Hood

  ‘In the rain?’

  ‘It’s stopped.’

  ‘So it has,’ I said, looking out the window over the stairs. ‘Does it get you down?’

  ‘The rain? It’s a relief from the heat.’

  ‘I suppose sun’s not what you came to Ireland for.’

  ‘No.’ Kate stayed where she was, leaning against the coat cupboard.

  ‘What have you been up to all day?’ I asked her, suddenly guilty about my deficiencies as a hostess.

  ‘Oh, you know. Reading reports. Watched a political documentary; I’d forgotten how much better British TV was.’

  ‘The house closes in a bit sometimes, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She smiled back.

  Grace ran out of the kitchen, stopped short when he saw us, and slunk back in again. ‘He gets restless in the evenings,’ I explained.

  ‘Has he always been like this?’

  ‘I’ve noticed it more since his operation. He probably resents us for making him a eunuch.’

  ‘Right.’

  And suddenly I couldn’t bear this woman to be so brittle, so ill at ease in her own family home. ‘Come on, let’s go for a spin.’

  Kate’s face brightened. ‘Unless you had something to do?’

  ‘Not a thing.’ What were any of us doing this week except killing time? I busied myself finding a raincoat and my keys. My crow-headed umbrella was missing; finally I remembered that I had lent it to Jo.

  As soon as we reached the car I said, ‘Damn. She wouldn’t budge this morning; there must be something wrong with the starter motor.’

  ‘Give it a try.’

  Against all logic, Minnie burst into life the minute I turned the key. As I was backing out, I paused in the gateway. ‘I never thought to ask your father to join us.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘But I think he was listening to something on Radio 4,’ I invented, and wheeled on to the road.

  ‘We could go to that pier,’ suggested Kate. ‘Can’t think of the name. You know, the one down by the sea.’

  ‘Not like all the other, landlocked piers,’ I commented under my breath.

  A good savoury laugh she had. ‘Fair point. I mean the long one, where Dad always used to take us on Sunday afternoons.’

  I smiled to think how little Mr. Wall had changed in his ways, and turned on to the road to Dun Laoghaire. ‘Do you remember the neighbourhood much?’ I asked her. ‘Or is it all gone?’

  ‘Bits,’ said Kate.

  ‘Like?’

  A few seconds passed; it was like prising open a tin of old paint. ‘This overhead bridge, say’ – she pointed through the windscreen – ‘I remember Cara nicked the hood off my school gaberdine and ran up here and dropped it over.’

  ‘The brat!’

  ‘There were all these muddy tracks from the trucks across it by the time she picked it up. I made her wash it and dry it with Mum’s hairdryer, but it was never the same.’

  ‘Did she do it for devilment or to pay you back for something?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Kate, from a distance. A new sandstone wall went by in the window, then a private clinic surrounded by young trees, then one of a chain of pizzerias with a grinning neon face on the side. I tried to watch it all flow by through her eyes.

  ‘So,’ she said at last, in the tone of voice used for resuming a confidential conversation. ‘Thirteen years, then, if you got together the year after we left. If you don’t mind talking about it…’

  ‘No, that’s fine. Not talking wouldn’t keep me from thinking, so I might as well talk.’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘There were plenty of gaps, though,’ I told her, keeping my eye on the road. ‘Cara left me for men a couple of times in the early years.’

  ‘A couple of times?’ I could hear the rebuke in Kate’s voice.

  ‘It did her good,’ I added brightly. ‘She always said it was her scars that had turned her into a serious feminist.’

  ‘Real scars?’

  ‘Well, all I remember is one little burn mark between her finger and thumb, from when Roderick bellowed at her as she was lifting a vegetarian lasagne out of the oven. I laughed at it once, and she said that if I trivialized male abuse I was complicit with the patriarchy.’

  Kate hoisted herself in her seat to straighten her trench-coat. ‘Did she always talk that way?’

  ‘Nah, she put it on for special occasions.’

  ‘I’m rather glad I never met the grown-up Cara. I’d have told her she was full of shit.’

  ‘I didn’t think corporate people used such language,’ I murmured.

