‘Hello Tina,’ Spike said.
A sudden flare of shock took her words away. She told herself that it was simply that she hadn’t been expecting to see him. He looked just the same. Slightly older around the eyes maybe, a little less hair and more forehead – but everything else was unchanged. It wasn’t until this moment that she realised just how well she remembered him. He still had that slightly protuberant left ear. She had once pinned it back with a bulldog clip as a joke.
‘It’s been a very long time. Seven years, I think,’ Spike said, sensing his advantage.
‘I thought you’d moved away from San Francisco,’ she said at last. She was aware of Lottie looking at the two of them with curiosity.
‘I did,’ he said, ‘but then I came back. I missed the smugness of the locals and being freezing cold at four o’clock in the afternoon, even in summer, and the terrifying cost of renting an apartment.’
‘Are you still looking for little stones?’ Tina asked.
‘Yep. In fact, I’m going to Mexico in a couple of weeks’ time on a field trip.’
‘He collects pebbles,’ Tina said, turning to Lottie in explanation.
‘I’m actually a geologist with a particular interest in meteorites.’ Spike’s voice was good-humoured. ‘But why split hairs? Tina’s right – basically I look for bits of old iron.’
‘It sounds very interesting,’ Lottie said.
Tina yawned ostentatiously. ‘It is if you’re the sort of person who finds crawling around on scrubby ground riveting.’
Spike smiled at Tina, and she scowled at him. ‘It’s good to see you haven’t changed. I’ve been hearing about your road trip plans from your sister. It sounds as if it’s going to be quite an adventure.’
‘Yes, it will, actually,’ Tina answered sharply. She wondered if he was making fun of her.
‘I wish I could come along,’ he said, ignoring the edge in her voice.
‘Three’s a crowd. And besides, I’m sure our little trip will seem tame since you’ve seen it all before.’
‘Travelling without children?’ he asked.
‘Neither of us has children,’ Tina said.
‘I see,’ he said.
‘I don’t think you actually see much at all,’ Tina retorted. ‘You never bloody did.’
‘Shall we go back inside and get a drink?’ Lottie said. ‘Why are you being so rude to him?’ she whispered, as Spike led the way back inside.
‘I’ve always brought out the best in her,’ Spike said, without turning round.
*
Back at the party Tina disappeared with a tall woman dressed in what looked like a workman’s overall. Lottie did her best to mingle. She attempted to dance a little, but she felt foolish and inhibited. She wondered why other people seemed to lose themselves so effectively, swaying with their eyes closed and their arms above their heads in a way that should have looked stupid, but somehow didn’t. She could never seem to get her body to do what she wanted. The group next to her were doing moves to ‘Blame It On the Boogie’ in a great, grinning line, all with synchronised hand gestures. I just can’t, I just can’t dance, Lottie thought, and was relieved to see her sister making her way towards her.
‘Shall we call it a night?’ Tina shouted above the noise, and Lottie let herself be taken by the hand and pulled out of the room.
It was early October, and the city dripped slow rain from its curving metal staircases and elaborate plasterwork. Cars sparked water, the sound of their tyres like sticky tape being pulled away slowly. Lottie could smell the sea –a briny, slightly oily odour, as distinct as the spices and smoke of the daytime.
‘Let’s walk back,’ Tina said. ‘I don’t think it’s very far.’ She was shivering a little in her tiny dress that barely covered her bottom. She fumbled in her bag and brought out a thin scarf that she wrapped around her shoulders. Lottie refrained from reminding her that she had suggested Tina should bring a jacket; even she knew she had to rein in her tendency to be pompous.
‘So what’s the story with Spike?’ she asked.
‘I met him when I was here last time.’
‘Well, I know that! I was just wondering what happened between you. Didn’t you live with him for months?’
‘Just because I lived with him doesn’t mean I was sleeping with him. Rachel was pregnant and being sick and I felt I’d outstayed my welcome at their house.’
