Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (10 page)

‘We’re not having it,’ said Liz heavily. ‘It’s not a discussion till you say something.’

‘Look at her,’ pleaded Sophie. ‘Look at her eyes.’ There was a tiny crust of mucus at the corner of each. ‘They’ve never been dull before, like the light’s been switched off.’

‘I know, sweetheart,’ said Liz. She stared at the crisp print to remember her arguments. ‘But eleven hundred dollars—’

‘She’s our cat,’ Sophie cut in. ‘This is Cleopatra we’re talking about.’

‘But we don’t even know for sure if there’s anything serious wrong with her.’

‘Exactly,’ said Sophie. ‘We don’t know. We haven’t a clue. That’s why I can’t sleep at night. That’s why we’re going to pay them to test her for kidney stones and leukemia and FOP disease and anything else it could possibly be.’

‘FIP,’ Liz read off the page. ‘FIP disease. And it’s a vaccine, not a test.’

‘Whatever,’ growled Sophie. ‘Don’t pretend to be an expert; all you’re looking at is the figures.’

‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Liz, louder than she meant to. ‘Let’s look at it item by item. Hospitalization, intravenous catheter insertion … Jesus, sixty dollars to put a tube up her ass, that can’t be more than thirty seconds’ work. IV fluids, OK, fair enough. X-rays … why does she need three X-rays? She’s less than two feet long.’

Sophie was chewing her lipstick off. ‘I can’t believe you’re mean enough to haggle at a time like this.’

‘How can you call me mean?’ protested Liz. ‘I just get the feeling we’re being ripped off. This is emotional blackmail; they think we can’t say no.’

There was a dull silence. She tried to hear other voices from other rooms and wondered if Rosalita was standing outside the door, listening.

‘Look,’ she went on more calmly, ‘if we left out these optional blood tests we could trim off maybe three hundred dollars. What the hell is feline AIDS anyway? Cleopatra’s a virgin.’

‘I don’t know what it is, but what if she has it?’ asked Sophie. ‘What if two months down the road she’s dying of it and you were too damn callous to pay for a test?’

‘It’s probably just crystals in her bladder,’ said Liz weakly. ‘The doctor said so, didn’t he?’

Sophie curled over Cleopatra, whose eyes were half shut as if she was dreaming. Liz stared around her at the cartoon cats on the walls, with their pert ears and manic grins.

After a few minutes silence, she thought they’d probably got past the worst point of the row. Now if she could only think of something soothing to say, they’d be onto the homestretch.

But Sophie stood up straight and folded her arms. ‘So what is she worth then?’

‘Sorry?’

‘A hundred dollars? Two hundred?’

Liz sighed. ‘You know I’m mad about her.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I can’t put a figure to it.’

‘Really?’ spat Sophie. ‘But it’s definitely under eleven hundred, though; we know that much.’

‘We don’t have eleven hundred dollars,’ said Liz, word by word.

‘We could get it.’

Liz was finding it hard to breathe. ‘You know I can’t take out another loan, not so soon after the car.’

‘Then I’ll sell my grandmother’s fucking rings,’ said Sophie, slamming her hand on the counter with a metallic crack. ‘Or would it make your life simpler if we just had her put down here and now?’

‘Give me the damn form,’ said Liz, pulling the estimate towards her and digging in her pocket for her pen.

Sophie watched without a word as Liz signed, her hands shaking.

Dr McGraw carried Cleopatra away to the cages. The cat watched them over his shoulder, unforgivingly.

Out in the car, Sophie sat with the empty basket on her lap. Liz couldn’t tell if she was crying without looking at her directly, but she had a feeling she was. Liz thought of their early days when they went to the cinema a lot and Liz always knew just when Sophie needed her to reach over and take her hand.

She drove home, taking corners carefully.

‘I’m just curious,’ said Sophie at a traffic light. ‘What would you pay for me?’

‘What?’
Liz’s voice came out like a squeal of brakes.

‘If I was rushed into the emergency room and a doctor handed you an estimate. What would I be worth to you?’

Liz told her to shut the fuck up.

Rosalita rang the same evening, her voice bright. Crystals in the bladder, that’s all it was. Little Cleo was doing fine, had taken well to the new diet, and they could pick her up the next morning. That would be just ninety-eight dollars.

