Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (17 page)

Lee didn’t comment on how quickly I was getting us lost. Cradle snatcher, I commented to myself, and not even a suave one at that. As we hovered at an unmarked fork, a man walked into the glare of the headlights. I stared at him to make sure he was real, then rolled down the window with a flurry of elbows. ‘Cashelagen?’ I asked. Lee had turned off the radio, so my voice sounded indecently loud. ‘Could you tell us are we anywhere near Cashelagen?’

The man fingered his sideburns and stepped closer, beaming in past me at Lee. What in god’s name was this fellow doing wandering round in the middle of the night anyway? He didn’t even have our excuse. I was just starting to roll the window up again when ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘ah, if it’s Cashelagen you’re wanting you’d have to go a fair few miles back through Ballyalla and then take the coast road.’

‘Thanks,’ I told him shortly, and revved up the engine. Lee would think I was the most hopeless incompetent she had ever got into a van for immoral purposes with. As soon as he had walked out of range of the headlights, I let off the hand brake and shot forward. I glanced over at Lee’s bent head. The frightening thought occurred to me:
I could love this girl.

The lines above Sylvia’s eyebrow were beginning to swoop like gulls. If she was going to get cross, we might as well turn the radio back on and drive all night. I rehearsed the words in my head, then said them. ‘Sure who needs a castle in the dark?’

Her grin was quick as a fish.

‘Everywhere’s quiet at this time of night,’ I said rather squeakily. ‘Here’s quiet. We could stop here.’

‘What, right here?’

Sylvia peered back at the road and suddenly wheeled round into the entrance to a field. We stopped with the bumper a foot away from a five-barred gate. When the headlights went off, the field stretched out dark in front of us, and there was a sprinkle of light that had to be Galway.

‘What time did you say you had to be in Dublin?’ I asked suddenly.

‘Nine. Better start back round five in case I hit traffic,’ said Sylvia. She bent over to rummage in the glove compartment. She pulled out a strapless watch, looked at it, brought it closer to her eyes, then let out a puff of laughter.

‘What time’s it now?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ she told me.

I grabbed it. The hands said half past three. ‘It can’t be.’

We sat staring into the field. ‘Nice stars,’ I said, for something to say.

‘Mmm,’ she said.

I stared at the stars, joining the dots, till my eyes watered.

And then I heard Sylvia laughing in her throat as she turned side-ways and leaned over my seat belt. I heard it hissing back into its socket as she kissed me on the mouth.

When I came back from taking a pee in the bushes, the driver’s seat was empty. I panicked, and stared up and down the lane. Why would she have run off on foot? Then, with a deafening creak, the back doors of the van swung open.

Sylvia’s bare shoulders showed over the blanket that covered her body. She hugged her knees. Her eyes were bright, and the small bags underneath were the most beautiful folds of skin I’d ever seen. I climbed in and kneeled on the sheepskin coat beside her, reaching up to snap off the little light. Her face opened wide in a yawn. The frightening thought occurred to me:
I could love this woman.

‘You could always get some sleep, you know,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ Then I thought that sounded churlish, but I didn’t know how to unsay it.

‘Oh, I know I could,’ said Sylvia, her voice melodic with amusement. ‘There’s lots of things we could do with a whole hour and a half. We could sleep, we could share the joint in the glove compartment, we could drive to Clifden and watch the sun come up. Lots of things.’

I smiled. Then I realized she couldn’t see my face in the dark.

‘Get your clothes off,’ she said.

I would have liked to leave the map-reading light on over our heads, letting me see and memorize every line of Lee’s body, but it would have lit us up like a saintly apparition for any passing farmer to see. So the whole thing happened in a darkness much darker than it ever gets in a city.

There was a script, of course. No matter how spontaneous it may feel, there’s always an unwritten script. Every one of these encounters has a script, even the very first time your hand undoes the button on somebody’s shirt; none of us comes without expectations to this body business.

But lord, what fun it was. Lee was salt with sweat and fleshier than I’d imagined, behind all her layers of black cotton and wool. In thirty-four years I’ve found nothing to compare to that moment when the bare limbs slide together like a key into a lock. Or no, more like one of those electronic key cards they give you in big hotels, the open sesame ones marked with an invisible code, which the door must read and recognize before it agrees to open.

