Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (18 page)

Her hundreds of skinny plaits gleamed; I wondered how she kept them like that. Under her army surplus shirt her shoulders were wider than anyone’s I knew. She had all she needed to be a total butch and didn’t seem to realize it.

‘So how did you pick the name?’ she asked at last, jerking me out of my daze.

‘What, Luce? Well, I was christened Lucy, but I’ve always—’

‘No,’ she interrupted softly, ‘the co-op’s name, the Welcome.’

‘Oh,’ I said, with an embarrassed laugh.

‘Is it, like, meant to sound like everyone’s welcome?’

‘No, actually, it’s named after some defunct co-op down in London, on Welcome Street,’ I told her. ‘When they folded they passed the leftover money to a group in Manchester that was just starting up. Before my time.’

‘So are you really only eighteen?’

I almost blushed as I nodded.

JJ had to be in her twenties, but she didn’t specify. In fact she hadn’t volunteered any information about herself yet, it occurred to me now.

The whole time I’d lived in the Welcome – with all the guff that got talked about acceptance and non-judgmentalism – I’d never met anyone half as accepting as JJ. Her tolerance even crossed the species barrier; it didn’t seem to have occurred to her, for instance, that a rat wasn’t a suitable pet. (And Victor did turn out to be a total charmer.) Like a visitor from Mars, JJ displayed no fixed opinions about race, class, or any other label. Though she’d chosen to live in a women-only housing co-op, I never heard her make a single generalization about men (unlike, say, Iona, whose favourite joke that summer was ‘What’s the best way to make a man come?’ – ‘Who the fuck cares!’).

When various of our housemates talked as if all the world was queer, JJ didn’t join in, but she didn’t make any objection, either. She listened with her head bent, wearing what Di called her ‘wary Bambi’ look. At JJ’s interview, I remembered, it was Rachel who’d come out with the usual uncomfortable spiel about ‘This co-op has members of a variety of sexualities,’ and instead of giving either of the two usual responses – ‘Oh, but I have a boyfriend’ or ‘Fab!’ – JJ had just nodded, eyes elsewhere, as if she were being told how the washing machine worked.

Shy people annoyed Di; she thought it was too much hard work, digging conversation out of them, and the results were rarely worth it.

‘But is she or isn’t she, though?’ I begged Di.

‘How should I know, Luce?’

‘Didn’t they teach you how to assess people at nursing school?’

Di laughed and flicked her hair back from her soup bowl. She blew on her spoon before she answered me. ‘Only their health. All I can tell you is the woman seems in good shape, apart from a bit of acne and a few stone she could afford to lose.’

I felt mildly offended by that – JJ being the perfect shape, in my book – but I stuck to the point. ‘Yeah, but is she a dyke?’

Di twinkled at me. ‘What do you care, Miss Celibate?’

Not that I thought I had much of a chance, whatever kind of sexuality the woman had, but I needed to know anyway. Just to have some information on JJ. Just to find out whether it was worth letting her into my dreams.

One evening when I came in after the news, JJ told me, ‘The government are cutting housing benefit,’ and before I could stop myself, I said, ‘The government
is.
’

Her thick black eyebrows contracted.

‘Sorry. It’s just—’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s a collective noun,’ I muttered, mortified. ‘It takes the singular. But it doesn’t matter.’ I suddenly heard myself: what an unbearably tedious teenager!

But JJ’s bright teeth widened into a grin. ‘You like to classify things, don’t you, Luce?’ she said. ‘Everything in its little box.’

‘I suppose so.’ I thought about how good my name sounded in her husky voice.

‘Do you classify people, too?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, trying to sound cheeky, now, rather than obnoxious. ‘Like, you, for instance, I’d say …’ I was bluffing; I tried to think of something she’d like to hear. ‘I’d say you’re someone who’s at peace with yourself, I suppose,’ I told her. ‘Because you only speak when you’ve something to say. Unlike someone like me, who rabbits on and on and on all the time.’ I shut my mouth, then, and covered it with my hand.

The light was behind JJ; I couldn’t read her eyes. ‘That’s how you’d describe me, is it, Luce? At peace with myself?’

‘Yeah,’ I said doubtfully.

She put her throat back and roared. Her deep laughter filled the room.

‘What’s the joke?’ asked Rachel, sticking her head in the door, but I just shrugged.

