by Rebecca Ley
‘What ways?’
‘They struck a deal that worked well for them both,’ Gloria said. ‘We get the produce that still grows in that milder part of the world, and they get our best women. Our most fertile. The ones who won’t be missed. The ones who don’t play by the rules. The ones who don’t do their duty, they’re the easiest to give up.’
‘But – Gwendolyn,’ I said. ‘What do they do with them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gloria said, ‘Probably kept somewhere to fulfil their duty of adding to the population. They’re just traded, like they’re pieces of fruit. I can’t think of it, can you?’ She looked down to her knees. ‘Oh, my dear girl. I never thought it would touch us. I should’ve protected her.’
‘You couldn’t have done anything,’ Jaminder said, a hand on her arm. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘George warned us, didn’t he? He said Wendy was a trollop. He used to think it was funny, but he wanted her to settle down like the rest of us. Set an example, have a child. But she wouldn’t do a thing like that. And we just laughed at him.’ Gloria stamped out her cigarette on the bathroom floor, lit another. ‘The list was just on top of our strawberries. Can you imagine it? She’s in transit, already, crossing paths with our deliveries. In a van filled with strawberries. After the delivery turned up, and I saw it, I ran three miles down the road to chase after the car. Frank had to pick me up in Camden Town and I told him I’d die if he didn’t bring her back. He said there’s nothing he could do, it wasn’t his decision. She’s gone.’ Gloria let out a wail, and put her face in her hands.
‘What do we do?’ Jaminder said, desperately.
Gloria let her hands fall from her face. ‘I’ve been here, and I’ve known, and I’ve done nothing. I’ve drank myself stupid and hosted these parties every night. I’ve eaten that food and I’ve taken it all, just as he did. I’m complicit. If it wasn’t for me, she’d still be here.’
‘No,’ Jaminder said, ‘It’s not true, it’s not your fault.’
I handed the piece of paper back to Gloria. She folded it up without looking at it and put it into her pocket.
‘Frank helped me, you know.’ Gloria said. ‘A man in a position like that. I was so grateful to him, so I married him. We just wanted to live our own lives, and we thought it cruel to bring a child into this mess. And I was terrified of dying in childbirth like my mother, or being forced to marry a fool just to have a child who dies at the age of three from a goddam cold. So we agreed. He could do what he wanted and he’d sort that out for me. We were friends, mostly.’ She reached in her jeans pocket, her hands shaking, she pulled out another cigarette. ‘You know what they do with people who don’t like the opposite sex. You know what they make them do.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘It wouldn’t warm your heart.’ She held her lighter up and lit the cigarette, inhaled, slowly, her fingers shaking delicately. ‘I might as well not have bothered,’ she said. ‘He changed. Stick around here, and you change. The pressure of it got to him. He cracked like an egg. I love him, you see, as best I can. And he loves me. But in this place, it doesn’t mean anything. So I said nothing about what was going on. I couldn’t say anything.’ She looked at the cigarette intently, letting the paper burn through without flicking the ash away. She inhaled as she nodded her head. ‘I got it wrong, all these years. I got it wrong.’
Jaminder moved towards her, took hold of her knees. She wrapped herself around them and placed her head on top of them. ‘Oh, Gloria,’ she said, and she sounded as desperate as ever I’ve heard her.
‘Were you with Gwendolyn?’ I said, afraid of my own question.
Gloria looked at me. ‘What does all that matter now?’ She let out an amused sigh. ‘What does it matter to you? What I wanted, what she didn’t? She was still my family. I still treated her like my sister, I treated her like a husband treats a wife; better, even, than that.’ She swallowed, sickeningly. ‘What does it matter? Now that she’s gone, I feel I’m already dead.’
Jaminder lifted her head up. ‘No, Gloria, don’t say that. Please, don’t.’
‘All of us,’ Gloria said, her eyes glassy and vacant. ‘We all are. We’re sitting ducks. Ready to be traded like government waste. Oh, Gwen, you damn fool, you should’ve run.’
