Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  ‘But what if someone comes by?’

  ‘Just say hello and ask them to join us,’ Tina said, grabbing a bottle of red wine from the provisions rucksack (a travelling essential, according to Lottie, who had planned to fill it with healthy snacks – but Tina had had other ideas) and two wine glasses from the cupboard, which had been hygge-ified with scorched doors.

  The hot tub was positioned at the side of the tent and had a view of the sea and the beginnings of a sunset, rose pink now but soon to bloom into a startling orange. Tina walked out like a queen and plunged in. Lottie followed a few moments later, hastily submerging herself so that she was in bubbles up to her neck. She gave a sigh of contentment.

  ‘It’s like heaven, isn’t it?’ Tina said, pouring the wine.

  ‘What if we have to get out of the tub and go somewhere?’ Lottie asked, looking around her. The place was quiet, but every now and again someone emerged from a nearby yurt to go to the toilet block or the restaurant, or to walk along the road by the sea.

  ‘Why would we have to do that?’

  ‘Or say the stove caught fire and we couldn’t get back into the yurt?’

  Tina palmed her forehead. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of things you worry about . . . fire, floods, running out of drinking water, cutting your tongue when you lick envelope flaps, exploding cookers, garlic breath, the fluid levels in your ears and not having enough clean knickers – and that’s just a few of them, not to mention showing even a small section of your body.’

  ‘It’s all right for you. Your body is perfect.’

  ‘I have no breasts to speak of, my bum is square and, unless I really concentrate, I walk with my feet turned in. I think you have a far sexier body than mine.’

  Lottie made a disbelieving face. ‘I promise I’ll try and relax,’ she said, allowing her neck and arms to emerge. She took a gulp of wine. ‘This is like a glamorous version of sister soup.’

  ‘I remember you used to accuse me of having verrucas.’

  Lottie smiled. ‘We were all so close then.’

  ‘Mia kept us together,’ Tina said, her voice sombre.

  They could no longer see the sea, only hear it. From where they were sitting, the waves sounded like the night traffic in San Francisco.

  It was true, Lottie thought. Mia had always been the glue. As three sisters, they had had their own language and their own strength. Three was the perfect number. Three was the Holy Trinity, three wishes, Three Musketeers, Three Graces, three harpies, three witches. Mountains and rivers and bridges came in threes. Even crops were grown in three-sister formations, the corn providing the height for the beans to climb up, the marrow giving ground cover so that the other two plants could thrive. When they were children they had once made up a triangle, the sturdiest shape of them all. If you took away one corner of it, it was simply a line going nowhere.

  ‘We became like a stool with only two legs,’ Lottie said.

  Tina nodded sadly. ‘Yes, we did.’

  Chapter 6

  THE NEXT MORNING WAS MIA’S birthday and her shadow hung over them. Lottie disappeared for a run and Tina walked along the beach taking photos. Her heart wasn’t really in it. The sea, which had seemed so beautiful the day before, was drab under a cloudy sky. The sand was covered in weed – horrible stuff with green blisters, still unpleasantly moist. Pelicans swarmed in the air, occasionally diving head first into the water as if suddenly losing power. The awkwardness and distance between her and Lottie had risen up again now that the first excitement of being on the road had worn off. It had been stupid of her to imagine that the trip was going to move something on between them. She wasn’t even sure what it was that she had hoped for.

  They were too different now. It was more even than a difference of personalities. You could love people whose idea of fun was rubbing their Lycra-clad thighs together like locusts on interminable weekend bike rides, or people who had a special Hoover for cleaning out their car, or who wrote letters to the paper about the dearth of taxis. Hell, you could even love a Brexiteer as long as they didn’t talk about it. What was harder to deal with was not being able to find a way through to the common ground, the stuff that bound you together, even if one of you enjoyed spending high days and holidays dressed up as a Tudor wench.

  *

  Lottie had stopped running and was sitting on the edge of a wall, looking out to sea. She felt too tight and miserable to really get going, and she had only managed a mile or so before despondency had shut her legs down. Running usually liberated her and silenced the querulous voice in her head.

