The Bad Sister (13 page)

Night has come down on the street now that Tony's mother has gone. But I am distant from it, hanging in a cage of light above dark pavements and the slow tread of battered wives who go out in threes for safety, and the beginning of the pounding hum from Paradise Island. I am a rectangle of yellow light, and tonight there is no round moon sailing in on me. I am empty and square as a windowpane. Only my throat aches. What will Gala say to that? And what will happen now? As the room shows no sign that Gala will ever come, I can think of no answers. The only objects that seem to move in my mind are the clothes I wore for my first journey – the jeans and narrow-shouldered jacket still, I suppose, in the washbasket in the kitchen. I can see them more clearly than the things round me in this room yet it may be I will never put them on again. How can I ‘bring' this girl to Meg? How can I do it? She will have me stuck here like a fly if I don't move.

The thought only paralyzes me further. I see Tony and Miranda together in a car, they are travelling fast through rain while I am glued here, they are smiling at each other like people in a film and there is the red glow of a cigarette
level with her face. They are talking but I can't hear them. There are such big rainspots on the window that her face seems to have run a little, to have grown lopsided: but she is still beautiful. She is an enigma, she is deep. I am shallow, one white plane.

I see Meg. We are at the limit of a wood and beyond that is ice which is very crisp under the moon. We climb onto a sledge. We go fast over the ice. We are at war – we are chasing or being chased – but the ice wind is so cold that my face is frozen and I can't hear what Meg is calling to me. When the trees disappear, I am in terror: there is only the expanse of white ice as far as the eye can see. If it could crack, even! But it won't. There will be no black, ice-cold, welcoming gush. Just the ice, and us going fast over it like witches in our sledge.

I try to see him again. Of course this is impossible. He is the void. Meg won't show him again until I bring her what she wants. I am frozen because he isn't here. The lack of him has chained the objects in this room to their places, and has stopped the clocks so Gala will never come, and has filled the world with somnambulists who turned the world upside down, walking themselves one-eyed, Cyclopean, seeing from the eye in the ass the mess they made of it all. When it's night they say it's day. I sit in this artificial day without him – not even able to make the expected clucking noises, not able to produce what I'm expected to produce. Soon they'll get rid of me perhaps – sterile, expendable. But what could I have done to please them anyway? Strut for a few years, push out unwanted babies, find part-time ‘fulfilment', take the blows or the eternity ring, die?

From under the table with the telephone a bright green triangular edge of cardboard – a part of Tony's address book – is sticking out on the carpet. A blob of Mrs Marten's cigarette ash lies on it, and it's because the colour of the book so resembles the colour of the ash that I start forward in my seat and then freeze again, this time with my arms out in front of me in the air. I had only imagined that bright green – in reality it's grey to me! So – it's happened already.
And I almost feel relief. Until Meg frees me … yet the thought is too horrible and I turn away from it. Deuter Jane, who can see no green in the real world, who must leave the world to breathe. My palms, which are still stretched out and a foot apart from each other as if I were about to clap, begin to run with sweat. I am the bad throw of the dice. I am the double, now it's me who's become the shadow. Where I was haunted, now I will pursue. And the world will try to stamp me out, as I run like a grey replica of my vanished self– evil, unwanted, voracious in my needs. I will be outcast, dogging the steps of stronger women, fastening myself onto them at nights, trailing as their lying shadow in the day. Unless … bringing the world to rights … bringing to Meg's red altar the essential sacrifice … I am restored to life and greenness and in tearing out the simulacrum need no longer live as one myself. I can feel my legs tense as I prepare for the journey across the room to that triangle of grey board. My hands go down on the settee and give a push … slowly, deliberately, I go through the ever-greying room.

I never knew Tony knew so many people. A lot of them seem to have moved several times since he first inscribed their names, there are crossings-out and rehousings on every page. What does he do with these people? There is something ridiculous about the address book – it makes me laugh to think to Tony's serious face as he copies them out. Does he ‘go through' the book to discover whom he feels like seeing? It's true we gave a party once, and he used the book with an air of triumph, but the party wasn't much of a success. Nobody seemed to know what they were doing there: perhaps they felt they had walked straight out of Tony's address book and couldn't wait to get back in there again.

