by Anne Billson
Lulu's reply came over loud and clear. 'Hi, it's me.'
My spirits plummeted. It was all over. Through the doorway I saw Duncan's face light up, then it was suddenly transformed into a mask of guilt, like a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bike sheds. 'Shit, shit, shit,' he said, racing back to me. 'Quickly, into the bathroom.'
'What?' I couldn't believe I was hearing this.
'You know what she'll think if she catches you here. She's possessive as hell.'
'This is ridiculous, like a French farce. Can't we sit down and discuss it like civilized people?'
'Please,' he said, flapping his arms. 'I'll make it up to you, Dora, I promise.'
There was another buzz from the entryphone. Duncan threw himself back at the intercom, pressed the button so we could both hear her saying, 'Oh Lord, I left my keys behind. Duncan, let me in.'
Duncan went wild. He fled into the bedroom and came back with my clothes all in a bunch, and pressed them into my arms.
I said, 'I don't know if...'
He turned very stern and forceful. I wished he was like that more often - I would have done anything he'd wanted. 'Now listen, your hot water heater's bust, someone spilled red wine all over you at Ruth's, and you've come round to take a bath. Now get in there right now.'
I slouched into the bathroom just as he was releasing the lock on the front door. I heard him say, 'Hey Lu, come on up,' and then I shut myself in. I dropped the clothes and kicked them as they fell. The black chiffon scarf somehow floated loose and drifted into the bath. I left it swirling in the water. How dared he treat me like this? I picked up a can of shaving foam and squirted FUCK across the steamed-up mirror.
The bath was a large Victorian one with legs, and barely a quarter full, and the water was scalding hot, so I started to run the cold as well. I paced up and down, tweezed my eyebrows, clipped my nails, cleaned out my ears with cotton buds. The everyday bathroom activities helped me to simmer down. I was half expecting Lulu to knock on the door at any second and demand to know what I was doing, but I couldn't hear anything over the noise of the running water. I wondered if they were arguing about me, so I opened the bathroom door a crack, just so I could hear what they were saying.
They weren't saying anything. I opened the door a bit wider and peeped out. Duncan was sitting in his favourite spot on the sofa. Lulu had her back to me, and she was sitting on his lap, exactly where I'd been before she'd shown up. She had her arms around him, and they were kissing, really getting into it. I couldn't believe it. This was too much. Duncan had swapped one girl for another - as though we were different makes of car or something. He was acting as though nothing had changed, everything was back to normal.
Only it wasn't. Not quite. There was something off-kilter about the scene, only I couldn't work out what it was, not until I felt a draught and started shivering again, more violently this time. I drew Lulu's pink bathrobe more tightly around my chest, and it was then I realized what was wrong. Lulu always wore pink. Pink or red, everybody knew that. But she wasn't wearing pink now. She was wearing black.
I stood there, blinking, trying to absorb this information. It was significant, I knew that much, but I was so tired and drunk I couldn't even begin to work out why. I don't know how long I was standing there. It might have been a few seconds, or it might have been a couple of centuries. Then I must have made a noise. Either that, or it was the cloud of steam leaking out of the bathroom which made her look up. No, look up is wrong; she didn't so much turn her head as whip it round.
The black didn't make her look sallow, as she'd always feared, but she seemed paler than usual, powdery white, and the contrast with her skin made her mouth appear luscious and red. At first I thought it was lipstick. Then she licked her lips, and I saw she'd had her teeth done, but the dentist had made a hash of it; some of them were too sharp. There was a small red bead clinging to her chin, and even from where I was standing I could see minute flecks of white powder suspended on the curved surface. I stared very hard, but I had a feeling I was concentrating on all the wrong things.
'Dora,' she said. 'How nice.'
