by Diana Evans
And Bessi said: “I know what you mean, sweet. Me too.”
They sipped Baileys. They looked ahead of themselves.
Georgia was ready. “I’m moving to Tottenham with Cynthia.”
Bessi scratched her arm and nodded, too quickly. “It makes sense,” she said.
“Why don’t you move in with us?” Georgia found herself saying (If she says no, she thought, I’m going anyway—there will be drills).
Bessi thought about it. “Give us a bit.” She held out her fingers. Georgia passed her the chocolate gâteau.
They drifted through possibles. Bessi smoked. Georgia waited. Then Bessi started shaking her head.
“No…no, it wouldn’t be good. It’s too far, I’d get bored, and we can’t leave Kemy on her own.”
Georgia took three deep breaths, as Carol advised in chapter seven, “Emergencies!”
“Bessi,” she said. “I’m getting out.”
Oh, but it’s full of good-byes, Georgia wrote, packed and ready, sitting alone on her bed—it would always be her bed, it had taken her to Gladstone, the moon, St. Lucia and the evergreen, it was a boundless bed. She stood up and looked out. They were down by the apple trees in their anoraks and Bessi was waiting for thumps. I think Ham’s d’stressed, said Georgia. Is he in the bathroom? said Bessi. You don’t have to have a bath, said Georgia. What shall we do? They came into the loft and sat down in the strawberry corners. Georgia watched them and wanted to decide with them, but there was nowhere for her to sit.
She traced the chalk ghost of 26a on the door. The twins stayed where they were. They did not look up when she left the room.
Bessi cried at the good-bye. She was working four nights a week and hadn’t been spotted yet.
“Don’t forget to water the roses and the lettuces,” Georgia reminded her.
She arrived in Seven Sisters and stripped her evergreenless, sunsetless window. She lit a joss stick as Bel had instructed her, to clean away the person before, and placed Bessi’s orchids carefully on the bookcase. When Bessi came to visit, sometimes accompanied by Kemy, they sat together on the bed and the room became brighter. Neither Georgia nor Cynthia had many visitors to the flat. The people who came were mostly Jo’s friends, who gathered in her room listening to music and shrieking with laughter. Occasionally, Cynthia’s brother Toby would come, always late at night. From Cynthia’s room, which was next to Georgia’s, she would hear low voices and the intermittent sound of a guitar playing.
As time went on the rumble of the Tottenham traffic spread into Georgia’s head. It was as if it was always there, and the people were always pushing, and the cars were always sneering at her, and the men on West Green Road were always shouting. There were few hills. It was London in a way that Neasden was not London. It had no river and none of the right ghosts, no alleyways with silver streaks, and no lofts for kingdoms of two.
In Downhills Park she found three willow trees standing in a triangle. They made a silent green house where the white daylight picked through the roof like so many stars. There were dead brown leaves on the floor. She stood inside, while birds passed overhead, and a thin woman slumped on a bench outside hummed to herself and stared at the ground.
The first appearance of red was in a lecture when Georgia put her hand up to ask a question that she forgot when she put her hand up. What was the—? How do you—? There appeared words, faintly, the real questions, up above her head. And how, exactly, they asked, will you go about this? Is it a question that they, the others, will find worthy? And what was the question? What is it?
She sat there with her hand in the air and couldn’t put it down. The eyes of the other students waited. Questions lurched off the ceiling and squabbled. She lifted the other arm and used it to bring down the arm in the air. She got up and left and went straight home. And lay down.
It became difficult, some days, to buy milk.
11
Music
Digger’s of Soho was next door to a club called Spicey Riley’s. Between the early morning hours of three and six, steamy clubbers staggered out of Spicey Riley’s and into Digger’s for chips, club sandwiches, pizzas and tortilla wraps, which were Digger’s specialty. Many of them were still hallucinating, tripping along roads of ecstasy or acid. There were nights when someone might jump up onto their chair, in sequins and a belly top, and start shouting at the dancing video screens along the wall above them. More than once, people had walked into the mirror wall, thinking Digger’s was twice itself.
