A call from down below; I walked to the top of the stairs.
‘Coffee?’ Mr. Wall’s voice was oddly hopeful, a sort of elderly Oliver Twist.
‘No thanks,’ I said automatically.
‘Sorry?’
Then I couldn’t bear to disappoint him in anything. ‘That’d be great,’ I called, too enthusiastically. She would think I was a callous hedonist, an empress stuffing my face with pie and coffee as Rome fell around me. Why did I care what this stranger thought? Just a habit, left over from the year I was fifteen in red gaberdine and thought the world spun around the girl who used to be Kate Wall.
Back in my bedroom, the suitcase opened with a prompt click. Folded autumnal clothes, none of them familiar at first glance; Cara must have gone on a spending spree around the Isles. How could she have afforded all this? Mr. Wall must have slipped her some particularly lavish handout for her holiday. Under a layer of cotton I found a cream satin camisole. I fingered its milky folds; for a moment I imagined its pencil straps on Cara’s freckled shoulders, and smiled in anticipation, my mouth watering. Then I remembered, like a great hand closing around my throat. How many times would I have to remember and make myself believe it, before remembering once and for all?
I covered the camisole with a black jumper I thought I remembered. Then something struck me: what had Cara done with her old stuff, her tie-dyes and political T-shirts? What kind of weird transformation had she undergone on this holiday? If I was going to lose her, at least I wanted to be sure how to remember her. In a clear plastic toilet bag there was a yellow toothbrush, which I pocketed for return to the Attic. There was also a box of pills, marked with the days of the month and arrows. My stomach contracted. I could handle most changes, but not this. Not a change, even, but a slide back to the old world, the old boring story, fucking men.
I stuffed the pills back into the bag, zipped it, then slammed the case shut. Why did I feel such a voyeur, when there was no one alive to have her privacy respected? I hauled the case on to the landing, not wanting to share a room with it. Mr. Wall was calling; I went downstairs and took a cup of coffee from Kate. The glass chattered on its saucer.
‘Did my bag turn up at last?’ she asked.
I stared.
‘From the airport. They said they’d send it on.’
My mouth caught up with my brain. ‘Oh yes.’ She was looking puzzled. ‘I left it on the landing,’ I told her, and bent to my coffee, cheeks scalding. Not caring whether her eyes were on me, I dipped the spoon into the sugar for a third time.
Mr. Wall cleared the plates away, smooth as a robot butler.
I left them exchanging comments on world news and tugged the kitchen door shut behind me as I stepped into the yard. Jet-lag would force Kate to bed soon, I thought, and Mr. Wall would ring round the relatives. Was it rude to stay out here in the steaming garden, checking the drains and righting fallen plant-pots? Everything looked not newly washed, but battered. Smeary as a woman after an afternoon in bed. The slabs were patterned with snail-tracks of mud, and the gutters on the garage roof were still dripping. I leaned my face into a yellow rose but could smell nothing; a cold drip ran down my nose. The white ropes of the hammock were dark with rain. On the grass lay a cushion I made years ago of dirty yellow brocade from an old jacket of my mother’s. I knew I should take it inside and wash it, but it looked so well against the grass that I left it there.
I remembered that cushion from a few summers back. Cara and I in the hammock after mass, limbs entwined under a shifting blanket of Sunday supplements. I had stuck a row of buttercups between her toes. My hand was a daredevil mouse, scrabbling between layers of newsprint, creeping under her hem of Indian gauze. Cara’s hiss of protest trailed off, and her head sagged back on the yellow cushion. ‘Lie still,’ I whispered, ‘you’ve got a touch of the sun.’ The huge scent of her clouded around us, filling the garden. I remembered the swallowing up of my thumb, and that look of hers, like fury, like astonishment.
The grating echoed behind me; Kate’s step, firmer than her father’s. Damn the woman, could she not go to bed like any normal highflyer? ‘Hey there,’ I said, not turning my head. I busied myself with pulling some withered leaves off the lemon balm.
‘Hey.’
‘Dinner all right?’