She rose and came towards me. She'd always been tall - five nine, bumped up to five ten or eleven for professional purposes - but I'd never felt her towering over me quite as much as she did now. Her feet were touching the ground, but she wasn't walking so much as gliding, I couldn't actually see her taking the steps, no matter how hard I stared. She was getting nearer, and I realized I'd been standing there for ages, staring, when I should have been doing something else, such as making a run for the front door, or shutting myself in the bathroom. But I was no longer sure where the bathroom was. I'd been thinking it was right behind me, but somehow I must have been moving away from it without I realizing because now I was standing right in the middle of the living-room floor, staring into the big mirror on the opposite wall. I couldn't see Lulu there, but I could see myself. At least I assumed that's who it was, because it didn't look like me at all; this unfamiliar-looking person had the expression of a rabbit gazing into the headlights of an oncoming truck.
I might have stared for ever if the ancient springs of the sofa hadn't creaked. I tore my gaze away from the mirror and saw Duncan was still where she'd left him. I said his name once or twice, but my voice was very tiny and there was no reply. He was sitting in an unnaturally stiff position, clutching his brandy glass. The collar and most of the upper part of his shirt were a deep red. Tie-dyed, I thought. It crossed my mind that he might be dead.
I thought, Oh fuck.
It wasn't fair. I wanted to wind the tape back and start again. I'd always been so careful and now here I was, half-naked and defenceless, no garlic, no crucifix, no nothing. Lulu opened and closed her mouth like a guppy - it should have been comical, but it wasn't. She was making a strange whistling noise through her teeth. She hadn't yet grown accustomed to them, and the thought filled me with disproportionate relief, as though it made any difference from where I was standing. Then she said, in a conversational tone, 'Honestly, Dora. You can't leave him alone for one minute, can you?'
'I was just having a bath,' I said with an embarrassed giggle. 'My Ascot broke.' Even to me it sounded pathetic.
She threw back her head and laughed too, but throatily, not like her normal little-girl giggling. Now she was closer, she didn't look quite so good. The make-up was thick, but not thick enough to conceal the state of her skin, which was dry and flaky, dull and lifeless. She hadn't been taking those early nights, after all.
'And you always pretended to be my friend,' she was saying. 'I was always so nice to you. And now here you are, trying to steal him away as soon as my back is turned. I always knew there was another woman. I just didn't realize it was you, Dora.'
'But it wasn't me,' I murmured, trying to remember what I'd done with my crucifixes. There was garlic in the kitchen, but Lulu was standing between me and the kitchen door. There was garlic in the pocket of my jacket, but that was somewhere on the bathroom floor. At least, I hoped it was somewhere on the bathroom floor. I tried to remember whether the jacket had been part of the bundle of clothes which Duncan had shoved into my arms, or whether I'd left it hanging in the hall.
'...and you're wearing my bathrobe,' she said in an outraged tone. 'You think you can waltz right in and steal my boyfriend and wear my bathrobe. But you can't. You look terrible in pink, Dora. It doesn't suit you at all. You should wear black, like everyone else.'
All this time I was edging backwards, and as soon as I found I'd backed into the bathroom doorway, I scuttled inside and slammed the door, shooting the bolt across, but even as I shot it I saw how flimsy a bolt it was. The door shuddered as something crashed against the other side - it sounded much too heavy to be Lulu - and there was a loud splintering as the bolt casing began to part company with the frame. I scrabbled around amongst the clothes on the floor, trying to find garlic, crucifixes, anything. I finally found my jacket, but the only things in the pockets were an old receipt and a couple
of mangy paper tissues.
There was a second juddering blow, and the bolt casing flew across the room, and the door was hurled open with so much force it swung free from one of its hinges. 'Look what you made me do,' said Lulu.
I started to gabble. 'We saw your picture in the paper. You looked great.' I thought if I could keep her talking, perhaps she wouldn't get a chance to do anything else with that big red mouth of hers. 'How do you manage to put your make-up on without a mirror?'
'I don't need mirrors any more.' She raised one of her hands and ran it through her hair in a parody of one of her favourite model-girl gestures. 'Mirrors and I have parted company. I'm beyond the world of mirrors now.'
'But you don't eat meat,' I said hopefully.
She smiled and for the first time I had an unrestricted view of her brand-new teeth, which were pearly white and ferocious looking. 'Bugger that vegetarian lark,' she said. 'This is the first time they've let me out on my own, and I'm starving.'
'What about Duncan? You came for him, not me. You could finish him off, and let me go.'
