Judith narrowed her eyes, watching Christina closely. ‘Stomach acid is detrimental to the tooth enamel,’ she said. ‘Eats it away pretty quick.’
‘My teeth are fine,’ Christina said, and she put down the bowl. ‘You don’t have to lecture me.’ She wondered whether Judith had been given a brief from the college to snoop into aberrant eating habits. It was true that the residential corridors did reek, here and there, of people’s vomit.
Meanwhile, Judith appeared to be enjoying her tenacious inquisition. ‘So why don’t you eat when you’re hungry?’ she said. ‘Little Chrissie Angeletti?’
‘But I do eat,’ Christina said. ‘I don’t eat meat, that’s all.’
‘Ah,’ Judith said, only partially appeased. ‘And fish? You eat fish?’
‘Sometimes,’ Christina said. ‘Look. What is all this? I work in a chippy for heaven’s sake.’ She wondered, as she spoke, why Judith’s own catering was so unspeakably dreadful. Gristle pie and green packet jelly. Jesus Christ, what next? It was as if she had gone and raided the local NHS canteen. ‘Your husband has just told me that I smell of Sarson’s Malt Vinegar,’ she said. ‘It would be all right with him, I expect, if I’d smelled of the balsamic variety.’
‘Come again?’ Judith said.
‘Balsamic vinegar,’ Christina said. ‘You know. The miracle of Modena.’ Seeing the stuff on foodstore shelves always reminded her of her father. Matured in oak casks since the quattrocento. The Precious Blood of the foodie sect. And why was it that Judith always reduced her to thoughts of her father? Last time, after the party, it had been those camels, had it not?
‘I’ve never learnt how to cook,’ Judith was saying, as though this were her proudest boast. ‘Learn how to cook and you never stop cooking. People expect it of you. It’s the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Lust in action is nothing to it. Don’t ever cook, Christina. I tell you, it’s politically incorrect.’
Christina laughed. ‘My father has always cooked like a crazy man,’ she said. ‘Does it all the time. Worships food. Says he’s a Catholic, but what he really worships is food.’ It occurred to her that, after all, this was not altogether surprising – given how much the ritual centred on the elevation of food.
But Judith was there, waiting to pounce. ‘Aha!’ she said. ‘And now I know why you don’t eat, little Chrissie. Your father is a gourmet cook.’
‘I don’t eat meat,’ Christina corrected. ‘I eat. I always have.’ Green tomato relish and six canned lima beans, eaten slowly, one by one, with a fork. She could not remember what motivating force had lain behind that intransigent childhood stance. Whatever it had been was buried far too deep. And then, of course, there was Pam, who had always eaten meat; had dutifully forked up all that exquisitely tortured veal. Presumably still did. Pam, who had taken such trouble over the nursing of wounded fledglings; had worried so tenderly over the squirrels’ tree-houses during wind storms. But, damn it, Christina thought. Now Judith had tricked her into brooding upon her sister.
‘As it happens,’ she said, ‘my older sister always ate meat like anything.’ She paused, to reflect rather irritably upon all those star turns of yore that had appeared on her parents’ dining-table. Images flashed poisonously upon the inward eye. Images of the dolls’ little plates of crostini, served with tiny fillets of chicken liver and golden truffle butter.
‘He was forever messing about with it,’ she said. ‘With meat, I mean. Boning it, pounding it, grinding it, wrapping it up in vine leaves, stuffing it with artichoke paste, dredging it in crushed green peppercorns. Jesus, he could even do disgusting things with halved goats’ heads.’
Judith was smiling broadly. ‘He?’ she said. ‘The cat’s dad?’
‘My father, of course,’ Christina said. ‘I’m not joking. Really. He wooed my mother with the pancreas of newborn calves.’
‘Sexual jealousy,’ Judith said, and she paused to gulp her coffee. ‘Little Chrissie, I love you. You’re so adorably transparent.’
Christina felt both provoked and patronized. Yet, for all that, she loved it that Judith loved her. Most of all, she felt confused. Somehow Judith possessed the power, simultaneously, to raise up and to cast down.
