Sam grinned. ‘You must be so glad you came.’
Outside there was more cheering.
‘What are they called again?’
Sam watched with surprise as Sarah unbuttoned her shirt and took it off.
‘Stirsign.’
She held it under the tap, lathering it with soap and then rinsing it.
Sam watched her. ‘D’you want me to stand guard at the door?’
‘Not when the band’s just come on. It’s perfectly private in here.’
She wrung out the shirt and then stuck it under the hand dryer.
Sam couldn’t help staring at Sarah’s body, which was pale, angular and extremely thin. She wore a turquoise bra which efficiently cupped her small, neat breasts. Sam thought her too thin, as though if she moved too sharply or quickly her bones might push through the skin and show themselves, bursting out like little daggers.
Sam touched Sarah’s shirt to see how quickly it was drying. ‘It’s still soaking. The dryer isn’t very efficient.’
Sarah misconstrued the source of Sam’s concern. ‘Look, why don’t you go on out? I wouldn’t want you to miss anything.’
Sam shook her head. ‘I can see him any time. Anyway, it’s too crowded out there.’
‘What’s your star sign?’
‘Guess.’
‘Aquarius or Gemini.’
‘Neither: Pisces, but I am a water sign, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
Sarah smiled at this. ‘I’m a fire sign. We’re incompatible.’
Sam was about to reply when the door swung open and two women came in. She noticed them staring at Sarah’s bare skin and exchanging glances. One of them went into a cubicle while the other fluffed up her hair with her hands, watching Sarah in the mirror. Sam felt compromised, but couldn’t understand why.
‘D’you want me to hold it under for a while?’
Sarah, apparently oblivious, handed the shirt over. ‘Thanks.’
She picked up her lager and took a sip of it. Sam held the shirt under the dryer. It felt soft.
The second girl came out of the cubicle, washed her hands and then held them, dripping, limply in front of her.
‘Oh, sorry.’
Sam turned and was about to step sideways. But Sarah said, ‘Don’t worry,’ pushed her firmly up against the dryer and kissed her, fully.
Sarah’s lips felt delicate and her breath tasted of lager and another flavour: garlic or liquorice. Sam felt Sarah’s tongue, like a mollusc, a foreign thing, curving up along the inside of her lips.
She felt her hands, she was sure she felt them, touching her breasts, soft on her breasts. The dryer pushed out warm air, the weight of them both reactivating its mechanism.
Just as suddenly, Sarah withdrew. She was laughing. ‘They’ve gone. We frightened the shit out of them. Give me my shirt and I’ll put it on.’
Sam handed her the shirt. ‘Why did you do that?’
Sarah slipped it on and began to fasten the buttons. ‘It was the highlight of their evening.’
She peered at herself in the mirror, wiped the corners of her lips with her thumb and forefinger, smiled and then pushed the door open, holding it ajar for Sam. ‘Come on.’
Sam didn’t pause to check her own reflection.
Her stomach
. How did it feel? As if she’d just been told the lemonade she’d been drinking was actually turpentine. A kind of horror. Confusion? No. A pure feeling without fixed meaning.
Sarah led the way, pushing past people at the back, moving gradually forwards. Near the front, everyone was dancing. Several people were stage diving.
Sam shouted over the noise, ‘If we get too close we’ll get thrown about. Everyone’s pushing.’
Sarah launched herself into the middle of the fray. Sam opted to stay back, craning her neck, trying to see Connor. Eventually she could see him, banging away at his drum-kit, hair in his face, T-shirt still on but soaking wet.
I want to feel part of this, she thought. She wanted to, but suddenly she felt removed from everything. Lonely. Alone. The drum, the beat, the sound it made, reminded her. Of what?
She was twelve years old and Sylvia was asking her if she could borrow her skipping rope. The music - she couldn’t escape it, but she could block it - came in waves. It reminded her of the rope: swinging round and round, whizzing, whirring and slapping the ground.
Sylvia had borrowed it. Sam heard the rope turning: vicious, unstoppable, cyclical. She watched Sylvia’s feet as she jumped, inefficiently shod in a pair of old, soft, blue canvas deck shoes.