At one point Lee rolled under me and muttered, ‘There’s somewhere I want to go,’ then went deep inside me. It hurt a little, just a little, and I must have flinched because she asked, ‘Does that hurt?’ and I said, ‘No,’ because I was glad of it. ‘No,’ I said again, because I didn’t want her to go.

Sylvia’s voice was rough like rocks grinding on each other. As she moved on top of me she whispered in my ear, things I couldn’t make out, sounds just outside the range of hearing. I never wanted to interrupt the flow by saying, ‘Sorry?’ or ‘What did you say?’ Much as I wanted to hear and remember every word, every detail, at a certain point I just had to switch my mind off and get on with living it. But Sylvia’s voice kept going in my ear, turning me on in the strangest way by whispering phrases that only she could hear.

I’ve always thought the biggest lie in the books is that women instinctively know what to do to each other because their bodies are the same. None of Sylvia’s shapes were the same as mine, nor could I have guessed what she was like from how she seemed in her smart clothes. And we liked different things and took things in different order, showing each other by infinitesimal movings away and movings towards. She did some things to me that I knew I wanted, some I didn’t think I’d much like and didn’t, and several I was startled to find that I enjoyed much more than I would have imagined. I did some things Sylvia seemed calm about, and then something she must have really needed, because she started to let out her breath in a long gasp when I’d barely begun.

Near the end, Sylvia’s long fingers moved down her body to ride alongside mine, not supplanting, just guiding. ‘Go light,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Lighter and lighter. Butterfly.’ As she began to thrash at last, laughter spilled from her mouth.

‘What? What are you laughing for?’ I asked, afraid I’d done something wrong. Sylvia just whooped louder. Words leaked out of her throat, distorted by pleasure.

At one point I touched my lips to the skin under her eyes, first one and then the other. ‘Your bags are gorgeous, you know. Promise you’ll never let a surgeon at them?’

‘No,’ she said, starting to laugh again.

‘No to which?’

‘No promise.’

When Sylvia was touching me I didn’t say a single one of the words that swam through my head. I don’t know was I shy or just stubborn, wanting to make her guess what to do. The tantalization of waiting for those hands to decipher my body made the bliss build and build till when it came it threw me.

There was one moment I wouldn’t swap anything for. It was in the lull beforehand, the few seconds when I stopped breathing. I looked at this stranger’s face bent over me, twisted in exertion and tenderness, and I thought, Yes, you, whoever you are, if you’re asking for it, I’ll give it all up to you.

In the in-between times we panted and rested and stifled our laughter in the curve of each other’s shoulders and debated when I’d noticed Lee and when she’d noticed me, and what we’d noticed and what we’d imagined on each occasion, the history of this particular desire. And during one of these in-between times we realized that the sun had come up, faint behind a yellow mist, and it was half five according to the strapless watch in the glove compartment.

I took hold of Lee, my arms binding her ribs and my head resting in the flat place between her breasts. The newly budded swollen look of them made my mouth water, but there was no time. I shut my mouth and my eyes and held Lee hard and there was no time left at all, so I let go and sat up. I could feel our nerves pulling apart like ivy off a wall.

The cows were beginning to moan in the field as we pulled our clothes on. My linen trousers were cold and smoky. We did none of the things parting lovers do if they have the time or the right. I didn’t snatch at Lee’s foot as she pulled her jeans on; she didn’t sneak her head under my shirt as I pulled it over my face. The whole thing had to be over already.

It was not the easiest thing in the world to find my way back to Galway with Lee’s hand tucked between my thighs. Through my trousers I could feel the cold of her fingers, and the hardness of her thumb, rubbing the linen. I caught her eye as we sped round a corner, and she grinned, suddenly very young. ‘You’re just using me to warm your hand up,’ I accused.

‘That’s all it is,’ said Lee.

I was still throbbing, so loud I thought the car was ringing with it. We were only two streets from the hostel now.

I wouldn’t ask to see her again. I would just leave the matter open and drive away. Lee probably got offers all the time; she was far too young to be looking for anything heavy. I’d show her I was generous enough to accept that an hour and a half was all she had to give me.

I let her out just beside the hostel, which was already opening to release some backpacking Germans. I was going to get out of the car to give her a proper body-to-body hug, but while I was struggling with my seat belt, Lee knocked on the glass. I rolled down the window, put
Desert Hearts
out of my mind, and kissed her for what I had a hunch was likely to be the last time.

I stood shivering in the street outside the hostel and knocked on Sylvia’s car window. I was high as a kite and dizzy with fatigue.

