The Bad Sister (7 page)

I'd seen the girl several times, the laird's real daughter. I'd been up the narrow mud road that led to our exile's cottage, and stared down at the large white house where she lived with her father and mother. She had a thin, bony, Scottish face, with grey eyes and fair hair, and always a slight smile of self-satisfaction at the corners of her mouth; she bounced an old red rubber ball against the wall of the kitchen garden as I watched her from the moorland above; sometimes her hair was tied in bunches and I knew it went a little frizzy in the rain. I was completely and obsessively jealous of her. I was her shadow, and she mine. By the time we went to the village school together, for we were almost exactly the same age, I think we both knew we were sisters. We fought in the school playground, which was a small stretch of concrete slung high in the hills, on the outskirts of the laird's small village. I went up on the seesaw, which was made from the thick trunk of a felled tree, and she went down; she went up, her eyes excited, grey as the drizzle that fell continually on us, her hooked, bony nose and thin mouth hovering over me, while I was down on the ground. One day she got up and walked away when I was up in the air, and I came crashing down. The teacher looked the other way.

My mother called to me from the kitchen to come in. It was the summer holidays: long, empty, grey days. Today the jeep would come along the mud track, over the top of the hill, and the laird and his party would spread rugs out in front of our cottage, on the sloping grass by the overflowing burn. In the gentle rain, watched by sheep, they would eat pies and hard-boiled eggs and drink beer and wine, leaving the cans and bottles for my mother to collect. Then, flushed, they would go slowly up the hill to their holes. I was never allowed to be there. But if the daughter was with them she would twist on her rug and gaze at the windows of
the house. Her mother, fair-haired as her daughter, and self-contained, also with an expression of secret amusement on her face most of the time, never turned to look at the cottage. When she walked back to the jeep with the picnic basket after lunch, it was always head down, eyes on the thin grass by the track, and the sheep droppings, and the ugly colt's foot that grew there, yellow and darkened with rain.

‘Can't you see it's raining?'

Of course; it was always raining. My mother was using it as a pretext to get me in from the grass in front of the cottage. She came halfway towards me from the back of the house. Her head was jerking in the direction of the track; she must have heard the jeep. I saw she was crying. My mother's eyes were blue. When she cried they were like the water of the burn, bursting its banks. I went stiff, with anger at the life we led here. I stood my ground.

‘You'll be soaked. Anyway, they're coming. Jane! Hurry up!'

My mother scurried up the bank and disappeared round the back of the house. In the past she would have dragged me with her – perhaps a part of her now, exhausted by the repressions of the past years, wanted a showdown of some kind. Indecision as to whether to move or not kept me rooted to the spot. And the jeep reared up on the crest of the hill. The engine was roaring, in first gear, the wheels were coated with mud.

‘Jane!' My mother tried calling me one more time, from behind the window of the front room, and her voice sounded distant and resigned. I turned to face the jeep. Rain ran down the windows and the faces of the other mother and daughter were distorted, like the sound of my own mother's voice. Ishbel, for that was the name of my sister, looked as if she had been painted grotesquely onto the window, in thick white paint, and yellow for the streaks of her hair down her face. I made no movement, but watched them park the jeep, and push the doors open, and from the back two Labradors sprang
out so there was an instant movement of sheep on the side of the hill.

On the screen in front of me the men are wandering the roads with their lorry. They are passive, looking for meaning, resigned to the fact they will find no more than the half-buried roots of their own childhood. They are lonely, but have blocked off their hunger and loneliness behind expressionless faces and obsession with technology and film. They can't live with women, but they can't live without them, for their wandering seems so absurd, so unlike any real journey of exploration of the past.

The girl in the row in front of me – Ishbel – looks at this sad whining end of the age of the conquistadors in silence. When the audience laughs she remains silent. The music is sad and persistent, not unlike bagpipe music I used to hear coming from inside the white walls of her house when her/ our father gave a party. I sit tensely behind her. She had what I wanted. She had what should have belonged to me. What is she doing here now, what of mine has she got her hands on now? She is an omen. And there above our heads, on the grey flat roads of the over-discovered world, the men neither of us want go aimlessly about their lives. What shadow battle will she and I fight next?

