by Diana Evans
The things. These are the things I came to this island for. To blow my mind with what I didn’t know. I did not know who volcanoes were until I got here. Imagine it, sweet. The mist, the wind, the mountain upside down.
When I grow up, I want to be a volcano.
Love and a hug,
Bessi
January 8, 1992
Dear Bessi,
I’m sure you enjoyed Christmas on the island and I don’t mean to spoil your fun but I think it might be time for you to come home now. I’m very worried about Georgia. At Christmas she practically locked herself away in the loft and hardly ate a thing. She drifted out into the garden on Boxing Day and just stared at her allotment, and when I went out to see if she was all right she said, “We’re nineteen soon, I’m going to be nineteen without her.” It was freezing out there. Nothing’s growing yet in the soil, it was all cracked and icy, but she just stood there, staring. She’s too quiet, there’s a dark, lost look in her eyes. You should come home, Bessi, she needs you. She’s not like you, with your wings and your ease. So please, come home and comfort your twin.
Safe journey,
Bel
The Third Bit
10
What Is It?
It was not always easy, buying milk. Before the milk (or the tomato purée, or the newspaper) could be bought, there were decisions to be made and questions to be answered. Up above her head was the decision to be made as to whether or not it was possible, at this moment, to actually do it, what with all that it meant. And making this decision required, first of all, an assessment of her current state of mind. Blue would suggest it was mildly feasible. Lilac even more so. Yellow was a good place, but she was not often yellow when it was difficult to buy milk or tomato purée or a new pen. Orange meant it could be dangerous; something terrible could happen on the way down the hall, or worse, in the street—it had happened before, the panic, the meanness in a face floating by—that would send her running back without the milk. And if she was red, an unforgiving place of chains and confusion, it was out of the question absolutely, milk, onions, a walk in the street, everything.
That was the first thing. And once she had established the color of life on that particular day in relation to buying milk, she then spotted the next question which asked her how exactly she intended to go about it, and this was a very large question. She could faintly see the words written in the air in red letters, up above her head. HOW WILL IT BE DONE? The question gave birth before her eyes to other questions with nervous voices who asked her such things as whether she should brush her teeth first or change her clothes first and what she was going to wear anyway, where she’d put her wallet, where she’d put her keys, whether she needed to buy anything else apart from milk, and if so did she have enough money and would she need to go to the bank?
But the bank was a whole other set of questions.
Often it was easier not to buy the milk and have an apple instead, which was actually much better for her than fattening cereals. But if she did brave it, if she managed it, the appropriate clothes (a pair of denim dungarees, a Christmas-present sweater from Bel), no terrors in the drafty hall, out the front door and along the street to the minimart at the end, she found more problems. The minimart was out of semiskimmed. The milk aisle was crawling with human beings. She would have to squeeze past and one of them might know her from college and want to engage in lighthearted chat of the kind that took place in the student union bar around low sticky tables. There was a time and a place and a color for lighthearted chat, and it was not in the minimart next to the milk on an orange day, unless it was Bessi, unless it was Bessi she was talking to, about Tyrone Taylor or when they’d go to Brighton to see the sea, or whether broccoli was edible when it was yellow, or how funny Jay was when he’d tried to spell whunderful like that, unless it was Bessi, unless Bessi came and pulled her out.
And yet, other days, on yellow days, it was nothing, buying milk. It was a skip to the corner with forty pence and back again with a carton in her hand.
The carton goes in the fridge, the muesli has a partner, there is breakfast. Life is simple.
Georgia’s room in the flat in Tottenham had one small window. It looked out north instead of south, which meant that she was on the wrong side of the sun. Her flatmates, Cynthia and Jo, had taken the best rooms, where the windows were innocent. Even in the spring, Georgia’s window, which she had stripped naked on moving in, remained weak and possessive with its light. On yellow days without questions it could give her sun. On red and orange days it got shifty and found an old gray cloak to wear.