Well, at least JJ found me funny, I told myself. It was better than nothing.

I still hadn’t gathered a single clue about her sexual orientation. Some mornings, I woke with the clenched face that told me I’d been grinding my teeth again. To me, the fact that I was a dyke had been clear as glass by my thirteenth birthday, but then, precision was my thing. Maybe JJ was one, too, and didn’t know it yet, would never know it till my kiss woke her. Or maybe she was one of those ‘labels are for clothes’ people, who couldn’t bear to be categorized. She dressed like a truck driver, but so did half the straight girls nowadays. With anyone else I would have pumped her friends for information, but JJ didn’t seem to have any friends in Manchester. She worked long shifts at the Pizza Palace, and she never brought anyone home.

We got on best, I found, when we just talked about day-today matters like the colour of the sky. No big questions, no heavy issues. The sweetest times that summer were when she came out to help me with the vegetables. After a long July day we’d each take a hose and water one side of the garden, not speaking till we met at the end by the crab apple tree. Sometimes she brought Victor’s cage down from her room for an airing. If Iona – who called him
that rodent
– wasn’t in the garden, JJ would let him out for a run; once I even fed him a crumb from my hand.

We got talking once about why I wanted to do politics at college in the autumn. ‘I just think it’ll be interesting to find out how things work,’ I said.

‘What things?’

‘Big things,’ I said, trying to sound dry and witty. ‘Countries, information systems, the global economy, that sort of thing. What goes on, and why.’

JJ shook her head as if marvelling and bent down to rip up some bindweed. I waited to hear what she thought; you couldn’t rush her. ‘I dunno,’ she said at last, ‘I find it hard enough to understand what’s going on inside me.’

I waited, as I trained the hose on the tomato patch, but she didn’t say another word.

Some days that summer I had this peculiar sense of waiting, from when I first rolled out of my single bed till long after midnight when I switched off my light; my stomach was tight with it. But nothing momentous ever happened. JJ never told me what I was waiting to hear – whatever that was.

She lavished care on Victor the rat, stroking his coat and scratching behind his ears with a methodical tenderness that softened me like candle wax. But she never touched another human being, that I could see. She wouldn’t take or give massages; instead of goodbye hugs, she nodded at people. It was just how JJ was. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but of course I did.

Iona didn’t like her one bit, I could tell. Iona specialized in having enough information to take the piss out of anyone; pinned to her bedroom wall was a sprawling multicoloured diagram of who’d shagged who on the Manchester women’s scene since 1990. One evening a few of us were in the living room, and JJ was stroking Victor all the way down his spine with one finger, very slowly and firmly. Iona walked in and said, ‘I get it! You don’t fancy humans at all, just rats.’

JJ threw Iona one unreadable look, scooped Victor back into his cage, and disappeared up the stairs.

The room was silent. ‘Aren’t you ever going to give up?’ I asked, without looking up from my book.

‘Oh, she’s probably just another repressed virgin,’ Iona threw in my direction.

But it didn’t even have to be questions about sex that made JJ bolt, I discovered. She was prickly about the slightest things. For instance, one Sunday morning, most of us were lying around in the garden, half naked. JJ was wrapped up in her huge white flannel dressing gown, as usual. Rachel, bored of the newspapers, started teasing me about waxing my moustache off.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I saw your little box of wax strips in the bathroom, Luce. Trying to get all respectable before you start college, are you?’

JJ lurched out of her deck chair so fast she knocked it over. She stomped off into the house, her dressing gown enveloping her like a ghostly monk. We all stared at each other.

‘Which particular sore point was that?’ snapped Rachel.

I shrugged uncertainly. ‘Maybe the wax is hers.’

‘Who cares if it is?’ Iona butted in. ‘I’ve got pubes down to my knees, for god’s sake!’

Di spoke from behind her magazine. ‘Hands up who didn’t need to know that.’

Di, Kay, and I put our hands in the air. Maura let out a yelp of laughter.

‘Well, one reason I moved in here,’ growled Iona, ‘was to get away from that crap about what should and shouldn’t be talked about. Nothing’s unmentionable!’

‘Yeah, well you can mention what you like as long as you leave JJ alone.’ That came out more loudly than I meant it to. I kept my eyes on the article on permaculture I was skimming. In the silence I could almost hear the others exchange amused glances. Nothing was ever private in the Welcome.