My hands are clumsy and the pages turn over in clumps as I look for her. Μ … why should she be in under her first name anyway? But I have a feeling she is. Μ for mother, for murder, for Meg. Μ for her. She made me a shadow,
discarded by Tony before he had even met me. I am in Meg now, for Meg has my blood, and soon, M, you will be. We'll both be there. Together again! But this time I'll be the strong one, you'll see.

Monica … the name in faded pencil and no surname … I smile in spite of myself at the idea that Tony went to prostitutes. But how can you tell anything about people? I see Monica in a flat in a red-brick mansion in Chelsea, opening the door in a clinging black sweater and tossing her head. Tony makes a foolish face. They go in and the door closes behind them. No. Monica, it's not you. Margaret … Margaret has changed her name and address so many times that her different married names pile up to the right of her like the corpses of flies – in the end Tony must have decided she was simply Margaret. Oh, Margaret, why did you marry so often? Did you believe there was going to be happiness and content? Didn't you see the world in grey sometimes, didn't someone come and take your substance away? How optimistic you must have been, every time you left the Registry office and went off to buy a new casserole, material for comforting curtains that would screen you and your new mate off from the outside world! Did you tire of them quickly … or did you kill them perhaps, like Bluebeard, and leave them in a small room with their congealed blood? For you must be quite rich, Margaret, you live in an expensive area. Did they marry you for your money and your casseroles and then play a double game? They two-timed you, there seems little doubt about that.

Miranda …

Now I've found her I don't know what to do. I was right, Tony had simply put in the first name, for him she has no second name unless it's his. She is a part of him. She lies right on the middle of the page in the middle of the book. Μ the thirteenth letter, the centre of the alphabet, the centre of his world. She is written in a careful sloping hand, as if every letter was stroked as it went down, and she is in a strong black ink he doesn't seem to use otherwise except for the addresses of solicitors and doctors. This makes her
official somehow, and obedient to him – for although the ink is strong the curve of the letters is feminine and submissive. Maybe she wrote her name herself? But there is something of Tony in the writing: together they entered her in his life.

Miranda lives at 114 Albert Drive, the other side of the river. Albert Bridge which is strung with coloured lights at night – on a dark night they make a red and yellow and green road above the bridge – leads to Miranda. I can see Tony walking the aerial road, arms outstretched in the artificial fairy glow … dropping down into the blackness to take her in his arms. But this time, Miranda, it's me that's coming to see you. I'll go over the water and I'll bring you back. And I almost laugh, squatting there on the grey carpet by the grey TV screen, with Mrs Marten's cigarette ash scattered on the floor. This is Caliban calling, Miranda … When I've delivered you where you belong, I'll be myself again.

At first I misdial the number. My fingers are numb, and for some reason I don't feel like sitting down properly, so I stay in squatting position and it makes me unbalanced and shaky in my arms and legs. Then finally I get it right. As it rings I stare across the room at the window … ah, I'd like to fly out there now and not make this call. Or … why didn't I close the curtains? Suppose there's a wave of laughter and singing from Paradise Island or a fracas in the wives' home at the appearance of a drunken husband – I won't be able to hear what Miranda has to say.

In fact, a silence seems to fall on the street as Miranda answers. There are no footsteps, the parrot no longer fills the puncture it has pierced in the air, the clink and thwack of the Schweppes bottles has entirely stopped. I can hear Miranda breathing as if her throat were two inches from mine.

‘Is that Miranda?'

‘Yes?'

‘This is Jane.'

In Miranda's silence, the street begins to come to life.
Right under my window, from where she used to stand, a man gives one of those shouts that are meant to communicate nothing, that are just a man's shout, like a dog's bark. But the shout hangs in the street: in response a wooden crate drops and a window goes up with an ear-splitting yawn.

‘What do you want?'

