Lola and Gracie – just back from school, giggling with delight at the boys on the bus who had stared at their legs and asked for e-mail addresses; yelping with glee at the boys’ total hopelessness, hopping from one coltish leg to another as they dragged huge school-bags up the path, shrieking with panic as they splashed into the puddles – were ecstatic to discover that no one was home, in the cavernous house Lola’s mother had inherited. Faith, though too late to harry Lola in the morning, had come in later and filled up the fridge. That meant they could eat mountains of ice-cold cheesecake, sample the juices, the smoothies, the thickies, plunder the chocolates, catch up with their e-mails, and watch TV at deafening volume.
(Elsewhere, south and east of the city, children come home to cold houses, rattle the tin for cheap biscuits, care for other, younger children, put the washing on to please their mothers, then watch TV at the same volume. TVs blink and blare all over the city.)
Lola had been raised with lots of money; Lottie’s wealth had come from fur, her father having made millions in the trade long before people disapproved of it. Money was the air the Segall-Lucases breathed; fur was something soft and scented that Lola’s pretty mother wore in winter, something Lola liked to put her face against.
Then adolescence hit, with its souring knowledge. Some of her friends at private school had got in on scholarships, through brains, not money. She began to understand the whole world wasn’t rich.
Her best friend changed every month or so, but for several months now it had been Gracie, though they quarrelled vividly every other fortnight, and made up with fleets of passionate notes, secretly launched across the classroom.
This friendship, like Lola’s other friendships, seemed to be about shopping and music. In fact it worked at the deepest level – they liked the selves they had found with each other. Gracie, less rich and indulged than Lola, could take a brief dip in consumer paradise, spray herself with musk-rose and lily-of-the-valley and other, sharper, more elegant smells from the continental masters of perfume; riffle through Lottie’s delicious handbags – the strawberry suede, gold-embossed Verso, the ultra-slender cream clutch by Parade – and be, for an evening, teenchild in paradise, glossy, an It-girl, Gracie the Ditsy.
In fact she had dimensions Lola lacked. Gracie’s mother Paula was a radical journalist who’d made her name investigating the security services. A single parent, a nag, a bore. Mysteriously, though when Gracie was home she couldn’t bear her mother’s carping, her predictable, puritanical opinions, her arguments with the television news – though Paula as a mother was faintly ridiculous, a potential source of public shame in tracksuit bottoms and turquoise anorak – mysteriously, when Gracie was away from her, at times when she felt she was on the line, her mother’s opinions leaped to her lips, her mother’s world-view became her own.
Now Gracie and Lola sat in Lola’s bedroom, listening to hundreds of decibels of hip-hop, picking out, biting into, and discarding the expensive chocolates they’d filched from Lottie’s dressing room. ‘This one’s disgusting … Banana praline.’
‘This one’s good. It’s sort of brown.’
‘A bit of brown never lets you down.’ Both of them instantly fell about laughing, till Gracie remembered she didn’t understand it.
‘It’s something my dad used to say, you know … I haven’t seen my dad for two years. Mum had a row with him. I miss him. He was much nicer than that byaatch my mother.’ Gracie was still giggling, but her eyes, which were large and black, were sad. Her dark curviness came from her father, who most people thought of as big and fat, but to Gracie he was the missing hero. And her lucky big sister lived with him, whereas Gracie had got stuck with her mother.
‘I like your mum,’ said Lola, cautiously. It never did to criticize mothers. Friends had to like them, though you did not. But Lola didn’t really like Gracie’s mother. Her clothes were shameful. Her hair sagged down like a couple of sandbags. Unlike her own mother, she was always depressed.
‘You’re lucky,’ Gracie said, throwing over a praline, which Lola liked and Gracie hated. It missed, and fell on the cream wool rug, and when Lola went to pick it up, she trod on it. She scraped up half of it, and left the rest. ‘Yuck! These chocolates are so disgusting!’
‘Shall we put back the rest of the box?’
‘No, my mother will never notice.’ That was nice about Lottie, her not noticing. The worst kind of parent noticed too much.
They began to dance, frantic, to the music, their hips gyrating, fluid, slick, their faces parodying ecstasy, their big feet beating time on the carpet, long hair whirling out like mermaids, stamping the chocolate into the mat, singing along with the Hesperican voices that took them over when they sang, and when they bought, and when they ate, for the city was part of the satellite lands of the Hesperican empire, in its final decades.
‘Do we feel like a smoke?’ Lola asked.
‘Weed or tobacco?’ Gracie said.
‘You know I don’t do weed, disgusting, though my stupid dad has always got some … Shall I go and get some from his dressing-room?’ Lola asked.
‘Are you serious? Your dad smokes weed? That’s really cool,’ said Gracie, uncertain.
‘No it’s not, it’s pathetic,’ said Lola. ‘My mum says it’s pathetic, too. Not that my dad is pathetic,’ she rushed to say, just in case there was doubt. ‘My dad’s really clever. He knows everything.’
‘What does he do, exactly?’ asked Gracie. ‘He goes to an office somewhere, doesn’t he?’
