Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  When he opened his identical door and took a step back, instead of forward to kiss me, I saw that he was afraid of me.

  So I kissed him, to make it easier, and he looked at me intently and said: ‘Thank God you haven’t cut your hair.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I don’t know. I had a terrible feeling that you would cut it off.’

  ‘Like a nun? My life isn’t that blighted,’ I said lightly, as if I were just barely flicking him with a whip.

  We had gone through from the absurd bucket of hall into the cramped tea-chest of living-room. A bedroom led off it, so small that you could see all three walls through the doorway, and on the other side was an alcove kitchen no bigger than the noxious nook where Kate’s mother stewed the clothes in Butt Street.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘All right. Like a drink?’

  ‘All right.’

  He gave me a drink and a cigarette, and lit it for me. I stood in the middle of the room and held them.

  ‘You’ve grown up,’ he said. ‘More sophisticated.’

  ‘It’s the cigarette. I don’t - I don’t smoke, Daddy.’

  Looking round for somewhere to put it, I felt myself sag for a moment, and took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to give way over a thing like him forgetting that he had promised me fifty pounds if I didn’t smoke till I was twenty-five.

  In silence, he handed me an ashtray and watched me put the cigarette out. ‘Do you want to talk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would. I just had to see you before you went back to New York. Are you going back?’

  ‘I may. I have my mother to think of now, you know,’ I said insufferably.’

  ‘Sit down and have your drink and don’t be so damn righteous,’ he said harshly.

  Because I had expected him to be apologetic, or at least placating, I was surprised into sitting on the hard square arm of a hard cube chair. Where did Benita sit when she came? One of the things I had been afraid of was a smell of her, a comb, an apron. In films, women scatter tell-tale lipsticks or compacts about like chaff. In life, they only leave small parcels, or pamphlets that have been thrust into their hand in the street. There was no sign of her.

  Having no mantelpiece to lean on, since there was no fireplace, and no fender for his foot, my father stood on the insulting carpet and looked down at me with his hands in his pockets, resting the hip of his bad leg like a horse.

  ‘They say at the court,’ he said at last, ‘that I take too long over cases and make people miss trains. Why? Because you have got to understand why things are done before you can judge whether they are right or wrong. I don’t think you can understand what I am doing, so don’t try to judge.’

  I looked up at him quickly. That was almost what I had once said to him about Tom. But he went on talking as if he were unaware of that, as if the lunch at the flat, the agonizing talk in the toolshed, had never happened, and this was new, the first time anyone had ever been caught in the egotism of love and thought themselves justified in whatever they did.

  I almost laughed. I could have said: Why tell me this? I knew it before you did. I swear, I had said, and he had said: I swear. I looked at him and he was a stranger, trying to make a stranger out of me. I got up to go and, when he took his hands out of his pockets, I saw that on the back of the right one was the mark of a broken vein, never properly healed.

  I thought I would be all right. I went home and cooked the steak for my mother, and found her a tablet for the indigestion she knew it would give her because it was so late, and saw her and the dog into bed, and even slept myself, with the voices in my head.

  But in the morning I went into the toolshed where he had talked to me of right and wrong, and took the stiff scrubbing-brush and whacked it blindly at the flower-pots. I broke dozens of them and left the pieces on the damp earth floor. I told my mother the cat from next door had done it, and she said that she had always believed there should be a tax on cats and bicycles.

  I had to see Kate, even if she didn’t have to see me.

  My mother had kept me with her every day, inventing errands, trips to make, people to visit. She is being very brave about seeing people, but I think she enjoys their embarrassed sympathy more than their disinterested acceptance of her when she was with my father. Discretion is still the word, and those who do not know are not told, even if they say: Where’s David? or: Bring David round for bridge next week. Roger wants to see him.

  She will temporize and invent, rather than say: He’s left me. My demon won’t let me concede this to her as pride, because I know it is cowardice.