I wouldn’t ask anything naff like when we were likely to see each other again. I would just wave as she drove away. Sylvia probably did this kind of thing all the time; she was far too famous to be wanting anything heavy. I’d show her that I was sophisticated enough not to fall for her all in one go, not to ask for anything but the hour and a half she had to give me.

When she rolled down the window, I smiled and leaned in. I shut my eyes and felt Sylvia’s tongue against mine, saying something neither of us could hear. So brief, so slippery, nothing you could get a hold of.

I tore stripes off Carola when I noticed that ad, taped up in the window of the newsagent’s next door to our house. She said I could hardly complain if I’d missed the meeting where the wording of the ad was agreed on, but I should feel free to share my feelings with the policy group anyway. ‘They’re not feelings,’ I said, ‘they’re facts.’

Dear Policy Group,
I typed furiously.

Re: Recruitment Ad. I suggest we use a hyphen in Co-op, if we don’t want the Welcome Co-operative to be confused with a chicken coop. Some other problems with this ad: ‘Seeks Member’ sounds like we don’t have any members yet. Do you mean ‘Seeks New Member’? – and, besides, it sounds rather like a giant dildo. Also, I’m just curious, why should the applicants HAVE ‘Ability To Get On With People’ (and is People a euphemism for Women, by the way, given that this is a women-only co-op?), but only SHOW ‘Commitment To Co-operative Living’ (
commitment
being spelled with two
m
’s and one
t,
not vice versa, by the way, in case anyone cares)? Or are you suggesting that an applicant might claim to HAVE such a commitment but needs to be forced to SHOW it, e.g. through housework? And if so, why not say so?

The way I see it, there’s not a lot of point having policies on Equal Opportunities and Accessibility and Class and Race Issues if we’re going to keep on writing our ads in politically correct gobbledygook that would put off anyone who’s not doing a PhD. And speaking of Race Issues, what on earth does it mean to say that ALL ethnic backgrounds (members of all ethnic groups, I think you mean) are ‘Particularly Welcome To Apply’? Who’s not-so-particularly-welcome, then? Or do you mean white people don’t count as an ethnic group? I can’t believe one five-line ad can give such an impression of confusion, illiteracy, and pomposity all at once. Why can’t we just say what we mean?

My hands were shaking, so I left it at that and printed out the page.
Yours, Luce
, I’d added at the bottom, as if it weren’t obvious who’d written the letter from vocabulary alone. As Di was always telling me, ‘It’s like you’ve got the
Oxford English Dictionary
hidden up your arse.’ She had a point; some days I sounded more like eighty than eighteen. I suppose I’d read too many books to be normal.

It was only when I was sealing the letter into the envelope that I remembered: in my absence, at the last co-op meeting, they’d decided to rotate me from the maintenance crew to the policy group, because, as I’d been pointing out for ages, my syntax was a lot better than my plumbing. I was meant to replace Nuala, who was moving back to Cork, and if Rachel made up her mind to go off for three months to that organic farm in Cornwall, it occurred to me now, there’d be no one left in the policy group but myself and Di, and I’d end up handing her my letter like some mad silent protestor. Or if Di happened to be away that evening, on one of those Buddhist retreats her boyfriend ran, it would be just me having a one-person meeting, and I’d have to read my own letter aloud and make snide comments about it.

Arghhhh. The joys of communal living. After two years in the Welcome Co-op, I could hardly remember living any other way.

I ripped the envelope open and went downstairs. In the kitchen I pinned my letter up on the corkboard over the oven – the only place you could be sure everyone would see it. I went back down for a prawn cracker five minutes later and found Di reading it as she stirred her miso. ‘The ad was appalling,’ I said defensively.

‘Yeah. Carola wrote it after the rest of us had gone down the pub. You know you use the word “mean” four times in the last paragraph?’ she asked, grinning.

I ripped the thing down and stuffed it into the recycling bin.

‘Temper, temper,’ she said, tucking away a pale curl that had come out of her bun.

I licked my prawn cracker. ‘What’s wrong with me these days, Di?’

‘You know what’s wrong with you.’

‘Apart from that.’ I shifted uncomfortably against the wooden counter.

‘There is no apart from that, Luce. You’ve been a virgin too long.’

My head was hammering; I rubbed the stiff muscles at the back of my neck. ‘Why does every conversation in this house have to come back to the same-old same-old?’

