‘Were you really in love with that Yank?’
‘Yes, as near as possible.’
Agnes shook her hair loose and rolled back into bed. She turned out the light and Sadie notched into her back. She began to stroke Agnes’ soft upper arm, then moved to her haunch.
‘I’ve got a bit of a headache, love,’ said Agnes.
Sadie turned to the wall and Agnes felt her harsh skin touch her own.
‘My God, Sadie,’ she said, ‘you’ve got heels on you like pumice stones.’
SHENA MACKAY
Cardboard City
‘We could always pick the dog hairs off each other’s coats …’
The thought of grooming each other like monkeys looking for fleas sent them into giggles – anything would have.
‘I used half a roll of sellotape on mine,’ said Stella indignantly then, although she wasn’t really offended.
‘It better not have been my sellotape or I’ll kill you,’ Vanessa responded, without threat.
‘It was His.’
‘Good. He’ll kill you then,’ she said matter-of-factly.
The sisters, having flung themselves onto the train with no time to buy a comic, were wondering how to pass the long minutes until it reached central London with nothing to read. They could hardly believe that at the last moment He had not contrived to spoil their plan to go Christmas shopping. For the moment it didn’t matter that their coats were unfashionable and the cuffs of their acrylic sweaters protruded lumpishly from the outgrown sleeves or that their frozen feet were beginning to smart, in the anticipation of chilblains, in their scuffed shoes in reaction to the heater under the seat. They were alone in the compartment except for a youth with a personal stereo leaking a tinny rhythm through the headphones.
With their heavy greenish-blonde hair cut straight across their foreheads and lying flat as lasagne over the hoods and shoulders of their school duffels, and their green eyes set wide apart in the flat planes of their pale faces, despite Stella’s borrowed fishnet stockings which were causing her much angst, they looked younger than their fourteen and twelve years. It would not have occurred to either of them that anybody staring at them might have been struck by anything other than their horrible clothes. Their desire, thwarted by Him and by lack of money of their own, was to look like everybody else. The dog hairs that adhered so stubbornly to the navy-blue cloth and bristled starkly in the harsh and electric light of the winter morning were from Barney, the black and white border collie, grown fat and snappish in his old age, who bared his teeth at his new master, the usurper, and slunk into a corner at his homecoming, as the girls slunk into their bedroom.
‘It’s cruel to keep that animal alive,’ He would say. ‘What’s it got to live for? Smelly old hearthrug.’
And while He discoursed on the Quality of Life, running a finger down Mummy’s spine or throat, Barney’s legs would splay out worse than they usually did and his claws click louder on the floor, or a malodorous cloud of stagnant pond water emanate from his coat. It was a sign of His power that Barney was thus diminished.
‘We’ll know when the Time has come. And the Time has not yet come,’ said Mummy with more energy than she summoned to champion her elder daughters, while Barney rolled a filmy blue eye in her direction. The dog, despite his shedding coat, was beyond reproach as far as the girls were concerned; his rough back and neck had been salted with many tears, and he was their one link with their old life, before their father had disappeared and before their mother had defected to the enemy.
‘What are you going to buy Him?’ Vanessa asked.
‘Nothing. I’m making His present.’
‘What?’ Vanessa was incredulous, fearing treachery afoot.
‘I’m knitting Him a pair of socks. Out of stinging nettles.’
‘I wish I could knit.’
After a wistful pause she started to say, ‘I wonder what He would …’
‘I’m placing a total embargo on His name today,’ Stella cut her off. ‘Don’t speak of Him. Don’t even think about Him. Right, Regan?’
‘Right, Goneril. Why does He call us those names?’
‘They’re the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella of course.’
‘I thought they were called Anastasia and … and …’
‘Embargo,’ said Stella firmly.
‘It’s not Cordelia who needs a fairy godmother, it’s us. Wouldn’t it be lovely if one day …’
‘Grow up.’
