The Bad Sister (8 page)

It must be lonely, being a sculptor,' Tony said. I glowered at him: I was in no mood for fatuous remarks tonight.

Yet I laughed. The meal was before us at last, and Tony was eating with satisfaction. He put a blob of redcurrant jelly on the edge of his plate. He unscrewed a jar of mint sauce. He beamed down at his food. At last, as a recompense for having to wait for it, he was getting his Sunday lunch.

I glanced towards the window. It had grown darker after all. We were tilting away from the sun, we were spinning just as we always had done. The moon had grown stronger and more assured. I thought of Gala's face, pale on the cushions in her sudden sleep.

‘It's time men were prepared to become more psychic,' I said wilfully. ‘Then we'd be able to talk about the really interesting things – you know.'

‘I'm sorry, I'm sure!'

The lamb had put Tony in a benign state of mind. He cut himself another slice. The gravy was wrinkling already in the pan. The clock was ticking. She was standing out there, trying to jam the world into reverse. But it raced on without her, she stood under the moon like a sore finger. Would she be there when it was day? Day was waiting somewhere for her, a grey dawn standing in the swirling lino hall of my block of flats.

‘Some things are too important to say,' Tony said. ‘I wouldn't say them for anything.'

TV. Coffee. I wouldn't wash up, in case I was tempted to look out at her again. Tony felt that by peeling the potatoes he had done enough. I felt his surprise when I sat beside him in front of the TV: he had unconsciously allowed himself a space on his own while I cleaned the kitchen. I was smiling at him, I was holding his hand, I felt his unease.

‘Why haven't there been any great women composers?' I said. ‘Why wasn't James Joyce a woman? Why are we so narrow in our minds and wide in our hips?'

The documentary was on Thailand. How did they manage to flatten the place like that? The people smiled despairingly at the camera, as the Americans had taught them to do. They knew they were revealing nothing, they glanced round uncomfortably, feeling the packaging coming down round them once more.

‘Shall we catch some of
Film Night?
' Tony said.

The Thai vanished. I went into the kitchen after all. The night was still dragging. I poured out a glass of wine. I toasted my reflection, and the figure beyond, in the dark street. Idly, I opened the drawer of the kitchen table. The moon was shining right in at me now, and in Paradise Island they were dancing to revamped Elvis. Everything comes round twice, there's nothing new under the moon. I rummaged in the drawer, beyond the string and a worn ovencloth: my fingers were searching for something now.

It was so slow. After I found the photo I went back in to Tony with it. So there she was. The dark hair, the pale face. I recognized her straight away. The programme showed a clip from a Spanish movie – a woman was slaughtering a fox in a deep green stream by a millhouse. The green celluloid waves spurted jets of red.

‘I've no idea how it got there,' Tony said.

‘But it's the one who was your girlfriend, isn't it?'

He sighed wearily. We were in a motor station in the States. There were two funny guys in the car. It was a comic film. Tony's stern mouth lifted in a smile.

‘She's outside, waiting for you now. You never stopped seeing her, did you?'

‘What on earth do you mean?'

‘She's standing under the streetlamp. I recognized her at once.'

Tony got to his feet. It was all so slow. He went to the kitchen, he opened the window and leaned out. Later he chewed the back of my neck as we lay in bed. He came into
me, but his body was dead. Had he really not seen her there at all? As in slow-motion films, his cock moved in and out, paused, shuddered in an exaggeration of slowness, and released spray. The night was right over us now. Day was unimaginable. We lay breathing self-consciously, as if trying to catch each other out in some demonstration of lack of feeling. Had he really not seen her at all? Yet I knew she was waiting there for me.

