Strange equations filled my mind: sarcasm equals aggression equals attack. I clenched my hands into fists, turned, ran. ‘Wait, don’t go,’ Mary called after me. I collided with a wall, too frightened to think about which way I was going, and felt something sharp spike my skin through my shirt. I looked down. There was a small red dot on the cotton.
‘I’ll get you a plaster to put on it,’ said Mary. ‘There are some in the bathroom cabinet, if they haven’t crumbled to dust by now. They’ve been there since I moved in. So’s that killer weed.’ She beckoned me towards her.
I couldn’t believe she was inviting me inside. To mask my confusion, I muttered, ‘It’s not a weed.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing.’
Mary walked over to where I was standing and stroked the plant that had pricked me. ‘You know what this is?’
I nodded, not looking at her. I’d seen hundreds. Never one sharp enough to pierce skin, though, until now. I was trembling, unable to keep still.
‘Tell me.’
It seemed easier than talking about what I was doing at her house. ‘It’s called a sempervivum. It’s been planted there, to grow out of the wall.’ I felt idiotic, after injuring myself so clumsily, and expected her to burst out laughing.
‘In that case, I’d better not yank it out,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Come on, if you’re coming.’ She took it for granted that I would follow her. I did, round the back of the house and into her kitchen, which was horrible and falling apart. ‘You’re shocked by the state of the place,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘I’ve done nothing to it since I moved in.’ She said something then about the charm of a found object, but I wasn’t fully listening. How was I going to get Abberton? Why hadn’t I foreseen how impossible it would be? I considered telling the truth, then rejected the idea. My boyfriend thinks he killed you years ago-would you mind giving me the picture you refused to sell me last June, so that I can prove to him that you’re alive?
Mary told me to wait in the kitchen while she went to fetch a plaster. I didn’t need one-my wound was a pinprick, almost non-existent-but I didn’t want to risk antagonising her. As soon as she was out of sight, I felt trapped in the room, even though the door was open. Frantically, I itemised objects I could see to calm myself: kettle, microwave, a tea towel with ‘Villiers’ printed on it beside a picture of what looked like a big stone castle, four boxes of Twinings Peppermint tea, stacked one on top of the other…
I couldn’t concentrate or keep still. I went out into the hall, which was small, narrow and smelled of a mixture of noxious substances: smoke, gas, grease. There was another open door to my left, through which I could see, above a gas fire with bent bars and ropes of dust clinging to it like grey tinsel that had lost its shine, a painting of a boy with a pen in his hand. He had written the words ‘Joy Division’ on the wall and was standing back to survey his work. His face wasn’t visible, only the back of his head. Instantly, I recognised the picture as Mary’s handiwork. Something about the boy’s posture made it look as if he might turn round any second and catch me spying on him. I found the painting disconcerting; it made me want to lower my eyes. How did she do that? How could she take a brush and some paints and produce something as extraordinary as this?
Mary leaped down the stairs, landing beside me, making me cry out in alarm. ‘Here we go. Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.’ She was holding a plaster in her hand. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t still angry with me, why she cared that I was bleeding.
I put out my hand to take the plaster, but Mary was already ripping the paper tabs off it. Once they were gone, she put the plaster between her teeth and pulled up my shirt. I hadn’t been expecting it, and I recoiled. My back hit the wall. It was too late. She’d seen the scar, the thick pink line that divides my stomach in half. She must have seen my bra, too, having pulled my shirt up higher than she needed to.
She wasn’t interested in that, though. I could see where her eyes had landed, on my damaged skin. After the operation, I’d heard a nurse who thought I was asleep say, ‘Better hope she never puts on any weight. That stomach ever gets fat, it’ll look like an arse.’ A male nurse had laughed and called her a catty bitch.
Mary was fascinated by my scar. She stared unashamedly. I itched to yank my shirt ends out of her hand and cover myself, but I was afraid to give my own wishes precedence over hers. She wanted to look, and I knew what happened when I displeased her.