By the time the Spicey Riley’s influx started, Bessi was sleepy. An important part of her did not yet understand this business of being awake all night. This part of her fantasized about sumptuous duvets and the loft in lamplight. Yet the other part of her, that wanted desperately not to be serving chips and espressos in a Digger’s apron in the middle of the night, and getting the tube home in the morning with the nurses and security guards while the garbagemen lugged stinking bags of rubbish off the Soho streets, but to be making records (or something that involved traveling a lot and eating out a lot and wearing superdishy clothes), sent her to the toilets to reapply her lip gloss and back out into the music and the mirrors with the smile of a winner. Because you just never knew who could walk in. Sasha Jane Sloane probably had no idea she was being spotted but I’ll bet, Bessi thought, she’d had on her lipstick, and without that she wouldn’t be where she was today. And Bessi had heard from Digger himself, the man in the T-shirt with DIGGER on the front who spent a lot of time sitting down, that Spicey Riley’s was frequented by certain members of the music industry.
She walked, with a bounce and a tray, up and down the metallic aisle, preferring to think of it as a catwalk (or something). When the customers waved or shouted or pointed for more this or more that, she responded with a dazzle as late as 5 A.M. She kept an eye on the door for the spotter. Early in her third month there, a man with big shoulders and a shimmering turquoise shirt had walked in with two glamorous-looking women. As Bessi took their order, smiling brilliantly, she noticed the man studying her and she was convinced it was him (spotters were usually hims, she assumed). She waltzed off and told the cook to hurry and the barman to hurry, and as she sped back with the tray she felt the spotter’s eyes, all over her, measuring, imagining. Can’t you see me? Bessi said with her hips, with her teeth. Can’t you see me up there, like Mary J. Blige?
The spotter paid the bill. As Bessi leaned in to take the money, the man put his hand on her waist and whispered in her ear.
“What?” Bessi shouted. “I didn’t hear. What?”
The man moved his hand down over her hip, which Bessi was not at all sure about. “I said,” he drawled, “do you wanna come back with us, my beauty?”
Oh. It’s not him, thought Bessi.
She stood up, snatched away the money and said, “No thank you.”
“The filthy dog!” she told Georgia over the phone when she’d woken up the next day at 4 P.M. Breakfast was at four. Dinner was at eleven. There was no lunch. She lived in nightworld and her face was going sallow.
Georgia told her to be careful of men like that. “Don’t go home in the mornings until it’s light,” she said. “Why don’t you work in the day instead?”
“They’re not open during the day.”
“I mean work somewhere that is.”
“Oh no, Georgie! The whole point is that people get spotted more often in the night, in clubs and bars and stuff. So it’s better. You have to make sacrifices if you want to conquer the world, you know.”
Georgia grunted. Conquering the world was ridiculous.
“Did I tell you?” Bessi was getting excited. “Digger said music industry bods go to the club next door, Spicey Riley’s, producers and artists and journalist sort of people. We should go there sometime and see.”
“I suppose.”
Bessi had a sudden thought. The two of them, looking super. The dishy twins. Now there’s a spotter’s dream.
“Georgia,” she said. “Have y
ou ever imagined yourself on telly?”
“No. Never,” said Georgia.
Bessi continued practicing her singing at home and being dazzling at Digger’s. With her tips she bought a pair of hazel contact lenses to jazz up her eyes. She asked Kemy whether they suited her and Kemy said “Hazel smazel, what’s wrong with brown?” It crept into five months and seven months and summer came and went, Kemy’s dreadlocks got solid, Georgia became a second-year. There were several more indecent proposals and Bessi got less dazzling. She became a whole smoker; she sampled acid with a fellow waitress and saw a polar bear walking up Regent Street in the early morning. It began to occur to her that there was a very slight possibility that it might not happen at Digger’s, that, in fact, nothing might happen at Digger’s, ever. And shortly after Bessi had this revelation, she got into an argument with another “spotter” and slapped him across the face as he went for her thigh. Digger was not happy about this. He told her that the customer was always right no matter what because the customer paid her wages, not so? And if she wanted to stay a lucky Digger’s girl then she’d better treat the Digger’s clientele with a little more appreciation. “You play the game, eh, and they tip you more!”
