Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  Tamsin is chastened by Faye’s personal habits. It is rare for her to drink anything other than water with a squeeze of lemon juice. She eats delicately, too: small plates of fig and passionfruit drizzled with just a little honey and plain yoghurt, undressed salads of rocket, pecan and pear. She tells Tamsin that she never cooks; she only buys fresh food that will look pleasing on a plate. This is what she tells Tamsin, and then she reminds herself, with a giggle, that she must consign this sentence to the past tense.

  Each night Tamsin sleeps next to Michael in a bed beneath which is a suitcase. Because Michael has no curiosity, Tamsin has no need to lock it, even though it now contains things that she does not want him to see. On nights when he studies late at the library, she unpacks its contents onto the bed. She lays out the small white singlets, the small white hats, mittens and socks. And then she puts them away again.

  Most nights Michael gets into bed beside her and kisses her, with intent. And she kisses him back, without. And he takes up his book from the bedside table without asking why, or why not. She wishes that he would ask, because she has the answer ready. It is right there, just behind her bottom teeth, where she could oh-so-easily flick it up and onto her tongue. It’s tainted, she would say, if only he would ask. Tarnished. She would give him words to conjure the metallic sheen of her spilled blood under bright lights.

  IV

  ‘Where is Kate?’

  As time passes, this is the question Tamsin begins to carry with her up and down the aisles of supermarkets, stir into her pasta sauce, and squeeze onto her toothbrush late at night. It is the question that flares on the day that Faye’s femur crumbles like plaster of Paris beneath the weight of her pelvis, the very last day of her life that she is able to stand on her feet. It steadily burns as weeks pass and Tamsin measures Faye’s decline against the black-lined fractions of the syringes she draws up and plunges into needle-bruised skin. It will not be long now. And the telephone does not ring.

  ‘You don’t have any photos on display,’ Tamsin observes one day.

  ‘I like my pictures to be made of paint.’

  ‘You must at least have some pictures of Kate.’

  ‘I brought her into the world. Her face is the one I am least in danger of forgetting.’

  It is one of the worst things for Tamsin: that the face she never saw is unrecoverable. Resentment snakes through her, a drug in her veins. It is general, indiscriminate. Kate may have been the only one ever to have curled up inside Faye’s body, but she, Tamsin, will be the one to share the final intimacies of her life. She will give the needles that dull the pain, place the pillows that cushion the hollows of her body, wipe the shit from her shrivelled arse. She will be the true daughter at the end.

  V

  ‘Where is Kate?’ is the question Tamsin wants to ask Faye. She asks Michael instead, and his answers turn into a game.

  ‘Perhaps she’s a suburban drunk with nine grotty kids and she smokes fag butts from ashtrays at shopping centres.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s taken a vow of silence in a Mongolian yurt.’

  ‘Perhaps she lives in a trailer park in Texas with a Mormon polygamist and his six other wives.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s not Kate anymore, but Kevin.’

  A Word from Rosie Little on:

  Nominative Determinism

  We’ve all heard jokes like the one about the Greek skydiver, Con Descending, but the creepy regularity with which people’s names match their vocations or characteristics is no laughing matter to me. I am certain that the entire responsibility for my failure to grow beyond five feet can be sheeted home to my unfortunate family name. Just how its six letters have managed to entirely counter the effects of fresh genes injected into the Little family pool over successive generations I don’t know, but I do know that the quip ‘Little by name, little by nature’ wore out its welcome with me well before I attained the long-coveted height at which I could graduate from the booster seat in the back of my mother’s car.

  The naming game began with Adam, apparently, who got to decide how to refer to all the bits and pieces God left lying around for him in the garden. Later on, explorers seemed to get quite a kick out of naming things too. But these days, unless you’re a botanist and can find a particularly obscure orchid, or you’re an astronomer with a telescope powerful enough to track down a new star, the only things you’re likely to get to name are your pets and your kids. So, if you feel the desire come upon you to fling names around like a seventeenth-century sea captain, you’ll need to have a particularly large family, or buy yourself a substantial aquarium and stock it with a great many fish.