‘I thought … I thought you'd gone out this evening with … with Mrs Marten. You didn't?'

‘What? With whom?'

‘To some embassy …'

‘What Jane
is
this?'

Now that's a good question! You know very well, Miranda – but perhaps you're not being so disingenuous after all. Have you also dreamed of me? Do you know you follow me wherever I go?

‘With Tony's mother,' I said. ‘I'm sorry, it must have been another Miranda.'

A pause. Miranda is thinking. I can feel her think and I can see two blue veins in her throat, pulsing.

‘Yes I did go actually,' she says. ‘Earlier.'

My first thought is prosaic. Whatever time can it be now? How long did I sit waiting for Gala? Then I freeze. The bitch! How cool and collected she sounds! What on earth is she doing with Tony's mother? I refuse to accept that she must have had a relationship with Tony's mother long before I met Tony. Tony, after all, only existed for me when I met him – Miranda too through him. It has always been impossible to imagine Miranda sitting in Mrs Marten's home in the Surrey hills, flipping through magazines and making plans, quite unaware of my being in the world.

‘I think I'd better ring off,' says Miranda.

She thinks I'm drunk, hysterical. She knows, from what Tony has told her, that he can't wait to leave me and be with her again.

‘Miranda! I'm only ringing to ask you to a party. As we've never met … it seems so silly really …'

‘A party?' Miranda sounds suspicious. Tony has probably
told her by now, on the phone from Rome airport or a Geneva hotel where he lies groaning for her at night, of my obsession with her photo. So why am I asking her to a party? But I'm good at this. I didn't get my job for nothing.

‘I just think you'd enjoy it. And it seems a bit ridiculous that we can't ever meet … as if Tony was standing between us like the sword of Damocles! No … it's a party the day after tomorrow at Miles Alton's house … yes the man who makes … exactly … And as I know you're doing sets at the moment for that film …'

‘Where is it?'

Miranda's voice is still very cool but I can hear the excitement, buried under layers of ice. How clever of me to remember that Miles Alton's party is in fact the day after tomorrow … is that Thursday … yet it is … and consciously I haven't given the matter a thought since the card came weeks ago. Of course she'll want to meet him, he's one of the few good film directors. Of course she'll want to be asked to design his next film. Can't she just see herself doing it – in Hollywood with any luck – she'll wear black, with a V neck. I can't help smiling at my vulgar jealousy. But I know I've caught her, fair and square.

‘14 Sloane Gardens,' I say. ‘All one house, one bell. About eight onwards.'

‘I'll see if I can make it. Well thank you, Jane, for asking me.'

We say goodbye and ring off. For a long time I stay crouched on the floor. Two more days, before Tony comes back … before the party … before seeing Meg again. We were in my bedroom, Gala and I. Where Tony lies, on the side of the bed nearest the window, his shoulders hunched and his back to me as if in a state of perpetual shrug. Gala sat and smoked, her spine up against the wall. She was late because her sculptor had come to see her – they'd gone out to supper then he'd had to go back to the country again – and her eyes were bright, her movements sudden. She had embarked on an evening with him, and I felt that only a part of her was with me. I lay diagonally from her on the end of
the bed, with the big square ashtray between us. Her legs swayed as she spoke, in a secret dance, and her arms swooped and circled. Her energy crept into me, through my veil of tiredness and confusion.

‘Were you afraid then, Jane?'

‘Yes. Yes I was. I can't believe that's what she wants me to do.'

‘Oh I think you do believe it. You do believe it's right.'

Yes. Gala, as always, could recognize a past feeling spoken in the present, smell its wrongness. I did now believe Meg. But why? How? I was in two worlds, and slipping into the abyss between them. My actions showed my growing belief. My spoken thoughts were firmly in the world I lived in with Tony, and work, and that muddle of hope and defeat which everyone drags with them through the day. But if I were really to go after Miranda …

‘You realize you were very lucky to be chosen,' Gala said. ‘She must see the potential in you, Jane. There are only a very few people like you, you know … Don't you think you
are
fortunate, Jane, to be one of us?'