26a

by Diana Evans

  “Guess what,” said Bessi over the phone.

  “What?” said Georgia. The headache was eating her eyelid.

  Someone had offered Bessi a job in a record company, a man she’d met at Digger’s (“I knew it would happen!”). Bessi had insisted he take her on, while drinking vodka and lime at four in the morning in her uniform and reeling off the names and song titles of all the videos on the screens above their heads. “I didn’t get a single one wrong. He was well impressed.” And although she wouldn’t be getting paid much at first and the work was basically office work and she wouldn’t really be singing—and maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a singer anyway—she could work her way up, couldn’t she, and eventually she’d get to travel or something and meet really interesting people, and the office was just behind Oxford Street. “Good, innit!”

  Georgia’s eyelid was throbbing.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is that it?”

  “I’ve got a headache. I have to go.”

  “What is it?” Bessi said.

  “My head. I have to go.”

  “Georgia?”

  She hung up. She dabbed rose and chamomile oils at her temples and went to bed for three days. In the timeless dark she woke up. There seemed to be a pressure, pushing her down into the mattress. It said to her, We are here. And perhaps it wasn’t true (but what if it was?) that there were hands pulling the covers away from the bed. What if it was real? A stranger in the room, not a human stranger, a thing, a demon, watching her closely, leaning down to grip her shoulders and shake her, lay on her the hands of death. There was a voice, a horror voice. It said, Get up, spin spin spin around, you will never find a sleep!

  I don’t understand, she said to the dark.

  She lay still. Be okay, be okay. Think of one good thing.

  The two little girls, both of them in one of them, cartwheeled through the window. Their dress blew about in the no-breeze.

  “Are you ready?” they said.

  “No,” said Georgia.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” they said.

  “No,” said Georgia.

  She fell back to sleep at dawn, when the light took the things away. In the long afternoon bath (three and a half hours, for the water was soothing and the water was safe) there was a lot to discuss:

  The days are red. And what was the drill for red?

  I don’t remember.

  What’s the drill for red?

  But why is it red? I want to know that.

  Because you have a headache.

  Yes.

  And because you are afraid.

  Yes.

  And we must make you strong again.

  Yes.

  So. The drill for red?

  I drink water. I restore my body to a state of purity.

  Yes.

  I eat apples and yogurt for breakfast and salad for lunch.

  Yes.

  I breathe and run through the trees and feel my heartbeat.

  Yes. That’s right.

  And anyway, it will be better in the spring. It always gets better in the spring.

  She decided to clean the flat to a state of purity. In the living room she pulled the cushions off the sofa and vacuumed underneath and then she pulled the cushion covers off the cushions (you could never be sure) and soaked them in a bucket. She mopped the bathroom and kitchen four times each with bleach, polished mirrors without looking inside them and cleared underneath her bed. She was lying there in the gloom on her stomach and a flash of something ran across the room.

  At Middlesex she went to see the head of history. He always wore a thin brown pullover and he kept a peppermill next to his in-box. Georgia sat down in a blue chair across the room from his desk. She had an odd flicker of worry that she might suddenly shout something nonsensical to no one in particular. The history dean looked over at her and waited.

  Georgia’s chair was facing the adjacent wall. “It’s just. Well, it’s,” she said. “Um.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes.”

  “I was thinking. It’s been, very difficult.”

  “Ah,” he said, and touched a paper on his desk.

  She huddled in the dark. “So I thought. Maybe…”

  “Hmm?”

  “Maybe I should intermit, for a year, for now, and come back when—”

  “Any reason in particular, er, Georgina?”

  “I thought it would get better. I can’t cope with—”

  The history dean said, “It’s common at this stage, yes. But there needs to be a very good reason for it. We don’t like to see talented students dropping out halfway through the course.” He leaned back and glanced out of the window. “Is there a specific reason?”

