Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  ‘If you decide you are going to marry Dreary Dean,’ here Tina gave a meaningful cough, ‘you’ll need something more alluring for the honeymoon than the M&S nighties you are probably thinking of taking. I’d lay money that Dean has a fondness for a nurse. He looks the type that’s secretly yearning for a bed bath.’

  ‘We’re not even going on a honeymoon,’ Lottie said, and Tina rolled her eyes.

  ‘Seriously? You have the perfect excuse for an extended break and decide not to take it! Well, a nurse’s outfit will come in handy even if the pair of you are so lacking in imagination you are stay-mooning.’

  Despite Spike’s charm offensive and the fact that Lottie had admitted being attracted to him, it seemed to Tina that Lottie was still planning on going ahead with the wedding. She couldn’t detect any particular closeness between her and Spike – if anything, Lottie was acting a little frostily towards him. Perhaps she had decided she didn’t fancy him after all. It was as if Lottie felt that since she had set the whole wedding thing in motion there was nothing she could now do to stop it. How could she be crying one minute at the thought that her wobble over Spike meant she was not sure about Dean, and the next talking calmly about her honeymoon? Cancelling a wedding was a huge, embarrassing thing to do, but it wasn’t nearly as catastrophic as tying yourself to someone you weren’t sure about. There must be a way of making her see what a terrible mistake she was making. Tina couldn’t give up yet. She still had a week to make her sister see the error of her ways.

  *

  In Amore, Tina tried on a variety of costumes. Spike had taken himself off to the sports bar next door. ‘I don’t really think this is an activity I should share,’ he had said, hopping to the exit on his blinged-up stick with the look of a man who had found himself in the right place at the wrong time.

  Tina tried on a ridiculous cheerleader outfit complete with pom-poms and crotchless knickers, followed by a PVC Catwoman suit. Lottie mostly just stood and laughed, but was finally forced into a zip-up nurse’s outfit with matching stockings as part of the challenge.

  ‘Dean will be in raptures,’ Tina announced.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit retrograde to dress up like this for the titillation of men?’ Lottie asked, protesting as Tina handed her a leather thong.

  ‘Not if you want to do it,’ Tina said. ‘Some men really like dressing up, too. I once had a boyfriend who enjoyed wearing a rubber playsuit.’

  ‘I’d really rather not hear about it,’ Lottie said. ‘Dean says he likes me to be natural. I think he’d be embarrassed if I showed up looking like a cartoon.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Tina said. ‘Men are simple creatures. They are easily impressed by even the suggestion of lace. You could parade around in a couple of doilies and it would do the job. It makes them think that you’re making an effort, and that’s always a turn-on.’

  ‘Don’t you sometimes think you let playing games with men get in the way of actually allowing yourself to love them?’ Lottie asked, her serious tone somewhat diminished by her red-crossed headband worn by no real nurse anywhere.

  ‘There are no games between consenting adults that are anything but healthy,’ a voice suddenly announced. Tina and Lottie parted their cubicle curtains to find themselves confronted by an ancient-looking woman in a feather boa and fake green eyelashes.

  ‘I’m wondering if you ladies need any help,’ she continued. ‘I always find our British customers take a little longer to embrace the merchandise.’

  ‘No thank you, I think we’ve pretty much settled on what we want,’ Tina said, a little offended by the slur.

  ‘A British clergyman invented the sock. An American company developed the nylon stocking,’ the woman continued. ‘It tells us all we need to know.’

  ‘I’m sure people were wearing some version of stockings in medieval England,’ Lottie said.

  ‘They were just kind of bandages,’ the woman said dismissively, ‘worn for warmth, not visual appeal.’

  ‘I’ve never met a stocking expert before,’ Tina said waspishly.

  ‘Is my wife boring you with her encyclopedic knowledge of fetish fashion through the ages?’ A man appeared, looking just as extravagantly crumpled as his partner in a white suit and platform boots.

