by Diana Evans
“Are you there?” she called. “It’s cold out.”
Gladstone didn’t speak. He didn’t come to the door. She looked in through the window and saw that the house was empty, apart from a small black cockroach crawling across the floor.
Shortly afterward, Georgia and Bessi were put into separate classes. The staff had discussed it and decided it was time they pursued their individual paths. When the twins insisted they stay together for home economics, Aubrey had to come in for a meeting with the headmistress.
The headmistress said: “Mr. Hunter, it’s very important they do not remain too attached to each other. The world outside is a world of separation, they must be prepared.”
“Yes,” said Aubrey, a little flushed in the cheeks, the headmistress noticed. Georgia and Bessi were waiting outside in the corridor hoping Aubrey wouldn’t shout. Last night he had come home late for the first time in a long while, and they had heard him shouting in the middle of the night. He said now, “They’re like bread and butter, those two, always cooking together at home and whatnot.”
“Flapjacks, by any chance?” said the headmistress.
“Thousands of them,” said Aubrey.
Bessi had her ear up against the door. “What’s he saying?” whispered Georgia.
“Dunno,” said Bessi, “something about the flapjacks.”
“But do you not agree, Mr. Hunter, that they would benefit from some independence from each other?”
“Of course,” said Aubrey. He leaned toward the headmistress, who was much taller than him. She looked down at him over the desk and thought she smelled a hint of liquor. “I’ve never been one to sniff at independence,” he said. “But when the time is right, when the time is right. And what’s an hour in a week of independence? Like bread and butter, they are.”
The headmistress asked Aubrey whether, if she might be so bold, he had been drinking in the middle of the day, perhaps a celebration of some sort? Aubrey replied that he never drank during the day, and had never been much of a drinker at that.
As he walked down the corridor toward the exit he held Georgia’s and Bessi’s hands, one left, one right, very tightly, so tightly that it hurt. Before he walked away he bent down and seemed about to say something. He looked from one twin to the other, then looked away. His voice did not sound like his own when he finally spoke. “Your grandmother’s not well,” he said. “She’s had an accident.”
“What accident?” said Georgia. Judith was a hazy pre-Sekon memory, a mesh of white hair and knitting needles that had once or twice appeared in the living room bossing people about. Over the phone, when they had arrived back from Sekon, she had spoken, to each of them in turn, including Ida, and told them to wash their clothes thoroughly to make sure all the flies were gone. “Flies in Africa have diseases,” she’d said.
Judith had been knocked over by a bus in central Bakewell on the way to the post office. According to Wallace’s forlorn account (his first conversation with Aubrey in years), she had been absentminded lately and had probably walked out into the road without looking, the old pansy. There were damages to her ribs and she’d hit her head badly on the pavement. Aubrey would be leaving the next morning to go and see her in hospital.
“Can we come?” asked Bessi, spotting a perfect opportunity to skip school.
Aubrey said no, that they must stay here with their mother, and Gran would be fine. He wandered off without saying good-bye.
The headmistress allowed Georgia to stay in blue for home economics, but she was moved to red for Nelson for everything else. She sat in the empty space next to a girl called Anna. Anna asked her, “Are you Bessi’s twin?” She told her, “You’ve got pretty eyes, haven’t you.” They began to share packets of crisps during breaks. Anna had a gerbil at home. Georgia told her about Ham. They discussed gerbil and hamster differences.
It was foreign, living like this, coming across each other in the playground the way others did, as if they were the same as them, the twinless ones. It felt to them like being halved and doubled at the same time. Anna became Georgia’s best friend. She was freckled and ginger-crowned and also known as Pigeon-Shit Nose because a pigeon once had swooped overhead and opened its bowels onto the end of her long sharp nose. And Reena and Bessi were already a pair. Reena was getting badder. She began wiping snot on the insides of double-decker bus windows to declare her hardness, and she was sent out of classes for being a nuisance. Twice she’d been caught shoplifting, “once in W. H. Smith,” she said, “and once in the newsagent.” What happened at Woolworth’s that winter, Georgia was convinced, was all Reena’s fault. She started it, she wrote afterward, she made us. She’s bad.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE Christmas, the Neasden branch of Woolies gleamed red, gold and holly green in the gathering dusk. Its hazy candy-wrappered windows blinked like Georgia’s secret eyes. Scented crayons, glittered pencil cases, rainbow umbrellas. Chocolate honeycomb, sherbet sachets, pick ’n’ mix galore. On weekdays herds of schoolchildren, catapulted by the 3:30 bell from dreary classrooms to the rolling freedom of after-school, hollered and loitered in the playground outside. The boys from Watley Boys’ High ogled and asked out the girls from Watley Girls’ High. Older brothers and little sisters were reunited. Ties were stuffed into satchels. Teachers were cursed. Crushes were confidentially disclosed.
