IT HAD TAKEN DAYS of psychological warfare, but she had persuaded Damian to take her to the Arcadia Ballroom. To hand your coat to the cloakroom attendant and bay cigarettes from girls with trays around their necks and step out under the glitterball was to undergo a rite of passage into Grown Up Stuff. Rozzie and Em went to the Arcadia Ballroom with their respectives, and their plush descriptions of that soft-shoe pleasure dome had made her prickle with envy. She would never have gone on her own—people would have thought she was that sort of girl. But as a couple, it was more than respectable, it was a social necessity. Jocasta aided and abetted in the deception. Caldwell mere and pere must never suspect if difficult questions and more difficult answers were to be avoided.
The band played “Moonlight Serenade” as she hoped they would: cat-sensuous, purring clarinets and muted saxes. The Harry Hall Orchestra sat in white tuxes and Brylcreem behind sequin-studded frontals. H. H. himself conducted flaccidly and shot twenty-four-carat smiles at the dancers moving in crowded orbits, dappled with glitterball freckles. Jessica pressed close to Damian. She was shocked and delighted to feel a hard lump in his number one best pants.
“Oh, you naughty bugger, what’s that I feel?”
“It’s, shall we say, my professional credentials?”
Jessica was considerably more shocked than she would have been if what she had felt had been mere erectile tissue.
“You mean to say that you are in here carrying a…”
He put his hand over her mouth.
“You never can tell…”
The dancers wove through a fog of mentholated cigarette smoke. A crooner crooned something into a squat microphone. Couples applauded. The night and the music played on. A cord of sexual tension wound tighter between Jessica and Damian. She looked at him and felt something in her chest struggle to tear free. The power of her emotion frightened her, and that edge of fear made her hunger sharper. They left the dance before the last waltz to make the last tram. They sat on the open top deck in the heat of the night, smoking, communicating at a level beyond speech. Jessica rested her arms on a railing and looked out at her city, purpled, mellowed, by the hot summer night.
“You think you have your life all set, that nothing’s ever going to change, and then it changes, all at once. All of a sudden, things happen and life becomes very complex.”
“What do you mean?”
She did not answer immediately, but rested her cheek on the brass railing and watched the city roll past. “Complex. Like you see all the things you’ve ever wanted for your life falling through your fingers and you can’t keep a hold of them anymore.”
“You come away with me, and you can be anything you want to be.”
“Don’t piss me about, Gorman.”
“I’m not. I’m serious. Come with me.”
“Oh? You keep saying that—come away with me, to the waters and wild, to Sligo and a new life, just us, together, forever. Daydreams, Damian, daydreams. Life is not like this.”
She returned to a number twenty asleep, the house all dark save one sliver of light under Jasmine’s door. The sliver expanded into a wedge. The Shite stood, arms folded, faintly intimidating in flannelette nightie.
“Go to bed, you spying little frigger.”
The Shite was defiant, unassailable.
“No, I won’t go to bed, I won’t. You won’t make me.”
Jessica made to push her sister back into her roomful of teddy bears and toy horses and Girls’ Brigade pennants.
“No one likes you, Jessica. No one likes you, don’t you know that? You tell lies and swear and no one likes you because you have to be different from everyone else. You can’t be the same, you have to be different, better. The boys don’t like you; they all talk about you and laugh. Bullshit Caldwell, they call you, did you know that? None of them will go out with you. The only boy you can get is a murdering IRA man.”
“Shut up!” Jessica hissed, fearful of lightly sleeping parents, but The Shite was speaking with a voice and inspiration of her own. She had discovered she could hurt her sister and was wielding her newfound power with vindictive abandon, twisting the knife.
“No one likes you. I don’t like you—I don’t like you at all.”
“Well, you just have to like me, because we’re sisters.”
“No, we’re not,” gasped The Shite. “You’re not really my sister. That’s what the nice hurdy-gurdy man with the monkey told me. You’re not my sister at all—not a real sister, like Jo-Jo is, and Mummy isn’t your Mummy and Daddy is not your Daddy and you’re not really their daughter.” The Shite froze, hands to mouth, conscious that she had crossed the line between righteous indignation and calculated cruelty; moved into a region where cause and effect no longer behaved in strict ratio to each other—a state of minute action and colossal reactions.
Jessica’s face was pale, as if drained of life by a vampire. Her lips moved faintly.
“What? What? What are you saying? What are you saying?”
Hearing the swelling strain of hysteria, The Shite slammed her bedroom door with a sob of fear. The sound of key turning in lock was uncannily loud.
The telephone rang.
Numb to everything but the demand of the ringing telephone, Jessica went downstairs to answer.
“Hello? Caldwell residence.” Her mother insisted she call it that. It lent an air of gentility.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, incredibly far away. “Is that Jessica?”
“Who is this?”
“Is that Jessica?”
“Who is this?”
“Is that you, Jessica?”
“Yes, this is Jessica. Who is this?”
“This is your mother, Jessica. Your mother.”
“Hello? Hello? Hello…”
“Your mother, Jessica. Your mother.”
The heat in the hall was stifling.
“What is it?”
“Remember, Jessica. Remember.”
The line went dead,
“Hello? Hello! Hello…”
Seated on the threadbare carpet, worn by the passage of many lives, she remembered.
It had been as if her life were a broken bridge and she had stood on the edge of remembering, looking across the gap too wide to leap at the part of her life that was unremembered. Then the words were spoken and they were the keystone that completed the broken arch, and she was free to cross over into the unremembered and remember it. One foot after another, she had made the crossing and all the lies that had made up her life rose before her like startled birds. She saw, she heard, she touched, she remembered.
She had loved them with a child’s intuitive, uncritical love, and all the time they had known it had not been their right. They had not deserved Mother-love, Father-love. Mother. Father. Sisters. She ripped away their names, their titles, and left them pure identityless faces, bundles of formalised relationship without substance. One short, clean stroke had cleaved the threads that bind individuals into a family.
Adopted. Adopted. The great whirling machinations of betrayal. The fanlight above the door cast a brightening rose of light across her; short summer’s night at its end.