It showed her the upside-down sofa in the jungle of the backyard. And when she opened it there crept in a subtle smell of petrol and chicken patties which drifted on the Seven Sisters air. More than anything else, there was noise. Georgia opened her window and she heard the arguments and the shouts coming from West Green Road, the shudder of concrete beneath the roaring high-street traffic, the children next door screaming, the dogs and drills and motorbikes. The noise was followed by headaches, and so she closed the window.
Next to it, on the bookcase, was its equalizer: dried St. Lucia orchids from Bessi, in a sandy bell-shaped vase. And a photograph: Bessi in Trinity, with sunglasses.
She had come back last year the darkest coffee ever with a new walk and foreign memories. Georgia, leaning over the railing with Kemy, had seen her glide out of arrivals in a strange green hat close to the skull, a serene expectant smile, and things were best again. The world was the right way up. Holes were filled. There was nothing anymore to dread. Bessi put down her bags and they stepped into a mighty hello. “Hi, sweet,” Bessi had whispered into her hair, “I’m back.”
The room was half the size of the loft and the bed was not far off the floor. There were two cockroaches, she knew this, she had seen them once, small ones, stamping about under the desk while she was studying. She had closed her eyes and had the following conversation:
Now, we talked about this, didn’t we?
Yes. We did.
We said, if this leaving home thing is going to work, there have to be drills.
Yes. Drills.
Cockroach drills, bad-dream drills. And what was the cockroach drill?
A cockroach is a flat-bodied insect that mainly inhabits tropical environments. They thrive on dirt and darkness rather than cleanliness and light.
Yes. That’s it.
Robinsons, page 209.
Very good. Good girl.
And since then, nothing. They left her alone with her history books. She was interested in how the past had made us and she remembered what Gladstone had told her many years ago, that everything had already happened. “Do you know?” she said to Cynthia and Jo at the kitchen table where they came across one another in the evenings. “Today is past’s future, and today is also the future’s past. We have already happened.”
“You could have a point in that, George,” said Jo, who compulsively abbreviated people’s names and had recently shaved her head. “That’s what déjà vu is, could be.”
“She’s wise, isn’t she,” said Cynthia, who always said very little.
History was a way of watching from outside. She looked at people in the past in the same way she looked at people in the present, as belonging to someplace beyond her own moment. She looked at them, like photographs.
Along with the emergency drills, there were preventative methods, pacifiers and pick-me-up activities for fighting red and orange days. When the great black hand was sensed lurking near her, she should stop still and take ten deep invigorating breaths from the base of the stomach. As you are breathing, according to Carol Fielding’s Your Breath, Your Life, imagine a white light shining above you; with each inbreath you are filled with this healing light. If you wake from a bad dream, Carol also offered, in the chapter “Leaving Anxiety Behind,” lie back down in the sheets with arms open at your sides and relax every muscle in turn, down through the body, ending at the feet, breathing in,
breathing out. Another book, The Essential Guide to Aromatherapy, advised that chamomile, lavender and rose essential oils were excellent for restoring a sense of calm. All these things contributed not only to a healthy mind, but a healthy body too, obviously improving circulation and respiratory journeys, while also opening the mind to the idea of holistic, alternative self-care, said Carol.
She was talking about DIY happiness (was that what Bessi had meant in her letter?). Good health was happiness. The right foods, the right combinations of vitamins and minerals and proteins sliding down into the body was a good, cleaning feeling of happiness. To wash it down each day with four pints (as advised in The Detox Bible) of fresh mountain water was a kind of minor DIY baptism, the restoration of the self to a state of purity. And exercise was the dealer of natural highs. Twenty minutes’ jogging, a few laps of a pool, an hour of aerobics could evoke such euphoria and a sense of well-being that if it didn’t, Carol would eat her hat. Of course, exercise was also useful for not getting too fat, and Georgia wanted never ever to be a big bumbling blob, which was what she became when she got past eight stone. The aim was lightness, to glide, to slice through water, to take up very little space. At seven and a half stone the world was full of the possibility of yellow days. During three-day fruit-and-water detoxes she savored the sensation of shrinking. As she sat at her desk, she felt that there was less of her sitting there, and this was a good feeling, a DIY happy feeling. Breathe in, breathe out.
