by Diana Evans
“I’m coming,” Bessi says. I can smell rice and fish. I can smell the tomatoes soaked around the fish.
Bel waits. She is staring intensely at us. In a swing of light as Bessi turns toward the door, her eyes catch mine. She suddenly seems as if she is about to cry. “For a moment,” she says, “you looked just like Georgia.”
Ida and Aubrey are sitting in their places at the table opposite each other. Before sitting down, Bessi moves her mat and plate to the right so that she can sit in my place. Ida stops eating. “Sit in the middle like your sista.”
“No. I want to sit here.”
Aubrey clears his throat. “Let her sit there if she wants.”
They eat their rice and fish in the evening and the echoes. The rice is a little bit soggy. Outside there is rain still falling on the sun-lounge roof.
Ida says, “At home a woman will not live by herself, she lives with her family. They look after her. They ask you how you are.”
“Yes, Mum,” says Bel.
Bessi feels something new in her neck and at the top of her head and in the veins throughout her body. I shake myself loose throughout her. It is a feeling much sharper than the flute and the aches, it is very close to pain. A tightening of the skin and a sense of being filled up, of teetering on the edge of bursting, like the top of making love. It makes her tremble and drop her fork. I have moved fully into her legs, her arms and feet, into her eyes, and I am almost comfortable now. I almost fit. It has been harder than I imagined it would be, to find a way to fit her.
Oh, sweet, thinks Bessi, it’s true!
I move, finally, into her heart, and I tell her yes.
“You should slow down when you eat,” Aubrey says. “You’re out of breath, look.”
Sweat has broken out on Bessi’s forehead and there is glitter inside her cheeks. She’s eating the fish and looking at her hands, rubbing her stomach, rubbing her heart. Bel and Ida are staring. I can see Nne-Nne clearly now, sitting with Mum, virtually inside her. Nne-Nne is staring too, as if we are under a microscope. She squints at me again, then she turns to Ida and says, “All the stories Baba told were true. You see it.”
She turns to Bel and points at me with her long shriveled finger. “You see it.”
Bel sinks back in her chair, astonished.
“Georgia?” says Ida.
“Bessi, you mean!” Aubrey is distressed. “It’s Bessi!” Yesterday he accidentally called Bessi Georgia and afterward he went upstairs and hid in the bathroom.
Ida looks down at her plate, refusing to see, her voice strange and cracked as she tells Bessi, “Go and lie down.”
“I’m going home soon.” Bessi smiles. She takes her plate into the kitchen. The feet walk neither inward like Bessi nor outward like Georgia; they face the front. She laughs in the silence, and in the laughter, there is a trace of fear.
“Why don’t you stay here with Mum?” Bel says from the kitchen doorway. “You shouldn’t be on your own.” For a moment Bessi does not recognize her. It is as if she were standing a long way away from her, in another place.
“Don’t worry, Bel,” she says. “She’s all right now. I know she is.”
BEL DRIVES US home through the wet glass streets. The houses and the sycamore trees are upside down and twice themselves. At Lanten Road, Bessi says she’d like to walk the rest of the way on her own because the night is ravishing.
It has stopped raining. The sky is washed and the stars can see us clearly: a woman in a blue coat, half skipping. She passes the bus stop and the petrol station. She picks up speed down the hill. She is almost running.
Bessi asks the most urgent question.
Did it hurt?
A little bit, I tell her.
I’m sorry. Oh dear, I’m sorry.
Let’s not talk about pain. That pain was less than the pain before.
The pain before, she says, that is even worse to think about! I should have done something!
Like what?
I should have stayed with you in the nights, all the awful nights, I should have looked after you—
I am not a child, I tell her, and you are not my mother. The pain is over.
I am so glad it’s over.
We skip and we run with forward feet. Bessi says it feels like flying. We reach the flats. We take the stairs.
What happened after? she asks.
I’m not sure.
I try to think of it. Bessi’s muscles and ribs feel very warm, like the beginning of fever. Her head is light. I tell her this, I imagine this:
It was like flying, just like that. A flash, a jump. I became white light, silver flesh and galactic bone.