Among them were Georgia and Bessi, Forehead 2 and Forehead 1, Georgia’s backward and upward, Bessi’s upward and backward. They were working hard toward Flapjacks and developing a professional attitude. While Georgia raised her hand in 2G to answer “Why did Boudicca lead the revolt against the Romans?” with “Because the Roman army killed her husband and attacked her people,” Bessi raised her hand in 2B to answer “Where in Australia did Captain Cook first hoist the British flag?” with “Botany Bay.”
They were flanked by Anna and Reena. The twos had become a four, though it was understood that Anna and Reena were only token best friends, less best than Georgia and Bessi were to each other. This was unspoken and accepted.
The four of them wore identical, roomy white corduroy coats with explosive cream cuffs that they had recently begged their parents to buy from Wembley Market (“It’s the style,” Bessi told Aubrey, “we need them”). At the school gates, in the playground, in the precinct, the foaming four arrived always as a waddling arctic vision, a vision that would be reluctantly discarded when the winter was over, and washed, wardrobed and yearned for until the next.
Woolies glistened. It beckoned. The security guard at the door peered out at the after-school with a mixture of dread and goodwill. Georgia, Bessi, Anna and Reena approached the double doors. Snowgirls risen from the ground. He bowed as they entered, setting off four scruffy giggles. He watched them scuttle away, past the gurgling prams and nattering mothers toward the stationery section, where the girls, top teeth holding bottom lips, fiddled with pencils of fresh aromatic lead, sharpeners whose blades flashed under the lemony neon lighting, and smudged their pencil fingerprints onto the latest selection of erasers. He watched them, rocking steadily on his feet and clasping his hands behind his back. More schoolchildren sauntered in and his darting eyes tried to keep track of all ten bouncing lollygaggers with loud, bickering voices and the after-school racing through their veins. It was not easy. He did not see the foaming four journeying toward the candy aisle, where the Twixes beamed in their silken caramel wrappers and nudged the bubble-light Maltesers and the pick ’n’ mix sparkled with sugar—the undisputed crown jewels of Woolies Wonderland. The girls huddled together, conferring and rustling for change.
“Twenty-eight pence,” Anna held out coins in her palm.
“Thirteen pence,” said Bessi.
“What about your paper-route money? I’ve got fifty pence left from mine,” said Georgia.
“I spent it at lunchtime.”
They all looked at Reena. As usual she was penniless. Then, without warning, she picked a lime-wrapped mint toffee from one of the pick ’n’ mix trays and shoved it i
n her pocket. Their eyes lit up. They swerved around to see if anyone had seen. It was safe.
“Reeeena!” Bessi hissed. “That’s naughty!”
“Oh, don’t be so goody-goody. ’Sonly a sweet,” snapped Reena. She lifted a white chocolate milk bottle from another tray and popped it into her mouth, chewing defiantly.
Anna giggled.
Georgia and Bessi said, “It’s stealing!”
“’Snot stealing. My brother said anything under one pound’s not stealing. It’s the law.”
They considered this. It sounded feasible. They would ask Bel when they got home.
Fizzy cola bottles twinkled next to rainbow vermicelli. As Reena sucked on her milky prize she arranged her face in a skyward orgasmic grimace. The other three watched her jealously. Milk-livered. Scaredycat. Chicken. Reena reigned supreme in the ranks of hardness.
“Dare you,” she sucked.