I knew what I was going to do. I leapt the burn while the pale stockinged legs of the laird and his party were still coming out of the jeep, and I ran up through wet bracken to the wretched line of trees by the wall at the top of the hill. These firs, straight and black, with wispy branches at the top hardly strong enough to support a wood pigeon, had no doubt been planted to protect the shepherd and his sheep from the terrible winds, the snow drifts that came at the speed of wind, the rain that was like having a bucket emptied in your face. But they were our bars. They surrounded our small prison, our patch of sheep-nibbled grass – in the long Northern evenings, when the sky went dim behind them and I was sitting out on the collection of rough
pebbles that made up our front garden I would reach my arms out to them sometimes, prise them apart and squeeze them together again. Wherever you looked, there they were, except for the cleuch, of course, and what was the point of thinking you could escape up that boggy face that led to nowhere? Stumbling to the invisible horizon, clamped under mist, walking on dead legs deeper and deeper into the peat. It was fifteen miles to the next crofter's cottage, and much further to the town.

I would hack my way out, and take my mother with me. I stood thin behind the tallest tree on the hill. My hands clasped the wet bark. It was scaly, unpleasant, like some sea animal which has struggled to shore and grown a thin fuzz of fur. The soft, wet wood dug in under my fingernails. I thought of the school, and Ishbel walking along the road to the school. She always looked confident and happy. My mother never used that road – the few times she left the laird's land to go shopping in the small store beneath the school she walked along the side of the hill on a sheep track. They were treating her like a sheep. I was some animal they would never even look at, although the law insisted I should go to school. I looked down at the jeep, and saw Ishbel climb out, stand exposed on the grass, yet blurred by the constant rain.

Suddenly I felt something watching me. I turned round: the track, planted on either side with a bristle of young firs stretched in a straight line across a wash of grass and heather to the white house, down in the furthermost dip, which was wrapped in cloud. There were eyes on me. Then I saw them. They were no more than three or four yards away. They were set close together, in a hare's face, brown, bright, almond-shaped. There was no intelligence in them. I felt they were my eyes, staring down at Ishbel, concentrated with an evil energy, and yet they were staring at me. I felt as if the hare had sprung onto my chest and was crouching there with heavy feet.

While the eyes were on me I saw myself holding Ishbel under the water. The brown water of the burn made
partings over her face, like waving hair. Her face was very pale. Her eyes had slipped out of her face and there were only white circles, like snail slime. She didn't move, after the first flutterings. A small trout darted from a round hole under the bank. There were wild nasturtiums growing above her head, bright orange and yellow, with their spotted, orchidaceous lips, and they made a crown over her head. The trout lay as if stunned by the giant's face under the water, then it went quick as a blink back under the bank again.

But all I did in effect was throw a stone. The hare went off on a slow bounce as I stooped to reach for a three-cornered stone from the crumbling wall. The hare looked quite domestic from behind, hindquarters low and rather fat. It didn't turn once, to give me the brown stare. I stepped out from behind the tree, raised my arm, and threw the stone as hard as I could at Ishbel.

The men are singing in the film. It's a desolate countryside, on the border with East Germany. It looks like most industrialized countries now, as if it's been made for passing through – yet where to? Piranesi's dreams have been realized, in an infinite complex of overpasses and autobahns. One of the men leaves the lorry and squatpees on a mound of industrial waste. Water trained for our uses sits in a square tray, about one hundred feet long, beyond the mound. Soon they will travel on, holding the only unchangeable thing left to them, reels of edited film. It's a country of loss, where there's no point in mourning.

The stone hits Ishbel on the side of the face. Immediately several things happened. My mother ran out of the back of the house, skidded on the wet grass and threw herself at
Ishbel, as if trying to shield her from me, too late. Ishbel's mother, who has just extricated herself from the jeep, stood back with a terrified expression, gazing up at the fringes of trees where I was hiding. The men, who were slithering down the bank to the picnic quarters, noticed nothing. It was only when they looked back – where was the rug, where were the women and the food – that they saw Ishbel still on the same spot with her hand held to her face. Her/my father climbed up the bank to comfort her. She pointed at the bracken at the foot of the tree. Yes, she was right! Ishbel knew where I was. Only she would know the exact place. Her mother, who had recovered herself by now, patted her cheek with a handkerchief. Was there blood? The bracken was too thick for me to see. Would they hunt me? I lifted my head a fraction in the hard fronds. Now I saw my mother and her mother together. What had I done? My mother was standing with her head to one side and she was pulling, pulling at her hair as if she was trying to get it out by the roots. Ishbel's mother was staring at her, for the first time she was taking a really good look, she could even afford to have her hands on her hips like a caricature of a fishwife, for my mother's child had thrown a stone at hers. And as she stared, my mother tugged at her hair and stood silent.

