by Diana Evans
“Don’t tell anyone, Bel!” Georgia said.
“Not Bessi?”
“Not Bessi.”
They sat still. The house was still.
“Bessi is where bad things never happen,” said Georgia.
PERFECTION, CONTENTMENT AND supreme obedience were waiting for Aubrey. All the mirrors had been polished, along with the tabletops, sideboards, door handles, shelves and Aubrey’s desk, with every piece of paper replaced exactly as it had been found. At 7:30, Ida, Bessi and Kemy watched television with the sound down low so that there would be enough time, because when Mr. Hyde came home, when his keys jangled outside the door, the evacuation procedure had to be quicker than quick. They’d have to: straighten the cushions on the sofa where they’d been sitting, make sure the tassels at the bottom were dangling properly, check for pens, bits of paper and anything else that could be on the floor, put the kettle on for his tea, get his dinner on the plate, turn off the television, put the remote control on the left arm of his chair and run upstairs to bed with tissues to shove into their ears to block out sound.
The house waited, and everything in it.
The waiting began to buzz.
At half-past nine he had not come. This night will be a night, Ida said to Nne-Nne. He is late. Nne-Nne was shaking her head. Big mistake, she said, marrying that man. He took you all this way away from home and for what? Where are your happy times here, Ida? He took you away from yourself.
Ida turned up the heat on the cooker.
“Come,” she shouted. “Let’s eat.”
She slammed out plates and dropped rice on them, chicken stew on top, vegetables on the side, among them spinach (Ida had forgotten that Bessi was allergic, despite the list on the wall called Bessi Can’t Eat…). Kemy checked the twins’ plates to see if they had more than her. Georgia kept her red eyes lowered so that no one would see.
They ate in the dining room inside the waiting and the buzzing and the tightening air. Runner beans ran down throats. Chicken was sucked of its salts. Bessi pushed her spinach to the side of her plate and Ida used more cayenne pepper than usual. No one said a word. They ate quickly yet savored everything as if it were the end of food.
There was no time for cherry bakewells or peeling pears or warming up ice cream. Bel washed up swiftly, Georgia dried, Kemy and Bessi put away.
Before they left, Ida took Bel’s arm. She said, “Don’t worry, it’s okay for me, we sort it out. I’m sorry.”
The exodus began. Skyward and away, the marching feet. Kemy tripped up on the stairs. “Oh, let me sleep with you!” she asked the twins. “Please. It’s better in the loft!”
“And you too, Bel,” Georgia said. “He’ll want to get you most. Let’s all sleep in the loft.”
Bel and Kemy sped up with their duvets and dressing gowns. Teeth chattered as they were cleaned and clothes were thrown in corners. Ida closed her bedroom door and put on her hairnet. The house lay down and prayed for peace.
WHERE DO THEY wander, the angry ones? The moors would have him if Neasden had moors. But there are the hills, and there is a storm tonight, and moonlight. Mr. Hyde is blowing in the wind. He roars and shakes his fist at the sky. It begins to rain. His dance carries him through the empty streets in the rain and his hair is getting wet. Mr. Hyde staggers up the alley where the moon has leaked into the cracks in the ground. He looks down and sees silver, electricity, around his feet, the silver men rocking and swinging and flying, and he thinks, faintly, Ah, there you are, ah, there it is, don’t spare the horses! Is the dinner ready, missus? It’s cold out here. He wanders past Waifer Avenue because sometimes Mr. Hyde forgets the man he came from. He is made up of the worst parts of that man—they often forget each other.
SLIPS OF RAIN rushed down the face of the moon. In her sleep, Georgia pushed away the covers. She opened the window so that the moon was naked, and watched it. Full and bright you are, she dreamed, what a face. She pulled herself up with groggy arms and clutched the windowsill. She stepped over it, sat down on the sill and didn’t feel the cold air around her ankles where the nightgown ended. Georgia dangled on the edge of the house, on the edge of sleep, and dreamed in colors of Sekon, how the kitten felt that night, because in sleep she could remember. It felt as soft as a beginning, it felt simple, it felt like light in her hands. The best time, the best journeys are sleep, under a cover in the dark, and safe from the dark; we are free to roam back to our own first lights and find the ones we have lost, the unruined, the ones we dream of becoming again.
