The Bad Sister (16 page)

The steps are in the room now. It's my father, but there are other men with him as well. Ishbel is so close to me we could have been sewn together. The teasing look has gone and she is worried. But there is still something triumphant about the set of her shoulders and her round, spoilt face. By standing so close to me, of course, she is both protecting and condemning me. They won't strike in our direction, for fear of hitting her. But she will point the finger at me, and I'll be marched away. My ribs are tight with fear. One of the children begins to sob. And my father pulls the cupboard door open, our side first, as I knew he would.

What I hadn't taken into account is the torch. It hits me straight between the eyes, and Ishbel too, so that she whimpers aloud and claps her hands to her face. The game isn't funny for her any more. The other children file out miserably into the room. I hear my father ordering them to go downstairs, find their parents and go home. And as Ishbel and I instinctively edge backwards from the light into the depths of the cupboard, my hand clasps a dress and brings it down round my shoulders. Now I am really
caught! The dress is light, and highly scented. I am standing in the bright light in the act of stealing Ishbel's mother's dress. My father, and Ishbel, and Ishbel's mother's dress, and I. There is absolute silence. My hand flies to my neck, to disentangle myself. It comes across something hard … a pin, a brooch …

‘I'm so terribly sorry to disturb,' Mrs Marten said. ‘But I feel the most
gnawing
pains of hunger. I know you're tired after the journey, Tony dear, bu t…'

Because our room was dark – Tony had pulled the curtains together before getting into bed – Mrs Marten appeared in the door in a fantail of light, her small body thrust forward and a gin and tonic sparkling in her hand. She stared greedily at us. ‘Your dear friend is still here, Jane. Shall we all lunch together? I've discovered rather a sweet little Italian place round the corner.'

‘Oh, Mummy!' Tony was on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Do you really have to?'

The door opened wider. The light swelled to the shape of a bowl and began to encroach on the bed. I shrank from it, under the sheet, into the recesses of the cupboard where Ishbel still stood guilty and trembling, down to blackness. Even so, I could feel the stretching daylight on the top of the bed and round the room. When it saw me it would strip me bare. And I, white flesh and hair, crouching by the warmth of Tony under the covers, would be reduced to X-ray, gutted.

‘If Jane isn't well she could have some soup here and we could go.' Mrs Marten's voice was muffled, but strong. ‘Come, Tony, there's
nothing
in the house, you know!'

Then there was Gala. I was in the cupboard still. I heard Ishbel's mother's voice, her sharp cry of alarm when she saw her trampled dresses. I tore the pin from the thin folds of the dress that had got enmeshed around my shoulders. I fought with it, hung with the sweet-scented silk like an animal caught in a trap of leaves. I lifted the glinting pin, silver with a single bright blue eye.

‘Go on,' said Gala. ‘Now!'

‘You'll come to the restaurant, I hope? I had such a lovely cannelloni there. And, you know, there's never
anything
here!'

Oh, I don't know how I could have done it! Ishbel was looking at me suddenly with such frankness. I could have trusted her with the rest of my life. She was very close to me again, crouching on shoes in the very back of the cupboard; there were discarded dresses there, neatly bundled but worn and old: in the skirts of a black dress we squatted like sisters, hiding from our mother the enemy. Her gaze was very soft … very appealing! Her eyes seemed to have grown lighter, even in the gloom there, but her mouth and chin were ugly still: there was nothing she could do about that. She was quite unlike my mother. Why was she so close to me? I could feel her breath on my neck. And her shoulder looked as if it had sprouted from mine. I had to lean forward to press the pin home. Right in the middle, between her breasts that weren't yet breasts. It went in very easily, leaving the eye shining on her chest.

‘Now run,' Gala said.

Ishbel fell as heavily as a dropped doll when I left her side. I dived under the beam of light from the torch. My father's legs were running towards me, but I dodged them. There … to leave the house … lighter already … the great square house in the square garden was behind me when I was on the hill, in a total darkness. No snow. Thank God, no snow as yet.

‘Perhaps I'd better book a table,' Mrs Marten said. ‘He's a sweet man. Used to be at Da Lorenzo.'

Tony's legs were moving beside me in the bed. ‘I'll get up then,' he said in the tone that suggests he is doing a lot of women a great favour. ‘What's the time?'

