You Must Be Sisters (7 page)

She was in bed now. She pulled the blankets up to her chin and gazed at her silent room, its washbasin glimmering in the moonlight. I’m a whole mass of people, she thought That’s my
trouble
. And none of them – except when I’m alone, or with Claire – none of them is convincing.

Somewhere out in the echoing night a dog barked. Outside these four warm walls there were real sadnesses, and real problems, and spaces and aborigines …

Laura snuggled down in bed, cosily wrapped up in her blankets and complexes.

CHRISTMAS EVE, AND
all along the Harrow avenue lights glinted in the windows; fairy lights, lanterns. Stretches of hedge, then fence, then stretches of hedge again; in between them, gates – The Lilacs, Woodland View, Greenbanks. Beyond the gates, pale in the gathering dusk, gravel drives and beyond them houses, similar but not identical, each with its shadowy double garage.

Out of the gate marked Greenbanks, a house whose double garage had Tudor eaves, issued a little party of three – two sisters and Badger, who was a border collie with a black and white face.

‘Woods?’ suggested Claire.

‘No,’ said Holly. ‘I’m always going there.’

‘Rec?’

‘Shut. It’s dark.’

‘Oh yes. Well, what about that bomb site place Laura and I used to play in?’

‘It’s got a house on it now.’

The two of them stood on the pavement, thinking. Laura was usually the leader, but Laura had disappeared somewhere. Actually, it was rather a relief being without her. She had seemed so grumpy this holidays, mooning about and telling their parents how hideous their furniture was, things like that. One felt more Christmassy without her.

Badger looked up at them and waved his white plume of a tail.

‘I know,’ said Claire finally. ‘The roofs.’

‘What roofs? What roofs?’ cried Holly.

They set off down the road, past the similar houses, past the large dark gardens, past the Rec with its closed iron gates. Holly, thrilled at this sudden sisterly adventure, skipped along the pavement. Now it was dark, there was that unmistakable Christmas feeling in the air, a sense of timelessness, a hushed expectancy.

At the bottom of the road they turned a corner. Here they passed a wrought-iron fence and Holly slowed down from a skip to a walk.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Claire.

‘Touching each of the twiddly bits. I have to when I go past.’

‘Why?’

‘So none are left out’

Claire laughed. ‘Do you know, I did that? At least, I used to run my hands along those bobbles at the top.’

‘So you’d be sure there would be chocolate cake for tea or it wouldn’t hurt at the dentist’s.’

‘That’s right.’ They moved off down the road. ‘What else do you do?’

‘Oh, I canter this bit when I’m being a pony.’

Claire looked down at the pavement. ‘And you never tread on the cracks.’

‘Of course not. You are, though.’

Claire looked down where she was stepping. She felt a vestigial tweak. Fear? Guilt? She started avoiding them.

With crack-avoiding strides they made their way down the street. They stepped in harmony. Soon they arrived at the block of flats with the roofs, the roofs where Claire and Laura had so often played. They crept through the shrubbery, past the rows of lighted windows; up the fire-escape at the back they tiptoed.

‘This is super!’ whispered Holly. Badger’s claws made little scrabbling clatters as he followed them up. Claire gripped the iron railing; she peeped furtively into the lighted kitchens they were passing; she ducked when a shape appeared and closed a window. Her skin prickled with delicious fear, a feeling she thought she’d outgrown. Badger barked, once. ‘Ssh!’ hissed Claire. That exquisite, dry-throated alertness was still there, hardly blunted with her adulthood.

They tiptoed on to the roof. It was an interesting one, full of skylights and tanks and large strange air-ducts. Claire looked around; just for a moment she wished that Laura were there. Now they’d arrived she hadn’t the faintest idea what they’d ever
done
. But she’d think of something; half of her was tingling with excitement. Half, the adult half, just thought of it as a nice view.

The skyline was jumbled with shapes; they were creeping past them when Holly drew in her breath. They stopped.

Holly pointed. ‘Look!’ she hissed.

Claire looked. ‘What is it? I can’t see anything.’

‘Look at that shape. It’s a person. It
is
.’

Claire stiffened. Holly was right: it was the hunched shape of a person. Someone was sitting there.

Just then Badger barked. The shape jumped up, suddenly familiar.

‘Laura!’