So the cat came home, and for a while everything seemed like it ever was.

And when six months later Sophie left Liz for a beautician she met at the cosmetic academy and moved into the beautician’s condo in a building with a strict no-pets policy, Liz used to hold on to Cleopatra at night, hold her so tight that the cat squirmed, and think about the cost of things.

On rare occasions, over the years that followed, if he was having a few pints with a mate, Joseph thought of asking,
Would you break up with your girlfriend over a hair on her chin? Don’t laugh,
he’d add,
it’s not funny.

But the question sounded impossible when he put it in words, so he never did ask it.

It was most unlike him, the whole thing. He’d always been glad Róisín didn’t cover her fuzzy peach face with layers of foundation. He relished her bushy black eyebrows that almost met, like Frida Kahlo’s.
Perfection Incarnate,
that was one of his names for her. They were in agreement that Róisín was not only the brains of the relationship but the beauty as well. Joseph was the pancreas, maybe, or the kneecap.

For seven years they’d lived in a skinny terraced house and had no problems. None that Joseph knew of, anyway. Then after a while they hadn’t the time for problems, because they had Liam instead. Liam was never a problem; he was the opposite of all problems. So when Joseph was made redundant from a telesales job he’d hated anyway, they decided it was perfect timing: he’d stay home and mind the boy.

One Sunday, Liam was up till two with a tickly cough, so the next morning there wasn’t a peep out of him. Joseph lay among the pillows, relishing the lie-in. He scratched his stubble and watched Róisín run in and out, power-dressing. Tights half up, she dipped into the wardrobe for a pair of heels and stubbed her forehead on the hinge. Then she stumbled over to the bedside table to scoop up her watch and earrings. Joseph leaned out far enough to hold her legs in a rugby tackle.

Róisín told him to get lost, but not as if she meant it.

‘Stay home today,’ he offered, ‘and I’ll kiss every inch of your body.’ He used to say that a lot in the old days, when they were students and every day was twice as long. She stooped down to kiss him now and he arched up like a turtle to meet her mouth.

It was then he noticed it. One dark bristle, just under her chin, a quarter of an inch long.

He must have let go of her legs, because she said, ‘What?’

Joseph shook his head as if he didn’t know what she meant.

‘You were looking funny.’

He lay back against the pillows and denied it with a laugh.

‘Dadda!’ In the next room Liam sent up his wail. Róisín made a lunge for her briefcase, and Joseph struggled out of the sheets.

It wasn’t like Joseph went round thinking about it all day every day after that; he wasn’t some kind of Neanderthal, like his father. He’d been born in 1970, for god’s sake. He could ask for Tampax Super Plus in the chemist without lowering his voice more than a notch. He’d never wanted Róisín to be some airbrushed pinup or Stepford Wife. He’d always liked the dark fuzz on her thighs, her crazy-paving bikini line, the scattered hairs that danced their way to her navel. He had a habit of burying his face in the spiral curls under her arms. So why would it bother him, one little hair on her chin?

But somehow he couldn’t shed the childhood image of an old great-aunt with a full set of quivering whiskers, and how once when she’d tried to kiss him he’d run away screaming. And every night now when he read fairy tales to Liam, the book seemed to fall open to the same picture of a toothless, mole-studded, hairy-faced witch.

Joseph was aware he was overreacting; he knew he’d have to snap out of it soon. It wasn’t that he brooded, exactly, only that being home all day left a lot of little chinks of time free for thinking.

One evening he was waiting up for Róisín and couldn’t find the remote, so he flicked through a magazine she’d left on the coffee table. FREE YOURSELF FROM FACIAL HAIR FOREVER, a headline ordered. His eyes scuttled over the diagrams. The follicles looked like blueprints of mining shafts.

When he heard Róisín’s key in the lock, Joseph stuffed the magazine down the side of the sofa.

She was still peeling off her coat in the hall when he rushed out and hugged her. Under cover of a kiss, he stroked her chin. But he couldn’t feel a thing.

The next morning the demented chirp of the alarm clock woke Joseph first. Róisín’s face was half immersed in the pillow. He bent over, very carefully, to see if the hair had grown at all. Was there really only one? How many could sprout below the line of her jaw before she’d notice?