Did you?
I got to the water and I lay down in the water.
Yes.
I heard you scream and I ran.
Yes.
Miles and miles through the forest. I was carried in the body of a child and her dress had turned to rags and her name is Ode in Onia. There were birds crying in the trees above my head and the howls of witches in feathered skirts. There was fire in the distance.
I remember that story.
The thorns on the ground cut my feet as I ran and I could hear you all in the house, all the howling. I tried to shout but my voice would not carry. I began to wonder whether I would make it at all. But then I found you.
You found me.
I climbed up your ribs.
Moved into me.
Yes.
Bessi unlocks the front door. It is our house. She takes off her coat and puts down her bag in the living room. The door to the balcony shakes in the wind and creaks.
“I don’t like that noise,” she says to the door. “It sounds like rope, twisting and untwisting.”
The phone rings; Darel leaves a message asking where Bessi has disappeared to. She ignores him, washes and goes to bed. Tomorrow is another big day, she tells me. We’re going to the cemetery to choose a double-decker bed. And we’re going to get your things.
The room is dark except for the moon, which sends the vase of daffodils on the windowsill across the ceiling in long bold shadows. The shadows ripple and Bessi thinks of ghosts.
Are you a ghost? she asks.
I do not answer her.
She gets up and turns on the lamp. She lies back down, turns onto her side facing the window, draws up her legs and holds one hand in the other hand.
I’ve got an idea, she thinks.
What is it?
You are the right of me. I am the left.
The balcony door creaks. Bessi’s words quicken.
I give you my right hand and right leg and everything on the right, and when I want to touch you I take your hand in my left.
Okay, that’s a good idea.
I am both of us.
Yes. Like a flame. It flickers Georgia, it flickers Bessi.
We will be fire.
She is almost asleep. She can no longer hear the balcony door.
It’s not true, is it? she says, nearly dreaming.
What?
It’s not worst for Bessi. It’s best for Bessi. Isn’t it. Will you stay forever?
I do not answer.
We sleep a deep double sleep, holding hands.
THE KEEPER OF the graves lives in a cottage by the dead. He carries a stick and wears a cap. Under the morning sun he leads us along the silver beech avenues, through the elms and the ash, the blackberry bushes and the mausoleums. There’s an open tomb in the walkway of the chapel. I can smell the flowers of lavender and hyssop and rosemary.
At night, in the cemeteries, the ghosts are said to wander among the stones. They are white and murky, with see-through empty selves. They pass through the cemetery walls and stand motionless in people’s bedrooms. It is not true. We are lace shining around the living who still need us. We are the glitter in their faces that is close to madness. We lift them up, and pull them onward.
Some of the monuments here, the keeper of the graves is telling Bel, date back to the 1700s. There are Gre
eks and Russians, Ethiopians and royalty. There are stones big enough to live in with statues on the roof of birds and cats, and stones that are crumbling and mottled and forgotten.
On Sundays you can get a two-hour guided tour, for under five pounds.
Bel and Bessi follow the keeper of the graves to the vacant plots. Bel is wearing Wellington boots to protect her stockings.
It should be somewhere with lots of light, I tell Bessi. Yes, she says. And not too near the wall.
“Here?” says Bel, on a hill near the chapel.
“No,” Bessi says. It’s cramped, there’s too many weeds.
We carry on. There is a site overlooking the keeper’s lodge, and another close to the entrance, visible from the main road. We pick our way through the sleeps.
On a level plain at the bottom of the hill we find an evergreen tree with a bench nearby. There is room for us between two crumbling stones. A throng of butterflies are sifting over the long grass as flocks of cloud pass over the sun.
Bel says, “Is it here?”
“Yes,” we say.
Here, then, thinks Bessi. This is where they will take me—what a thing to know. She is getting a rash on her neck. She keeps scratching it, with her left hand, and I tell her to stop it with my right.
