‘What about Emmy and Bex?’ I ask.
‘What about Emmy and Bex?’ she says.
‘Are you not going to ask them?’
‘I don’t want to ask Emmy and Bex.’
‘But why?’
‘They are busy right now. And they don’t know a single thing about flowers.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘You’re on your break. You’re having a cup of tea. You’re having a biscuit. Do you want a biscuit? Here, have mine. Relax! You’re my maid of honour. You’re supposed to help me with the flowers.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘But I genuinely have no clue where to start.’
I have noticed two things lately: I’ve been finding it easy to agree with her, yet easier still to speak my mind. I worry I am starting to trust her. And, although that’s not a bad thing in itself, it makes me feel nervous. I’m not ready for it and it’s not done me any good trusting people, not in the past.
‘Look, Ruth,’ she says. ‘It’s not as hard as it seems. Each flower, you see, has a meaning as well as a scent and a distinctive colour and shape. It seems complicated at first, but really I think it’s quite easy to guess the meaning just by looking at the flower. Once you’ve guessed the meaning, even the scent will make more sense. I promise.’ For a moment she looks incredibly serious.
‘But isn’t that what the book is for? To provide us with the correct information so we don’t have to guess randomly?’
‘The book has all the information we need, but what is the information we’re looking for, exactly? The book doesn’t know me; you do. Want to take a guess?’ She flicks the book open. ‘Come on; it’s fun.’
Her cool hand locks around my wrist like a daisy chain. I don’t remember her ever having touched me before, though I know this can’t be true. I look at our joined hands. Alanna guides my fingers to the bottom of page seventy-seven, The Peony, and covers the description before I can read it.
‘I promise it’s not hard. We’ll start easy.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘What does this look like to you?’
‘A peony?’ I say lamely, reading the title at the top of the page.
‘Jesus, Ruth. Come on, girl!’ She gives my hand a little squeeze. ‘Make an effort.’
‘It’s very pretty,’ I say.
‘It is pretty,’ she says. ‘And? What does it remind you of?’
‘It looks like fabric. Like silk.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’
‘A bit like a tutu?’
‘Well, ballet tutus are a bit – you know – fluffier.’ Of course, she took dance lessons as a teenager, I remember now. Her modelling career wasn’t her only failure. She’d wanted to be a professional dancer in school, but then she did her knee in and had to quit. It was a minor scandal; it made the local papers, I think. Something to do with her ballet teacher, who’d been pushing students too hard and a whole host of injuries. I haven’t thought about this in, how long? A memory flashes: I remember her pirouetting down the stairs of our hostel, in Rome, leaning against the railing. A white sundress and big round sixties sunglasses. ‘This is a plié,’ she’d said, bending low on her knees, her back straight. It was sunny and I remember I felt happy. It was the first day of our holiday. The memory is a small, good one. I smile at the thought of it. Alanna narrows her lips, looks at me seriously. ‘Sturdier also. The tutus?’ she says. ‘More aerodynamic. They’re work clothes, basically.’
‘Of course you know everything about ballet,’ I snap. Why try?
‘No, but you’re right, it looks a bit like a ballet skirt. Is that what you meant?’ Her voice softens. ‘I wore the kind you’re thinking of, for training, and they look a bit like that, you are right. I wore it in the gym. I spent hours and hours there and the fabric was a little heavier, a little warmer. It was a comforting weight when I was there until late. And when I did the splits it would spread out and I felt a bit like a flower. A peony perhaps!’ She claps her hands. ‘Ruth! I told you you’d be good at this!’ She flashes her little pointy canines. But she’s just smiling.
‘Do you miss dancing?’ I ask.
‘I miss it. But that’s another story. For another day. I focus on the present these days.’ She squeezes my hand on the book. She looks at me.
‘Now, seriously,’ she asks. ‘What do you think the peony means?’
‘Well, let’s find out! What does the peony mean?’ I try to pull my hand back but she holds my wrist in place, with gentle restrain.
‘Take a guess?’
‘I don’t know what it means.’
‘Think about it. It’s not so much about what it means in general, but what it means to me. What would it mean to me, having peonies at my wedding?’
‘To you?’
‘From what I just said? About having to quit dancing? What do you think the peony means to Alanna?’