In the end, they did nothing. They ate the picnic, and threw the wine bottles and the beer cans down the bank, and packed up the greaseproof paper in the hamper. They went up to their holes in the side of the hill. Ishbel and her mother drove home in the jeep. But by then I had crawled through the bracken all the way along the hill. I was miles from where they were shooting, shivering and frozen, lying by a cairn on the highest, barest mountain above the loch which was fed by our burn. I could hear the shots. It was nearly dark by the time I limped home.

The film is over. I leave the cinema, knowing Ishbel is just behind me. In the foyer I turn quickly, to catch her there, but she is too quick for me, she has gone. I walk out into the
real street. The buses are painted silver for the jubilee of the monarchy, the streets are as grey as the film I've just seen. Images from the real world superimpose on the film, and on Ishbel my shadow, who must be following me somewhere – or I am following her?

GALA LIVES IN
a messy ground floor flat in North London. There are wooden steps going down off a shaky wooden platform into the garden, the wood is grey with damp and age and the whole construction looks like some kind of underwater gallows, the packed, dense greens of the bushes and grass rising up to meet the feet of the suddenly falling victim. Cats with magpie markings prowl the low brick walls. There is nowhere less private than these gardens, which are overlooked by all the rear windows of all the houses in the street, yet oddly enough the patch of rough grass behind Gala feels completely secluded, as if she had cast a spell of invisibility on her minute portion of land. Because it was a warm day, and most of the families in the street were inside eating their Sunday meat, we took rugs out into Gala's garden and settled on the grass. I immediately asked her what she thought of my experiences of the last twelve hours.

Gala took some time to answer. She is a sculptor, her face is long and high-boned at the same time, like a stone face, a face from the desert, and her black eyes swim fiercely towards each other but at a downward angle, carried by a strong current for they flash and leap, even when her face is at rest. A part of Gala has for a long time been with Meg. She lives in fear, I think, of losing touch with the spirit world, the world she needs for her work, and of finding herself on the surface again, condemned to tread endlessly the flat plains of accepted reality and received ideas, her idea of hell as I suppose it would be mine. But this doesn't mean she is incapable of being realistic: her boyfriend Paul, who has a wife and children in the country and is also a
sculptor, is seen very clearly by Gala: she is caustic and affectionate, and good at keeping a distance in a situation in which she might well feel miserable. Sometimes I think she does feel miserable more often than she admits – but she has a good, strong laugh and a love of the absurd. Also Gala, with her brittle bones and her thin hands that look as if they could be unscrewed at the wrist, is strong and tough. I know she may well be stronger than I am. For the first time since she took me to see Meg again, and I saw the first avenues of my escape, I began to wonder if I had been right to go. It could well be that Gala could cope with these other worlds as well as the one in which we were sitting now – where the black and white cats were jumping along the tops of the walls, and a man in a short-sleeved shirt was standing heavy with concentration at his kitchen window in front of a tin and a tin opener, and his arm, thick with reddish hairs, turned like a torturer's above the tin, and a plane above us left a gap of white smoke on the sky – I couldn't. What horrifying, uncontrollable regions might I find myself in – perhaps forever? I told Gala of the waterfront at the end of the High Street, and of my instant knowledge of Ishbel. I was afraid. My hands were twisting on the edge of the rug, and I saw Gala see them.

‘You're looking for something,' Gala said in a very quiet voice. ‘It's not as simple as escape.'

Gala gave a sudden smile as she said this. I wondered how her voyages had affected her way of seeing her life. She didn't seem very calm as a result of them: in fact she was often nervous and agitated. But perhaps she would have been unable to survive without her strayings into the first circles of the outer world.

‘Let's go in and have something to eat,' Gala said. ‘I'm hungry. No, Jane, it just sounds to me as if you've got to do something about this sister Meg seems to have given you.'

‘Do something about her? What do you mean?'

We were standing in Gala's kitchen now, after coming up to the wooden platform and stepping from the damp green garden into the clutter of indoors: enamel pots and pans
with half the enamel scraped off, an angular sculpture by Paul, cushions and basketwork chairs. It was a relief to be in. Gala took ham and some gherkins from the fridge and reached over my head for plates.