‘Well, that's the point! It's nearly two!'

‘All right, all right. Come on, Jane … aren't you hungry?'

Tony kicked me under the covers. In my darkness I knew Gala and Mrs Marten had left the room and closed the
door. The light had gone. I saw the end of my race to my mother's cottage, but only in the dull reds and blacks of the dark room. That was all that was safe for me now. I must not be exposed. I could merge in the infra-red light, a shadow, half-developed, visible one minute, gone the next. But to go out into the street …

Tony pulled back the covers and gave me a quick glance. He dressed quickly and efficiently, snapping into his pants and trousers as if he wished he'd never taken them off. ‘You look all right! You must be hungry, Jane, aren't you? Don't imagine I'm going to have lunch with Gala and my mother without you!'

It was certainly a strange party. It was true, I had to go. As always, I felt it was my fault for having Gala round there, rather than Tony's fault for having a mother like Mrs Marten. If I covered my head, stayed close to the wall …

Tony pulled back the curtains. I groaned again. The light pulled at the skin of my face. My eyes ached, as if the daylight would pull them out.

‘You must have got a migraine,' Tony said. There wasn't a trace of sympathy in his voice. He pulled the quilt up over his side of the bed, and left the room. I lay there by his pristine side of the bed and wondered if I was even there. Had he been beside me; had we made love? I looked up at the bulb on the brown flex. It swung empty over my head. I pulled down Tony's cover and stared at the sheet. His stain was there, a grey mark shaped like a fish. I pulled the cover back.

Gala called me through the door. ‘Get up, Jane! It'll be OK! You must eat, you see!'

They got me out with difficulty. I had to find a scarf for my head, and ended up with a black Greek scarf with gold sequins stitched on it that I had once bought on holiday in Delphi with another boyfriend – only to discover too late that the scarf denoted widowhood, death. I tied it under my chin and followed Mrs Marten and Gala and Tony out of the flat and onto the swirling lino. Mrs Marten's stiletto
heels went down into the rubber with an airport sound and Tony trudged beside her: they might have been leaving, meaninglessly, for an international destination. I thought of the way they took and squandered and consumed the world, as if it had been laid out for them like a tray of hors d'oeuvres. Once, Mrs Marten would have been considered a sinner. Now she merely slimmed. I thought of Meg's instructions, in the crystal ball in my bedroom. And I could see Mrs Marten as disposable. The only sign of her non-existence would be an inscription on a board in her upholstered shrubbery:
For Sale
. It had been her motto, now it could be her epitaph.

We reached the street. How easy that sounds! Gala knew what I was suffering and hung back with me. The main door was open and Tony and his mother were passing through; I could see the patch of grass, grey of course, and by the gate the long uncut grass with the cuckoo spit, grey on grey now like an arty photograph. Beyond, the lumpy old women were walking, and a couple of grim youths in clerical 'fifties-style suits and steel-rims, conspicuous austerity. It was a brilliantly sunny day. The colourless trees cast deep shadows on the pavements. Broken glass outside Paradise Island glinted like coal in the shadows from the houses. I stood in the hall with my back to the grandiose mango wallpaper and my hands spread out on the walls by my side. How could I go out there? Had I really killed Ishbel? Or would she be waiting for me, always fleetingly behind me or ahead of me, blameless, triumphant, with a fixed smile on her lips above the stabbed heart? It was hard to believe she was gone. I had felt freer while anticipating her disappearance than I did now. Perhaps this was an omen –I would in no way benefit from the end of Miranda.

‘It's only round the corner,' Gala said. ‘Walk quickly and it'll all be over.'

I went out, still holding her hand – Tony hadn't waited for us and we had to pull the door open again: it had swung shut while I hesitated. Now we passed the long grass and opened the wrought-iron gate, and we were in the street.
Tony and Mrs Marten were quite a way ahead: just passing the battered wives' home, in fact, and I saw Mrs Marten look up at the building and give the little wrinkle of her nose which she considered a charming and rueful expression in the face of something unacceptable. I watched one of the women come out, with a two-year-old child in one arm and a bag of washing for the launderette in the other. She looked at Mrs Marten, in her white suit and her high white shoes and her white hair in a cascade of ringlets, as if she had just landed from the moon. Then she came along the street towards me. Her face was tired and her breasts drooped. She looked at me once, and then down at the pavement. Then she looked up at me again. Her eyes went wide. She pulled the child into her so that it wriggled at the tight grip.