  She was sitting in a cave. There was no air in the cave. She tried to breathe. Be okay, be okay. A specific reason.

  “Red,” she said, her eyes getting wet (Oh, not here, not here).

  “I’m sorry?”

  She couldn’t stop it coming now. She shook with it in the corner and sniffed and used her sleeve. The history dean’s bookshelves, the blue door and the history dean were leaning away from her. She would have to be picked up and thrown out.

  “Georgina, there are—” He rubbed his knees and stood up and sat down again. He touched paper.

  What she had to do was get up and get out of here. Up. Out. It was not easy.

  Through the corridors as she ran there were loud echoes. Get out, spin around, get out, spin spin spin around. She escaped into the unpretty day and ran toward the willow house. The winter sky was darkening as she approached. She was held in the moment of lilac becoming indigo, the in-between which had nothing inside it but the coming of rest. Night birds were singing. The earth smelled of old rain. She leaned against the trunk of a willow tree. She felt the pulse of peace.

  In a very pale blue, she wrote it down, on separate lines:

  I want to be dusk

  I want to be

  a lonely magic color

  and fall and fall unstoppably

  into darkness

  12

  A Cottage by a Hill

  Later that year Bel had a dream she didn’t like. A woman was climbing a flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The woman, whose face she couldn’t see, was reaching her arm up toward the light. Her head was thrown back, her fingers wide apart. She climbed and climbed. Bel was afraid that if she touched the light she would burn her hand. When the woman reached the top of the stairs, Bel woke up.

  She telephoned Georgia in Tottenham. She asked her about the colors.

  Georgia said, “Don’t worry, Bel, we’re fine. Toby’s helping me with my revision.”

  Bel reminded her not to study too much at night, it wasn’t good for headaches. Before they hung up, Georgia asked, “Can I tell you something?”

  “What, love?”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I have dreams. I want to walk toward him while he waits for me, holding a ring.”

  Bel had seen them, how they were. She had seen how alike they were in their distance from things, in their eyes. When Toby had returned in February he had virtually moved in. It was not always wise, Bel thought, to join yourself to another so like you. Colors could grow; they could double themselves.

  “Think about it carefully,” she told Georgia.

  He held the back of her head in his palm. She thought about it. I would like to walk toward you, and disappear there.

  Toby had come back with new songs and a memory of a cottage by a hill. It belonged to a Danish musician he had met and he had stayed there one night between gigs. He described it to Georgia as absolute peace—the sound of the birds, the quietness of dawn.

  His hair had grown past his shoulders. They lay on their sides facing each other in Georgia’s room, which was spotless. His rucksack had been left by the door for later, when he would take it home and unpack his things. She ran her fingers along his lips. She drew him closer until her eyela
shes brushed his collarbone.

  “Next time,” she said, “take me with you.”

  She told him nothing of Spicey Riley’s. Toby said she had lost some weight, that her eyes looked different, and he wanted to know what was wrong. “If you’d told me to come back sooner I would have,” he said.

  “I couldn’t ask you that.”

  “Yes,” he said, his hands stroking the skin on her back, “you could.”

  The nights were peaceful. On occasion, if he was not there, she slept with the light on. Toby worked more hours at the factory and helped her through the final year at Middlesex. She did not mention the cockroach she spotted in the bathroom, lying on its back with its legs in the air.

  AT WAIFER AVENUE, absences swept through the rooms and flew up the stairs. They collected in the loft, where the air was heavy, and the saloon door was hanging off its hinges.

  Bessi left for work in the mornings now rather than the evenings. The record company had promoted her swiftly from the girl who made tea to an assistant in the press office, where she was proving to be a gifted networker. She was especially gifted at attending photo shoots and taking people out to lunch, always dressed in the latest Oxford Street fashion, like a true and committed member of the music industry. Her hair was worn in corkscrew extensions applied in Bel’s shop, and she had acquired some blue contact lenses.

