‘Do you find him attractive? You didn’t seem to earlier in the evening. Or was it just a drunk fuck?’
Tina did one of her scary – to Lottie at least – head swivels. It reminded her of a dog suddenly smelling blood.
‘That’s the trouble with you, right there. You are small-minded. Mean.’ She mimicked her sister’s tone of voice. ‘Was it a drunk fuck?’
Being mimicked was one of the things that always riled Lottie. She remembered Tina doing it as a child and even now she couldn’t resist rising to the bait.
‘I don’t talk like that! I was just wondering why it’s OK for you to go to bed with a man you met five minutes before – why behaving like a slut is somehow transformed into being a free spirit when you’re the one doing it?’
Lottie wasn’t even sure why she was arguing. She didn’t really care that much who Tina decided to sleep with. What really annoyed her was the way Tina cloaked what was pretty pathetic behaviour in an aura of virtue. Lottie knew the implication was that she, by contrast, was shut-down and unadventurous.
‘I don’t think Spike was that impressed,’ she said.
‘Who gives a fuck what Spike thinks?’ Tina said. ‘You’d better Skype that droopy fiancé of yours, before you forget he even exists.’
‘What the hell are you implying?’ Lottie almost shouted.
Both of them were standing up now and panting at each other across the table.
‘Spike wasn’t that impressed,’ Tina said, imitating Lottie again. She smiled nastily; Tina was the mistress of the horrible, fuckwit, annoying smile. Lottie couldn’t remember when she had last felt this angry. It was as if she was a child again and had that same quivering sense of being terribly wronged and not being able to articulate the injustice. Usually she was the one who sucked things in and smoothed things out, but Tina had always been able to probe her soft spots, to winkle out the very things she wanted to keep hidden and under control.
‘Lottie fancies Boris Jarvis! Lottie thinks that poo comes out of her fanny hole! Lottie’s wearing a bra even though all she’s got are a couple of raisins!’
‘I seem to have hit a nerve,’ Tina said. ‘At least there appears to be some feeling in that buttoned-up chest of yours.’
‘For your information, letting it all – and I mean all – hang out is not a sign that you have feelings. It’s a sign you’re a shallow, self-centred arse.’
‘Ahh, so she’s fallen back on that oft-used phrase “For your information”. I was wondering how long it would take for you to start informing me of things.’
It came out of nowhere. It was as if Lottie was watching someone else as she drew back her hand and slapped her sister in the face. It was as hard a blow as she could manage from the other side of the table. The impact left finger-shaped marks on Tina’s skin. Her sister didn’t move.
‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Lottie. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘But you did,’ Tina said.
Just then they were greeted by voices from below.
‘Look what we caught!’
Beneath the balcony, Greg and Spike were beaming and holding up a giant fish. It shone silver in the sun, its mouth drooping open, the life almost still in it.
‘Well done!’ Lottie got up and leant over the balcony, although she found it difficult to summon up any enthusiasm. She thought of the feel of the fish, the slippery drag of the scales, the slight give of the flesh, and felt sick.
‘That’s lunch sorted,’ Greg announced. He was wearing some sort of complicated fisherman’s smock with bulging pockets and a waxed, feathered hat. Spike was in shorts and a baseball cap and carried the fishing rods over his back. Neither of them looked as if they had missed out on any sleep.
‘See you downstairs,’ Greg said, and the pair of them disappeared from view.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ Tina said, and she swept out of the room on the wings of righteous indignation.
Lottie felt ashamed of what she had done. She didn’t think she had ever hit anyone before. Even as children the sisters had never progressed much beyond the occasional shove or sly pinch. Her interactions as an adult might have sometimes caused her to clench her teeth or to send evil looks in the direction of the drivers – almost exclusively male – who swung out in front of her in their cars, but nothing had ever stirred her to real violence. She knew where hate got you. She had seen it at first hand, the disgusting, dribbling dance of it. The way it made you feel as if nothing in the world was safe. Maybe, she consoled herself, it was different when you hit your sister. Sisters were not the same as the other adults in your life. They came from the same weaving, the same story. It was almost as if you were hurting yourself.