I shook my head. ‘I tried.’ I said, in a small voice. ‘I tried to leave. I can’t now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t.’
The sickness returned and travelled up my stomach and into my throat, burning me like acid. Jaminder didn’t release Gloria’s knees or look at me. But I knew her silence meant agreement.
I watched the bath and its slippery texture, the shiny porcelain and the smoothness of its surface. I imagined it filling with water and slipping inside of it. Submerging. I know they imagined it, too.
We heard the drum of the party downstairs. And the noise became gradually louder and penetrated my senses more and more. I worried they would come and call for us.
‘Oh, God, Gloria.’
We sat in silence after that for a long time.
Gloria was the one who eventually spoke. ‘I imagine the world,’ she said. ‘Like it’s not a thing that is dying, that it’s not a thing that was born out of a bang or matter or stars or explosions. That it’s just a thing that manifested because the conditions were perfect, and all that’s happening now is the conditions aren’t right, and it’s manifesting itself out of existence, as it perfectly well should. I imagine it’s the same for us. Time isn’t linear. We just choose to live in this moment as a comfort to ourselves. Everything that’s already happened, and everything that will happen, is already contained in this moment. There’s no birth and there’s no death. There’s only the right conditions to appear, and then the conditions gradually cease, and we leave.’ She looked at us. ‘There’s no sadness to it. We are both everywhere and nowhere. And everything and nothing. We exist and don’t exist. We have been born and we will die. Just like the world.’
Jaminder put her head in her hands. I leant over the edge of the bath and put my hand in it. But there was no water there. It stayed empty all that time I’d imagined it otherwise.
‘We can help her. We can help each other.’ I said desperately, urgently. But even as I said it I knew we couldn’t. And still, Jaminder smiled at me while Gloria looked down and wiped the ash from her jeans.
She sighed. ‘Wouldn’t that be a thing,’ she said. She lifted her head up to the ceiling. ‘Can you imagine a thing like that.’
Gloria tapped her fingertips to her lips, one by one. Afterwards, I tried desperately to remember if her nails had been painted. I asked Jaminder, who hadn’t known. But I wanted to know. I wanted to know if she’d bought the acetone, for no other reason than for swallowing it. Or did she have it in her cupboard all along, and it had been waiting for her for months, years, waiting for her to get to it. And she used it to remove her nail varnish and she’d re-apply it, leisurely, afterwards. It was such an unimportant detail that meant so much to me.
I like to imagine her as the wonder that she was. I think she’d have preferred her nails to be red, even if she’d never had red nail varnish. It would have laid itself on top of the life that she was leading as a reminder of how things used to be. A reminder of how human we all were, after all.
I think about Gloria’s idea of manifesting sometimes. It makes me think we could be a substance as liquid as water. That our molecules could just appear and dissolve, and succumb to the earth, be beaten by the blackberries. I found the idea of the tangle of shining beads taking our place a reassurance, that we all have our hour in the day. I wonder if she meant it to be as comforting as I found it.
Jaminder and I left the bathroom, and Gloria stubbed out her last cigarette and said she’d be down in a minute. We re-joined the party and the minutes passed. When Jaminder went to go and check on Gloria she said she found her unconscious on the floor of the bathroom, blood pouring from her mouth. What we heard downstairs,
above the record player, were Jaminder’s delayed screams. We all froze, watered-down champagne in hand, and Frank bolted from the room, startled like an animal.
George came to stand beside me, took my hand. In a last, desperate attempt, I looked around for Jaminder. I tried not to feel the moist closeness of George’s hand in mine, the lines in his palm sticking to my own, the grooves of each finger and their individual animal-like form. I counted them in my palm, tried to decide which was the worst finger, which finger held the power, which finger caused the trouble. Had his hands done it, themselves? Had they been the ones, physically, to do it? I spent this time waiting to know what the screams were, thinking only of his extremities, and nothing of my friend.