‘Great; I haven’t tasted real home cooking in a long time.’
I felt patronized, but shoved the feeling away. ‘Good thing your bag turned up; I don’t think I could have found you anything of mine that you’d care to wear.’
‘Oh, those morons are always misdirecting my baggage.’ She yawned behind her pale brown hand. ‘Someone had obviously gone through it in a hurry. Do you know what they stole, of all things?’
My stomach churned. I hadn’t, I wouldn’t.
‘My toothbrush.’
I gave the obedient giggle of breath and kept my head down, contemplating the plants. The yellow toothbrush was suddenly stiff in the pocket of my trousers; I was sure it was outlined down my thigh. ‘There’ll be a spare in the cupboard beside the sink,’ I told her.
I headed down to the compost heap, picking up a dead leaf or two along the way. The sky over the wall was the slate-blue of my mother’s all-purpose eyeshadow. Any minute now it would be dark.
‘This her?’
I turned and peered through the twilight.
Kate held up a packet of photos. ‘Found them beside the phone.’
‘They’re Jo’s.’ I turned back.
‘Is this one her?’
I kept busy at the compost heap. ‘What’s it of?’
‘A crowd of women on a beach. The one I’m looking at has practically no hair, but it seems red. Sitting on a motorbike.’
‘Nah, that’s Sherry. Cara’s terrified of motorbikes. Look for the tallest of them, with hair to her chin.’
Kate was silent for a while. Part of my brain wondered how indiscreet the photos were; which graphic T-shirts, which casual embraces, had been caught by the camera. I walked up as far as the pear tree. ‘Found her?’
‘Yeah, there’s quite a few. I saw her in the first one, actually, but she looked so young I thought it couldn’t be.’ Kate tapped the pile on her knee to straighten it, and put it back in the envelope. ‘You want a look?’
‘No need.’ I picked up the sodden cushion and tossed it into the hammock.
I could hear Kate’s voice deepen as if the power had been switched on. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you seem a little hostile.’
‘Hostile? Really?’ I held her gaze for a second, to show I could.
‘I know it’s probably just the shock. I wondered if I’d done anything…’
‘No, no, sure what could you have done, you’ve only been here a day. I’m not quite myself this week. But you’re not to feel…I mean, you’re welcome to this house.’
‘Thank you,’ murmured Kate, equally formal. After a minute, ‘I’m not really coherent, I should probably hit the sack.’
‘Do.’
‘Have you got a bus schedule? I have to go into the city tomorrow and fax a report to the office.’
‘So they don’t let you off work even for a sister’s funeral?’
She cleared her throat tiredly. ‘We’re always expected to stay in touch. They want me back Thursday morning.’
I relented. ‘The buses are impossible. I’ll drive you into town tomorrow, if you can stoop to a Mini.’
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t put you to the trouble –’
‘I’ve nothing else to do, I’m off school till Thursday. Honestly, I’d be glad to.’
‘That’s kind of you,’ Kate said uneasily.
I caught her eye and we were suddenly laughing, a short burst each. ‘See,’ I told her, ‘I can be nice. Get a good night’s sleep.’
‘You too.’
I watched her walk up the garden path, and suddenly I recognized her. Not just the similarities to the girl she was at sixteen but the sameness, the two Kates blending together as s
he walked away from me, their angles merging. I supposed I knew her best from behind. There was a Yeats line I used to mouth in my head, watching her from three rows in a sleepy classroom: ‘high, and solitary, and most stern’. And now I found myself as angry with her as I ever felt, as I was the day I sat the Inter Cert for the first time.
It is five minutes before the Maths exam and I am being calm. ‘6 June 1978’ I have printed unnecessarily at the top of the pink answer book, and a minuscule K in every corner for good luck. Some girl – I remember a plait, no name – leans over for a last gossip. ‘D’you hear about the Walls?’
‘What walls?’
‘Kate ’n’ Cara. Their parents are getting a separation, isn’t that awful? Lucy says Kate claims the mother’s got this hightech architecture contract out in Ohio, they’re going in July, but it sounds to me like the mother’s got a boyfriend.’
