Touchy Subjects: Stories

by Emma Donoghue

  I stood shivering in the street outside the hostel and knocked on Sylvia's car window. I was high as a kite and dizzy with fatigue.

  I wouldn't ask anything naff like when we were likely to see each other again. I would just wave as she drove away. Sylvia probably did this kind of thing all the time; she was far too famous to be wanting anything heavy. I'd show her that I was sophisticated enough not to fall for her all in one go, not to ask for anything but the hour and a half she had to give me.

  When she rolled down the window, I smiled and leaned in. I shut my eyes and felt Sylvia's tongue against mine, saying something neither of us could hear. So brief, so slippery, nothing you could get a hold of.

  The Welcome

  Women's Housing Coop Seeks Member. Low Rent, Central Manchester. Applicants Must Have Ability to Get On With People and Show Comittment To Cooperative Living. All Ethnic Backgrounds Particularly Welcome To Apply.

  I tore stripes off Carola when I noticed that ad, taped up in the window of the newsagent's next door to our house. She said I could hardly complain if I'd missed the meeting where the wording of the ad was agreed on, but I should feel free to share my feelings with the policy group anyway. "They're not feelings," I said, "they're facts."

  Dear Policy Group, I typed furiously.

  Re: Recruitment Ad. I suggest we use a hyphen in Co-op, if we don't want the Welcome Co-operative to be confused with a chicken coop. Some other problems with this ad: "Seeks Member" sounds like we don't have any members yet. Do you mean "Seeks New Member"?—and, besides, it sounds rather like a giant dildo. Also, I'm just curious, why should the applicants HAVE "Ability To Get On With People" (and is People a euphemism for Women, by the way, given that this is a women-only co-op?), but only SHOW "Commitment To Co-operative Living" (commitment being spelled with two m's and one t, not vice versa, by the way, in case anyone cares)? Or are you suggesting that an applicant might claim to HAVE such a commitment but needs to be forced to SHOW it, e.g. through housework? And if so, why not say so?

  The way I see it, there's not a lot of point having policies on Equal Opportunities and Accessibility and Class and Race Issues if we're going to keep on writing our ads in politically correct gobbledygook that would put off anyone who's not doing a Ph.D. And speaking of Race Issues, what on earth does it mean to say that ALL ethnic backgrounds (members of all ethnic groups, I think you mean) are "Particularly Welcome To Apply"? Who's not-so-particularly-welcome, then? Or do you mean white people don't count as an ethnic group? I can't believe one four-line ad can give such an impression of confusion, illiteracy, and pomposity all at once. Why can't we just say what we mean?

  My hands were shaking, so I left it at that and printed out the page. Yours, Luce, I'd added at the bottom, as if it weren't obvious who'd written the letter from vocabulary alone. As Di was always telling me, "It's like you've got the Oxford English Dictionary hidden up your arse." She had a point; some days I sounded more like eighty than eighteen. I suppose I'd read too many books to be normal.

  It was only when I was sealing the letter into the envelope that I remembered: in my absence, at the last co-op meeting, they'd decided to rotate me from the maintenance crew to the policy group, because, as I'd been pointing out for ages, my syntax was a lot better than my plumbing. I was meant to replace Nuala, who was moving back to Cork, and if Rachel made up her mind to go off for three months to that organic farm in Cornwall, it occurred to me now, there'd be no one left in the policy group but myself and Di, and I'd end up handing her my letter like some mad silent protestor. Or if Di happened to be away that evening, on one of those Buddhist retreats her boyfriend ran, it would be just me having a one-person meeting, and I'd have to read my own letter aloud and make snide comments about it.

  Arghhhh. The joys of communal living. After two years in the Welcome Co-op, I could hardly remember living any other way.

  I ripped the envelope open and went downstairs. In the kitchen I pinned my letter up on the corkboard over the oven—the only place you could be sure everyone would see it. I went back down for a prawn cracker five minutes later and found Di reading it as she stirred her miso. "The ad was appalling," I said defensively.

  "Yeah. Carola wrote it after the rest of us had gone down the pub. You know you use the word 'mean' four times in the last paragraph?" she asked, grinning.

  I ripped the thing down and stuffed it into the recycling bin.

  "Temper, temper," she said, tucking away a pale curl that had come out of her bun.

  I licked my prawn cracker. "What's wrong with me these days, Di?"

  "You know what's wrong with you."

  "Apart from that." I shifted uncomfortably against the wooden counter.

  "There is no apart from that, Luce. You've been a virgin too long."

  My head was hammering; I rubbed the stiff muscles at the back of my neck. "Why does every conversation in this house have to come back to the same-old same-old?"

  "Well Jesus, child, take a look at yourself."

  I glanced down as if I'd got food on my shirt.

  "You came out at fifteen, but you haven't done a thing about it yet. For years now you've seen every kind of woman pass through these doors, and you haven't let one of them lay a hand on you. No wonder you've got a headache!"

  I was out the door and halfway up the garden by then. Di was fabulous, but I could do without another of her rants about regular orgasms being crucial to health. Nurses were all like that.