  You should be doing this. You have forgotten to do that. Why do you always say the wrong thing? Does the mole on your back look bumpier than it did last week? Is there really a point to any of this?

  She supposed she should try meditation or mindfulness, both advertised at her local community centre, but sometimes her thoughts seemed unstoppable. Surely any intervention would only offer a brief respite, the way a beaver-built dam in a river only holds fast until the first spring tide. Besides, sitting cross-legged making uninhibited sounds with strangers was not something she felt she could comfortably do. She wondered if the day would ever come when she would listen to her thoughts and there would be no commands or criticisms, only the unchaotic sparking of joy or of noticing what needed to be seen. Somehow she always got in the way of herself.

  She had taken the job at the homelessness charity because she thought it might make a difference to people who had nothing. She had also hoped it might put her worries in perspective, having to contemplate on a daily basis what it was really like to have no sure and safe place to be. The stories the homeless people told her about the inevitable steps downwards, the small increments that led to a scrap of cardboard by a hot air vent, moved and dismayed her but did nothing to switch off her redundant static.

  As she stared at the sea, grey today and moving gently as if brewing something, she wondered if she had always been like this.

  ‘We have to get rid of some of this stuff. We haven’t space in the car,’ her mother had once said, getting ready for a move to another town by tipping the entire contents of her desk drawers into bin bags. Lottie could still remember the feeling of panic their loss had engendered. The maps, the journals of holidays, the scraps of things cut out and glued – these were what helped her to make sense of what was otherwise confusing. What she did, what she had always done, was to establish routines, set things down so that they were clear and unambiguous.

  Mia had helped. She’d had the gift of seeing to the heart of things, of making dramas and anxieties seem not so bad, just annoying or inconvenient but easily surmounted. Nothing was ever the end of the world to her – until, of course, it had been.

  With a little twist of pain, Lottie thought of how beautiful Mia had been as a young woman: tall and strong, with the kind of curves that denim was made for. She had a long neck and sloping shoulders and a round, dimpled face and the Ward girl curving top lip. She caught the eye, not because her beauty was dazzling, but because it surprised you. She had stealth beauty. The kind that makes people feel clever for noticing.

  ‘Here you are!’ Tina exclaimed, appearing suddenly from round the corner and sitting down on the wall. ‘I’ve been looking for you. I thought you had gone running in the other direction.’

  ‘I’ve barely run at all,’ Lottie replied. ‘I’ve just been sitting here, thinking.’

  ‘What have you been thinking about?’

  Lottie paused. ‘What makes us the way we are.’

  The wind picked up slightly, knocking the wading birds off balance and catching up the sand so it misted the surface of the beach like steam.

  ‘I don’t think I actually know who I am,’ Tina said, with surprising openness. ‘I’m quite hard-working, loyal to my friends, impulsive, unromantic, grumpy – but I’m getting on for forty and I still feel half formed. Look at me, I’m still dressing like a teenager.’

  Lottie looked at her sister. S
he was wearing a bra top under a checked shirt that doubled as a dress.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ Lottie said. ‘I need to get something that isn’t black, white or navy. I feel so ordinary next to you.’

  Lottie didn’t much care what she wore. She chose plain clothes simply because it was one less thing to dwell on in the morning. She had no flair for putting things together, but she knew it would make her sister happy to imagine she was having an impact. It made her feel suddenly tender towards Tina, to be able to offer her this.

  Her sister lit up gleefully at her words and grabbed her hand. ‘Right, that’s Challenge Four sorted. We’re going to hit the shops!’

  Lottie laughed. ‘That’s not much of a challenge.’

  ‘It is when I’m in charge of it,’ said Tina in a slightly menacing tone.

