Sally had taken the transistor radio from the kitchen into the bathroom. It was standing on the wash basin and she was lying in the tub, singing along. It felt old-fashioned only to have a radio to play music on, not a phone: like something from another world. You couldn’t choose what you wanted to listen to, just got what you were given, whether you liked it or not.
They’d spent half the day in the vineyard, after which they’d driven over to a meadow that Liss had never taken her to before, to pick apples. She hadn’t realised how scattered the fields and meadows Liss owned actually were. She’d asked her about it. Why the fields weren’t all together. Why she put up with driving several kilometres to get from one bit of land to another. And if she was rich. She had so much land. Liss had laughed and explained how things worked in the country. That you didn’t buy all the fields in one go but, over the centuries, people bought one here and sold another there, married into one here and bequeathed another there. So why didn’t they just swap them around between other farmers? Sally had asked, when they were sitting on the tractor and driving back, the trailer filled with sacks of apples. Liss had grimaced almost contemptuously and said that ownership meant more to most people in the village than logic. And was she rich? Sally could tell that the question had surprised Liss because she had to think about it a while. Yes, she’d said, eventually, slowly, if only the fields belonged to me and not to him. She’d been able to tell from the scorn in her voice that Liss had meant her father. But in any case, it was a strange way to be rich, seeing that she sometimes couldn’t pay the bills. Land was also a load to bear.
Sally stretched out in the bath. She hadn’t had a bath for ages. Only ever showered. But the unfamiliar ache in her back had worsened over the course of the day, the more apples she picked. She propped herself on the edge of the bath with her arms, and raised herself slowly into a bridge. Her head dipped under the water up to her ears, her body rose up out of it, shining and wet in the dim light of the bathroom lamp, and Sally caught her breath, almost scared, because she … She dropped back into the water so hastily that it slopped over the edges. For a moment, she’d thought she looked beautiful. She shut her eyes to hold the image for a moment. The radio was playing a song she didn’t know. Meaningless.
Meaningless. Was it? She opened her eyes again and looked into the clear water. She didn’t like bubbles in the bath. She lay there in the water, tall though a little foreshortened by the refraction, but yes: somehow it looked beautiful and not meaningless. She was only now realising that that was how she’d seen her body most of the time. As if it were meaningless. The important things were will and strength. But right now, it felt good to be the way she was. Maybe that was because here she wasn’t moving for the sake of moving. She didn’t run for the sake of running. She didn’t cycle for the sake of cycling. Here, she had to bend a thousand times to fill sacks full of potatoes or apples. Here, she had to ride the bike to get to the town or up to the vineyard or into the forest. It didn’t feel … empty to struggle here, to run up to the limits of her strength. She looked at the radio and started so violently that the water splashed over the edge. In the mirror, she could see Liss standing in the half-open door, looking at her.
‘What?’ she shouted, in a mingling of sudden rage and deep shock. ‘What?’
All at once, she felt stupid and helpless in the bathtub, like a child, and she stood up and yelled at Liss, who’d withdrawn a little but was still standing in the doorway, a look on her face that Sally didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand either.
‘What?’ she yelled again. ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you…? Are you gay, or what?’
She was so angry now that the words gushed out of her. She felt so … attacked, and she hit back as hard as she could.
‘Why are you looking at me? What’s going on? Want to lick me, yeah?’
She spread her legs obscenely, slipping as she did so, and she would have fallen if she hadn’t managed to grab hold of the shower bar with one hand; that made her all the angrier.
‘Do come in. Come in!’ she roared after Liss, as she turned away without a word. ‘You bitch!’ she screamed, her voice breaking, helpless because it wasn’t the right word, it didn’t cut deeply enough.