‘It’s kind of a study, actually. He’s writing a book,’ said Lola, defensive. ‘It’s about philosophy. Time. Things happening,’ she said, to prove it, and then regretted having said so much. She had only recently grown defensive. Until she was thirteen or so, she was convinced that her father, Harold Segall, was the cleverest man in the universe, and one of the handsomest, as well, though it was a pity he had gone bald. Then something her mother had said sank in. ‘Why don’t you do something, Harold?’ she had shouted, in the middle of a row they had one evening. ‘You’ve been writing this book for nearly twenty years. Don’t you think perhaps you should get a job?’
‘You don’t believe in me,’ Dad had said. ‘But I’ll finish it in the next few years. My book might actually be important.’ ‘Oh poppycock, Harold, you’ll never finish it.’ His face became ashen, awful with hurt, and Lola ran in and put her arms round him, but she heard her mother, from the edge of what was bearable, say, ‘Really Harold, don’t be so pathetic. And you, Lola, stop making a fuss.’
‘I hate you, Mum,’ Lola had shouted. The first time she’d said it; it felt horrible. But now she said it every week. Though the one time her mother had said it back, furious, desperate, ugly with tears after Lola called her a hideous old cow (which she should have been cool enough to ignore), Lola remembered it for weeks, and swore to her mother that she’d never forgive her.
But actually, Lola adored her mother. She was very cuddly, and wore nice clothes, and smelled exquisite, and laughed a lot. She handed out money on request. She told Lola she was beautiful, which Lola needed to hear daily. ‘You look exactly like I did at your age. Everyone was in love with me.’ She didn’t complain when Lola borrowed her tights, her pants, bras, shirts, makeup, partly because she had so much of everything, though she once got cross when Lola tipped a bottle of her favourite perfume in the bath, the one Babe Grimaldi wore at her wedding, which cost three hundred dollars an ounce. She wasn’t virtuous, like Gracie’s mother. Her good points far outweighed the bad, or so Lola thought on the happy evenings when she and her mother curled up in bed with pizza and chips and ice-cream and videos.
But now Lottie was doing something quite out of character, a City Institute course in the History of Art. Lola was convinced this wouldn’t last. In some ways Mum was very stupid, not half so bright as Lola’s dad. Lottie didn’t understand about school work, and said the wrong things at parents’ evenings. ‘I don’t think children should work too hard. There’s plenty of time for her to learn things. I am just starting, and I’m middle-aged,’ was her robust reply to a form teacher who thought that Lola should work harder. ‘Don’t turn her into a boffin, please,’ when the head of science suggested A-levels. ‘Lola is artistic, like me,’ she asserted. ‘I hardly think she wants to do science.’ ‘No, you like art, Mum,’ Lola had hissed. ‘Ignore my mother,’ she told Ms Tansy. ‘We’re not the same person,’ she screamed at Lottie later.
They did look alike, though. Everyone said so. This wasn’t too bad, since Lottie was pretty. Though Lola was taller and slimmer, thank God. She must have got that from Harold, her father. Together with her brains, hopefully.
‘So what did you say your dad’s book is about?’ asked Gracie. Gracie was a reader.
‘Time’ sounded rather a weedy subject, so Lola decided to avoid it. ‘Non-fiction, I think.’
‘Is it political?’ In Gracie’s house, most things were political.
‘He’s quite political. Yes, he is. He definitely says he’s a socialist.’ Lola lost confidence in that. He didn’t actually do anything socialist. ‘Let’s look at the web-site again,’ she said.
For Gracie and she had got a new interest. They had both become anti-capitalists. This had lasted a long time; at least two weeks.
They sat together over Lola’s lap-top. Nothing much happening this weekend. All the exciting stuff was in other cities. Protests in Varna where a massive new dam was said to be threatening the whole coastline. A chunk of the island as big as a city could apparently fall into the sea. Eco-protesters envisaged tidal waves, global disaster, millions drowned.
‘They go over the top a bit, don’t they?’ said Lola. Things like that made her feel very nervous, as if it could suddenly all be dissolved, the comfortable, perfumed, glittering city, the only thing that she had known. She wanted to attack it, but not actually destroy it.
‘It could be true though,’ Gracie insisted.
‘Not much we can do about it any case. Varna’s a long way away, isn’t it?’
‘Not far enough, Lolo, Lollikins. It says tidal waves would sweep around the world.’
The two girls stared riveted, for a moment, at a computer simulation of a tidal wave. Tiny people struggled like ants. Something big and important at last. Something marvellous that would sweep them away and spare them the slow bits of growing up. Something massive, sexual, final.
Yet they loved their playthings, their friends, their homes.
‘I could ask Davey. Davey would know. Davey knows everything about science.’
Davey was Lola’s half-brother, her favourite person in the whole world. He had done a degree in science, she thought; after that he’d been a salesman of scientific health-food, then written for a magazine called SpaceTime which was a monthly guide to the galaxy, actually ending up as editor; then presented science on kids’ TV, and had now become CTV’s Mr Star-Lite, fronting a weekly programme on astronomy. Its ratings were very high.
‘I think your brother’s so cool,’ said Gracie. ‘You know, I watch his show on TV He’s really handsome, for, like, an older guy.’
‘He’s not really old. His thirtieth birthday was, like, just a few years ago, I can’t remember,’ his sister said, defending him. ‘Our mother says he knows everything. Not that she knows anything.’
