The Bad Sister (15 page)

I saw Tony looking at me in the way he always did when he had decided I was menstruating. This would account for my rude behaviour, and also my paleness: I had discovered, in fact, that it could account for anything and therefore removed any proper claim I had to identity, as pre, post or current bleeding was always at the root of the problem. The same thought clearly went through the mind of Mrs Marten, and mother and son carefully failed to exchange glances.

‘If only I could get this film settled,' said Tony, with the very definite air of a man who has no intention of going on holiday. 'But then we will … Mummy … Jane!'

‘Gala your friend was telling me about the party tomorrow,' Mrs Marten went on. She crossed the room as if she had been invited to feel at ease there, and glanced out of the window. From where I stood I could see her profile in a buzzing orange that looked as if the colour overlay had been badly applied, and beneath her in the street a battered wife with her child making for the supermarket and the tanned cut-out women guarding the goods. She stared at them, oblivious of their existence. I turned angrily to Tony, but he was unpacking a small bag on the end of the bed and pulling out a dressing gown.

‘I love fancy dress parties,' Mrs Marten said.

‘Who said it was fancy dress?'

‘Oh … I … I don't know. I just assumed it was. Did your friend tell me? I can't remember, darling. Why? Didn't you know? Haven't you got an outfit?'

Even Tony was beginning to be annoyed now, I was pleased to see. He clearly thought the best way to set me right again was to spend some time alone with me, and the presence of both Gala, whom he detested, and his mother, about whom he felt constantly guilty, was getting on his nerves.

‘I want to have a bath,' he snapped. ‘What is this party anyway? Do you mind, Mummy, I want to change and so on?'

‘Dear, I'm so sorry and tactless!' Mrs Marten turned away from my view, having raped my private knowledge of the street from that angle, taking with her in the retina of her eye green trees and grass I couldn't see, and went girlishly to the door. ‘I'll chat to your friend again, Jane! So fascinating to talk to artists. I used to know dear John Masefield, you know! But we'll all have a wonderful time at the masked ball, I'm sure of that!'

A masked ball. Of course, a masked ball. I saw the faces without eyes, floating in the dark rooms. Behind one of them was Meg … behind another was my dark, unknown enemy. The faces walked on sticks … I had to tear them from their owners' heads. I pulled the eyes through the holes in the white paper heads.

Tony had his arms round me. He always wanted to make love when he came back from these trips, as if it was the only thing that could ground him properly again. So he was concerned about my condition.

‘Have you got the curse today?' he whispered. His tongue shot into my ear. I shrank from him, then pretended to succumb.

‘No. But I've lost a lot of blood,' I said.

Tony made a satisfied, clucking sound –I was OK, now, then. He pulled me over to the bed. I lay under him. It was true, I was weak from loss of blood. There were red spots in front of my eyes, and whiteness, like when you are about to faint. I thought of the ball. Behind a mask on a long stick, prowling the dimly lit rooms, was Gil-martin, his shadow falling over me and replacing mine.

Tony's eyes were closed as he did his thrusting. Mine were open, my head was to the side of him, and his mouth was fastened in a sucking shape a few inches above Meg's bites, of which he was as yet oblivious. I stared up at the ceiling at the naked light bulb. There had been a shade once, but the paper had cracked and it had fallen, and I had never bothered to replace it. The bulb swung slightly, from the droughts that always manage to penetrate the flat, even when the windows and doors are shut. It swung above me, on a brown flex. It swung back and forth, globular, growing in size, bursting from the ceiling like a giant droplet of dew. I saw faces there, and as Tony sawed into me I saw clouds in its full roundness, and the street in miniature upside down. Mrs Marten and Gala were talking next door – or at least Mrs Marten was talking to Gala, constructing an identity for herself, turning it around for the customer to see in the light, like a new mink coat. Tony drove on, powered like the planes which roar in and deposit him in different corners of the world. I divided for him, but my new emptiness made me slip away. I was no longer truly under him, a match of his own making. I was oblique, I was half-filled, I was diagonal. And as if he felt me disappear, he gripped all the harder until the bulbs above me dissolved, and the faces and people spilled into the room.