Georgia sat very still as the rain wet her legs. Behind her, Kemy and Bel were asleep on the floor, snatching rest. Bel was dreaming of a girl on the edge of a house. And Bessi tossed in her sleep. She dreamed of the sound of keys, and then she opened her eyes.
Was it a figure there in the window, or was she still sleeping, with her eyes open, like Georgia did sometimes? Like that time Bel came out of the toilet in the middle of the night and found Georgia standing there on the landing, just standing and watching nothing in the air, asleep. Bessi closed and opened her eyes again to check. Yes, it might be Georgia, on the windowsill. Yes, she’s going to fall and hurt herself.
Bessi’s heart beat suddenly hard and fast. She had to keep quiet, she knew. Bel had explained once that if you wake someone doing awake things in their sleep you could kill them, the shock could give them a heart attack. So, quietly now, Bessi threw back the covers and sprang toward the window. Inside herself, shocked, she was calling Georgia, Georgia in the window! Stay there!
She gripped the back of Georgia’s nightgown and pulled as gently as she could. Georgia fell back onto the bed with her legs in the air, and woke up. Bessi was allowed to speak. “What are you doing, what were you doing, you scared me to death, you could’ve fallen, what were you doing, Georgia!” Bel woke up and saw the window open and Georgia disheveled on the bed. She went to see her eyes, and there were bits of moon there, and she knew that Georgia had been somewhere far. “Be careful there,” she said quietly. Then Kemy sat up saying, “What? What? Is he back? It’s freezing in here.”
Georgia looked about her. “I was sitting down,” she said. “I was just…looking out.”
What she didn’t say: The night, the silence, something that lives inside them, it called me, it wants me, and I answered.
Three floors down, a set of keys danced in the lock.
The front door opened. The front door slammed shut.
“It’s starting,” said Bel.
For a moment they were statues just out of sleep. They stopped breathing. Ida alone in her room stared at Nne-Nne. It was that instant of nothing, of death, the silence down in the soil, before what you imagined you couldn’t bear.
Bel swung back to life. “Okay,” she said, “into bed, don’t make a sound, be asleep. Have you got tissues?”
“I haven’t,” said Kemy.
Bel grabbed the toilet roll out of the bathroom and gave a piece to Kemy. She kissed Georgia on the cheek. They lay back down rolling tissue balls and stuffed them into their ears. Kemy took the extra precaution of covering her head with her pillow and securing it around her ears with her forearms. Now she could hear only the silence of cotton.
He was wet and standing in his wet clothes and the mirror could see him but he didn’t look. He opened the front door and slammed it again, harder, so that the house shook. That’ll do it. Mr. Hyde took off his coat, creaked into the kitchen and put Jack Daniel’s on the table. Smooth brown shoulders and a long warm neck. He sat down and poured himself a glass. The glass knocked the wood, the legs of a chair scraped the floor, the wind-chime bells rang out as he wandered into the sun lounge—it’s a symphony of discontent. They could hear it, the creaks, the terrible music, through tissue balls and double-deckers of pillow. There he sat, by the dishwasher with Jack, and out in the dark he saw a figure among the trees. She reached out her hands and said, I’m going now, my best boy. We must face these things with fortitude. And in the wind and the rain the apple trees moan
ed.
Where’s the dinner? Where’s the girl? Mr. Hyde was hot in the throat and hot in the heart but cold in how to get there. The bells rang. He walked up and down the hall. It was time for shouting. “Isabel!” he said. “Bel!”
He marched for more Jack and gulped and shouted, “Get down here, Bel!”
“Be asleep,” said Bel in the loft. “Be asleep!”
He pumped his fists. He was pink all over, lobster pink, boiled in the cheeks, beetroot lips, sticky fists. Bel didn’t come. In bed, Ida tossed toward the window. Nne-Nne’s eyes and Nne-Nne’s cheekbones flashed in the dark. Be tough, Ida!
Mr. Hyde began to mount the stairs. The middle stairs creaked most and the top two had a deeper sound—the house knew exactly where he was. The door to Bel’s room was closed. Mr. Hyde opened it and barged in. He swayed in the empty dark. The fury and the terror got bigger. He burst into Kemy’s room and there was just moonlight there, in a pool on the bed where Kemy should be. “Fucking God almighty, where the devil are they!” he said, squeezing his fists. Ida braced herself. Mr. Hyde charged out onto the landing and swung around and mounted the stairs to the loft. Ida jumped out of bed and put on the magic dressing gown. He bellowed, “Bel! Are you up there? You get down here!”