  My grandmother came for two nights, and the chauffeur slept in the room where Dotty and I used to have our cards and wine sessions. Foiled of alcohol, he is now trying to smoke himself to death, and his strangling cough and sodden sinuses were even worse than my mother and grandmother trying to rally each other with games of backgammon and racing demon, and brightly not talking about my father.

  My Aunt Millicent came one day with Derek, and brought a bottle of brandy, which was a good thing, because my mother won’t take anything from the cellar; but the day was like a wake, My father should have been stretched out upstairs with candles head and foot, to match the hushed, consoling voices.

  ‘How can you stand it?’ Derek said, when we were outside to take a glum look at the small gem of view, self-conscious in its primary greens and fresh-turned earth.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You’ve got to get out.’

  ‘I owe her something:

  ‘Anyone can give birth. I’ll tell my father to order you back to the States. Then it won’t be your fault. Count on me.’ He squeezed my hand and we rubbed cheeks. He is turning into the kind of man who will always be there at every crisis, every wedding and funeral, blandly ushering, putting a hand under the elbows of doddering unknown relations, just sexless enough for comfort.

  It was almost two weeks before I could get away to town by myself. I took my mother’s car. He had left her his, but she refused to use it, and it stood cold in the garage, like the riderless charger with stirrups reversed.

  I drove through the familiar streets, sick with the great grey sickness that lies on all this part of London, to the blocks of brown and grey stone, ringed round with iron balconies that look on nothing.

  All the narrow green doors on Kate’s level were newly painted. Things were looking up. On her door, the paint was already scarred again on the bottom corner where it had to be kicked to get it open. Things were not looking up far enough to have the door rehung.

  It was opened by a woman in a pair of tight shiny pants of that painful colour the Americans call aqua. The baby-sitter? She was sitting without her teeth, if so.

  ‘Is Kate there?’

  She shook her head and winked, as if I had asked for a prostitute. ‘Wrong flat, dear.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘I don’t know who she is, let alone where.’

  ‘She used to live here. I thought perhaps you—’

  ‘Whoever lived here,’ the woman said, smacking her empty gums, ‘should have their nose rubbed in it. Took me six weeks to get the smell out.’

  ‘Doesn’t the Council—?’

  ‘The Council.’ She laughed mirthlessly and swung the door at me, kicking it from inside to make it shut.

  Turning to go, I became aware of an agitation at a window two flats along the balcony. It was Mary Gold, the wreck of the Golden Mary, signalling at me with the curtain. She was beckoning, so I went to her door, found it ajar, and went in.

  I have been to places with Johnny Jordan where you take a deep breath of real air before you go in, and try just to move your diaphragm in and out, like poetry recitals, until you come out. I have been to places where even he looked uncomfortable. The woman with all the cats. The baby with the wad of wet newspaper steaming in the bottom of his pram.

  Mary Gold’s flat
was the worse yet, and I doubt if even Johnny would have got through into the farthest room. You couldn’t. The smell was fetid, relendess, the invisible wall of science fiction. Mice and meals and drains and feet gone bad like cabbage stalks, impenetrable as the brambles round the Sleeping Beauty, and, beyond it, Mary Gold sat in her parlour and called to me.

  ‘Looking for Bob and Katie?’

  She was grinning and nodding her big grizzled head so benevolently that I stood in the hall and stared. To Kate and me, she had always been a witch, a strangler, a succuba who raped men in their sleep. I had never thought of her as a nice smelly old lady in an armchair with the seat dropped to the floor, watching a tot’s programme on the television.

  ‘Looking for Katie?’ she asked again. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen you go by, dear. I should have thought you’d know.’

  ‘Know what?’ What horrible thing had happened to Kate, and me not there, who had sworn to stick by her?’

  ‘The usual. They’ll let you go so long, you know, and owe just so much, and then it’s -’ Golden Mary licked her spatulate thumb and flicked it over her shoulder. ‘Mrs P. isn’t Job, you know.’

  She pronounced it like a job of work, and fixed me with an eye, so I said: ‘I didn’t think she was. I knew Bob was out of work, but he was sure they’d take him on again.’

