The Bad Sister (11 page)

In the metal forest, a melodramatic Disney-movie night had set in. And I could see her waiting for me there, under a hard moon bright as a sequin, by the straight trees which looked as if they had just been sprayed with aluminium paint, her head to one side and her eyes as always in deep shadow. He had gone, and she had returned to me. She was my curse, my bitter dragging-down weight that would keep me out of true all my life, pulling one side of me down in grief and rage, snapping my heart. The wolves walked round her, but they didn't turn to look at her. She was all mine, she was for no one but me.

I rose and walked out of the ring. I left behind the twilight, the uncertain time when the world might turn and go in the other direction. Meg had sent me the vision. I thought of it as I walked straight into the metal forest. I walked past the girl, who was leaning against a tree, her lips blue in the unnatural light from the moon. I went on, through the lines of trees as straight in rows as the crosses of dead soldiers. I looked back once and she was following me. Meg had sent me the vision. I would lose her in the end.

There was no way of measuring time in that artificial forest. My heart beat as if it could hardly beat any longer. My legs felt nothing. After a time, through the last rows of the trees, I saw the lights of Meg's house.

MEG'S HOUSE WAS
in one of the streets allowed to remain ‘pretty' in Chelsea. The houses were low, and flanked by magnolias. The doors were painted fruit colours. Rock music on summer nights was subdued here; the crowds, the mixing of the races, the energy and the corruption and the optimism and despair of modern London were kept out by a system of one-way and dead-end signs more potent than written language. This timelessness – chi-chi is the word that would have been used to describe it a quarter of a century ago – was odd and disconcerting. Even the young people seemed to wear deliberately dated clothes. Posters of the Queen were on show in several windows. There was an air of slightly self-conscious well-being as if the residents knew they were exhibits, perhaps: last traces of a vanishing way of life. My shadow, with her shoulders hunched in a black coat, and her sallow face and her black, sightless stare, was horribly out of place here. She turned the corner after me, and leaned against a low wall as I rang at Meg's bell. She looked like a murderer, or a rapist. As I waited for Meg, I watched women cross the street rather than walk into this sudden chilling patch of shade.

The patio in front of Meg's house was whitewashed, and there was even a grapevine climbing a neat canopy of trellis over the porch. The windows had muslin sash curtains, tied, Bo Peep style, with shiny blue ribbons. The house looked blind, and white, and innocent – a nest for an old woman with fleecy hair, a retreat that was at the same time a fashionable and expensive investment. It had all that disingenuousness. That was why, I remembered, I had
shuddered at it when Gala took me there – for rinding Meg inside was like opening a mother-of-pearl box and finding inside a jet of fire.

Meg opened the door. Along the street, my sister moved restlessly. It was a bright day, and she wanted the unmitigated black of the forest, or at least the two lights of evening, to help her creep up on us. A light wind stirred the flowers and leaves outside the neat houses. And a sweet smell came off them – it may have been lime – it was the sweetest I had ever known. I wondered, when we were in Meg's narrow hall, why she chose to keep it out and burn the inevitable incense sticks. The heavy, Eastern smell closed us off from the street more effectively than thick curtains. I could sense my shadow moving closer, pressing up against the impenetrable scent.

Ah, it was a relief to be in! To be in there, in the red glow. Meg kisses me on the cheek. She looks amused. She is in a long gown of deep red, slashed at the bosom to show a white neck like a column going up to support a Roman head. There is a band of cherry velvet round the middle of the column, and a white rose pinned under her left shoulder. Her lips are carmine, and glisten under the soft red lamp from the hall ceiling. She doesn't take my hand, but leads the way to the first-floor sitting room. It is redder than I remembered, the light so red that it becomes grains of redness, like African sand in a sandstorm. You can almost touch it. We sit on the pile of cushions, by the claw-legged table with the red baize cloth.

‘I've shown you a great deal,' Meg says. ‘How have you liked it, Jane?'

She must know. She must know very well why I am here. Yet I hold back, as if afraid to answer. Meg's head is tilted to one side, like a statue decapitated at the cherry velvet band – down one side of her face runs a shadow of the deepest red.

‘I … I want to go back to the waterfront. Why can't I go back there, Meg?'

‘The waterfront?' Meg chuckles. ‘You want to leave on the ship, you want to go there again?'

