The Bad Sister (5 page)

WHERE WAS I
going? My new body seemed to know. I was walking fast, but smooth and controlled, and I was heading for the High Street. The street where I lived looked already like a ruin excavated a hundred years ago: as if the houses had been built with their deformities, crazed pipes, broken roofings, ghastly follies in the worst of Victorian taste. The light from the slit-eyed lamps was lunar. Women stared at me as they went into Paradise Island. They hesitated at the sight of me: I was unplaceable perhaps, a new genetic pattern like a neon sign in cuneiform, something ancient and known and at the same time infinitely strange. I didn't smile at them, so they remained unsmiling back. Their lips were hard, the colour of prunes.

And I passed the house of the battered women. There was one light on at the top of the house. It was a bedside lamp, with a pale blue frilly shade. This pale blue light showed up two heads, and two bodies in black jumpers and skirts. The room behind them was dark as a cave. They sat immobile there, in this distant, parodic memory of the primeval beach – the blue light thin as water around their scarcely breathing forms, the cave an illusion, four walls in reality, property of the Council, dark, stretching back to the days of their birth and the first astonished burst into the sunshine of the untouched beach, four walls of crumbling lath and plaster, a temporary refuge, a mock womb before it was time to move on again. One of the women was knitting. She looked down on me with less concern than the women who had gone into Paradise Island. Her options were closed. She had copulated with the wrong man. She had been sterilized now, as a punishment for her mistakes, and
she sat quietly, drawn to the artificial light below, its stern lack of mystery resembling hers. Her eyes were empty and black, like a moonless sky. And, to reassure myself, I looked up beyond her at the moon. It was there tonight, whether people would have it or not: wisps of black cloud danced over its face. Whether man had climbed on it or not, it still smiled sardonically. And I smiled – thinking of the facial twitch, the smirk, which would send them off into unending space, like swatted flies.

I was at the end of the street, by the corner supermarket, the compound for the women who are neither battered nor dyke. The channels are narrow, and iron gates, like automated warders, bang against the knees. The women smile at the cheerful goods. Who knows but one day, unwrapping the bright tartan package, mile on mile of paper, some crinkled as corrugated iron, some transparent and horribly soft, membrane, caul, out will fall the wax doll with the pin in its heart, the scapegoat for all this. Then it will have been worth it! Until then, the Pandora's boxes hold vertigo and fear, and fear of closed spaces and fear of open spaces and a drowsiness while operating machinery. In the dark corners of the boxes, the still unwrapped portions, under the Free Gift Offer, lies the forgotten past. The women pull and tear at the little white worms of paper that make the wadding. Then the box lies open and shallow. It has revealed nothing at all.

Tonight there are only representations of these women in the supermarket, for the supermarket is closed. Cardboard women, shown to be beautiful for their sojourn there, and in their cardboard surrounds, at least, bathed in colour. Some of them hold boxes of objects to eat, others boxes of objects which will absorb their blood, some hold a pink drink. I bow to them as I pass. Hi! I feel sympathy for them: they can reign at night, when their alter egos aren't bustling and shopping in the compound, but unlike me they are locked in with the darkened goods. They can contemplate the shelves. They love the boxes, they gaze at them in total self-absorption.

The High Street is wider than I remembered. There is no traffic. The islands look as if they would sink if boarded; glacial mannequins wave from distant shops; in all this, which is like a muted cruise, a secret departure at night for Purgatory, I am walking several feet above the ground and with my hand firmly on the pistol in the pocket of my coat. This time others are at risk, not me. I am looking for someone to kill. And as I pass the fluorescent reds and yellows, the prayers and exhortations to eat and sleep and breathe for the sake of the manufacturers alone, I exult in my new power. I might fire a bullet at the perplexed, wrinkled brow of Burt Lancaster as he struggles on the poster level with my head. I might blacken the teeth of the housewife suspended in the vapours of her pie, her smile moistened in the wreaths of animal fat coming up at her like winter breath. Or I might shoot at the steeple of the church, which is encircled by motorway now: if the elastic were pulled any tighter it would snap and fall. But I'll save my fire. I may need it later on.

