Brothers and Sisters (18 page)

My cousin Karen and her best friend were also living in London, somewhere real, that they had found for themselves. They were nursing in one of the hospitals in the centre of the city. They did a lot of night shifts, and had plenty of time to visit me during the day. Karen wore a leather jacket covered with studs and told me how she’d stamped on the toes of a man who’d shoved her at a Smiths gig. Her docs had extra-thick soles. Her face was set in a defensive snarl, which faded after an hour or so in the creamy quiet of our flat.

‘I’m fat,’ I said to my cousin—something I could never say to Emma.

‘I’m fat too,’ said Karen, who was looking in our fridge. Her spiked blonde hair brushed the shelves as she bent down to take out a block of cheese.

‘I’ve got a new way of losing weight,’ said Ruth from the living room. She was lying full length on the cream sofa, her boots splayed on the cushions.

‘Yeah?’ said Karen. We came to stand in the doorway, Karen holding the cheese.

‘The twist,’ said Ruth, staring down at her boots.

‘What do you mean?’ said Karen.

‘You know those fifties movies? You never see a fat girl, do you?’

We watched as she swung her boots to the floor and stood up. She began to twist on the white pile of the carpet, her dyed hair flopping into her face. It was like the traffic that you could see through the window—odd, jerky, no soundtrack, except the hushing of her boots on the carpet.

Karen laughed scornfully, and began to tear open the plastic wrapping of the cheese. ‘It wasn’t the twist. It was the Ford pills. They were all taking laxatives.’

‘I wonder if that works,’ I said. Ruth kept twisting. Karen and I met each other’s eyes.

Oh, Jerome
. I heard Emma say this one night. I had been asleep but woke at the sound of the key in the lock. I was suddenly rigid in my bed. The bedroom door was open. What should I do?

But they were only saying goodnight. I turned quickly on my side before Emma came in, and didn’t answer when she said softly, ‘You awake?’

The next day was Saturday. Emma made me come with her to the National Portrait Gallery. We were early, and sat on the steps in the pale sunlight, watching the pigeons milling and crashing in the square.

‘You should stay at Jerome’s house if you want to,’ I said. I was clacking the toes of my doc martens together. I had recently noticed that I could not sit without some part of my body moving.

There was a pause. People were beginning to line up around us; we kept having to lean sideways to let them pass.

‘I wouldn’t want to leave you alone,’ said Emma.

‘I’ll be alright,’ I said. Then added, ‘You’re not my mother, you know.’

‘What if someone broke in?’

I looked straight at her now, as witheringly as I could. I kept my feet still. There were three separate security doors between us and London, and anyone who did manage to breach them would not bother coming down the lengths of carpeted corridor, turning the corners, passing the stairwells, all the way to our flat. I couldn’t imagine commanding that much attention from anyone, not even a murderer.

Jerome had a friend who managed a chain of bookshops. There was a job available in their smallest branch, which was on the fifth floor of a department store in Knightsbridge. In my letter of application I invented a bookshop back in Sydney, and named it after one of my university friends. I rang her up—long distance, still an event in those days—and asked her to make up some letterhead and write me a reference.

At the interview, the manager of the tiny book section said, ‘You seem very nervous. Why are you so nervous?’

I was nervous because I had written the letter too quickly, I didn’t have a copy, and I couldn’t remember what I’d said about my time working at Woods Books in Enmore. He was holding my friend’s letter and I kept trying to peer at it. I could see that she must have used one of the computers at university to type it up. I could see that she had changed her signature to make her seem more like the proprietor of Woods Books. I couldn’t tell if it was obvious that she, like me, was only eighteen.

I think I was probably clacking the toes of my boots together again, too. I said, ‘I just really want the job.’

‘Well,’ said the manager, looking down at the letter, ‘I suppose I’ll have to give it to you then.’

I watched him as he sorted through his desk drawers for the right forms. His name was Rory. He had white skin that looked as though it would be cold to the touch, a tightly knotted woollen tie and a patterned waistcoat. He would have been only three or four years older than I was but his
I suppose I’ll have to give it to you then
was elaborately patronising. I tried to imagine being friends with him—perhaps eating lunch with him—and felt my mouth make an involuntary grimace.