The tissue wasn’t working at all now. Georgia and Kemy had run into Bessi’s Best Bed because it was farthest from the door, which definitely made it best tonight, and they’d wrapped themselves around each other and they trembled. There was no key. They’d been asking for keys but Aubrey kept saying no, they didn’t need keys, they were too young for keys. Bel had stopped saying “be asleep.” She was on her feet in her long silk dressing gown in the middle of the room, ready for him, her temper beginning to thump. “If he tries anything, if he tries, oh, shit!” Mr. Hyde banged the door with his fist.
The light out in the landing was on and it rushed under the door. Bel thumped the door back. This did not seem to Georgia or Bessi the best idea but Bel was hot tonight, volatile, like the spiders in Sekon, like Ida when she was pushed too far.
Ida shook the world now. She ran out into the landing in her hairnet and gown and looked up at Mr. Hyde. He had that look of shrinkage, a livid pink devil with a shrunken neck.
“Get away from there with your trouble,” she said. Nne-Nne was behind her, the cheekbones sharp.
Mr. Hyde scowled. He stamped down toward her and wobbled his damp finger in her face. Jack Daniel’s flanked him like a stinking bodyguard. “I’m talking to Bel,” he said, “I’ve been walking in the rain and I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’ve been working for thirty years. You get out of my way, woman!” He started back up the stairs.
Ida grabbed his arm.
“Try to mek trouble with her, I will lose my tempa!”
When Ida lost her temper, she was capable of killing. She was might and she was thunder, the first that God ever made.
“Leave dem!” she said.
His face was the other face. Her heart was the wild thing underneath. There was no place to meet or talk or simmer. Inside Mr. Hyde, Aubrey wanted to cry out. What he wanted was to take his wife in his arms and tell her he was sorry for it all, and that he needed comfort. He wanted to be a good strong man for those he loved. But he couldn’t get out.
Mr. Hyde ripped his arm away. “Bugger!” he shouted. Ida followed him up the stairs and got his arm back but Mr. Hyde’s body was made of iron. He broke free. And when she got him back again, four stairs down from the loft, she slapped him hard across the cheek. Mr. Hyde slapped her back.
“Monkey,” Ida yelled, “you dog!”
They had put on their dressing gowns, the children. Ida and Mr. Hyde fought on the stairs, which was not a lot of space for fighting. They rolled down the stairs to the first-floor landing. Mr. Hyde roared. Georgia and Bessi locked hands. Kemy was afraid, her eyes in circles. Now it was time. Bel opened the door and the four of them burst out of the loft and swept down into the thunder, their gowns billowing out behind them.
Bel and Kemy, oldest and youngest, pulled at Mr. Hyde’s arms. Georgia and Bessi took Ida but she couldn’t be held. She had used her nails for scratching and her legs for kicking. Mr. Hyde shouted over the struggle, “I want to fucking hell dammit talk to Bel!” who was behind him, there on his arm wrenching it back. He spun around and gripped her by the neck and shoved her to the floor. Bel banged her head against the bathroom door. Kemy screamed.
It could be the sound of the youngest screaming. Or it could be the sight of the oldest hurt, that makes a woman lose completely the order of things, the sense of past and future and what if, what would happen if. Ida and Nne-Nne and Cecelia’s ghost went downstairs to the kitchen. It did not take long, as long as it takes fire to spread. They arrived back. Bel looked up, her head dazed, and saw them. “Mum,” she said. Ida was holding the Sunday mutton carver, the largest blade in the house, and Nne-Nne was behind her all in red. They were going straight for Mr. Hyde, where his heart was. Cut him, said Nne-Nne.
Ida raised the knife. A strange croak flew out of her mouth. The tracks on her cheeks blackened. Kemy fled. Next door the Kaczalas opened their eyes to little girls screaming in the night. The knife came down. It slashed Mr. Hyde down the arm and lifted again.
“Stop it, Mum! Look!” cried Bel.
The blood ran through Mr. Hyde’s shirt and he didn’t seem to notice. His hair was standing up. His dentures fell out. “She makes things…so very, very difficult…for me,” he said.
