I turned away as they hurried to the door. The kettle was growling; its lid gave a jerk, and then it sighed to a halt. It made me nervous; I pulled out its plug and leaned against the sink. Not only was I irritable to the point of being a complete bitch today, but I was a coward as well. If I couldn’t handle a brief ceremony, just accompanying the body from the hospital’s chapel to the parish church, then how was I planning to cope tomorrow when they started shovelling earth on top of her? My throat contracted. I folded myself over the sink but nothing came, only a delicate necklace of spit.
Hush, ba, shush now. It was all right. It was understandable not to want to go look at what was left of her in the chapel of rest – what a ghastly euphemism, as if the bodies had dropped by voluntarily for a little siesta. I knew they’d leave the lid off, and I couldn’t bear that. I wanted to remember Cara live and exasperating, not floppy in a box. Whereas Mr. Wall seemed to take comfort in doing this mourning thing according to the letter. I could just see him now, stooping over the coffin on its brass trolley, lips puckered as if approaching an irreplaceable manuscript. What about Kate, was she going along just to be polite? I wondered whether she would kiss the papery forehead she had last brushed with her lips at Logan Airport in 1984 after the family reunion. How much did she really care whether this flickering memory of a sister lived or died?
The sink was scummed grey. I tipped in some boiling water from the kettle and scrubbed at its sides. I knew I would have to get myself psyched up for the funeral, but this stupid removal ritual was more than I could take right now. If I broke down, blubbing on to the wooden rim of the box, there would be no one to look after me. Cara wouldn’t slip her cold hand surreptitiously into mine; she would be lying there all blithe and callous. As on the odd night when I couldn’t get to sleep and used to curl up on my side, watching her mouth move in the gibberish of sleep, those wholly private conversations.
I reached under the sink for the disinfectant and filled up the sink with water hot enough to hurt my hands. Time to get a grip, get to work, batten down the hatches. I thought it best to clean all the surfaces I could reach, in case any day now I lost whatever was keeping me in one piece, and sat in the corner for a month with unwashed hair, clutching a biscuit tin while the whole house went to seed around me.
When my sponge had swabbed its way as far as the bookcase above the sideboard, it caught the edge of a pamphlet. I tugged it out from behind a stack of Bibliopegy Quarterly. On the front was a drawing of a crystal ball with hearts and stars rising off it like steam from a freshly baked loaf. Inside, the blurred print asked, ‘Would you like me to tell you all you need to know?’ and, undeterred by the lack of response, explained that ‘through using her exceptional gifts of clairvoyancy since childhood, direct descendant of the Romanies Miss Dora Moon will answer stressful questions and up-tie the tensions in your life, with the use of psychometry and holding a sentimental item.’ God yes, I remembered it now; our private catchphrase for a month or so had been ‘Ooh, hold my sentimental item, big girl’. Cara had brought this back from a Psychic Fair in Edinburgh, amused by the grammar but attracted by the promises. I never knew whether her healthy cynicism or wide-eyed belief would win out; I could never tell when it was safe to laugh. The back of this dust-stained booklet offered a course called ‘How to Attract and Keep the Partner of Your Dreams, in 7 audio cassettes for only £55’.
I folded it in quarters and put it in the compost bin, so it could take part in the great psychometrical cycle of rebirth, as Miss Dora Moon would probably describe it. I balanced the chairs upside-down on the table. Only when I had swept the floor and mopped all of it except the corner I was standing in did I realize that I was listening out for the phone.
Once during a breakup Cara rings me at my mother’s. ‘Will we ever get back to being just friends?’ she whispers.
I sit on the kitchen counter in the very centre of the small empty house, hugging my knees. ‘We were never just friends,’ I tell her. ‘We were always sort-of-girlfriends.’
‘Old s.o.g.s,’ she murmurs, savouring the resurrected phrase. ‘But we get on OK nowadays, don’t we? Considering?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I really enjoyed that last phone call,’ Cara says, like a child at a birthday party.
I breathe out between my teeth, focusing on the hiss of air. ‘It’s not so bad when you ring, but whenever we actually meet, in those rare half-hours when you manage to tear yourself away from reassuring Roderick about his masculinity, those times are bizarre.’
A heavy pause.