‘Something happened between you. I could tell by the way you were talking to each other.’ Lottie might be a stiff on the dance floor but she could recognise intimacy when she saw it, and her sister had definitely had sex with the cat burglar on at least one occasion. Tina had gone into haughty hair-touching at the mere sight of him.
‘It was just a fling. It was years ago and meant very little. I had several relationships – if you can call them that – while I was living here.’
Lottie had no trouble imagining the swathe a thirty-one-year-old Tina must have cut through the local male population. A man had once driven into a lamp post at the sight of her sister marching down the street in shorts – a story their mother was fond of recounting with a kind of envious glee. Lottie herself had only slept with three men, including Dean. They were getting married on the tenth anniversary of their first kiss.
*
It had been autumn. The wet leaves had slid under their feet and a bonfire with a chemical tang was burning somewhere near. In the park, the pear tree they were standing under still retained its fat, golden fruit and a girl, too old to be there, was moving backwards and forwards on a swing, bouncing her feet along the spongy stuff they put down so that children didn’t hurt themselves. It had been a clumsy kiss – she had turned her head slightly at the last minute so that his mouth had landed on the corner of hers. But the second one had been better, and the heat of it had sent them home smiling and touching shoulders on the tube. In his room in the draughty shared house he had unbuttoned her coat and placed his hands on her waist and looked at her as he pulled her skirt up slowly. She had been amazed, both by his confidence and the depth of her longing. Despite the grey, unforgiving light, which came solidly through the curtainless window, and the housemate in the next room, she had forgotten and then found herself in him.
‘How do you know that you’ll want to sleep with him forever?’ Tina had asked once, after a not particularly successful drink out which Lottie had arranged in an attempt to get her sister and her boyfriend to know each other better. ‘It’s not as if you have much to compare him to.’
‘I just know,’ she had said, and she did know, although there had been times over the years when she had allowed herself to wonder how it might be with someone else. Despite the way she loved him, there was a little tug sometimes from the things she would never now know. It was a bit like finding the perfect house and rejoicing that you can live in it forever, but feeling wistful on certain summer days that you were never going to live by the sea.
*
‘I would hazard a guess that it was a little more, for him at least, than a fling,’ Lottie said now, scrutinising her sister’s profile. ‘And you looked as if you had seen a ghost.’
‘Stop staring at me!’ Tina said, with exasperation. ‘I can feel your eyes boring into the side of my head. You’re wasted at that homelessness charity. You should work for the police. You’d force people to admit to all sorts, even things they hadn’t done.’
Lottie smiled. ‘I’ll get it out of you in the end.’
Chapter 4
‘YOU DO THE FIRST STRETCH, and I’ll take over in a couple of hours,’ Tina said, as she settled herself into the car. ‘I’m feeling a bit rough at the moment.’
After saying goodbye to their hosts, they had had their first American breakfast in a café round the corner, Lottie tucking into a pile of pancakes topped with berries and maple syrup while Tina picked at a piece of toast.
‘Where’s our next destination?’ Lottie asked.
‘This trip is not about having an itinerary,’
Tina said. ‘It’s about stopping when we feel like stopping. We can drive all day, or stay in one spot, just as the spirit moves us.’
‘I’d rather the spirit didn’t move us to spend the night in some lay-by, or up a track with a dead end,’ Lottie said.
‘Remember you agreed to say yes to everything. You even signed the document. Challenge One is for you to give up control. I know it’s difficult for you, but let go of your addiction to timetables and maps. Allow yourself to just be, and see what turns up.’ She fiddled with her phone and the melodic strains of the Red Hot Chili Peppers singing ‘Road Trippin’’ filled the car.
*
Lottie had always had an irresistible impulse to master her territory. Looking back, Tina thought it was as if Lottie could only come to terms with their regular moves if she was able to exactly record her environment. She would tear out pieces of paper from her exercise book and Sellotape them carefully together along their edges to make a large enough expanse to fashion a map. She would give grand names to even the most insignificant of things; a curved hedge was called The Green Crescent, a bus shelter became The Silver Cave and the downward slant of a road was The Great Fall. Each of these places was recorded and colour-coded in elaborate keys at the bottom of the page. The dotted lines along the streets, looking like Hansel and Gretel’s dropped crumbs of bread, traced the routes they had taken. The map would be marked with things only Lottie had noticed: a house that looked like a bearded face, the slavering hound of hell who guarded the post office, the totem pole lamp post strung about with colour photographs of missing cats.