  ‘We seem to have wandered into The Rocky Horror Show,’ said Tina in an undertone.

  ‘Are you guys here on vacation?’ he enquired, apparently unperturbed by Tina’s rudeness.

  ‘Yes, it’s my hen road trip,’ Lottie explained, rather taken by the shop’s eccentric proprietors. ‘I’m getting married at the end of the month.’

  ‘Well, good luck to you. We’ve been married for fifty-two years,’ he replied, putting his arm around his prickly wife.

  ‘Wow,’ Lottie said. ‘What’s the secret of your success?’

  ‘Having an endless supply of vibrators?’ Tina asked, still disgruntled.

  ‘Hell no, we grew out of all that a few hundred years ago,’ the woman replied. ‘Sex is all very well, but there’s nothing to touch being able to laugh with each other.’

  ‘That and knowing when to tune out,’ the man said, and she gave him a friendly shove that almost made him topple off his boots.

  ‘My recipe for a long and happy marriage is actually very simple,’ she said, the queenly tilt of her head suddenly revealing the beautiful shape of her face. ‘If you want it to last, you have to choose it over and over again.’

  *

  ‘If you were a fast food, what would you be?’ Lottie asked.

  Tina had decided to delay their arrival at the Grand Canyon by taking a detour via Route 66. ‘It’s iconic,’ she had announced, brushing aside Lottie’s objections about how much time it would add to the trip.

  ‘I’d be a bacon roll from a truck stop,’ Tina said now.

  ‘I’d be a carton of clam chowder,’ said Spike.

  ‘I’d be a banana,’ Lottie said, ignoring the derision from her travel mates. ‘It comes sealed up in its own packaging. Completely hygienic.’

  A few miles further down the road, both Spike and Lottie fell asleep. Tina turned down Sheryl Crow’s ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ and looked sideways at her sister. She had her head jammed against the window, a mouthful of hair obscuring her face. Tina took her eyes off the road for a second and gently extracted the clump of curls. Lottie barely stirred. It wasn’t like her to sleep in the car. She must be really tired. Lottie believed Tina to be a reckless driver and had until now remained beadily vigilant. She had the annoying habit of making sudden startled exclamations. ‘What? What?’ Tina would ask, looking to see the source of the alarm – and Lottie would point at a junction in the distance or a car parked by the side of the road. She had once yelled out at the sight of a dog lolloping along the edge of a field. ‘It might suddenly decide to dart out into the road,’ she had explained to an incredulous Tina. ‘It could well be a deaf dog.’

  Tina looked in the mirror at Spike. He had wrapped a blanket around the alabaster vase and was using it as a headrest. He was supposed to be parting company with them in two days, although his leg was still hurting and he was doubtful about how much use he was going to be to the team in Mexico.

  ‘You won’t be able to walk far, but you can wait at the base and sift through the rubble,’ she had said to him earlier, keen to let him know she wanted him gone, although there was a part of her, a part she fought hard against, that made her feel desolate at the thought.

  ‘And there I was thinking you were actually enjoying my company,’ he had replied, yawning and stretching to reveal a brown, toned stomach. She was sure the display of skin had been deliberate, like a peacock fanning out its tail, or one of those Amazonian frogs puffing up its neck into a bulging goitre in an effort to attract a mate. He was suffering under the misapprehension that he was utterly irresistible.

  ‘What happened to the baby?’ he suddenly asked from the back seat, startling her. She hadn’t realised that he had woken up. ‘Did you decide to get
rid of it?’

  ‘How like you to use that disgusting expression,’ she said furiously.

  ‘Well, it’s always been easy come, easy go with you, hasn’t it?’

  Spike had no idea why he was talking to her as he was. He had never before thought about abortion in those terms. He understood that as a man the relief or the pain or something infinitely more complicated would only ever be felt by proxy. He would never have to say, ‘This is what I want,’ and set in motion something that could never be changed. He wouldn’t feel a presence and then an absence in his body and know that he had wrought it.