Sylvia counted as she jumped, ‘One, two, three, four …’ By the time she’d reached fifty, her feet had grown heavier, faltering. She stopped on fifty-four, without grace, clumsily tangled, her breathing laboured.
On the ground, surrounding her, their necks and wings broken, were five or six birds. Injured by the rope. Killed by the rope.
Sylvia fell to her knees and gathered them up with her hands, her breath turning into jerky tears.
Sam had watched coldly, thinking, Will I ever love anything that much?
Her heart contracted and the feeling she experienced was not so much love as jealousy.
Steven spent the evening watching
Sophie’s Choice
on video. During any especially tedious or gut-wrenching moments he cast an eye, somewhat apathetically, over the latest edition of
The Stage
.
Steven loved Meryl Streep. If asked to explain this adoration, he’d say that he loved the way that she was never shrewish. She was so dignified. She could be angry - he thought she did Angry extremely well - but she was never vulgar. She didn’t forget herself, her dignity.
Sometimes he’d masturbate as he watched her on screen. She was so aloof, and that in itself was sexy. But after he’d finished - when he’d cleared away the tissues and washed his hands - he’d always feel an intense pang of self-disgust.
He’d been staring at one particular page of
The Stage
for several minutes, reading but not reading, when something caught his eye and caused him to blink, pick up the paper and stare at it more intently. The focus of his attention was a small but nicely written obituary towards the bottom of the page. He read it, re-read it.
Sylvia watched Brera talking on the phone. She watched but she didn’t listen. She’d been using the nebulizer since the morning, and its vapours had been opening her bronchial tubes, releasing the hostage air in her lungs, and then escaping; travelling
onwards, upwards, making her brain smart, glisten, pulsate, making colours painfully clear, and smells … but she couldn’t smell anything, she just knew that everything was clearer, magnified, extended, elongated. Her senses were ecstatically jumbled.
Brera was sitting close by, talking on the phone but also staring at Sylvia, thinking, It’s not so much that she can’t breathe, more that she doesn’t want to breathe. She’s happier not breathing.
She focused on Sylvia’s face. Her lips were moving, she was muttering, and whenever the mask fell from her nose and mouth, Brera could hear disjointed pieces of conversation. She struggled to keep her attention focused on Steven.
Inside Sylvia’s head facts and images were floating, connecting, disconnecting. She said, ‘I can see these conversations taking place, everywhere, but really the conversation is the same one. It’s the same conversation.’
She saw herself in a place full of bright lights and a bright girl with white hair was saying something about ideas.
‘You say you like ideas? What does that mean?’
A voice responded. It came from nowhere, but it was a harsh voice, full of emphasis: ‘Ideas alter things, form things, change things unilaterally. They can be modified, disciplined, controlled. I see stuff. Life. I see life and it’s only a mishmash of facts, thoughts, images, pictures. But everything crystallizes in my head, forms doctrine, produces its own clear meaning. My mind works that way.’
Sylvia couldn’t understand this at all. The girl seemed to be having difficulty too, but she said, ‘Life is more jumbled than you think. Caring about things should be enough. Even if you can only manage to care about one thing. You have to understand what it is to be good. Not so much what you can make of life, but what you can give to it.’
Sylvia wasn’t bothered any more, but the dialogue continued anyway. ‘That’s an idea, though! It’s just that you can’t be bothered to take it any further, to politicize. It’s just sloppy thinking.’
Sylvia could taste the word
politicize
on her tongue. Its rough
edges, its sharpness. She had no feelings either way - towards it or against it - she could only taste it.
The white voice was saying, ‘I never take things further because that’s how you get into trouble. Once you accept one thing, you end up accepting loads of stuff, half of which you don’t really understand. When things get too big, they get out of your control. You start off by thinking that you’re being good, but you end up finding out that ideas have a life of their own. They can turn bad, can make you bad and you don’t even know it.’
The hard face, the hard voice, laughed. This laughter tickled Sylvia. It had its own particular charm, this laugh, like snuff, or the smell of fruity pipe tobacco. ‘But I want to get into trouble! Don’t you? Why not get into trouble? You’re naive. You know it too, and you think that your naivety makes you good, but in fact all it makes you is easy to manipulate.’