Pigeon-Shit Nose sidled up to the pick ’n’ mix. She looked around with beady eyes. She caressed jelly baby bellies with sweaty fingertips. Deep breath. Gather and seize. Remove fisted hand. Look around. Raise hand. Five jelly babies. Open mouth. The babies jumped in. Yippeeeee. Tee-hee. A chomping mouth stuffed with candy babies. Anna’s eyes flashed. Reena the pioneer punched her shoulder in revolutionary fashion. They doubled over raucously, cavorting, laughter wrestling with jelly in Anna’s triumphant mouth.
“My girl’s bad, you know!” said Reena.
“You know say!” Anna agreed.
The twins bit scaredycat lips with chicken teeth. They touched eyes. Shrinking.
Georgia nudged Bessi. “Let’s go,” she said. But Bessi didn’t move.
“Goody-goody twinnie twins!” Reena taunted.
“Shaaame!” lashed Anna, sentencing them forever to further humiliation. As if Spam was not enough.
Two aisles away the security guard, sufficiently assured that the other lollygaggers were up to no more mischief than replacing studied, unaffordable goods incorrectly, heard the hooting of the forgotten four. He walked to the end of the confectionery aisle. He peeped down it, seeing nothing but the loitering snowgirls, two guffawing, two silent and shuffling their feet. No hands pocketing sweets. Not then.
He watched.
Bessi knew what they had to do. “Come on, Georgia,” she said. “We’ve got to do it.”
In a hasty telepathy of embarrassment they decided that something sugared, something superior to jelly babies or milk bottles, yet something less than one pound, had to be taken.
Woolies didn’t sell flapjacks, so they chose the Twix. Not one, but two. A twin bar each for the soon-to-be bad girls.
Georgia and Bessi sidled up to their biscuit-centered prey. Facing each other, they checked for candy police, sliding their eyes nervously. It was safe. A clammy left hand and a clammy right hand wiped white corduroy. One last terrified check. One sudden image of their parents. Butterflies tickled their intestines with frenetic wings. Deep breath, one each. Place hand on Twix. Open fingers. Softly lift. Seize. Remove fist. Check for police. Fill pocket, one each. Touch eyes, gleeful, guilty. ’Snot stealing.
Then why was the security guard charging toward them without his smile? And why were their best friends slinking away from them? Why did their hearts rattle and reel? Terror snowballed. They whirled around and saw candy policeman, kind eyes replaced by ice, the mouth now pursed and lined with punishment.
“Right, girls, come with me,” he said.
No buts. No ’snot stealings. Just hold hands and follow him to a very tall candy policewoman with disgusted mercury eyes and a Woolies manager badge—Mrs. E. F. Winters. Two Twixes are retrieved. Two twelve-year-old souls quake. Anna and Reena back away, saving themselves, out the double doors to freedom.
Georgia and Bessi’s sentence was worse than imprisonment. The most perplexing, most frightening, most intimate kind of exposure.
Mrs. E. F. Winters ordered: “I want you to go home now and tell your parents what you have done and that you have been caught doing it.”
Tell their parents? Aubrey’s wrath. Ida’s disappointment. To two other shoplifters, Anna and Reena for example, who had proved their hardness, this would have been a lucky sentence. A let-off. They would have agreed instantly, promised to inform their parents, strolled away, and “forgotten” to keep the promise. But for Georgia and Bessi, whose quivering memories dipped into five years ago when Bel had stolen socks from C & A and Ida had chased Bel around the dining-room table, over and over, and then sat on her when she had flopped onto the sofa, surrendering—sat on her—and Aubrey had made her stand in the cupboard under the stairs for a whole afternoon with no dinner afterward, the punishment was devastating.
Their stammers staccato’d in time with each other.
“I p-promise.”
“I-I promise.”
And together now. “We p-ro-miss.”
Mrs. E. F. Winters watched the two brown snowgirls waddle away, hands interlocked, heads earthbound, and out the double doors.
White corduroy returned to the falling snow.
ON THE WAY home through the dusk that had become night the twins shed tears. Bessi’s arm looped through Georgia’s, their hands squeezing each other in Georgia’s pocket, they assessed their choices. They walked back up the steep narrow alley. There were cracks in the ground and when it rained they looked like silver veins; or in the mornings, when the twins were the first to tread it with their papers, fat orange slugs still slept there wetly, making them dodge. Tonight the alley was snowing. Everything is white, Georgia thought softly through her anguish. When the white is over, the cracks will show.