The administration of death is a thing of work and activity, journeys and signatures, telephones and composure—yet the world has changed. Flowers become louder than concrete. All the colors are extra. Bessi watches a woman with auburn hair striding along Neasden Lane past the station, swinging a purple umbrella by the hook. She sees two boy twins in their pram, asleep, with black hair, under a white quilt. They are facing each other. It occurs to her that these streets will never again carry Georgia’s outward-walking feet, my own walking body, and that is why they have changed.
Ida is pleased we chose a grave near a bench. “That’s it,” she says. And she approves wholly of the cemetery being visible from Bessi’s window. It is as it should be, like Cecelia under the washboard in Aruwa and Baba by the vegetables. They should remain with us, in our domesticity.
Neither Bel nor Ida will address me directly, but they know I am here. They look at Bessi with suspicion, with amazement. They look at her twice, thinking hard with their eyes. It is the same expression that mounts on Toby’s face as we walk toward him, in the empty street in Bruce Grove, outside the home we shared.
He has cut off all his hair. Tufts of it are jutting out from his skull. He looks thinner than ever, wrapped up in his coat with his bootlaces undone, so thin and dirty that I feel something close to regret. The flame flickers Georgia. I move toward him. There’s a trace of terror in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Bessi…I still can’t believe it. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, Toby,” we tell him.
He looks away from me. Bessi makes herself very small so that I can take, for a moment, the left arm as well as the right. I put these arms around him and feel him shivering against me like a little boy. “What did you do? What happened?” he says. He takes the back of my head in his palm.
“Have you been waiting long?” asks Bel.
Toby breaks away and drives his hand through the clumps of his hair. “Not long,” he says. He looks around him frantically, as if about to run. “Let me take some of those.”
Laden with empty boxes and plastic bags, we climb the stairs and Bel unlocks the front door. The air inside is barren, there is a lack of waiting. A home waits, it expects, it waits for knocks or rings or voices; this home waits for nothing. In the lilac shadows off the hallway my white coat brushes Toby’s cheek and he twists away from it. “Come on,” says Bel, “come on.” Bessi clutches Toby’s arm up the stairway. She hears the sound of rope, twisting and untwisting; she imagines the little body swaying up there, above their heads.
I try to talk to her. Do not think of it, I say. But she will not listen. Do not think of it, the spinning, think of what I told you last night, white light, I ran to you, the pain is over.
Toby goes straight into the bedroom and sits down on the bed. I watch him through the crack in the door, staring at one of the pillows, not moving. Bessi goes past into the living room. The record stack is open on Roberta Flack, the wicker chair is facing the window. She wonders how it was that night. Was there music? she asks me, but I will not answer. Was it like this? Did you sit in the wicker chair and look at the street moon and rise up, and look through the records for the perfect sound? She wanders out onto the landing and runs her hand along the cold banister. Like this, did you walk out here, quiet in your heart? Were you very sure, were you very clear, that you were going, that you were leaving, exploding beyond yourself? What was it like, Georgia?
I was a wizard, I tell her faintly. I was magic.
Or were you chased away, biting your fist and clutching your clothes. While you were choking, did you regret? Because breath takes a time to leave, doesn’t it, Georgia? The body will not let it go. It jerks and twists. It cries until there is no breath left, only a final push, a whisper that says I was equal with this air. How can I know for sure? Bessi stamps her foot on the floorboards.
Regret is worthless, I say. I was spinning! The spinning set me free.
She unplugs the phone. She turns in a circle. She wants to spin too.
No! I tell her. You can’t!
From somewhere else in the flat, Bel calls out Bessi’s name. Bessi rushes toward the kitchen and finds Bel standing by the best bench, holding open a notebook. She passes the notebook to Bessi, and leaves the room.
We sit down at the bench.
It was here, wasn’t it? she thinks to me. You were sitting here.
There are whole pages colored in red and entries written in yellow, blue and orange. There are letters to God and to someone called Carol. There is a letter that starts Dear Bessi. It is dated two weeks before Valentine’s Day.
Bessi reads the letter. Believe in me, it says. Believe in me until the end.
