Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  Rachel was made up of a series of circles – round face, wide eyes, rosebud mouth, bobbing curls, plump arms heavy with bracelets which made expansive, curving, excitable gestures. Lottie quailed slightly in the face of such uninhibited vigour. She hoped that not all Americans were prone to such excesses of energy or she would not survive the trip.

  Later, when they had showered and changed, and just as the rather glutinous lasagne was about to be served, Tim arrived back. He was as quiet as his wife was voluble, but in his studious, blinking, round-shouldered way, he seemed just as pleased as Rachel to welcome the sisters to his home.

  ‘Tina stayed with us for a few months, while she was studying here,’ he said. ‘We had a ball.’

  ‘I thought you lived in San Francisco for a whole year while you did your internship?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Oh, after a while she moved in with Spike,’ Rachel answered.

  Lottie looked at her sister, who had got up and was inspecting the photographs on the wall. ‘I’ve never heard about a Spike.’

  ‘Well, it was a long time ago now,’ Tim said. ‘It’s been at least seven years since Tina was here.’

  ‘Was he a boyfriend, Tina?’ Lottie asked, smelling a mystery. Sometimes she thought they knew almost nothing about each other. She wondered exactly when the closeness between them had gone. Things changed when you were not watching, like a once-hefty dune diminished by the wind or a vibrant flower kept between the pages of a book, which falls out, years later, as a shadow of itself: you only noticed differences when you looked in the same place.

  Tina didn’t turn. ‘Mm, kind of.’

  Sensing a slight awkwardness, Tim tactfully changed the subject. ‘You’re unlucky to miss the boys,’ he said, ‘although I realise that other people might not see it that way. I sometimes forget that not everyone is as besotted as we are. They are staying with my mother for a week.’ He pointed to a picture of his progeny: two solemn-faced boys with carefully combed hair, standing shoulder to shoulder in matching purple T-shirts.

  ‘Which means we are child-free and carefree,’ Rachel said, ‘and we thought you might like to come along to a party we’ve been invited to this evening.’

  ‘If you’re too tired, don’t worry,’ Tim added hastily. ‘We’d be happy to stay in with you guys. Maybe you want an early night.’

  ‘Jet lag is best managed by just pushing through. We’d love to come – wouldn’t we, Lottie?’ Tina said this in a meaningful way, so even though she had a headache, Lottie nodded with what she hoped was the right amount of enthusiasm. She had, after all, signed on the dotted line. She only had herself to blame.

  I, Carlotta Ward, soon to be married to Dean Fowler Watt, agree to cancel my boring old hen weekend (Denim and Diamonds . . . Seriously??) and go with my dear sister Valentina Ward on a two-week road trip in America instead. We will set off from San Francisco and fly back from Park City and hire a car for the bits in between. I confirm that I will say YES to every single challenge.

  Chapter 2

  LOTTIE WENT UP TO THE roof terrace to get away from a middle-aged man in a pork-pie hat and flip-flops who had demonstrated a dim grasp of the need for personal space.

  ‘I could listen to you all night,’ he had said, leaning towards her. His breath was musty like worn money and his face was soft and creased on one cheek, as if he had been lying on a rough surface and had just woken up. ‘British people always sound so polite. It’s real sexy.’

  To be fair to him (and Lottie always did her best to be fair), there wasn’t a lot of space available anywhere in the house. The living room was heaving with bodies, and in the smaller, adjacent rooms the guests had claimed every single surface, even the floor. Pretty much everyone seemed to be drunk or high on something. They moved too quickly and said things in earnest, frantic voices that she couldn’t quite catch. Her ears were still not functioning at full capacity. The women at the party were conspicuously younger than the men, who all seemed to her to be a little predatory and yet also strangely capering, like people who were in the grip of a desperate, unstoppable joviality.

  Her life with Dean mostly involved seeing the same people in the same places, and the fact that she was not tied to anything or anyone except for Tina made her feel uneasy. She was used to knowing exactly where she was, but here, everything was new. She wondered what Dean was doing right at this moment. Sleeping, probably, since it was gone midnight back at home. He was careful to get his allotted eight hours.

  ‘I don’t function well on less,’ he always said, his neat beard well oiled, the whites of his eyes bright. She thought of him tenderly – the way he curled his body in their bed, the duvet between his legs, his fists clenched despite her continually reminding him to relax. She felt suddenly lonely. She had lost sight of her sister more than an hour ago. Tina was probably somewhere in the crush on the dance floor; she always made it her mission to be at the centre of the action, as though she needed to be held up in the movement of things, in case slowing down would cause her to falter and fall.

  The city around her glittered in bits and pieces; it was dusk and the lights were not yet all illuminated. The view from the roof was cut across by a great sweep of raised road, which curved off into the distance. Beneath the pillars of the highway, a man and a woman were sitting on the bonnet of a truck, sharing a bottle of wine. The traffic moved above them in a continuous flow. In the corner of the terrace a firepit burned, fed with kindling and coal by a man in black jeans and a dark jumper. Lottie thought he had the look, with his close-fitting clothes and compact body, of a burglar, someone athletic yet debonair like Cary Grant – who could move across roofs and slide from balcony to balcony, as comfortable in this shining landscape as a cat. Or maybe it was simply that she was in America and on a roof.