Bessi crawled to Tottenham in the wind and the rain. She sat in the kitchen while Georgia made mushrooms on toast with not a lot of oil. Georgia had given her Bel’s Christmas pullover to wear. It was a beige color, with red flowers and a wide collar, and it made Bessi look pale and small. She wrapped her hands around her mug of tea and closed her eyes. The kitchen was a womb. Georgia was cheerful today, she noticed. She told Bessi that she was starting to like living there and that Cynthia’s brother Toby had promised to teach her to play the guitar. They ate their food and then went to Georgia’s room. The safety of it and the danger outside, or the fact that she missed hearing Georgia breathing at night, or that Trinity was yesterday and Digger’s was today, or that the future might ruin her, or simply because she was tired and uncertain, Bessi sat down on Georgia’s bed and began to cry.
“Oh, Bess,” said Georgia, patting her. “Don’t cry!”
“I’m not crying,” said Bessi.
“What is it?”
“Everything!”
Georgia rubbed her shoulder and hugged her. “You need to get out of that place, you know. Just leave. You can get a job somewhere else—you can do anything you want.”
“Can I?”
“Of course you can. Anything.”
“But, Georgie, I want to be…I want to be…more.”
“I know.”
“And it’s so hard.”
“It is hard. It’s not easy,” said Georgia.
“And I’m so tired and I haven’t even started yet and I’m just a waitress at Digger’s—”
“You are not a waitress at Digger’s. You are Bessi. That is a lot to be.”
Bessi started to feel better. She laid her head on her sister’s shoulder.
“Lie down with me, Georgie. You’re such a good listener.”
They lay back. The gray window watched them. Bessi fell asleep for a few minutes and woke again, in the silent afternoon. She remembered all that time and space ago, two furry creatures with petrified eyes, staring into the headlights, the engine surging, the lights threatening blindness.
“Are you awake?” she said.
“Yes,” Georgia answered.
After a pause, Bessi said: “I think, sometimes, that we weren’t made for this world.”
Georgia stroked her. She remembered it too. “I know, darling. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, all this time.”
HE DID NOT phone very often, and when he did he asked for Cynthia. She had come to recognize his voice: melodic, sleepy, with a question mark at the end of sentences. When Cynthia was out they talked for long periods, as if they knew each other well. Georgia would sit in the hallway, moving one foot in and out of her slipper, her studying forgotten. As he talked, she pictured him that morning in September, when she had walked past Cynthia’s room and glimpsed him standing by the window, his thin torso alight in a blast of sun.
At the start of the new term Jo had ordered Cynthia and Georgia to the union bar to celebrate her birthday. Cynthia, who hated pubs, had agreed to go only because Toby sometimes played there. “I like watching my brother make a fool of himself,” she said. They sat at the sticky tables amid loud messy discussions and the guzzling of beer. Georgia sipped her wine, making vague attempts at lighthearted chat and watching Jo getting drunk. She was about to go home when the entertainment started, two shaggy boys with long hair playing guitars, one of them Toby, with his bootlaces undone.
“Jimi Hendrix,” announced Toby, “will never die. He lives in a hut in Friston Forest in Eastbourne, where he taught me this song.”
There were lazy laughs in the audience. Conversations resumed. Toby glanced at his bandmate and hoisted his guitar. They played “Belly Button Window”’ hesitantly at first, then louder. Toby flicked his hair off his face. Georgia watched his fingers walking across the strings like ballerinas on their toes. She thought of Hendrix in his hut with Toby and couldn’t help smiling. People shouted over the music, Jo was cackling with one of her friends; and Georgia had the thought that human beings were nonsense. She said to Cynthia, “He’s not that bad. He’s quite good, actually.”