An ambulance was called, on the shiny black plastic phone in the hall, and Frank’s voice could be heard throughout the drawing room. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, there’s blood everywhere, come soon.’ And their reply, which surely would have been, There’s only one ambulance available, it might be twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! And the phone slammed down.
That’s when I prised my fingers apart from George’s and followed Jaminder’s wailing, which was now outside the bathroom and up the stairs. She was being held away from the closed bathroom door by a large man, arms wrapped around her waist, her legs kicking. Frank looked up to her from the phone with a grimace and I followed that look. She looked like something terrible had been dropped inside her head, her legs kicking at the closed wooden door, arms pressing down upon the arms that pressed her.
‘What did you do?’ Frank shouted at her. ‘What did you tell her? What did you make her do?’
She didn’t respond with words but noises, a word straining to get through, her mouth a wide orange O, her lips stretched apart and over her teeth.
Eventually her wail did turn into words, and those words snapped Frank’s head towards her. They lead him to mount the stairs towards her, and take her off the man holding her, as though she were a small thing, a plate of fruit, something inanimate and portable. He threw her down the stairs like that, slid her down them, not even forcefully, carelessly. She landed in a heap near me. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open in that horrible O. Her dress had slunk above her knees and revealed her stockings; worn and repaired and laddered, faded through, so that the skin of her legs could be seen. No one was there to cover them back up for her.
Before I could fall to my knees in front of her, hands fell all over me and I was ushered into the drawing room again.
George took my face in his hands. ‘We should go.’
‘I want to know that they’re all right,’ I said.
He told me we were going home. I looked up at Frank, standing at the top of the stairs, hands over his face. ‘Where’s that bloody ambulance,’ he said, smacking the top of the banister.
‘I want to go home, home,’ I said, and I repeated the word in the hope that it made sense to him, and I said it over and over: home, home, home, and I said it underneath my breath when we were back in that car, until I was dropped at my grandmother’s house and he had left me there.
I said it as my grandmother stroked my back and I looked at the car reversing from our house with unease, and fear. I said it as I listened to the words in my head Jaminder had said, had screamed them down the stairs at Frank: You killed her, you killed her, you all killed her.
I worried for her life, both of theirs. I sat on my bed in that old garden flat and didn’t sleep. I went downstairs to the kitchen and watched the old phone, that one remaining thing. I worried about who would call, and I worried about trying to call someone myself, and thought only of hearing that drone, and not being able to get through.
2
I was taken ill, then, and developed a high fever, and told my grandmother to relay this information to anyone that called. She intercepted several calls from George, and none from Jaminder. I didn’t dare ask after anyone, and couldn’t read a word of anything, or look at a piece of food on a plate, and so I spent several days in a dreamlike state, staring at the walls and the stitches of my duvet. I was aware that during this time my grandmother still brought me hot soup to my side, and seemed delighted to have me back, ill health or not.
She sat next to me, with her piles of sewing, and lit torches and candles for me in the evenings, even though I needed the light for nothing. She read to me, too, and we listened together to the words of old books, which she’d pause over and muse, out loud: I wonder what that was, I don’t remember that. She read to me in English, and she talked to me about my mother in French, and laughed to herself, even when her voice strangled around the words. My fever shook my limbs and hands, and I held them out in front of me and watched them reverberate, as though they were a sail on a boat on the high seas. I thought it might be Dengue, but didn’t have the words to ask. I slept for hours at a time, and sometimes I would wake up and find myself calling for Jaminder.
After two days I began to talk again. ‘What does George ask when he calls, grandmother?’ I said. She sat next to me, working on the hem of a blue garment, delicate and careful work.
‘He just wants to know how you’re doing. I told him not to come round.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s good.’
‘How are you feeling?’ she said. ‘George sent round some medication, you should feel better soon.’