‘Manipulate? Who by?’
‘By me. By anyone and everyone.’
Sylvia felt herself being sucked away and thrown between the stars, but the stars were on the ceiling, were, in fact, just one star: a bright bulb peeking through a wicker shade. The roof was white. Now she heard something else, but it was the same thing she had heard before. A familiar voice, but a different place, in a sea of orange and roughness: ‘I’m like you. I like to think about things, to be open to every influence and then to make up my mind. But sometimes, sometimes it becomes impossible to make up your mind because the information, the information … books, paper, pens, books, films, paper, pens …’
Sylvia digested the word
information
and it made her want to burp. The voice said ‘information’ almost as though it had not said that word at all but had said ‘sex’ - with a mixture of desire and dread. ‘Sometimes you end up finding out too much. Reading, discovering and uncovering.’
Sylvia wanted to locate the other half of this conversation, thought for one awful second that she herself was expected to provide it. Luckily this was not so. The voice came, the rebuttal. It was a loving voice, wheedling and whining: ‘You don’t have to
digest everything, to crystallize it. Why can’t you just open yourself up to things, be open to things and let that be an end in itself? I guess that’s a sort of, a kind of …’ The voice hesitated. ‘I was going to say “liberalism”, but I don’t want to involve myself in all that.’
The first voice sounded sad: ‘That’s just it. You have to involve yourself, otherwise you can’t give anything.’
‘I want peace and freedom.’
‘Clichés.’
‘Why?’
‘Because those things don’t mean anything when you say them.’
Sylvia picked up the word
mean
and juggled with it. She thought, Everything has meaning. I’m in a sea of it. Swimming in it, drowning.
The voices came together in her head and each voice she tried to simplify by making it into a shape. The harsh voice became a square, the white voice an arrow, the familiar voice was a circle … A fifth voice emerged, strident, sensual, suggestive, feminine. It said, ‘I don’t want truth. Ideas get lost in truth. Truth is stupid. Take any letter away from it and it becomes stupid.
Trut. Thur. Hutt. Ruth
. It’s just a word. It’s just another word and words stand for very little unless you use them sensibly and with rigour. I only want truth if I can use it. I want to rebuild the world with my own ideas, selectively.’
This voice contained all of the other shapes. It was a star. It throbbed. For a horrible moment Sylvia thought that this was in fact her voice, her own voice, but then she realized that she didn’t believe anything that this voice was saying. She mistrusted it. She had no voice herself.
Ideas flooded the room and she floated on them. One idea was that every story was one story, everything boiled down into one single narrative. Every thought, idea, commentary, fiction, was travelling towards a single meaning. She tried to find this meaning but it was hopeless. It was too big. It was nothing. That one meaning might have to be God, she decided, which would be like a defeat.
She found herself in a cave. She remembered reading
A Passage to India
(where did that come from?) and the sequence in the caves, with the echo, when every noise that was made, that could be made, every noise was reduced to nothing, a hauntingly meaningless echo, a jolt, a thud.
A song became a thud, a poem became a thud, a prayer became a thud, a sneeze, a thud, science, thud, beauty, thud, glory, thud, love, thud, God … And so …
She sighed. The mask fell from her face and she, in turn, fell from dreaming to sleeping.
Brera put down the phone and walked over to Sylvia. She picked up the mask, folded it and turned off the nebulizer at the plug. The air smelled high and vaporous. She stared down at her sleeping daughter, then slowly, hollowly, said out loud the worst word she could think of: ‘Cunt.’
She regretted this instantly. ‘Sam would have something to say about why I chose that word,’ she muttered. ‘I’m too old to swear.’
It didn’t even make her feel better. It just sounded foolish.
Connor woke Sam by kissing her ribs and her belly, by dampening her hips with tiny, sharp licks and bites.
Unfortunately, as Sam awoke, instead of finding this luxurious introduction to wakefulness pleasurable and erotic, she had to restrain the impulse to slap Connor with the back of her hand, to swat him.
‘Did we argue last night?’ she asked.
Connor’s tongue stopped what it was doing and he straightened up, placing his head next to hers on the pillow. He stared at her, but she didn’t catch his expression because she was looking up at the ceiling.
