Perfections (35 page)

Lina is clenching her fists so tightly, it feels as though her fingernails are shearing straight through her palms. She opens her hands. A series of deep, savage crescents grin up at her. ‘This is monstrous,’ she hisses, and the hateful woman in the bed has the audacity to laugh.

‘Yes,’ Sally Paige says, contempt glinting in her eyes. ‘
Monstrous
is exactly what we are.’

Lina stalks towards her. No clear thought in her mind beyond inflicting some kind of hurt. She reaches for the plastic tubing that runs from the medication machine into the woman’s scrawny-sallow chest, delivering her a painlessness so ill-deserved it’s obscene, and–

‘Jacqueline, don’t.’ Ant rises unsteadily from her chair.

‘Why are you protecting her? She
tortured
you.’

‘It’s not her I’m protecting.’ Eyes red-laced and bleary, her sister looks dead on her feet. Her voice trembles as much as the hand she now lifts. Fragile, pleading. ‘This isn’t who you are, Jacqueline–
Lina
. You’re better than this. You’re better than
her
.’

‘Am I?’ She shakes her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Please. I
need
you to be better.’

Lina hesitates. Half-hoping Sally Paige will pipe in with some gloating, goading remark. Final straw, permission slip, mitigating fucking circumstance. But she says nothing. Does nothing.
Is nothing
, Lina realises. Is merely the hollow, stiff-faced husk of a mother who never was. And Lina smiles, and folds her hands over her middle, and moves away from the woman cowering in the bed. One day, soon perhaps, she will bring a child of her own into the world. A child who will never know the poison that is Sally Paige. Who will never even know her name.

‘Come on,’ Lina says, walking around to her sister. ‘You’re exhausted, you should rest.’ She takes Ant’s hand. ‘We don’t need her anymore. We
never
needed her.’

At the door, her sister stops and glances back towards the bed. ‘What did I lose?’ she whispers. ‘When I made . . .
Charlie
, what did I give up?’

Sally Paige shakes her head. ‘I don’t know, dear. Whatever it was, I doubt you’ll have missed it. That poor creature is so simple, so
ill-conceived
, you could have put him together from doll parts and spit.’

‘Ant, leave it. Let’s go.’

‘Yes, go,’ Sally Paige says. ‘I’m tired. I want to sleep.’

Lina puts an arm around her sister’s waist. ‘Come on.’

But Ant pulls away. ‘You shouldn’t have taken him, Mum. He wasn’t your mistake, he was mine.’

‘You were just a child.’

‘Yes, but not anymore. And now I want him back.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sally Paige scoffs. ‘You couldn’t possibly cope, not with
three
of them. You just wait, my girl. Those two you have, they’ll drag you down soon enough.’

‘What’s she talking about?’ Lina asks.

‘Nothing,’ Ant says. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, it
matters
, dear. Don’t you kid yourself about that.’

‘Ant?’

Her sister shrugs her off. ‘This isn’t the end of it, Mum.’

‘No,’ Sally Paige replies. ‘I don’t suppose it is.’

Antoinette wakes, dry-mouthed and disoriented, a crick in her neck from where she’s been curled against the arm of the couch. The dull, grey light of early evening seeps through the living room windows and someone has draped one of Sally Paige’s crocheted throw rugs over her while she slept. She pushes herself upright, wincing at the pain throbbing behind her right eye. There’s a glass of water on the coffee table, two small white tablets nudging its base, and Antoinette washes them down gratefully. Out in the kitchen, the kettle begins to shriek.

It’s the only sound in the whole house.

With some effort, she gets to her feet. Shuffles into the kitchen with the throw still wrapped around her shoulders, motley caped crusader somewhat worse for wear, and finds her mother spooning tea leaves into a pot. ‘You want a cup?’

Antoinette shakes her head. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘I heard them go outside earlier. I assume they’re with
him
.’

‘I meant what I said before.’

‘So did I.’

‘I’m not just going to let you take him with you.’

Her mother picks up the kettle, bracing her elbow with her other hand, and starts to fill the teapot. But her aim isn’t the best and hot water splashes off the porcelain rim, splattering her wrist with scalding drops.

‘Mum, here, let me.’ Antoinette takes it from her. ‘I don’t know why you bother with a whole pot. You never finish the first cup half the time, and even if you do get to the second, the tea’s gone cold.’

‘It’s better made in a pot. Tea bags are vile.’

‘Whatever. You want to have this in the living room?’

‘I’d rather not.’ She glances towards the window, the backyard yawning empty in the diminishing light. ‘They’ll probably be in again soon.’

‘You don’t have to hide, Mum. It’s your house.’

‘Not while they’re here, it isn’t.’

Antoinette settles her mother back into bed and pours her a cup of tea. Sally Paige takes a small sip, makes a face like she’s been tricked into drinking tepid swamp-water, and promptly passes it back. ‘It tastes off.’

‘I don’t think tea can go off, Mum.’ But she takes the cup anyway, puts it on the bedside table beside the pot. ‘Do you want something else instead?’

Sally Paige makes no reply, just sits propped in her nest of pillows, frowning as she fiddles with her medication tube.

‘Mum?’

‘Your sister hates me.’

‘Yes. I think she does.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘I guess . . . I can see your side of it. I mean, okay, you made the twins because you thought you couldn’t have a baby of your own, but I created Loki because my stupid boyfriend dumped me. You can’t get much more pathetic than that, really.’

‘You didn’t know what you were doing.’