We sat at the kitchen table. Gala was also a teacher, to earn enough money to be independent of Paul, and exercise books were scattered on it, as depressing somehow in their anonymity as faces of the unknown dead in Eastern cemeteries: all the effort, the desperate upright writing, and the feeling of seeing something that's not meant to be seen. Gala pushed them to the far end of the table. We began to eat.

‘I hate correcting their work,' Gala said with a half nod, for she must have known what I was thinking. ‘If I give them bad marks I feel low for days.'

‘And how's Paul?' The effect of the ham, and thick slices of white bread was to make the shadowy other life more doubtful, more distant. Gala shrugged.

‘He's feeling old. He tells me that if his wife had been a more organized person he would have been a sculptor of the first class instead of the second. Presumably he tells his wife this too. It must be very irritating for her.'

‘It does sound very irritating.' I laughed. ‘But you feel free of all that kind of thing, then?'

‘Only because I never married or had children. I think it was because I can't bear criticism! It was built into the puritan idea of the family, I suppose. The head of the family may criticize the wife and the children. He may morally disapprove of them. Now why should anyone morally disapprove of me? I would lose my nerve as a sculptor if I were under a constant barrage of criticism!'

‘Quite right,' I said. I felt cheered up. Sometimes Tony's disapproval of me was as strong in the flat as the scent of a fox. It half choked me, I had to get out. It was strange, I thought, that Gala had two sides like this, and that I always forgot one when she turned to the other. But now she was reversing – after her loud laugh and a swig from the bottle of red wine on the table she fell silent again.

Her everyday thoughts began to be submerged and a parallel track shot out ahead of them, going at a dizzying speed. I looked round the kitchen, feeling trapped. I wanted to go home. I would make it up to Tony, by cooking an evening meal, sitting in front of TV and watching old movies. But the thought of that was trapping too: they were eerie, the old, unageing stars acting out the fantasies of their long-dead scriptwriters. And the documentaries on 'thirties fascism, the faded goosestepping and deafening noise juxtaposed with brightly coloured food and bouncing pets, were more of a dictatorship of my mind than the travels imposed by Meg or Gala. I wondered how Tony could stand it. But he did more than stand it, he consumed it and helped to produce it. He moved freely in those wildly fluctuating zones of time and space.

‘Give Meg a chance,' Gala said. She got up and I followed her into the sitting room next door, which gave out onto a balcony too narrow to sit on and a low wrought-iron railing and the base of a thick tree with new green shoots sticking out from the bark. I saw that Gala was tired. When she sat I stood, my eye on the door.

‘I think she'll help you to eliminate that bad sister,' Gala said. She yawned suddenly and briefly, like a cat. Her eyes closed. She could sleep like that, anywhere and in front of anyone. But her expression, even when sleeping, was sombre. I wondered where she had galloped off to now. ‘Goodbye, Gala,' I said in a whisper. I let myself out of the flat. And I went into the street feeling dejected and alone. All the excitement of last night had evaporated, and I wanted only to sit at home and think of nothing at all.

I wasn't really surprised to find her in the street. She was waiting by the corner. I had already passed several girls who could have been her: white face, empty eyes, dark hair. Now she had no name. She followed me to the bus stop and when I got on she hopped on last, as if she had only just made up her mind that this was where she wanted to go. She sat two rows behind me. I only dared to turn once,
when asking for my fare. She was half obscured by a large African woman with carrier bags in a mountain on her lap. Was this half-hidden girl what Ishbel had looked like? She seemed a complete stranger, and utterly familiar at the same time. Her face gave no glimmer of recognition. Yet when we were there, at my stop, she got off ahead of me and I had to follow her all the way down the street to the block of flats.

As I went in I could feel my heart pounding. She had gone off down the street a little way and stood watching me with her back against the area railings of the house next to Paradise Island. A man came between us, heaving a crate of soft drinks. I ran into the cold, numb smell of the lino hall and jabbed the light button. I prayed that Tony would be in. I heard no steps as I scratched round my purse for my key. If she was there, she had come in silently and was standing still in the entrance to the hall where I couldn't see her.

The door opened. I pulled the key out clumsily and banged it shut behind me. The lights were on. TV voices spoke earnestly and then with laughter from the sitting room. I thought of the room empty, and the voices speaking to the empty room. I couldn't feel that Tony was there.