  ‘I didn’t think grade-school teachers were…a bit like you.’

  I took my eyes off the road for a moment, amused by the euphemism, but she was looking away. ‘And what would Cara have said if she’d met the grown-up Kate?’

  ‘No idea,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘Possibly she’d have thought I was full of…a different kind of shit. We were never exactly bosom buddies.’

  ‘Ah, you never know how well you might have got on, once you were past the adolescent hormones.’

  ‘Yeah, well, never know is right.’

  That put a lid on the conversation for a good half-mile. Kate stared out the window at the footpath going by, its wet patches lightening as they dried. What I really wanted to ask was, if she couldn’t care less about her sister, what was she doing back in Dublin? But I supposed the fact that she was here meant that she had to care, on some subterranean level.

  Just as we were locking the car doors, the wind changed, making my eyes water. We made it along the pier as far as the first set of slippery steps down to the boats before it started to rain again. Two girls hurried past in sleeveless T-shirts, their shoulders striped with sun. ‘Yeah, but no matter how happy…’ I heard one of them say, before their conversation was out of earshot. I fought back the impulse to run after them and ask who was so happy, and what negative was to follow?

  Kate’s brown eyes turned to me; she huddled in her jacket. ‘So when did Cara come back to you for good?’

  For better, for worse, in sickness and in health… ‘Eighty-seven, I think it was. I moved in the next year.’

  She absorbed this for a minute. The last splinter of sunlight was digging into the sea; the lighthouse was starting its periodic wink. The drops were getting bigger, so we turned back by silent consensus. A dog went by with its rain-hatted owner, straining at the leash and scrabbling on the wet granite. We climbed back into Minnie and sat looking out through the windshield.

  Then, as I turned on the wipers, some perversity made me add, ‘Of course we still had our ups and downs. For a while, when she was seeing this girl in Kilkenny…’

  ‘Seeing?’ asked Kate, as if the word was new to her.

  ‘Sleeping with.’

  ‘What, you mean while she was – while you and her –’

  ‘I gather Boston is the last bastion of absolute monogamy,’ I put into the strangulated silence.

  ‘No, but – just, if my sister was cheating on you –’

  ‘Oh, stop it,’ I spat, staring into the rain. ‘Why do hets always call it cheating? A relationship that’s negotiated in a civilized and honest way to allow for the occasional other sexual partner is hardly the same as one of your grubby little bits on the side.’ I choked myself off at that point, before I could say anything worse. Three slow breaths. ‘Sorry,’ I added, turning off the windscreen wipers. ‘That was totally out of order.’

  ‘No,’ said Kate, ‘I was tactless.’

  ‘No,’ I told her, ‘I’m taking things out on you that are nothing to do with you.’ The rain brimmed freely on the glass now. I cleared my throat with a roar that seemed to fill the car. ‘As you may have gathered, you got me on a sore point.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s a sore point for everybody,’ she said.

  After a long minute, wondering if she had a story to tell, I went on, ‘Cara and I were honest, at least, but I can’t claim it w
as always civilized.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So if you’re wondering how I put up with it, well, it was still a lot better than anything else around. I like a challenge,’ I went on rather frantically, ‘and I liked Cara, and I liked who she was when she came back from travelling. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Kate.

  I sighed. ‘She wasn’t somebody you’d want to restrict to just one of their selves.’

  ‘Right,’ she said flatly.

  ‘And I figured I’d just have to get used to the fact that people don’t stay still. You left and never came back, didn’t you? At least Cara kept coming back.’

  ‘Do you think Cara minded that I stayed away?’ said Kate, her voice going off on a tangent.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said wearily. If it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone else minded, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

  ‘When I’d been in Ohio a year, I really wasn’t the same person any more,’ she went on. ‘All I really remembered about Cara was that horribly clean podgy look of hers.’ She was staring out the window, as if making out her sister’s features on the rain-blotted tarmac of the car park.

  ‘But she’s a skinnymalinks.’