It wasn’t grave then, I would recover. I didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t relieved. I couldn’t go back to him and he wouldn’t leave me here. I knew too much. I began to eat a little soup, and my grandmother watched me carefully.
‘How did you get that mark on your head?’
I rested the spoon back in the bowl and lifted my hand to my head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘George sent the doctor round yesterday, he said you should be careful.’
‘Maybe I fell down the stairs,’ I said emotionlessly. I thought of Jaminder and her body crumpled next to mine, and my whole world fell down the stairs in an endless jumble of images.
‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you? If something was wrong? If you needed help,’ my grandmother said.
I turned my face from her. ‘Have you heard from Jaminder? Have you heard from Gloria?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. Are they your friends?’ She put her sewing down on the floor and came to stand beside me. ‘I’m worried,’ she whispered. ‘I’m worried for you. What can we do?’
I turned my face towards her. I felt that my eyes were stretched thin and peculiar, and sight was a drain on my whole head. I closed them, for her sake. ‘There’s nothing to do. I think I will have to have a child.’
My grandmother grabbed my shoulder, her fingers gripping like the claws of a bird. I didn’t open my eyes. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Not with him.’
‘It’s for us.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘He told me not to tell you. But I have to.’ Her hand shook against my arm. ‘Oh, Mathilde.’
I opened my eyes and her face was a blur of worry and pain. ‘What is it?’
‘Your friend, Jaminder. She was arrested for possession of contraceptives. He’s working on getting her out.’
‘Who is?’
‘Well, George, of course.’
I shook my head. If it wasn’t such trouble to stretch my mouth over my teeth I would have laughed. ‘Oh, no, grandmother,’ I said. ‘He is the one that put her there.’
I lay in bed for several hours, without speaking. I counted the cracks in the ceiling, one by one. I named them after Jaminder and all her family, who I imagined, and who she’d never spoken of. I imagined the cracks to be her ancestors and her children, which she’d never have, and I named them, one by one, girls and boys and men and women and I counted up the cracks of her life, as a way to search for an answer. At the thirty-second crack and the thirty-second name, I came upon one.
I sat up in bed in one smooth motion. My grandmother yelped, having thought me asleep. ‘My jacket,’ I said, a
cry in my voice. ‘Is it here?’
My grandmother stood up, ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. She ran from the room to retrieve it, and in all my life I’d never loved her more. She came back, and I told her to look in every pocket, to find a piece of paper with a number on it.
‘There’s nothing here,’ she said, and she looked at me worriedly.
‘Where is it,’ I said, ‘How will I find her.’
‘The doctor said you’re improving. Your fever is going.’
I raised my hands to my temples, ‘I memorised it. Can you take down this number?’ I sat there for a good ten minutes, trying out the combination of numbers, to find the right one that fitted inside my brain. I haven’t forgotten it since.
‘Call it,’ I said, and I told her to dial the number, and to find Jaminder on the other end of the line, and to tell her I would come and get her, would bring her out of there in any way possible.
I waited for hours. I stared at the ceiling in the darkness and counted the cracks again. I looked at the black ceiling and imagined it a sea; and Jaminder and I were sailing along it, getting lost amongst the waves. We kept losing and finding each other and our hair was damp with wetness, and our bodies were soaked too, but we swam for miles. We became blue whales, the kind you see in old colouring books, with their fat tails and large, round bodies. We were whales, those animals that don’t exist, but we existed. We called them into being.
The phone rang. It was in my room this time. My grandmother must have brought it up there after I asked her so often who called. She wasn’t around to pick it up. I leant across in the darkness to answer it.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hullo,’ she said.
I grasped the phone with both hands. ‘Oh God, Jaminder.’
‘I’m sorry if I scared you, I’m out now.’
‘You’re safe?’
‘Of sorts. I’m safe for now.’
‘Oh, thank God.’
‘What are you thanking God for?’ I could hear the click of a lighter and the intake of her breath, and it was the most blessed sound.