26a

by Diana Evans

Bessi was glaring at Georgia but behind the glare was the wish to hold her and stop her tears and make her feel better. She held on to the glare.

  “You’re acting as if what I am depends on you or something, like, I can only be happy if you’re not. That’s just nonsense. We’re two different people, Georgia, and what I feel does not depend on you.”

  “But it does. That’s what I’m trying to say!”

  Bessi stood up and snatched the tobacco from her dressing table. The desire to comfort her sister had disappeared. She was a whole person, on her own, she did things on her own, and she didn’t depend on anyone. “Who do you think you are?” she shouted. She had roamed the streets of London and had a long cool drink of oneness. She had gone to Trinity and discovered her wholeness, and none of it did she owe to Georgia, none of it. Bessi furiously rolled herself a whole cigarette. She started shaking her head, curt, stubborn shakes. Georgia had the sudden urge to slap her twin across the face.

  Georgia narrowed her eyes. “Elizabeth,” she whispered. “I have made sacrifices.”

  Bessi had not been called Elizabeth since she was six and Aubrey had seen her scratch the side of the car with her bicycle pedal. She had almost forgotten, in fact, that her name was Elizabeth. She burst into an odd, hysterical laughter, and it was at this point that Georgia, unable to contain herself an instant longer, a reckless screech escaping her mouth, sprang forward and slapped Bessi with full force across the face.

  “I have made sacrifices!” she yelled.

  Bessi dropped her cigarette and fell back onto the bed. Nothing moved, nothing spoke. She looked around her as if she couldn’t remember where she was, and then, at exactly the same time, the two of them burst into tears.

  Georgia held out her arms and moved toward the bed.

  “You slapped me!”

  “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry, Bessi—”

  “You slapped me, that hurt, I can’t believe you hit me!”

  Bessi struggled up, the side of her face turning crimson. She said nothing. She pushed past Georgia, flung open the door and stamped downstairs to the bathroom, leaving Georgia alone in the loft with an ache arriving in her head.

  After ten silent minutes, Georgia heard the sound of running water from the bathroom downstairs.

  She sat down on the floor. She watched the fog fading away.

  An hour later, Bessi was still in the bathroom. Georgia went down to the kitchen for the carton of tomato juice she’d left in the fridge, and drank it, and thought of Toby, a cottage by a hill, the musk of his hair, his hands on her back, his mouth on her scar. She thought of Bessi in the bath and muttered, “Won’t you come out now?” She sat in the sun lounge and watched the garden. At the back by the shack of spiders the grass had grown to forest. Ode in Onia were standing in it, with leaves in their hair. Apples had fallen. They were rotting, bruised, among the blades.

  Another hour passed and the bathroom door was still closed. Georgia told herself it was Ida in there, not Bessi. She knocked on Ida’s door.

  Ida said, “Come in.”

  Georgia’s head throbbed. She clutched the beads around her neck.

  “Nothing, Mum. It’s Bessi I wanted.”

  “Bessi is in the bath,” said Ida.

  Georgia approached the bathroom, which was opposite Ida’s room.

  “Bessi?” she whispered.

  Through the door she saw Bessi lying down in the water. The water was very cold. Bessi was under the surface with her eyes open. She was not moving at all. Above her, high up near the ceiling, a red mist was crawling across the air.

  And Bessi did not know the drills for red.

  Georgia thumped the door with her fist, twice.

  “Bessi!”

  There was no answer. The red was spreading down toward the bath.

  “Bessi! Get out of the bath! Get out of the bath, please!”

  On the other side of the door, Bessi sat up. Her cheek was sore and she was freezing cold.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Come out.” Georgia went weak with relief. “Come here. Please come out, won’t you? You’ve been in there too long. I’m sorry I hit you.”

  “I’m cold,” said Bessi, lifting herself up. “I was sleeping.”

  “It’s dangerous, come out now.”

  Georgia waited for Bessi to unlock the door. When she came out, there was a tinge of gray in her face and crimson in one cheek and her eyes were hollow and dim. It frightened Georgia, that look. She had seen it many times before, in the mirror. It didn’t belong in Bessi’s eyes. It was essential that Bessi remain in a strictly yellow place. I am a thief, she thought as she climbed the stairs after her. I have stolen from you. But it is also true that you have stolen from me. You are light, I am shade.