It was tea-time in the City Institute, where Lola’s mother was working in the library (as Shirley Edwards would have liked to be). Lottie’s tongue was caught between big white teeth as she wrote an essay on ‘Conservation’. It could have been about pictures or buildings, but Lottie, with a newly discovered enthusiasm, wanted to write about books and manuscripts. Lottie was searching the internet. She had previously used it to buy flights and flowers, but the world of information was a marvellous surprise, gleaming with brainy-ness and cleanliness. She stretched like a cat and smiled to herself.
Paul Bennett, her lecturer, was watching her, amused, from a carrel twenty metres away. He loved his wife Alma, but all the same, his female mature students sometimes tickled his fancy. It was one of the good things about making his move from schools to universities; some of your students were not off-limits. Lottie Whatwashername – ah yes, Segall-Lucas – was sexy, absurd, good-looking, fun.
Quarter of an hour later, Lottie’s sense of fun was deflated. She was reading about the ‘Memory of the World’ programme. The title really appealed to her, but the content was incredibly lowering. Most of it was about loss and forgetting. Except for Hesperica, which only fought wars in other countries, the biggest cause of loss to libraries was ‘armed conflict’. Way down the scale came accidental fire, flood, mould, damp, dust, insects. Even fire and flood quite often came about as a result of contractors ‘improving’ the libraries. Lottie knew this was an irony: her third Art History lecture was all about irony. Irony had a bitter taste, not the kind of humour Lottie enjoyed. She kept on reading. The metal taste got worse. Some of the libraries destroyed by fighting in the last ten years were full of books salvaged from the second world war. The last fifty years had been the worst in the history of the world for losses to libraries. And there was another, nightmare problem: more and more writing was being produced, more and more copies of more and more documents, until no library system could cope, and Lottie found her eyes glazing over … She shook herself awake from an enjoyable dream about fire-fighting librarians with long, thick hoses. Human beings were impossible, she decided: they wrote the words, a great flood of words that was meant to explain and record the whole world, then they fought the wars that destroyed the lot.
Mind you, war was important. She wasn’t against it.
Elsewhere on the campus, Angela Lamb, Iceland winner and minor celebrity, mother of the red-haired girl called Gerda who was watching a Painted Lady butterfly at the zoo, had a tea-time date with an academic. It wasn’t something she looked forward to. Fifteen years ago, before she was successful, before she had won the Iceland Prize, she had been grateful to receive a letter from a Dr M. Penny, senior lecturer in English at City Institute, enclosing a paper she had written on Angela. The signature was illegible; for some reason Angela assumed she was male. Being between boyfriends, at the time, and liking men who admired her work, Angela sent back a sheet of sharp comments with a charming letter asking Dr Penny to lunch. Thus she had got landed with what she described in unbuttoned moments as ‘that daft old biddy’.
At first Moira was quite pleasant. Both of them were fairly young at the time; Moira was in her late thirties, still hopeful of fame and love and a baby or two, Angela half a decade younger. Moira was sure she had the upper hand. She could give this girl the patronage she needed – a sympathetic (and brilliant) reading, her work discussed at feminist conferences. Angela was virgin territory. The novelist’s flat was poor and small, allowing Moira to feel kindly towards her.
Angela, for her part, quickly recovered from the disappointment of Moira being female, and turned her attention to correcting her errors. But Moira, when challenged, swiftly changed the subject, and later, when Angela tried to insist that some of the ‘influences’ couldn’t be right, because she simply hadn’t read those authors, Moira said, smiling, chin held high, ‘Influences aren’t quite that simple. I’m adducing a pattern of intertextuality, setting your work in its cultural context. You tell me you haven’t read Jude the Obscure, but how do I know you aren’t unconsciously suppressing it? In any case, some texts are just in the air – to put a lay-person’s gloss on it.’ As she said that, her large long-sighted eyes stared suddenly very hard at Angela.
‘Jude the Obscure? In the air?’ queried Angela.
But that first time they agreed to differ. Both of them thought there was something to gain. Angela gave Moira some first editions, which she signed, sweetly, ‘To Moira; thank you from my heart for your interest in my work.’ Moira, for her part, invited Angela to a well-endowed conference in Barcelona.
They kissed each other’s cheeks on parting, and just for a moment their eyes met appraisingly. Moira’s slightly bulging brown ones stared into Angela’s blue-grey gaze. Moira was older and more established. Angela was younger and prettier. Moira was a critic, with a PhD; Angela, though, was the artist. When the chips were down, she was the source. The chicken came before the egg collector.
Then Angela won the Iceland Prize. The Iceland meant the global big-time; even Hesperica took notice of it. Angela jetted to New Work a few times, but decided to stay in the satellite cities. A certain loyalty impelled her to assent when Moira wrote to say she had been offered a contract to write the first critical biography.
Soon strains entered their relationship. Things had been going less well for Moira. The menopause found her still childless, loveless. Despite a good record of publications, she was only a reader, not a professor, because of prejudice, she insisted, against the female authors she wrote about.
Angela thought it was more likely to be because Moira was impossible to work with. Moira never actually agreed with anything, specializing in amused dissent, even to remarks about the weather, with a certain expression like a sneering camel that Angela began to anticipate, wincing. Moira never seemed to change her mind. To her, the author was a kind of appendage, useful to know, but not a source of knowledge.