Her eyes were very blue. He jerked back. She grinned up at him confusedly.

It wasn’t a turnoff; it wasn’t as simple as that. It was more that Joseph would be sitting beside Róisín on a park bench as she played clap-handies with Liam, say, and suddenly she’d turn her head a fraction and he’d see it. It interrupted the smooth curve of her chin. And a little frisson would go through him, like lust but not quite.

It had become a sort of tic, this habit of peering at his girlfriend’s chin. The little hair there wasn’t sharp like the ones that pushed out of his own skin overnight. It was so soft he could barely feel it when he found a pretext to stroke her face. It was just a wisp, really. There was no harm in it. So why did he long to take it between his nails and yank it out?

It was like an itch in his fingers, too deep to scratch. It disgusted him.

Another man might have simply asked her to pluck it.

But Joseph couldn’t imagine saying those words. Not to Róisín. This sort of thing was a delicate matter; you didn’t just tell a woman she was growing a beard. They were sensitive about these things. It would be best if it came up naturally in the course of conversation, but if he tried to lead their dinnertime conversation gradually round to female facial hair he knew he’d make a hash of it. She might be cross that he thought it was any of his business to tell her which bits of her body were acceptable. Or worse, she might be hurt; she might think he didn’t fancy her any more, now she wasn’t twenty-one, now she had stretch marks and other proofs of a body that had been lived in.

Not that he was God’s Gift to Womanhood himself. He never had been. Joseph stood at the bathroom mirror, these mornings, and stared at the hair matted on his brush. Had he always shed that much? His hairline seemed to be in the same place it had always been, but maybe the change was so infinitesimal he wouldn’t notice until the day he woke up bald. He tried to laugh at that thought, but only managed the half grin of a stroke victim. He ran his fingers across his head, and another hair came away, wrapped round his thumb.

Maybe there were only a given number of hairs in the world, and they had to be shared out.

Surely Róisín would laugh if she knew what was scurrying through his mind, these days. It could become one of her running gags. ‘Be careful of Bearded Ladies, Jo-Jo,’ she might say. ‘They have a habit of running away with the circus.’

The real question wasn’t whether she would be hurt if he asked her to pluck it, Joseph realized. The real question was, What if she said no?

In the library he left Liam slamming Barbie and Ken’s heads together and ducked round the corner. He thought it might take some research, but the first encyclopaedia told him all he needed, and more than he wanted to know.

It turned out that a hair was a filament or filamentous outgrowth that grew from the integument of an animal or insect. Joseph had never known he had an integument. He also learned that although in many cultures beards were a symbol of the dignity of manhood, there was nothing intrinsically masculine about facial hair at all. Native American and Chinese men didn’t tend to develop much hair on their faces; Mediterranean women did. Even in the British Isles, the incidence of facial hair among women was much higher than was commonly supposed.

Joseph felt slightly breathless, at this point. He had been tricked. To think of all those hairy-chinned women out there on the streets, plucked and waxed and powdered down, going about their business with nobody knowing a thing …

He read on distractedly. Both men and women of high birth in ancient Egypt wore metal ceremonial hairpieces on their chins. Then there was Saint Uncumber, who prayed to God to deliver her from men and was delighted when he gave her a beard.

Joseph let the encyclopaedia sag shut. He edged round the corner to Self-Help, where he found a book called
Women Are

Cats, Men Are Dogs: Making Your Relationship Work.
He had to skim through Sexual Positions, Money Worries and In-law Trouble before he found the right section.

Instead of commenting negatively on her appearance, say ‘Honey, I’d like to treat you to a top-to-toe makeover. You deserve the best.’

Joseph tried out that line, under his breath, but it sounded like bad karaoke.

Down on his knees on the cork tiles, a few hours later, he tried to unclog the bath; the plunger made a violent gulp. He finally had to use his fingers in a tug-of-war with the long clot of soap and hair; more and more of it unreeled as if it grew down there. From the colour it looked more like his than hers. Queasy, he flicked it into the bin.