There is a strong smell of the sea at the end of the street. Dead, flat sea trapped in walls, sea heavy with driftwood and speckled with the white bellies of dead fish, a scum of sawdust by the gangways to the ships. I can see the masts standing in the port. The smell quickens my step. I am bringing the smell with me. The moon rests at a cockeyed angle to the highest mast, string slipping, clouds bob over like streamers and are gone into the night. I arrive at the port. So this is where I will embark for another world! On one of these great liners, filled with orange light and soundless activity. Dancing on the deck, sailing into warm, opaque waters so deep they seem to balance the sky above them like a plate. Going up in a cloud of spray to pierce the ether. But first, I must find my prey.

The first thing I see is that I am in the centre of the port. Its wide arms embrace the ships, the strips of pavement and the shadowy cafés with lights and onion-braids of sponges hanging by the doors and blue round sailors' hats thrown down. There is no movement in the water at all. Not even
the smallest boat nudges the jetty. I can see people walking about inside the big liners – it looks as if they're making ready to cast off any minute – and more people in the cafés. But not a sound. Are they all dead already? Have I come too late? I pull the gun from my pocket and make my way along the right-hand tentacle of the harbour. I will go into the first bar. I will accomplish my mission, as they say in
Men Talk
on TV. And then I will be free to go.

The bar is stained with green light when I go in. Bars of green on the sailors' faces, like shutters hiding their eyes and distorting the curve of their jaws. Pools of green on the surface of the bar where there are half-drained glasses and plates of crumbling, soft nuts. I cock the gun and point it at the room. Green smoke comes down steadily from the roof, as if expelled from the mouth of an amateur theatrical dragon. It blows into my eyes. I fire the gun at the first sailor in my range, who is sitting with his chin cupped in his hands at the nearest table. He slumps to the ground. But the shot was noiseless, and so was his death. It's not what I had hoped.

Now the sailor is dead all the others crowd round and beg me not to kill them. They clasp at my waist, and we dance without sound. When I drink, the green liquid scorches my throat, and when I see myself in the glass, through the verdigris and the smudged filth from the sailors' hands, I see why they want me so. In my perfect androgyny, my face round as a mermaid's, my mouth black and slit like a wound from a knife, my legs like a young stevedore's – with the rime of green under my fingernails that tells how long I have been under the sea, hair growing upward, sucked by the bubbles, waving like weed in the cold green current – like a treasure long lost at sea, embedded in nacreous green rock, shifted here and there on the sandy floor by shoals of spotted fish, I am for them the dread of their seafaring days: the siren with a cracked voice who lures them to the bottom of the sea, the forgotten woman and half-man who make up the Angel of Death. In the deep, sub-aqueous silence we dance on, for I know now they will never let me go. In sea years, they are a long time dead.

In the port, the biggest liner pulls out. No sound, just the orange lights in the cabins – and I can see a Latin American band, all orange satin frills and soundless maracas on the forward deck. A steward ushers guests aft, to wave us all goodbye. Champagne corks are forced from bottles, silently they fly up to the sky. Everyone waves. I am whirled faster and faster round.

My hand lay curled on the floor by the bed. Blood had gone down into the fingers, and they were bunchy and red: they felt as if they had been trussed by the butcher and then cut apart again. The palm looked up at the ceiling, mottled, the lines of destiny like faint pencil marks on the flesh. On one line, which marched across the hand and disappeared over the other side in a delta of fainter etchings, a strong, adventurous exploration of the upper side, the side it never could see without taking the inexorable step, I had walked for a while last night. But I had, literally, missed the boat. I was to be kept here a while yet, on the inner track.