She felt a sudden need to talk to Dean. Her uncharacteristic act of violence had shaken her. He would surely be back from work now.
When he answered the Skype call, his face on the screen of her iPad made her feel like crying. Without her there he had forgotten to check his hair; it was sticking out the way it did when she didn’t remind him to wet it and press it down in the morning.
‘Hello, my darling,’ he said. ‘How are you getting on? How’s that sister of yours?’
‘I’ve just hit her,’ she said.
He looked surprised. She loved the way his eyebrows rose as he widened his eyes. ‘That’s not like you,’ he said. ‘What did she do?’
‘She was mimicking me,’ Lottie said, feeling foolish.
‘Well, we all know we should never do that,’ he said gravely. Then he smiled, the ends of his mouth hidden a little by his moustache.
‘You need to give your hair a trim,’ she said. ‘I can’t see your whole mouth.’
‘Never mind my hair. What’s it like? America, I mean.’
‘It’s beautiful, much more beautiful than I ever imagined. It’s like being inside a wide screen all the time. The edges seem further apart than they do in England.’
‘I miss you,’ he said, carefully upbeat. She knew he didn’t want to make his missing her a source of blame.
‘I wish you were here. We went to Cannery Row,’ she said, knowing that he would appreciate the reference. Dean quoted something about the light and the noise and the dream-like quality of the famous street. He knew the first lines of hundreds of novels. It was his party piece.
‘The whole of America feels a bit like a dream,’ she said.
‘Where are you now?’
‘Near Guadalupe,’ she said. ‘The dunes are massive and everything smells of strawberries and I’m just about to go down and eat some fish.’
‘You look so beautiful. Is that a new dress?’
‘Yes. Tina chose it.’
‘It suits you,’ he said, putting his hand up as if he thought he could touch her. She blew him a kiss.
‘I love you. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you again soon.’
Switching off his face invoked another wave of melancholy. She really needed to get a grip. She was in America, and supposed to be having the time of her life on a trip Tina was paying for. She loved her sister. Whatever had happened in the past could surely be mended somehow. She wondered briefly why she hadn’t mentioned to Dean that they had acquired a hitchhiker. It wasn’t that she felt she had anything to hide; it was more that she wanted to protect him from feeling the insecurity he sometimes seemed prey to. She thought again with a stab of guilt about the way Tina’s skin had bloomed with the mark of her fingers. She would go and apologise properly to her now.
Chapter 10
TINA WASN’T IN HER ROOM, so Lottie followed the sound of voices downstairs to the huge kitchen. It was decked out in steel and solid-block wood surfaces, as if it was lying in wait for an army of chefs.
‘Ah, finally you emerge!’ Greg said. He was in a striped butcher’s apron and wielding a knife. ‘Look at this beauty! A truly fresh fish glistens like this. The flesh should be pearly-white rather than grey.’
Of course, he was as expert at the filleting of fish as he was at eve
rything else he attempted. He had sliced it along its belly and its innards, darker than she imagined, lay in a shining, tangled mass on the table. Lottie felt another wave of nausea. She vowed to avoid margaritas and cheese and ill temper in the future. She tried to catch her sister’s eye, but Tina was looking studiously away from her. All signs of the ravages of the night before had been smoothed away by her shower. The mark on her cheek had faded, too. She was looking beautiful in gingham shorts and a tight, halterneck top that showed off the skin of her arms, already turning a little golden.
*
After lunch, they hit the road again. Tina gave the wooden horse a sly kick. Lottie, to whom she had spoken only the bare necessities since their row, was driving. Spike was sitting in the passenger seat wearing Lottie’s cowboy hat. The two of them were as thick as thieves, she noticed sourly. Laughing at each other’s jokes, passing a cup of coffee back and forth. Even with the roof of the car down, it was hot. Raptors wheeled around in the relentless blue sky, looking for the absent breeze.
