by Diana Evans
Now I live for both of us, as you sleep for me, wait for me, in the double earth.
They look down at their work. Bessi thinks the face is smirking at her. Gradually, she notices a red tinge at the edges of her sight. The area around the coffin is beginning to turn red. It starts with a tinge of fever rose and becomes stronger. It hovers over the coffin and casts a mocking rosy shadow on the face.
Bessi backs away, clutching the bag. The red begins to buzz. It sucks her breath away and travels across the room and flares up the white curtains. Bessi drops the bag and her hand flies to her throat.
“Bessi, what’s wrong!” cries Bel.
She gropes behind her for the door and bursts out into the hall. JP rushes out of his office: “What’s happening here?” Bessi spins around in a circle. “Red!” she cries. “Red!” She runs out into the street. She sees Kemy walking toward her in an orange jacket and the orange makes her weep. Ida and Aubrey are walking on either side of Kemy and the three of them begin to run. Bessi’s legs disappear. She reaches out her arms toward Kemy and falls down in the burning street. “Bessi’s dying Bessi’s dying!” says Ida’s voice, which also disappears.
They are in the loft, the two of them, and they are standing face-to-face. There is grass beneath their feet and flowers lying down. They are wearing their summer dresses, which are dusty and torn. They have arranged that they will go now. Bessi will go first and Georgia will follow, and they will meet at the evergreen tree. Bessi ties the scarf and jumps. She runs to the evergreen. But when she arrives, Georgia is already there.
“SMAZEL?”
“Sssh,” says Bel.
“She’s waking up,” says Aubrey.
“People knock on your door, they ask you how your body.”
Bel’s hands are stroking her head. There are people on the ceiling in the loft. They are all enormous people with blue in their faces.
“Thank God—help us,” says Ida.
Bessi’s lips are stuck together. Kemy hands her a glass of water with a slice of lime floating at the top. You fainted, she says. You were spinning round and round on the spot. It was pretty freaky.”
“You were overwhelmed,” says Aubrey.
“But you’re all right now.” Bel tests her palm against the back of Bessi’s neck. “You’re not so hot anymore. Let’s leave her be for a while.”
Kemy remains with Bessi in the loft. She has Trinidad coffee in her skin and smells of coconut oil. They lie on their backs and look up at the ceiling. They are two-thirds of three.
“I knew she’d do something,” Kemy says. “When I hugged her at the airport, I could sort of feel it. I said to her, ‘You won’t do anything silly, will you?’ and she said, ‘No, silly!’ She never listened to me about anything, the stubborn cow.” Bessi starts laughing and Georgia is in the laugh. “Then when Bel phoned that morning, I was getting ready for the carnival and I just knew. As soon as the phone rang, I knew it was Georgie.”
Kemy thinks about Georgia’s eyes. She thinks about how they were always somewhere else.
“She never really liked it here, did she?”
“No,” says Bessi.
“Where d’you think she is?”
Bessi shuts her eyes. There are bits of red left over in the dark.
“I don’t know.”
Kemy turns to face Bessi. “On the plane on the way back from Trinidad, I looked out of the window at the clouds. I looked for a long time and thought about her. Then I saw her. She was sitting down on a cloud all to herself and dangling her feet over the edge. She waved at me. I think she’s everywhere.”
“Not all the time,” says Bessi.
Kemy looks at Bessi’s eyes, and sees that they have changed.
ON THE TUESDAY THEY sang in the church as candles danced in lakes of heat. Before the lid was fastened over the box, Bessi and Kemy had their last look. Bessi bent in toward the body, and kissed the cobbled lips.
They put her in the ground after that, JP in his coattails, the keeper of the graves directing the digging, and they sang again, and lifted her memory to the sun. Bessi looked down. The box was beneath the soil. She forgot, for a moment, that Georgia was not in there. She thought: I want to go down. I want to go down and get you out of there. Toby ripped the plastic off the flowers so that their stems and leaves and petals were free. She was smothered in flowers, the yellow velvet roses and the lilies lying down, lilac stems and shoots of tulip spilling over the hump of double earth. JP explained that it would take a year to sink level. After that, they could bring her stone.
