The Continuity Girl (6 page)

In her youth, Irma had littered the English-speaking world with a great deal of bad poetry. Highly acclaimed bad poetry in
the vein of Sexton and Plath, except, as Irma famously pointed out in her
Paris Review
interview, “without all the depressing
bits.” All that left, naturally, were the sexy bits, and Irma tore into the burgeoning sixties literary market of women “taking
control of their own sexuality” like a horny priest at a boy-band convention. Her expertly timed 1969 collection, Dirty Girls
on Acid, launched Irma as a sort of En-
glish poetess counterpart of Erica Jong. For one perfect summer the international literary world couldn’t get enough of her.
She toured North America doing readings in every city and college town from Dartmouth to Denver. Accompanied by a smack-addled
vanload of jazz musicians from Cornwall, bird-boned Irma had been a vision of threatening feminine liberation—a
vagina dentata
for a new era.

It was on her trip through New Mexico that she established her signature look of live jewelry (she often turned up at parties
with a tarantula on her scarf or a defanged asp coiled around her throat). It was on the California leg of that trip that
her daughter was conceived.

Righting herself slowly, Irma was stopped dead by a word.

“Mom!”

She looked up and spotted her daughter jogging toward her in a velour leisure suit. Clearly some kind of awful Canadian trend.

“Hello, dear. Lovely to see you.”

They kissed apprehensively and began to push through the crowd.

Meredith’s luggage cart jammed in the exit door, and she stumbled over the hem of her pants.

“Mom! For God’s sake, what’s the hurry?”

Irma put her hand to her pumping heart and glowered at her daughter. They’d been together less than a minute and already Irma
felt misunderstood. Much as she enjoyed the anticipation of going to a place, as soon as she had reached her destination,
she was filled with a compulsion to leave. She wanted out of this airport. Now. She was well known for disappearing between
courses at dinner parties and fleeing the theater at intermission. As a quitter, Irma never quit. Just the day before, in
fact, she had coolly broken it off with Jose, the South American refugee poet. Her reasoning had been simple: it could never
last, and anyway, this was probably her last chance to make a man under the age of forty weep. And weep he did.

Irma took in the whole of her daughter with a glance, noting with relief that while Meredith’s style remained grimly conservative,
she had not yet grown fat.

“Well...” Irma said conclusively. She smiled and placed a hand on each of Meredith’s cool cheeks.

“I thought we could take a taxi into town this time, Mom. On me.”

“Oh dear, would you mind terribly if we don’t?” Irma winced. “I just loathe making chitchat with the drivers. And besides,
the tube is so good for you.”

“Good for you? How?”

“Lots of novelty bacteria for your body to absorb. A real workout for your immune system.”

Meredith looked too tired to argue.

“Come along now, don’t get scratchy just yet. Wait till we’re back at the flat.” Irma grimly hauled a knapsack from Meredith’s
luggage carrier and wriggled it onto her back. “There’s a brave old sausage.”

With that, they stepped aboard the escalator that would take them down deep, hundreds of feet below the teeming city, the
buzzing, ancient catacomb of laughter, conniving and stink that is London.

The flat on Coleville Terrace was located on the third and fourth floors of an ivy-strangled town house. The building had
originally been intended as an upscale single-family dwelling, but had been chopped up into several apartments sometime during
the postwar boom.

Dragging her luggage uphill from the tube, Meredith listened to her mother’s rant about the neighborhood. Over the past couple
of centuries the area had risen and fallen in its fortunes, and risen and fallen again. In the four decades since Irma moved
in, the area had changed dramatically, and in her view, for the worse. The West Indian flophouses had been bought at a pittance
and renovated into gleaming mausoleums by the offspring of ailing rock legends. She could barely leave the house to buy a
can of sardines without running into one of these trustafarian twits, on the way to the salon to have their hair matted or
tuning up their vintage kit cars. They put her in a bad mood, the bohemians of today. Such pretenders. So
rich.
The village
was nothing like in the old days when drugged gypsies flopped for the night in doorways playing bongo drums and everyone pretended
not to mind. Back then, Coleville Terrace was dirty and uncomfortable and
real.
Now it was a movie set inhabited by upscale
squatters.

