by Diana Evans
one day in your life
you’ll remember a place
someone touching your face
you’ll come back and you’ll look around
They lay there, sprawled over one another, and wiped their eyes.
8
Flapjacks
Bessi spread out the map of the world on the floor of the loft. The map was old and curling at the edges from being imagined over. Her fingers moved across the sea. She spotted herself, alone, sitting in a Spanish bar and sipping a long cool drink. The whole world—she marveled—look at it.
The time had come for the Empire. Over the four years since its conception the twins’ flapjack research had become substantial, and was kept in a folder under the alcove. Georgia had been especially diligent about keeping the empty flapjack wrappers, labels and notes in neat piles so that when the time came a plan of action could be easily constructed.
First of all, she suggested, they had to perfect their recipes and confirm their range of flavors.
“Yes,” said Bessi, “then once we start selling we can branch out a bit.”
“One thing at a time, though,” Georgia said.
They spent the holidays before the start of Watley sixth form preparing themselves. Labels were typed bearing the name The Famous Flapjack Twins, and freshly baked sample flapjacks were wrapped in plastic wrap (the most cost-effective packaging according to the notes). These were passed out to Watley pupils as complimentary tastes, and well received, then batches of the real thing were sold at lunchtimes from a table at the back of the canteen. One flapjack cost forty-five pence. They became a popular dessert and midafternoon snack, the top flavors being apple-almond and cinnamon-and-blueberry.
Georgia was satisfied with local trading. It was all just about enough for her to sustain a sense of purpose—the baking and wrapping and labeling, pulling out of the oven fresh flapjack trays with new souls, along with the perpetual fostering of the roses and the lives she was discovering in her history books. She was especially interested in Disraeli, Benjamin, 1804–1881, who was Britain’s first and only Jewish prime minister, and Gladstone’s archrival.
Bessi was not so content. Within a year she became eager to branch out beyond Watley and even beyond Neasden. Neither of them could drive, so they’d have to do it without a car. “We need a business card,” she said, “like Bel with her hairdressing. We need to spread the word.” They bought colored cards with their profits and Reena helped them arrange the information on her computer. The sheets were printed out and then cut up into slightly crooked business cards:
“Now,” said Bessi. “To the city.” She did her lips and her eyes. Georgia did the ends of her twists. At first they put on the same white tops, and Bessi had to change.
Georgia put two nectarines in her bag and they waited for the tube at Neasden Station, a double-edged, open-air platform on the Jubilee line, formerly the Fleet line, and changed to Jubilee in 1977 when the Queen went silver. Stanmore lazed at one end, at the far north, quiet avenues and debonair houses, and the miles and miles of track reached southward through Wembley, past Neasden, into shabby Willesden Green, where the second zone began. The houses sucked in their stomachs and the traffic got louder, shops and walkers multiplied, and the stop between St. John’s Wood and Baker Street was a long chugging black tunnel into the madness of zone one. Here life was speed, lights and sterling. Green spaces fell away. Tourists stood baffled on street corners with maps dangling at their sides and beggars sat against the walls of department stores looking out for guilt. The smog snarled above it all, oozing poison. The blossoms were out. It was a damp spring day.
As the tube raged through tunnels Georgia and Bessi saw themselves in the world of the black windows, fuzzy girls in bright tops, their lives getting quicker. They got off at Charing Cross and walked through Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly Circus. Pedestrians yelped beneath the towering walls of lights clutching bags of shopping and trying to overtake. Double-deckers smirked and puffed out fumes which people stepped into, women with bare legs in thick bracelets of smoke. The noise was thunder, the same as it had been when Georgia was lost at the Leicester Square fair, underneath the orange polka-dot horse with wings. For hours it seemed she had crouched there, looking out at the cold endless spin from a merry-go-round, and she had felt certain that she was much safer where she was, under the belly of a fantasy beast, that it was kinder than the beast out there.
As they crossed Shaftesbury Avenue Georgia slipped her arm through Bessi’s. A bulky man with a pale frowning face pushed past her. They stationed themselves next to the Trocadero.