She half fell out of the bath, wanting to get out of the water as fast as possible, caught herself with her hands on the slippery tiles, got up and slammed the door as hard as she could. Then she stood in the bathroom, breathing fast and began to shiver uncontrollably with rage and cold, feeling at the same time that the tears were starting. That made her angrier still. She had no reason to cry. That … that woman! She couldn’t make her cry. She’d … she didn’t know what it was that she’d done to her. She grabbed the radio and smashed it into the mirror. Although it cracked, it didn’t fall, so she slammed her fist into the glass now. This time it shattered into the wash basin. Sally screamed as loudly as she could, took the radio, which was still playing, and hurled it onto the floor with all her might. She felt … she didn’t know … dirty. Yes, wasn’t that just perfect. She’d had a bath and got dirty at the same time. That bitch. That piece of shit! She’d … she’d … It was as if she’d … when she’d trusted her. She’d fallen for it again. Stupid idiot. Stupid, stupid, stupid idiot!
She … she screamed again, pulled a towel off the shelf, turned on all the taps and ran into her room.
She was sitting on the bed next to her packed rucksack, listening out for any sound in the house. At some point, she’d heard the woman go into the bathroom and sweep up the glass and mop the floor. Good. The bathroom had been under water. Very good. Then she’d waited some more until the reflection of every light in the house had vanished from the yard. She hadn’t put a light on herself. She’d been sitting on the bed for hours, thinking nothing at all. She was just waiting. She never wanted to see her again, not even for the second in which she left.
She heard the church clock strike half past one. Everything was quiet. A thin moon hung in a gently veiled sky. She’d take the bike, she thought. That was the least she was owed.
Quietly, she stood up. Almost soundlessly, she slipped the rucksack on. She had her shoes in her hand. The cut from the mirror had stopped bleeding long ago, but there was still a large, dark stain on the bedsheet. With compliments, thought Sally, with compliments.
Quietly, she opened the door and walked noiselessly down the stairs, opened the kitchen door to get straight to the yard and saw the blazing red glow of the cigarette at the same moment that she noticed the smell. She resisted the impulse to immediately slam the door again and run away down the corridor to the back door. No. Then she didn’t want it any other way. The woman was sitting there in the dark kitchen on a chair in front of the open French window like a sentry, and smoking as if nothing at all had happened. Sally took a tremulous breath and walked past her, ready to hit out at once if the woman touched her.
‘No,’ she said in a strained, quiet voice, once Sally was in the yard.
‘No, what?’ Sally shouted, not stopping. In the dark, she couldn’t immediately find the latch on the barn door.
‘No, I’m not gay.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Sally mocked. ‘How d’you know? Never dared before, or what? Because it took someone that you thought couldn’t get away, or what?’
She could feel the smooth wood now, and threw open the barn door. The bike always stood by the left-hand wall. She yanked it furiously over.
‘I have tried it. I’m not gay. That’s not why I was looking at you.’
The words came slowly, with an effort, half muffled by the night.
Sally didn’t know what she felt. She was helpless with rage. She hurled the bike right across the yard, towards Liss. It skidded over the concrete with a clatter. The noise ripped into the dull quiet of the village.
‘Why? Why did you do that? What are you … are you sick or something? I trusted … You just stood there and ogled me. Lusted after me. I saw it! D’you think I didn’t see it?’
The cigarette lit up, illuminated Liss’s face for a moment, and Sally could see that it was wet. So it should be.
‘I’m…’ Liss began, and paused. Sally didn’t wait.
‘Now! Say it. I’m getting out of here right now and if you want to say anything to me, say it now. I’m not in the mood to wait till you think of something.’
‘OK,’ said Liss, carefully stubbing out the cigarette. ‘I don’t care how this sounds, but this is how it was. I walked past the bathroom and saw you. When you … you’d just kind of arched yourself up out of the water or something.’
Sally felt herself suddenly grow hot. Yes. That was the last way on earth you wanted to be seen. The very last.
‘And? Turned you on, did it?’
‘No,’ answered Liss in a voice that Sally couldn’t quite pin down. ‘No, that wasn’t it. It … it reminded me.’