  ‘They took on some of the men, but not im. The wonder is why they took im in the first place. When she had the second child I said to her, I said: “Now you’ve got three babies to look after.” ‘

  She laughed, and her eyes strayed back to the television, and her thick white hand strayed out to the box of biscuits at her side. ‘Have a ginger nut?’

  ‘No thanks.’ She still had me stuck in the hall behind the barrier of smell, and there were ants countermarching in the biscuits, but she was no monster. Why had Kate hated her so extravagandy? It was odd that she had never told me that they were at least on speaking terms. She always had to have an enemy. Even at Molly’s where she was happiest, she’d had Joan and Matron to hate.

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘There was some talk of her and the kids going to a ostel, but I think e got a job in the end. Been drawing is unemployment benefit, but of course they’d spent it as it come. Like kids. I bought a iron off her. Then the man come to repossess it after. You could take her to court for that, he said. Ha! With my family, you stay clear of the courts.’

  A little animated wooden man came on to the screen with a barrow. ‘Woody Woodman!’ Her eyes were glazed and fixed. It was time for me to go.

  WHEN I OPENED the door and there she was, with her hair piled smooth and high at the back and tumbling forward over her square bony forehead, I could have died.

  I was in pyjamas, the torn ones - well, all right, the only ones. I hadn’t felt like getting dressed. After I came out of the bathroom and found Dino waiting outside in that monogrammed dressing-gown he says some woman gave him, and rushed back to the room because I didn’t want him to see my face, though he must have heard, Sammy had tipped over a jug of milk, so I clouted him and went back to bed, like a mouse going back to its hole.

  When I got up in the end to feed the baby, I wished I hadn’t. It turned out to be one of those days when every time I started to do something, Emily would yell, or Sammy would pull the curtains down on him, or knock something over, or crawl somewhere and get stuck. One of those days? Show me a day that isn’t like that.

  Two days ago, he fell down the stairs. Bump, bump, bump, all the way down to the half-landing, I heard him. Dino came out in his black trousers with black hair all over his chest - he was dressing to go to work - and picked him up and brought him back and scolded me.

  They all scold me, Marge and Norma and them, but they should have my lot. Dino scolds me just for fun. When he saw Bob wasn’t in the room, he said: Can I come in?

  I told him what he could do with it, but one day he will get in, and you can trust Sammy to tell Bob. He can’t talk much, not above a few words strung together all wrong, but he’ll manage. The day I bit him because he bit Emily, he told him, clear as a bell: She bit me. How could you, Katie, a little baby? Bob said, and I didn’t bother to explain to him that you can only discipline kids with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He can’t always understand the theory of things, but he’s dead jealous, and he’d have no trouble understanding about Dino.

  I was in pyjamas with a pair of Bob’s jazzy socks on my feet and not a hair of my head combed. When Em saw me, she took in everything at once, the room, the mess, the bed unmade, the puddle of milk on the floor, the wreck of about three meals on the table, the kids in their night things, both wet and filthy, me looking as bad as I felt, and all she said was: ‘Oh, Kate, you’ve cut off your hair!’ As if that was all that had happened to me since the days when she and I were equals, sisters, blood comrades.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ was all I could say.

  ‘Molly told me.’

  ‘She went away.’ Everyone went away, everyone but me and Bob.

  ‘I know. I wrote to her in York, and she told me where you were.’

  ‘It’s no palace,’ I said, but she pretended that she didn’t see the room, except as a place where I was. She kissed me, and hugged. She smelled so good, I could have stood there hugging her for ever.

  Sammy came to her. He looks like one of the seven dwarfs in that trailing old nightgown. She picked him up and said that he was beautiful, and of course he was all wet, trust our Sam, so there was no need for her to ask why he hadn’t any pants on. He’s always wet, that’s why.

  I picked up Emily for her. ‘We named her after you.’

  ‘She’s better-looking than me.’ And she is too, I don’t mind saying it. If Sammy had her curls and round face and fruity skin he wouldn’t be such a gnome.