At the top of the alley, she saw again a small black cockroach, scuttling across the snow. It grew before her eyes to the size of a rat. It turned its dirty head and looked at her and she looked at it back.
“What are you looking at?” said Bessi.
I’m looking at you, pretty, he said.
Georgia slipped once or twice on sketches of ice.
Bessi said, “What shall we tell them? Daddy’s gonna kill us.”
Georgia thought of the most obvious thing. “Let’s say there’s a cockroach in our room. Then we can tell them upstairs, in private, maybe just Mummy on her own.”
“You don’t get cockroaches here.”
Yes, you do, thought Georgia. She looked at Bessi sideways. Her eyes were stinging.
Bessi said, “A spider.”
Georgia nodded.
They would keep their promise. They would tell. But after further discussion it was agreed that they would not tell Aubrey and Ida, because Aubrey would rant at them for stealing while their blessed Gran was still not right, and there was no telling what Ida might do. They would tell Bel, which was almost telling their parents, except Bel did not have the authority or the bulk to sit on them. They would keep their promise to Mrs. E. F. Winters.
They walked up the driveway and in through the back door of home. Kemy was drawing a woman in a red dress at the kitchen table. She looked up when they came in.
“Where’ve you been? Mummy’s annoyed.”
Bessi was the first. “Only at the library with Anna and Reena.”
Georgia followed. “We were working.”
“I’m working.”
“No you’re not,” said Bessi, “you’re crayoning. That’s not working.”
“I yam! It’s homework. I’m going to be a dressmaker!”
“Where’s Bel?” asked Georgia.
“In the sitting room watching telly. Daddy’s home early.”
It was delivered as a warning. The twins shuddered. Kemy carried on drawing, with added sobriety, determined to prove to Bessi that she too had important things to do.
They hung their coats in the hallway and crept into the sitting room. Aubrey’s eyes were attached like a magnet to the TV. Snooker highlights. The kiss and crack of red and yellow balls and a white one colliding. Bursts of applause. Bel was sitting on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her. She looked bored.
Safer than Aubrey. The twins touched eyes. Deep breath. Hello.
“Oh, there you are. Where were you?” asked Bel, not quite angry.
“Library.”
“Working.”
Aubrey did not adjust his vision. “You should’ve phoned, your mummy’s been worried. Why didn’t you phone?”
“Forgot.”
“Sorry.”
Aubrey glazed back wearily into snooker land. Bessi dived in.
“Bel, can you come upstairs for a minute? There’s a spider in our room.”
“Yeah. A really big one,” Georgia confirmed.
Bel looked them over.
“You just came in. How do you know?”
“We went upstairs first. It’s still there. It was there this morning as well. It’s even got hairy legs,” said Bessi.
“Hairy? I don’t think so. I hate spiders. Why don’t you ask Dad?”
“Nooo! We want you to come.”
Bel huffed. “It’s probably gone now anyway. I have to help Mum with dinner.”
The twins looked at each other and squirmed. They had not envisaged that Bel might respond with such complexity, such lethargy. They could not insist. It would arouse suspicion. But they had to tell.
And then it occurred to Bessi: Perhaps they didn’t have to tell. Perhaps this was their chance at being bad.
“It doesn’t matter, then,” she said. “We’ll sort it out.”
Georgia was confused. Bessi pulled her hand as she walked out of the room, her eyes on fire. “That’s it!” she hissed as they climbed the stairs to the loft. “We did it!”
They marched to school the next morning and Bessi told Anna and Reena they’d gotten away with it, shrugging as if she hadn’t been terrified. “It was nothing,” she said. “They couldn’t touch us.”
Anna and Reena were impressed. “Bad girls,” they said.
For a time the cool gray eyes of Mrs. E. F. Winters haunted them in the stillness of night. But the snow melted. The cracks in the ground showed through. Summer blushed, and the eyes faded away.
“Bessi,” said Georgia as they lay in the dark the night of Woolies, without a spider in their room.