The Bad Sister (4 page)

‘Meg's method was to trap her victim in a dialectic of madness. I'd never dreamed fanaticism could be carried to such lengths, and sound so purely and coolly lucid and convincing – once you'd been brainwashed, that is. I asked her if Mr Dalzell was in fact Jane's father because I worried about her, and about possible repercussions. “I don't believe for an instant that Jane knows or cares,” Meg said. “This is a paternalistic society. Mr Dalzell was a symbol of the father of all women.” “A symbol?” I said. “How can you see him as that? He's now a body in a morgue. Doesn't that make any difference to you?” “His assassination was symbolic,” Meg replied. “It was a ritual killing. The left hand performs the act figuratively, the right hand performs it literally. There is no difference between the two. He was the incarnation of capitalism. We have incarnated our disapproval of him.”

‘I just didn't know what to say to all this. It's the modern evil, I believe, this jumble of Marxism and Tantrism and anything else thrown in, which is used to persuade people to kill each other. Meg went on to tell me that women had been defiled and degraded always, and particularly since the seventeenth century when they had been execrated as witches or elevated to virtuous wives. She said something about “taking one of each” and I should have realized Dalzell's daughter was in danger but I didn't, for once again Meg confused me, and I thought she was still talking about the “two-women-in-one” which she claimed was the root of the wrongs of society – the suppression of masculinity in women and of femininity in men. Had I thought then, too, that it was the money they wanted, I'd have been quicker.'

‘So Meg told you nothing definite.' I was determined to get some facts, if I possibly could, but it was becoming clear to me that there was something quite unusual in the case. I
knew I would have to hear more of this woman's crazy theories – the future, I fear, is on the way to becoming more and more like this, an endless display of a phenomenon I read somewhere described as ‘evaginative pyrotechnics'. However, if only Stephen could remember Meg admitting to – or perhaps boasting – of the murders we could inform the police and mount a full-scale search.

‘No, no, she didn't say anything definite,' Stephen said. ‘She said the power of the word would return through women, that it was when belief in the prophecies of witches and sybils ended that the world began to die.'

‘Oh yes,' I said. I glanced quickly at Stephen. He sounded quite unmoved by Meg's wild ideas – I suppose he had heard them many times before. I flipped open the file and turned to the photographs of the body of the daughter of Michael Dalzell. They were a horrible sight. She was lying partly under a sheet but you could see her neck was badly torn. Her eyes, unlike her father's, were closed. She had what looked like a small tiara in her fair hair. ‘So you saw Jane before this – you've seen these, I presume? – happened?' I handed the police photographs over the desk. Stephen flinched and looked away from them. It crossed my mind that he had persuaded himself by now, to such a degree, of some kind of magical agency at work that he had forgotten the brute facts.

‘Oh yes.' Stephen put a hand over his eyes, then removed it again quickly. ‘I saw her that night. She wasn't well, but she wanted to go to the party. We'd been going to some strange parties then, I remember, mostly through Jane's boyfriend who was in the film world. We went to a party given by some rich people called Berring … and then, a few nights later … on the night …'

‘And you honestly think she was responsible for the death of Michael Dalzell's daughter?'

‘I don't know if that's who she thought it was, by then,' Stephen said. He looked suddenly sad and tired. ‘Or if you could call her responsible. She seemed to be living in a perpetual state of sanctioned irresponsibility – the state
induced by Meg, of course. And she couldn't have done it anyway, could she? She was seen at the party at the time the girl was killed.'

‘Unless it wasn't really her who was seen,' I heard myself saying. I stopped short, and avoided meeting Stephen's eyes. ‘No … well,' I corrected myself. ‘It was one of the gang perhaps – the point being that Jane lured her from the party to her death?'

‘I just don't know.' Stephen glanced in the direction of the document, which was lying on my desk, and said: ‘If I'd read that then, I would have done everything in my power to find her after that evening. Not that I would necessarily have succeeded. She was secretive about her movements. She never talked about her childhood. I wouldn't have known where to look.'

‘No.' I stared down at the identikit pictures, all ridiculously dissimilar to each other, of the girl seen by passers-by in Hampstead, and the girl seen in the street where Dalzell's daughter was found. There were photographs of Jane in existence, of course, but it was hard to gauge anything about her from them. Her hair was blonde, but it looked as if it was probably tinted. Her face was curiously blank.

‘What was Jane really like?' I said.

Stephen looked up at me, surprised. ‘I couldn't describe her. At her best she was confident, but too often she was very uneasy with herself. I was fond of her. Being with her made me feel interested in things. Yet she often said she wished she was someone else.'

‘Did she? This is a difficult era for women, I suppose.'

‘Oh yes. She was always searching for some “missing male principle” or something.'

‘Poor Jane!'

For a time Stephen and I sat in silence, thinking of the sad and messy lives of Jane and women like her. Then Stephen said: ‘I think Meg's cleverness was in realizing she couldn't gain her ends by crude political argument. Jane had been away from her world too long.'