He was tidying up the living room after lunch when he noticed that Róisín’s magazine was on the coffee table again. She must have found it stuffed down the side of the sofa cushion. She must have wondered. Joseph stared at the crumpled cover, wondering what exactly she’d have wondered. SIZZLING SUMMER SANDALS. PEACE OF MIND IN JUST TEN DAYS. HOW TO TELL IF HE’S CHEATING.

These days he was trying to ensure that sex wouldn’t happen. Not that he didn’t feel like it. But he knew that sex brought his guard down, and he was afraid that it would ruin some intimate moment if Róisín caught him staring fixedly at her chin.

He was just playing for time. He knew he had to tell her, whether it sounded reasonable or not. He had to say something at least, make a joke of it instead of a sore point. Otherwise he was going to lose his tiny mind.

They used to be able to tell each other anything, the two of them. That’s what they’d boasted, in the early days. Everyone went round saying things like that at college.
Tell me. Honestly. I really want to know.

Later that afternoon Joseph had a better idea. He ran upstairs to the bathroom and ransacked the cupboard like a burglar. He rooted through all Róisín’s paraphernalia: eyelash crimpers, toenail sponges, an old diaphragm. Finally he recognized the tweezers. He was holding it up to the light to check its grip when he sensed he was being watched. He turned. Róisín in her stocking feet, arms piled high with files, staring.

‘You’re home early! Sorry about the mess,’ he said as if it was a joke.

‘What are you doing with my tweezers?’ she asked.

‘Got a splinter, down the playground,’ Joseph improvised.

Róisín took hold of his hand and tugged him towards the window. She peered at the map of lines: head, heart, fate. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘It’s tiny,’ said Joseph, ‘but it’s driving me mad.’

That evening he was watching some stupid quiz when Róisín came in and sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘You’re in a funny mood these days,’ she said, so softly that he thought at first she was commenting on the programme.

‘Am I?’ Joseph assured her he didn’t know why he seemed that way. No, he didn’t miss his old job; what was there to miss? No, Liam wasn’t getting on his nerves, no more than usual. It was nothing.

At which point Róisín reached for the remote and muted the TV.

Joseph stared at the flickering images. He wasn’t ready to look at her yet. He was choosing his words. ‘It’s nothing that
matters,
’ he said at last, too cheerfully. ‘It’s—’

‘It’s me,’ interrupted Róisín, ‘isn’t it?’

And he turned to look at her then, because her voice was stripped down like a wire. Naked. The skin below her eyes was the blue of a bird’s egg.

Joseph gathered her into his arms and lied with his whole heart. ‘Of course it’s not you. Why would it be you? You’re grand. You’re Perfection Incarnate,’ he added, pressing his lips to her neck, trying to shut himself up.

She twisted her head. ‘But are you—’

‘I’m just tired, love,’ he interrupted, so she couldn’t finish the question. ‘I’m just a bit tired these days.’ He faked an enormous, apelike yawn.

It was two in the morning before he could be sure she was in deep sleep. He opened his eyes and sat up, feeling under the pillow for the pen torch and the tweezers.

Hovering over Róisín, he aimed the tiny light at her chin. His thumb pressed hard on the ridged plastic of the switch. Arms shaking, he caught the little hair in his narrow beam. With the other hand he reached out to close the tweezers on it. Please god he wouldn’t stab her in the chin.

Just then Róisín stirred and rolled towards him, onto her face. Joseph lurched back and snapped off the torch. He shoved everything under his pillow and lay down flat. His heart was hammering like police at the door.

He lay quite still for a long time. Veils of darkness hung all round him. He was sinking.

Then Róisín spoke. ‘Can you not sleep?’

Joseph didn’t answer.

In the morning he lay hollow-eyed, watching Róisín put on her lipstick in the bedroom mirror. She grabbed her bag and came over to give him a kiss.

She turned to open the door. He hauled himself upright and put on a casual voice. ‘Hey. You know that tiny wee hair under your chin?’

He waited for the world to crack apart.

‘Which?’ Róisín doubled back to the mirror without breaking stride. She stuck her jaw out and threw back her head. ‘Got it,’ she said in a slightly strangled voice. Her finger and thumb closed together and she made a tiny, precise movement. Like a conductor might, to finish a symphony.

She brushed her fingers together and gave Joseph a little wave on her way out.