  What’s in a name? A Rosie by any other might smell as sweet, but would I have grown into precisely the same girl if my parents had called me Persephone? It’s such a gamble. Do you give your child a fanciful name in the hope that it will give them a head start in marking themselves out from the flock? Or do you take the opposite approach and give them a plain name, upon which they might write whichever personality they choose? I think I’d lean towards supplying a child with a distinctive brand, but I know that it can go horribly wrong. It certainly did for one babe whose birth notice I read recently. Perhaps her parents envisaged her growing up to unlock the complex ciphers of cyberspace, but I suspect it’s more likely that she’ll spend her life trying work out why on earth her parents called her ‘Decoda’.

  But then, it doesn’t necessarily follow that a person with a good, sensible name will be a good, sensible person. Even if it is a no-nonsense, easy-to-spell, no tricks name like Kate.

  Then one night he says, ‘Perhaps it’s not Kate that’s the dark horse. Perhaps it’s Faye. Maybe she murdered Kate and buried her beneath the hydrangeas.’

  His stupidity wakes every sleeping thing inside of her and in an instant Tamsin can hear the thrumming and drumming of a thousand demons’ tiny veined wings in her chest. Within three moves the conversation is a fight and soon he is saying it again: ‘It wasn’t the right time, love. We talked about this. My degree. Financially, we —’

  And she is getting shriller as she moves through her lines: ‘Financially we killed our child so we could afford a nice house for our child to live in. We killed our baby so one day we could send it to a private school, so it could wear nice clothes. How does any of this make sense to you?’

  He doesn’t pull the punchline: ‘Tam, it was a decision we made together.’

  And she hates him, hates him, for saying it. Most of all because it is true. She hates him all the way up the stairs to the bedroom, and for all of the time it takes to get out of her clothes and get into the shower. She wants to wash from her mind the orange-bricked building and its lay-back chair and its plughole swirling with her own red cells. Standing in the hot fall she feels an invisible cat kneading at her abdomen. Since the termination her periods have been clotty and painful. Now blood begins to fall from between her legs in heavy splotches. It is claret, then pink, as the diluting water swirls it towards the plughole.

  After a while Michael opens the shower door, his look concerned, gentle. It makes her want to stretch her wet arms around him and pull him, clothes and all, into the shower with her. She wishes the droplets were her tears, and that he would stand in them until he was drenched. Then she sees him see the blood and she sees him think a thought he is too well-schooled to say out loud. But he doesn’t have to say it. The damage is done. In place of concern there is relief — twofold. His mouth tightens into a tiny patronising smile, and she wishes her hands were of the type that could flick out a set of long sharp claws with which to scratch his face. She slams the shower door, catching his fingers, and when she sees through the beaded glass how he clutches them in pain, she is glad.

  VI

  ‘Where is Kate?’ Tamsin finally asks Faye, on a day when her bitterness is so strong that she cannot help but make everyone else taste it too.

  She asks her question with a careful measure of spite, her eyes on the face of her fob watch and her fing
ertips pressed firmly into the old woman’s wrist. She expects to feel the pulse leap in concert with her own. But it does not.

  ‘She’s in the liquor cabinet.’

  Tamsin flushes, hot with guilt. She has been cruel. And not only that, she has been cruel to an old woman whose mind — her sharp and beautiful mind — is following her body into decay. Tamsin has nursed more than one person through and beyond this point, but she had not thought that it would happen to Faye.

  ‘In the liquor cabinet? I see.’

  ‘That mollifying tone does not become you, you know.’

  Tamsin looks away from the watch face, losing count, to find Faye’s eyes as clear as ever.

  ‘And that crazy old biddy one doesn’t do much for you. You frightened me.’

  ‘The anger goes, darling. I can promise you that much. It is the most volatile part, and it soon burns itself off.’

  Tamsin flinches as if slapped. She had not known it could be seen from the outside.

  ‘And then,’ says Faye, ‘there is only the sadness.’

  VII

  ‘Kate,’ says Faye, ‘really is in the liquor cabinet, you know.’

  And on this day, which feels like one of the very last they will spend together, Tamsin is almost ready to believe her.