She shook her head. 'You don't know anything. Duncan's special. They said I could come here, as a present. I wasn't supposed to kiss him, not yet, but I was so pleased to see him I got carried away.'
'What was a present? They said? Who said? Violet?'
'Violet? No, no, I'm talking about Rose. She said Duncan would know exactly what to do. Because he's done it before.'
'Done what?' Lulu's teeth and dietary habits may have changed, but she was as stupid as ever. 'But Rose is Violet, you fool. And if she sent you, she had a reason. I know what I'm talking about, Lu. See this?' I held up my left hand and waggled what remained of my little finger at her. It was hardly a threatening gesture. 'I've been here before.'
A faintly perplexed look skittered across her face, as though an ancient race memory had stirred somewhere in her head, but then it vanished and she was stretching out towards me. 'I'm so tired of talking,' she sighed. 'And I'm so bloody hungry. Now are you going to come to me or do I have to come and get you?'
'Oh hell,' I said. 'Come and get me.'
She stopped being Lulu and started being something else.
She tried to overwhelm me with her eyes, but she had a few hundred years to go before she mastered that technique, and I was wise to it. I concentrated on the teeth and the soft red flesh of her lips. I was groping around the basin, trying to find something - anything - to use as a weapon, but Duncan's electric razor wasn't much use, nor was his aftershave. I threw a can of hairspray and it bounced uselessly off her arm. Lulu feinted playfully, and I jumped, and my elbow sent a clutch of toiletries crashing to the floor. The plastic bottles bounced and rolled, a couple of glass ones smashed. The air was suddenly fragrant with vetivert, and aquamarine jelly oozed out over the shiny white tiles. She advanced purposefully through the wreckage, heels making a crunching, squelching sound, and carefully stepped from the shiny white tiles on to the fluffy white bathmat. As she did so I ducked and grabbed the edge of the mat and tugged it up as hard as I could.
If she'd been wearing sensible footwear she would have regained her balance easily. But this was Lulu, and she was wearing flamboyant fuck-me shoes with lizard-skin trimming and four-inch spikes. So when the earth moved beneath her feet she teetered back and forth in a dainty cha-cha movement, one arm windmilling into the bathroom cabinet; one corner of it came away from the wall and sent more jars and bottles crashing across the room. The smell of vetivert was now mingling with verbena and bergamot and Rive Gauche. I put my head down and butted her, and she fell backwards with a surprised grunt, and the rim of the bath caught her behind the knees and she landed in the water with her legs in the air.
For one brief blissful moment, I thought that was it, I thought she was going to lie there quietly, and it would all be over. I was standing there thinking that when she came up screeching and clawing. I pushed her back again but her fingers fastened on to the sleeve of the bathrobe and pulled me down with her. For a few seconds our faces were only inches apart. Her teeth gnashed shut, just missing the tip of my nose, but I managed to push her under the gushing tap, and she twisted her head from side to side and made an enraged burbling sound, letting go of the bathrobe and scrabbling at my forearms so that fine threads of blood dribbled into the water and uncoiled there, turning it pink like dentist's mouthwash. I tried to hold her down, but she was too hot and slippery. My nose and mouth were filled with fragrant steam, but I caught a whiff of something spicy and unpleasant lurking beneath the overlay of perfume. Lulu's face was coming out in large shiny blisters which burst, one after the other. She sat up suddenly, shaking her head so that drops of water flew in all directions, and shaking me off as well. It caught me off guard and I felt myself tumbling backwards.
My feet were cold. I couldn't work out what I was doing on the bathroom floor, but it would have been comfortable enough had it not been for the cold feet and the nagging thought there was some other matter to which I should have been attending. I tried to get up but everything tilted. I slapped my hand down to steady myself, and felt broken glass sink into the palm. I said, very crossly, 'Oh, shit,' as it started to sting. My hand wasn't the only part of me which was hurting; the back of my head was throbbing where I'd cracked it against something, and now everything was going hazy, and the steam and the smoke swirled up and made it even hazier. Through the haze, I saw someone stand up in the bath, and her black dress was clinging to her figure and I recognized Lulu, even though her face was red and shiny. She didn't seem to mind about the mess her face was in - she was laughing as if this were the most fun she had ever had in her life. It was all so deja vu that I knew I had to be dreaming.