I DISCOVER THAT I can leave her when she sleeps. I stretch out and enter the mouths of the night birds. I paint the night with the flowers and discover that I am all of this, everything my body made me forget.
I visit Bel in her dream. She is standing in the garden in Sekon, waiting. I walk into the garden in pajamas and a cardigan and I am much younger than I was. Bel says, Come here, little one, let me protect you. Sedrick creeps out from the bushes. Bel begins to shout at him. She’s flinging her arms around and swearing. I point at Sedrick and shake my head. No, Bel, I say, everything was strange to me.
In the morning there are two pigeons sitting on Bessi’s balcony rail. She sits up in bed feeling blank, and studies them. She wonders what they are talking about. The birdsong was very loud this morning. It woke her up.
When I get back (I am late) the pigeons fly away and Bessi yawns as if she has just come to life.
I had a dream that you died, she tells me.
Oh.
You were dead and I was upset about it, so I cried all night in bed. In the morning I got up and went into the living room, and guess who was sitting on the sofa.
Me?
Yes! Imagine how happy I was. Your hair was tied back and it had a yellow rose in it and your cheeks were shiny. I made a big fuss but you acted as if it was nothing. You seemed older.
Forty-five minutes?
Older than that. Much older.
She gets up and starts tidying the bedclothes.
What are we doing today? I ask.
We’re going to paint her, she says.
Bessi packs a bag of makeup. We walk in the sun along Kilburn Lane—it is an unnatural level of sunshine for this time of year. She walks swiftly, swinging the bag of things. The blood is charging up and down her legs, swirling around in her head, and she scratches her neck with her left hand. She does not wait for the cars to stop before crossing the road. I am invincible, she thinks, the worst nightmare is true and anything after is lesser. If I were a soldier, and called into th
e deadly center. I would run to it because whether I live or die, I am invincible.
Bel is waiting for her at the parlor. JP has an oat in his whiskers and he offers us Murray Mints to which Bessi says no thank you; she is hot and her mouth is dry and she is feeling bad toward sugar.
JP warns them about the embalming, which may have altered her features. He warns them about the fingertips.
THE WHITE CURTAINS rustle as the door is shut behind them. On the wall there is a bare silver cross; beneath it on a table, a vase of long white lilies.
Georgia is lying down. A doll in a box. They have prepared themselves for the cool of porcelain.
Bessi holds the bag with both hands. Her right side feels weak, all of a sudden, and when she entered the room there was a fearful tugging within her skin. Now she feels this heat, this fever, crawling up both sides of her face into her hair.
They stand around the coffin, looking in at the peculiar face. The skin around the nose, chin and forehead is turning gray. From the chest down she is covered in a white brocade, so they cannot yet see her hands. The curtains sigh again and seem alive.
Bessi moves her fingertips toward the face. She touches Georgia’s forehead, then draws away. She touches it again, and stays there, and moves the fingers up and down by an inch. “Cold,” she says.
She lays out foundation, lipstick, Vaseline and Vicks that Ida has insisted is rubbed into Georgia’s chest to protect her from angry spirits who might disapprove of what she has done. Aubrey overheard this and muttered, “Haddock.”
Bessi takes the sponge and dabs it with foundation. She rubs and blends until the gray is gone. There, she thinks, that’s better, and breathes in and out, and feels the fever spreading through her. She touches the lips, which are hard like cobbles, and her fingers scuttle away for the Vaseline.
“I’ll do it,” says Bel. Bessi leans back against the wall, getting hotter.
Bel makes the lips ruby again. She rubs Vicks over the heart. Then Bessi takes one of two silver rings out of her pocket. “Help me lift her arm—the right one.”
They pull down the brocade and lift Georgia’s right hand, whose fingertips are black at the tip. Bessi thinks, It’s a very heavy arm not Georgia’s arm it’s too thick to be Georgia’s real arm, isn’t it! The fingers, the black ones and the alive ones, jostle with one another. Stay still stay still! With these bands of silver, let us marry across the graves. Bessi pushes the ring down. She puts the other ring on the same finger of her own left hand.