‘My eating habits,’ she said primly, ‘are all to do with my DNA. Some people have genetic arrangements that are best suited for beans and grains.’
‘And lime-green jelly, of course,’ Judith said, looking at her sceptically. ‘Your big sister shares your DNA, little Chrissie, so that doesn’t wash, I’m afraid.’
‘But my sister was always very compliant,’ Christina said. ‘She was always very sweet and good.’
In response, Judith delivered a lecture. Christina thought it pedantic. She used a great deal of professional terminology but, all the same, it sounded to Christina as though she had a personal axe or two to grind. It had to do with siblings and with sibling rivalry. Older siblings, she established, were inclined to align themselves with adults. They were, most of them, possessed, by dint of their primacy, of techniques for delegating transgression. Younger siblings, Judith explained, were thus unconsciously co-opted to commit all necessary acts of subversion. And necessary acts they were. That way, Judith pointed out, older siblings could transgress by proxy, while maintaining their unspotted reputations.
‘But not my sister,’ Christina said, who knew that Pam was different. Judith wasn’t listening to her. She had lost herself in stereotypes. Then she got up rather suddenly and found cause to fidget amongst a row of tins and jars that sat on one of her shelves. When she turned and faced Christina, the colour was higher in her cheeks. ‘I tell you,’ she said. ‘Your Miss Goody-Two-Shoes will have been contriving to wrong-foot you.’
Then, suddenly, Judith told her story. It was not a happy one and, like Judith herself, it was something larger than life. It left Christina shattered. She wished that Judith hadn’t told it.
Her parents were émigré South Africans who, since the mid-seventies, had managed a small food shop on the fringe of Islington. They had decided – after spending their lives as activists in anti-racist politics – that enough was finally enough. Personal bereavement had affected their stamina and they had simply run out of steam.
Fate had never given Judith’s parents a particularly smooth ride. Throughout their lives, they had experienced waves of loss as friends were victimized, imprisoned, or, towards the end, picked off by anonymous hit squads. Yet none of these things had caused them to lose heart as did the death of their older daughter, Sandra.
When Judith, aged eleven, had managed, by misadventure, to drown her sister, it was Zak, her nine-year-old brother, who had taken on the guilt. Judith, by that haunting act of sibling struggle, had ceased, at once, to occupy the place of middle child and had become the older sister. She saw herself become, in consequence, a sort of Tiresias figure, who could walk in the shoes of either. She knew the devious strategies of both.
It had not been an easy childhood for them, being three children of activist parents whose time for family life was inevitably limited and whose safety from the arm of the state was always conspicuously in jeopardy. Jostling and mutual resentment had been intense among the girls. In the event of open conflict, Judith and her younger brother had always stood together. This alliance had been skilfully contrived and artfully maintained by Judith, who was sharper than her older sister and verbally more persuasive. It had meant that Zak was not infrequently the butt of Sandra’s physical assaults.
Sandra had come to grief at the close of a long, hot day during a seaside vacation. The children were alone on the beach. The evening was drawing on and all other holiday-makers had returned, by then, to their various seafront hotel rooms. It was Judith who had suggested a burial in sand, though Zak had wanted to linger over a castle for which he was right then contriving crenellated ramparts. It was Judith, too, who – innocently enough – had proposed that unfortunate variation upon the more usual mode of horizontal, beach sand burial. She had set her little brother to dig
ging a prodigious, perpendicular trough.
The work was so arduously accomplished and so impressive that a degree of competition had then ensued between the sisters for the privilege of being buried first. Sandra had only won the day because she was bigger and stronger. She had duly been buried right up to the neck by the time that she and Judith had begun, as usual, to fall out.
‘Well, I’m going,’ Judith said. She kicked up a little shower of sand. ‘Come on, Zak,’ she said. ‘We’re going.’
Her brother was wont to follow her lead but, on this occasion, he had hung back, though not through any foreknowledge, nor special instinct for danger. He had simply, right then, felt sorry for Sandra, who was a pig to him in general, and a thumper into the bargain. But she had seemed to him, suddenly, the more vulnerable of his two sisters. As a result, he had hesitated and had mumbled his reservations.