I SLEPT AND
I woke. The walls of the bedroom and the humps under the covers that were our bodies and the dim piles of our clothes on tables and chairs that looked as if they had come adrift from the floor were like characters in a forgotten language: if we could understand them – the four walls which man had for so long constructed for himself, the two bodies welded together by Nature's relentless urge, the familiar, perishable things which are kept for comfort – we would learn the world again, read the signs. But we've thrown down our blots. The image is more important than the real. The world swims beside its own satellite photograph, uneasily. And even in that room, where I had slept for years, there wasn't only myself and Tony. There was the photo of the girl. It lay two inches from my nose, on the thick shadow of the bedside table. I could see its white edges: she was preserved in four walls of white, as we were. I was sleeping between them – from time to time I turned to stare at the outline of Tony on the pillow and then back at her again. I picked her up delicately, by her corners, so as not to put my thumb on her face. Even in the dark I could see her, only her face looked paler and her eyes even more profoundly obscure.

I ached with loneliness. Tony's reptilian movements had done nothing to stir or assuage me. I jammed my fingers up against my cunt and pressed on the soft flesh. I wanted to make a gate there, never to feel the desolate openness again. My hand made a five-barred gate over the entrance. I saw the girl in flashes, riding Tony in a sexual frenzy, her pale composure gone. I saw them at a table, eating – outside was a green river and trees, they were enclosed in their privacy.
Sometimes I saw her alone, and this was worse. She was quite self-contained. There was nothing in her screaming for a wild ride through the night. She fitted in the world like a glove. It protected her as she moved through it. She was quite complete in herself.

Jealousy. All this was quite untrue, of course. If she was half of me then she was incomplete, the half that was me she yearned for, her dreams of me were as much an invention as mine were of her. We envied and pitied each other, we begged for our fullness. Yet the joke in the whole matter was that these two halves were quite arbitrary – Tony, by needing us both, had split us in this way.

It wasn't a difficult thing to do. The Muse is female, and a woman who thinks must live with a demented sister. Often the two women war, and kill each other. I thought of the male Muse – or the male counterpart who is needed to make a woman complete in herself: he is yet to come. And as I lay hating the girl in the photo I wanted to expel her too, to throw her from my body. She had tormented me in childhood. She was always there, as she is now: with her secretive, slightly self-congratulatory manner that also suggests a passionate nature smugly concealed. She, my shadow who waits still in the street, is the definition of that vague thing, womanhood: a pact made with the eyes, signalled to men, that suggests women should pretend to enjoy a subservient position while ruling the men with ‘an iron hand in a velvet glove'. Men like her because she is so finite. She never dreams, there is no static around her head – this is reserved only for me, only for the other sister, and in the terrible competitiveness, it's a battle she will always win.

The night shifted slightly, a grey bar showed under the door, but it would stay there a long time before it advanced. My mind moved too – through dates, meetings, moods: when had Tony last seen her, why had he placed the photo in the kitchen drawer? How long had it been there? I thought of my face hanging over the kitchen table, as I was chopping, skinning, peeling, plunging hands in flour
only a tiny distance above that quiet smile, that dark head and white face. Did they do this together too – cook in her flat: did Tony stare at her hands kneading and wringing and coiling and straightening as dispassionately as he glanced at mine?

I crept up to Tony and touched his back, which was turned to me as always when he slept. He gave a grunt, a sigh. He had knowledge locked in him that could never be extracted. He was like a sealed pyramid: I wandered, lost in the labyrinth of speculations that lay around his inner knowledge. Yet, if he were really brought to account, Tony would probably be surprised at the idea he might love her more than me or the other way about. There were as many strands to him, as there are to all of us, as veins in the body. Why did I feel I had to be the other half of him – or, for that matter, of the girl? Why this terrible need for joining, unless we were all perhaps two creatures once.

The restlessness couldn't go on. I knew from the implacable appearance of his back that Tony wasn't going to turn and hold me. I hated myself for only wanting him so ferociously because the existence of the girl had come to light again. I wondered if Meg had sent her, as a challenge. And I thought of Gala's words, that I should get rid of my bad sister.