Bessi took a few of the cards out of her pocket. Georgia got hers ready. “So…we just, hand them out, then,” said Bessi. They stuck out their hands with the yellow cards in their fingers. People ignored them. Bessi stepped forward, feeling slightly ridiculous, and began pushing them into passing hands. Georgia picked up momentum too. “Flapjacks?” she said, though no one could hear. “Good, sweet flapjacks?” They worked until they got tired and hungry and leaned back against the wall.
“Want a nectarine?” said Georgia.
“Go on then,” said Bessi.
Flapjacks were for business. Nectarines were for pleasure. These were sweet. Perfect balls of juicy sunset sliding down their weary throats.
“The fruit is good,” said Georgia.
“The fruit is fine,” said Bessi.
The circus spun into evening. It began to make Georgia feel giddy, the voices and the flashing and the gaudy heave of a thousand nights out. There did not seem enough room for everything. “Let’s go home,” she said to Bessi. “I’ve had enough. I need a bath.”
“You go,” Bessi said. She was watching a woman standing alone by the fountain looking around her, as if she did not know where she was. “I feel like staying out for a while.”
“What for?”
“Nothing. Just.” There was a hint of defiance in Bessi’s tone.
She watched Georgia walk away through the crowds with her shoulders narrow. She watched the top of her head disappear down the steps. And she began to walk.
Just as if she was lost, she wandered through the streets and the back roads looking in shop windows and restaurants. She walked into a café wearing an imaginary Spanish dress with a wide skirt and sat at the counter alone. Georgia was somewhere else. Bessi asked the waiter for anything in a long glass. She sipped it, slowly, glancing at people walking in and out, a waitress wiping tables, the girl in the mirror with the plaits. It was just her.
This is what oneness must feel like, she thought.
THE FLAPJACK CALLS did not come as much as they expected. In June they received three inquiries. One from a man with a small voice: Bessi picked up the phone and he said, “Are you famous, then?” Bessi said, “What?” And the man said, “Famous Flapjack Twins—that’s what I’m asking, are you famous?” Another was from an old woman who lived in Hertfordshire. Kemy answered this one and the woman asked whether she could speak to one of the Famous Flapjack Twins. “They’re not in,” Kemy said. The woman told Kemy a long story of how she herself had been making flapjacks since she was a girl (she’d even had a recipe published in the local newspaper), and the other day her daughter, who visited her twice a month with her husband Jeff, had given her this delightful little yellow card and she’d decided she’d give it a try because she always liked to keep abreast of new flapjacks. After several attempts Kemy managed to tell the woman that she wasn’t sure whether the twins delivered outside of London because they couldn’t drive yet, but she’d tell them to call her back.
The other caller was a gruff-sounding man whom Georgia spoke to. “Yes, this is the right number,” she said. The man lowered his voice. It seemed he was in a phone booth. “I’ve seen your card…flapjacks, eh, nice touch! Hope that’s not all you do!” Georgia immediately put down the phone.
That was all, apart from the Hertfordshire woman, who kept ringing back and insisting the twins come and have tea with h
er and bring their recipe so that they could compare. To stop her calling, Georgia prepared a package for her containing four different flavors and a photocopy of their recipe. “She’s probably lonely,” she said to Kemy.
The twins went out again and got rid of more cards, this time in Kilburn and Cricklewood, and at the entrance to Brent Cross until a security guard asked them to leave. Orders trickled in. They got a request for twenty flapjacks for a kids’ party in Dollis Hill. “This is it!” said Bessi. “It’s starting!” But after that nothing again for weeks. Aubrey advised them that this was normal for a new business. “It takes time for things to get going,” he said. “You’ve got to be persistent, that’s the thing, you’ve got to crack on.”
But Bessi was getting restless. The beginning of eighteen and all there was to look forward to was exams and failing flapjacks. What would it be like, she wondered, to be lost entirely? To awake in another place, not home, to be stripped of everything until all that was left was your mind and body and the future? “To the twins,” said Aubrey for their birthday toast. “To the twins,” went the chorus. And Bessi added something of her own. “To being old enough,” she said.