  ‘She had lots of puppyfat before puberty stretched her out. I remember when she was small we tried to teach her to use the phone, because she was scared of it. Mom wrapped Cara’s pudgy fingers round the receiver and gave her a nudge, and you know what she said?’

  ‘Hi?’ I suggested.

  Kate’s voice sounded caged in her throat. ‘She said, “Hello, is this me?” That sums Cara up; always had to be different. I get, I used to get so irritated with her.’

  ‘You still do,’ I pointed out after a second.

  She was staring down at her hands. ‘It doesn’t seem decent now.’ After a minute, ‘It’s normal to be like that when you’re kids. Cara had a face like, like a balloon, you know?’

  ‘Red and round?’

  ‘Bright. Easily deflated. I used to long to prick it, but I was always sorry when I did.’

  ‘I know what that’s like,’ I told her.

  ‘Yeah?’ Kate’s eyes met mine, amused. ‘I suppose if you knew her for nearly as many years as I did, you must have got to know her weak spots.’

  ‘A few,’ I admitted. ‘Though Cara was much quicker with the needle.’

  ‘Only if you let her. What really bugged me was when she’d get all mushy and go on about loving things,’ said Kate. Her voice rose to a whine of imitation: ‘“I love Mammy and I love Daddy and I love Cáit and I love God.” “Get into bed this minute,” I used to say, “or the rug’ll eat you.”’

  ‘So you’re the one who told her the rug came alive at night?’

  Kate looked slightly sheepish. ‘She wasn’t meant to believe it.’

  ‘Took her years of therapy to get over that one,’ I said with a theatrical sigh.

  The whine began again: ‘“I love rhubarb and I love jam and I love when the leaves go red…”’

  ‘Yeah, well, love was a bit of a hobby of hers.’

  Neither of us could think of anything to say after that. I started the wipers again, and turned on the engine. By the time we got home, the sky seemed to have drained itself. I listened to Minnie’s engine cool, suddenly too lethargic to undo my seat-belt. ‘The house must strike you as awful shabby,’ I commented. ‘We haven’t done much with it for the last few years.’

  ‘No, it’s pretty much how I remember it,’ said Kate, staring through the windscreen at the garden wall. ‘It’s a losing battle, keeping a house up. I used to have to paint that lumpy wall every few summers.’

  ‘It soaks up gallons of paint, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a monster. One year I tried to liven the job up by turning up Pink Floyd on the radio so I could hear it out the window, but Dad said did I mind, he thought it might bring on one of his headaches.’

  ‘He gets them bad, you know,’ I said with a hint of reproach.

  ‘It’s his sedentary lifestyle. Librarian’s blight.’

  I was worn out myself; it seemed a year since I had set out to school this morning. I went into the house without a word, leaving the door open for Kate. It was not ten yet, but I thought if I went to bed straight away, I might be able to catch sleep before it sidled away.

  Clothes were strewn around the bedroom, and the curtains had been half-closed for days now. Cara would laugh at me for becoming a bigger slob than she ever was. The horrible possibility occurred to me that I had to be both of us now: my own messer and tidier, rebel and nag, a little bit of everything.

  Please, Lord, let me sleep tonight. I knew I had to grow and change and expand, but I was so tired I couldn’t face it. Grant me spiritual enlightenment through pain, sure, Lord, grand, you’re on, but not tonight.

  I decided to put my clothes away at least; I felt ugly enough these days without going round as crumpled as a bag-lady. I stooped to pick up the black silk shirt I had worn to the funeral. How many handwashes before it would be cleaned of that association? How faded would it have to be before I would think of it merely as my black silk shirt, or that old thing, rather than as the shirt I wore to Cara’s funeral? I was checking the pockets when I remembered the hair I found yesterday, down by the gear-stick. It was still there, curled on my fingers when I lifted them out of the silk. In this light it looked brown; it took sun to bring out the sparkle of ruby. I held on to it, pulling gently. So strong for such a thin thing. Where could I put it so I wouldn’t lose it? If I laid it on the bedside table it was sure to get swept away by an elbow. I had no locket, and besides, I needed to touch it, not just to know it was there.