Greg had been oddly formal when she’d left. ‘Thank you for visiting,’ he had said, as if she was a relative he had been duty-bound to put up. She had been a little offended by his apparent coldness, but when she had stretched out to kiss him goodbye, she had felt him tremble.
‘Where’s the wife?’ she had asked the night before, as they lay together amongst the tangled sheets. He had given her body the skilled attention he seemed to give everything, although she knew even as he touched her, smoothing her skin with his competent hands, that this would only last until he noticed something else. As he plunged between her legs, he demonstrated his ability to stay down without breathing, if not for twenty-two minutes, at least long enough for her to resist and then let go.
‘I had one for a while,’ he said, his subsided penis lying snugly against his thigh. On the wall opposite the bed a stuffed owl stared, and through the open window she could smell the iodine of the ocean.
‘What happened?’
‘We were very young. Barely out of college. On the second anniversary of our wedding, she leant over the restaurant table as if she was about to wipe soup from my face, and asked me when I had last thought about her. I didn’t understand what she meant. I said something about how I had spent the previous morning choosing the diamond bracelet I had presented to her as an anniversary gift. “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I don’t mean actions. When did I last stray into your mind? Tell me one time recently when you were driving somewhere or reading a book and the thought of me made you soften or even harden. I’d take that,” she said. I couldn’t find the right answer. It seemed to me that it was enough to think about her when she was there in front of me. It was a misunderstanding. I thought she was happy but it turned out she was lonely. I’ve never risked it again.’
‘I get that,’ she had said, touching him on his already absent face. They were not dissimilar. She recognised in him her own need not to dwell, to move on and keep moving.
She looked out of the car window. She had been more shocked than hurt by Lottie’s blow. It wasn’t the sort of thing she would have imagined her sister doing. Lottie was verging on priggish in her earnest desire to do the right thing. The evils of plastic drinking bottles, the opening divide between the rich and the poor, the criminal use of logs in wood burners, the greed of bankers, the disinterest of politicians, men who touched waitresses, the imminent extinction of the bee all filled her with outrage. She was right about almost all of it (Tina was indifferent on the matter of burning wood), but it would be just so much more restful if she could switch it off from time to time.
‘What’s going on with you two?’ Spike asked, turning round to look at Tina as if he thought she was to blame.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Oh, come on. You haven’t said a word to each other for hours.’
‘I behaved rather badly,’ Lottie said, in that prissy way she had that made Tina want to gnaw on her own tongue.
‘I can’t believe that,’ said Spike, grinning at Lottie. ‘I thought your younger sister was the badass. What did you do?’
‘I hit her,’ Lottie said. She managed to make it sound rather cute, as if she was a kitten who had not quite learnt how to control her claws.
‘The hitting thing is not good. You can’t fall out on this trip,’ Spike said. ‘Why don’t we stop and sample some wine? You two can drink a loving cup.’
‘I’m not sure I want to drink any more after last night. Perhaps we should all go easy today,’ Lottie said, which immediately made Tina feel like getting drunk just to spite her.
In Los Alamos, a small town with Victorian hotels and shopfronts that still bore evidence of their western past, they stopped outside the tasting room of a local vinery. Between walls decorated with architectural salvage and pictures of grapes, Spike and Tina set about seeing if they could work their way through every wine on offer. Lottie swilled a little Grenache around the inside of her mouth and spat it out into the bucket.
‘I’m going to explore some of the antique shops,’ she said, after about ten minutes.
‘Don’t, whatever you do, bring back anything larger than a silver fork,’ her sister shouted after her.
The wine kept coming, the deceptively small glasses adding up. Before long Tina realised that she was getting drunk. She needed something solid to eat. The fish at lunch had been delicious – soft-fleshed and crisp-skinned – but one small fillet and a peppery salad wasn’t enough to sustain her.