An echo of her sentence strikes me. ‘Who’s they who’s going?’
The invigilator rapped on his desk and a hush falls as the papers are handed out. ‘Kate,’ the girl’s chapped lips form. It is unmistakable; the lips widen to let out the sharp vowel. If it was the younger sister, Cara, the girl’s mouth would only have dipped a little.
After a minute I remind myself to breathe. I will not scan the line of heads before me for Kate’s brown curls, the determined dip of her Roman nose towards the first question. I look down at the fresh page and think I will be sick on it, thus breaking some examination rule they never thought to make. I lay down my biro. There is nothing it would make any sense to write. My fantasies have been truncated; the story has been ripped up. My plans for the choreographed winning of Kate Wall over several years have been crushed into two weeks.
I will not ring her. I will not say something every schoolfriend will say, like ‘Sorry you’re going.’ How dare she do this to my life and not even notice?
They don’t let you leave for the first fifteen minutes in case you hand the exam paper over to a confederate in the toilet. I keep busy, writing K over and over and darker and deeper scored into the paper, covering the inches, because when the page is full then I can go.
I was standing in the wet garden now, and it was night. Best time for remembering, I supposed, the sky being a black retina on to which the mind could project any image. Though what possible good it could do me to remember being mad about Kate Wall I did not know. What had it amounted to but a riot of adolescent hormones that cost me my exams? The only useful thing about remembering her was that it distracted me from her sister. It almost convinced me that I had an independent self, a Pen who pre-existed (and so might even survive) Cara. A younger self who knew nothing of the compromises and endurances of a long-term partnership, who knew only the basics: longing and hiding, a lust so distilled it felt almost platonic.
I felt my way down to the end of the garden. The dump was filled with ash from last month’s bonfire; its whiteness caught the light from the kitchen. I fished in my pocket for the toothbrush, and pushed it well in.
I shut the kitchen door behind me, brushing the last dab of ash from my fingers. They ached a little, as if I had been carrying heavy bags. No sign of either of the Walls; my castle was my own again. Robbie hadn’t rung, it occurred to me, which was just as well really. Our connection, over this past year since he had somehow got himself hired by the nuns, was a matter of matching raised eyebrows in the staff-room and the odd gorge at the nearby Pâtisserie; what would I have to say to him tonight?
I made myself a cup of cocoa, very milky, hoping the associations of comfort and sleep would outweigh the caffeine. I shut off the light and sat down at the table. The dark was balm to my eyes. Grace leaped from nowhere on to my knee. When my heart had stopped hammering I reached to scratch his head, but he winced as if I had hit him. A leap, and there he was, stalking along the counter, nosing a chopping-board. A dislodged envelope caught the light as it floated down on to the tiles. Then the cat-flap smashed open and he was gone on his night prowls.
My elbows slid a little on the smooth plane of the table. I leaned my full weight on them, holding the steaming mug close to my face. There was a girl in our class who had spilt a pot of cocoa on her arm as a toddler; the flesh there was red and rippled. On the hockey pitch one day, someone made a crack about it. My eyes were on Kate as usual, and when her mouth opened to laugh I laughed too, and when hers shut, so did mine, and only then was I ashamed.
Of course I might have laughed on my own initiative anyway, being as cruel as any other schoolgirl. There was no need for me to go blaming Kate Wall for everything. She was not to know the effects her slightest actions had on me the year I turned sixteen, and the earthquake it set off in my head when she moved to Ohio. As for the Inter Cert, I might have mucked it up anyway, what with period pains and panic-stricken nights listening to the whisper of Radio Luxembourg under the blankets.
Just as well I failed the exams that time around, really, since otherwise I would never have stayed back a year and found Cara. But I didn’t want to think about her now. She took too much out of me. Another swallow of cocoa scalded my tongue; I poured the rest down the sink and climbed the stairs to bed.