She licked her finger, wiped a spot of blood from my skin and rubbed the plaster on, her knuckle moving back and forth across the material. She’s insane, I thought as she smiled at me. It occurred to me that this so-called help might be a subtle form of attack. If her aim was to humiliate me, she’d succeeded again.
‘What do you think of it?’ she asked, nodding at the Joy Division picture through the open door. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes.’
She looked puzzled. ‘What, that’s it? I thought you loved my work. So much that you couldn’t wait to get your hands on it.’
‘It’s… it’s good. They’re all good.’ Two more of her paintings were up in the hall, one of a man, a woman and a boy sitting round a table, the other of the same man and woman, her looking in a mirror, him behind her, lying on the bed. Her face was visible only in the glass, reflected; her gaze seemed to taunt me, and I turned away. Against the drab wallpaper, Mary’s paintings stood out, vibrant and mesmerising, like diamonds shining out from a bed of sludge. The sight jarred; these pictures looked wrong here, violently out of kilter, yet without them the house would have had nothing. I had a powerful sense-one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had-that 15 Megson Crescent needed Mary’s paintings.
‘I know-you wouldn’t want them on your wall,’ she said, mistaking my awe for distaste. ‘A pretty scabby family, all things considered, but that’s life on the Winstanley estate. You’re brave to risk a visit. That lot don’t live here any more, but there are more of the same, and even worse.’
‘I’m not brave,’ I told her. Couldn’t she see I was petrified? Was she mocking me?
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology for what happened last June. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
Talk about something else. Please, change the subject. I’d clamped my mouth shut and my jaw was starting to ache.
‘I was frightened. Selfishly, I didn’t think…’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It still bothers you, doesn’t it? What happened at the gallery.’
How dared she expect confirmation from me? Rage began to blister inside me, but I tried to nod as if I felt fine. My natural reaction to anger: bury it before it’s used against me. Deny it an outlet. It was practically the first thing I learned as a child in my parents’ house: I wasn’t entitled to my natural responses, especially the more ‘un-Christian’ ones. I was allowed to manifest only those states of mind that would please my mother and father, make them proud of me. Anger, particularly anger directed at them, didn’t qualify.
‘Why does it still bother you?’ Mary waited for an answer I had no intention of giving her. ‘Do you blame yourself, is that it? Why do we do that? Human beings, I mean. Why do we take each mishap that strikes us, and twist it until it loses its randomness and becomes a big black arrow pointing at us, proving our worthlessness?’
Her words, so unexpected, went all the way through me. I knew I wouldn’t forget them for a long time.
‘When I lost it with you, it reminded you of something else, didn’t it? You’ve been attacked before. I’m right, aren’t I? Your reaction that day was pretty extreme-I can’t believe that was all down to me. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’
I stood rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed on the smear of blood on my shirt.
‘The way I behaved that day had nothing to do with you, what you said or did,’ said Mary. ‘No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It’s the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he lo
athes. He or she.’
Try telling that to the victim, I thought.
‘I don’t sell my work. I never do. I don’t even like people seeing it, unless they’re people I trust, and I trust nobody. I’m a coward. You were a strange woman demanding to buy my painting-I felt threatened. Exposed.’ She lit a cigarette.
‘Why?’ I asked. My turn to wait for an answer.
Mary didn’t seem bothered by the long silence. It was a while before she said, ‘Is there anything in your life that’s… in your past, I mean, anything that’s too painful to talk about?’
How could she know? I told myself she couldn’t.
‘I think there is.’ She pointed to my stomach. ‘The scar. The story that goes with it. It’s all right, I’m not asking you to tell me.’
The moment for denial came and went. I’d as good as admitted she was right.
‘Has it ever occurred to you to write it down? Your story, I mean. I saw a therapist for years. I stopped when I realised there was no fixing the broken bits. That’s okay-I can live with it, if you can call my half-life in this shit-hole living. Because that’s what it’s like, isn’t it? I know you know, Ruth. When your world falls apart and everything’s ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.’
