Fiona’s friend – Ruth, that was the name – was leaning over a lavender bush, its purple heads faded to grey. She rolled one between her fingers, and inhaled, then she rubbed the scent on her temples, under the rim of her black velvet cap. Catching me watching her, she smiled a little sheepishly. ‘Good for headaches,’ she explained.
‘Do you want an aspirin?’ Too late, I remembered having left my handbag at home.
‘No, no, I’m fine, it’s just preventive because of the sun.’ She held out the crumbled flower, and I opened my palm for it. ‘Hope you don’t mind my asking –’ she began, her face sobering.
‘Mmm?’
‘Well, Fiona said you were together for a really long time. You and Cara. I only met her a few times, over here,’ Ruth stumbled on, ‘but I remember her talking about you.’
‘It was thirteen years this May,’ I said rather grandly. It was already beginning to sound unreal, a figure arrived at by adding together your age, weight, and phone number, then dividing by the number you first thought of.
‘Wow,’ said Ruth, her voice hushed. She hesitated, combing the grass with the toe of her boot. ‘This is a kind of crass question, but if she hadn’t – if –’
‘If she was still here,’ I suggested, to save her embarrassment.
‘Yeah. Would you, do you think you two would have managed the long haul?’
‘Depends how long the haul would have been,’ I said. ‘You mean, like, for life?’
Ruth nodded, her fingers knotted in the curls at the nape of her neck.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I told her. ‘I certainly expected we would. But right now I don’t have much faith in my ability to predict the future.’
Her nods were deepening. I thought the conversation was over, and was starting to move away, when she said, ‘That’s what I want.’ Her pointed chin was set firm.
‘You think so?’ I asked, with only a hint of condescension.
‘Getting more sure by the year,’ said Ruth. Just then Fiona called her over for advice on barbecue sauce.
‘Good luck,’ I said after her, suddenly, but I wasn’t sure if she’d heard.
I held the crumbs of lavender to my nose, lulled by the sweetness as I talked to another primary teacher about class sizes, then to a part-time waitress about tax evasion. From behind us came a squeal of ‘Look at all the Agatha Christies, my sister will be in ecstasy.’
Jo turned up at last, windblown and sticky from her bike ride, with no nut cutlets. ‘Fuck it,’ she said, ‘I’ll have a sausage.’ She put her arms around me lightly then led me inside, the char-black sausage between her teeth. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘the ritual thingy’s not till about seven, and if we all start talking about Cara this early we’ll get depressed, so I thought it would be best to watch my French and Saunders videos and eat popcorn.’
It was good to have someone else make the decisions. I sat through the comedy sketches in a state of utter passivity, eating a handful of popcorn every time the bowl passed on to my lap, but never reaching for it. It was strange to be so squashed on a sofa; I was used to empty space around me. Rather funnier than the sketches was listening to Mairéad take the piss out of the ads in between; she had the screamed jingle from the sanitary towel ad almost perfect.
Jo went over to a long-haired woman I didn’t know to bum a cigarette, then settled herself back on the sofa. Fiona ruffled Jo’s layers of hair as she went by with a bowl of salad. ‘There’ll be no smoking in our Old Dykes Home, you know,’ she said, ‘not even at parties.’
‘Ah, don’t worry your head about me,’ Jo called back. ‘If I live long enough to have to think about any of that, I won’t still be sharing with hardliners like you.’
Fiona blew an absentminded kiss.
Towards the end of the video I must have been looking rather glazed, because Ruth peered up at me from the rug and said, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Just cramps.’
‘Here,’ said Sherry, ‘let me do your pressure points.’
Engrossed in the next sketch, Mairéad shushed us.
Sherry sat up on the arm of the sofa and, as I was searching for a polite yet barbed rebuff, picked up my right hand. She took my palm between her finger and thumb, and pressed deeply. It hurt for a second, and then I felt something inside me relax. By the time she was finished, in fact, I was gushing so fast that I feared I might leave a permanent memorial on their sofa. I staggered off to their tiny toilet, and read my way through all twelve months of the Dykes to Watch Out For calendar on the back of the door. The cartoons didn’t make me laugh out loud today; I made a mental note to read them again under different circumstances.