  I pulled it over my lips; it was an invisible finger, calling the nerves to life. The reading lamp over the bed, that would do; I tied the hair around its narrow metal base. Clean and springy, it tried to slide out of the loop. I tied it in a double knot, then a triple, and secured it with a triangle of tape. Last thing before turning off the light, I reached up and the hair tickled the pad of my finger. For a second I tugged on it like some kind of bell-cord.

  I dream of a tower, a cascade of red hair which I am climbing, clinging to the delicate strands which break off in my hands as my feet struggle to find a purchase on such slipperiness. I am about a third of the way up, and can see no face at the window. Is she there at all, or is this just a wig tied to a bar? I hear voices, one deeper than the other. I keep climbing.

  And then the sound of a horse and harness jingling, and a rider comes by, pausing at the foot of the tower where the long mane of hair heaves like a dying snake. Face upturned, disdainful in the moonlight, the rider who is Kate puts back her hood and spits at me.

  I woke gradually, my stomach tight with tension. It was still dark; I hadn’t made it to dawn, then. I watched the clock’s green fluorescent fingertips resolve themselves into ten to twelve. All at once I couldn’t bear to lie there, a prisoner thirsting for the royal reprieve of sleep. I got up; my foot landed on the cool surface of a book before I kicked it away. I supposed I could always sit downstairs in my dressing-gown and drink cocoa; that was what they did in the TV movies, and it seemed to help. But mostly, it occurred to me, because on TV small children came in and climbed on your knee and offered unknowing words of comfort. I could not imagine Mr. Wall coming in and sitting on my knee.

  Walking back from the bathroom, rubbing the dust from my eyes, I caught sight of the half-moon out the window. It was irregular and translucent, like a slice of some newly discovered fruit. My mouth imagined how cool and crisp it would be to bite.

  I hauled on layers of clothing and my anorak over it all. I was startled to find Mr. Wall in the kitchen. He peered up: ‘Oh good lord, I thought you were a burglar, in that coat.’

  ‘Just fancied a bit of air.’

  He was looking down again at the stiff page of the photo album held between his finger and thumb. I waited a few seconds, rather stifled in all my gear. I was just shifting my weight towards t
he door when Mr. Wall said, without looking up, ‘This is a good one.’

  I went and looked over his shoulder. His index finger – knobbly, the skin dry beside the white nail – pointed to a sixties snapshot of two girls in an inflatable paddling pool. The darker had to be Kate; the smaller had her pale face turned up to the sun. Mr. Wall turned a few heavily encrusted pages – past the gap with four tape-marks from the photo I stole – and gestured at another one of Cara, longlegged in bell-bottoms, slouching against the garden wall. ‘I had no idea what to do with a growing girl like her after the separation.’

  I couldn’t think what to say, so made a little sound of interest.

  ‘I fear I am a dull person to live with,’ said Mr. Wall. I could tell he was not fishing for a compliment. ‘Then you came along,’ he went on, ‘and made her much happier.’

  I kept my eyes on the picture, tracing the pattern of ivy along the wall that needed repainting. ‘Not sure I did, not all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Cara was her mother’s daughter. She could never have been happy all the time.’

  He didn’t know, I was sure of it. I’d been eating off his table for four years now, and the poor sucker thought I was a good influence. ‘I’m off out,’ I said, too loudly, the words booming round the shadowy kitchen.

  ‘What, at this time of night?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  My voice must have been sharper than I meant, because he nodded fearfully and bent his head over the albums again. I paused at the door but could think of nothing nice to say. Maybe I should have asked him to come with me, but I didn’t want to.

  I let myself out, pulling the front door behind me very softly in case it woke Kate. The clouds had cleared, the air was drying. I meant to stick to the well-lit roads around the woods, but the streetlights dazzled my eyes. When I came to the side entrance I slipped in around the steel stile. As the last orange bulb disappeared behind a great trunk, the stars spread themselves above me. I had never seen them so clear before, a huge join-the-dots puzzle for the eyes. Why had I never come up here at night before? What timid creatures we were with our baths and cocoa and bedside books.