I tried hard to hide the effect her words were having on me.
‘This therapist-she said I wouldn’t be able to move on for as long as I was determined to apportion blame. She told me to write it like a story in the third person, describe how all the characters felt, not only me. It’s a way of showing that everyone involved has a point of view, or some such crap.’ Mary stubbed her cigarette out on the wall. Immediately, she lit another. ‘I didn’t do it. Didn’t want to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. You know?’
I watched the pain rampaging across her face as she spoke, and wondered if my face sometimes looked like that.
Mary laughed quietly. ‘I digress,’ she said. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t talk to a soul from one week to the next. Can I paint you?’
‘No,’ I said, hating the idea, not sure if she was serious.
‘Why not? Your face is perfect-like a fairy’s or an angel’s. Not that I’ve seen either.’ A cunning look came into her eyes. ‘I won’t forget what you look like. You can’t stop me painting you if I want to.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Some people get no say in the matter.’ She gestured at the pictures on the walls.
‘I don’t want to be painted,’ I told her. ‘If I did, you’d be the person I’d choose to paint me.’ I was pleased with this answer: firm but generous. She couldn’t fault me.
‘Why’s that, then?’ she asked.
‘Of all the artists whose work I’ve seen, you’re the best.’
She rattled off a list of names in a bored voice. ‘Rembrandt, Picasso, Klimt, Kandinsky, Hockney, Hirst-better than all of them?’
‘I’ve never seen their work,’ I said. ‘Only pictures of it.’
Some emotion-triumph?-flared in Mary’s eyes. When she next spoke, her voice was hoarse. ‘Ruth,’ she said. I looked up in time to see her mouthing my name several more times, soundlessly. ‘Wait.’ She stood up.
I was waiting already, to see what she would say next. She’d said my name for the sake of saying it, it seemed, not as the precursor to anything. She went upstairs again. When she came down she was holding Abberton. My heart started to race when I saw it. In my mind, all this time, it had represented that terrible day at Saul’s gallery; I tried not to think about it, but when I did it made me feel disorientated, out of control. Now that I had faced Mary, now that she’d apologised to me, it was different. Something had shifted.
‘If you still want it, it’s yours,’ said Mary. ‘Gratis.’
‘What? But…’
‘I didn’t trust you before. I do now.’ She looked embarrassed, tried to smile. ‘Anyone who knows they haven’t seen a painting unless they’ve seen the original is all right in my book. You’d be amazed how many people put a poster of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on their wall and imagine they’ve got Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on their wall.’
I felt terrible, as if I was cheating her somehow. I’d come here to get Abberton for Aidan, not for myself. His proof: Mary’s name and the date at the bottom. She knew nothing of my ulterior motive. I tried to persuade myself I was doing nothing wrong, imagined opening my mouth and saying Aidan’s name to see how she would react. Impossible.
I didn’t want her to know his name, or that he was my boyfriend. I wanted her to know nothing about us. I despised myself, knowing that no matter what Mary said or did, I would never trust her.
She held up her hands and made a frame shape in front of my face with her fingers and thumbs. ‘What’s your story, Ruth Bussey? Before I paint a person, I need to know their story. What happened to you? How did you get that scar?’ This time she didn’t say that I didn’t have to tell her if I didn’t want to, so I said it to myself. ‘You think it makes you strong, suffering in silence, bearing the burden alone? So what if it does? What’s the advantage of being strong? Do you know what happens to strong people? I do. Weak people attack them. Why do you think I went for you in the gallery that day?’
I stiffened. How long before I could escape?
‘You seemed so strong, and I felt so weak. Weak people always attack strong people-it’s safer. It’s weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Strong people can walk away-no repercussions, you see, if you attack a strong person. Want to know how I ended up so weak?’