  He just wanted a real reaction from her, something more than the mocking flippancy that she had shown towards him so far on their trip. He had thought that this desire to unsettle her, to have some sort of impact on her, had worn off long ago. After she had gone back to England, he had struggled with the loss of her for more than a year. He had been so close to phoning her on numerous occasions, but the memory of her in bed with that man had always stopped him at the last minute. He had also ignored the calls she had made to him. He couldn’t risk being hurt like that again.

  He had eventually tried to move on. It was what people did. It was only in poems that lovers pined and died from broken hearts. There had been other women since Tina, some more important than others, although none had really stuck to him the way she had. Time had just stacked up until she had become part of his past and there was no way back, like an old bridge tumbling into a widening river.

  ‘I know you don’t really care what happened, but I didn’t have an abortion. I lost my baby,’ Tina said.

  Spike was shocked both by this new piece of information and by the sadness beneath her combative tone.

  ‘It broke me, although no one even knew it had happened,’ Tina said. ‘There was a life in me for a while and then it went away. I was left feeling as if I’d been abandoned.’

  There were tears in her voice. It wasn’t like her to show so much of herself, especially not to him. If she had revealed the true extent of her feelings at the time, would he have behaved differently? He tried to remember how she had looked the day she had come and told him she was pregnant. What he recalled most clearly was her defiance. What had she said exactly? She had said she wanted to keep the baby, but it had seemed to him at the time that what she had really wanted was to hurt him. He thought she had been saying she wanted the baby, but not him. Perhaps he had misunderstood. In his work he knew that it was only by patiently accumulating knowledge based on observation and experience and remaining open to infinite possibilities that any real progress could be made, and yet it seemed as if he had in this particular instance jumped straight to judgement. His sadness caught him by surprise. The sense that he had lost something that had been partly his seemed more real to him now than it had at the time. He had just been hurt and angry then. He wondered if things might have turned out differently if he had picked up the phone and talked to her.

  ‘It just wasn’t meant to be,’ Tina said quietly.

  In the front of the car, she stared fixedly at the road. The sense of what might have been was always there. She saw the peanut shape of her child’s head, the whorl of pale hair and her wide-eyed, unblemished gaze as vividly as if she had actually been able to hold her.

  Despite what she’d said to Spike, she couldn’t help feeling that what she had lost was exactly what she was supposed to have had, and the life she was living now was one that was never intended for her. She wondered if part of getting older was coming to terms with the knowledge that where you found yourself was not at all where you had planned to be. Perhaps everyone was completely lost, and it was just that some people were able to hide it better.

  ‘Never let them know you are a tourist,’ had been her mother’s travel advice when Tina had started to go abroad for work. ‘It lays you open to being ripped off.’

  Lynne had been wrong about that as she had been about so many things. Travelling without a map, pretending you knew where you were going, only sent you down a dead end.

  *

  ‘Isn’t this the town where Lottie’s number one fan lives?’ Tina asked. Hearing her name, Lottie sat up, suddenly awake. They had arrived at Chloride – if the ghostly place could be considered a destination. It was an old mining town that had, in its glory days, boasted seventy-five silver pits. Now parts of it lay abandoned. There was an empty jailhouse and a crumbling train depot and a vintage garage, but despite first appearances it was clear people still lived there. Lopsided signs made up of a patchwork of wood advertised beer and barbeques. Many of the houses were worn and unlovely, although it was evident that the inhabitants shared an artistic impulse – glittering bottles and twists of metal swung from the boughs of trees and fences were festooned with garlands of rusting colanders and old farm implements. In one front yard a giraffe made of old drums and lumps of spiked concrete stared at them with bottle-top eyes. In another, parts of a Hoover had been fashioned into an emu and a dustbin lid was painted with a grinning face. Buildings, roads, trucks and junk artworks were all covered in a kind of dusty veil, as if the whole place needed picking up and giving a good shake. Beyond the first clump of houses, in the centre of the town, the sense that things were not quite as they seemed was reinforced by a mocked-up western scene with saloon doors and wonky porches.