  Bessi sat back down on her bed. She had taken out her contact lenses but she could not look Georgia in the eye. Georgia put her arm around Bessi. “A cottage by a hill,” she said. “It’s only a dream.”

  “It’s not,” said Bessi. “You were right.”

  GEORGIA AND TOBY moved into a small first-floor flat in Bruce Grove, behind the Tottenham clatter. It was connected to Neasden by the A406. They painted the staircase leading up from the front door in lilac. On the landing there was a naked lightbulb hanging from the landing, which Toby covered with a paper shade.

  The flat was on a hill and had lots of light. A wicker chair in the lounge looked out onto a green, and at the bottom of the hill was not the sea but a flower stall next to a shop where they could buy milk. For the bedroom they chose yellow. And on the door of the bedroom, on the inside, Georgia wrote in chalk, G+T. It was their house.

  Once a week she sat down for fifty minutes on a chair opposite a woman whose name was Katya. She had gray hair at the front and she often said “hmmm” and threw her head abruptly to one side. The office smelled of many kinds of blue and next to Georgia’s chair was a brass box with a slit at the top, a single tissue half pulled out.

  Georgia told Katya about the fear and the figures in the darkness. She told her that she had many questions, that they were written in words in the air above her head, and they gave her headaches. She said that sometimes there were colors that made things difficult. Katya threw her head to one side. Georgia pulled out a tissue and a half and Katya said: “Hmmm.” There were echoes of Italian in her voice. “It is possible,” she said, “that sadness becomes something that lives, a monster, it has taken on its own flesh. And it is possible that the monster can multiply.”

  Georgia sat back in her chair and her heels lifted off the floor. She said, “But how will I stop it from multiplying? How can I make it die?”

  Katya told her it might never die, but with acceptance and good management it could be eased. “It is an endurance,” she said (endurance was a word Katya used a lot). “You overcome and chase it away, and you must be determined. You smash it to the floor. And if it is necessary you scream and tell it, ‘I do not consent.’”

  It got better in the spring. The herb garden Georgia had planted on the windowsill shot up to full bloom and she talked about looking for work in a flower shop. Toby remained at the factory, performing occasionally with Carl. In the evenings he sat in the wicker chair and sometimes played the song he had first taught her, a streetlight moon looking in from outside. When Carl came up with another gig abroad, he decided not to go. “I want to stay with you,” he said, when Georgia asked him if he was happy. “I told you I would.”

  Some weekends, Bessi came to stay. She was living alone on the top floor of a block of flats in Kensal Rise. From her window she could hear double-decker buses going past and she could see a graveyard with a chapel and hundreds of trees. She told Georgia she loved the top floor at night because it was like living on the same level as the stars.

  They sat next to each other on the bench in Georgia’s kitchen (“Bessi’s best bench”), lightly touching arms. Bessi told Georgia about a man she’d met in Oxford Street called Darel. He had irresistible shoulders like
a basketball player or something and he drove a nice car, a convertible. He took her for long drives and played Louis Armstrong through the city, the wind making her close her eyes, and Bessi sighed in and out with pleasure and thought, This—this is a life I love.

  Summer turned. It flickered through the rooms and turned away. Georgia told Katya that she was experiencing panic. She had been to John Lewis to buy a birthday present for Ida and had taken a plate off a shelf. As she held the plate, which was made of clay, she became extremely worried that she would drop it. Her fingers squeezed the sides of the plate. She held it for half an hour, not moving. Then she bent both knees, concentrating, and went lower, put the plate on the floor, and walked out. Outside the shop, she had started running.

  “Endurance,” said Katya. “Tell the monsters they are not real.”

  But Georgia was losing her words. Something irreversible had happened. The panic was connected to the change in season, and the realization that neither warmth and light, nor the opportunity to merge into the darkness of winter, might save her. She fell with the leaves in autumn and in November she got a headache that would not go.

  Toby placed a cold flannel on her forehead. She said, Come here, come closer.