The knife was coming back down. As it got closer, Ida saw the blood seeping out of Aubrey. There were open cuts on his face from her nails. Her girls were wailing. She heard Aubrey her husband whisper, in his blood, in her blood, in the blood of their children, I’m sorry.
The blade came down, and fell away.
IN THE HUSH, a panting, whimpering hush, Kemy said, “You wouldn’t, Mummy, you wouldn’t have done it, would you?” She was curled up three stairs down from the loft, visible through the triangular hole in the banister.
The man on the floor stood up. He looked up at Kemy through the triangle. He was not quite Mr. Hyde and not quite Aubrey. He walked past Ida and went down into the bottom of the house. In the kitchen, he sat down and stared at the fridge. He held a pen and not a drink in his hand.
Bel had stood up and was holding Georgia close to her. She wished she could have hidden her away from this night. And she wished she could stay.
“You’re going, aren’t you,” said Georgia.
“Yes,” said Bel.
(Aubrey wrote, Your father’s tired, your father doesn’t know what to do all the time, on a piece of paper and left it on the kitchen table.)
She called Jason, packed some things and put on an orange dress that smelled of rosemary, with green high heels the color of her eyes.
Just before dawn, Ida went downstairs. Aubrey was asleep in his chair. The photograph of his parents was lying on the floor next to him. Ida woke him up and bandaged his arm. They didn’t look at each other.
“Bel is going,” she said, “I will take her room.”
7
Ginger
The apple trees were ghosts. They reached up their arms, they swayed and yawned on Wednesdays, but no one heard. The grass around them grew wilder, and in the shack at the back of the garden the spiders forgot how incredible they were. During the great London storm of 1987 the terrible wind blew away part of the fence. A year later Mr. Kaczala mended it. Georgia became a vegetarian, Bessi discovered the truth about the parson’s nose, Diana and Charles had arguments in the evenings. And in Kilburn, a child was born.
Bel had moved into Jason’s flat and she took in her chemical-free-hairdressing clients at home. She’d produced business cards to advertise her services and she handed them out, one hand on the pram, the other outstretched, on Kilburn High Road, where she bought all her shoes. For a small extra fee, and if the child, a boy, was sleeping, she also read palms.
She came to Waifer Avenue twice a week with Jay in the pram, while Aubr
ey was at work. She and Ida whispered to the child about mystery, how thunder and lightning were a mother and son, and the sun and the moon a man and his wife. Nne-Nne sang him old songs from the singing tree and he had the permanent look on his face of being startled. He would never get to meet his other great-grandmother, because Judith had finally slipped away in her sleep the night before he was born.
Of his three aunties, Jay liked Kemy the best. She lifted him up and gave him plane rides. She kissed him and took him for perilous walks through the misty wild of the apple trees. It was there that Kemy would stop, and think about Michael Jackson.
Very soon,
Michael Jackson was coming to Wembley.
“Do you understand, Jay?” Kemy said while the little boy bounced about in the grass. “He’s coming. At this moment, he is on tour, getting ready.”
Georgia looked out of the loft window. She blew out smoke. Bessi, Anna and Reena were in the bathroom behind the saloon door. They were talking about sex. She had come away for a minute on her own.
She heard Reena say, “You’re supposed to breathe heavily and make noises, so they know you’re enjoying it.” Then Anna: “It’s better if you moan too. Trevor likes it when I moan. It gets him all excited.” She heard Bessi laugh and Reena say, “Yuck, that’s nasty.”
Georgia saw Kemy with Jay in the trees. She could tell what Kemy was thinking about because she had a daze about her, even from all that way up. The sun glittered out over the evergreen tree. Georgia closed her eyes. “Are you going downstairs, Georgia?” called Bessi. “If you are, could you get some tea?”
She left and went downstairs to the kitchen.
The twins had arrived at breasts and cigarettes. They did not have cleavage, like Bel had when she was fifteen. They needed Wonderbras to get cleavage and would not be able to afford them until after the Empire, so they did without. Georgia wasn’t much bothered, and she couldn’t understand why Bessi went on about it, or why she felt she had to wear lipstick and eyeliner wherever she went, like Reena, who smudged a black smile beneath her eyes every morning. “It’s all right for you,” Bessi said to Georgia sometimes with a touch of jealousy in her voice, “you don’t need it. You’re a rose, aren’t you, like Bel says, and you don’t even realize it.”