You Must Be Sisters (11 page)

Five minutes was an awful long time to do nothing in. She tried to turn the pages of
Woman’s Realm
but they were too floppy to be managed with one hand. So she listened to the tactful little hum of the machine busy at her arm, and gazed up at the ceiling.

‘All over, dear.’ The nurse stilled the swinging bag and dismantled the apparatus. It relinquished its vein with a sigh.

‘Now sit up carefully, dear, just in case you feel a little dizzy.’

Laura hoped she would feel a little dizzy, as proof of her loss, but she didn’t. She watched her sack being put into the fridge next to his, touching it. This made her feel odd, as if he and she were already acquainted.

He hadn’t left. He was still in the waiting-room, sitting in a chair and rolling a cigarette.

‘Reckon we deserve a Guinness after that,’ he said, looking at his cup of tea. ‘Could manage a pint nicely.’ He was growing a moustache, Laura noticed, a tentative moustache; its shadow on his face looked curiously mannish.

The stout woman set down another cup of tea for Laura and turned to him. ‘Now you
know
,’ she said, shaking her finger, ‘that there’s no smoking for half an hour after giving blood.’

‘It’s me nerves, me nerves,’ he said.

She chuckled. However corny they were being, everyone got pampered in this room just for five minutes.

‘Well, be it on your own head,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to catch you if you faint.’

‘
She
will,’ he replied, looking at Laura. ‘Won’t you?’

Yes
, thought Laura. She smiled into her teacup.

The stout lady went back to her urn. Now they were alone, Laura wondered what she could say. He looked content enough, idly turning the pages of her
Woman’s Realm
and raising his eyebrows at some pictures of Princess Anne. Nice eyebrows; humorous, quizzical ones. She would ask him a question.

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Yeah. It’s me only good deed for mankind.’

‘I was terrified at first, but there’s nothing to it, is there?’

‘Right. And they give me time off, too, to come here. If there was Guinness it’d be perfect.’

He stubbed out his cigarette, pocketed a couple of biscuits and stood up. Laura stood up too, perhaps because vistas of his less good deeds intrigued her. She would leave at the same time.

Outside it was sunny. He stood still and considered for a moment; then he turned to the right and wandered along the pavement. Why shouldn’t she turn to the right also? The only alternative was turning to the left. She looked at his back view; he was ambling along as if he didn’t mind her catching him up. Ah, now he’d stopped; he was munching a biscuit. Why not, Laura? The sun’s shining; be bold. Fifty-fifty chance you’d be walking this way anyway.

She caught him up.

‘Have a biscuit,’ he said, offering her the other one.

It startled her, how pleased she was. She took it and they both ambled along, munching. One biscuit each; it was nice.

Outside a supermarket she stopped. She had some shopping to do. She also had the desire to test the bond between them. Would the thread snap? She mumbled something and went in.

For a moment she was pleased that he had followed; then she was gripped by her usual paralysis. She always felt like this in supermarkets; it was something to do with the pitiless lighting and long perspective of little packets. She never knew what to choose. The packets dismayed her too; the earth’s fruits dismantled and reassembled into economy-sized plastic squares. Masses and masses of them, rows and rows.

Clutching her wire basket, she hovered. There were only a few people about, preoccupied and boring-looking, like people usually look in supermarkets.

He held up a tin, eyebrows raised hopefully. ‘Have these,’ he said. ‘Such a classy label.’ Marron Purée, it was; its picture was embellished with leaves. He dropped it into her basket.

Hands in pockets he shambled along the row of frozen meats, looking as incongruous here as he’d looked in the clinic, enquiring and messy, altogether rather cheering in the sterile aisles. Definitely not preoccupied and boring.

‘Could you find me some sausages?’ she dared to ask.

He rummaged amongst the frosty packets and found her some – beef ones, she didn’t like those, and far too many just for one – but she took them. He went off, eyeing the shelves.

‘Treacle you must have,’ he called out. ‘Reminds me of me youth.’ He put the tin in her basket. ‘Hey, and a bottle of this. What a kitsch colour. I like it.’

‘But
I
don’t like it. It’s raspberry cordial.’

‘Put it on your mantelpiece and admire it. Give it a home.’ He put it into her basket and wandered off again. She looked down at her odd little collection.