  Yes? he said.

  Toby. Sadness is not a season. Now I understand.

  He held the back of her head. Stay with me Georgia, he said.

  And she closed her eyes.

  She began to slip past him like mist. You are symmetry, he told her, remember. She smiled at that. But the next day, which was a harsh deep red day, she couldn’t get out of the house. She took a plate off the kitchen shelf, smashed it to the floor and shouted, I do not consent!

  The air in the flat became thick and stifled and Georgia noticed, in a haze of questions, that Toby had stopped playing his guitar. She could not allow it. She said to the ache in her head, I must not kill his music. He took her to the sea, they watched the indifference of dusk silently, like strangers would watch it, and the dusk told her, You must not kill his music.

  At Waifer Avenue the Hunters and Toby sang “Auld Lang Syne” with their arms linked. Georgia was watching invisibles and Toby was trying to see them too. Bel was alarmed. She said to Georgia in their place on the edge of the bath, Talk to me. Georgia looked at the green in Bel’s eyes, and said very little. She had discovered something, and she was trying to remember it until she got home. It was there in Bel’s eyes, it was in Kemy’s lively voice, in all of them, she had seen it as they’d sang. Most of all, it was in Bessi.

  Me-ness, she wrote. I am within them. And as long as they remain, I will remain.

  Georgia spent her twenty-fourth birthday with Toby, and she cried again that day, in the morning, which was the most dangerous time to cry.

  Toby, she said, I feel like the old West Pier.

  Don’t cry now, he said.

  In the bedroom, in their house they lay down. Come here, she said. There were shadows. The moon outside was turning red. Lie down with me, Toby, said Georgia.

  She memorized his heartbeat. She said: Forgive me, my darling, I am a thief. You have to go.

  13

  See You Monday

  Like a wizard you spin. Whole and new, spin spin spin. Tragic magic, set me free. Your golden face will turn in the breeze of spinning and there has never been such bravery, there has never been such glory. You drift toward the rowing boat, across the water, the bright open blue, and she holds out her hand toward you. From the mountain up above, the silver mist is falling down upon your eyes. That is how it will be.

  On the way home from Bessi’s this morning, Valentine’s Day, 1997, Georgia stopped at the flower stall at the bottom of the hill. She bought two large lilies with gyp. It was not difficult, because there were no colors. The old man with a large tweed cap over his little head was putting the tulips in their buckets. She thought, I would have liked that, yes, to put tulips in buckets in the morning, wrap them up, choose how best to make beauty, and hand it to someone. Nothing more complicated. She said to the man, I would have liked that.

  Before returning home she walked around the park opposite with the bunch of flowers in her left hand, held slightly out in front of her, the stems sticking out of the bottom of the paper. In her right hand she was carrying her bag of things (toothbrush, a book, a change of clothes). She wore a hooded anorak that made her look like a child, and her hair was in two messy bunches. For a moment she sat down on the bench, but stood up again quickly, and went home.

  As she climbed the lilac stairs, Ode in Onia waited at the top. Their eyes had gotten very large, and their dress had gotten very dirty.

  Georgia said: It’s nice where you are. Isn’t it.

  Six weeks ago, after Toby had left, she’d sat in the kitchen on Bessi’s best bench (where she is sitting now, at twilight, thinking, deciding, her head strangely tilted). She had the sensation that she was in someone else’s clothes, in someone else’s home, and she had no right to be sitting there, with the kettle boiling and the alfalfa beans sprouting by the window and an empty salad dish in the sink, baffled, and the sugar bowl with the lid off. They had drunk final tea, he was a man of sugar. He had left, vanished, turned back once and waved.

  Nights gave her sleep until the darkest deepest hours when she sat up in bed to the noises, definitely, someone standing on the landing outside the bedroom door dressed in black, there, footsteps, fingernails on the banister, and she switched on the bedside lamp and waited for dawn to come back. (There is nothing slower than dawn.) And then she would bathe. And then she would go out walking, wearing a white cotton scarf with a dark blue pattern of figures, tied around her neck.

  This winter was very cold. There was fog.