On the way back from the airport, Georgia had also noticed that Bessi had new eyes. They were tougher. They had seen volcanoes and they wanted more.
“You’ve lost weight,” she’d said.
“Have I?” said Georgia, flattered.
“She’s been on another diet,” said Kemy, who’d tried it too, out of interest, but had thought it unreasonable not to be able to have custard creams.
Back then, Georgia’s holistic alternative self-care literature took up only a small space on the loft bookshelf. Bessi stepped back in and the loft returned to (beanbagless, strawberryless, but nevertheless) magic. She told Georgia the black sand memories, how she’d ridden standing up on the backs of trucks down the winding road to town, watched an open-air gospel concert and people twitching with the hand of God, and out of the tiny plane windows seen islands like big black bears asleep on the sea. She said, “It’s so beautiful there and so warm. I wish I could take us all back there to live. London’s an ugly place, isn’t it.”
“Oh yes,” said Georgia, amazed that Bessi had only just noticed, that it had taken the comparative effect of six months in the tropics to see what a cold and trapped and dirty mesh of poisonous streets it was. Commuting to the Lint offices in Bond Street on the tube every day had confirmed this. She had developed a ritual.
Before she left, she told herself: You will count to five now and when you have finished you are dead until you get home tonight. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Simply, she wanted to lie down somewhere green, where she could hear the birds, the sea, and the kindness of the sky. She wanted to learn how to wander through time, and even to shed it.
Bessi had returned to a fierce winter. Her teeth chattered at dinner and she wore two cardigans, one on top of the other. She scratched rashes sprouting on her arms and mourned the loss of vitamin D. St. Lucia coffee shrank backward from her skin. Trinity, and Pedro, and Pedro’s chest were the heaven she’d lost (even though, if she was honest, she had gotten rather bored toward the end and she was relieved to get away from the bananas). “In Trinity, the oranges are green, you know, not orange,” she said. “In Trinity, there was music everywhere, it’s so quiet here!” and “In Trinity, Mrs. John doesn’t use washing-up liquid, you don’t need it, she just uses a brush.”
Kemy said it was a classic case of the holiday blues.
“But it was more than a holiday!” Bessi whined. “It was a whole other life.”
“Well, anyway,” said Kemy. “You’ll get over it. So, d’you like my locks, then?”
Kemy’s locks had not yet reached the level of mat and solidity that constituted dreadlocks. Bel had explained to her that the softness of her hair meant it might take years to get there. For now, to Ida’s disgust, uneven clumps of hair wired together by daily applied bees-wax hung noncommittally from Kemy’s head. She had ditched her Michael Jackson poster—though she would always hold a place for him in her heart—for Maxi Priest, and she and Lace had had sex to marijuana and the You’re Safe album in her room while Aubrey was at work, Ida at her Brazilian cookery class, Georgia out walking in Gladstone Park, and it was assumed by all that Kemy was in her room studying. She had confessed to Georgia a few days later, and added, “Lace is my nyabingi prince.”
Bessi sniffed at Kemy’s hair. “It smells funny,” she said, “and they look dusty. You should’ve seen some of the locks in—”
“—Trinity, yeh yeh yeh,” said Kemy.
The spring seemed to cheer Bessi up. The Neasden sycamores swelled into blossom pink clouds reminiscent of flapjack-Edith’s hair. While Georgia tended to the allotment that was actually a vegetable patch and, as always, the roses, Bessi started singing again. She sang Randy Crawford’s “Streetlight” and Kenny Thomas’s “Thinking About Your Love” in the bath and in the garden and up and down the stairs, in her newly louder voice, as if she hoped someone might spot her, like Sasha Jane Sloane had been spotted in Waitrose. She wrote a song devoted to Pedro called “Lucia Lover” that went like this:
My Lucia love is yesterday
until the ocean parts
Lucia boy I’ll walk away
from home back to your heart
lovely Lucia Lucia love
oh lovely Lucia Lucia love
and she performed it for Georgia and Kemy in the loft, using her fist as a microphone, her brow taut with passion. Georgia said she thought the chorus needed some work, and Kemy said it wasn’t bad but sometimes she went flat and she might have to do better than that to get on Top of the Pops. Apart from this, Bessi showed no other signs of career building.