‘No … I …'

I am becoming confused now. Meg's tones are distant and rather affected, as if I had disturbed her in preparation for one of the soirées common in the area. I see there are candles – red of course – burning on the card table at the end of the room. A scarlet-headed Tarot card lies on the top of the pack there. Perhaps she really is planning to entertain. I came at the wrong moment. I can feel my triumphant shadow stir outside in the street, just under the trellis of vines.

‘Of course you shall go there again. But perhaps not quite yet, Jane!' She reaches out both hands, and places them over mine. As happened when she did this last time, I feel astonishingly refreshed: my fear begins to slip away.

‘That's better,' Meg murmurs. ‘My poor Jane! What you've been through! My poor Jane! And that girl such a tiresome nuisance to you … inside you day and night, enemy or friend, enemy shadow … or sister … I've seen her … she dogs you day and night. Oh yes … I know. And only when you are rid of her will you go to the port again … and see the man … the man in the clearing in the forest, you know … Oh yes, he'll be there, Jane. How would you like to be with
him
, instead of
her
? Ah, it's hardly a question, is it?'

Meg breaks off at this point and looks with such intensity in the empty grate that I fancy she has started a fire flickering there – for a second I see the orange, leaping flames and a face, a face of forked flame, a face that is my own and looks straight into my own – then it is gone and the stifling red of the room closes in on us once again.

‘Certainly you can't live with them both!' Meg gives a short laugh, rises, and pulls me up with her. ‘It's so easy, Jane. Get Tony's girl, bring her to me, and I'll do away with the rest of them, I promise you!'

‘Get Tony's girl?'

All the while, with her light hands, Meg is pulling me
across the room and out onto the landing. I see the door into another room I had never noticed before is open to receive us. A slice of reddish brown light comes out at us on the gloom of the landing, like the blade of a rusty knife. I hang back, heavy as a stone, afraid.

But Meg drew me through the door into the room. My palms were ice cold now, and wet, but Meg's touch was unchanged. I looked round the room, which was as dim as the sitting room, and small, although it was difficult to tell the proportions in the infra-red glow. There were glass cabinets, and files; in the far corner, pushed up against a heavily curtained window, was a divan covered with a patchwork quilt in diamond scarlet and white pattern. Meg slid open the top of one of the show tables and pulled out two squares of glass with a coil of hair between. I turned to search for the door, which had closed behind us and was now invisible in the small, square room the colour of dried blood. I was in panic. Meg held the twist of hair up close to me. It lay inert and brown as a long-dead caterpillar between the minuscule panes of glass. I shrank away from it.

‘You know what this is, Jane? This is hair from the head of a woman struck by thunder three centuries ago. Now, we all know it's impossible to be struck by thunder. But not really, Jane, not really. It all depends on what we believe and how we say it. Now, Jane, you want to lose that wicked sister, don't you?'

‘But why … how … can I bring you Tony's girl?'

I pulled the crucifix from the chain, wrenched it from my bosom and broke it in two. Why had Stephen given me this? A man handing a woman the effigy of a tiny man on a cross! I feel my fear recede once more. And Meg's demanding tone had changed and she was smiling. I noticed how familiar she suddenly seemed to me, as if in some way she was a part of myself, as if I had known her for a long time. She reminded me of something, of myself … of the figure in the clearing in the forest, who was perhaps a part of herself for she had sent him … I felt a balance return, as
light and easy in that forbidding dark red box as it had been in the even light and shade of the forest ring. The snapped cross lay on the floor between us, Christ's head and body at right angles to his feet.

‘I'll show you how to bring her here.' Meg was looking down at me through eyes as slanting, mocking and clear as those of the elusive figure in the fairy circle. I saw suddenly that they were one and the same: if I brought Meg what she desired he would indeed be mine. She had only to conjure him from air, from leaves, from atoms, from water and fire … Meg put her hands on my shoulders and I felt him there. There was a violent lurch in the pit of my stomach as my shadow struggled outside, beating her head on the walls in an effort to get in and take possession again.

‘Who is he?' I said.

Meg's face was close to mine. Her eyes were shining. Her lips parted. In the depths of her mouth the teeth were as long and white and pointed as stalactites.