Then Angela committed the unspeakable crime. Two years after winning the big prize, she conceived a child, by a Danian writer of fairy-tales she met at a conference.
‘Are you going to have an abortion?’ asked Moira, when Angela confided she was six weeks pregnant. Moira happened to know the Danian writer’s wife, a suicidal sculptor. ‘You never said you wanted to be a mother.’ (She meant, It’s unfair: I have longed for a child.)
‘I didn’t,’ said Angela, ‘but soon I shall be. I think it’s a girl. My baby girl.’ That was the way she imagined it; a tiny beauty who lay at her feet.
Moira could never forgive Angela that naked statement that she would be a mother. My baby girl. The words were white knives, in a city full of childless women.
Now, six years later, they hated each other. Moira’s biography was long overdue, though she always insisted it was near completion. They hadn’t met in the flesh for three years.
Today’s rendezvous in the City Institute’s café had been arranged by Angela, following a letter from Moira asking her to read a draft of the biography, ‘to check the spelling of personal names’. She had also written, vaguely but alarmingly, of ‘certain new spiritual commitments’. Angela realized, reading this letter, that Moira had never asked her any questions about her childhood, her love-life, her daughter. What kind of biography, she wondered, would leave all these areas a blank?
Moira turned out to be reluctant to meet. Angela had learned over the years that it was vital to Moira to have more commitments than anyone else, even as it became increasingly apparent that she didn’t have a boyfriend, and wouldn’t have children. Meetings involved a long and tortuous process of negotiation. Umbrage was taken if Angela didn’t pay tribute to Moira’s crowded schedules. The ‘spiritual commitments’, though, were new.
They finally met in the 1930s café overlooking the drenched campus as the sun went down. Angela was shocked by the change in her appearance. Moira looked gaunt, pale and mad. Her hair lay long and grey on her shoulders, with a greasy lankness suggestive of dirt. She had aged ten years in the three since they’d met. She sat in the window in the cruel late daylight, her hand clamped round a mug of water.
Was it the menopause? Angela wondered. ‘Hello,’ she hailed her, nervously. ‘Lovely to see you. I’ll get us some tea.’
‘But I don’t drink tea,’ said Moira, frowning. ‘Why do you assume that I drink tea?’
‘Coffee? Juice?’ Angela asked.
Moira ignored her. ‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘Only five minutes, surely. I couldn’t find the café, you see. Some of the paths were blocked off, with the flooding.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Moira, with a thin smile that meant the opposite. ‘I rushed back from an important meeting in the centre of the city to be here, that’s all, and now I’m stuck here waiting.’
Angela retreated to buy herself some coffee. There were anti-war posters everywhere. A sturdy, youngish woman with dark curling hair was standing on a chair, sticking up the last few: the man behind the hatch called across to her, ‘I think we’ve got enough now, Zoe.’ The most popular poster had a flock of vultures, each with a replica of Mr Bliss’s face, brooding over a field of corpses. Angela looked at them dispassionately. Once she had believed in all that. It was harder, when you got rich and soft. (She wondered, briefly, if she still existed, somewhere, the sullen schoolgirl she had been? Awkward, pious, Angela Ship, the girl who refused, with her father’s name; her friends called her Ange; she wrote ardent, embarrassing poems against starvation and nuclear war: ‘Children of Dust’, ‘The Bone-shadows’. Thank God that most of them had never been published. And her brother George, whom she’d loved so much, who had been her friend when they were both children, was dead; and so was her younger brother, Guy. And she had survived as a different person.)
Thank God she was a different person.
While she was queuing, two students came up to her, all shy smiles, to say they liked her work. She got rid of them as soon as she decently could, but was aware of Moira craning round in her seat, frowning at them, looking at her watch.
(Lottie, taking a break from her essay and drinking a cup of dreary herb tea, spotted Paul Bennett at a nearby table. She was about to join him when the silly young woman who’d been sticking her anti-war posters everywhere went over and started harassing him. Lottie hoped the lecturer would tell her off, but to her surprise Paul started laughing, and when she left, she kissed his cheek.)
Angela brought two slices of cream-spliced carrot cake back to the table where Moira sat.
‘Would you like one?’ Angela asked. ‘They look frightfully healthy.’
‘Why do you assume that I need health food?’ Moira asked, on a rising note.
‘That’s OK, I’ll eat them both.’
But Moira watched her eat the cake resentfully, hungrily. Angela saw she was much too thin. That white bent wrist, with the knobbed bones showing, those skeletal fingers, plucking at crumbs.
‘Are you sure you don’t want some?’
‘Do you think I want your food? Do you think I eat leftovers?’
‘Of course not, Moira. But it’s, you know, delicious. Don’t worry, I’m really enjoying it.’
Though by now there was only a morsel or so left, Moira suddenly plunged on it like a heron, stabbing the cube off Angela’s plate and snapping it down, her throat briefly bulging.
This was something new in the scale of hostility.
Angela began to feel annoyed, but she tried again. ‘Those students,’ she said. ‘I’m so grateful to you, really. You actually seem to have made them like me. You must be a terrific teacher.’ Somewhere Angela had read this advice: to win over any human being in the world, try a smile, money, or flattery.
But something had gone extremely wrong. Moira suddenly flushed red, from pale.
‘Why do you assume,’ she was nearly shouting, ‘that I am the person teaching your work?’