They stared at each other, then giggled. ‘Goodness, what a relief!’ They laughed, each pretending they hadn’t been frightened.

‘What are you doing here?’ Claire asked.

‘Just thinking. Dreaming. Escaping from home for a while.’

They both looked at Laura. The surprise subsided, leaving the atmosphere changed.

‘I came up here to breathe,’ said Laura. She threw her head back and gazed up. ‘To look at that beautiful sky. Amazing, isn’t it.’

Holly frowned. ‘What about our game?’ she asked.

‘We can look at those incredible stars,’ said Laura.

Holly treated that suggestion with the contempt it deserved. ‘You’re not saying the proper things.’ She looked from one to the other. ‘Anyway, if you two are so feeble I’m going off with Badger. First I’m going to explore. Then I’m going to see where those pipes go. Then I’m going to try and get down one of those window things.’

Claire, with the faintest sense of loss, sat down beside Laura.

‘Don’t go near the edge!’ she called to Holly, as boringly as an adult. Then she turned and stared down at the strings of street lamps.

‘I feel so stifled at home, Claire,’ said Laura. ‘They don’t realize I’ve grown up. All the nagging!
Why don’t you give just a little tidy to your room, darling, if you’ve nothing else to do, and couldn’t you possibly wear something a little more becoming, you know that Marion and her mother are coming for drinks and I do like you looking nice
. That sort of stuff.’ She threw her head back and gazed at the sky. ‘You know, even when I was younger my real reason for coming up here was to breathe.’ To illustrate
this
she breathed in, deeply. ‘You see, I needed space and freedom.’

Claire burst into laughter. ‘Laura! You were as ordinary as me! You came up here to play! To boss me around. Don’t you remember?’ She looked at Laura’s brooding profile against the night sky. Childhood was far away; it did seem a pity. ‘Really, you do seem muddled.’

‘I am muddled. And I analyse myself so endlessly I get into a worse muddle. I just think about what
I’m
doing all the time, how
I’m
reacting, what impression
I’m
giving. Very claustrophobic, it is. It’s only when I’m alone that I can really relax and breathe again.’

‘But don’t you feel free at Bristol, with your lovely independent room and all?’

‘Not really. It’s different pressures there.’

‘What like?’

‘Oh, pressures to look as if one’s got masses of friends and one’s doing no work and one’s sexy and careless. Insidious things, those.’

‘So at home it’s pressures to be tidy and in Bristol it’s pressures to be messy. So to speak.’

‘I never thought of it like that. And each is as bad as the other.’ She fell silent. How was it that Claire, with her cramped flat full of landladies’ cast-offs and Yvonne’s tapestry pictures, with the difficult pressures of her teaching job – how was it that Claire seemed curiously freer than she, Laura, felt? For, even in mid-grumble like this, she knew that if she were honest she had all the freedom in the world – time, liberty, her own room – heavens, poor Claire even had to share a bedroom! And yet Claire in her unobtrusive way had managed to become much more independent inside herself than she, Laura, with all her gesturings, had ever done. Somehow she’d never had to be the loud one; there was no need. She’d grown up without a fuss, leaving home as naturally as fruit falls from a branch. No traumas, no complexes, no knots that had to be tugged against, then examined at length.

‘Why were you always so reasonable at home?’ she asked peevishly. ‘Why did you never quarrel?’

‘I was just more boring and obedient than you.’

‘But you weren’t. Underneath it all you were doing your own thing. You just didn’t go on about it all the time. I make such a muddle of everything.’

‘Still talking?’ asked Holly, coming up and sitting down on the
pipe
next to Claire. ‘You missed lots.’

‘What sort of things?’ asked Claire. Badger poked his nose into her hair and licked her ear thoroughly, leaving it wet. ‘What did you find?’

‘I got one window thing open but I couldn’t get down, so I had a jumping competition with Badger over some pipes. They were very high, right up to my waist.’

‘Who won?’

‘Me, of course. He kept going under them instead; and then he looked so smug, silly dog!’

‘Good old Badge! Shall we go back for tea?’

They both looked at Laura, who was sitting chin in hand. Badger went and sat in front of her, thumping his tail and gazing in his intent, flattering way into her eyes, but she was deep in thought.

‘Laura?’