‘Well Jesus, child, take a look at yourself.’

I glanced down as if I’d got food on my shirt.

‘You came out at fifteen, but you haven’t done a thing about it yet. For years now you’ve seen every kind of woman pass through these doors, and you haven’t let one of them lay a hand on you. No wonder you’ve got a headache!’

I was out the door and halfway up the garden by then. Di was fabulous, but I could do without another of her rants about regular orgasms being crucial to health. Nurses were all like that.

The June sun was slipping behind the crab apple tree. My courgettes were beginning to flower, a wonderful pale orange. I picked a couple of insects off them. When I’d moved into the Welcome, the week after my sixteenth birthday – the date chosen to ensure my mother would have had no legal way of dragging me back home, if she’d tried, not that she did – anyway, at first I found the constant company unbearable. I’d been used to spending all my after-school time locked in my bedroom with a book, living in the world of the Brontës or Jung or Isabel Allende; just about any world would do so long as it wasn’t the one my mother lived in. And now all at once I was supposed to become part of some bizarre nine-woman feminist family. The housing co-op was what I’d chosen but it freaked me out all the same. In the early weeks, digging the garden was the only thing that kept me halfway sane. The vegetable plot had been strictly organic ever since I’d taken it over, but sometimes I got the impression that most of my sweat went into providing a feast for the crawlies.

Di was sort of right. I was a pedant, a twitching spinster, dried up before my time, and I’d only just finished secondary school! Sixty-seven fortnightly co-op meetings (I’d counted them up, recently) had frayed me to a thread: all those good intentions, all that mind-numbingly imprecise jargon. These days even typos in the
Guardian
made me itch. When I was old, I knew I wouldn’t wear purple, like in the poem; instead I’d limp around under cover of darkness, correcting the punctuation on billboards with a spray can. Rachel said I should become a proofreader and make a mint, instead of starting political studies at the university this October and probably ending up politically somewhere to the right of Baroness Thatcher. On my eighteenth birthday, when Di gave me a T-shirt that read DOES ANAL RETENTIVE HAVE A HYPHEN?, I was too busy considering the question to get the joke.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the idea of sex, by the way. I was just picky. And somehow, the more free-floating fornication that went on in the Welcome – the louder the shrieks from Carola’s attic room, the more often I walked into the living room and found anonymous bodies pillowing the sofa – the less I felt like attempting it. Besides, there was never enough privacy. At my birthday party I got as far as kissing a German acupuncturist, and by breakfast the next morning my housemates had given me: (
a
) a pack of latex gloves (Di), (
b
) much conflicting advice about sexual positions (Rachel, Maura, Iona, and the two Londoners whose names I was always getting wrong way around), and (
c
) a paperback called
Safe Space: Coping with Issues around Intimacy
(Carola, of course). The acupuncturist left me a message, but I never rang back. Collectively my housemates had managed to put me right off.

So Nuala went back to Cork, and that’s how it all began. The Welcome’s rent was so low, it was never hard to fill a place. We interviewed seven women, one endless hot Saturday at the end of June. I was the one who volunteered to tell JJ she was the lucky winner.

‘I wasn’t sure was it all right to ring at nearly midnight—,’ I told her, down the phone.

‘Yeah, no problem. That’s … excellent.’ Her voice was as deep as Tracy Chapman’s, and hoarse with excitement.

‘Well, we’re all really glad,’ I added, somehow not wanting the call to be over so soon.

I could hear JJ let out a long breath of relief. ‘I never thought I’d hear from you people again, actually. I made such a cock-up of the interview.’

‘Not at all!’ I said, laughing too loudly.

‘But I hardly said a word.’

‘Well, we figured you were just shy, you know. All the others were brash young things who got on our nerves.’

Di, passing through with a tray of margaritas for her hospital friends who were partying on the balcony, raised one eyebrow.

It was kind of a lie; we hadn’t been at all unanimous. Carola had voted for a ghastly woman from Leeds who claimed to be very vulnerable after a series of relationships with emotionally abusive men and wanted to know did we do co-counselling after house meetings? But in the end I played the race card, like the hypocrite I was; I told Carola that if we were serious about Particularly Welcoming and all that – if we wanted to improve the co-op’s representation of women of colour from none in nine to one in nine – then we had to pick JJ.

Not that her being black had anything to do with it, for me. I wanted JJ because her fingers were long and broad and made me feel slightly shaky.