  ‘Are you Tina’s sister?’ the cat burglar asked, and Lottie jumped at the sound of his voice. She felt a rush of embarrassment that she had been caught staring at him.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said. As he walked towards her, she saw that he was much less polished than his movie counterpart. He looked as if he could have done with the attentions of a barber. His hair was a little too long and curled on his neck and his stubbled jaw bore no resemblance to Cary’s smooth cleft.

  ‘You’re so alike,’ he said. He looked at her intently and she had the familiar feeling of being compared, perhaps unfavourably, to her younger sibling.

  ‘I’m not nearly as beautiful,’ she said and immediately wondered why she had said something so cringingly self-deprecating.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s altogether true,’ he said. He smiled at her, and all of a sudden the movie-star looks were there again. He had dark, clever eyes and a way of holding himself that she recognised as confidence. She always noticed this quality in others because she lacked it herself.

  ‘How do you know Tina?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m Spike. We hung out for a while when she was younger,’ he said.

  *

  Tina thought that perhaps the jet lag was catching up with her after all, despite the two lines of coke she had been given by one of Rachel’s friends, a statuesque woman called Fay. Fay was dressed in a boiler suit unbuttoned to the waist and when she had bent down to the table, Tina had seen that one of her nipples was threaded through with a twist of glinting copper wire.

  She pushed her way off the dance floor looking for Lottie. She sighed; she was probably hiding away somewhere. The trouble with her sister was that she was just so terminally cautious. She always had been, even as a child.

  Tina remembered a wood and a river. All three of them had been there. She couldn’t recall now which of their temporary homes this particular wood and river was associated with. They had never stayed long enough in any one place to form attachments, and after a while she had discovered it was easier not to start things because then you wouldn’t miss them when you moved on. She had once rejected a neighbour’s cat that had taken a liking to her, even though she had wanted so much to pick i
t up and feel its body beating. I can’t like it, she had thought. I can’t save bits of meat from supper and feed it from my cupped hand. I can’t set out a cushion for it on the deep windowsill, which catches the afternoon sun. If it starts to expect meat and sun it will mourn their absence when I can no longer provide them. It was better that she didn’t set in motion a process that could only end in loss.

  In the unnamed wood a tree trunk had toppled over the river, the weight of its fall embedding it safely on either side of the muddy bank. The sturdy path over the rush of water had been an invitation she couldn’t resist.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Lottie had said, her eyes anxious. ‘You’ll fall.’

  Tina had ignored her and stepped on, enjoying the sickening way the wood gave slightly under her and the speed of the water moving below. She had turned when she reached the middle, executing a triumphant pirouette, and laughed at her sister’s face, made pale by worry and the green shade cast by the trees. However many times Tina had run back and forth over the log, demonstrating its strength, Lottie had refused to attempt the crossing and had eventually walked away by herself. Mia, torn between staying and enjoying the bridge or ensuring that Lottie didn’t get lost, had gone after her. It hadn’t seemed so much fun after they had gone. There was something silly about teetering along a bit of wood if you didn’t have someone to watch you doing it.

  *

  When she had discovered her unexpected windfall, her first thought was that the money could pay for a trip for her and Lottie. She had been surprised that the notion had come to her as suddenly as it had. Tina and her sister had not seen much of each other in recent months, and they had never been on holiday as adults together before, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Being away would give Lottie the opportunity she so clearly needed to work out if her upcoming marriage was really what she wanted. Tina didn’t think Lottie had thought it through; she seemed to have just acquiesced to her redoubtable, but extremely dull, boyfriend’s wishes. She couldn’t understand why Lottie was even bothering to get married. It wasn’t as if anyone in the family had made a success of the institution. Their parents’ union had been a disaster, and Mia’s had sealed her fate. Getting married was something to be avoided at all costs.

  ‘Dean proposed to me at the top of the Shard,’ Lottie had said, as if this was proof positive of the depth of his feelings, rather than the act of someone desperately short of imagination. Apparently some people had been doing yoga in the viewing gallery at the time of the romantic encounter. Undaunted, Dean had still got down on one knee and presented her with a ring, while thirty women doing the downward dog had cheered at them from between their legs.

  ‘Please come,’ Tina had said, when she had rung her sister to explain the plan. ‘We’ll have fun, just the two of us. I guarantee adventures. Just think: California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado . . .’ She rolled the names around her tongue as if they were delicious.

  ‘I’ve got so much to do,’ Lottie had replied. ‘I can’t afford the time – nor, for that matter, the money. We’re spending so much on this wedding.’

  ‘I’ll pay for the flights, the accommodation and the car. You can buy the drinks. Live a little,’ Tina had said. ‘We’ll wear hats and take chances. You know it makes sense.’

  ‘It makes absolutely no sense. Besides, how can you afford it? Have you just got a big photography commission or something?’

  ‘Unfortunately not, although it can only be a matter of time. I’m expecting a call from Beyoncé any day now.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll be doing the triplets photo.’ The smile was evident in Lottie’s voice.

