’t recognise goes by. Here I am, doubtful, with the stick cutting into my hand, standing on the edge of the parade.
I wander away to the kitchen. Sheena’s mum, a woman in trainers and aquamarine trousers and sweatshirt, is still at the sink. Her hair is cut so short the back of her neck looks like a man’s. She turns around looking for more cups to wash and I see that it’s Senga McMillan. Her hair is strangely dyed and the face and body are heavier but it’s her. We both break into smiles. She peels off her rubber gloves and plumps her hair.