  Bessi was organizing a press campaign for a new artist called Leopard who had an unusual off-key quality in his voice that was being hailed as a vocal revolution in pop music (as she had phrased it in her press release). Leopard was very fond of fur coats, which he always insisted on being provided with when he posed for his photo shoots. To be kept satisfied and amenable to the press he had to be taken out for meals a lot, and Bessi took this opportunity, in order to avoid the drafty loft and the cloudy, solitary dinners with Aubrey and Ida, to stay out late as often as possible.

  Ham had passed away on September 30, 1980. Bessi had forgotten the date but Georgia never had. It was not an anniversary, because anniversaries were for weddings. It was a noticing. The ones who had lost and who remembered closed their eyes and looked inward for a time, and then they carried on. On September 30, 1995, a foggy white Saturday with flecks of rain, Georgia came to Waifer Avenue to talk to Bessi for a specific reason. It was not a matter of permission. It was a matter of needing her blessing, which was a kind of permission.

  In the sun lounge she stood by Ham’s old table, closed one eye, then the other, and looked inward. Then she went upstairs.

  The curtains were still drawn. Bessi had been lying in bed for two hours because she didn’t like fog. She was still wearing her blue contact lenses from the night before. Georgia sat down next to her. They put pillows behind their backs and the covers over their knees. It was dark here, with the window on the other side of the room and the fog behind the curtains. And in the dark were other kinds of uncertainty.

  “Have you decided what to do yet?” Georgia asked Bessi.

  “What about?”

  “Where you’re going to live.”

  “No,” said Bessi. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, though. Definitely not south London, it’s too far.”

  It’s not as far, thought Georgia, not as far as somewhere better.

  She said carefully, “Me and Toby have been thinking, too.”

  Bessi hesitated. “Have you?” She swallowed tea and looked at the end of her bed.

  “I’ve had enough of London. It’s no place to live. Toby says it’s all madness and choking, and he’s right. I don’t know how you do it every day, going to Oxford Street.”

  “It’s not that bad, the shops are fantastic.” Bessi remembered a new pair of jeans she’d bought yesterday that were such a spot-on, music industry blue that she hadn’t been able to resist them; she was about to ask Georgia if she wanted to see, but Georgia was speaking rather quickly.

  “That’s not what you said when you got back from Trinity. You said London was ugly and cold. You said you wanted to take us all back to St. Lucia and live by the sea, that’s what you said.”

  “Well, I’m used to it now, aren’t I. I’ve warmed to the fruits.”

  Georgia found this irritating.

  “Anyway,” she said, “we’ve been thinking, me and Toby, of moving away somewhere quiet, out of the city. We want to live in a cottage by a hill.”

  Bessi sometimes started singing when things disturbed her. It disturbed her, the emphasis Georgia had placed on “me and Toby.”

  “A little cottage in Negril,” she said, “remember that song, Tyrone Taylor?” She began to sing.

  “I’m serious, Bessi.”

  The singing stopped and was replaced by half a laugh.

  “You want to live in a cottage by a hill? What hill? How far away is this hill?”

  “There’s hills in Brighton and around Brighton. I could see myself living in Brighton—with Toby, we’ve talked about it a lot. We might even go to Eastbourne, Toby says its gorgeous there.”

  “Eastbourne! Bloody hell! What d’you want to live in Eastbourne for!”

  “It doesn’t really matter where, Bessi,” said Georgia passionately. “It’s the idea, near the sea, open space, that could be lots of places. And anyway, what’s wrong with Eastbourne? You’ve never even been there.”

  “Georgia, honey,” said Bessi. Honey was a word she’d started using recently—Georgia felt a whip of fury. “Some dreams are just dreams. Cottages by hills are just dreams.” Bessi shifted her position like a teacher about to explain something to her student. “It’s like me with my singing, right? I dreamed of it for all those years and in the end it wasn’t meant to be, it was something similar, but not exactly it.”