So that was how He saw them, bewigged and garishly rouged, two pantomime dames with grotesque beauty spots and fishnet tights stretched over their bandy men’s calves, capering jealously around Cordelia’s highchair. Cordelia herself, like Barney, was adored unreservedly, but after her birth, with one hand rocking the transparent hospital cot in which she lay, as a joke which they could not share, He had addressed her half-sisters as Goneril and Regan. Their mother had protested then, but now sometimes she used the names. Under His rule, comfortable familiar objects vanished and routines were abolished. Exposed to His mockery, they became ludicrous. One example was the Bunnykins china they ate from sometimes, not in a wish to prolong their babyhood but because it was there. All the pretty mismatched bits and pieces of crockery were superseded by a stark white service from Habitat and there were new forks with vicious prongs and knives which cut. Besotted with Cordelia’s dimples and black curls, He lost all patience with his step-daughters, with their tendency to melancholy and easily provoked tears which their pink eyelids and noses could not conceal, and like a vivisector with an electric prod tormenting two albino mice, he discovered all their most vulnerable places.
Gypsies had travelled up in the train earlier, making their button-holes and nosegays, and had left the seats and floor strewn with a litter of twigs and petals and scraps of silver foil like confetti.
‘We might see Princess Di or Fergie,’ Vanessa said, scuffing the debris with her foot. ‘They do their Christmas shopping in Harrods.’
‘The Duchess of York to you. Oh yes, we’re sure to run into them. Anyway, Princess Diana does her shopping in Covent Garden.’
‘Well then!’ concluded Vanessa triumphantly. She noticed the intimation of a cold sore on her sister’s superior lip and was for a second glad. Harrods and Covent Garden were where they had decided, last night, after lengthy discussions, to go, their excited voices rising from guarded whispers to a normal pitch, until He had roared upstairs at them to shut up. Vanessa’s desire to go to Hamleys had been overruled. She had cherished a secret craving for a tube of plastic stuff with which you blew bubbles and whose petroleum smell she found as addictive as the smell of a new Elastoplast. Now she took out her purse and checked her ticket and counted her money yet again. Even with the change she had filched fearfully from the trousers He had left sprawled across the bedroom chair, it didn’t amount to much. Stella was rich, as the result of her paper round and the tips she had received in return for the cards she had put through her customers’ doors wishing them a ‘Merry Christmas from your Newsboy/Newsgirl’, with a space for her to sign her name. She would have been even wealthier had He not demanded the money for the repair of the iron whose flex had burst into flames in her hand while she was ironing His shirt. She could not see how it had been her fault but supposed it must have been. The compartment filled up at each stop and the girls stared out of the window rather than speak in public, or look at each other and see mirrored in her sister her own unsatisfactory self.
The concourse at Victoria was scented with sweet and sickening melted chocolate from a booth that sold fresh-baked cookies, and crowded with people criss-crossing each other with loaded trolleys, running to hurl themselves at the barriers, dragging luggage and children; queuing helplessly for tickets while the minutes to departure ticked away, swirling around the bright scarves outside Tie Rack, panic-buying festive socks and glittery bow ties, slurping coffee and beer and champing croissants and pizzas and jacket potatoes and trying on ear-rings. It had changed so much from the las
t time they had seen it that only the late arrival of their train and the notice of cancellation and delay on the indicator board reassured them that they were at the right Victoria Station.
‘I’ve got to go to the Ladies.’
‘OK.’
Vanessa attempted to join the dismayingly long queue trailing down the stairs but Stella had other plans.
‘Stell-a! Where are you going?’ She dragged Vanessa into the side entrance of the Grosvenor Hotel.
‘Stella, we can’t! It’s a HOTEL! We’ll be ARRESTED …’ she wailed as Stella’s fingers pinched through her coat sleeves, propelling her up the steps and through the glass doors.
‘Shut up. Look as though we’re meeting somebody.’
Vanessa could scarcely breathe as they crossed the foyer, expecting at any moment a heavy hand to descend on her shoulder, a liveried body to challenge them, a peaked cap to thrust into their faces. The thick carpet accused their feet. Safely inside the Ladies, she collapsed against a basin.