Aubrey told her: “You’d better start thinking about what’s next, hadn’t you? The horse won’t budge without a kicking.”
Ida said: “Why not go with your sista? To Muddlesex?”
Kemy said: “Don’t go, Bessi! Don’t leave me here with Mr. Hyde in the nights!”
And Georgia said: “But I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to commute.”
At least, that was the idea until she got there—without Bessi, because Bessi, after leafing through the Muddlesex prospectus, had decided that university was a lot of haddock if you wanted to be in music, and that getting a job as a waitress in an all-night diner in Soho was a much, much better way of getting spotted.
The corridors had blue doors and loud echoes and the rooms had blue chairs. The crowds of students made her feel lost and nervous, and Georgia tended to rush in and out of classes to avoid them. Eventually, she began to recognize certain faces. One morning on the tube, Cynthia stepped into her carriage. Georgia remembered her from the common room, and Cynthia smiled and sat down and didn’t say anything. She had very pale, almost translucent skin, and they quietly shared the journey. Georgia had a lot of respect for people who could be quiet, who could creep gently through the world.
She began to think of leaving, like Bessi had left for Trinity. It would be strong and daring of her, wouldn’t it, to be the one to leave for good, to do it first. At Christmas, three weeks after it was announced that Charles and Diana had decided to separate, Georgia concluded that probably, if she could do it, if it felt safe (and she could do it, of course she could), then she might, after all, go.
Charles and Diana were very sad about it all. The Queen was disappointed. It had been an “annus horribilis” for the family, she said with a tight mouth in her speech by the Christmas tree at Sandringham. Ida, suffering from a cold, watched the speech from her rocker and Aubrey listened with his eyes shut from the chocolate armchair.
Georgia
told Bel what she’d been thinking about. They sat together on the edge of the bath.
“Why not?” Bel said. “Leaving home was the best thing I ever did, and you’re old enough now. It’ll be good for you.”
“It will, won’t it?”
“Yes, of course.” Bel had plastic reindeers hanging from her earrings from Jay’s Christmas cracker. She put her hand on Georgia’s wrist and added, “But just you, on your own—without her.”
“I know, Bel,” Georgia mumbled.
And it had been a dreadful Christmas. Ida’s cold had made her bad-tempered, and it meant that Georgia was next in line to cook the turkey (Bessi never prepared poultry because of the parson’s nose, and Kemy couldn’t cook). With Georgia being a vegetarian, her turkey failed to be the turkey of kings and queens, and Ida nagged at her for being “silly about food.” To add to this, two days before Christmas Eve Aubrey had caught Kemy and the twins smoking weed in the loft (Kemy was the pusher, Georgia and Bessi only dabbled). He’d sniffed a funny smell and knocked on the door, opened it, and there they were, the Little Ones, sitting on the floor with an unusually shaped cigarette jumping out of Bessi’s hand onto the carpet, the funky smoke curling around the room. Mr. Hyde exploded later that night. “I’VE BEEN WORKING FOR THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AND THIS IS THE THANKS, THIS, THE LOUSY ROTTEN MUTTS!” On Christmas morning he was still fast asleep in his armchair, and no one had known whether to wake him and forget about Christmas or leave him and forget about Christmas. Lunch was an extremely late, soggy meal of tasteless turkey, and vegetables cooked by Kemy, through which something sepulchral and silent, not quite Mr. Hyde but only just Aubrey, in a cardigan, had kept a tight leash on any possibility of festive merriment or good cheer.
At the end of the day, Georgia and Bessi went up to the loft for a Baileys and a Viennese whirl. Georgia said: “Bessi. I really, really, really want to get out of here.”