‘I sit beside you in a coffee shop and feel like there’s an electric fence between us, like your shape is broken up by all these horizontal force lines. I look at your hand holding a cup,’ I rush on, ‘and it’s foreign to me. I distinctly remember that I used to kiss that hand and tell you that I’d know it anywhere, if I ever needed to identify your body in a morgue, say, but it’s just not true any more. I sit there thinking, how could I have loved this stranger?’ The words hang on in the air, hollow and theatrical.
Cara’s voice is almost too low to hear. ‘Am I suddenly so unlovable?’
‘No,’ I tell her tiredly. ‘But it’s like you’ve emigrated.’
Another time during another breakup, Cara rings me at my mother’s. ‘So what’s new?’
‘Nothing much.’ I smile at Mammy as I grip the receiver between shoulder and jaw and carry the phone into the hall.
‘Do you still hate me like you said?’
‘No,’ as I pull the door shut, ‘I hate you in different ways.’
Cara’s voice is a hoarse whisper. ‘All the time?’
‘No,’ I say civilly. ‘When I wake up in the morning it’s lying on me like that lead apron they make you wear at the dentist’s, but then I shove it off and pull on my jeans and I’m free.’
‘Bully for you.’
‘Ah come on now, love, don’t be petulant. If anyone’s entitled to be petulant it’s me.’
In the pause I can hear the characteristic jagged rhythm of her breathing. ‘Do you hate Kevin too?’ she asks. ‘Because really he wasn’t the reason.’
‘I couldn’t care less about Kevin,’ I tell Cara, hoping it rings true. But I cannot sound careless when I ask, ‘Have you gone on the Pill yet?’
A stagey sigh. ‘I keep telling you, Pen, I know when I’m fertile. I’m in phase with the moon.’
‘So that’s what “lunatic” means.’
‘Huh?’
‘You could get pregnant, you stupid little fucker.’
‘Ah stop,’ she says in surprise, ‘I’m all right.’
‘Don’t I even have the right to worry about you any more?’
Another time, during another breakup, I ring her at her father’s.
‘Hey, Cara,’ I begin. ‘The reason I missed lunch with you on Friday wasn’t that I was upset but because I spent the day in bed with a woman from my pottery class. She’s called –’
‘I don’t think I want to know,’ Cara cuts in.
‘Suit yourself,’ I carol. ‘I suppose I should be flattered that you’re jealous, though you’ve no right to be.’
‘I’m not jealous,’ she says painedly, ‘I’m actually really glad for you.’ After a second, ‘What’s her name?’
‘Bella.’
‘Right.’
‘What do you mean, “right”, in that tone?’
‘Well, you must admit it’s a bit naff, as names go.’
‘This,’ I say in amusement, ‘from a woman who claims not to be jealous?’
Then Cara’s voice goes low and wispy. ‘I miss you,’ she says. ‘Why was it we parted?’
Parted? That’s such a nineteenth-century word, you can’t use words like that any more. And she has the gall to ask why, as if it wasn’t her who gave me a ten-page letter of reasons why, being bad for each other, bringing out as we did each other’s worst contrasting attributes, we had to part. The pause this time is long. Anger is bubbling like oxygen in
my veins, so I hardly notice she has put the phone down.
I write her a note on the back of a Picasso blue woman. Cara, it begins – dear Cara would be too great a concession – you are fucking me up big time. How dare you get all nostalgic now? I wouldn’t mind so much if you meant it but you don’t. Don’t humiliate me by even suggesting you might come back when you know I’d take you back anytime even though I know right well you never will. I find it difficult to hold on to grammar around Cara.
By return of post comes a sunset with writing tiny enough so that no one but me would have patience enough to decipher it. You misunderstood me, it begins, I was just slightly shocked by your news about B. Communication is too sore right now. We have entered separate folds and if we turn back our wool might snag on the wire as it were.
Cara, I snap in reply on a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, I’m not asking you to turn back. The way I see it is, we’re in this mess together. Think of it as a lab experiment, not sheep but rats; I am Control and you are A, exposed to the male virus. I look forward to seeing how you turn out.
Dear Pen, says her next card (a cruciform stained glass), I can do without that sort of condescending crap. Have fun humping Bella.
The irony of the situation being that Bella is a lie, a fairy tale, the first name that came into my head. But Cara’s hurt makes it almost real. I walk round all week in the arms of my invisible lover.