‘Well, I’m sorry, it did seem likely – Aren’t you?’
That expression appeared, the contemptuous camel, the mouth curling, the eyes half-closed, and Angela remembered that camels could spit. And kick, surely. Her chair inched backwards.
‘The department in its wisdom has given other, junior staff my graduate teaching.’
Angela looked at her narrowly. Moira’s face was working wildly. There was something furious yet absent in her mouth, her eyes, her twitching fingers.
‘Is something wrong?’ Angela asked.
‘I have been ill,’ Moira announced. ‘You never asked if I was ill. It never seems to have occurred to you.’
This was so unfair that Angela fell silent. Moira always put her on the defensive. Around them the café was emptying. In the latticed window the sky burned scarlet, then crimson, magenta, preparing for dark. The red reflected on Moira’s face, flared in her iris: mayhem, fury. There was another world outside the window. Angela longed sharply for escape. Somehow she had to calm Moira down.
‘I was busy,’ said Angela. ‘I had my daughter –’
‘Why do you think I want to know about her?’
This time the words were ejected with such venom that Angela actually flinched, and moved back. She looked at her hands, and tried again. ‘Well if you’re doing a biography, I think that Gerda might have to come in. They change your view of the world, you know.’
‘My view of the world? My view of the world? What do you know about my view of the world? What do you know about my book? Why do you think I wanted children?’ Moira had stood up, and was shouting loudly. People in the café were turning to look.
(Lottie stared from her adjacent table. One of those women looked vaguely famous, and the other one absolutely barking. If you were too clever, you clearly went mad. Still, cleverness was not Lottie’s problem.)
Angela Lamb was far from unselfish, but she saw a person in awful distress, a person who was surely damaging herself, losing her temper here in the café in front of students, in front of colleagues. She got up too, put her hand on Moira’s shoulder, and said, quite gently, ‘I don’t mean to upset you, Moira. I think you’re very unhappy about something. Why don’t we go outside for a walk. We don’t have to talk about the book today.’
‘The book is rubbish,’ Moira said, quieter, but still with terrible intensity. ‘The book doesn’t matter any more. I have been given a sign, today. Father Bruno has spoken. All the books will drown. Even your books, Angela. Your books which follow me and contradict me. Except the One Book, the One True Book. “God said to Noah, ‘I intend to bring the waters of the flood over the earth to destroy every human being under heaven that has the spirit of life; everything on earth shall perish …’ The second angel blew his trumpet, and what looked like a great blazing mountain was hurled into the sea. A third of the sea was turned to blood, A THIRD OF THE LIVING CREATURES IN IT DIED, AND A THIRD OF THE SHIPS ON IT FOUNDERED …”’
By the time she finished Moira was shrieking, a long metal ribbon of screaming sound, one arm lifted to the fluorescent ceiling, the other gesturing towards the red window, and all the faces, the eager, the indolent, city-worn faces, tired clever faces, innocent, ardent faces of the young, were fixed, startled, on the old woman prophesying.
Lottie decided it was time to leave the café. As she did so, somebody touched her shoulder. ‘Well that was quite something,’ said Paul Bennett. ‘I need a stiff drink, after that. Coming?’
At half-past six, Lottie still wasn’t home. Lola began to feel cross with her. She ought to come home every day at five so she could make Lola and her friends some tea. Lola was sixteen, but that wasn’t the point. She had homework to do, and so did Gracie. They might do it and they might not, but they shouldn’t have to waste time on housework. Her mother had been less reliable lately, since she’d started doing this Art History.
(They had found a cold chicken in the fridge, true, but it wasn’t Lola’s normal favourite kind. Faith didn’t understand how to shop. It was wrapped in bacon, with chestnut stuffing. They had flipped off the bacon, desultorily – ‘I’m a vegetarian, I don’t eat bacon’ – eaten some breast, got bored and abandoned it, on the kitchen floor where they happened to be sitting. ‘Is it free range?’ Gracie had asked, sternly, her mouth full of meat, eyes suddenly horrified. Lola had checked on the label. It wasn’t. ‘We usually only buy organic,’ she said, but both of them at once stopped eating.)
Mum at the City Institute! It didn’t make sense. She would never stick it.
Lola had spoken to her seriously. ‘Mum, you don’t have to do this, you know. We love you as you are. You don’t have to be clever.’
‘Thank you, darling. I’m not trying to be clever. I just thought I’d like to learn something new. I mean I do have quite a good eye for pictures. And I did, you know, get quite a few from Grandpa.’
‘But honestly, Mum. You will be home most nights?’
‘I can’t promise,’ Lottie said. ‘I’ll try of course. But I might make new friends. Even mothers do that. I might use the library. I might have classes. Faith will put food in the fridge, darling. I could even get her to come back in the evenings. I’m not quite sure about her cooking, though. And you two haven’t been getting on well.’ (Faith had been with the family ever since she came to the city, young and desperate, with a tiny baby. Yet Lola and she had never bonded. Faith, who was passionately partisan, tended to quote Kilda against her – ‘My Kilda always cleans her room’ – ‘My Kilda hems her trousers’ – though Kilda was nearly a year younger than Lola. The recent row, awesome, total, was because Faith had disposed of two of Lola’s toy animals, a huge golden lion and a metre-high bear, which Lola happened to have left on the floor.