  “That’s not true!” Georgia pushed the covers off her knees and got out of Bessi’s unbest bed. “You of all people should know that’s a ridiculous thing to say. You went off to Trinity on your own—that was a dream, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that was only for six months,” Bessi pointed out.

  “Yes, and six months can be a long time!”

  “All right, all right, calm down.”

  Georgia opened the window and let in the fog. She breathed in and breathed out. “I’m trying to make my life easier,” she said coldly, controlling her voice. “I’m trying to find somewhere I can fit. Isn’t that what dreams are about, finding a way to fit? Just because you lost yours doesn’t mean I should too.”

  Bessi winced. She covered it with a shrug, which agitated Georgia even more. All of a sudden it bothered her wildly that Bessi had never known the terror that could exist in buying milk, or making a cup of tea, or waking up alone in the middle of the night, or being happy right through and watching red crawl toward you to take it all away. She threw up her hands. “Honestly, Bessi, you have no idea, do you?”

  “No idea about what?”

  “Oh, forget it.”

  “What’s wrong with you today anyway?”

  It was then that Georgia let it out. The words toppled from her, they stumbled out, in an awkward voice: “Everything’s so easy for you, isn’t it, you just breeze through and it’s all nothing, nothing, it’s nothing—” Georgia shrugged and let her hands dance in gestures of nothingness, her voice went higher and trembled. “You go up the road and buy milk, you fly off to the other side of the world on your own, you hang around with pop stars and you hardly have to think about it, I know, I watch you, anything you set your mind to and it’s done. It drives me mad!”

  Bessi couldn’t seem to take in all the aspects of what Georgia was saying. She crossed her legs and sat up straight. “Right, okay,” she said mathematically. “First of all, okay, first of all, it’s not easy getting a job, right, remember Digger’s? Not easy, not easy at all. Secondly, getting a job is not the same as buying milk, and thirdly—”

  “See?” Georgia threw up her hands again. “No idea!” She stepped toward Bessi’s bed so that their faces were close together. She frowned into Bessi’s false blue eyes.
“Buying milk can be the same as everything else. Getting out of bed, getting to the front door, being out in the street in a crowd is all the same when—when you are so afraid that you can’t lift your arm or take one step forward, not one step, do you understand? Of course you don’t.”

  “I do understand!” said Bessi. “I know about sadness, we all feel it, not just you, because nothing is easy”—though Bessi had not quite grasped how buying milk wasn’t easy—“and sometimes it is a struggle, so we get blue, I get blue. You’re so far inside your own head, Georgia, that you don’t—”

  “No.” Georgia was firm, her voice was loud but steady. She looked taller, as if a cord was pulling her up toward the ceiling. The loft listened as she spoke.

  “Blue is not the only color. No. Everyone does not feel like this. And especially not you. All this time, all this time I have carried and protected you so that it would stay easy for you always, so that you’d never have to feel like me. And you can’t even see it.”

  Bessi’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

  Georgia turned back toward the window and saw the evergreen tree in the distance. She put her hands over her mouth and stared at the tree with her eyes wet and bulging. She turned back to Bessi, who had moved to the edge of the bed in disbelief.

  “You carry me? Is that what you said?”

  Georgia dropped her hands. “You don’t understand, you can’t…”

  “Well, that’s one thing you’re right about.”

  “Listen to me, Bessi. You’ll probably never understand this because you never asked for my help or my protection—”

  “Protection?”

  “I said listen!” Bessi flinched. Georgia continued; there were tears coming down her cheeks. “I needed somewhere that wasn’t bad. I wanted to be light and happy like you, and I wanted never for you to see the dark. I was scared I would infect you with terrible feelings and pictures in my head of walking out in front of the traffic and—no. That’s not for you, see? Not for you to hear. I needed you to be my sunlight, Bessi”—and here Georgia paused and her words became very small—“I lost mine, I lost it.”