As I put the mop and bucket away in the cupboard under the stairs, I remembered with a quiver of satisfaction that I’d never let on about Bella. Cara used to ask the occasional question about her, which I answered only in the vaguest terms. She became a sort of running joke between us, after we got back together and I moved into the big house.
‘Gimme the last slice or else,’ I’d say over a mince tart.
‘Or else what?’
‘Or else I’ll feck off back to Bella.’
Somehow I could never bear to reveal – not even in our closest moments, when stories bubbled up for the offering – that the whole Bella thing had been a lie. Not that it would bother me to be caught out in a dishonesty; no, what I winced from was the prospect of Cara knowing that, all those times she left me, I sat at home and watched television. I thought it might go to her head if she discovered that, sometimes unwanted but more often unwanting, I had never gone to bed with anyone but her.
I replaced the chairs on either side of the table and sat down. A patch of lino, still wet from the mop, glistened by my sandal. To be fair to Cara, the asymmetry did bother her. Once she was lying behind me, her long body cloaking me from draughts, and she said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been the only one for you, apart from Bella.’
I grunted sleepily.
‘No, but I mean, how boring. If I was my only lover, I’d go demented.’
I chuckled under my breath.
‘Surely it got a bit raunchy between you and that substitute teacher last year?’
‘I know you’d like to think so,’ I yawned, ‘but I never bothered. She was only a bit kissable.’
‘How’d you know till you try?’
‘I just didn’t fancy her enough to try.’
Cara tutted, shifting position in the bed. ‘What about that long-haired woman whose B&B you stayed at in Cornwall?’
‘Mmm,’ I said reminiscently.
‘Did you fancy her enough?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Well then?’
‘She had a really classy come-on line, too; I was queueing outside the bathroom in nothing but a towel at midnight, and she walked up, took hold of the edge of the towel, and said, “What a nice sight.”’
Cara wriggled round excitedly. ‘So why didn’t you fall to the floor with her?’
‘It would have felt wrong.’
A weighty sigh from Cara.
‘Look, I’ve told you before: my head doesn’t have room for two women in it and me as well.’
She gave a gentle snort. ‘Why does your head have to come into it?’
‘Heads always come into it, you know that.’
‘Suppose.’
‘Besides, sex doesn’t interest me just for itself; it has to stand for something.’
‘You’re such a Catholic. Couldn’t it stand for fun?’
‘Sweetheart, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to rush out and sleep with someone else just to salve your conscience.’
‘My conscience is doing fine.’ Cara pulled back, and cold air slipped a blade between our bodies.
‘If you say so.’
‘Don’t start guilt-tripping me again. Monogamy’s not natural.’
‘No, it’s just not easy.’
‘None of it’s easy,’ said Cara with a groan as she sat up. The bedclothes heaved with her, letting in a whirlpool of draughts.
I tucked myself in up to the ears. ‘Tell you what’s easy: make me a cup of tea.’
Oh, I was always good at the soft words to end a difficult discussion. But now it occurred to me, she was right. How very foolish I had been, in this age of pic-’n’-mix consumerism, to have slept with only one woman in the thirteen years since I discovered the whole business. Now I was left high and dry and loverless. Though I knew theoretically that there were other people in the world who could heat up a bed for me, I didn’t believe in them as anything more than fantasies. Bed was Cara, and without her, without at least the possibility of her return, I felt infibulated.
I revved up the vacuum cleaner and ploughed it through the house, veering round corners, plunging under coffee tables. The snarl filled up my ears so I didn’t have to think. I hauled it upstairs, its heavy head bouncing on the carpeted steps. Bathroom, hall, my room at the front, Cara’s bombsite at the back…not Kate’s room, I didn’t want to disturb any of her things. I carried the vacuum back downstairs and wound the cord into place before stowing it in the cupboard.
I stood in the hall. My hands were scaly; I was sweaty, cold, and almost satisfied. It occurred to me that I had not seen Grace for hours. I went through the rooms, calling to him, then tried upstairs in the wardrobes. He was such a clumsy animal, there was no limit to where he might have got himself stuck. I wondered whether he had picked it up from Cara, who bounded and jerked as if used to the gravity of a heavier planet. All the carpets in this house were watermarked from her setting down a glass beside her chair, then kicking it over as she crossed her legs. We didn’t let her wash dishes, Mr. Wall and I; it was too hard on the nerves. She had less chance of breaking anything if she swept the floor and emptied the bins.