As Aubrey advised, Georgia remained persistent and kept the stall going at lunchtimes. “I told you,” she said, “it’s better to just keep it local for now, while we’re new.” She succeeded in dragging Bessi to Hertfordshire with her to see Edith (that was her name) who, when she had received her package, had gotten so excited by the originality of flavor, the cinnamon-and-blueberry especially, that she felt she just had to meet them. She’d kept calling. She said she’d given Beccy (that was her daughter) and Jeff (her husband, you know Jeff) a try of the choc-and-nut and they’d mentioned they might even order a few themselves! Kemy decided she was a stalker. She went with them to Hertfordshire on the overground for strength in numbers.
On the journey, Georgia dozed and woke and looked out of the window, and later she wrote it down. There were fields and small houses out on the edge. I saw a girl standing on the train tracks. She was wearing a dress and boots, and waving at me. I waved back.
Edith was tiny, with pink hair. She opened the door and said, “Ooo, aren’t you all a lovely color!” and sat them down in her bungalow to show them pictures of Beccy and the children, and give them tea and Edith’s Flapjacks (she’d decided to name her own brand, the twins had inspired her), which Georgia felt were perhaps too stodgy, too much margarine, and less sugar. What do you think, Bessi? her eyes said. Bessi shrugged and looked away.
In her best bed, Bessi kept having the same dream. That her clothes didn’t fit properly. She was sitting on the floor in the loft and her jeans got tighter and tighter and started to split. Her legs got longer, her knees expanded, her foot crashed through the roof, the window shattered.
One morning while Georgia was downstairs Bessi took out the world and spread it on the floor once more. Nations bulged. Oceans waited. She walked up along the coast of Brazil and dived into the Caribbean Sea. She advanced toward the edge of Senegal, across Ghana, and back into Nigeria for a little while, to see how it was, to have a piece of suya, and then onward to the Atlantic coast, into the blue, to find an island, a place she’d never been, and sip a long cool drink.
Georgia came upstairs with Gladstone and Disraeli. She’d taped her revision notes with Kemy’s help—Kemy read the questions, Georgia read the answers—and listened to it on her Walkman while she was washing up. Unlike Disraeli, Gladstone had little interest in foreign affairs. He approached decisions with caution. He was willing to work in consul with the great powers to preserve peace. He had a European outlook. He was noninterventionist yet his morality compelled intervention in certain cases, for example, the Bulgarian massacres. His reasonable policies, however, sometimes seemed weak and spineless…She turned off the tape when she saw Bessi sitting on the floor with her head hanging over the map as if she wanted to become a part of everything else.
“What are you doing?”
Bessi looked up and grinned like someone who had just realized that the world belonged to them. “I’m going away.”
This is how it would be, Georgia knew. Bessi walks away, she turns back once and waves, the sea takes her off, a black hand reaches for Georgia. It is dreadful and silent.
“You can’t go away. We’ve got exams.”
“Not now. After the exams.”
“But how long for?” Georgia asked, getting angry.
“I don’t know. I’ve only just decided.”
Bessi got up and sat on her bed. Georgia stood at the other end of the room, picking at her nail. Between them on the floor the world stayed open.
“Don’t you ever get the feeling that life is too small?” Bessi said. “Like, there are parts of you in different places, and you have to go and find them?”
Georgia didn’t reply.
“That’s what I’ve been thinking lately anyway. I have to go away, and soon, to see stuff.”
“What stuff? Where?”
Bessi’s voice sounded underwater.
“Okay, I haven’t decided exactly yet, but I want to go somewhere in the Caribbean, to an island that’s hot. I could get a job or something or do voluntary work. Lots of people do after A levels. You can get placements where you stay with a family…”
“Yes, I know you can,” said Georgia. “I’m not stupid.”
“Well,” said Bessi. She looked at the map, then back at Georgia. “Do you mind?” It annoyed her that she felt she had to ask for permission.