It troubled me that JJ would be so embarrassed about something petty like having a slight, faint moustache. Hadn’t anybody ever told her what a handsome face she had? Now I came to think about it, she couldn’t bear praise. ‘
Seriously
cute,’ I’d let myself say once when she’d come in wearing a new pair of combat trousers – that was all, two words – and she’d glanced down as if she’d never seen herself before and froze up. Could it be that she didn’t like her body – the solid, glorious bulk that I let myself think of only last thing at night, in the dark?

Di was doing the pressure points in my neck one night during the news; she said I felt like old rope.

‘Sleek and flexible?’

‘No, all hard with salt and knotted round itself.’

I stared glumly at the TV pictures.

‘Jesus, Luce,’ asked Di out of nowhere, ‘why her?’

My head whipped round.

Di pushed it back into place gently. ‘And don’t say “who?” You’re so obvious. Whenever JJ’s in the room you sit with your limbs sort of
parted
at her.’

My face scalded. ‘No I don’t.’

‘Even Kay’s noticed, and Kay wouldn’t register the fall of a nuclear bomb.’

I hid my face in my hand.

‘Of all people to fall for!’ said Di crossly.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked.

‘JJ’s an untouchable, honey.’

I flinched at the word.

‘You know it’s true. That rat is the only one let into her bed. You’ll never get anywhere with her in a million years. Don’t take it personally; nobody could get past that force field.’

‘I think she cares about me,’ I said, very low. ‘When I had bad cramps, last month,’ I added in what I knew was a pathetic voice, ‘she left a tulip outside my door.’

‘Of course she cares about you,’ said Di pityingly. ‘Leave it at that.’

But she didn’t know how it was. JJ and I stayed up late sometimes; after the others had all gone to bed, we raided the fruit bowl and watched any old rubbish that was on television. Once, in the middle of a rerun of
Some Like It Hot,
my hand was lying on the couch about half an inch from hers, but no matter what I told myself, I couldn’t bring myself to close the gap. JJ stared at the flickering screen, quite unaware.

I couldn’t sleep, too many nights like that one, wondering what it would be like. Just the back of her hand against mine, that’s all I imagined. I had a feeling it would be hot enough to burn.

August came in hot and cloudy. The tomatoes hung fat but green in the humid garden. Di and I were peeling carrots one morning. She was looking baggy-eyed after a bad shift in the emergency room. ‘Your problem is, Luce,’ she began out of nowhere, ‘you’re too picky. You’ll never find everything you’re looking for in one woman.’

‘What if I already have?’ I muttered, mutinous.

She let out a heavy sigh to show what she thought of that.

I knew I shouldn’t push it, but I couldn’t stop. ‘What if JJ’s my ideal woman?’

‘Your ideal fantasy, you mean. Listen, next time try picking someone who’s willing to sleep with you. Call me old-fashioned, but it’s a big plus!’

Irritated, I gave my finger a bad scrape on the peeler.

‘You should have copped off with someone your first week in this house,’ said Di.

‘With whom, exactly?’ I asked, sucking the blood off my knuckle.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘someone old and wise and relaxed who wouldn’t have put you through any of this angst. Someone like me,’ she added, lopping off a carrot top.

I stared at her through my sweaty fringe. ‘You’re not serious,’ I told her.

‘Well, no,’ said Di with one of her dirty laughs. There was a pause. ‘But I might have been, two years ago,’ she added lightly, ‘when you were all fresh and tempting.’

‘It’s a bit bloody late to tell me now!’ My voice was shrill with confusion.

‘Oh, chop your carrots, child.’

We worked on. I thought about Di and about her current boyfriend, Theo, quite a witty guy who remembered to put the seat down and, judging by the retreats he ran, which involved sitting cross-legged on a mat for six hours a day and Understanding the Pain, he seemed to have more staying power than her others. ‘Besides,’ I said at last, getting my thoughts in order, ‘you’re straight.’

She laughed again and did her
Star Trek
voice. ‘
Classification Error Alert!
’

I was sad then, and Di could tell.

‘Don’t worry about it, Luce,’ she said gently, shovelling the chopped carrots into the pot. ‘In the long run, you know, if two people matter to each other, it doesn’t make much difference whether they’ve ever actually done the business or not.’