‘Yeah, but what you said, how we all want to believe that we’ll be the one lucky woman who gets it right?’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m no different. Maybe it wouldn’t have been
Loki
, but sooner or later I would’ve perfected
someone
, regardless of what you had or hadn’t told me. So there’s no use blaming you for that, and as for the rest . . . I don’t agree with most of it – I don’t
like
any of it – but you did it for us, Jacqueline and me both. You tried to give us normal lives, and I can’t hate you for that either.’

Her mother is silent for a moment. Then she nods, seemingly more to herself than to Antoinette, and pats the bed beside her. ‘Come here. Sit down.’

Antoinette sinks into the mattress.

‘You need to give me that boy,’ her mother tells her.

‘If I do that, it’ll be the same as killing him.’

‘Nevertheless.’

‘No.’ She swallows. ‘If I get sick at some point, then fine, I get sick. Loki’s done nothing wrong. He didn’t ask to be here, and I’m not going to put a death sentence on his head just because things might . . . get hard.’

‘Things
will
get hard.’

‘You carried two perfections for over twenty years. And you know what, Mum? You have
cancer
, not some magical, mystical illness that no one can explain. Yes, it’s awful, but people get cancer all the time.’

‘It’s not the same,’ her mother says. ‘The
charliedoll
is barely alive, barely even sentient. He demands so little compared with your sister – that’s
why
I could host them both for so long. Believe me, I know what two full-blown perfections can do to a woman. I had the twins for four years. Growing weaker as they grew older, more complicated, more demanding. They almost killed me, Antoinette.’ She lowers her gaze, lowers her voice. ‘It was unsustainable.
They
were unsustainable.’

‘Mum . . . I don’t–’

‘Choice can be the cruellest of illusions. Sometimes, there’s no decision you can make that won’t be wrong.’ Clearing her throat, she lifts red-raw eyes to meet Antoinette’s once again. ‘But still, you have to make it
’

‘No. Charlie, he . . . it was an
accident
.’

‘It wasn’t
planned
. That’s a whole world of difference.’

An ordinary Thursday afternoon. Bath time for the twins. A ringing phone. And Sally Paige, numb and nauseous as she’s been for the past month or more, staring down at her two soapy, squealing children. If any thought stumbled across her foggy mind – and she doesn’t think one did, not consciously at least – it must have been that her youngest daughter, her
real
daughter, might prefer an older
sister
.

And so it was Jacqueline she scooped out of the bath.

Jacqueline she wrapped in the fluffy yellow towel.

Jacqueline she carried, heavy and damp, through the empty house.

‘You left Charlie alone
on purpose
?’

‘No, I simply chose your sister. It’s not the same.’

Sally Paige was on the phone for maybe a minute. As long as it took for the man from the library to remind her about the three overdue books she still had out on loan. For her to apologise and promise to bring them back the next day. She heard the crash as she hung up. The pain-laced wail cut surprisingly short. And Sally Paige put Jacqueline down on the kitchen floor. Left her swaddled in the towel and told her to wait. Mummy would be right back.

‘He’d wanted the bottle of bubbles,’ her mother says. ‘I’d left them on the windowsill and he must have climbed up on the side of the tub to reach them. Slipped and hit his head when he fell.’

Antoinette holds up a hand. ‘I know the rest of the story.’

‘That’s right, you know the
story
.’

Yes, Charles was unconscious when Sally Paige returned to the bathroom, but his face was not beneath the water. Instead, he’d fallen sideways and lay angled across the tub, his head propped up on the edge. Blood dripped from his scalp, threading scarlet down white enamel. He was still breathing as she slid his limp and unresisting body along the length of the tub, still breathing as she turned him over onto his stomach and placed her hand gently upon his head. But he never struggled. He never woke up.

The last thing Sally Paige did before calling the ambulance, was rinse away the blood from the side of the bath.

‘You
murdered
him,’ Antoinette whispers, horrified.

‘I made a
choice.
I couldn’t keep them both.’

Antoinette lurches to her feet. She can’t be this close to her mother, not right now, maybe not ever again. ‘And Charlie?’ she says. ‘
My
Charlie? Why didn’t you just do away with him as well? Instead of taking him from me, instead of keeping him locked up like some sideshow-alley freak?’

For a second, Sally Paige’s face crumples – but only for a second. She wipes at her eyes with a corner of the sheet. ‘You think I’m a monster.’ Her voice is wavering and hoarse. ‘And you’re right. But whatever I am, whatever else I’ve done, I could
not
kill my son
twice
.’

Antoinette backs slowly away, bumps her hip on the edge of the open door. ‘I can’t listen to any more of this.’

‘You have to give me Loki,’ her mother insists. ‘It’s the easiest way.’

‘Never.’

‘Then you’re a fool.’

‘Maybe. But at least I’m not you.’

And Sally Paige laughs, actually
laughs
, a braying hyena cackle that chills Antoinette to the bone. ‘We’ll see. Like mother, like daughter – that’s half
my
blood you have, running through those veins.’

Antoinette swallows. ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to take Loki and my sister home. And then I’m coming back here, and I’m going to sit by your side every day. I’m going to watch as you get sicker, as the pain gets worse and the drugs get stronger, and when you’re weak enough, confused enough, I’m going to reach in there and take back my brother.’

‘You can’t do that.’ But that voice is uncertain now, tinged with doubt.

‘I think you know I can,’ Antoinette says. ‘I think you know I will.’

Then she smiles, a sour-sharp twist of her lips that – god help her – must be the spitting image of a patented Sally Paige grimace, and steps backwards from the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

And,
oh
–

Gasping, hand flying to her heart as she almost runs, smack-bang right into the both of them: Loki-Lina huddled Siamese in the darkling hallway, two pairs of eavesdropping ears, two pairs of startled eyes opening wide, and Antoinette doesn’t even need to ask how much they might have overheard.