‘But Jude . . .’ he said. ‘But Jude . . . Say, Jude . . .’
Judith had grabbed his arm. ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘Just leave her. She can jolly well get back on her own. Let’s you and me go and buy ice-creams.’
Judith had swept on purposefully, making wide, yeti footprints in the wet, densely packed band of sand nearest the waterline. Zak’s footprints had appeared alongside hers, smaller and more frequent, as she had lugged him along by the hand. Her sister’s plaintive whinings were, right then, music to her ears.
‘But Jude . . .’ Zak had objected, as Judith yanked him on. She pulled him by the hand towards that final ridge of sand, where a line of succulent plants appeared as a prelude to the roadway. And then their thoughts were all for the kiosk that sold choc ices and cones.
‘Funny thing,’ Judith said, pausing to glance up at Christina. ‘They were known in my childhood as “Eskimo pies”. That’s what we always called choc ices. We called them Eskimo pies.’
Judith’s parents had, that day, been taking tea with friends. By the time they had returned to their hotel, it was to find the police were on the threshold. And – while this was for them a perfectly familiar occurrence – it seemed that on this occasion, the police required their presence in a matter more personal than political. They were needed to identify the body of a drowned, twelve-year-old girl.
Judith had subsequently been most articulate with the authorities. They had commented favourably upon her clarity, poise and helpfulness. She had explained to them that her little brother had dug a hole and had buried their sister and had filled it up all round with sand.
She explained, now to Christina, that, as she had told her story, it was as though she had seen her own bodily person observing from the opposite side of the room. Her voice, her brain and all her being were working, somehow, without her. It had made her feel curiously elated. It was maybe like speaking in tongues. And Zak – who had wanted so much to finish his castle – Zak had stood by, trance-like, dreamy and silent. He had allowed her to indict him and to damage his reputation. He had gone along with her in that, as he had always done in everything. Zak had simply allowed her to delegate transgression.
Judith paused. She licked her lips and ran a hand over her hair. She turned to face Christina, who was seated at the counter, white and trembling, not wanting to believe Judith’s story; wanting to run it through, like a dream, with an alternative ending.
‘I stood there and let them blame him,’ Judith said. ‘The parents worshipped Sandra. They terribly wanted the solace of having someone to blame. They were appalled and they believed me. Can you beat that? Both of them. The stigma hung about his neck for years. They were decent types, my parents. You could tell they tried to wrestle with their burgeoning negative feelings. For quite a while they felt a perceptible aversion to his presence. It pretty well eroded Zakky’s childhood.’
Soon, Judith explained, her parents had acted to dispatch the boy to boarding school. A Catholic boarding school, Judith said. A hell-hole.
She spread her hands for emphasis. ‘Can you believe it?’ she said, a sort of flamboyant bitterness drenching her voice. ‘They were Jews, for Christ’s sake. Left-wing Jews. This place. It was staffed by a brigade of bloody sadists. Celibate imports in long black frocks. Spare the rod and spoil the child. And there was my darling brother – a fat, dozy little Jewish boy with pebble specs and a lisp. Un-physical, Chrissie. Terrified of cold water. Never could catch a ball. Worst of all, he was brainy as hell. It’s my belief they loathed him for it.’
Judith stood there as Christina watched, transfixed – a tall, stunning figure of great, troubled beauty. Yet suddenly, having tormented herself with the exhumation of this macabre, appalling vignette, Judith abruptly resumed her bright, brittle manner.
‘A serious case of nature imitating the sick joke,’ she said. ‘You’ll know that joke, of course, Chrissie? About Goldberg and the Catholic school?’
Christina shook her head. She did not feel much in the mood for jokes, whether sick or otherwise. She swallowed against a sudden surge of nausea as the contemplation of Judith’s disclosures began to interact with the lingering, faint odour of meat that still hung upon the air. She began quite suddenly to panic at the idea that her own dear sister could possibly have come to grief without her knowing. She resolved to make a telephone call just as soon as she possibly could. Or did she dare?