He was holding up another tin. ‘Must try these.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve never tasted them before. Whole Guavas. From Malaysia. Somebody must buy them after all that; think of them bumping about on donkeys, and packing cases, and –’

‘– stick ’em in, then.’

She was enjoying this. Inspecting her list, comparing prices – how dreary all that seemed now! As dreary as the other people here with their empty faces and heavy baskets.

And to hell with money, she thought, standing at the checkout and watching the paper strip of mauve numerals lengthen.
I
don’t care what Marron Purée costs. Anyway, there’s lots of grant left. ‘Five pounds, eighty-five pence,’ said the girl at the machine, uninterested whether guavas came from Malaysia, uninterested whether they came from Mars.

Laura put the things into her carrier bag while he stood, hands in pockets, and still looking somehow as if he shouldn’t be there. His muddy plimsolls had left marks on the floor. As she put in the Weetabix (for she’d added things too) she felt the bond between them thicken; thicken with something domestic, a suggestion of breakfast. Now he knew she ate Weetabix in the morning, could they any longer be strangers?

They stood outside for a moment. Somewhere a clock struck twelve. ‘How about a quick one, then?’ he asked.

At the doorway of the pub she summoned up her courage. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Mac.’

They went inside; she sat down, he went up to the bar. No longer nameless, his ensuing Mac-ness filled her with pleasure; the way he fumbled for money in the frayed back pocket of his jeans, the way he said something to the man behind the bar and the man chuckled, the way he came back with the brimming glasses, raising those eyebrows at a girlie calendar on the wall and then raising them at her. She liked that. She smiled; they shared the
nude
; the bond thickened. There was something easy and natural about him; by comparison she felt fussy, the way she thought about how much things cost, the way her carrier bag kept spilling its contents when she moved in her seat.

‘What’s yours, then?’

‘Laura.’

‘That’s nice. Know what? You’re the first fanciable bird I’ve ever seen in that blood place.’

‘Am I?’ She didn’t know what to say to that. Gladdened by being fanciable yet taken aback by its simplistic sort of solving, she gazed into the timeless amber of her cider. The pub was empty and dimly lit. She was thankful about that, for words could trail off into the semi-darkness, they could even be left unsaid, yet suggested by the shadows.

‘Fancy a cigarette?’

‘Yes, but I can’t roll them.’ She liked watching him do the rolling; his hunched shoulders, his whole concentration, when she’d seen it in the clinic, had been the first thing about him to move her.

‘I’ll show you.’ He put his tobacco tin on his knee and took her hand in his. One by one he laid out her fingers and in her palm placed a paper; into its crease he fed a slim roll of tobacco. She looked with distaste at her hands, clumsy and red compared with his calm beige fingers which worked despite her own stubborn ones springing back and getting in the way. Finally it was finished and lay, a simple offering, in her palm.

‘We’ll share it,’ he said. ‘It’s the last of me baccy.’ He lit it, hand cupped, cradling the flame the way men on street corners cradle the flame. He
is
different, she realized with a small thud. What sort of thud? Excitement?

They sat back in silence, an easy natural one on his part, she was sure, but even with this lighting she couldn’t quite relax. Such an unfathomable silence, that was why. A silence as yet with no complexion, for knowing him but an hour she had no clue how it would finish, and it is the words around a silence that create its complexion. Had he broken it with ‘Do you go to university here?’ it would have been confirmed as an enquiring, nervous silence; had it been ‘How about seeing “Oedipus Rex” with me tonight?’ it would have been confirmed as a constructive one. How analytical and selfconscious I am! thought Laura. Can I never shake it off? He’s probably just enjoying his Guinness.

When what he actually said was: ‘I planted twenty-four fir trees this morning,’ she was pleased. What a relief; it had been an easy, companionable one.

‘Where?’

‘On a grassy bank. It looks quite Norwegian now, if I’d ever been to Norway, that is. Each one I put in I prayed to Thor that it would grow.’

‘Who’s Thor?’

‘Some Scandinavian almighty. I read about him somewhere. Remarkable bloke, Thor.’ He relapsed into reverie. Laura, though, was curious.

‘Are they for you?’