The day she was to move in, I came downstairs to find the living room transformed. There was a Mexican blanket slung over the back of the pink couch, an African head scarf wrapped around the lampshade, and my framed print of Gertrude Stein appeared to have metamorphosed into a dog-eared poster of a woman carrying a stack of bricks on her head that said OXFAM IN INDIA: EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EDUCATION.

Rachel, Di, and Iona claimed to know nothing about the changes. Carola said she was only acting on the advice of a book called
Anti-Racism for Housing Co-ops.
She was trying to make the atmosphere more inclusive, less Anglo-Saxon.

‘Gertrude Stein was an American Jew!’ I protested.

‘She lived on inherited wealth,’ said Carola, spooning up her porridge.

‘So?’

‘So I just don’t think we should cover our walls with images of women of privilege; it sends out the wrong signals.’

‘Gertrude Stein only covered about three square feet of the wall!’

Carola rolled her pale blue eyes. ‘You’re being petty, Luce. I wonder why you’ve got so much invested in the status quo?’

‘Because the status quo was a pretty stylish living room. And you know what signals this room is sending out now, Carola? Embarrassingly obvious, geographically muddled, white guilt signals!’

She pointed out that we all had feelings around these issues.

‘Feelings about,’ I corrected her, ‘not around,
about,
’ and it all went downhill from there, especially when I pulled down the Oxfam poster and a corner tore off. Di had to intervene, and it took hours of ‘feelings around’ before we reached a grudging compromise: yes to the Mexican blanket, no to the lampshade wrap, and OK to a laminated poster of dolphins that none of us liked.

I’d been planning to do some weeding that afternoon because my eyes were sore from reading Dostoevsky in a Victorian edition with tiny print, but I was afraid I wouldn’t hear the front door. I pottered around in my room instead, and when I heard the bell I ran downstairs to help JJ carry up her stuff. But she didn’t have much in the way of stuff, it turned out: two backpacks, a duvet, and a rat.

I backed away from the cage.

‘Ah, yeah, his name’s Victor,’ she said nervously, clearing her throat. ‘I forgot to mention him at the interview.’

‘Oh, I’m sure everyone’ll love him,’ I told her, grabbing the cage by its handle and frantically thinking,
Hamster, it’s more or less a hamster.
I managed to carry the cage all the way upstairs without looking inside.

I was going to offer to help JJ unpack, but somehow I lost my nerve. There was something private about the way she dropped her bags in the corner beside Victor’s cage and stood looking out the window. ‘This room gets the sun in the late afternoons,’ I told her; ‘I lived here, my first year in the co-op,’ but she just nodded and smiled a little, without looking back at me.

That night we had a communal dinner in JJ’s honour, even though when the nine of us sat down together there was barely elbow room to use a fork. I talked too much, ate too much of Melissa’s sushi and Kay’s gooseberry fool, and felt rather ill. JJ seemed to listen attentively to the conversation – which covered global warming, how to eat a lychee, the government’s treachery, what we wanted done with our bodies when we died, and (the inevitable topic) female ejaculation – but she said even less than she had at her interview, though I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. I wondered whether we sounded peculiar to her, or ranty, or Anglo-Saxon.

Iona carried in the tray of coffee, chai, peppermint tea, and soy shake. ‘So tell us, JJ,’ said Carola with a sympathetic smile, ‘is it going to make you feel at all uncomfortable, d’you think, being the only woman of colour in the co-op?’

Di rolled her eyes at me, but it was too awful to be funny. I stared out the window at my tomato plants, mortified.

But JJ just shrugged and sipped her coffee.

Carola wouldn’t let it rest, of course. ‘How old would you say you were, like, when you first became aware of systemic racism?’

‘Carola!’ Di and I groaned in unison.

This time JJ let out a little grunt that could have been the beginning of a laugh. Then she muttered something that sounded like ‘Bodies are an accident’.

If I hadn’t been sitting right beside her, I mightn’t have caught that at all. Startled, I looked down at myself. A short, skinny, pale, post-adolescent Anglo-Saxon body; a random conglomeration of genes.

Afterwards JJ volunteered to wash up, so I said she and I would do it and everybody else was to get out of the kitchen. Some went to bed, and some went out to smoke dope by the bonfire, and I got to stand beside JJ, watching how gently she handled the plates. I took them dripping from her big hands, one by one, and wiped them dry.