Again I hoped to steer the conversation away from this unprofitable area. I said:

‘Would Jane inherit the Dalzell fortune if she were alive and came forward to claim it?'

‘That I don't know.' Stephen rose. I saw that his patience had come to an end. ‘Don't they wait seven years before you're declared officially dead? Then it'll go to a cousin, I suppose.'

I had the feeling Stephen was a little annoyed that I hadn't taken his descriptions of Meg more seriously. He made his way to the door, and I made a point of showing him out of the house and thanking him warmly. I promised I would read Jane's journal and would let him know my impressions. On the doorstep he paused. ‘Meg was a kind of embezzlement,' he said. I was surprised at his use of the word, and couldn't repress a smile. ‘An enravishment,' he went on. ‘You must bear that in mind.'

Then he went down the street. Because he was plump he had rather a waddling walk. I glanced at the address on the piece of paper he had handed me, and wondered if I would ever see him again. Then he turned the corner and was gone. Somehow I knew he hadn't told me where he really lived. And when I looked for him it turned out I was right. The address I'd been given, at the end of a wide street in Battersea, was that of an abandoned and boarded-up church.

I now present the strange ‘journal' of the girl Jane. The poem printed overleaf was found among the pages of the journal, and I presume must have been copied out by her: what it signified to her I don't know. I will make no comment on the pages which follow, except to say there can seldom have been so forceful an example of the effect a fanatical mind can have on an impressionable one.

Edinburgh, July 1986

I'LL HAVE TO
tell you now of the night I first went on my travels … the night, most of all, that Meg gave me further signs of her power.

I left the Berrings' party and walked home through the streets where it looked as if it had never rained, I walked fast in front of the dust gardens and the brick walls to keep people in, I sent cats up trees to perch heavy as fruit in the foggy grey leaves. As I walked on I could feel myself falling apart. I was in a frenzy of impatience to become another person. My rump was soft and divided under my clinging silk dress as men photographers would have it divide: ripe, ready for a mouthful to be taken out. My legs were thin and perched in high-heeled sandals, the pale tights making them all the more ridiculous and vulnerable. My breasts, unshielded, nosed the air for potential attacks like glowworms swimming always a few inches in front of me. And yet – somehow – I got home! The streets had been very silent; tonight the menace hadn't come out in a humped back in grey gaberdine, or a gaggle of youths flying low like crows; it had lurked there, the urban forest, waiting for something impossible to come about.

I let myself into the house-converted-into-flats where I live and think every year will be the last. Look at the lino! That purple and cream scum whirling and foul smelling on the floor, dead blood and feathers. And the walls! Who made this elephantine pattern of chandeliers on a mango background, what grandeur did they think they were instilling there? As always, it is chilly in the hall and on the stairs. The overhead light, resplendent though it is, goes out after a minute with a popping sound from an odious
black plastic button by my door. I am never at my door on time. I have to fondle this excrescence, caress it into being, so it will click on again and let me in through total darkness to my flat.

There are all the signs in the flat of Tony and I having gone out to the party in a bad mood. Once up the three stairs carpeted in hard cord, lights on and standing on the landing, I can smell us there together: from the sitting room, where we drank cold Stolichneya vodka before we left and Tony complained at me spending too much of my money on it; in the bedroom, which is just on my left, I can see the dresses and skirts I tried on and then threw on the bed in despair. The whole place feels both over-occupied and totally empty. Perhaps I never will return.

I can imagine how Tony is doing at the party. He has a small affected smile on his face and he is pretending he isn't working his way ever nearer to the daughter of an American film producer who might make his life a little more exciting for him. Although he's a screenwriter, the editor of a literary quarterly has just asked him to write on the new Spanish cinema. Tony is secretly more pleased by this than by an offer to write a Hollywood blockbuster. He can't forget Cambridge, and the poets and writers in old tweed jackets who give a short surprised laugh when they bump into Tony now. Or perhaps he has been trapped by Fay Langham. She is telling him about feminist cinema. His eyes are wandering, his tongue suddenly becomes dry. ‘Let me get you a drink, Fay.' I laugh as I go into the bedroom and then into the tiny bathroom beyond.

There was no time to lose. The familiarity of the flat had deflected me for a moment, and had reconciled me to my skin – I sat in both uneasily for so many years that it was hard to imagine I could change. But now it was happening. I sat down on the bed because the floor seemed to be moving under me. Over the pile of discarded clothes, the scarlet flowers on black background, black roses on white nylon crêpe de chine, layered skirts and flimsy tops, I reached for the scissors that lay on the table beside my
bed. I picked them up and my hand brushed the soft dresses: I thought of Meg – Meg whom I had seen again tonight, her dress of gypsy handkerchiefs and the eyes that had made me turn on my heel and leave the party as if I had immediately read her command. I hadn't expected her to follow me. But I knew that she knew tonight was my first real chance to escape.