  ‘You can take her out if you want to. I haven’t taken her out for years.’

  ‘So you have got a photo of her?’

  ‘Go on. At the back.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you show me before?’

  ‘Behind the port.’

  The ownership of a liquor cabinet is, to Tamsin — whose meagre supply of cheap booze sits in the corner of her kitchen cupboard — an index of elegance. A woman who owns a liquor cabinet is surely one who can coil her hair into a chignon and tong out lemon wedges with a demeanour as cool as the ice in her silver bucket. Tamsin imagines a young Faye, shaped like a Vogue paper pattern sketch, handing out drinks at a party.

  The cabinet’s rosewood doors open in her hands like those of an expensive car, smooth and substantial. Inside is the cut crystal of several decanters fitted with orbed stoppers. There is ruby port, sapphire gin, and something poisonously emerald. Tamsin removes the stopper and puts her nose to the neck.

  ‘Crème de menthe? Yuck. Honestly Faye. And here I was thinking you had perfect taste.’

  ‘At the back, at the back.’

  And at the back, behind the port, Tamsin sees Kate.

  Kate is small. Much smaller than Tamsin would have expected. Hers is a thick glass jar with the word Fowlers pressed into the metal of its lid. Inside she floats, her delicate infant skin faintly rippled by the liquid preservative. Away from her belly twists a length of purplish flex, an umbilical cord to nowhere.

  ‘Oh, Faye.’

  ‘Born too early, you see. Much too early. There was nothing that could be done.’

  Tamsin touches a fingertip to the glass, as if she might trace the sculpted curves of the baby’s tiny lips, or the sparse pale hairs of her eyebrows.

  ‘I’d wanted her so much, I couldn’t bear to leave the hospital without her. Keith arranged it for me, knew who to speak to. When I brought her home, I didn’t know where to put her. The liquor cabinet seemed somehow …ironic. When happiness is no longer possible, you see, one might as well try to keep oneself amused.’

  Tamsin is gentle, but when she lifts the jar she cannot prevent the foetus from bobbing stiffly in her formalin bath, knees and elbows fending glass.

  ‘Let me see her.’

  Tamsin cradles Kate in her arms for a moment before handing her to her mother, propped on the pillows of her bed. Faye takes her tenderly and when her tears fall, they touch glass, dissolving into its thickness.

  VIII

  ‘Kate,’ Tamsin thinks.

  It is the first thing she thinks on the day she arrives to find the apartment’s front door, its windows and the rear of an ambulance left gapingly, indecently, open. It could almost be Faye’s frail corpse so carelessly exposed. Tamsin ditches her bike on the street and rushes, wanting desperately to draw a nightgown down over the whole, horrible scene.

  The night nurse is on the patio, smoking and looking out over the river, her long ribbed cardigan tightly twisted around her torso. Faye’s nephew is there too, but he cannot settle to sitting or standing or leaning. His movements crisscross the near-white carpet but avoid the men in blue coveralls who have clipboards and kind faces. They have already moved Faye out of her own bed and onto the hard and narrow mattress of the ambulance trolley.

  Tamsin touches the now slightly yellowed skin of her face, smoothes the soft lilac of her hair. The nephew watches as if Tamsin were television.

  ‘She liked you.’

  ‘I liked her.’

  ‘Thank you. For making her comfortable.’

  Tamsin lifts Faye’s bird-bone hand and touches the back of it to her cheek. She lays it down again and nods to the ambulance officer who clicks off the brakes and begins to wheel the trolley towards the door.

  ‘She wanted you to have something,’ the nephew tells Tamsin. ‘She said you could choose.’

  Tamsin wonders if he knows how obviously his eyes flicker to the smallest of the paintings, the ones he is not sure she knows are the most valuable of all. So easily could she claim one, just a small one, and all in the guise of being too modest to pick a larger canvas.

  ‘Anything. She did say anything.’

  Tamsin sees how he must fight himself to say this, and by what a narrow margin his better self wins.

  ‘Could I have one of the decanters, from the liquor cabinet?’