‘Whatever you care to call him. He may be my brother, he may be yours. Use the initial Κ for him, if you wish. A bent line that comes in on a straight line and shoots it to pieces! Or Gil-martin, that's my name.'

From under the cherry red choker at Meg's neck two drops of blood appeared. They stayed a moment defying gravity on the stately white neck, then, leaving a tearful trail of pale red, went down to the edge of her dress and the white rose pinned there. The rose took the tinge. I stood fascinated. Meg was very pale now and her cheeks drawn, mouth open and wet and red behind the needles of white, upper lip arched as a rainbow. She pulled me to the corner, to the divan pushed up against a window – the divan covered with the white quilt and the scarlet diamonds of blood. She pushed me so that I fell backwards, and lay on the quilt, head butting the red velvet curtain that covered the window a few feet above my shadow's head.

‘Jane!'

Meg's face had become huge above me. It blotted out the light, anonymous as the memory of a mother's face. From
the sides of the vast head sprang her snake locks, and the rest of the room, the glass-topped tables with the strange relics from the days before science, the filing cabinets – God knows what she kept there: the names of her victims, the addresses of the invisible regions they would be permitted to visit? – lay beyond her without perspective. From the angle where I lay crushed, the objects and the dim red room seemed painted round her head, like detail in an icon, like stilted representations of figments of her imagination. As she leaned further over me, the redness became more interior … it was the redness of a bloodshot eye, it came from within me, particles of red spattered out in the dark room. I felt a total guilt … the weight of the guilt was Meg … I could do no right, I was the eternal victim. I floated in the horror of the guilt … but she pinned me down there … if she was going to kill me now, I wanted it. I was at one with her: she was completely accusing, and I completely guilty. And as I half-fainted, in the room which seemed encompassed behind the lids of my eyes, of red membrane and buzzing dots of blood, I saw the witches Meg and I had been: I saw us in the villages, in the mud streets, hounded in the open country, with our chums, and old hands with webbed fingers, and the gaze of self-righteous accusation straight into our eyes like stakes. I felt the hatred. I felt to blame. And yet … somewhere beyond that … we had been happy together, in another country. We had been whole.

‘Jane! Open your eyes and look at me now!'

I did. I began to struggle, but I soon stopped. Meg's white bosom lay over mine. In her throat the wounds shone like a ferret's eyes. Beneath us, my sister beat her head – slower and slower, like a collapsing heart – against the door of Meg's house. I could feel he was somewhere in the room, for Meg lay very still and as mine opened, her eyes closed. Somewhere, over by the door to the red landing, or in the far corner by the dark cupboard, he was standing. He was made of red light, and dancing particles of dust, and all the magic relics, amulets and cabbalistic papers of Meg's
collection. He had come as suddenly as a flame when two sticks are rubbed together, and he was as suddenly gone. But I felt his warmth, at the side of Meg's cold white body.

The pain – ice splinters of pain for a second so intense that I thought I heard my own scream, but there was no scream, for it was there that the pain came, at the side of my throat, and my larynx closed – threw my sister outside onto the ground, and there was a thumping, and then silence. Meg's eyes were shut. Her teeth were still extended: her canines, her eye teeth which took blood and gave sight, jutted over her lower lip – my blood was on her chin and on the quilt, where it ran down into the scarlet lozenges as if they had been sewn in there for that purpose. Her face looked smaller again, a normal size: as she drank, perhaps, she bloated, or she needed that vastness to stun her prey. Her hair, free from the blood, lay in damp coils over the side of the bed. She was like a woman who has given birth, where there is exhaustion, and blood and sweat. Her breath was noisy, and fast.

I lay in a limbo. My sister was dead. My guilt was gone. I was as empty as if a hand had gone inside me and pulled out my guts. I had felt his presence, and Meg would bring him again. I felt such gratitude to her that I lifted my arm, which was as heavy as lead, and stroked the dark hair that hung over the side of the bed.

‘Jane!' Meg's eyes opened.

‘I'll do anything for you.'

I was sure I had never said those words in my life. And as I said them, I knew she would make sure I still had my side of the bargain to fulfil. But she had given me the means to do it! I would bring such power to Meg, that she would be like a great Buddha on my blood.

Meg was smiling up at me. Her lips were together now, a faint red, bow-shaped.

‘So you will bring me the girl?'

‘Yes I will,' I said.