  ‘Mia would have loved this place,’ Tina said.

  They parked the car and wandered through on foot and, as luck would have it, were just in time to witness the midday shoot-out. Two paunchy men in battered hats faced each other along the road and then solemnly shot several, presumably blank, rounds at each other. One of them staggered dramatically, clutching his chest, and then fell to the ground amid a smattering of applause. They ate grilled turkey on sourdough sandwiches in Yesterdays – a beamed barn with a dingy mural on the wall and a few white-haired men propping up the bar – and then drove to the visitor centre on the edge of the town where they got instructions on how to get to the boulder art painted in 1966 by Roy Purcell. They drove across a cattle grid and along a dirt track road, and stopped when the car started bouncing around too alarmingly. Spike stayed in the car because his leg was playing up, but Tina and Lottie got out to explore.

  They walked a mile or so further along until they came upon some surprisingly bright stones, painted in the style of Native American art with goddesses and snakes wrapped around trees and a blue dog with a heart in his stomach. On one of the boulders, the words ‘The Journey, images from the inward search for self’ had been painted in a curly script.

  ‘They’re so bold-looking in this hazy light,’ Tina said. She scrambled a little closer to take some photographs, while Lottie sat on a flat rock by the side of the track waiting for her.

  ‘Are you sad our parents aren’t coming to the wedding?’ Tina asked, when she had slithered back down. ‘That’s assuming, of course, that the great event is actually going to be taking place,’ she added, unable to resist another opportunity to unsettle Lottie. She didn’t know why the thought of Joe and Lynne had jumped into her mind just then. Perhaps the words on the rocks had reminded her of their parents’ endless journeys away from one failure or another – a job lost, a neighbour with whom they had started a war, a vague dissatisfaction with the landscape or the people. Perhaps each move had held out the prospect of a beginning for them, but when they had arrived at a new flat or a borrowed house, in the end it had just become another place in which to tear at each other.

  Once, when she was about sixteen, Tina asked her mother why she and Joe stayed together.

  ‘Because I love him!’ her mother had said to her, astonished.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like love to me,’ she had said.

  ‘You know nothing at all of life,’ Lynne had answered. ‘One day you will understand.’ Tina was now much older than her mother had been then, and she still didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m sad I haven’t got parents I really want to be there,’ Lottie answered.

 
‘It’s just as well they’re not coming. You want your wedding to be a peaceable affair.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Lottie asked her sister, as if she knew what she had been thinking about.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tina said.

  ‘How can you not know? It’s easy. You either love someone or you don’t.’

  ‘It’s never been as straightforward for me. My feelings for people are always hampered by a sense that I might be fooling myself, or that they might be fooling me.’

  ‘I love Dean,’ Lottie said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he feels like part of me.’

  ‘And yet, here you are, miles away from him, thinking about the parts of quite another person,’ Tina said, grinning wickedly.

  ‘You always have to lower the tone.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not wondering what it would be like to sleep with someone else? Isn’t that why you’ve been acting so distracted?’

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s about sex. It’s more that I wonder about alternative versions of my life. I could have been a hundred different things and been with a hundred different people, and yet it has all come down to this particular set of choices. Who’s to say I have chosen the best possible outcome?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about,’ Tina said. ‘How’s it possible to embark on anything with all your heart when your heart could be pulled all sorts of different ways?’

  ‘When you’re young – I mean, I know I’m not old now, but when you’re really young – you imagine that absolutely anything might happen. You think that immense wealth, or being able to dance on the points of your feet or living in a houseboat are all within your grasp. But then you grow up and discover you’re flat-footed and the thought of sharing a space with a chemical loo makes you uneasy and that you will always earn the sort of wage that makes you dread the cashpoint a week before payday.’

  ‘I’ve always thought of you as someone who has made the choices she wanted to make,’ said Tina. ’You always seem so certain.’