'Dora Dora get up Dora...' Someone was saying my name over and over again. I tried to pull myself up, and then the clouds rolled back and I saw that Duncan wasn't dead after all. He was prancing around like Errol Flynn, holding my biggest crucifix back to front, like a dagger. Lulu snarled, and swiped at him, trying to knock it out of his grasp, but as the metal touched her flesh there was a hissing noise like an iron on a damp shirt, and she jumped back with a howl, pawing at the steaming red mark on her hand. Duncan stepped back and held himself on guard, and glanced at the crucifix in surprise, as though he hadn't really expected it to have had such a drastic effect. Then he lunged and yelled 'Touche!' as he struck her just above the left breast. This time nothing happened - her skin was protected by the fabric of her dress - and both of them looked rather taken aback. Duncan shrugged it off and lunged again. She dodged, but the metal brushed against her chin and left it sizzling, and she squawked and lashed out with her fingernails. He stepped aside and started casually to cut and thrust at her face. He was treating it as a game, and Lulu appeared to be going along with it, as though they'd rehearsed this many times before, but her retaliatory swiping was getting wilder and he was barely having to sidestep now, and scoring more and more hits, each one followed by a gratifying amount of hissing and yelping. So entrancing was this spectacle, I almost forgot what I was watching until I heard him saying, 'Suck on this, you vampire slut,' in an eminently reasonable voice. Then he half-turned and said over his shoulder in a businesslike manner, 'Don't just sit there, Dora, go and get something.'
I tried to reply in an equally businesslike manner, but all that came out of my mouth was a feeble croak. How come I always seemed to be on the critical list when things got lively? Duncan was having all the fun again. I pushed myself up with my uninjured hand, and immediately got broken glass in that one too. I staggered as far as the kitchen, and it wasn't until I sat down to rest that I remembered what I was there for, because I found myself sitting on the wobbly chair. I tugged at the loose leg but it wouldn't come off, so I rocked the chair violently backwards and forwards until the wood split down the middle with a sharp crack, so now I had a useless three-legged chair and a useful chair-leg with an uneven point. I was tidying up the splinters with a vegetable knife when I heard someone shouting, 'Dora! What the
fuck are you doing?' so I shambled back to the bathroom.
Duncan had tired of his Captain Blood routine. Now they were lying in the bath together. Lulu was gargling and kicking her legs and the water was slapping rhythmically. If I hadn't known better I might have thought they were humping. Duncan had somehow got hold of my chiffon scarf and had wound it around her head and was holding her under the water with it. I tapped him on the shoulder and handed him the chair-leg. As he loosened his grip and rocked back on his haunches, she sat up and started to scream, and he said 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up,' and jabbed her with the stick. The point sank in about half an inch and snagged on her ribcage, and they both stared at it in surprise and then looked at each other. They were still looking at each other when he tried again. This time it slid between the ribs and her eyes opened wide, and she made a sort of 'oof' sound, and fell straight back into the water like a toppled tree. He put one knee on her stomach and worked the chair-leg free. As it came out it made an obscene sucking sound, and a lot of dark blood came out with it and turned the water an even darker red. He stuck the stick into her again, several times. The chiffon scarf floated up and away, and half her face seemed to come away with it.
'It's not enough,' I said. 'We have to cut her into little pieces, before she starts singing Madame Butterfly.'
'She's not going to sing,' Duncan said, hauling himself out over the side of the bath. 'She's not like Violet.'
'They're all the same,' I said. 'They all wind up with stakes through their hearts.'
'Cut it out.'
I peered down into the bath. The water wasn't running any more; it was thick and stagnant, and there was a lot of red froth on the surface. She was under it with her hair floating like seaweed and the chair-leg sticking out of what looked like a gallon of blackcurrant jelly spread all over the middle of her chest. Her face was almost unrecognizable. Duncan took a hand towel from the rail and let it drop over her head; it floated for a moment and then the water weighed it down and it sank around what remained of her features.