Tony's back faced me on my left. I pulled up my hand from the floor, and before the blood crept down my fingers I felt it for a moment make an independent movement, in the direction of the door, as if the invisible body to which it was attached had decided to go out. No such luck for me! I was still only half in myself and I must lie still until things were right again or I might vanish altogether. I must contemplate Tony's back. Shoulder blades, freckles. Matrons, soap, thin shoulder blades in sports blazers, white aertex shirts open-pored over freckles, like tiny molluscs living on the skin that must be allowed to breathe. Thick white clouds over too many dark rhododendrons. Tony's beautiful feet in white plimsolls, which hardly seem to anchor him to the ground as he runs over the grass. I think of Tony like that because that's where he's stuck: twenty years later still the prep school boy: charming, eager to get on but tentative; would the effort of becoming a man break him up and turn him to dust? No, he need never change.

Bells were ringing in the church at the end of the street. I
had forgotten it was Sunday – a day to pray for good, to pray for strength to fight the evil world into which I would soon be abducted. But a pleasant laziness came over me at the thought. Who said that where I was going was evil? Why make out that the present world had anything good to say for itself? In this godless street only the old man with the parrot went to church, leaving the parrot haughty and outraged in the window of his front room. And some of the old women, shoe-horned from attic rooms at the sound of the bells, their heads grey as winter cabbages, flesh in bulges all down their bodies under their coats. Did they pray to go into the next world just as they were now? Or did they think it would be something quite extraordinary, a real shock, but well worth getting down on stiff knees square with pain to ask for, one eye on the vicar's pointed black shoe under his skirt.

Tony moved, and the shoulder blades went down under him as he turned on his back. No matter: I was myself again now, I could deal with his sleeping profile. Ageless in sleep, I saw that he belonged to another century, a time when the important thing for a man was to go away and then to return again, a long crusade, a dusty journey home in a column of armoured men glinting like fish scales under the foreign sun. Once home, he could enjoy his tomb, and the placid skies of Southern England beyond the crypt. But now, poor Tony, with his script conferences in Rome and Zurich and the rubber corridors of the airport: he was always setting off and returning, to no avail.

Tony's eyes opened. It was a melancholy sight, for as the lids lifted I felt his uncertainty, and his depression with the world, and his puzzlement at the wall opposite, as if he had never been here in his life before. Then I felt annoyed. I had been a long way, further than him. I even despised his dreams. Yet his foolish frown at the wall, with its Victorian oil of a pig he had bought in the market a year ago and a Paris May '68 poster I had once put up (it was a dark bilious yellow, de Gaulle's powersaw nose had been ripped at the edge), suggested he had no real desire to be here at all. It
was as if he had come for a one-night stand and stayed two years, after a drugged potion, an uneasy sleep.

‘Do you want coffee?'

I always address Tony as a guest, although we share the bills of the flat. In fact, he has made almost no impression on the flat, which is as hard and gloomy – in the ridiculous red brick building with the artificially grand hall, the syringa bush outside and the irritating unmown grass by the gate where cuckoo spit collects in summer and brushes my bare legs, and then is gone again – as before he arrived here. What difference
could
he have made? Sometimes I think, although Tony may imagine he's returning from these journeys to me, it's really his mother he yearns for. Ah, Mrs Marten! When will her next visitation be? Her thin legs, her jerking arms. The flat is mine in name only, she is the white magnet that draws him and me and the rooms we live in, she controls us and burns us dry. He leaps like a mouse to the sound of her voice. Yet, as if it's too unbearable to marry a son and mother in this way, I often think instead of his past life, in another flat, with another girlfriend. I imagine him transformed, radiant: the girl is pliable and dark. What do these words mean? That I want him to have been capable once, at least, of being the other side of himself? And is my vision of the girl just another escape from my own skin into the opposite? I suppose so. Tony and I – as we are – are not very convincing.

He noticed my hair. He asked me what the hell I'd done that for.

‘I don't know. I just did it. Last night.'

‘Obviously. It wasn't like that at the Berrings.'

‘Why? Does it look so awful?'

‘Of course it does.'

‘But men cut their hair off like that. Why shouldn't I?'

‘Suit yourself.'

I went into the bathroom. What was the point of going on like this? Certainly my face looked odd, but it was what I felt like at the moment rather than a picture to please someone else. I was in a transitional stage. The strawy
spikes standing on my head announced my state of siege. I brushed my teeth and looked around for the jeans and denim jacket on the floor. There was no sign of them. My heart sank.