  Bessi said, Come and stay with me. I’ll look after you. Don’t be on your own.

  They slept in Bessi’s bed by the moon, with the light on. Bessi held Georgia in her arms; she said, Sleep well now, think of good things. In the middle of the night, Georgia felt a knocking against her skull. It was a devil. He told her a story. The story was about a woman who lost her soul, she misplaced it one day, and couldn’t remember where. Of course, said the devil, it was impossible for this poor woman to live without her soul, so she began to look everywhere for it. She asked everyone she knew, she searched high and low, she looked on this side and on the other side. And when she found it, she vanished. Isn’t that a good story? said the devil.

  No! Georgia shouted. It’s a terrible story, I hate it!

  Carol Fielding, Katya, The Detox Bible, and most recently, Saving the Soul, had no advice on what to do when the devil came.

  Except, unless, there is a crucifix.

  Bessi woke up. Georgia charging up and down, up and down in the moonlight, her hands over her ears shouting Not this, not mad, not this! Bessi called her name; it took eight times, with her thumb rubbing the skin between Georgia’s eyebrows, smoothing the twists away. The devil shrank back. Bessi saw it fly out of Georgia’s eyes, a distortion, something utterly without pity, and it made her shudder.

  (Valentine’s Day. Three o’clock. Someone dipped the afternoon in sun. She walked into Bel’s shop in her bright yellow trousers and she looked as if the air had just made her. “You look wonderful today,” said Bel. She had plaited her hair. Ode in Onia had helped.

  Georgia and Bel said good-bye. They hugged and Bel held the back of Georgia’s neck in her magic palm. The palm could not tell.

  Now she gets up from the bench. Spin spin spin, she wrote, like a wizard you spin. She walks toward the stairs.)

  The day after the devil came, Bessi took Georgia to Waifer Avenue, to Ida, and went to work. “I’ll come back later,” she said. Ida made chicken stew and eba because Georgia liked eba. She rubbed Vicks on the temples of the headache. “You’ll be all right,” she said, “lie down.” Ida sat in the armchair next to the sofa and stroked Georgia’s head. Her bracelets were very faint bells in the dream.

  First she heard the seagulls calling, then she heard the water, it said
, Lie back now and rest, dear, lie down here and rest. Georgia was sitting in the boat wearing a white dress with a yellow belt. She reached out her hand, which was too small for her wrist. She was more lovely than anything Georgia had ever seen. Softly, she said, You have to ask Bessi.

  Ida’s bracelets brought her back. The peacock on the ceiling, the rocking chair, the silver men keeping still. From the edge of her sight, Georgia could see Ida’s long red fingernails as she stroked and stroked her hair.

  Mum, she said, tell me the story about when you left the village.

  Ida told Georgia about running from the house with her bag of things, and how she’d waited for the bicycle in the dark by the water pump, the sound of the trees, the sound of the moths.

  Were you scared?

  Yes. I was very afraid. I was leaving my family and my home.

  Georgia lifted her head. How did you know it was right?

  Ida stopped her stroking and nodded slowly as the right words came to her. My life is my own, she said. There was no future there for me and I cannot live for nobody else. She stroked again and added, Only you, my children.

  Do you ever regret leaving? asked Georgia. Did it hurt?

  No. Regret is worthless. And pain, it goes away, you see, it goes away. You’ll be all right.

  Georgia lay back down. Dusk was walking in through the bay window with a fearless slender stride.

  She said, You were brave, Mum, to leave the village.

  (Georgia is in the living room now. She is holding her scarf in one hand. She has decided that it is the right one: white, the restoration to a state of purity; and dark blue figures, because we know each other well. And will there be music? She is bending down, flicking through records with her right hand. What song? What music? Or should it be silence?)

  One week after Ida and the eba and the stroking, on a vast, sunny morning, Georgia and Bessi went with Kemy and Lace to the airport, to see them off. They were going to the Trinidad carnival. Kemy had packed hot pants, gold ones, with sequins, she told them, and Lace turned the music up loud. Marcia Griffiths and Tony Rebel sang “Ready to Go” and Georgia and Bessi held hands in the backseat in case of the devil. Tony and Marcia sang,