It drove me mad, that she should be standing so patiently out there, waiting for Tony and me to come to an end, waiting to take him calmly from me. Only a short time ago I had been dreaming of my escape from him. Now she was there … she could wait as long as she liked but I would never lose either of them. Now – if I didn't let go – I had them both in the palm of my hand.

I got up and pulled on my skirt. I went to the kitchen, took the jeans and jacket out of the washbasket and substituted them for the skirt, which I threw in on top of Tony's musty-smelling shirts. The jeans went on without difficulty: as I lay in the dark bedroom I must have gone through my metamorphosis. I found my sandals in the corner of the kitchen. It was a warm night – warm in the
kitchen, at least, with the cooker and the feeling of safety from the food, bread and spaghetti on the shelves. I didn't go to the window and look out, at the moon and the street lamps. Anyway, the moon had gone, risen, tugged away to a higher part of the sky. The light from the streetlamp came up at the window in a blue haze. I was going down the stairs, into the terrors of the hall, and out.

How bright it is. Even before I open the door I feel the brightness, which is trying to burst through the keyhole, and in at the hinges: a strong, white brightness, almost blinding. Day as it might be constructed by beings from a lightless planet after hearing descriptions of the phenomenon: a force nine laboratory daylight. I half close my eyes before stepping out. This is day as you must remember it when you are lying dying in the night. Day as white as ice and without shadows.

There are no signs of the street around me. I feel the block of flats at my back slip away like a heavy liner going down the estuary into the sea. Grass at my feet. Fields. Little flowers, yellow and white, which also look more invented or remembered than real – they are too neat, somehow, too well placed. I might be in a painting, or in a housewife's embroidered tea towel of the 'thirties, for a house with Jacobean chimneys, and a garden with dark red roses, and a reddish cow are all arranged straight on in my line of vision. There are no hills, and the width of the white sky is oppressive: it's like being under an eyeless head. Clumps of trees make an impressionistic fuzz behind the house. There is even a plume of smoke from one of the tall chimneys. What a comforting scene! How peaceful! I know I live there. But I hate it. I am afraid of it. Why do I have to live there? Why do I have to walk over the field, on a path conveniently stretching to a low stile, and then across the long grass of the outer garden, before sneaking through the roses to the back door? What crime have I committed, or am I about to commit?

I look down with dread at my body. The jeans and jacket I put on in the flat have disappeared and I see instead a
black dress, about mid-calf length and of very poor material, and two impossibly white, floury legs, with mud marks on the ankles. My breasts are large, and in no way contained – they swing under the horrible dress at every step I take. I feel like a felon, a convict, a laughing stock. Have I just been publicly humiliated, pelted with rotten fruit in the village square, raped by the village idiot with froth at the corners of his mouth? I know I am reviled, hated. There is a great void in me, an Ο that drips and aches, a round sea with rancid tides that slap against me at the pull of the moon. But it's not a man I am looking for. I came out here in search of the pale girl with dark eyes. She is the only one who can save me. Without her I am too alone in this smug, tapestry world: I might die. She was waiting for me before. Now, when I need her so badly, she has gone.

In my cheap canvas shoes I can only walk slowly through the grass. It springs round my ankles and then back again, like a succession of feather traps. One of the strangest things about this landscape, I begin to see, is that although it gives an impression of such opacity it is in fact threadbare in places: there are tiny suggestions, as if the tea towel had got wet, worn thin, of the street where I live in London. For all the weight of the richness of the red land, and my body pulled like a sack to the well-settled house, and the woolly white sky, traces come through of the familiar pavements where I had gone in my jeans to seek the girl. Sometimes, underfoot, there is a fleeting glimpse of tarmac, a hardness through the thin shoes of broken concrete. In the fresh, untainted grass there lies a soft-drink can, such as are consumed at Paradise Island. And if I lift my head suddenly, a row of windows seems to appear in the sky, like an after vision from staring at a bright light: they turn to empty rectangles and are gone again. It feels, here, as if I have arrived in a place which is both the past and a piece of the future superimposed on the present. What I have done – what I am about to do – has been done, and until the balance of the world is restored it will be done again.