‘Well? Isn’t this better than queuing for hours? And it’s free.’
‘Supposing someone comes?’
‘Oh stop bleating. It’s perfectly all right. Daddy brought me here once – no one takes any notice of you.’
The door opened and the girls fled into cubicles and locked the doors. After what seemed like half an hour Vanessa slid back the bolt and peeped around the door. There was Stella, bold as brass, standing at the mirror between the sleek backs of two women in stolen fur coats, applying a stub of lipstick to her mouth. She washed and dried her hands and joined Stella, meeting a changed face in the glass: Stella’s eyelids were smudged with green and purple, her lashes longer and darker, her skin matt with powder.
‘Where did you get it?’ she whispered hoarsely as the two women moved away.
‘Tracy’ – the friend who had lent her the stockings, with whom Vanessa, until they were safely on the train, had feared Stella would choose to go Christmas shopping, instead of with her.
Women came and went and Vanessa’s fear was forgotten as she applied the cosmetics to her own face.
‘Now we look a bit more human,’ said Stella as they surveyed themselves, Goneril and Regan, whom their own father had named Star and Butterfly.
Vanessa Cardui, Painted Lady, sucked hollows into her cheeks and said, ‘We really need some blusher, but it can’t be helped.’
‘Just a sec.’
‘But Stella, it’s a BAR … we can’t … !’
Her alarm flooded back as Stella marched towards Edward’s Bar.
‘We’ll get DRUNK. What about our shopping?’
Ignoring the animated temperance tract clutching her sleeve, Stella scanned the drinkers.
‘Looking for someone, Miss?’ the barman asked pleasantly.
‘He’s not here yet,’ said Stella. ‘Come on, Vanessa.’
She checked the coffee lounge on the way out, and as they recrossed the fearful foyer it dawned on Vanessa that Stella had planned this all along; all the way up in the train she had been expecting to find Daddy in Edward’s Bar. That had been the whole point of the expedition.
She was afraid that Stella would turn like an injured dog and snap at her. She swallowed hard, her heart racing, as if there were words that would make everything all right, if only she could find them.
‘What?’ Stella did turn on her.
‘He might be in Harrods.’
‘Oh yes. Doing his Christmas shopping with Fergie and Di. Buying our presents.’
Vanessa might have retorted, ‘The Duchess of York to you,’ but she knew better than to risk the cold salt wave of misery between them engulfing the whole day: a gypsy woman barred their way with a sprig of foliage wrapped in silver foil.
‘Lucky white heather. Bring you luck.’
‘Doesn’t seem to have brought you much,’ snarled Stella pushing past her.
‘You shouldn’t have been so rude. Now she’ll put a curse on us,’ wailed Vanessa.
‘It wasn’t even real heather, dumbbell.’
‘Now there’s no chance we’ll meet Daddy.’
Stella strode blindly past the gauntlet of people rattling tins for The Blind. Vanessa dropped in a coin and hurried after her down the steps. As they went to consult the map of the Underground they almost stumbled over a man curled up asleep on the floor, a bundle of grey rags and hair and beard tied up with string. His feet, black with dirt and disease, protruded shockingly bare into the path of the Christmas shoppers. The sisters stared, their faces chalky under their makeup.
Then a burst of laughter and singing broke out. A group of men and women waving bottles and cans were holding a private crazed party, dancing in their disfigured clothes and plastic accoutrements; a woman with long grey hair swirling out in horizontal streamers from a circlet of tinsel was clasping a young man in a close embrace as they shuffled around singing ‘All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth’, and he threw back his head to pour the last drops from a bottle into a toothless black hole, while their companions beat out a percussion accompaniment on bottles and cans with a braying brass of hiccups. They were the only people in that desperate and shoving crowded place who looked happy.
Stella and Vanessa were unhappy as they travelled down the escalator. The old man’s feet clawed at them with broken and corroded nails; the revellers, although quite oblivious to the citizens of the other world, had frightened them; the gypsy’s curse hung over them.