It's strange, to lie to the side of Tony and slightly above him, and see my own body still in his clamp, I can feel that people are searching for me … but they don't look there. I don't care to look down on my face. Suppose it weren't my own! And part of me still holds the sheet, so it must be me. Am I naked? No, I seem to be in a skirt like a little girl's skirt, so where are my jeans and jacket, if I'm to leave now on another journey? I am floating almost up to the level of the light bulb – can the Persian students opposite see me, flying without a carpet? The thought makes me smile. Am I taking this light-headedness with me to the other world? And the shopping women, some of whom look up into the sky on their return from the supermarket – will it rain today,
wouldn't it be good to put the washing out for once? – do they see my weightless state under the swinging bulb?

In the crystal ball that hangs just beyond my reach I can see Meg in her red house, eating at her round table with a man. Below me in the room, Tony and my body are still locked, but there are other people there now, and a feeling of airlessness and suffocation as the room fills up. The red glow has disappeared, as if drawn back into the bulb, into the filaments of Meg and her companion. Above the crowd, which makes no sound at all, I swim fascinated a few inches from the bulb. Meg has a red and white spotted scarf on her head, like a gypsy scarf. Gil-martin – for I know it is him – is staring into the fire. In my peace and emptiness, I circle over him. He doesn't look up, but I have no need to see his face. We had rough times together when we were children, he and I! Then I lost him. He looks the same, a little sadder perhaps. For his sake I'll bring the shadow woman Meg needs, I'll drag her like a dead vole to their front door.

Meg is saying something. Κ leans towards her to listen. Both their faces are distorted in the rotundity of the light bulb, like funfair faces. I can see myself in him, though: Κ is I divided by <. And now I am alone and empty, with only a few mundane chores to carry out before we can be joined, I hover near them, separated from them by thin glass. A girl comes into the red, rounded room. She is Jane. I never saw her before like this. Was this the way Jane talked and moved? Against the sides of the swinging bulb I see Jane's life pass in flickering characters. She looks a fool there with Stephen, giggling… a colour that sums up a whole year of her life passes, scratched on the glass like a Chinese ideogram … a stone, next, that is the house where she lived as a child. And Tony. He stands, last in line of her worldly lovers, while the others, ahead of him, look at her without recognition, and jostle for a place to show off their importance. Poor Jane! She is in her own street now, which is still showing as tiny as when she was lying in bed, and she, as small as a witch's doll, is walking along it. When she turns into the garden of the block of flats, and the cuckoo
spit on the already browning grass washes over her thumb-high legs, will she walk up and right into me? Yet at the same time I can still see her, in the semi-transparency of Meg's room, sitting large as life beside Gil-martin. Below me, in the room where Tony and my body lie, it is dark and stifling. There is a smell of sweating flesh. In the red room, as my shrunken figure crosses the glass, Meg is speaking in a low, intense voice, and Gil-martin nods his head but still doesn't look at me.

‘You can rest assured that society will thank you, will praise you for your bravery,' she is saying. ‘For, just as society is responsible for the creation of such monsters as Mrs Marten and Miranda, so, when it is purged of them and reconstituted, it will exonerate you of any blame for violent acts performed symbolically. You are leading the way, Jane.'

I can see Jane nodding, although she looks afraid. What are they leading her into now? I wish I could break through the glass and discover how she feels. For it must be extraordinarily wonderful to be with Gil-martin like this, as close as if they met every day … and yet I can feel nothing, shut off out here. I'm not ready yet, I know, to find my wholeness but all the same … the scene in the red room is as frustrating as a romantic movie, with all those feelings nothing but dead celluloid. In my cut-off state, it's hard to imagine that I'll kill Tony's mother … but for Meg …

Jane gets up, she is ready to leave. I see that, like me, she is wearing a skirt that is too short and too tight for her. She looks like an overgrown child who has forced herself into her younger sister's clothes. Gil-martin turns in his chair and smiles at her. Meg goes to open the door. And the bulb shrinks and swings, glowing in a last, bright red as Meg and her companion turn to burning fibres once more. I am alone. I am Jane, or what remains of her. Like a heavy fish in an aquarium I float in the dark, confining room.