The uncertainty of the world where I am walking, despite
its appearance of enduring stability, makes me feel more nervous and desperate than before. My thighs, fat and moist from the permanent, needing leak above them, smack together as I try to run, to reach the house. Surely she must be in there. She must be waiting for me there. But as I run I feel myself watched, pointed at, there is laughter. My breasts! My blubbery cheeks! To them I am an animal. Hardly worth feeding, let the fat sow lie on its side and die. But my arms at least have developed muscle. I have worked for them. I have heaved and hoisted. My thick back has a permanent pain from carrying for them. After the drunken dinners they come up the back stairs from the smoking room and into the bachelor quarters, and they rattle up into the attics, they want to stick themselves into my black swamp. But we have pushed the narrow brass beds against the door. We pant there, eyes bright with fear in the darkness. They go away from our pigsty muttering, to release themselves under plaster ceilings. They hate us, they see us as pigs.

Now I know why I have the feeling of being seen. I have reached the low stile and my legs open as I climb clumsily over it. They are playing tennis on a court just a few feet away, kept in by wire netting, running and leaping like prisoners in a cage, but it is they who are the jailers and those wandering outside who will never be free of their rule. One of them guffaws and points – specifically at my cunt, knickerless, exposed to them as I pant and clamber over the stile. They all pretend to drop their rackets and come after me. But the game is more important to them. I am over now, I head like a beast for the long grass, which parts to take me in on all fours, I run stooping through the moving flanks of grass. What will I do when I come to the rose garden? There is implanted in me already a memory, a prophecy, of punishment among the stiff roses, the violent movement of my body under a flogging beside the stiff, espaliered roses. I pause, my breath comes in short gasps. Kneeling in the furthest extreme of the long grass, I see my white, fat breasts heaving under the dress.

Of course! We're not allowed in the garden, my sister and I. Not in the formal garden. We would bring chaos, a bad smell in the place of the polite handkerchief smells this garden has been trained to produce. Yet sometimes we have to run through it – to deliver a message, to take food and drink at a sudden command to Master George, who makes a black pinch with finger and thumb on our legs. If we're caught, we're beaten. Even if we went the long way round, the gate from the drive is usually kept locked. So that's one of the ways they trap us – they'll beat us just for the sake of it. They whack out at us if they see us there with their flowers, they lash at us before the hedges clipped to the shapes of peacocks and chessmen – sometimes Master George is on the sitting room balcony and he laughs.

Still, I have to do it today. If I stretch my hand out I can touch the mown grass, the rolled lawn where we must not put our cheaply shod feet. It hardly looks like grass. It is so compressed it might be the filling of a sandwich, with the earth they own below and the sky which is also theirs, fitting down neatly from above. All the daisies have been shaved away. I must go onto it, with my filthy legs and my unkempt, slobbering cunt, and crawl the length of the roses to find my sister.

The woman is coming down towards me from the direction of the house. She has a wide basket for flowers, secateurs and a hat tied down with a blue scarf to keep out the glare of their indigestible sky. Her eyes are tiny, triangular and blue. I know the coils of white hair she makes me brush at night. I know her artificial mouth, which she draws over the thin, unforgiving line of her own. There are dabs of rouge like pink sugar on her cheeks. But she is a death's head. In her stomach lie the small, permitted quantities of pastry and chocolate mousse and good meats served at their table in the light of white candles. She sees me, or rather she sniffs me. I can see her small, thin nose going up in the air and a small, detestable smile. I stay like an animal, resting on my hands on the mown lawn, which seems to melt, to dissolve under my weight. She comes up closer and stops.

‘What are you doing there, Jeanne?'

‘I was looking for Marie, ma'am.'

‘And why should Marie be in the rose garden, I wonder?'