  ‘You want to be godmother, Em?’

  ‘Do I?’ and off we went, planning for the christening, what we’d wear, and whether we’d have the baby in short or long, ‘my old family lace’ - it would have to be one of the curtains - and what we’d eat and drink afterwards, for the party.

  With Em and me, we can fall right back into it. I felt she’d never been away, even though she looked a bit different, and I knew I looked a lot different.

  ‘I’ll grow my hair again,’ I said. ‘I promise. I’ll get this place cleaned up. I was going to start tomorrow. You’ve just caught me. I was just going to start.’

  She laughed, not believing, and sat down on the bed, and I didn’t bother to say that I was going to change the sheets today. She wouldn’t believe that either. She took Sammy up, and he tipped over the saucer that was beside the bed, and ashes and cigarette stubs went everywhere. I took a swipe at the little bastard, and Em said quickly, ‘Bob never used to smoke so much.’

  ‘We both do now. Smoke all the time. Everybody we know does. Got to have some pleasures in life. Mr Zaharian can put a cigarette in his nose and make the smoke come out of his cars.’

  ‘Zaran! Zaran!’ Sammy loves him, because of it.

  ‘Why didn’t you write?’ Emma asked, when I had stopped the child running about like a mad toy and got him on my knee to get some clothes on him.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Not since Emily. That was almost a year ago.’

  ‘Don’t nag me, Em. I did mean to, but there’s never any - well, you see how we are here. This is a house of hell. I’m paying for something I did in one of those other lives. Remember about the Roman slaves, and that time we were the cavewomen? This was all we could get at the time. We had to get in somewhere. I had a spell at the centre with the kids, as it was. Never again, no thanks. I felt like Mrs Micawber. Even Bob was a welcome sight to me. Even this room. We’ll get out of it. We still owe a bit.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Not much.’ I looked away. Em was studying me too closely. ‘We’ll pick up soon. Bob’s after a better job. Moll got him in as cleaner at a school, but he couldn’t stand it. Those big cans of
garbage, it turned his stomach. He’s in a shop now.’

  ‘What does he sell?’

  ‘Nothing exactly. He couldn’t manage the change. No, he - he cleans up, and that. It’s a butcher’s shop.’

  ‘That sounds worse than the school.’

  ‘Well, he won’t stick it much longer,’ I said, and he won’t. He could never stand the sight of blood. If he cuts himself, he cries.

  ‘Kate,’ Emma said, ‘why don’t you put the children in a nursery and get a job yourself. Get yourself—’ she was going to say out of this hole, but then being Em -1 know her so well - she thought: they’re only here because it was the best they could do, so she changed it to, ‘get yourself some new clothes, and make up.’

  I fished about on the mantelpiece and found a lipstick stuck in a packet half-full of cigarettes where I’d put it to keep it away from Sammy. He eats lipsticks. Soap too.

  ‘That better?’ I turned round and grinned at her.

  ‘Much. Now, the job/

  ‘I can’t. I don’t feel well enough.’

  She stood up. She was actually angry, and I rushed across the room to her. ‘Oh Em, don’t be cross. I can’t help it. It’s just one of those things that happen.’

  ‘Not every year. Not to people with any sense. You can’t afford to keep two children as it is, and you’re worn out with it. At twenty. You’re getting used up.’

  ‘I can’t help it, I tell you!’ I was angry too. What was the use of telling me what I knew already? ‘Bob won’t do anything. I’ve asked him - even bought him things, but he won’t. He just laughs. There’s nothing you can do with him.’

  ‘He should be sterilized.’

  ‘Oh shut up, Em, that’s dirty.’ I couldn’t help giggling though, because it was funny, the way she came out with it, as if he were a mongrel.

  She didn’t laugh. She asked me what was the matter with me, that I didn’t do something about it, and I told her, ‘I’m not going to the clinic’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They fit you. They can kill me first. At Stinkney they almost did. They had to tie me down. Not that again.’