I don’t understand. ‘From what you said, I’m thinking – maybe, to Alanna –’ I hesitate; it could be anything, so I say the first thing that pops into my mind ‘– a peony might mean working hard to achieve something she loves.’ Her eyes are very blue. ‘Something she loves very much.’ She nods. ‘It means determination,’ I say. ‘The determination to achieve something she loves.’ Why are we speaking in the third person? Should I hold her hand in mine? She is nodding and smiling.
‘Let’s see,’ she says. Alanna slides my hand gently off the book, releasing my wrist. My hand, where she held it, feels warmer than the rest of my body. I can still feel the ring of her fingers around my forearm. She reads out loud: ‘Peonies promise good fortune. Watch them grow from small buds into strong, magnificent blooms and you’ll see why peonies beautifully symbolize a long and happy marriage.’ She claps her hands happily. ‘Peonies are perfect! You’re a genius, Ruth, I knew it!’
‘Go for the fuchsia ones. They’ll suit your skin tone,’ I say, in a nasal voice. What the fuck am I talking about? But there, I’ve said it. I do mean it. She will look incredibly beautiful. Alanna’s eyes widen with surprise. She throws her arms around my neck and squeezes. I put mine around her waist and I squeeze too.
In this dream the water is blue and our heels are dipped in it. We have dropped most of our garments further up the beach. Our fingers are curled around each other’s loosely in the sand. We wiggle our toes, tighten our hands together.
‘Do you ever think,’ you say, ‘about the times you’ve been kissed for the first time? Not the first time you’ve ever been kissed – or not only that time. Each time you’ve been kissed for the first time.’
You look at me and I look at you and I can see that you are doing maths behind your eyes. This hurts my feelings.
I kick water on to your naked leg. You kick back with your shin against mine.
‘You’re peeling,’ I say.
‘You never answer me.’
Your head tumbles on to my naked shoulder.
In this dream we are lying together on towels on a roof terrace. The towels are much too small to hold our bodies; they are more like hand towels than beach towels. All the same, since we are not on a beach and there is no sand, we are fairly content. Our heels push into the hot grainy tarmac that covers the roof. It is getting warmer and I’m beginning to sweat. The country is Spain, maybe Italy. It is very early in the morning and perhaps we have stayed up all night. I am wearing tinted sunglasses and when I look at your arm through them, your skin is a burnt amber colour. I can make out the white hairs that fan out in circles around your shoulder bone. I look at the side of your face: from above, you could be looking right at the sky, but from here I know your eyes are shut. I roll my upper arm across the towel towards you so that the inner side now faces up. This way we are closer together by almost an inch. I walk my hand towards you sideways, like a crab, inch by inch, until my pinkie grazes the side of your sleeping hand. You don’t stir, not even when the ends of the hairs on my arm are touching the ends of the hairs on your arm, static energy bringing us
a few millimetres closer still. I am reassured and frustrated by your lack of reaction. I want more. I close my eyes and feign sleep. After a while I get bored and feign stretching in sleep. I roll over to your side and now my mouth rests against the heat of your shoulder. I can smell your sweat and its salty coating. The sea is very close, the sound of the waves is deafening. I lick your shoulder. You don’t wake up, or if you do, you let me.
In this dream I am living in a very large mansion in the state of Florida and my husband is a very rich man. I, on the other hand, am the kind of wife who is never seen in public without heels. I lift a finger to my cheek and feel the powder of my make-up. I am curled up on the sofa with a chilled glass of white. I am vaguely aware that my husband is out with his yacht, but I am not perturbed by the idea. The trip has been arranged with a lot of notice and he has made thorough preparations. Despite his absence, or perhaps because of it, tonight I am throwing a cocktail party and all the ingredients are lined up on the long marble table in the hall, so it looks like it’s happening soon. I am not fretting. I am having my nice, chilled glass of white in my nice sitting room. I look out of the bay window and realize there is a woman on the decking out back. I can see her from where I am sitting. She has a silk scarf around her head: it must be the sixties in the dream, or she has expensive sixties vintage taste. She is wearing big round sunglasses and holding a large portable telephone to her ear. She twirls her headscarf between her index finger and thumb. The home telephone rings and I pick up its heavy Bakelite receiver. ‘It’s about your husband,’ says the voice in my ear. I lift my eyes up and the woman is staring at me through the glass window. The light hits her sunglasses from behind, so I can see her dark eyes shining through the dark lenses. ‘Never get your heart broken twice,’ she says into the receiver and hangs up.