Aubrey stood by the mound of flowers. He fumbled with his tie and cleared his throat. “There’s butties and macaroons back at the house,” he said to the congregation.
The house was surprised by the noise, the voices, thick in the living room and kitchen and all the way up the stairs. Kemy put on Michael Jackson and Bel kicked off her shoes to dance with Jay. She said it was bad luck for the departing spirit if no one danced at their funeral. Aubrey clapped his hands to the music, slightly out of time, and said, “God bless you, Georgia!” He didn’t drink a lot. Mr. Hyde was not invited to the party.
That night, as they lay in bed, Bessi and Georgia agreed that it was a wonderful funeral. Bessi asked Georgia very delicately what the gravestone was like that she’d seen in her chest, the evil stone, so that they could choose one that was nothing like it. Georgia said she couldn’t remember exactly, except that it was crumbling. She was concentrating on keeping the bad memories to herself. It was proving difficult, since she was not entirely herself.
It was very quiet tonight except for the balcony door. No voices, no wind, no sound of traffic. The administration period was over. There was nothing more to be done.
3
Bessi went back to work with the rash still there on her neck. The corkscrew extensions were gone and her hair was plaited into cornrows with beads at the end the way Georgia liked to wear it. One afternoon she picked up the phone and accidentally dialed Georgia’s old number. A man said, “Rob speaking?” And Bessi said, “Who the fuck are you?” “No, who the fuck are you?” said the man. With her right hand, Georgia made her hang up.
Bessi felt, for the first time in her life, that the music business was composed vastly of fluff. She sensed that Leopard was perhaps not a genius pioneer of a new vocal movement destined to change the face of pop, but someone who couldn’t sing. She tried her best to be dazzling but spent a lot of time daydreaming, and more time in the bath. There were days that she felt she should call lilac and she liked those days, and there were others when she was upset by the color orange. Sometimes the nights were red, which Georgia couldn’t help, much as she tried, and on those nights Bessi sat in the center of her bed and begged Georgia to come back here properly.
Once a week with flowers they went to the cemetery. Bessi touched the evergreen tree and stood for a while by the wooden cross with the number on it. She wasn’t sure whether to talk to herself, the Georgia part, or the cross, or the tree, so she usually didn’t say much. Unlike Kemy, who always had a lot to say. She would sit down and tell Georgia all about the vegetable dyeing and how she was planning a market stall with Lace and a friend from college. She told her about a dream she’d had of a tiny mint green bird that flew in through the window and tapped her on the shoulder with its beak. She told her that she wished she was still alive but she understood that she couldn’t hack it.
Bessi reminded herself, as she watched Kemy chatting with such ease, that it was best for Bessi, even though it was complicated and sometimes hard.
“Kemy,” she said once, “Georgia’s inside me.” For three months she had wanted to say this to another human being.
“I know,” said Kemy, looking up at Bessi. “Of course she is. You’re twins.” She turned back to the cross. Bessi did not know what else to say.
She visited Waifer Avenue more often than before because Georgia was concerned about the roses. They watered them with her right hand. They sat with Ida, who sai
d, “You bring her to me,” and sometimes, when it flickered Georgia, “Why you didn’t come to me?” Ida had started going to church regularly, every Sunday without fail, to a place in Harlesden with her friend Heather from the Brazilian cookery class.
Bessi’s rash began to spread. It sneaked into her wrists and made them red. It found her elbows. She only ever scratched with her left hand because Georgia firmly refused to let her use the right. Kemy monitored Bessi’s itch. She said, “Stop scratching!” whenever she caught her, and she concocted a cream involving melon juice, Vaseline and granulated oats, which didn’t work. Bessi could no longer remember what it felt like to be rashless.