  *

  They packed up the car and set off with Lottie at the wheel. Simon and Garfunkel were spinning out their gentle ballad ‘America’, which echoed Lottie’s mood this morning with its mournful theme of searching for something when you didn’t quite know what you were looking for. They stopped at a small strip of shops – the kind you find at regular intervals along pretty much any American highway. In the car park, a hummingbird hung over some hibiscus, its wings beating so fast that it seemed, for all its sophisticated motion, as if it wasn’t moving at all.

  ‘This one looks promising,’ Tina announced, leading Lottie into the type of shop she never normally even noticed, set as she usually was on purchasing a replacement pair of jeans or a black jumper. There were tiny T-shirts and bejewelled shorts and wispy dresses made up of little more than a couple of straps and a pocket. Tina plucked garments off hangers as if she was catching butterflies and hustled Lottie into a changing room.

  ‘It’s OK if I vape, right?’ Tina asked the startled attendant, leaning back in a chair luxuriantly, a cloud of mist swirling around her.

  ‘Well . . . it’s not strictly . . . um . . . permitted,’ the woman ventured. She was wearing high-heeled shoes with spikes, which looked as if she had just trodden on a hedgehog, and a bright red pinafore dress, which added to the general roadkill look.

  ‘I feel like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman,’ Tina announced, ignoring the shop attendant’s objections.

  ‘A ruthless, misogynistic, middle-aged man obsessed with material things who pays a woman for sex and then pays her some more to become his wife,’ Lottie hissed from behind the dressing-room curtain.

  ‘OK, Hugh Grant then, in the scene when that American person is trying on wedding dresses.’

  ‘So you’re a floppy-haired idiot who can’t keep it in his pants, who chooses a numpty in a big hat who is so daft she doesn’t even know that it’s raining, over Kristin Scott Thomas?’

  ‘You really need to lighten up a little, Lottie.’

  There was the sound of urgent scrambling from behind the curtain.

  ‘I’m bloody well not coming out in this one!’ Lottie shouted.

  ‘Come on. Reveal yourself. Remember you’re on challenge time.’

  There was a muffled groan and then the curtain parted to reveal Lottie, bright red in the face, her normally groomed hair in a state of disarray. She had squeezed herself into a tube of animal-print Lycra.

  ‘Your breasts look magnificent!’ Tina announced, provoking another moan from her sister.

  ‘I look like a leopard that has just ingested an impala,’ she said, tugging at the dress.

  ‘OK, OK. It’s not for you. Move on!’

  The next showing was a minuscule dungaree dress with a startled rabbit embroidered on its bib.

  ‘Why have you been hiding those legs?’ Tina said.

  ‘Tina, I’m a forty-year-old woman.’

  A slip dress made out of something that looked like foil was rejected for its fire-hazard properties. A gauzy blouse and shorts met the same fate for their nipple and camel-toe exposure. Lottie pulled a terrible face in an all-in-one littered with bumblebees (‘I look as if I have some kind of a rash’), and posed sarcastically in a floral frock that had more than a hint of alpine upholstery.

  ‘That’s the one!’ Tina said, fifteen outfits later. Lottie was wearing a deep orange, slightly off-the-shoulder dress cinched at the waist with a broad leather belt.

  ‘Are you sure I don’t look like a satsuma?’ Lottie asked, but she was smiling. Tina also persuaded her to buy some loose blue silk shorts with big pockets, and a yellow top to go with them.

  *

  ‘We are sartorially sated,’ Tina said, tucking into a greasy grilled cheese sandwich in the café next door.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lottie said, ‘although I’m not altogether sure that Dean will like them. He prefers muted colours.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Tina said, ‘and here I was thinking he favoured purple leather.’

  ‘He’s not as boring as you think he is,’ Lottie protested – and then laughed at the qualification in her own words. ‘He’s just not flashy. He doesn’t need to be because he knows who he is.’

  ‘Is that why you like him so much?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Partly. He never falters.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not mixing up a strong sense of self with inflexibility?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s just sane, when so many other people don’t seem to be.’