Tina could still see Lottie crouched on the floor, drawing her way back home. If all the maps her sister had made were laid out next to each other, they would represent a strange sort of a world where motorways became paths through woods and rivers rushed through back gardens – that was what it had felt like when they were children. They had never really known how far things stretched, and where what they had to know began and ended.
*
‘I hate it when you say things like “just be”,’ Lottie said now. ‘It makes you sound so vapid.’
‘Only you would think to use the word vapid in casual conversation.’
‘Well, it does. All that let’s-go-where-the-wind-blows-us stuff makes me cringe,’ Lottie said. ‘And anyway, I thought going to the party last night was Challenge One.’
She was distinctly anxious about what Tina might ask her to do. She had found the party last night quite challenging enough.
When she had told Dean about the plan that she should acquiesce to whatever Tina told her to do, he had been incredulous. ‘Under her hippy-dippy disguise,’ he’d said, ‘your sister is bloody power-mad. Why the hell are you agreeing to let her manipulate you?’ She had been lying on her stomach at the time and he had been kissing the Finnish flag along her back. She had been struggling to identify its particular, subtle configuration. When it came right down to it, flags were pretty much all the same. At his instigation they sometimes played this game after sex. She found it endearing, but also ridiculous – a teacher and a charity worker’s idea of post-coital tenderness. She smiled now to think of how Tina would mock it: Christ, even sex with him involves having to LEARN something.
She wasn’t sure herself why she had capitulated to the challenges – only that she had heard the eagerness in her sister’s voice and it had reminded her of what they had always done. The three of them had bound themselves together with avowals and promises, with demands of overt demonstrations of faith.
If you climb that tree to the very top, if you run across the level crossing, if you kick Mark Savage’s ankle, we will live forever.
She remembered them sitting in the bunker on some quiet weekday evening, cutting the tips of their fingers with a Stanley knife and rubbing their bleeding hands together.
‘We promise we will always stick together, come what may,’ Tina had declared. She’d been dressed in a sheet, with a plastic flowerpot fastened to her head with an elastic band, the mistress of ceremonies, even then. She wants to test me as we used to test each other, Lottie thought. She thinks my life is dull and she wants to show me something else. It touched her to think that Tina wanted to share what she knew, and so Lottie had given in.
‘God, no!’ Tina said now. ‘That was nothing. Your tasks are going to be things that really take you out of your comfort zone. But don’t worry, I’ll ease you in.’
Lottie’s heart sank. She was aware that her comfort zone was a very narrow sliver of land, barely enough for a patch of lawn. She didn’t trust her sister’s concept of easing in. Easing in was a foreign notion to the woman who had once stabbed a man with a fork between his fingers, fastening him to the table, because he had put his hand on her leg. He had been married, but still – Lottie would have struggled to do more than blush and move away.
‘We have to know where and when we are going to sprinkle the ashes,’ Lottie said. ‘We have to have that as a destination, at least.’
She had been trying not to think about it too much, but the idea that they were carrying what was left of Mia in the boot of their car made her anxious. She worried that a bump in the road or a sudden stop might dislodge the lid, that the gaffer tape she’d wrapped around it would not be strong enough. It was typical that it had been her, not Tina, who’d had to smuggle the thing into America in her suitcase.
‘Why does it have to be me?’ she had complained. ‘I’m sure it’s against the rules to bring ashes across borders. They might think it’s drugs.’
‘Because you look like the sort of person who would never do anything wrong,’ Tina had answered, grinning wickedly.
Mia had made the transit safely. She was now tucked up under the carpet of the boot with the spare tyre, a precaution that Lottie had insisted on, despite Tina’s derision. It was strangely painful to think of the fragments of her being carried along a road she had never seen.