  ‘A decanter? Good God, you can have the lot.’

  IX

  ‘Kate,’ Tamsin answers the woman making expert tucks in tissue paper on the counter.

  ‘Short for Katherine?’

  ‘No. Just Kate.’

  ‘How lovely to hear a nice plain name. Almost unusual nowadays, isn’t it? And how old?”

  ‘Twelve …yes, twelve months.’

  ‘Oh you do have to think, don’t you? Goes so quickly. Before you know it, they’re asking for the car keys.’

  Twelve months. Can it really have been so long? Tamsin has not the usual milestones — sitting, crawling, standing, walking — to help her keep track.

  ‘Twelve months,’ the woman says, clucking her tongue. ‘Oh, they’re gorgeous at that age, aren’t they? Well, I’m sure your little Kate will look adorable in these.’

  They are shoes, this time, of the softest pink leather. Tamsin checks her watch. Now that Michael is working again, there is no need to rush. There is plenty of time yet, before he gets home, to add to her accumulation of secrets in the suitcase beneath the bed. In the street she sits at an outdoor café table and watches the movements of doctors’ wives and flowers and glossy cars. Into the boutique from which she has just come, go women with loose shirts over growing bellies. But Tamsin does not envy them. Not anymore.

  DESTINY

  Rosie Little Joins the Dots

  It is all very well to dream of climbing through the ceiling of a newspaper office via the branching ladder of an overgrown pot plant, out into the starry night sky. But even if you elect to take a more sensible approach — tender your resignation in warm and regretful terms, work out your notice, and leave through the front door on a Friday afternoon after a few paper cups of cask moselle — you still find yourself as bewildered as if you really were adrift on a rooftop, staring into the benignly unhelpful face of the Town Clock, with nothing more than a Mini with a busted door, twenty-seven pairs of red shoes and an arts degree to your name, wondering what on earth to do next.

  I went to see Eve.

  ‘What’s it like?’ I asked her, part way through the third bottle of wine, having invoked the privileges of dear friendship and rare appearance in order to keep her up drinking long past the hour Adam had excused himself and gone to bed.

  ‘What?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘All this,’ I said, waving my hand to ta
ke in the new and tasteful expanses of the remodelled picker’s hut, the room where her calm and dependable husband lay in his half of the marital bed, the nursery where their little boys were twinned in deep sleep and rude good health, the pair of matching dogs as flat as rugs before the open fire, and the walls ripely hung with painted apples. ‘You always were five steps ahead of me, Evie.’

  ‘That depends entirely, dear girl, on which direction you’re headed.’

  ‘But where do I go now?’

  She threw a cushion at me. ‘Go to sleep, for God’s sake. I’m up to my neck in toddler shit in two and a half hours.’

  A few weeks later, I set sail.

  Although, I find ‘sail’ to be a curious verb for the action of the floating white American skyscraper upon whose luxurious decks I stood as I pinned to my lapel the shining name tag that bore the legend ASSISTANT PURSER ROSIE LITTLE.

  Oh please, admire me in my cruise company uniform: the snug-fitting bottle-green skirt, the matching fitted jacket, the nylon nanna-print blouse, the beige pantyhose (that I ripped through at the startling rate of one pair every two days due to a ridiculous propensity for snagging), and the sensibly low-heeled bottle-green pumps. And please, do reach into the breast pocket of my jacket and bring out, for your amusement and mine, the laminated card which I could (and did) get a written reprimand for failing to carry, and upon which are printed the ten commandments of my life aboard the vessel. My favourites were always Number Three: ‘I smile, I am on stage’, and Number Ten: ‘I never say no. I say “I will be pleased to check and see” ’.

  I shared my flimsy walled, lower deck cabin with a Texan called Beth. Although she quite possibly had to have the pom-poms surgically removed from her cheerleader wrists before she took up her job as a shipboard dancer, she was forthright and funny and we were friends in an instant. Her boyfriend, also a dancer, was a Mexican called Octavio, whose polished manner and industrial strength hairdo remained undented even after a full day of cha-cha-chaing the wibbly flesh of seventy-year-old Nebraskan matrons.