Harrods was horrendous. They moved bemused through the silken scented air, buffeted by headscarves, furs and green shopping bags. Fur and feathers in the Food Hall left them stupefied in the splendour of death and beauty and money.
‘This is crazy,’ said Stella. ‘We probably couldn’t afford even one quail’s egg.’
Mirrors flung their scruffy reflections back at them and they half-expected to be shown the door by one of the green and gold guards and after an hour of fingering and coveting and temptation they were out in the arctic wind of Knightsbridge with two packs of Christmas cards and a round gold box of chocolate Napoleons.
In Covent Garden they caught the tail end of a piece of street theatre as a green spotted pantomime cow curvetted at them with embarrassing udders, swiping the awkward smiles off their faces with its tail. A woman dressed as a clown bopped them on the head with a balloon and thrust a bashed-in hat at them. Close to, she looked fierce rather than funny. The girls paid up. It seemed that everybody in the city was engaged in a conspiracy to make them hand over their money. Two hot chocolates made another serious inroad in their finances, the size of the bill souring the floating islands of cream as they sat on white wrought-iron chairs sipping from long spoons to the accompaniment of a young man busking on a violin backed by a stereo system.
‘You should’ve brought your cello,’ said Vanessa and choked on her chocolate as she realised she could hardly have said anything more tactless. It was He who had caused Stella’s impromptu resignation from the school orchestra, leaving them in the lurch. His repetition, in front of two of His friends, of an attributed reprimand by Sir Thomas Beecham to a lady cellist, had made it impossible for her to practise at home and unthinkable that she should perform on a public platform to an audience sniggering like Him, debasing her and the music.
‘It’s – it’s not my kind of music,’ she had lied miserably to Miss Philips, the music teacher.
‘Well, Stella, I must say I had never thought of you as a disco queen,’ Miss Philips had said bitterly.
Her hurt eyes strobed Stella’s pale selfish face and falling-down socks as she wilted against the wall. Accusations of letting down her fellow musicians followed, and reminders of Miss Philips’s struggle to obtain the cello from another school, her own budget and resources being so limited. She ignored Stella in the corridor thereafter and the pain of this was still with her, like the ominous ache in her lower abdomen. She wished she were at home curled up with a hot-water bottle.
‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘Of all the gin j
oints in all the suburbs of southeast London, why did He have to walk into ours?’ Mummy had brought Him home from a rehearsal of the amateur production of Oklahoma! for which she was doing the costumes, ostensibly for an emergency fitting of His Judd Fry outfit, the trousers and boots of which were presenting difficulties. The girls had almost clapped the palms off their hands after the mournful rendition of ‘Poor Judd is Dead’. It would always be a show-stopper for them.
Stella wished she had had one of the cards from Harrods to put in the school postbox for Miss Philips, but she hadn’t, and now it was too late. Vanessa bought a silver heart-shaped balloon for Cordelia, or, as Stella suspected, for herself. They wandered around the stalls and shops over the slippery cobblestones glazed with drizzle.
‘How come, whichever way we go, we always end up in Central Avenue?’ Vanessa wondered.
Stella gave up the pretence that she knew exactly where she was going. ‘It’ll be getting dark soon. We must buy something.’
They battled their way into the Covent Garden General Store and joined the wet and unhappy throng desperate to spend money they couldn’t afford on presents for people who would not want what they received, to the relentless musical threat that Santa Claus was coming to town. ‘If this is more fun than just shopping,’ said Stella as they queued to pay for their doubtful purchases, quoting from the notice displayed over the festive and jokey goods, ‘I think I prefer just shopping. Sainsbury’s on Saturday morning is paradise compared to this.’
Stella was seduced by a gold mesh star and some baubles as fragile and iridescent as soap bubbles, to hang on the conifer in the corner of the bare front room, decked in scrawny tinsel too sparse for its sprawling branches and topped with the fairy with a scorch mark in her greying crêpe-paper skirt where it had once caught in a candle. The candles, with most of their old decorations, had been vetoed by Him and had been replaced by a set of fairy lights with more twisted emerald green flex than bulbs in evidence.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 65