Of course Meredith didn’t remember it this way. Her early recollections of life here were hazy. Literally. A film of smoke
permeated the inner atmosphere of the flat from morning to night—cherry tobacco fumes emanating from a hookah pipe Irma kept
smoldering in the corner of the living room. There were visitors—hundreds of them, coming and going, sleeping and dancing,
eating and throwing up in the loo. These happy wanderers lit fires in the sink and sang campfire songs, pinched Meredith’s
ears and knees, and roared through the night at jokes she didn’t understand.

Early childhood—pre–boarding school, pre-Canada—was murky territory for Meredith. She had been back to Coleville Terrace only
once (on a layover flight to Croatia, where she was working on a sci-fi vampire Canadian-European coproduction) in the twelve
years since graduating.

Now, standing outside the chipped front door, Meredith was suddenly starving. This was unusual. Like her mother, she ate little
and was particular about what she did eat. Unlike Irma, she abstained for reasons of health and vanity rather than defiance
of social conventions.

She watched Irma fumble, muttering, in her handbag and, after a minute or so, withdraw a Hello Kitty key ring from which hung
two brass keys. One of them she detached and handed to Meredith with a ceremonial air. The other she slipped into the lock.

“Mom?”

“Yes, dear? Oh, and before I forget, if you must call me that, could you at least pronounce it in a way that doesn’t make
you sound like a cashier at Wal-Mart?”

Irma rammed the key into the keyhole, withdrew it and rammed it in again.

“All right, then.
Irma.
”

“Yes?”

“Do you have anything in the fridge?”

The door swung open with a
thud.

“To eat?” said Irma, as if her daughter had just suggested they spend the afternoon inline skating to Brighton. “I’ll pour
you a nice glass of London tap and that should curb it. They say eighty percent of hunger spells are actually caused by dehydration.
Particularly after a long flight. Murder on the skin. You look parched.”

Meredith began to drag her roller suitcase up to the flat. She remembered her prenatal yoga instructor’s words: “Be mindful
of your body, and the bodies of others.” She translated the words into a mantra of her own: “Try not to smack your mother,
no matter how much she tempts you.”

The flat was not so much dirty as decimated. Whole pieces of furniture were simply lost—buried beneath the heap of abandoned
human implements: paper, cloth, metal, plastic. The odor of wet wood shavings was overlaid with the suggestion of long-forgotten
fruit. For a moment Meredith considered the hopeful possibility she might be hallucinating from exhaustion. She gave her head
a shake. No luck.

The front hall opened onto the third floor of Irma’s building and served, illogically, as the upper floor of the flat: it
housed the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Immediately to the right of the front door was a largish bathroom, the walls covered
with crumbly tiles. To the right was the master bedroom, discernible by the piles of books, board games and discarded bottles
of Limoncello. Under a huge heap of velvet and a Cossack coat hulked Irma’s single bed. Beside it was a tea tray bearing half
a honeyed crumpet. Somewhere, from under something, a transistor radio brayed yesterday’s football scores.

Irma opened a door that led to her daughter’s childhood room. Meredith was relieved, and even touched, to see that it was
tidy compared to the rest of the place, even if it was barely the size of a pantry. The only furniture was a narrow military-issue
sleeping cot pushed against the far wall and made up neatly with a yellowed, but quite possibly clean, eyelet bedspread. The
walls were bare except for a framed and yellowed fingerpainting of a flesh-toned blob on a grassy expanse under a teal sky.
Meredith had no memory of executing this work, but figured she must have done it during one of her summer holidays spent with
her mother’s artist colony in the south of Spain.

“So what do you think?” Irma said.

“It’s very nice. But is there somewhere for me to work? I need to prep for tomorrow.”

“Hold your horses.”

Meredith dumped her suitcase and followed her mother up the stairs. At the top, she surveyed the main room.

“Hasn’t changed a bit, has it,” said Irma.

She walked into the kitchen (really just the southeast corner of the room), refilled the prehistoric electric kettle and set
it to boil with a flick of the switch. Meredith’s heart did not sink, it plummeted.