‘I don’t think we did. I was drunk. I remember Sarah droning on about something.’
‘What’s the time?’
She could smell his hair, which, although it looked ragged and uncombed, was soft on her shoulder and smelled of smoke from the night before.
‘I dunno. Eight? Eight-thirty?’
She sat bolt upright. ‘I promised Brera I’d be home early today. We’re going shopping.’
Connor grinned. ‘Oh yeah?’
She looked down at him. ‘You can’t come.’
‘Why?’ He pretended to be hurt.
‘Because I’m going with Brera.’
‘Sounds weird when you call her by her name.’
He reached down and pinched her knee, then let his hand slip up and along the inside of her thigh. She leaned over, pecked his cheek and jumped out of bed. ‘Actually, I would invite you to come, but I know you’ve got an interview at lunchtime.’
‘Which leaves me four hours to think of something interesting to say.’
‘You think that’s long enough?’
He laughed and threw a pillow at her, but she ducked and padded through to the kitchen.
Sarah was lounging against the kitchen cabinets waiting for the kettle to boil, wearing a short, multi-coloured bathrobe. Her long thin legs protruded from the robe, untanned. As she leaned over, Sam could see the curve of her breast and her tiny, pink nipple. Sarah’s red hair had fallen across her face, half covering it.
‘Hello.’
Sarah turned, straightened herself, and pulled a handful of curls behind her ear. ‘I’m totally knackered. Jet lag.’
She yawned with neat precision, like a cat.
‘Making coffee?’ Sam asked.
‘Tea.’
Sam walked over to the kettle and turned it off at the plug before it had a chance to boil for too long.
‘Mine’s white, if you’re making. I like it insipid.’
Sam busied herself locating cups and finding a tea-bag. She wasn’t sure if she felt a tension between them. She thought, Maybe it’s just because she isn’t dressed. She’s so sluttish, the way she lounges about. No make-up, her face all gaunt and white.
‘Do you have any plans for today?’ She poured water on to Sarah’s tea-bag.
Sarah shrugged, noncommital. ‘You?’
‘I’ve got to go shopping with my mother. We’re having some photos taken this afternoon.’
Sarah’s face brightened. ‘Can I come?’
‘It’ll be very dull.’
‘Go on. It’ll be a laugh. I can meet your mother. That’d be interesting.’
Sam finished making the two coffees. ‘I’ll phone and ask once I’ve taken this in to Connor.’
Sarah poured some extra milk into her tea. ‘I hope he appreciates you running around after him like this.’
Sam said nothing, only smiled as she carried the cup carefully out of the kitchen.
Connor reached out for the cup. Sam perched on the edge of the bed and handed it to him. ‘Can I use the phone?’
‘Sure.’
He pulled himself up into a sitting position, careful not to spill anything.
‘Sarah wants to come shopping.’
He frowned. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. She said she thought it’d be fun.’
‘Amusing. I bet she said she thought it’d be amusing. That’s the kind of thing she’d say.’
‘She said she thought it’d be a laugh.’
He brushed some hair out of his eyes. ‘Will she be going back to the flat in Hackney with you?’
‘Does it matter?’
He seemed to think that it did.
‘Have you told her about Sylvia?’ Her name felt strange on his tongue, as though it implied a familiarity that didn’t in fact exist.
‘No. Why? Should I discuss my sister with everyone? I’m sure you don’t make a habit of discussing your family at length with every new person you meet.’
‘I’m just saying that you hardly know her.’
Sam stared at him, irritated. ‘I hardly knew you once and it wasn’t a problem.’
Connor put his cup of coffee on the carpet and lay back down in bed. How can I feel jealous? he thought. Of
her
. Christ.
‘I’m tired,’ he said, sullenly.
‘Fine.’ She stood up. ‘You’re being pathetic.’
He didn’t answer. She pulled on her clothes, picked up her coat, which was slung over the door handle, and closed the door gently behind her.
Sarah was getting dressed in her bedroom. The door was slightly ajar. Sam called through: ‘I’m ready to go when you are.’
Sarah appeared in the doorway wearing an old-fashioned,
yellow shirtwaister, black tights and flat black shoes. Her hair was tied back with a yellow scarf. She wore no make-up.