When I came back, they were all carrying cushions out into the garden. ‘Jo,’ I whispered, tugging at the sleeve of her T-shirt, ‘I think I’ll be heading off, this isn’t my kind of thing.’
She raised her eyebrows as she interlocked her brown arm with my pale one. ‘Barely thirty, and already she knows exactly what her kind of thing is.’
I let her lead me out into the back garden. The barbecue had been built up into a real bonfire; it made the garden seem much darker. The rest of Cara’s things had been put back in a binliner and propped against the wall.
A woman with hundreds of beads in her hair got us to make a big ring. I sat as far back as I could without breaking the circle, between Jo and Ruth. I listened with one ear as the bead woman called on the elements; I passed the candle, the water, the stone and the feather as each came round to me. As I handed the bowl of water to Ruth, it slopped a little over the knee of her jeans, and we both let out a nervous giggle. No one seemed to mind; it wasn’t like being at mass.
With the rest of my brain I was wondering what to teach my class next week. After some stuff about the four quarters, a teenager in lycra running shorts knelt up and sang something in Irish. It sounded sad, but so did most Irish songs; it could have been about donkeys for all I could tell. Then Sinéad read an Adrienne Rich poem, rather gruffly; she kept her dark head low. I thought I recognized it; probably Cara had read it to me once while I was chopping onions. I didn’t really listen to the words this time. I thought they might either irritate me – since a cheapo hike around the Greek isles was hardly comparable to the death-defying climbing expedition described in the poem – or move me. I didn’t want to be moved in front of all these strangers. I knew that if I cried they would not even have the decency to ignore me.
None of that was too bad. There was no compulsory bursting into spontaneous dance or shedding of clothes. The bad bit was where the hippy with the beads (who was trying to act like she wasn’t the leader and it was all just happening under its own steam) threw the floor open, as it were, to individual testimonies about Cara. During a few of them I had to button my lip so as not to mutter ‘Ah, come on, she was not a wonderful cook’, or ‘Psychically sensitive, in my eyeball’. Others described Cara in terms that were too pedestrian, as a ‘really nice person’, or someone who ‘gave so much to the women’s community’. None of them seemed to catch the colour of her. And what really enraged me, as I sat listening to them praise a woman I barely recognized, was that I didn’t figure. I had thought of us for so long as a partnership, but now I was forced to see us as individuals.
There was a silence, then, and when I glanced up from the cooling grass I saw several faces turned towards me. I realized that they were silently conspiring to offer me, as official partner, the last word. I was grateful, but suddenly could think of no speech that would not be facile. The silence was growing; I might miss my chance. ‘I’m Pen,’ I said at last, staring at the clover and counting its leaves. ‘Cara’s’ – the usual list of possibilities tickertaped through my head – ‘lover,’ I added in explanation, before the words petered out.
It was getting dark, and colder as the bonfire died down. The beaded woman encouraged us all to inch inwards on our knees and join up. My hands were held by Ruth and Jo; theirs were much warmer than mine. The hippy began a chant. Shy voices all round me
began to take it up on the third round.
hoof and horn
hoof and horn
all that dies will be reborn
Sherry came in away to the left with a descant of surprising sweetness, and then the words changed to
corn and grain
corn and grain
all that falls will rise again
Eventually my need to be a part of it floated me over the barriers, and I cleared my throat and joined in, singing very quietly. I don’t know how long we kept it up, alternating the two verses; the effect was hypnotic.
When we went back inside, the light from the fire and the lamp was bewilderingly bright. Someone with a pierced eyebrow was rolling some homegrown, and Mairéad was upending liqueur bottles for the last eggcupfuls. The punch was a puddle of apple chunks, so Jo passed me a bottle of wine. I would have liked to get absolutely out of my face, but I was driving, so I poured a small glass.
‘That was kinda nice,’ said Jo doubtfully.