She woke up one morning and the two pigeons were sitting back on the balcony rail. Behind them was clear blue sky, the air could smell the coming of summer. Bessi felt limp in her right side. She waited and nothing happened. Eventually, she got out of bed and put on a dress of Georgia’s that didn’t help with the limpness. The pigeons were still sitting on the rail, their heads close together, twitching. She decided to go to Gladstone Park with nectarines. Her feet were pointing inward. She took the 52 to Neasden, bought two nectarines from the greengrocer’s, then walked unevenly to the park to sit by the duck pond next to Gladstone’s house. She heard the ducks chatter as they moved across the water. Down on the hill below, a man and a woman were sitting back-to-back eating sandwiches.
Bessi took a nectarine from the bag but did not eat it right away. First, she concentrated on what she had to remember: the moment before. The moment before—when it was possible to sit with her back against Georgia’s back—was in the nectarine. It was soft and sweet and it was ready to be eaten.
She brought the fruit to her mouth. She took a bite. The juice of the nectarine slid down her chin and she caught it with a finger. She concentrated on chewing and tasting. It was a perfect nectarine, but there was something not right. Bessi could not taste the sunset. If Georgia was sitting next to her as a whole other person, she would be able to eat the sunset.
“You made the world taste better,” she said out loud.
Georgia didn’t get back until late in the afternoon as Bessi was walking home along Chamberlayne Road. She climbed up the ribs and spread out. The feet faced forward again. The right side was equal with the left.
Bessi said, Where have you been? You’ve been out all day.
Sorry, Georgia said, I lost track. I was in Kemy’s dream last night and I think we went swimming somewhere, I can’t remember exactly. Isn’t it a beautiful day?
You remember the bad things but you don’t remember the good things, Bessi said bitterly.
Georgia was silent. The right side stiffened.
I didn’t mean it, Bessi said. I thought you weren’t coming back, that’s all. I was getting frantic.
Do you want me to go? asked Georgia.
No. Never. I just wish you’d never gone.
They did not speak the rest of the way home. When they got in they wanted to be in separate rooms, like people do when they have argued, but this was not possible.
The rash got worse with the heat. It flamed up and down Bessi’s arms and the backs of her legs. Georgia said it was unbearable and started scratching too; there was scratching with the left hand and with the right, there were blisters, cuts and sleeplessness, there were a thousand knives gnashing under the skin. Bessi had not had an outbreak of this scale since the egg lumps in Sekon after Nanny Delfi’s fish cakes. She checked her diet for eggs and peas and spinach; she went to the doctor, who told her that severe outbreaks of eczema were common under these circumstances. And Georgia got back late more often.
On the phone now, Ida said “How’s your rash?” instead of “How are you?” She had started going to church with Heather on Wednesday evenings as well as on Sundays. It was a small Baptist church with a local Zionist twist. Ida encouraged Bessi to come with her because God would save her. She had been reading the Book of Job and she was convinced that Satan was attacking Bessi the way he had attacked Job—the itching, the fever, the sadness in Bessi’s face and the dark shadows gathering around her eyes—and therefore God (and Vicks) were the only possible remedies. She was also trying to get Aubrey to come, to cleanse his soul of Mr. Hyde for good. Georgia, said Ida, was the sacrifice for all the sins of the Hunters and it was our duty to purify ourselves of the evil that had driven her to tek her life. Aubrey was not ready to put on a white head scarf and sing hallelujah in Harlesden and instead started redecorating the bathroom, which meant he had an excuse when Ida started haranguing.
He wanted to paint the bathroom walls in Georgia’s favorite color, but it occurred to him that he did not know what this was. He blamed Jack, and he developed more and more disgust for Mr. Hyde. On a cool summer night while Ida was in her room reading the Book of Job, Aubrey walked up to the apple trees and smoked a cigarette. He looked up through the branches at the stars. He found the brightest one, and he said, “Forgive me.”
A single green apple dropped to the ground.
That’s the color, thought Aubrey.
In the madness of the rash it took Bessi a few weeks to notice that something inside her was different. Georgia’s voice was getting quieter. Bessi asked, How are you, at the center of me? And Georgia replied with a fainter heartbeat. Bessi began to speak more softly and to spend more time alone, so that there was less interference when Georgia wanted to talk. She took long silent walks through the cemetery and the shopping expeditions on Oxford Street came to an end. Instead, Saturdays were spent at Bel’s house, babysitting Jay while Bel was at work.
