SO THERE WERE Lil and I, rubbing along okay in the kitchen one Saturday night. It was about a week since Maggie Tulliver’s gig. She had made herself wondrous scarce in that time, and Lil wondered did she still live there at all, though she was somehow always on hand to do the breakfasts.
Lil was making one of her famous stews, with lamb, potatoes, carrots and barley, and sloshing a bit of red wine into it, while she drank the rest of the bottle. It was a kind of Irish stew, I suppose, a homage to the Irish in us, though Lil’s surname was Ventura, surely an Italian name if ever there was one. In any case they were two cultures devoted to drink.
Hetty was very tired and grizzly; she had a runny nose and ground her teeth angrily in between chomping on some lamb’s liver that I’d cooked for her. I could tell she wouldn’t stay awake long enough for the stew.
Someone knocked at the front door and Lil went out. I was expecting it would be someone wanting to book in for the night, but I heard a voice from the hall: ‘Is Sophie here?’
Lil arrived back with Becky Sharp, and I was very pleased and surprised. I pulled her out a chair, got her a glass of wine, and she sat there with one elbow on the table, looking around her. I became overly conscious of the Dickensian nature of our kitchen: the crepuscular light, the cracked paint, the filthy old table, and Lil cooking away with cigarette in one hand and wine glass in the other. Hetty gnawed on the unsavoury-looking piece of meat, her nose running snot down to her upper lip; I wore a shabby dress stained with mashed pumpkin, with that morning’s porridge dried out on the bodice. You could have mistaken the place for a very low-class orphans’ home.
‘I’m sorry. I seem to have caught you at dinnertime,’ she said. I could tell that she had been very well brought up (though not perhaps well brought up enough not to call round at dinnertime, but who is to know these days when people might take it upon themselves to begin eating?).
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘People come and go here all the time. Anyway, dinner will be ages.’ Hetty finished chewing on her mouthful of liver, and spat it out, grey and desiccated, onto the tray of the high chair.
Becky Sharp said, ‘I came to see if you’d like to come out for something to eat. But…’
I looked at Lil. ‘Go ahead,’ she said, stirring the pot like a modern incarnation of one of Macbeth’s witches (cigarette in mouth to leave her hand free). ‘This will keep, and if you get Hetty to sleep first, I’ll listen out for her.’
Becky Sharp stayed in the kitchen with Lil while I put Hetty to sleep. It took ages, lying with her on my bed. I was impatient to be away. Once she was asleep, I put her into her cot, found a slightly cleaner dress on the floor, and ran a brush through my hair. In the mirror, lit only by the dim light from my bedlamp, I looked rather scary, all big hair and large, expectant eyes framed by glasses. And also very eager and impatient. I threw a thin shawl around my shoulders and slipped quietly from the room, leaving the nightlight on in case Hetty should wake.
Becky Sharp followed as I ran down the stairs barefoot; I hadn’t bothered with shoes – it was a warm night, and I like the feel of the ground beneath my feet. At the same time, I felt that I was flying. Becky and I wrenched our respective doors open at the same time, and grinned at each other over the top of her car.
This was only the third time I’d been in it, and it had lost none of its appeal. So original, so old, but with a CD player which she had installed. You have to have music while you’re driving. For a while we just drove around, and ended up at the lookout on Girard’s Hill. ‘What do you feel like eating?’ Becky asked. Lismore lay below, lights strung along the main roads, the city centre shining feebly, and house lights dotted between trees. Night and distance made the place look larger, with more possibilities.
‘I’m not very hungry.’
‘Me either.’
So we decided on takeaway falafel rolls. We parked downtown near the shop, and sat looking for a while at the people wandering about. Up close, Lismore is not the most exciting place to be on a Saturday night (or, indeed, many would argue, at any other time). There was a choice of several pubs, with or without live music, a nightclub (actually also in a pub), various takeaway food places, a couple of restaurants…but people were out and about, anyway. ‘Look at them,’ said Becky. ‘All of them looking for the heart of Saturday night.’
‘Oh!’ I said, breathless. ‘Do you like Tom Waits?’
She said, at the same time as me: ‘I love him,’ both of us with such fervour that we burst out laughing.
She put Tom Waits on, and we drove down to the river and got out of the car to eat, leaning against the bonnet.
‘I like Lil,’ she said. ‘Lawson told me about her, but I didn’t believe she was just as he said.’
‘I love her,’ I said, imitating the way I’d spoken about Tom Waits. And it was true, I did, though I don’t think I’d ever told her that.
I wanted to know more about Becky Sharp. Up to now, I’d known very little about her. She said that she’d come up from Sydney to go to university three years ago. The School of Contemporary Music seemed an obvious choice. Her parents had wanted her to stay in Sydney and do law, but she’d been interested in music all her life, and while she was still at school she’d started using the instrument they’d chosen for her to learn – the flute – in rock-type arrangements.
‘I like living here,’ she’d said. ‘Everyone at school (it was a posh girls’ school) was going to uni in Sydney, and I wanted to get away from all that.’
‘All what?’
‘Knowing everyone. Being part of the crowd. They’ll all end up marrying lawyers or fancy restaurateurs – some of them are engaged already.’
She flicked sauce from her fingers disdainfully, as though flicking away her past, and then licked them clean.
‘And Lawson?’ I asked, thinking of their apparent closeness. ‘Are you and he on with each other or anything?’
Becky laughed so much that she started coughing. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘No. Nothing like that. We’re just housemates and friends. Actually, Lawson thrives on unrequited love. I think he’d run away if anyone ever reciprocated it. I think maybe the only thing he really loves is photography.’
‘Who does he have unrequited love for?’
‘Jack Savage, at the moment.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you know him? Bad choice, was my advice about him. Even if he was gay, Lawson’d do well to stay away from him. Now, tell me about you.’
So I told her. I told her everything that I’d told Marcus that time, and more, because I told her about him as well, and how I’d come to have Hetty. I told her about searching for my grandfather, and the boys on the riverbank. It took a long time, but not, it must be admitted, all night.
And at the end of it all, Becky looked up and said, ‘I don’t think anyone has ever told me that much about themselves.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. Was I odd? Was I very odd?
She reached out and touched my arm. ‘It must be late,’ she said. ‘I’d better take you home.’
But I didn’t want to go; I was dismayed, but torn as well. I thought of Lil, who even now was probably fussing about in the kitchen warming a bottle with Hetty on her hip.
But Becky Sharp didn’t make any move to go. She leaned back against the car. We were very close.
And then, taking my courage in both hands, I leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. Perhaps it was a way of keeping her there with me.
I remembered the time I’d first tasted an olive. It had been strange and unfamiliar, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it. I almost spat it out, but was intrigued, and after a while I knew that I liked olives after all.
It was the same with Becky Sharp’s kiss, which wasn’t just a kiss, but a chance to see her up really close, touch her beautiful ears with my fingers, and her soft mouth.
‘Come back to my place,’ she said, and so I did. We went to her room, and she closed the door.