With the scissors I started to hack at my hair. Long pieces of blonde hair, highlighted every three months and slightly curled for the party, fell onto the rumpled clothes. I almost immediately felt calmer and more peaceful. I wandered to the bathroom, and watched my face look out as naked and surprised as a sheep at shearing. Aren't you trying to cut it properly? my eyes seemed to be saying back to me from the mirror. This is a terrible thing to do.
Think
how long it'll take to grow out again!

I shrugged at the reflection and strolled this time to the bedroom window, still hacking away with the scissors, which seemed to have taken on a determination of their own despite the protests of the owner of the hair. I pulled back the curtains, leaned on the window sill and looked out. I had often imagined myself flying on my broomstick from here – as my mother flew on that icy night after the brawl – but she fell, even the strength of her beliefs couldn't keep her in the air, and when they took her from the bank of snow to the lorry she knew the battle was lost. I would fly so as not to be with Tony any more, so as not to be me. Yet Tony could go if we decided it wasn't working out. We didn't have to marry. I didn't even have the risk of pregnancy: an IUD like a computer gadget lay inside me, with a thin cord for removal if I decided to ‘start a family'. How many times had I dreamed of launching myself from that window sill, floating into the black night until I banged up against the stars! And now I was going, but by a different route, and into quite another Universe.

The scissors had reached my fringe and decimated it, little spikes of straw stood on my head and it was quite rough when I ran my hands through it, like stroking a pig's
back. For the first time since childhood I could see by looking straight ahead, instead of shaking my fringe to one side, a gesture which, over the years, had become apologetic and feminine, as if I had to admit it wasn't my right to contemplate the world. I laid the scissors on the sill and looked down into the street – for the last time, I thought. A sort of rage came over me, and the night air, with an abrupt coldness, gave me the sensation my body had shrunk.

Down on the right, near the junction with the High Street, is the house run by the kind woman with big brown eyes, the house for the battered women of the neighbourhood and their children; but the most successful lesbian nightclub in London, Paradise Island, is next door to them, and the men who pass smile and shift uncomfortably at the mixture of misfits: the women who had the foolishness not to stop themselves from being beaten up, the great lakes of blue bruise on their faces and arms an unacceptable disfigurement, and the women who want each other, whose breasts meet like soft pillows as they dance. In the mornings the bottles come out on the pavement in front of Paradise Island. They look desolate: empty tonic, empty bitter lemon, hundreds of empty litre bottles of wine. Somewhere, scattered in their different flats, the women are sleeping it off. But when it's hot in the street, and the old man further down away from the High Street puts his parrot out on the doorstep, and the parrot calls out with a sound so alien that you feel there is no chance, ever, of one human being understanding another, and the smart young Persians opposite turn up their record players in their sunflower-papered rooms, then it's time to wonder what happened, to shut the window before you fall, and make, as far as possible, a construction of a day.

Now I did close the window, for some of my fear was still with me. I went back to the bathroom and re-examined my appearance. Women and mirrors; mirrors and women. My face seemed to have grown much smaller and my eyes were round and rimmed with exhaustion, black as the underside of a moth. My hair stood in tufts all over my head. I would
have smiled but my mouth, which looked thinner, was clamped together. I wondered if my teeth were different underneath.

I could see the foot of the bed in the mirror. My heart missed a beat: a pair of legs in blue jeans was lying there! Then I saw that it was blue jeans alone. And a straight jacket, also made of denim. I went towards them. I looked down at my body before I pulled off the silk party dress. My breasts were tiny now, and the bra that had once contained them looked large and empty. Like a shroud, I thought, as I stood there paralysed a moment, unable to move. Although it was ordinary modern gear that lay there on the bed, to pull on these trousers from an unknown world was like stepping into death.

The first thing that happened as I changed my clothes was a complete reconstruction of the party I had just been to with Tony – it flashed before my eyes, colours muted, but with cast complete. First I saw the people I liked there: Gala, Stephen. Then I saw Tony, being patronizing with a literary agent, frowning down into his glass as if an important truth was to be found at the bottom, like those mugs with a frog. I saw the hostess, rich, American: her walls hung with brown silk, shit silk money. Her hair was rich brown curls; her head was tilted back; she liked mixing people. There was a man who ran a famous gambling club talking to an ex-socialist historian. A Chinese-American hooker who said she had just come from Brando. Then I saw Meg. Meg's eyes were fixed on me. I felt the floor moving under my feet and the hostess's splendid pink candelabra went dim.

By this time I was ready. I was narrow-hipped, not too tall. There was a gun in the pocket of the denim jacket. I went out of the flat, shoved the black plastic button and was over the petrified lino steps three at a time.

I am out in the street, I think I can see Tony coming towards me, a little drunk from the party, weaving slightly as he walks. Yes – we passed – three feet apart. He didn't even give me a glance.