He was. He hardly looked up as I came in and threw myself down beside him. He was merged with the set, part of the antique dramas dancing in front of his immobile face.

I took his hand. I strained for noise other than that noise which seemed inescapable but could be cancelled at the click of a button. I wouldn't be able to turn this girl off at the switch. But it seemed that she hadn't followed me in after all. I could sense the complete silence in the other parts of the flat which always seems to reign when TV is on and claiming our attention, as if, transported somewhere else by the pictures, we are really no longer there and it can relapse into the silence of emptiness.

Tony gave me a quick glance. He asked me how I was. I said I was fine. Later he would ask me about the West German film, in two programmes' time probably. Slowly,
sitting beside him there, I grew calmer. But it was always with the sense of being a victim that I went through the rest of the evening: I cooked dinner guiltily, I smiled at Tony too much and felt already that he had abandoned me, gone off – and rightly – to someone else. I was no longer the triumphant predator, I was persecuted and at fault.

The evening seems to last forever. Tony, who is good at suppressing his feelings but unable to prevent himself from showing triumph, came into the kitchen as I cooked the joint we should have had for lunch and ran his fingers through my hair. I saw us reflected in the window – it was growing dark at last – my hair standing up in hedgehog prickles and him behind me like a husband in an ad. They'd never let a woman with hair like that on the screen. And what were we advertising? Certainly not the quality of our life together – it was a long time since either of us had made the effort to understand what the other wanted. It was as if there was a limited space in our minds that was open to the other's mind, and the space was gradually closing.

‘Hair still looks funny,' Tony said. He tweaked it again and I winced. I made myself smile. Now! I said to myself. Go to the window and look. While Tony's here. Go on.

I went to the window, half-pulling Tony behind me, as if in an affectionate, playful mood. There was my face, coming up closer to me in the glass. There was the street, which only last night I thought I had left for the last time. I saw a straggle of women going into Paradise Island. Their jeans made a clot of darkness against the pavement. The moon was full but not yet strong. It hung above my reflected face: two round, foolish faces staring down blandly at the women below.

‘Are you looking for the pots of herbs that used to be on the window sill?' Tony said. ‘Because they died. I threw them out this morning.'

He sounded friendly and co-operative. It probably had been a boring day for him. I didn't answer, but opened the window and leaned out. He was still holding my hand, and he gave a surprised squeeze at my behaviour.

She was under the streetlamp opposite. I couldn't see her eyes because they were in shadow, a shadow so deep that it looked as if she had empty sockets, as if the blackness on the upper part of her face were really night. She stood, as Meg had stood under the thin birches behind the cottage on Dalzell land, defiant and still – but this shadow owned all the world round her, by throwing her darkness over it… Margaret… my Meg… and my mother, is this what you've given birth to? She was like a woman who has been drowned in daylight, the lower part of her face as white as the day that saw her go. She was one of the women on the raft of the Méduse. She was gazing at me apparently sightlessly, with utter anguish.

‘I didn't throw them out,' Tony said, with good-natured impatience. ‘Is that the kind of thing you think I get up to when you're not here – throwing pots onto the heads of harmless passers-by?'

I drew back from the window and shut it. I was trembling, but Tony didn't seem to notice. When he was using his bantering tone he was particularly impervious to me.

I made the onion sauce to go with the meat. Tony stood at the sink, peeling potatoes. The meal would never be ready. It would never be eaten. I didn't know how I would make my body ingest it – and if I did, wouldn't it just sit there like a lump, for if time was refusing to move then the functions of the body would refuse to move too. How was she there? How did she dare to be there? The sky outside remained the same uncertain blue. We were in a perpetual twilight.

‘So how was Gala today?' Tony said at his most jaunty. I knew he hated Gala. He suspected her of conquering me, colonizing parts of me that couldn't be his. Not that he wanted them for himself, but it was irritating for him not to be complete possessor all the same.

‘She was fine.'

‘Talk about anything interesting?'

‘Oh, I can't remember … just the usual.'

I wished suddenly that Tony
could
answer the questions I wished I had made Gala take more trouble over. What did
she mean by my sister? My bad sister? How did she know about her, if Meg hadn't described what was going on? Or had she been there, watching me and Ishbel from behind a tree, shaping words out of our violence to one another?