‘That didn’t take long. The dress is great.’
‘Did you phone your mother?’
Sam shook her head. ‘No, but I shouldn’t think she’ll be bothered.’
Sam followed Sarah out of the flat. ‘I didn’t mention my sister before, did I?’
‘No. She sing too?’
‘Not much. We let her write some of our music.’
Sarah slammed the front door. ‘Yeah?’
‘She suffers from a kind of disability.’
‘Really?’
Sam stepped out into the street. ‘She’s afflicted.’
‘An affliction?’ Sarah smiled. ‘Sounds biblical.’
As soon as he heard the front door slam, Connor sat up in bed and looked frantically around his bedroom, trying to locate something - anything - that Sam might have left behind. Eventually his eyes settled on a small, white, cotton bra which was slung over the cymbal on his drum-kit. He went and picked it up, then folded it carefully so that it would fit into the fist of one hand. He smiled to himself, feeling its softness, then stopped smiling and tried to bring to mind exactly what it was that had passed between them.
Vincent led the way down to Berwick Street. He was bossy this morning and full of purpose. ‘I’m sure I saw a butcher’s down here.’
Ruby nodded. ‘There’s a few of them. They all open early. Supply hotels and stuff.’
‘This one.’
They went inside. Vincent smiled at the butcher, who stared at him coldly, taking in, in one glance, the cut on his forehead and his crumpled shirt.
‘I want a whole rabbit.’
‘Skinned?’
‘No, whole. Ears, fur, everything.’
The butcher disappeared into the rear of the shop. When he had gone Vincent turned to Ruby: ‘I used to do this trick with dead rabbits when I was a kid. I’ll show you later.’
She imagined him as a child - exactly the same, only smaller. She wondered what he was up to, but didn’t really care. She’d given up on things, temporarily. He’d had that effect on her.
Outside again, he said, ‘We want to head for Oxford Street.’
‘Fine. We can catch the bus from Oxford Circus.’
Oxford Street was quiet at this hour. Vincent stopped walking and leaned against a rubbish bin. They stood in silence together.
‘Now what?’
‘Shut up and listen.’
She waited mutely for several minutes but nothing happened. The dog began to grow impatient and pulled on her lead. She was about to complain when Vincent said, ‘I can hear something. Can you hear it? The dog can.’
Ruby looked down at Buttercup and as she looked she began to hear something: a strange kind of clattering and banging, a hollow noise, a repetitive thuddering-shuddering. Like thunder. Like an earthquake. She stared down the street, towards Oxford Circus and gasped.
A sea of horses. So huge. A glorious plague of them. Filling the city, exploding its damp, grey glass and granite, its rubble, its tarmac. Shattering the city with the gloss of fur, of muscle. Steam; ears, nostrils, quivering; eyes, black, whites rolling; tassels; tails. The smell of them. Their froth, their breath, their foam. Saddle leather. Sweet wax.
This was beauty. Like a knife twisting in her stomach. They passed her by, three abreast, on and on and on. Until the last, like water trickling down a plug hole, suddenly gone. Like a drum that stops beating. Beating.
‘It’s a fascist thing, really.’
‘What?’ She could still hardly breathe.
‘That feeling.’
Her eyes were full of tears. He had given her this moment, had handed it to her. She said, ‘Don’t say anything else. You’ll ruin it.’
He laughed at her - she was such a fool - and walked down to Oxford Circus, still laughing.
They stood on the track.
‘What’s the plan, then?’
He looked around him. ‘Give me a minute.’ Then added, ‘Let’s walk her for a while.’
‘Great idea.’
He scowled at her, but they started walking. Vincent had been full of ideas the night before, full of plans and schemes, all of which had suddenly dissolved.
Ruby was saying, ‘Either they feel the urge or they don’t.’
‘Where’s the hare?’
She stood still and glanced around the perimeter of the track. ‘If we carry on walking we’re bound to come across it.’
They walked past the traps, six metal boxes, neatly numbered, which had been pushed off the sandy track and on to the grass verge.
‘How come the traps aren’t on the track?’