“You can’t just go off on your own all that way!” Georgia snapped. “You said we’d go away together one day, remember? You’re only little, what if something happened to you?”
“Like what?”
Georgia heard water lapping against the side of a boat. The boat drifted across the lake. She wanted to lie back and dip her fingers in the water. Quietly she said, “Anything could happen, you don’t know. It’s—dangerous.”
“It’s exciting!”
“What about the flapjacks?”
“The flapjacks aren’t working,” Bessi said. “It’s silly.”
“Silly?”
“Georgia. The Empire isn’t going to work.”
Georgia threw her face toward the window and glared out at the clouds. She wanted to say, Don’t go, how dare you? Don’t go. While a part of her said, Let her go. She fought with herself. She panicked.
“It’ll be good for us,” Bessi was saying. “Don’t you think it’s time, to find out who we are when we’re on our own? We can go away together another time.”
“I am on my own when I am with you,” said Georgia.
Bessi walked across the room toward her. She took her hand and said, “Georgie, we are Hunters. We hunt. I want to go hunting. Let me go.”
There was a pause. Birdsong, outside.
“Then go,” said Georgia.
She slept deeply that night. A glittering sheet of water, a boat crossing to the other side where the mountain started, rising upward in jagged green toward the end. She lay back in the boat and saw the mist at the top of the mountain, silver light, a color into which things might disappear. Seagulls cast flight shadows on the surface of the lake. The water stroked her fingers. It said, tenderly, Lie back now and rest, dear, lie down here and rest.
BESSI GOT FIZZY. While Georgia slaved over her books she got a part-time job and did her research. She found a place in the Wind-ward Islands where she could volunteer and Aubrey, also fizzy, helped her pay for it. Six months, she decided, that would do nicely.
Ida tried to stop her. “Why not tek your sista?” she said. “I don’t understand. Why do you have to go all that way alone?” But Nne-Nne was quick to remind Ida that she herself had done much worse, running off at fifteen not eighteen to wherever in the middle of the night. Nne-Nne leaned back in her red chair and laughed. We have another Cecelia again, she said. Ida, the Bessi is exactly your own daughta! Heh!
Nne-Nne was right. “Mum,” said Bessi. “I’m goin
g on my own, and you can’t stop me.”
You see? Nne-Nne sniggered. You see it?
Ida remembered the night, that night. The moths at her ankles, the skinny moon, devils on the stars and the sound of the bicycle wheels along the road. Beneath the fear there had been a feeling of flight, of glorious possibility, and there was nothing else like the way that had felt, nothing since. In Bessi’s thirst for adventure, Ida was reminded of the rift between what she once was and what she had become. It left her restless, with a feeling that her children, that the world, were walking past her. She had a sudden and immediate urge to go outside.
She gave Bessi six months’ worth of Vicks. “When you hurt yourself or when you can’t sleep, rub it in,” she said, “whereva it hurts.”
Bessi did her plaits. It took her seven hours with Georgia doing the ends and Bel doing the partings. Bel was opening her own hairdresser in a basement in Kilburn and Jay was four years old now, with zigzag cornrows and smart shirts from Jason. He had not lost the startled expression on his face and this was due to his mother and her mother and her ghost mother and the things they told him. The week before, Jay had asked Bel, “Is Nne-Nne a real gran?” Bel had explained it like this: “Sometimes people get lonely and sometimes they get scared of things. To help them, they think of something that will make them feel better, like a special person, and this special person, Jay, if they think about it for a very long time, starts to be real. If you imagine it hard enough, it becomes a real thing. Do you understand?”
Jay didn’t understand all of it but he told his mother yes.
Bel let him help with Bessi’s plaits. He had to pass her the beads to put at the ends. He said, “Here ’tis, Bel,” and she said, “Good Jay, now wait for the next one.”
The night before Bessi’s going, the twins stood at the window and looked out at the evergreen tree. Aubrey walked up through the garden. His hair had arrived at smoke and it glowed whitely with his cigarette. Kemy knocked on the door (that was still a rule).