What I needed was someone to tell me a story. Once, during a particularly stressful summer term at Immac, I borrowed one of those relaxation tapes from the library, and was amazed by how well it worked, with what relief my mind handed over my body’s reins to the firm voice of some stranger. It was such bliss to be told what to do, muscle by muscle. It reminded me of being read to by my mother, before I was able to read for myself. I used to curl up around her hips like a prawn. She read with her eyes on the page, looking down every few pages with a slightly stern smile to ask was I sleepy yet. The best was that book about the princess and the goblin; when it got to the bit about the silver-grey thread that she had to follow all the way back through the mines and up to her grandmother’s room in the moonlit tower, I used to squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate till I could feel the thread between my fingers.
This was ridiculous; thirty years old, and my head was cluttered up with the detritus of childhood. I rolled over on one side, pressed half my face into the pillow, and resorted to the original mantra:
Now I lay me down to sleep I pray to God my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake I pray to God my soul to take
It was working; the iambic octameter was hypnotizing me towards sleep. I began to stumble over the rhymes, playing with them exhaustedly.
Now I lay me down to wake I pray to God my fear to take
If I should cry before I sleep I pray to God my fear to keep
Now I lay me down and die I pray to God my soul to try
If I should sleep before I wake I pray to God my wake to keep
Some hours later I woke thirsty, my tongue raw. I rolled on to my back, lifting my knees to ease the stiffness. Usually when I stirred in the night, Cara would wake too, and make some enigmatic comment – ‘Pen, Pen, I’ve just realized that three full stops make a dot dot dot’ – before sinking back to sleep.
I padded off for a glass of water. Halfway down I jolted in fright. Mr. Wall was standing at the foot of the stairs. I had never seen him in his pyjamas before; they seemed to be beige, with long sleeves almost covering his knuckles. He was looking up, his eyes dark below a patch of streetlight that illumined the carvings in his forehead. He filled the stairwell like a daddy-long-legs about to be smashed between dictionary and wall. I waited for him to explain what he was looking for, but he said nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, or brush by.
‘I’m just getting a glass of water, would you like one?’ I said inanely.
Mr. Wall blinked several times. Perhaps he was losing his mind. He never usually came upstairs; that was our place, mine and Cara’s. He seemed to be nailed to the ground, his mouth hanging slightly open.
A crash; no, just the warped door of the middle bedroom opening. Kate’s decisive steps went by above us, and the bathroom lock squeaked shut. I r
ealized that I had been holding my breath. The man below me had turned his face; he seemed to be watching something on the front lawn. All at once I felt immensely heavy, my King Kong limbs swelling to fill and crack the stairwell. I had to lean against the smooth wallpaper until I was convinced of my human proportions.
The bathroom door opened, and I followed the diminishing sound of her steps. I looked at her father. His mouth was shut and his eyes were down. ‘Goodnight now,’ he said, almost normally, and turned away.
TUESDAY
I woke to the phone, with the sense that it had been tolling in my ears all night. Groggy from the tablets, I pulled my orange robe around me and stumbled downstairs. Taking the receiver from Kate – she had a triangle of dark toast in her other hand – I held a brief and mutually hostile conversation with the plumber who was meant to come the previous Friday. Then I straightened the frayed towelling round my neck and climbed back to bed.
I dug my face into the crease I had left in the pillow. The world should go away and let me sleep. Too many mornings I had been woken by the sobs of the phone. The one in the small terraced house I grew up in, the house my mother inherited from her mother, had a rich old-fashioned sound to it. But when my father’s job gardening at the university brought us to the southside in my teens, the new phone turned out to be a whiner. I had taught myself to leap out of bed on the first ring, saving Mammy’s temper, because Cara always seemed to phone at the most unsuitable times of day. The time she rang with her big news, it couldn’t have been later than seven on a Saturday morning, a matter of weeks after she’d left me for the second time.
I lift the receiver and for a second the silence scares me, but then I can hear her stifled air. ‘Is that you? Come on, Cara, breathe.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Yes you can, you couldn’t speak if you weren’t.’
She hates logic.
‘Talk to me. Is it the Leaving Cert results, are they out yet?’