The day after I dream the third dream is the day before the big night.
CONDITIONER
The Girls
Now
There are creatures that only come out at night: bats, mice and owls. They all have their own specific cry. And fur or down or feathers designed to disappear into the night.
In order to survive the hostile darkness, these animals have genetic mutations: evolution has conditioned them to adjust to their current predicament. Tonight, we’ll paint our lips and lace up our waists and put gel pads in our shoes and fold soft pumps into our handbags. We will sing and we will dance in the footprints of those who came before us, orderly like wolves following a trail, placing a paw into exactly the mark left in the snow by the one in front. Our heels will skitter along prescribed routes. Hen-do as pastiche, a show reel: chick-flick, comedy, romance, damsel in distress, sexploitation, girl-on-girl, cuckold, female-friendly. Soft-bodied in the soft light, we are the girls and we are giving away our girl Alanna. It happens at night because it is secret and there is a right way to go about it that only we, the night creatures, know.
Her father will be in charge of the ritual. This is how it works: the priest will lift her hand in his and out of her father’s and place it firmly into her husband’s. Three men have outlined the conditions under which, swiftly, she will transition from a world in which a man bore responsibility for her wellbeing to a world in which she bears responsibility for a man. This exchange happens in broad daylight. The contract will be signed shortly after. Our girl Alanna. There is much more to her than meets the eye. It would take you years to know her properly. What makes daddy’s little girl choose to find out about abjection? To choose to put her body on the line, to live in proximity of human decay? At heart, the girl’s a born nurse: born to care for others. From rosy-cheeked childhood to changing old men’s nappies: the end point of a parable of ballet competitions and bubblegum photo shoots and kiddy amphetamine addictions. The doctors prescribed the medication and then decided her excessive use of it was a sickness in itself and resolved to cure it. She struggled to see it that way in the beginning. Her body just felt very light.
Men love helping girls out of their trouble. Restoring their youthful glow is usually an endeavour easy to fund. Young girls have a propensity to gratitude. When a girl becomes attached, she will change her whole lifestyle for you. This is one way in which girls are unlike boys: they’re willing to adjust their personality.
Alanna says that luckily, when you are really pretty, you don’t ever have to do anything you don’t want to do. She’s lucky. She’s beautiful. Anyway, she’s all done with that kind of thing. We pass around a photo of Paul, this new man of hers. In the picture he is holding a whippet by its lead. It’s supposed to be a cute shot, but the dog looks obscenely small next to his large body. It makes us uneasy. ‘It’s a miniature whippet, by the way,’ she says when she sees us looking. As if that made the photograph less upsetting, that the dog would never grow out of its bony frame, like the man had. Our girl Alanna. Making excuses for the man she loves. Ain’t she cute and don’t we all make excuses? Isn’t that what women do? Alanna and Paul, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Of course, we’ve reassured the groom that nothing bad is going to happen. We’ve provided a list of our movements, for safety purposes. The men have put in the effort for Paul: they’ve identical t-shirts to prove it. Professional partiers, branded like bulls with a number on the back and a nickname: COCK KNOCKER, BUTT TICKLER, AL COOLIC and PENIS PARMESAN (the oddball). They’ll drink beer. They’ll eat barbecued meats. Dark sauce will drip down their wrists like blood. Chuck us a bone, boys, we’ll make it last. They’re always hungry. They’re a team. They write best men’s speeches drunk in hotel rooms. They are always watching: TV, video-games, hen-do, pay-per-view, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, reverse gangbang. The groom gave us a serious look. If the wife-to-be misbehaves, we promise, we’ll tell on her. We wait until we’re outside the building to start laughing.