  ‘I’m stocking up on yards of net as we speak.’ Tina laughed. ‘No, the truth is – and this will probably make you choke, since you know how unlikely it is that I have ever paid insurance on anything – but I just got an eight-thousand-pound PPI payment. Couldn’t even remember I’d had the credit card in question.’

  ‘And how is it that I, who have never bought anything unless I had the money in the bank, get not a penny?’

  ‘It’s only money I’ve already spent, even though I didn’t realise I was spending it – because unlike you, I don’t have a ledger in which I write up every single pair of knickers and toothbrush I buy.’

  ‘I thought the point of this phone call was that you were trying to sweet-talk me into your hare-brained scheme to drive around America moments before my wedding. If so, you’re not being particularly successful.’

  ‘Don’t be so boring. I’m offering you the trip of a lifetime, gratis, free, no strings attached.’

  ‘There are always strings attached when it comes to your suggestions, Tina.’

  It had surprised Tina that the sharpness of her sister’s tone hurt her as much as it had. She didn’t have to do this. There were a hundred better ways to spend the money.

  ‘What will the trip be for?’ Lottie had asked, as practical as ever, as if you needed a reason to have fun and see something new. She was so fatally immersed in thoughts of ribbon colours and bubble machines and garters that she had lost all sense of perspective.

  ‘Does there have to be a reason for everything?’ Tina had answered. ‘Can’t we just take some time out to enjoy each other’s company?’ She didn’t think Lottie would have responded well if she had said, I think the man you want to marry is a bit of a tosser, so I’m taking you away in the hope I’ll be able to change your mind and get you to cancel your wedding.

  But Tina knew that she was not being completely honest, even with herself. There was something else she wanted from the trip beyond trying to convince Lottie that getting married was a terrible idea. There was a practical issue that needed to be resolved, of course – but she was also looking for some kind of resolution, a landing place. She couldn’t articulate exactly what she meant by that; she had never told anyone – it didn’t fit with her ‘I can leave anything behind’ persona on which she so relied – but when she was tired, or simply when a day had not turned out the way she had hoped, Mia came to her. She was often there, in the corner of Tina’s eye, conjured up on a breeze or in the half-light of the evening. The shape she took was not her final one, but rather that of the child she had once been, with her sweet, round face with its inward, distracted gaze, as if she was standing with one foot in a dream. It wasn’t that Tina wanted the haunting gone – there was comfort in it – but she wished the ghost of her sister would come to her peacefully and without blame. What she was about to say to Lottie felt like a risk. She took a deep breath.

  ‘We’ll be in America on what would have been Mia’s forty-second birthday,’ she said. ‘We’ll drive through the locations of all her favourite movies. You remember the code . . . A cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man or take unfair advantage. He must be gentle with children, the elderly and animals.’

  There was a silence at the other end of the phone. Tina thought perhaps this was not what Lottie wanted. She knew herself how much easier it was to shut down all thought of Mia.

  ‘I remember.’ Lottie’s voice lost its tone of resistance and became gentle. ‘A cowboy must never go back on his word or a trust confided in him.’

  They were both quiet, acknowledging the gap where Mia’s contribution would have been. Tina could hear her voice with its clear, earnest cadence . . . A cowboy is clean about his person in word, thought and deed. He respects women, his parents and his nation’s law.

  It had been like this ever since she had gone – the childhood rituals that had been carried on into adulthood were now always incomplete. She was not there to lead them as they walked in single file in strict age order (although Tina had always tried to get in front). Jokes were missing their punchlines. The poems they had learnt were without their central verses. Home-made cakes lacked their secret, vital ingredient.

  ‘The Cowboy Commandments are a litany of misogyny and racism,’ Lottie said over the phone.

  Tina ignored her. ‘We could even perhaps do wha
t we promised her,’ she said.

  Lottie didn’t answer. Tina could imagine her sister somewhere in her ordered house, that small frown between her eyes, her fingers picking something up and setting it down again in its place.

  ‘I suppose I’ll do it,’ Lottie said at last. ‘I’ll do it because of Mia.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘HAVE YOU SEEN LOTTIE?’ SHE asked Tim. Unshackled from children, he had drunk deeply from the vodka luge and was looking blearily around the party through misted spectacles.

  ‘I think I saw her go upstairs,’ he said.

  Tina looked into various rooms, most of which were piled with coats and lovers, before discovering a further set of steps up to the terrace. She was sure this was where her sister would be; the girl had always had an unhealthy interest in fresh air. Night had fallen while she had been inside, and she was surprised by the depth of the dark and the way the city showed itself in shining waves, bright at the front, falling away along its slopes into a smeared, velvety gleam.

  She was right; Lottie was hiding away up here. Her tidy black dress with its white collar was unmistakably out of place in this costumed city. She was talking to a man who was leaning with her against the railings of the terrace.

  ‘I’ve found you!’ Tina went up behind her and put her arms around her neck in the stranglehold they had perfected as children. That was the thing about sisters – you always knew just how to hold them and exactly where to push to get the expected reaction. Lottie hated being taken by surprise. It wasn’t until Tina had let her protesting sister go that she turned to look at her companion.