But I was glad of the job. I was grateful to be on the move again. I loved catching the tube in the mornings. I loved feeling as though I was the same as everyone around me. I enjoyed feeling exasperated with the tourists who stood in front of the turnstiles, holding their tickets, trying to work out how to get through. I wore headphones and listened to the Smiths or the Triffids. I learned to make my face impassive as I stood in the swinging aisles of the train, hanging onto a strap. I learned not to look at anyone. My friend from uni who’d lived in London had not learned this lesson fast enough—a woman in her office used to shout at her, if she caught her, ‘What the fuck are
you
looking at?’

Do Australians gaze openly around them? I am trying to imagine myself doing this. I can see myself exchanging smiles with people on the bus, but maybe this is not true.

Every few weeks Emma got a letter from Peter, who was finishing his commerce degree in Sydney. I got letters almost every post, having channelled my lost voice into aerogrammes. My friends drew pictures and sent me bits of their lives—some hair, a leaf folded into the blue paper. Emma showed me one of her letters before putting it in the bin. Peter said that he hated his degree, and hated the other students.
I always wanted to be a pilot
, he wrote,
but my mother wouldn’t let me.
I shall never forgive her for that.

‘Why doesn’t he do it now?’ I said, handing the letter back to her. ‘He’s twenty-two. He doesn’t have to do what his mother says anymore.’

Emma just looked at me, then did what she always did, ripped the letter, once, twice, and stamped on the bin pedal to flip the lid up. I didn’t know if she was writing back to him.

In my aerogrammes I told my friends how wonderful, how amazing London was, and with Emma, Karen and Ruth I dutifully went to see bands, new movies, exhibitions. I was so often bored when I went to see bands, but found it hard to admit this to myself. This was London. I had read about these bands in the
NME
. If I could get drunk enough I would not be bored, but often my capacity for the large, plastic cups of brown, watery beer fell short of drunkenness. I got sleepy standing there next to Emma, holding my cup, watching the other two dancing, yawning till my ears ached.

I made a friend at work, out of necessity. Her name was Sarah, and we were united in our hatred of Rory. Poor Rory. His face seemed always to be sweating—pearls of it on his upper lip and forehead— while I was still cold and getting colder, clutching my coat around me as I stood in the lift going up to our floor. Sometimes I wore my coat all morning. Rory was not bad-looking; he had a classic English look: dark hair and plenty of it, regular features. But the sweat, and the froglike skin, and the whining drawl he spoke in. I nicknamed him Rory the Reptile and taught Sarah to play
How much would you
charge?
We always ended up at the same place—
How much would
you charge to sleep with Rory?
Sarah was one of those conscientious players who tried to put a realistic price on things. Fifty pounds? One hundred pounds? I was always unreachable—a million pounds. A
billion
pounds.

I hadn’t, of course, slept with anybody, but Sarah had. She had a boyfriend called Michael, who often used to stay at her house. Her parents wouldn’t let him sleep in her bedroom, though, so they had to sneak into each other’s rooms at night. She told me everything they did. All day she talked about Michael and I suppose I encouraged her, for we were the only people who worked in our dwindling section, and I had no other friends. It was her or Rory.

‘We couldn’t make love this morning because Dad was up early. But we had a shower together after he left.’

I would be on my knees in the storeroom, slitting open a box of books with a Stanley knife. Sarah would be sitting at the desk with the invoice. It was my job to unpack and count the books while she marked them off.

‘Michael told me he wants me to buy some sexy underwear. So he can tear it off!’

‘Can you two hurry it up! I want to get those on the shelves before lunchtime!’

We glanced at each other and rolled our eyes as Rory walked away. Rory was not fat, but he had a broad bottom like a woman’s. I despised him for this, the way I despised myself. Sarah thought he was gay, but that was too obvious. He wasn’t anything. I knew people like that at home. Perhaps others thought that was what I was like. I never had any boyfriends. But I had desires, powerful desires, and needs, and I was young enough to think that Rory did not.