‘We don’t know exactly where we are going to put her,’ Tina said. ‘Only that it has to be in Monument Valley at “Landing Rock”, wherever that is.’
‘That’s the place Dove and Tache found the baby, right?’
‘Yes. Just before they are ambushed and Dove gets injured and Tache goes back for him.’
‘Dove, so named because he is anything but peaceable, and Tache, who had the smallest moustache in the world,’ Lottie quoted.
Films had been a protection and an escape throughout their childhood, and they knew Mia’s favourite movie by heart. They had latched on to westerns after Mia had come back from a jumble sale one day at the age of twelve with a box filled with videos of them – Red River and High Noon and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – Mia had loved them all, even Hop-along Cassidy, which everyone knew was a bit boring. The one she watched the most often was Landing Rock, the story of two brothers avenging the death of their murdered father.
‘Why do you like it so much?’ Lottie had asked her once.
Mia had smiled. ‘I like the fact that where they get to is not where they set out for.’
‘If you think you are going to go and die on me, you’d better think again. The baby has just dropped a load in his diaper,’ Tina and Lottie said now in unison, and laughed.
‘It’s strange that she liked all that shooting and murder,’ Lottie said. ‘Not to mention the subjugation of women and Native Americans.’
‘I think she liked the fact that in pretty much every movie the hero rights a wrong. In the process he has to fight the enemy, who is often someone a bit like him.’
‘Yeah. The moral code is always clear, even if you might not like some of the ways the protagonists go about doing what they think’s the right thing.’
Tina didn’t answer, so Lottie continued.
‘I think she saw herself in the role of the avenger. She was always trying to be good.’
‘Stop talking now, I’ve got a headache,’ Tina said.
Her sunglasses were on again even though it was foggy, and she wa
s moving her head very carefully as though she thought it might topple off her neck.
I won’t mention the red wine and the vodka and the cocaine, Lottie told herself. She didn’t want to be a nag. Last night, her sister hadn’t been able to fall asleep once they had finally got back to the house, which had turned out to be much further away than they had thought. By then Tina had been wired and frozen to the bone. They were sharing the double bed in the guest room, and Tina had shivered and wriggled beside her for at least an hour. Every time Lottie thought she was falling asleep, Tina would say something else.
‘I can’t get warm.’
‘All I can see when I try and count sheep are their shitty bottoms.’
‘What do you think is better – being blind or being deaf?’
‘Do you think Trump’s pubes are the same colour as his hair?’
‘Tell me something interesting.’
‘Describe what dull Dean is like in bed, that should send me off.’
‘I’m too tired to talk,’ Lottie had replied, her scratchy eyes firmly shut.
‘Does he go down on you?’
‘Fuck off, Tina.’
‘I can’t get comfortable. I’ll never be able to sleep,’ Tina had moaned. ‘Do you remember that imaginary place I invented to escape into when dearest Ma and Pa were going at it hammer and tongs?’
‘Please stop talking.’ Lottie had tried to muffle her ears with her pillow. Her sister’s words recalled the feeling of being in a siege that was so much part of her experience of childhood. They used to close their door on the rage that made downstairs a dangerous, shifting place, and the three of them would gather at the bottom of one of their beds, the sheets over their heads, pillows piled like hills and valleys. Without any props, they had been able to see and describe the place that lay there in front of them. Bedtown was a scattering of red-roofed houses that lay in the valley between two mountains. The graveyard had wafer-thin headstones. Shadowy cats, pale as ghosts, sat on the rims of bins. In the sweet shop the spun sugar shone in crimson and cobalt blue, the same colours as the church windows. The clothes emporium had dancing mannequins decked out in sequins and lace. The heart-shaped swimming pool was decorated with bunting and a flume twisted down into foaming water. White horses with green ribbons in their manes carried people up and down the mountain slope to the school on the other side of the mountain. A full moon, brighter than any sun, lit the town.
Live a Little Page 3