‘Could have been much worse.’
‘What were you expecting? Babies on pitchforks, or having to weave garlands out of bindweed?’
I gave her a shove on the shoulder.
Jo steadied her wine glass. ‘You were brave to come.’
‘Hadn’t anything much else to do, had I?’
That bottle was soon empty, so another was opened. Sinéad passed round a birthday card from her mother in Wales which said on the inside. In case you think the passage of time is softening my attitude to your lifestyle, well, it’s not. We groaned in chorus. ‘At least she’s referring to it,’ said Ruth, her chin wedged on the heel of her hand. ‘When I finally came out to my mother, she dropped her best sherry decanter in the sink. She hasn’t said a word about the subject since, except to beg me not to tell my great-aunt with the dicky heart.’
This line of conversation was depressing us all – except the teenager in the running shorts who claimed her mother was ‘totally cool about it’ – so I started telling Jo a story about Cara. Just a silly thing about once when she was collecting for the Rape Crisis Centre on Grafton Street and it kept coming out as ‘Please support the Ripe Grape Centre’. Halfway through I realized that I had the attention of the whole group, and wished it was a rather more significant anecdote. When they had laughed obediently, I remembered the biscuits and passed them round. The teenager lifted a curly-haired one to the light. ‘Hey, they’ve got faces,’ she said.
Jo gave her a slow hand-clap of congratulation. ‘Are they meant to be Cara?’ she whispered in my ear.
‘They’re just biscuits, Jo,’ I told her. ‘Take. Eat.’
Sherry had managed a bite but seemed unable to swallow it; tears ran down and collected in her dimples. I wanted to smash the biscuit into her face. Someone moved to put an arm around her. I looked away.
The bottles of cheap wine were being drained like water. I could hear tail ends of maudlin conversations all round the lounge. ‘Did you bring photos?’ someone asked me.
‘What, of Cara? No, sorry, I didn’t think to.’
Jo passed round her copies of the Greek ones. Such casual snapshots, now converted into holy relics, as women craned over each other’s shoulders to see Cara in the back row of a group, Cara out of focus on a volcano, Cara sharing a plate of squid. A quick glance round told me that the weeping total was up to five or six. Soon I might be the only stony-faced one. Well, I was damned if I was going to cry just because they expected it of me.
I rested my head on the edge of the sofa and let my ears pick up snatches of conversation. Two strangers, in Cara’s ‘Greenham Common ’87’ and ‘“Free Women Now” – Can I Have One?’ T-shirts respectively, seemed to be quarrelling over who had known her best. ‘It’s not that she was unmaterialistic,’ one was insisting, ‘that wasn’t it at all.’ The other said something about projecting your own ideals on to our friends. In the other corner of the room, two old friends had wandered off the topic of Cara and seemed to be arguing over which of them had been celibate the longest. I gave up my attempt to hear through the fog of voices, and finished my wine.
Jo was lying back on the sofa cushions, taking a long draw from a bulging joint. I leaned over on my elbow and asked her if she thought Cara would have liked this party.
‘Well, she came to a sort of wake here last year for Mairéad’s first girlfriend, and she seemed to enjoy that.’
‘Oh yeah, I remember.’ That was one of the Attic invitations I had refused. ‘Still, I suppose it’s different if it’s your own.’
Jo let out a giggle and passed me the joint. I told her that I was driving, and held it towards the group on the rug; a hand came up to relieve me of it.
All the women crying, except Sherry, were ones I’d never met before. Maybe tears were in inverse proportion to how well you knew the person the wake was for. Maybe these were volunteers who did the rounds of women’s parties, keening or cheering or laughing, depending on what was appropriate. The woman with the beads heaved herself up and staggered towards the kitchen; Fiona climbed into her place on the sofa, tucking her feet under Sinéad’s thigh to keep warm. She offered me more wine, and said if I wasn’t fit to drive I could always crash there.
‘Thanks, but I don’t think I’d sleep. Too much emotion floating around,’ I told her.
‘Tell me about it. I live here,’ she said wryly.