Judith’s joke had something to do with Goldberg minor being in need of discipline and the Catholic school having a boy nailed up to the classroom wall.
‘Yeah,’ Christina said, sighing heavily. ‘Listen, Judith. I suppose I ought to go. I – I suppose I –’
‘You and your sister very close?’ Judith said, catching her unawares.
Christina wiped the back of her hand briefly across her eyes. Playing for time, she contrived a small cough. ‘I guess,’ she said. ‘Well, yes. We were sort of like each other’s best friend. See, we were born seven months apart. She was adopted and I was premature.’
‘Chrissie,’ Judith said. ‘My God. The older sister and adopted, eh? Well, then, it’s hardly any wonder that she was always so sweet and good. She’ll have felt her presence in the family to have been conditional upon perfection.’
Christina stared at Judith, thinking her quite mad.
‘You, Chrissie dear, were the lucky one,’ Judith said. ‘You were the natural child. You were the one who enjoyed the licence to be as imperfect as you liked. Besides, by your mere existence, you will have destroyed your sister’s raison d’être.’ When Christina failed to respond to this, Judith continued all the same. ‘Happens all the time,’ she said. ‘People adopt a baby. They’ve no sooner done so than the natural child comes along. They stop trying quite so hard and it facilitates conception. Well, the poor parents are only human. They like the natural child better – much as they may strive against such a disconcerting emotion. They try too hard from then on to do it all perfectly right. Ace parents. Number One Dad. Four-star Mum. They play Happy Families. But it isn’t natural, of course. The anxiety is there and the children pick it up – some to play goodie-goodie and some to make trouble. No need to ask which kind you are. Who said families were supposed to be happy? Christ, Chrissie, they are something to be endured, I tell you. Survived if at all possible. And haven’t I just illustrated for you that it can be a fight to the death?’
Christina felt more drained than she could ever remember feeling before.
‘By the way,’ Judith said. She spoke quietly, for once. ‘There’s no way that you were premature.’
Judith, Christina noticed, was looking at her hard. Not so much at her face but at her cranium; at her whole person from top to toe. Christina sat, transfixed, under Judith’s gaze and scrutiny.
‘I’m speaking, now, as a medic,’ Judith said. ‘I really do know what I’m talking about. The shape of your head; your body proportions. Everything dictates against it.’
Christina continued to sit without moving, though she felt her pulse-rate suddenly accelerate. She wondered whether Judith was quite aware of the significance of what she was saying. A
nd was there possibly anything else that Judith was preparing to throw at her?
‘That’s got to be rubbish,’ Christina said. ‘My parents only met each other seven months before I was born.’
‘Oh dear,’ Judith said. ‘Oh dear oh dear.’ And then they both fell silent.
Part Five
Landing
Set Notation and the Holy Trinity
Christina made it for five o’clock. She’d changed trains in London. From the station she took a taxi. She thought speed was of the essence. The weather had deteriorated and it was now raining heavily. Her mind was so preoccupied that it was only as the car wound through the preambling woodland of Roland’s school, that she started to an awareness of the driver’s conversation.
‘You can call me old-fashioned if you like,’ he was saying, ‘but I don’t approve of mixed relationships.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Christina said, thinking this a novel point of view.
‘It’s the children I feel sorry for,’ he said.
‘Which children?’ Christina said, puzzled.
‘Like what are they then, eh?’ he said. ‘What are they?’
Christina hesitated, doubtful.
‘Are they children?’ she ventured.
‘Yeah,’ the driver said. ‘But what are they? Are they black or white?’
‘Oh, I see,’ Christina said. ‘Mixed relationships. Black and white. Right. Now I’m with you. I thought you meant men and women.’
She reflected that for her paternal grandmother a mixed relationship had always meant getting it together with a Protestant. For her mother’s generation it had meant getting it together with a black person. But that too was now old hat. A mixed relationship for someone as young as the taxi driver ought surely to mean getting it together with someone of the opposite sex.
‘You taking the mick?’ said the taxi driver, and he swung through the school gate, determined to make no compromise with the series of speed-retarding humps. He stopped outside the main entrance.
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