The room is smaller. The window has gone. Round my head, as I struggle downward to the cluster of people now obscuring
the bed, are long dresses smelling of mothballs and scent, and skirts bunched on hangers, and ghostly ruched shirts. I know it is Ishbel's mother's cupboard. I can feel her in the clothes. We're hiding in the cupboard, all the children from the village, and Ishbel, and me – my annual invitation, along with the village children, to go to the big house. So it's Christmas. I remember walking along the road on the side of the hill. It wouldn't snow, although the clouds were heavy with it. I was in a best dress made of scratchy wool. And my mother stood at the gate to wave me goodbye. Her hand was the only thing that moved. There was no wind, just as there was no snow: the valleys and the sky were paralysed, the slightest tremor would bring the storm, and obliteration. And all the colours were raw. It was almost January – the place needed the snow poultice. Then some of the terrible cold would go. I walked quickly, keeping my eyes on the frozen crevices in the road. When I broke out of the valley, and the next one opened up in front of me, I would see the house, which sat there as if it had always done so, smugly, in a square garden protected by hills.

Ishbel's mother and my father gave us tea at a long table in the main hall. It was a cheap village tea, and we ate slowly and politely. The food seemed to stick in our throats. The crackers only made a sound of tearing paper. My father made a speech. He said he was glad to see us there. He must remind us again that upstairs was out of bounds for games after tea. Now he was going to put out the light and we could see the Christmas tree. He would call out our names, alphabetically.

Yes, I remember that. I am down amongst the other children now, and a very faint light from under the door shows shiny, scrubbed faces and, in the case of the girls, hair wrenched back into bows for the party at the big house. How have we disobeyed my father like this and come up into the most forbidden place of all, Ishbel's mother's bedroom? My heart begins to race. It's my fault. It must be. I led them here, and we'll all pay the price for it – except for Ishbel.

The lights in the hall went out and the Christmas tree lights went on, as they did every year. The small children were pleased at the blue and the red and the green. I sat looking at the big windows in the hall, which stood as straight and bare as the branches beyond them in the garden. There was an early moon. Where did I come ‘alphabetically' in the list of names this time? Some years my father avoided the embarrassment of my namelessness by calling me last as if I were an afterthought, or a guest, or someone who had turned up at the party by mistake – sometimes he got it over by summoning me first, before the children had settled and taken in what was going on. The girls always got dolls, the boys Dinky cars. My row of dolls from past parties stood on the top shelf of the dresser in my mother's cottage. I never played with them.

The child next to me in the cupboard nudges me hard in the stomach. They can all hear someone coming but my heart is too loud for that. There's little air in here. The breaths are sweet, a mixture of cake and bread and paste. I think I can make out Ishbel, on the far side of the cupboard from me, leaning against the door. She looks excited and frightened. More of her vicarious thrills! For Ishbel will be only mildly punished for this. She came after all from the skirts which are draped round us, and we are from the outer ring, the squat houses which produce manpower for the big house. We have no right to be under her mother's skirts. Downstairs her motherly role is a farce. She would rather die than foster us.

This year my father called me last, so I had to wait with my hands sweating on my lap while the children were led up by their parents, and curtseyed or bowed and were led away again. When it was my turn to go to the tree I realized how much bigger I was than I had been the year before. And Ishbel's mother saw it too: she looked at me with hatred as she handed me the neatly wrapped package with the doll inside. I was big and awkward standing there, but she saw me as a woman no doubt, as my mother again. I was blinded for a moment by the lights from the tree and I
blinked at her. She turned away abruptly. Usually there was a scatter of applause after each presentation, but now there was silence. I stumbled into the bench on the way back to my seat. The main lights went on. Now that his job was done, there was no sign of my father. I knew he had gone to his study, to take a drink.

Ishbel has edged her way through the crowd of children and is at my side at last. She looks up at me with teasing eyes. Yes, she engineered this! I remember now. We all played in the big hall, and there was some half-hearted thumping on the piano, and while the parents of the village children huddled round the fire and nervously turned down offers of cigarettes and tea, she made us climb the stairs at the far end of the hall. We had to go on hands and knees. We were on the first-floor landing before we knew how we got there. And we ran down the dark passage as if we were trying to bury ourselves right in the centre of the house.