The room—a postage stamp of living area tacked onto a narrow galley kitchen—had the look of a well-loved bomb shelter. There
were books and papers and china teacups and strange swaths of gauze and feathers and tree bark and fur and antique hospital
equipment. Scraps of fabric that had once been ladies’ undergarments had been left to disintegrate on every open space. Piles
of human consumer waste—records, shoes, cutlery, ornamental gourds, dried-up potted plants, decorative papier-mâché party
place-setting cards left over from a long-forgotten dinner party, discarded auto parts, socks—were scattered about the place.

Meredith longed for a cheap hotel room but had to concede the truth. She was broke.

“Where, then?”

“Over there.” Irma pointed to a heap of books on top of an old steamer trunk.

“A trunk? You want me to work on a trunk?”

“No, dingbat, beyond it. In Jose’s old spot.”

Irma crossed the room, turned on a standing lamp and pulled away a saddle blanket to reveal a child’s school desk, the kind
with a plastic chair attached by a curved metal bar.

“You aren’t serious.” Meredith rubbed her face and reopened her eyes.

“Ucchh, of course I am.” Irma took her daughter’s hand and held it to her chest. “This is where Jose wrote his best poem.”
Her eyes shone with emotion. “It was only six lines long and it was about my hands. He called it ‘The Digits of Experience.’”

She fanned her fingers out for Meredith to see. The knuckles on her third and fourth fingers were thick with arthritis. A
liver spot on the back of her left palm looked like a tiny map of Africa cut adrift.

“What did it say?”

“I’m not sure. It was in Spanish. But it was beautiful. Poets communicate in a universal language.” Irma retreated across
the room toward the whining kettle.

As her mother puttered over the tea, Meredith fell asleep on the leaky beanbag chair in the corner of the flat. She awoke
several minutes later and wandered into the kitchenette.

“What is it, dear?” Irma had been reading a story in a tabloid newspaper about an eleven-year-old single mother of twins living
in Yorkshire.

“Nothing.”

Meredith was overcome by a sudden need to tidy. To organize and itemize. She felt weightless, as though she were floating
just outside her own body. Forget food—instead she would clean. If she could do something to introduce order, that would make
her feel better. She would start with something small, a surmountable task at the core of the chaos.

Irma vanished down the stairs to her bath (she had one every Sunday). Meredith observed her going as if from a great distance.
She searched the room for where to start. Of course! She would defrost the freezer.

Her mother’s icebox was a stout Frigidaire from the nineteen-sixties, a barrel-chested soldier of an appliance. Meredith held
her breath, gripped the stainless steel handle, pulled down hard and felt the latch give and the door swing out toward her.
Inside, the fridge was startlingly bare and bright. She sniffed. Nothing but the faint chemical smell of working electrical
machinery. The appliance hummed a meditative
om
and Meredith exhaled in unison. She reached up and flicked open the smaller
blue plastic freezer door—and was blinded by a glittering flash. There was a loud
crack,
a stab of pain and then, nothing.

When she came to, she was staring into a house of glinting mirrors.

“Silly goose!” her mother called from somewhere above her head. “Wake up and stop this nonsense, would you? There’ll be no
dying on my kitchen floor.”

She felt a hand on her forehead, but still the prisms glittered. In desperation she dragged herself a few inches along the
floor, until her mother pulled her up by the shoulders and propped her against the cupboard like a doll. Oh, poor, poor head.

“What were you doing in the freezer? You know I only use it to store the chandelier.”

“The
what
?”

“It must have fallen out and hit you on the head. It’s very valuable, you know. Edwardian.”

Meredith noticed the dangling topaz crystals, now scattered over the floor. She opened her mouth to say something, but before
she could do so, a longing moved through her. All the familiar sensations were there: the gaping belly yawn, the arterial
fizz, the hardening of her nipples...

“Mummy.”

“Yes.”

“Can you help me with something?”

“What’s that?”

“I want to have a baby of my own.”

Irma pressed a damp, dirty washcloth over the bump on Meredith’s forehead. “Is that all?” She laughed and patted her daughter
on the cheek. “Easy-peasy.”

That night Meredith’s eyes snapped open in the dark. She raised herself from the bed and removed the plastic bite-plate she
wore to bed each night in an effort to “deprogram” her from grinding her teeth. There would be no more sleep for now.