She roused herself and they made their way back to the fire-escape. Badger’s claws made scrabbling noises as he followed them down.

In the street, Claire turned to Holly with a touch of the old spirit. ‘Show me where you start to canter and I’ll race you.’

‘OK,’ said Holly in the casual voice that showed she was pleased. ‘We start here, actually. Want to come, Laura?’

‘Not really,’ said Laura.

Up the lamp-lit road they went, two cantering sisters, one barking dog, and one sister who was walking, her eyes on the pavement, not because she was watching out for the cracks but because she was feeling introverted.

Rosemary had watched the girls disappear into the dusk. ‘Rum butter,’ she said to herself. ‘Sprouts, gravy mix.’ She counted them off on her fingers. Tap-tap; in her high heels she crossed the room, drawing the curtains. Then she straightened some holly that had slipped sideways behind a picture frame – one of Dan’s pictures. The house was full of his paintings now. They were mostly rather wavery still-lifes in watercolour and everyone was very polite about them. ‘Stuffing.’

She gazed at the red rotating glow of the electric logs in the fireplace. Dan had protested when she had got rid of the real fire.
You can’t gaze into it any more
, he’d said. But Rosemary had found it so dreadfully messy with all those bits of Coalite in the carpet.

‘Ah, Holly’s stocking! I knew there was something left.’ She turned. ‘Dan darling, could you be an angel and run up to the girls’ room? See if you can find a thick pair of tights or something; I haven’t filled Holly’s stocking yet and it’s a good time now she’s out with Claire.’

Dan got up. Not being Father Christmas had made him feel inadequate once, but Rosemary had so obviously been more efficient at it that he had given up and left it to her. It had its compensations, anyway, in the shape of that second glass of whisky he could have after dinner; no longer was there the peril of tripping up on Holly’s hearthrug and spilling a sackful of teddies and tangerines all over the floor.

Upstairs in Claire and Laura’s room he scrabbled through the cupboard. Some wicked-coloured platform-soles were lying there all jumbled up with the sandals he remembered Laura wearing to school. He took the sandals out and looked at them; they were scuffed round the edges and had poignant bumps where her toes had been.

His feeling of loss returned; it was a familiar feeling and he shook it aside. After all, in a little while the downstairs door would slam and Laura herself would burst in, her cheeks reddened by the wind and her hair tousled.

But it wasn’t quite the same Laura. Her hair seemed unacquainted with the touch of a brush, and she smoked. At least, he’d known she’d smoked before because he’d found her doing it sometimes, and he’d tried not to look too disapproving or she’d just have smoked all the more. But she’d never been so aggressive and open about it. And she was restless in the house, floppy yet irritable, lethargic yet pert, so very adolescent, criticizing everything yet never lifting a finger to help.

He stood up and went over to the chest of drawers. On the top was a pile of books, ‘Evaluations of Personality’, ‘The Meaning of Pain’, ‘Stress and Duality’. All of their authors had impressive Middle-European names. He inspected them with awe. It seemed only last week that Laura had been sucking her Biro over her homework and it had been himself, Dan, who had bent over her and shown her how to do it. In his own small way he’d been able to contribute, and very satisfying it had been too.

But what on earth could he tell her about Duality and Stress? She seemed very far away now. He found some long socks and paused for a moment, gazing at the room with its twin beds,
Laura’s
surrounded by suitcases and scattered clothes. She hadn’t even unpacked. How transient it looked! This grumpy, far-away girl had hardly come back home at all.

‘Dan!’

He jumped.

‘Dan
darling
!’ She must be in one of her Bothers. He could tell by the ‘darling’.

‘Darling, what
are
you doing? They’ll be back in a minute.’

‘I’ve only been a moment.’

‘You’ve been three-quarters of an hour.’

WHEN HER PARENTS
came down to Bristol Laura, as she’d suspected, didn’t quite know where to put them. They stood around awkwardly, her mother with her matching outfit and persistent voice, her father stooping from years of work. They seemed the wrong shape for the room. Restless too, and inquisitive.

‘Darling!’ cried her mother. ‘Do tell us all about your friends. You’ve hardly said anything yet.’

‘Ssh!’ Laura glanced towards the door. ‘Most of them are OK.’ What else could she say about them?

‘Shall we meet any?’