  She remembered a train journey back to London. They had been at a wedding somewhere – there was a period of their life when they always seemed to be at weddings – and they had been sitting next to a group of young men drunk after a night out. The ringleader was louder than the rest, with a highly coloured face that was only a few years short of ruined, and a meatiness about him that made you want to look away. In the row of seats in front of them was a man who had the uncoordinated, bewildered look of someone struggling with a disability; his white neck and ugly anorak marked him out as a person who was used to being the focus of derision. The florid man started ripping up pieces of newspaper, chewing them noisily and then spitting them at the back of the man’s head, cheered on by his companions. The man in the anorak winced each time the pellets hit, but did nothing to stop the onslaught. Everyone else in the compartment was looking studiously out of the window. Dean had stood up and tapped the assailant on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be a dickhead,’ he had said, looking him in the eye when he turned.

  He had been shoved back into his seat for his trouble, but his action had shifted the mood on the train. Other people had started to murmur about ringing the police. One woman tutted loudly. Another held up her phone threateningly. In the end, after gazing around with a piggy-eyed belligerence, the tormentor shrugged and sat down. Lottie had been so proud of Dean she’d held onto him all the way home. He was a good person. She felt a little rush of happiness at the thought that they would soon be married.

  *

  Tina and Lottie drove back into Big Sur and took a walk in a patch of redwood trees. These were smaller than the ones found further north, and yet still magnificent with their great fluted trunks, frequently hollowed out at the base and providing shady caves for bats. Breaking through the tops of the trees, the sun struck the path in front of them in great slices of light, so that it seemed to their dazzled eyes that the world was a series of lines and segments. Lottie was not sure if she was imagining the smell of incense that insinuated itself sweetly through the odour of mushroomed wood and dank earth.

  ‘If you were a landscape, what would you be?’ she asked Tina.

  ‘I’d be a great, straight beach with a boardwalk in the middle, and people would stroll and cycle and skate down it, and in the sky would be hundreds of kites with coloured tails.’

  ‘I’d be a forest,’ Lottie said. ‘Something like this one, but with more water around, so you could hear it wherever you were, and the ground would be soft under my feet.’

  ‘You are an utter weirdo,’ Tina said, laughing. ‘Who wants squelchy ground when you can have golden sand?’

  ‘What landscape was Mia?’


  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . a field of sunflowers, or perhaps the South Downs with their rolling acres of poppies.’

  ‘I think her landscape was something much darker.’

  It was typical of Tina to put a convenient gloss on things. Poppies and sunflowers! Even now she couldn’t bear to look squarely at anything. She had been right to describe herself as half-formed, Lottie thought; she was still a child. The fondness Lottie had felt for her sister earlier in the day was replaced by irritation. Lottie should be at home, making the most of her days of leave, working out seating arrangements and buying shoes, not walking through this wood with a person who had spent most of her life pretending that everything was all right when it wasn’t, and that all you had to do was to keep on collecting things – men, travel destinations, hilarious anecdotes – as a barricade against, actually looking at anything.

  It was ironic, when you thought about it, that Tina had become a photographer, which above all other jobs surely demanded keen and extraordinary observation. And yet she was good at her trade, particularly her portraits of women. Tina’s photographs revealed her sitters’ personalities clearly, as if she had somehow made them show more than they wanted to. She had always taken photographs of the three of them when they were children – balancing her camera on walls and chairs so that she could be in the picture too. Every year she took a special one on New Year’s Day, wherever they happened to be. She slotted the photographs into a series of plastic folders so that they could be unfolded in date order, the clothes and hairstyles changing, the backgrounds almost always new, the early closeness morphing into the stubborn solitariness of adolescence, the alliances, the arms around shoulders seeming permanent since they were recorded there, but always shifting in real time. Despite the changing backgrounds and the way one or other of them stood slightly apart, whether one frowned and the others smiled, it was always clear that they were utterly linked.

  Lottie couldn’t remember when Tina had stopped taking the photographs. Looking back, it seemed to Lottie that the end of that yearly ritual had been the first stage of letting Mia slip away.