‘No, I’m a gardener. Work for the university. Up at Addison Hall.’

‘Heavens! That’s my Hall – or it was until last week. I wonder if I ever saw you.’ She was almost certain now that she’d seen him working in the flowerbeds. He didn’t look like a student, now she thought of it. He didn’t have that cultivated scruffiness; he looked as if he’d been born with his.

‘I wish I’d known,’ she said. She passed him the cigarette. ‘How long have you been there?’

‘Since last summer. It was good in the summer.’ He fell silent. Was he reminiscing about the girls; seducing classy birds in the rhubarb patch? She could imagine him doing that.

‘What do you like doing best?’ she asked.

‘Shit-shovelling. That and mowing. No hassles, nobody bothering you. Practically breaks your back, though. But I like that once in a while; makes my body feel good.’

Laura thought of his body and surprised herself by blushing. Was it slender and graceful, beige as his hands were? Today, anyway, it was linked with hers with its missing pint and now its added one. He passed her the cigarette; it was intimate, their sharing it like this. She felt so drawn to him; why?

‘You a student, then?’ he asked.

‘Yes, psychology. But I’ve moved out of Hall. I live in a room on my own now.’ She liked saying this, it made her sound different from the others. ‘I’ve got a garden too, but it’s a bit messed up at the moment, full of rubbish and stuff. The family upstairs have about twenty children and I’m sure they chuck stuff out of the window.’ She passed him the cigarette. ‘I want to dig it up and plant it and make it really lovely.’

‘If you like, I can borrow a spade from the works. You know, dig it for you.’

Laura sat back. The faded roses wallpaper, the girlie calendar, the back view of the barman who was polishing glasses, all were irradiated with the most surprising joy. She felt dizzy; she couldn’t look at him. Suddenly it seemed as if everything today had been leading up to this; she was amazed.

‘Oh yes, please do.’

‘What’s better than today, then? After work.’

He stood up and finished his glass. She stood up beside him. He gave her the cigarette. ‘The rest is yours,’ he said.

‘Strange, that draught cider. It makes me feel all loose round the edges.’

‘Good protein. Puts hairs on your chest.’ He smiled at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to touch her, he was so near. But he said. ‘Must be pushing along. They only give me time off for doing me blood.’

They went out into the street with its dazzling sun. She told him her address.

‘Be seeing you, then,’ he said. He went.

She leant against the wall. Quite apart from the cider, she felt intoxicated. Almost glad, she was, that he had gone, so that she could recollect everything that had just happened in detail.

The sunlight flashed on the windows of the buses as they turned up the hill; even the spittle-gobs on the pavement winked.

ON THE EVENING
of that same day, Dan was painting. He was painting in Laura and Claire’s bedroom. He liked it up there; since his solitary visit on Christmas Eve he’d found himself drawn to his daughters’ rooms, still redolent, as they were, of the girls – Holly’s with its mantelpiece menagerie of glass animals and its poignant pencil notice on the cupboard door MUSEUM – OPEN that she’d forgotten to change to CLOSED; Claire and Laura’s with those childhood shoes.

He looked round. Laura in particular he felt he was experiencing
in
theory rather than in her often exasperating practice; perhaps that was why he liked it there. The pictures and the books declared she was a girl with interests. Nothing was spoilt by the clothes all over the floor and the unmade bed that, once she herself was in occupation, reminded him that she could be also an irritating or a disappointing one.

He was painting a still-life. It consisted of a shawl-draped table with various objects on it. The objects were all right; it was the shawl that was giving the problems. A crocheted thing of Laura’s, he’d said it was terrible the first time she’d come downstairs in it, swathed like a granny. Tonight, on further inspection, it had turned out to be rather prettily intricate. Infuriating, though.

The thing was, how could he suggest lots of little holes without covering it with dots; and how could he cover it with dots without it seeming to be just that – covered with dots? A spotty shawl, in other words. How on earth did one turn a dot into a hole? Damn shawl; he dabbed jerkily on, but the shawl just got spottier. Even the folds didn’t look right and he thought he’d got the hang of folds. But the spots inside the folds were too bright, so it looked not so much full of shadows as full of stains. Stained and spotty, not shadowed and holey. And getting worse every minute!