‘Mmm, this is a nice one,’ Spike said. ‘Blackcurrant, damson, wet rope and just a hint of soil.’
‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, do you?’
‘I know what I like,’ he said, and looked at her. For a moment she thought that he was flirting with her, then she remembered the way he always used to look intently at her just before he spoke, as if he was working out which version of events she would find most palatable.
‘How did you get on with Greg?’ he asked, looking into his glass of wine as if he had found something floating in it.
‘Well enough,’ she said.
‘He said to me he thought you were sad.’
‘What, sad as in pathetic loser?’
‘No. He was quite taken with you, actually. Sad as in dejected and distressed.’
‘I don’t know what he’s on about. If anyone’s sad, it’s him, living in that great, empty pile of a house with its cabinets of coins and clutter, dressing like he thinks he’s Bertie Wooster.’
‘Greg’s come to terms with what he is,’ Spike said.
‘Meaning he thinks I haven’t? I don’t think one evening of chat and some sex is enough to qualify him to make an assessment of my psyche.’ Tina knew she had crossed the point from mild inebriation into full drunkenness. Her words were beginning to get away from her and the architectural salvage on the walls was looking ever more lopsided.
‘How was the sex?’ Spike asked.
‘Mind your own fucking business.’
‘You’re right. That was inappropriate. It was the damson talking, not me.’
‘You’ve still got that sticking-out ear,’ she said.
‘It’s the reason for my extremely acute powers of hearing.’
‘I want you to do something for me,’ she said. She was slurring her words now.
‘Oh yes? Carry you to the restroom? To the car?’
‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, thank you very much.’ She disproved the truth of her words by reaching for her glass and missing it completely. ‘I want you to seduce Lottie. You’re good at that sort of thing, right?’
Even through the mist of wine, Tina could see that she had astonished him. His eyes went wide and his perfectly formed jaw slackened.
‘What did you just say?’ he asked.
‘I want you to pretend you’re falling in love with her.’
‘Why the heck would I do that?’
‘Don’t make such a fuss. She’ll be back i
n a minute and I want to get it sorted before then.’
He looked angry. ‘You are sad in a pathetic loser way.’
‘It’s not a big deal. She’s about to marry a complete no-hoper by the name of Dean Fowler Twat and I just want to test her devotion. If she can resist you with your sticking-out ear and that irritating way you have of making people feel important, then I’ll wash my hands of her. She can marry him if she really wants to. The most interesting fact about him is that he knows the first line of one hundred and twenty novels.’ She cackled so much she nearly fell off her chair.
‘You really are a piece of work,’ Spike said.
‘Will you do it, though?’
‘No, I fucking well won’t.’
The door of the shop swung open and Lottie came staggering in with an alabaster vase on a plinth.
‘Oh, bloody hell!’ Tina exclaimed. ‘You can leave that behind for a start.’
Lottie surveyed the damage. ‘Looks like I’m driving, then.’
Chapter 11
‘IF YOU WERE AN ANIMAL, what kind of an animal would you be?’ Tina asked.
Lottie rolled her eyes at Spike. In the rear-view mirror, she could see Tina slumped in the back seat with the alabaster vase on her lap. They had already had to stop once so that she could throw up, and Lottie was worried that she might actually vomit again into her new antique.
‘I’d be an albatross,’ Tina announced. ‘Flying over the surf. Forever shunned as an unlucky talisman.’
‘More like a buzzard,’ Spike muttered.
‘I heard that! What would you be, Lottie?’
‘I don’t know . . . a beaver?’
Tina spluttered with laughter. She was dragging maniacally on her vape, but Lottie had given up remonstrating about the noise. Tina was unreachable in her current state.
‘Beavers are very industrious,’ Lottie said.
‘Your beaver isn’t,’ Tina said.
‘You’re so childish,’ Lottie replied. ‘Where shall we make our overnight stop?’
‘We’ll follow the road,’ Tina said, putting the vase down and getting to her feet. She spread out her arms as if she thought she was on the Titanic.
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