They sat together on the floor in front of the television, Bessi, Jay, and (faintly) Georgia, and watched gymnastics. Bessi sipped ice-cold water and rubbed lashings of cortisone cream into her arms. Jay had decided that when he grew up, he was going to be a gymnast; he had little muscles growing in his arms and held his back very straight. It was the most exciting job in the world, he said, apart from the tights you had to wear if you were a boy. He liked the vault a lot but he and Bessi agreed that out of everything the beam was the best.
Jay sometimes felt, when he was with Bessi, that she was more like Georgia now. She was a quiet one, and she was somewhere else.
“Auntie Bessi,” he said, “are you still a twin?”
Bessi’s face crumpled. She scratched her right hand roughly and snapped, “That’s a silly question, Jay. Of course I’m still a twin.”
A little girl from Romania did three somersaults in a row and landed in a split. A man in tights flew off the bars and twisted in the air. A girl from Russia who was only thirteen years old hopped up onto the beam. She stuck out her chest and stood straight and proud and ready with outward feet. Her balance was perfect. She threw up her arms after the jumps and didn’t wobble. Then, with her hands outstretched, she did a cartwheel. The cartwheel happened slowly. And inside the cartwheel, there were grassfeet memories and a cockroach army and a scream.
Bessi felt very itchy indeed. There was a jolt in her ribs, she fell back onto the floor, and burst into tears.
“WHAT A MESS now,” says Bel. “I knew this would happen.” She takes off her coat and lights joss sticks. Bessi is lying on the floor with her legs pressed closely together. An ugly shadow is resting on her face.
“It’s Georgia, isn’t it?”
Bessi clings to my right hand, digging the fingers into the palm. She nods and squeezes her eyes shut.
“Bel. Why didn’t she talk to me?”
From a shelf Bel takes a bottle of lavender oil and dabs our temples. “I think she didn’t want to spoil things.”
“We were in the garden,” says Bessi. “Such a beautiful garden. We sat down by the orange trees and there was fire in the distance.”
The shadow walks across Bessi’s face. It is still a face where bad things should never happen. She scratches the back of her knee. There is pain again in her ribs.
“When she is ready,” says Bel, “she must leave you. You know that, don’t you?”
&
nbsp; “Leave me?”
“Yes, Bessi. And both of you will be well.”
“But she can’t leave me!”
“Why? Don’t you remember Baba’s story?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“One year, for the soul to leave the earth?”
Bessi forgot that bit. “But no,” she sobs, “she can’t.”
“Why?”
She whispers it. She grips my hand and says: “No one taught me how to be alone.”
IN SEPTEMBER, ONLY a few weeks before Ham’s noticing, Diana was carried in a box to Westminster Abbey. The procession was four miles long and the flag on top of Buckingham Palace was lowered to half-mast for the first time in history.
She was buried at the family estate in Althorp, on an island.
While two and a half billion people watched.
The country was thrown into an unusual state of mourning. The palace at Kensington was choked with bouquets, the traffic slowed down, the people took notice of moments before, until they forgot. Charles and his mother became grave, their faces older, and concerned. In spite of it all, they carried on as normal.
Bessi began to panic. She said to Kemy, “I’ve not seen her since February, Kemy, I’ve not seen her properly in eight months.” Bessi’s body was eight months older. Georgia’s body had stopped. Did this mean that Bessi was older than Georgia, or that Georgia was older than Bessi? At work Bessi had picked up the phone as she still did and started dialing Georgia’s number; she was alarmed to find that she had forgotten the second-to-last digit.
On the strength of her position as one third of three, Kemy had appointed herself Bessi’s best friend. She had also offered to be her twin if she ever needed help making a decision or fancied making flapjacks. Kemy heard Georgia’s voice clearly sometimes coming from Bessi’s mouth, and it comforted her. As a Christmas present she made Bessi a citrus beanbag in remembrance of strawberry. She’d soaked the beans in the zest of a hundred limes and left them to dry for two weeks. On Christmas Day, they sat on it together in 26a, back-to-back, and shared a Viennese whirl.