‘They’re mobile. Think about it. If they left the traps on the track after a race had started, the dogs’d run into them on the last bend.’
‘Can we push them out?’
They pushed them out together. Vincent wanted to put Buttercup into one.
Ruby opened trap six and helped her inside. Vincent walked around to the front and peered in at her. He could see her pointed nose and her eyes. ‘She looks pretty bored from this end.’
Ruby crossed her arms. ‘She’s bound to. She can’t hear the hare or anything.’
‘Can we run her now?’
‘No. I’d have to ask the groundsman to operate the hare and I don’t fancy doing that.’
She opened the trap, pulled the dog out and put her lead back on. ‘The hare’s over there. Can you see it?’
Vincent looked in the direction she had indicated. ‘That orange
and white thing? It’s like a balloon. No wonder she can’t be bothered chasing it.’
He walked over and inspected it more closely, then took his rabbit out of the plastic bag, holding it aloft in his left hand, pushing the hare manually along its runner with his right, so that it made the requisite clattering noise.
The dog’s ears pricked up and she pulled on her leash. Ruby held her back. Vincent continued pushing and after several steps he broke into a slow trot. The dog began to bark and pulled on her lead so hard that Ruby had to hold on to it with both hands.
‘She’s pulling my arms off.’
Vincent carried on jogging but shouted over his shoulder, ‘Keep her until I tell you, then let her come, but let her pull you.’
The dog was riding up on to her back legs, still barking. Twenty yards on, he shouted, ‘Come on, then!’
Ruby allowed the dog to pull her along, slowly at first, but after several steps she could no longer control her and moved faster, and then faster still. Eventually she was running after Vincent and the dog was loping in slow but effortless bounds. Vincent stopped the hare just beyond the finishing line, about sixty yards from its original position.
He was breathless. He tossed his brown rabbit across the artificial hare and waited for Ruby and the dog to catch up.
‘What shall I do?’ Ruby was hurtling towards him.
‘Let her have it.’
She couldn’t do otherwise. The dog jerked out of her hands, almost pulling her arm from its socket, charged at the rabbit and did her best to grab hold of it through her muzzle. She managed, somehow, to snatch it off the hare and shook it, swinging her head violently from side to side. The fur on the rabbit’s hindquarters started to rip and the red flesh gaped through. Vincent, exhausted, was roaring with laughter. Ruby was bent double, trying to catch her breath, feeling the palm of her hand burning from the pull of the leash.
‘Don’t let her eat the bloody thing!’
He took hold of her lead and pulled on it. The dog held on to the rabbit and growled at him.
Ruby grinned, still panting. ‘You’re never going to get that off her.’
‘You try and grab it.’
He was facing the dog, pulling her towards him. The collar had ridden up on her neck and was stuck behind her ears. Her head was down low, close to the ground. She growled again.
‘D’you think I’m mad?’
‘Come and take the lead then.’
She obliged him. He moved closer to the dog, circling her, bent down slowly and then lunged at the rabbit. She snarled, still holding on, and jumped forwards, towards Ruby, altering Ruby’s centre of gravity and toppling her over. As she fell she let go of the lead. The dog dashed away, carrying the rabbit with her.
‘Are you all right?’
She sat up, slightly winded, and tried to dust herself off. He offered her his hand. Her first impulse was to spit on it, but she reached out and took hold of it.
Ruby apologized for being late, and was about to explain about the state of her clothes when the area manager, Tom Croft, emerged from the kitchen carrying a bundle of notes through from the safe. He had yellow hair and a long, soft chin.
‘So you finally made it?’
‘I just told Jason …’
‘What are you wearing?’
She said nothing. He stared at her coolly. ‘You think this job is so difficult? There are plenty of others who could manage to do it, come in on time and dress properly.’
He pointed towards the till closest to where she was standing. ‘I suggest you get some work done.’
Ruby sat down at the till and was about to give it a routine check when a punter came up for a bet. She rang it on, took the money and thanked him. When he’d gone, she took out the larger notes and counted them.
‘Jason, this is a tenner short. Did you put in a float this morning?’
Jason was about to say something when Croft interrupted: ‘I’ve been using that till myself all morning. It was fine when you sat down there two minutes ago.’