‘And then there’s the nights Mairéad practises her drums…’ Sinéad chipped in, briefly distracted from her conversation with the social worker.
I covered my yawn with my hand. ‘So are you all “on the team”, as they say across the water?’
Fiona took off her glasses and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. ‘Well, yeah, but I don’t think we agree on the words.’
‘Mairéad was “ambi” when I looked last,’ said Jo, glancing round to find her, ‘but she seems to be more serious about this woman in Rome than about any of the boytoys she brings home from gigs.’
‘Sherry’s “simply a sexual being”, then me and Sinéad are boring old dykes,’ contributed Fiona, ‘and Jo’s the last of the political lesbians.’
‘I am not,’ protested Jo. ‘I’m a lesbian who votes in elections, that’s all. Now, hand over that wine with all speed.’
‘But the important thing,’ Fiona continued in my ear, ‘is that we all watch Roseanne and Coronation Street. Televisual compatibility, that’s the secret of housesharing.’
I smiled abstractedly, passing the bottle to Jo. ‘You know, back when we were in school Cara insisted she wasn’t a lesbian, she just happened to be going out with a human being who happened to be female.’
‘Yep, I’ve used that one myself,’ said Fiona reminiscently, accepting the joint passed up from the rug. ‘Kept telling Sinéad that the whole first year we were together; d’you remember, love?’ But Sinéad was deep in a discussion of Satanic abuse with the social worker.
‘When Cara left me for Sean –’ I began.
‘Who’s Sean?’ asked Jo.
‘Oh, the worst of the batch. He managed to convince Cara she was frigid because, according to his calculations, she wasn’t as aroused as she should have been, considering what he was doing to her.’
‘Bastard!’
‘Then when she came back to me the last time, she said she’d made a political decision to devote her energies to women. I asked did that translate as she had decided to accept the fact that she kept falling for women?’
‘What did she say to that?’ asked Fiona, stretching over the back of the sofa to give Ruth the joint as she passed by.
‘She said I knew her too well.’
They nodded. A sort of gloom seemed to settle over us. Sinéad’s head was lying in the crook of Fiona’s elbow now. ‘I still can’t quite believe – oh, forget it,’ said Sinéad.
‘No, I know what you mean,’ murmured Fiona, combing back her lover’s hair with her fingers. ‘Cara was so bloody young.’
Ruth’s head joined us, her chin nodding on the burst
arm of the sofa.
‘She always seemed like she had so much life ahead of her,’ contributed Jo, slurring the consonants slightly. ‘She didn’t deserve this.’
Sinéad’s comment was lost in Fiona’s sleeve. ‘What you say, love?’
‘Who does?’ repeated Sinéad grimly.
‘Who does what?’ Fiona’s pupils were dilated, her voice confused.
I decided I was probably the only sober person in the house by now. ‘Who deserves to go this young, she was asking,’ I explained impatiently. ‘But if you look at it the other way round, we’re not entitled to a damn thing. It’s all luck or fate or God or whatever you call it.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ruth. ‘I suppose Cara got to live about a thousand times longer than most babies born in Africa.’
In the thickening gloom, Jo gave a giggle. ‘That has to be the ultimate politically correct conversation-stopper.’
‘Sorry,’ said Ruth, burying her nose in the sofa.
‘I think I need a cup of coffee,’ I said, hauling myself up and giving Ruth a small pat on the back of the head.
‘Try my cupboard – the one with the Frida Kahlo postcard on it,’ yawned Fiona.
In the kitchen, Sherry and the woman with the pierced eyebrow were stooped over the open fridge. ‘I just thought it should have been Jo who read out the poem,’ Sherry was saying rather drunkenly, ‘seeing as she was the last one involved with her.’
I got as far as the kettle before the words sank home. I turned on my heel. They didn’t look up. When I reached the living-room, the couch was empty; everyone was clustered round some new photo in the corner. I was suddenly so tired that my cheeks sank and my jaw opened and I leaned to one side, against the burst upholstery of the sofa arm.