For a year or so, admittedly.
‘She stole them,’ Lola had sobbed, broken-hearted. ‘She always does it. She takes my things.’ ‘Don’t be silly, Lola. She threw them away.’ ‘They were like my most favourite possessions, Mum.’ ‘Funny I never saw you with them.’ ‘I loved Leo Lion with my whole heart.’ ‘You still should not have called her a thief.’ This was the only insult that Lola had confessed to, but Faith insisted, ‘she used language, Mrs Segall. Awful. Terrible. Effing and blinding. The worst I’ve heard.’ In any case, Faith had demanded a large bonus before she continued working for them. Now she and Lola had a state of armed truce.)
‘No please, Mum, don’t, I’ll manage,’ Lola had said, hastily. Anything would be better than evenings with Faith. Still, Lola felt aggrieved. Her mum had always been there. What always had been, always should be.
Besides, Lola felt protective of her. Mum knew practically nothing of any use, except about paintings, and clothes, and money. She would surely fail, and be disappointed, and then she’d take it out on Dad. In the meanwhile, who would look after Lola?
‘I’m starving,’ Gracie said at seven o’clock.
‘Let’s go and get chips,’ Lola said. It didn’t seem much fun, on a February day. She cast about for something to cheer them both up. ‘And let’s do, you know, an action somewhere. A protest thing. Our first protest.’ (That would show her mother for not feeding her, and punish her weedy father, too, for skulking uselessly in his study.)
‘Oh cool, cool, that’s a great idea.’ Gracie thought for a moment. ‘What, though?’
‘We ought to, like, hit at commerce,’ said Lola, parroting the phrases she had read on the net.
‘What’s commerce exactly?’ Gracie asked.
‘Banks. Shops.’
‘But Lol, we like shops.’
‘Advertising, I suppose,’ said Lola. ‘It’s “The Great Evil”, like the web-site says. It sells powdered milk to Africa.’
‘Does it?’ This didn’t seem quite right to Gracie. Surely the powdered milk was something different. ‘So have they all got TVs in Africa?’
‘Yes.’ Lola didn’t believe in backing down. ‘If we were there, we could smash their TVs.’ Actions would be easier, if they were in Africa. Here things seemed more complicated. After all, she got her allowance from a bank. If they hit banks too hard, she might lose her money, just when she was planning on going to the sales.
But Gracie had an idea at last. ‘Well didn’t you say that woman was in advertising, that one who yelled at you for having the party, who came in here and snatched the plug from the wall? And your mum called her a silly old fool?’
‘Oh, Gloria. Yes. Our next-door neighbour. They made friends after that. Mum said we had to. She sent her about a thousand dollars’ worth of flowers. But Gloria still moans if I play loud music.’
‘So why don’t we go and like do her over?’
‘Cool,’ said Lola. ‘Yeah, cool.’ But she didn’t move. She knew Gloria. Gloria had sponsored her on charity walks. Knowing her made her seem somehow less capitalist. Most anti-capitalist actions seemed to involve paint, or posters, or flour. She imagined flour all over Gloria’s sofa. And the indigo stair carpet, crusted with paint. Poor Gloria had only decorated last year. Couldn’t they find some capitalists who weren’t their friends?
‘You’re scared,’ said Gracie. ‘Anyway, I’m starving. Let’s go for the chips and like see how we feel.’
‘Let’s take off our uniforms and put dark clothes on.’
Giggling, looking at themselves in the mirror, jumping on each other to make themselves scream, they both dressed up in head-to-toe black, tights, roll-necks, gloves and hoodies. The gloves were cashmere, lined in silk; Lottie had two dozen pairs like that, in shades from black to ice-cream pink.
‘We look like cats.’
‘We look like burglars.’
‘We could be anyone, dressed like this.’
Suddenly they felt they could do it. If they weren’t themselves, they could do anything. Two panthers prowled into the darkening city. They left the lights on, and both doors open.
Ten minutes later, Dirk strolled through, after a cursory ring on the front doorbell. He had found something he was good at, at last. It no longer mattered if Dirk was wanted; he got in anywhere, and took what he liked, remembering tips he had picked up in prison and learning quickly as he went along, for his brain had always been good at some things, though life had never given him the chances. Small, wiry people were good at burgling. It wasn’t really burgling, since it was for God. Father Bruno had explained all that. They needed funds for their posters and leaflets, their fares and food, and the leaders’ salaries. In any case, Dirk only burgled rich ponces who didn’t deserve nice things in the first place. Now he had a profession, and a cause to believe in, the One Way, which made all things right, and a couple of knapsacks, which were filling up nicely.
Half an hour later, a fox arrived. He shouldered his way through the fuchsia hedge and splashed through the garden, angled, eager. He had woken up hungry, earlier than usual after mating vigorously last night. His eyes were a good deal sharper than Dirk’s, with an extra layer of light-reflecting cells which made his amber irises glow green in car headlights. He had eaten, to date: three worms, two of which he pounced on from more than two metres away, a thin mouse, and a schoolchild’s discarded packet of raisins. The raisins were his favourite, delicious, but it wasn’t sufficient for a rutting dog-fox. Nearer the house it smelled horribly of humans, but the door to the kitchen swung wide open, the electric human light glared out. On the floor, within view, a plump gold-pink chicken blushed beside broken rashers of bacon. Spittle dripped on to the polished tiles as his jaws snapped shut and crushed the carcass.