‘No, I… no.’ I picked up Abberton, afraid she’d change her mind and take it back. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Mary grabbed my hand. ‘Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.’
I tried not to panic, said again that I needed to leave. I’d opened the front door and was almost out, with Abberton under my arm. ‘You’ll tell me one day,’ she said as she released her grip.
I ran to my car, gulping in fresh air as if I’d been trapped underwater. I didn’t look back at the house. I knew I would see Mary in the doorway, watching, waiting. As I drove away, uncertain as I was about everything else, I became convinced of one thing: Aidan’s insane belief centred around a woman who was every bit as insane as the things he’d said about her.
I didn’t know what that meant, but it had to mean something.
10
4/3/08
‘It isn’t a relationship,’ Olivia said indignantly. ‘I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but I don’t have those. That suits you fine, doesn’t it? Me having no one, being on tap whenever you want me.’
‘Don’t twist this! I don’t want you to be lonely, or…’
‘Terrified of telling any man I fall for that I lost my womb and ovaries to cancer and can’t have children?’
‘You always fucking do this! You throw the c-word at me for the sympathy vote and expect me to back down!’ Charlie wished her sister would stand up to argue. Olivia sat curled on the sofa in her tiny, designer-fabric-swathed Fulham flat, still in her cream satin pyjamas and dressing-gown though it was getting on for early evening. She wasn’t fond of physical exertion. Apart from sex with Dominic Lund, as it turned out.
Charlie felt like a bully shouting down at her. She also knew she had no plans to stop shouting any time soon. ‘How do you think I felt? After I’ve poured my heart out to him, begged him for help, and had to sit there like an idiot with him telling me what a loser I am. Enjoying trashing my confidence, revelling in his wisdom and my helplessness. Do you know what he called me? A psychopath’s ex-girlfriend. Quite a gentleman you’ve got there. When I told him to fuck off, he dropped his bombshell: “By the way, not only am I not going to lift a finger for you, but I’m fucking your sister and we’re both laughing at you behind your back.” It didn’t occur to you that I might have appreciated having that information in advance?’
; ‘Your self-absorption knows no bounds,’ said Olivia, her face pink with outrage. ‘I’ll throw another c-word at you in a minute. Will you listen to yourself?’
Charlie was in no state to listen. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t see what the problem is. You needed legal advice, I recommended Dommie. It wasn’t as if-’
‘Dommie? This is a bad dream,’ Charlie muttered. ‘I’ll wake up in a minute.’
‘I didn’t tell you because you’ve got a long history of thinking every decision I make is-’
‘Is he the best you can do? A semi-autistic cheapskate who can’t even look at people when he speaks to them and forgets his wallet on purpose when he goes out to lunch, who plays with his BlackBerry compulsively the way teenage boys play with their dicks, who looks like a buzzard…’
‘A buzzard?’
‘He looks like a big bird of prey-don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed! Acts like one too.’
‘All right!’ Olivia held up her hands. ‘Yes, he’s the best I can do. Is that what you want me to say? Somehow he’s managed to upset you, so you decided to come here and upset me, and you’ve succeeded. Job done. Happy now?’
‘Go on,’ Charlie taunted her. ‘Use that word you threatened me with.’
‘It’s only a casual thing, Char. It hasn’t been going on for very long. I wanted to-’
‘How long’s not very long?’
‘I don’t know, about six months.’
‘Six months! I told you Simon and I were engaged three fucking seconds after I knew myself! Since when you’ve been prancing around sanctimoniously, exuding disapproval, loudly dooming us to failure at every opportunity…’
‘Prance? I don’t prance.’
‘All I’m doing’s trying to be happy for a change. You keep saying you’ve said your piece and from now on you’ll keep your mouth shut, but it never works, does it? You can’t restrain yourself from pointing out that Simon’s weird and frigid and socially inept, and he’s never said he loves me…’ Charlie had to pause as a tide of rage swept through her, pushing all coherent thought aside.
The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down Page 24