History happened in the back rooms while we delayed our knitting: making and unmaking, the stuff of witches. We talked quietly. We trained our voices to speak so low that we could turn a thing into its opposite, making them still believe they’re in control. We’ve learnt to talk softer when we intend to be misunderstood, so that sometimes men swap our words around for the opposite meaning, which is exactly what we wanted. We’ll hold it against them in due time. We remember everything. We abide by the rules; we are clandestine. Tin phones threaded with wool: this hen-do. Perhaps the men suggested it but we planned it. They say a good soldier’s strength isn’t in winning all the battles, but in choosing the right ones. Although we didn’t choose it, we know we must win this. It’s Alanna’s big night, we’re going to have so much fun.
We chose the clothes in which to clad her: her armour. It is pink and white and gold, and the reason is the reason kings wore ermine for generations: garish and cruel and for special occasions. She is really pretty, and the pink is satin on her skin, and the white is silk, and the gold shines like real gold, so why should we have chosen differently? We’ve chosen her eyelashes: they have feathers on them and when she wrinkles her nose, they ruffle. She sits on the edge of the bathtub and swings her feet, fully a girl. We wing her eyeliner. We condition her split ends with a coconut mist. We paint her face. We take a long time, the time it takes. There is no one here to rush us. We drink fruit cocktails, which we set on the edge of the bathtub. ‘Girls love sweet cocktails,’ they say. Here in the bathroom it is safe to drink from a straw, bite on a strawberry; we could eat a banana whole, shove it right down our throats if we wanted. We touch her eyes, smooth out the primer. We sprinkle powder on to her eyelids. It makes her eyes sparkle. We shade in her bone structure and she acquires definition, coming into focus from the outside inwards. We say, ‘Tilt your head up,’ and she does. Baby girl. We work in a team, the all-girl team, in the top league of the overall league. We curl her hair in ringlets like a doll, then brush it all through to tousle them, and though the iron is hot, near her face, never once does she flinch. The last thing, of course, is to put the crown on her head. A crown, not a tiara. Gracious Alanna.
Th
e very, very last thing is to slide the garter belt up her leg. This is a role that falls to me. It’s like fitting Cinderella’s shoe: it does, perfectly, and my heart flutters. ‘Careful with the tights,’ Alanna says. ‘They are so delicate.’ I am extremely careful.
Bex spearheads our party into the hall. She’s blackened her beauty mark with eyeliner. It’s slick on her left cheek, like a dot of caviar, like Marie Antoinette’s.
Emmy braided her hair into a tight knot which looks like melted copper or coiled-up snakes. She’s brushed red glitter into the creases of her hair-do, green glitter in the creases of her eyelids: the effect is Christmassy and somewhat patriotic, like she’s representing a foreign country at Eurovision. She pulls it off with flair: her cheeks are sleek with powder, her eyes snake-like, too.
Mona has decided to change her name for the night. Tonight, she announced, she would like us girls to call her Jessica. So we will have a Jessica, after all of my efforts. She’s wearing chunky heels and her round legs in shiny leggings look dangerous. She keeps her hands on her hips, fists balled up, don’t-mess-with-me sexy. Her purse is full of tissues and Nurofen for tomorrow. Her cheekbones are high and round like thick apple slices. Her lipstick is wet-look. In the lift she pushes between us to check her backcomb in the mirror.
I am the last of the line as we leave the flat. I’m wearing a bodycon dress, like Catwoman, but with more thigh, and all my bones jut out, like I’m sketched out in pen. I’ve contoured my face: earthy shades filling in the hollows, translucent powder across the cheekbones, like slug trails in the light of the moon. I look beautiful. Around my neck is a locket of sentimental value and in the locket a picture of Miss Phyllis, who is alive, of course, and extremely miffed she couldn’t make it. Earlier today she gave me the locket so she could go along, in a way. She said, ‘Never lift your heels from the ground for too long when you’re wearing high shoes because it’ll only make your feet worse.’ Grind down into the earth for balance. There was a festive air to the care home, like that on the dock when a ship sets sail. ‘You girls have fun,’ chorused the old women when we left. Mrs O’Toole raised one serious finger and pretended to think hard about something, so I bent over to offer my ear, into which she burst a peal of laughter. They waved goodbye from their chairs, which we’d arranged in the living room in a semicircle. Only that shrivelled root of a man, Mr Hancock, sulked in a corner. He could rot in hell for all we cared.
Shelf Life Page 15