Lottie Segall-Lucas was not in her element: a golden Koi carp in ditch-water. On their way into the bar, which was more bar than wine-bar, slopping out cloudy pints of beer to scruffy students shouting at each other, Paul was hailed by a large, softish-looking man who introduced himself to Lottie as Thomas. For a micro-second he looked interesting – curly dark hair, olive skin – but he turned out to be a special sort of librarian who worked out theories of librarianship. Lottie thought, I bet you make them up, and this government gives you money for it. Besides, he was poor; he was drinking shandy. The two men discussed a forthcoming conference whose finer details escaped Lottie. She perked up a bit when the talk became personal. Thomas had evidently been let down by some pretty young woman who found him dull. Lottie chipped in with some words of comfort – ‘But that’s what today’s young women are like! My daughter and her friends are shockingly shallow. If you’ve got no money or looks, you’re a zero. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it.’ Oddly, the man didn’t seem cheered up. In fact, he had looked distinctly sulky. ‘Don’t worry’ she added, ‘you’ll be over her in weeks.’ ‘But Melissa left me a year ago.’ And Paul didn’t flirt with her at all (of course she would have discouraged it, if he had been man enough to do it, but still Lottie felt a bit disappointed). The young woman sticking up the silly posters in the café turned out to have been Paul’s daughter Zoe. ‘My daughter isn’t at all shallow. Rather too earnest, if you ask me.’ So was Lola’s shallowness Lottie’s fault?
Perhaps in future she’d go straight home.
Some time after sunset, the rain began. It beat against the window as Shirley cooked tea. We had the best of the day, she thought.
She got the boys into their bath. They were nearly too big to take it together, but they loved bath-times; with their clothes shucked off in a heap on the floor, they turned into one bucking and dipping body, giggling, slippery, deeply intertwined, spouting and gargling for happiness when they weren’t fighting for space or soap. She left them to it, usually, after standing and watching for a bit.
Sometimes a question came into her head unbidden as she watched her two naked babes at play.
They were very alike, but they weren’t identical.
Franklin was heavier and lighter-skinned, in company the shyer of the two: Winston was slighter, more imaginative, with light brown eyes like his murdered uncle; he made up stories; he was sociable.
Shirley had slept with another man around the time the twins were conceived. She had confessed to Elroy, but in general terms, not making a point of the dates or times, and he had been too upset to ask. They had never mentioned her confession again. But in her head, the questions whispered. The man had been white, but Mediterranean-looking, with olive skin and dark curly hair. Sometimes when she looked at Franklin, his powerful body reminded her of Thomas … but these were thoughts that she had to suppress before they leaked through and infected Elroy.
Today she was too tired to watch the bath. As she was washing up the tea-things, Elroy came home. He took off his jacket, called ‘Hello’, and stood in the doorway to the kitchen. ‘Kiss,’ he said. ‘I need a kiss.’
She pecked his cheek and asked, ‘How was your day?’
‘Oh, usual problems. There’s water in the basement. It might affect the electrical systems. I’m dealing with it.’ He was faintly dismissive. These days he didn’t bring his problems home. ‘Where are the boys?’ he asked, more warmly.
‘They’re in the bath.’
‘They’re early, then.’
‘Yes, there wasn’t any school today. I took them to the zoo.’ She didn’t add, ‘I went to college, and left the boys with Kilda in the Towers, and she may have taken them God knows where.’
He nodded, approving of her as a mother, which made Shirley feel fraudulent. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked, commandeering the paper she’d meant to read after washing up.
‘I didn’t know you were coming home. I ate with the boys. But I’ll fix you something.’ Shirley was tired, and her voice was reluctant, though she loved Elroy, and the wifely part of her thought her husband deserved a hot supper after working all day in the hospital. Why couldn’t he ring, though, and give her some warning?
‘It’s OK,’ said Elroy, picking up her tone, turning away abruptly and making for the hall. ‘I might ring Colin. We’ll pick up some food.’
Which meant they would stay out till midnight.
He didn’t sound annoyed, just resigned; she was often tired when he came home.
Too tired to talk, or make him supper, but not too tired to study, she thought. She heard him talking on the phone. Then he dipped back into the kitchen, and smiled. ‘I’m going to go say hello to the boys. I’ll get them into their pyjamas.’
‘Take Winston Bendy Rabbit, will you?’ Winston adored his Bendy Rabbit. Much of life consisted in re-uniting them. Elroy took it through, waggling its ears at her.
She was left by the draining-board feeling guilty. Her mum had always cooked tea for her dad; it would be waiting when he came in from the park, and they ate together, at the little table; the children were fed earlier and shooed out of the way, for it was understood that Dad came home exhausted. And afterwards he always said ‘Thank you, May,’ and sank into his armchair for a read of the paper. And then she would wash up, and come and join him. They sat there, silent, in a circle of light. Somewhere, surely, they must still be sitting there, lit by the table lamp, stooped companionably …
Where? She would never go home again.
And it wasn’t perfect – Dad could be a bastard, and look at Mum now, so slight, so tiny, as if she only half exists, without him.
Shirley wasn’t May, and Elroy wasn’t Alfred, and twins were tiring, and so was study.