I watched her playing football with a crowd from college once, and she wasn’t clumsy at all. At high speed there seemed to be enough room for all her limbs. Oh, and Cara was never clumsy when making love to me. The stress was not on the me there – no doubt she was equally graceful when in bed with other people – but the to. As long as Cara was running the show, moving, teasing, adjusting, parting, lifting her knees over me, she was as graceful as an acrobat. But as soon as she was being made love to – keeping with these crude distinctions for a minute – she lost all control. Bliss dissolved her brain. She might throw out an arm and smash an alarm clock off a table, or hit her head off the headboard, and she was so anaesthetized by pleasure that she didn’t care. I learned to clear a little space around us if I had intentions. I told her she might brain herself entirely one of these times, and she laughed lopsidedly, and said, ‘What a way to go.’
No sign of Grace anywhere upstairs. There was nothing else for him to get trapped in. Then I told myself to stop being paranoid, and went back down.
By the time the key turned in the front door, I was watching a documentary on pollution. I had sat through five minutes of a sitcom before feeling ashamed at the prospect of being caught laughing by the Walls on their return from the chapel of rest. I turned the TV off, then thought that if they found me staring at the blank screen they would worry about my sanity; finally I flicked through the channels till I found something sober.
I got to my feet and t
urned off the television. Mr. Wall nodded a few inches to the side of my eyes, and went straight into his bedroom. Kate dropped Minnie’s keys into my palm.
‘Did she give you any trouble?’ I asked, trying to convey warmth and apology.
‘Not once I’d got used to the clutch.’ She yawned, stretching her arms over her head and knocking against the paper lightshade, which swung crazily. She stilled it with one hand. Silence filled up the room in drifts. I wanted to say something nice, but nothing occurred to me. ‘I’d better get another early night,’ she remarked. ‘My body clock’s not right yet.’
‘Do that.’
‘Get lots of sleep yourself,’ Kate added over her shoulder. ‘It’s Cara’s big day tomorrow.’
Our eyes met, startled by the remark. ‘Night,’ I said, and watched till the curve of the banisters took her.
A hot bath would be the best thing for me, I knew, but I was too tired to wait for it to fill. I went straight upstairs, took all my clothes off and slid into the wide bed. I lay still on the outside edge until it began to warm under my body. I stretched one foot into the void of the other side; the sheet lifted reluctantly, like skin coming away.
When Cara was off on holidays or work jaunts I used to take to sleeping in the middle, but then when she came home again she’d complain that my body had become accustomed to the whole bed and was squeezing her against the wall. Apparently in sleep I used to turn my back and bend like an arrow head, taking up the whole square of bed. ‘Bottom from hell,’ she would mutter, shoving against my inert flesh; if I was fast asleep I wouldn’t notice until a particularly sharp poke produced an outraged ‘Ow’ and I shrugged over a little.
Tonight I clung to the edge of the mattress. It seemed unfair to steal any of her space now. I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars on black.
I am leaning back against the enamel, my flesh a wet padding for the bath. My left hand is skewed under the weight of a book; the fingers strain to keep the pages open and the hard corner off Cara’s freckled shoulder. She is lying back against my breasts, her head weighing on the skin below my neck which is beginning to soften as I near my thirties. Her hair, its ends darkened to peat by the water, lies in chilly strands across the dip of my collarbone. She is drifting, snoozing, rising and falling as I breathe. Every now and then I reach for a bigger breath and she rises an inch through the steaming water. My right elbow is propped up on the side of the bath, the hand hovering over a saucer which bears the remains of a crumbled chocolate bar. My eyes shift from the page occasionally to supervise my fingers as they brush the flakes of chocolate into a little heap without toppling the saucer, press it between the tips, raise it slowly to give the crumbs a chance to fall on the saucer rather than the water, then lift it to my mouth. Every second time I bring my hand round to where I can feel Cara’s drying lips; at my touch she opens them a little and receives the fragment of sweetness. She sucks on my fingers, whether to please them or to get all the chocolate or both, I am past telling.