‘Keep walking,' Gala said. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Don't stop!'

Why did I now feel the fear too? The woman wasn't Ishbel, after all. Or was she the first to notice that Ishbel was really dead at last? I watched her shadow approaching in ripples on the bars of the railings that guard basement steps and areas. It ran towards me, snaking on the bars, as large as a mother goddess, with the child fused into the body of the mother and the two heads rising and dipping as they came.

‘Jane!'

Mrs Marten was standing outside Paradise Island now, in her ‘model pose', stomach well in and head back, a tiny provocative smile on her lips. ‘Do hurry, dear!' Behind her a powerful woman was cleaning the windows. She looked at me with impatience. What did she see? A sad woman in a black scarf, walking nervously near the railings as if she might have to cling to them for support, a sad woman accompanied by another woman with a singular lack.

Mrs Marten saw, at the same time as the woman from the wives' home was giving vent to her anxiety by literally breaking into a run, screwing up her eyes as if the sun had suddenly become too strong, dashing past me with a sort of muttered grunt of apology. Mrs Marten dealt with
the phenomenon with a good deal more elegance, as she would certainly have expected of herself in the circumstances. She took Tony's arm – he too was standing impatiently at the junction with the main road, as if Gala and I were not to be trusted in a public thoroughfare – and went graciously up on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. I saw him frown. She didn't point, of course: that would have been bad manners.

It was then that Gala and I began to laugh. I was afraid still and the laughter ran through me like electric current. Here, in the hard, bright street with the summer leaves that looked as if they had been sprayed with silver tinsel, and the sharp white paint on the houses, and the crooked black shade, and Mrs Marten standing upright and ridiculous in her white outfit, at the end of the street, were Gala and I walking without shadows, vulnerable in the extreme, shadows ourselves, spreading terror as we went! We were invisible except for our laughter, our nervous systems, our X-ray spines. If we had no shadows we couldn't be alive. And Mrs Marten, like a figure in a cartoon, frozen with disbelief, awaited us there. Outside Paradise Island, of all places! Ο women who love women, take heart from us! We drove away our shadows, and look at us now!

Gala still had a hold on my arm, as if to show we would be stronger together than apart. I felt my feet very light, I might float off the ground altogether, but not as I was when I flew at the command of Meg. I was weak, my body barely obeyed me. And now Mrs Marten was only a few feet away, with Tony at her side wearing an expression of utter incredulity. Our laughter seized us once more. What did this mother-and-son team want from us then? Respectable ladies with proper, well-dressed shadows, and bank cards in our handbags? Sorry we couldn't oblige! By the time we were at the corner of the street, the same mercury flowed in our veins. Whether we still belonged to this world or not, we would give the Martens all they deserved. And part of me marvelled at the way Gala could give me such empathy,
as if the condition was hers for the first time too. Without her I might have been seized – exterminated – in the overpowering light of this day.

But the extraordinary thing was that neither Tony nor his mother referred to what they had seen. Tony nodded at us and said briskly: ‘Funny we never noticed this place before, Jane. I wonder how long it's been going?' He indicated the restaurant canopy, which jutted out in the main road just beyond the supermarket. And Mrs Marten, twinkling at Gala, said: ‘Normally it's vitamins and a salad for lunch for me. But – I don't know why – I feel so
ravenous
today! It must be the party at the Belgian Embassy last night. Do you know, the food was virtually uneatable!'

Gala and I exchanged glances. The laughter turned warm and pleasant inside us. So the Martens couldn't face the confrontation! But we knew we were in a position of power now, and it was they who were afraid at last. Who and what did they think they were going to lunch with at the trattoria? Did they sense their hour had come? Tony, even, smiled in friendly encouragement at me as we went into the clean, Italian interior. He had seen me looking at the supermarket as we passed, perhaps, and as always had misunderstood my reactions. ‘Look, Jane, if you've not been feeling too well in the last few days since I've been away, I'll get the shopping in this afternoon. Mummy says there's nothing in the house. I mean, I'll just get the basics, if you like!'