Afterward he came over to their table and Cynthia said, “Georgia’s your only fan, you’d better buy her a drink.” They sat close to each other. She turned and caught him watching her. Her eyes were drawn to his mouth, a gentle mouth that looked as if it had been left there, as an afterthought.
Toby was a final-year student in the sociology department. Four afternoons a week he worked in a factory inserting batteries into the backs of clocks. Music, he told Georgia over the phone, was all about timing and symmetry, but music had to be created outside of time, which was why the factory was good training—he could practice losing himself in the clocks while being surrounded by them. Toby believed that music should have nothing to do with making money; it was about being pure. He rehearsed in the evenings with Carl, his bandmate, in a room above a pub, and always finished late, sometimes going to Cynthia’s for the night because it was closer.
She began to listen for him, the tapping at the front door as she slumbered, the approach of his footsteps into the next room. At 1 a.m., the autumn warmer than usual, he knocked on her door. He was standing in the corridor with his guitar, wearing a shirt that was far too big for him. Georgia noticed the sharpness of his shoulder blades. “I thought you were awake,” he whispered. “A lesson on the guitar?” He taught her a simple melody consisting of five notes. It was a terribly sad song, Georgia thought, but beautiful. Afterward they made tea, Toby stirring plenty of sugar into both mugs. He looked childlike, drowning in his shirt in the lamplight, and he talked about Cynthia as if she were older than him instead of younger. Friston Forest, he told Georgia, had been their favorite place when they were growing up.
Just before he left, Toby lingered at the door. He said, “Not many people have symmetrical faces, but you have, exactly the same on each side, like the clocks.” He became shy, as if he’d failed to say what he had wanted to say. They stood in the approaching dawn, unsure of what to do with their hands apart from touch in some way, yet knowing that a touch too early could ruin a whole world of touching.
“Thank you for the lesson,” she said.
“We’ll do it again.”
The days turned to yellow. Toby invited Georgia to watch him rehearse and he spent more nights talking with her in her room. He believed in Hendrix like Georgia believed in Gladstone. “I was fourteen. I found him in the hut and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Toby, friends and talk are overrated.’” They went walking in the dark. One night they climbed over the wall into the park and she took him to the willow house, where she had only ever gone alone. They stood in the cold November leaves. It was easy. While he kissed her, he held the back of her head in his palm as if it were a baby’s
head. She felt that nothing would ever hurt now, and that she might, after all, have the capacity for non-DIY happiness, the type of happiness that came by itself and could not be learned from sources like Carol.
Cynthia asked her, “What have you done to my brother?”
They decided that they would take the train to Brighton to see the sea. Toby wore a red woolen hat down over his ears and Georgia a white coat with silver buckles. They walked down the long hill toward the blue at the end. It was Sunday, the streets were empty. Avenues sloped off the main road peacefully and Georgia peered up them. She imagined living in one of the pastel houses with Toby, a loft beneath the roof for when Bessi came to stay.
On the pebbles, as the waves crashed against the shore, they sat down by the old West Pier and ate doughnuts. The West Pier was the ghost of the main pier, the one with the amusement park and lights and psychedelic shops. The West Pier was a shadow on the water. Its legs were crooked and the railings rusty, or broken off into the bottom of the sea. Georgia said, “I bet there’s ghosts here.”
She started a second doughnut and didn’t worry about what Carol or the detox bible would say. With Toby—who was a man of sugar, with sugar all over his lips now—food was an adventure and there was no danger in it: in toasted halloumi cheese and warmed-up chocolate cake, or fresh salmon bagels from the Bruce Grove Bakery in the middle of the night with mango juice.
Georgia asked him, “Do you like the city?”
“Not much,” said Toby. “It’s fun sometimes, but I think it’s all madness and choking.”
Georgia laughed. Her laugh was getting louder. “It is like that, isn’t it.” She thought for a while, then said, “I wish I lived somewhere like this, somewhere calm with a West Pier. I’d be a lot happier if I could walk down the road and sit on the beach and think.”
“What would you think about?”
“Bessi says I think too much, and I get so sad sometimes—so I’d think about nothing.”