Mum never managed to do a degree. I do my best, Shirley thought, as so often. She wiped the surfaces, washed the cloth, and went into the sitting-room to read her textbook, thinking, if I keep quiet, Elroy might do the boys’ bed-time.
Slowly the domestic fog slipped away and her mind began to tune into pleasure. Culture, to Shirley, still meant the far continent, the world away from this flooded city. Elegant voices, silver architecture, long straight roads, a world of luxury –
Though Shirley and Elroy were far from poor. She was a wealthy widow when she married him; Elroy, who had then been younger, less established, had a new job now, more money, more status, high up in hospital management. Both of them had grown busier, older. The relationship had changed, but then, Mum said that children always changed a relationship. ‘One day they’ll be gone, and then you’ll miss them.’
Briefly, Shirley thanked God for the boys.
Then she sighed, and lost herself in her assignment.
About half an hour later, Elroy came through. He looked harassed; his voice was accusing. ‘Winston’s crying. He wants his mother.’
‘I’m a little bit busy … Could you do it, Elroy?’
‘Thing is, I don’t know what’s up with him. He’s talking about you killing a cat, and a man shouting, and lots of people, and everyone will die, and I told him it must be something he’s seen on TV, it isn’t real, nothing’s going to happen, but it seems this Kilda girl has told him it’s true. Why she been looking after my boys? You tell me you take them to the zoo, Shirley.’
They were always his boys when he disapproved, though Shirley knew that the truth was more complex, he’d never be sure if the boys were his, because she, Shirley, was a wicked woman. She could never tell him. Her sin lay between them. One day, surely, he would pay her back. Or had he already? How could she blame him? Yet he was a doting, passionate father.
Later she was thoughtful as she lay in bed. Winston and Franklin had been hard to comfort. Perhaps the boys had seen some frightening news; most TV news was frightening, at the moment. Mr Bliss was banging the war drum again. We must have war, or there would never be peace. There was a lot of footage of troops moving, and reports of ‘liberated’ cities far away. Dark-eyed, frightened, liberated people stared back as reporters waved microphones under their noses and asked if they would like to thank Mr Bliss. Ragged, uncomprehending clapping.
Or maybe they’d heard something about the rains. The rising tide of water was scary for everyone. Or Kilda might have been talking wildly. To Shirley she seemed shy, but people were mysterious. Kilda hadn’t told her where she had taken the boys.
Guilt pushed up again, black, powerful. She should never have dumped the boys on Kilda. If she hadn’t done that, the boys would be sleeping. And that poor cat would still be alive. She had driven straight on; that really was wicked. She winced at the memory of its small squashed body. Somewhere an owner might be weeping.
One of the boys started crying again, and the rain hammered hard against the window.
Shirley prayed for the everlasting arms to bear her up, but it was one of those times when Jesus seemed distant, and all that came back was her own small voice, and the empty wind, and the night was black, wet, endless.
May sat in her kitchen trying to read, with darkness pressing against the pane. She loved poetry, and myths, and novels, but she didn’t really have an education. (Shirley was getting an education.) May didn’t understand about wood-boring insects, she didn’t know history, or geography. Maybe she had married Alfred too young, and too many things had been left to him. How old had she been when they took up together?
A kid, really. A chit of a girl …
She’d been driven to the kitchen by the throat-searing smell of the chemicals the woodworm men had used. Her kitchen still kept its old tiled floor; having no wood, it had not been treated. But there wasn’t any heating, and the air was chill.
Feeling slightly wicked, she had switched on the oven, and sat by its warmth, clutching her book, unable to rid herself of the worry that Alfred would tell her off for extravagance.
And yet, she thought, if he did, oh if he did, if I heard his feet coming down from upstairs and his voice, slightly gruff, calling my name, if his dear red face should appear at the door…
Unpredictable, familiar, the tears welled up, and the grief came back, the old hopeless stone, to press on her chest, crushing, stupid. How could anyone so real and particular – angular, awkward, his look, his smell, the little phrases only Alfred used, Alfred, love, my dear, my duck – how could Alfred disappear for ever?
Where had he gone? Alfred, Alfred.
‘Stay with me, dear,’ she whispered to him. ‘You’ll never be dead while I am alive.’
Why had she never understood? She hadn’t realized that anyone died.
‘This won’t do,’ she heard Alfred say. ‘Pull yourself together, May. Make an effort.’
She put down the book, went to the cupboard and took out some flour to make a cake. When you lived alone, you could do what you liked; it didn’t matter what time it was. Since she had the oven on, she might as well use it, though Shirley was funny about her cooking. None of May’s children would eat her cakes, but as Shirley said, ‘The twins will eat anything.’
Alfred actually liked my cakes.
She suddenly knew he was sitting next door, in his old chair, waiting for his bedtime cocoa. She could open the door and slip through to join him, in another world, where they would sit together, where everything that had been, still was, just a little way off, slightly blurred, faded.
The hairs on her arms stood on end. The light on the dresser made them burn pale gold, as if she were still that sunlit girl…
He was waiting for her, and she should go, but the doorway to the next room looked dark.
She turned her back on it, and sifted the flour, and the beauty of its slow white fall softened the moment, fell across the slope where she struggled alone through the watches of the night with the endless question, where do we go?