‘Of what?’ Sally asked harshly. She was still standing in the yard with the rucksack on her back.
Liss stood up. ‘Of me,’ she said. ‘Of me when I was about your age.’
‘Right,’ mocked Sally. ‘Yeah, right!’
‘I don’t know if it used to happen when I was that age,’ said Liss, ‘but these days, images from the past sometimes strike like lightning. They just hit you … me. Full force. You don’t know what that’s like,’ she added, and her voice got lost for a moment.
You could hear the quiet clinking of a chain from a barn somewhere nearby as one of the cows shifted. Otherwise, everything was quiet. There wasn’t even a breeze to stir the leaves on the walnut tree in the yard.
‘You don’t know what it’s like to stand in front of a mirror in the evening and look at yourself. Your breasts aren’t what they used to be. There are blue veins on your ankles that you didn’t notice yesterday, and there are stretch marks on your belly. And the whole time, there’s the girl you used to be shining through this woman who’s starting to fall to bits. The girl who used to lie in that same bathtub, in a house…’
Again she faltered. She reached for the tobacco pouch and Sally could hear, even if she couldn’t see, that her hands must be trembling: she had to pull a second paper from the packet to roll her cigarette. She always made her cigarettes without filters, Sally thought, and it gave her such a weird, angry feeling that she knew these tiny details about this woman.
Liss lit the cigarette. You could make out her face again in the glow, but it was dry now and looked almost as calm as ever. Only the flame on the lighter was shaking.
‘If I’d known, back then, when I lay in that bathtub at the age of fifteen, that thirty years later I’d still be … I’d be back living in this house … I’d have killed myself. So…’
‘So, what?’ asked Sally.
Liss smoked in silence. Sally waited.
‘So that’s why it is actually better if you go now.’
Sally didn’t know what she was meant to think. She didn’t know what she was feeling either, but she didn’t want to allow her anger to die down.
‘So that’s it, right?’ she asked, far too loudly. She wanted to break the silence in the village. She wanted people to be able to hear her. ‘That’s all? You only watched me because I remind you of you as a girl, right? That’s so … I don’t believe it.’
This time, a change ran through Liss. Sally could faintly see her stiffen.
‘Sally,’ she said firmly, and the realisation that Liss had never called her by name before caught Sally quite unawares, ‘you have no idea. You have no clue how much you … the first time we met, you were angrily climbing the hill and it was like looking in a mirror with a thirty-year time lag. I can’t change that. That’s how it is.’
‘Oh right,’ said Sally. ‘So you only let me live with you because I’m you. But a younger and prettier version.’
She said it to hurt.
‘Maybe,’ Liss answered slowly. ‘Maybe that was part of it too.’
She paused and smoked.
‘No. Actually, no. At any rate, that wasn’t the main reason. I just remember how it feels. I remember how it feels at the point when you look at yourself and feel beautiful and special and different, to know that you were born for something more than this.’
Sally saw the red dot of the cigarette trace a scornful arc.
‘And I know what it’s like when that feeling, that certainty, of being special falls to pieces, a bit at a time, like a tree that’s been planted in the wrong soil and forced, with stakes and ties, to grow away from the sun.’
She flicked the cigarette away. A tiny comet that sprayed sparks then dispersed on the concrete of the yard.
‘I’m going to bed now,’ said Liss in a very tired voice. ‘Talked too much. Smoked too much.’
She walked into the kitchen. Barely more than a shadow in the night. But she left the door open. Sally stopped where she was standing. It was so quiet now that she could, very faintly, make out the chirping of the crickets in the garden. She jumped as half past two struck from the church tower. Two soft chimes. The kitchen door stood open. Sally felt the fury drain away like the water in a bathtub, and she felt empty. It wasn’t until much later that she walked through the open door into the kitchen, shut it and climbed the stairs in the darkness. Her feet found the way by themselves.