  The June sun was slipping behind the crab apple tree. My courgettes were beginning to flower, a wonderful pale orange. I picked a couple of insects off them. When I'd moved into the Welcome, the week after my sixteenth birthday—the date chosen to ensure my mother would have had no legal way of dragging me back home, if she'd tried, not that she did—anyway, at first I found the constant company unbearable. I'd been used to spending all my after-school time locked in my bedroom with a book, living in the world of the Brontes or Jung or Isabel Allende; just about any world would do so long as it wasn't the one my mother lived in. And now all at once I was supposed to become part of some bizarre nine-woman feminist family. The housing co-op was what I'd chosen but it freaked me out all the same. In the early weeks, digging the garden was the only thing that kept me halfway sane. The vegetable plot had been strictly organic ever since I'd taken it over, but sometimes I got the impression that most of my sweat went into providing a feast for the crawlies.

  Di was sort of right. I was a pedant, a twitching spinster, dried up before my time, and I'd only just finished secondary school! Sixty-seven fortnightly co-op meetings (I'd counted them up, recently) had frayed me to a thread: all those good intentions, all that mind-numbingly imprecise jargon. These days even typos in the Guardian made me itch. When I was old, I knew I wouldn't wear purple, like in the poem; instead I'd limp around under cover of darkness, correcting the punctuation on billboards with a spray can. Rachel said I should become a proofreader and make a mint, instead of starting political studies at the university this October and probably ending up politically somewhere to the right of Baroness Thatcher. On my eighteenth birthday, when Di gave me a T-shirt that read DOES ANAL RETENTIVE HAVE A HYPHEN?, I was too busy considering the question to get the joke.

  It wasn't that I didn't like the idea of sex, by the way. I was just picky. And somehow, the more free-floating fornication that went on in the Welcome—the louder the shrieks from Carola's attic room, the more often I walked into the living room and found anonymous bodies pillowing the sofa—the less I felt like attempting it. Besides, there was never enough privacy. At my birthday party I got as far as kissing a German acupuncturist, and by breakfast the next morning my housemates had given me: (a) a pack of latex gloves (Di), (b) much conflicting advice about sexual positions (Rachel, Maura, Iona, and the two Londoners whose names I was always getting wrong way around), and (c) a paperback called Safe Space: Coping with Issues around Intimacy (Carola, of course). The acupuncturist left me a message, but I never rang back. C
ollectively my housemates had managed to put me right off.

  So Nuala went back to Cork, and that's how it all began. The Welcome's rent was so low, it was never hard to fill a place. We interviewed seven women, one endless hot Saturday at the end of June. I was the one who volunteered to tell JJ she was the lucky winner.

  "I wasn't sure was it all right to ring at nearly midnight—," I told her, down the phone.

  "Yeah, no problem. That's .. . excellent." Her voice was as deep as Tracy Chapman's, and hoarse with excitement.

  "Well, we're all really glad," I added, somehow not wanting the call to be over so soon.

  I could hear JJ let out a long breath of relief. "I never thought I'd hear from you people again, actually. I made such a cock-up of the interview."

  "Not at all!" I said, laughing too loudly.

  "But I hardly said a word."

  "Well, we figured you were just shy, you know. All the others were brash young things who got on our nerves."

  Di, passing through with a tray of margaritas for her hospital friends who were partying on the balcony, raised one eyebrow.

  It was kind of a lie; we hadn't been at all unanimous. Carola had voted for a ghastly woman from Leeds who claimed to be very vulnerable after a series of relationships with emotionally abusive men and wanted to know did we do co-counseling after house meetings? But in the end I played the race card, like the hypocrite I was; I told Carola that if we were serious about Particularly Welcoming and all that—if we wanted to improve the co-op's representation of women of colour from none in nine to one in nine—then we had to pick JJ.

  Not that her being black had anything to do with it, for me. I wanted JJ because her fingers were long and broad and made me feel slightly shaky.

  The day she was to move in, I came downstairs to find the living room transformed. There was a Mexican blanket slung over the back of the pink couch, an African head scarf wrapped around the lampshade, and my framed print of Gertrude Stein appeared to have metamorphosed into a dog-eared poster of a woman carrying a stack of bricks on her head that said OXFAM IN INDIA: EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EDUCATION.

  Rachel, Di, and Iona claimed to know nothing about the changes. Carola said she was only acting on the advice of a book called Anti-Racism, for Housing Co-ops. She was trying to make the atmosphere more inclusive, less Anglo-Saxon.

  "Gertrude Stein was an American Jew!" I protested.

  "She lived on inherited wealth," said Carola, spooning up her porridge.

  "So?"

  "So I just don't think we should cover our walls with images of women of privilege; it sends out the wrong signals."

  "Gertrude Stein only covered about three square feet of the wall!"

  Carola rolled her pale blue eyes. "You're being petty, Luce. I wonder why you've got so much invested in the status quo?"

  "Because the status quo was a pretty stylish living room. And you know what signals this room is sending out now, Carola? Embarrassingly obvious, geographically muddled, white guilt signals!"

  She pointed out that we all had feelings around these issues.

  "Feelings about," I corrected her, "not around, about,"" and it all went downhill from there, especially when I pulled down the Oxfam poster and a corner tore off. Di had to intervene, and it took hours of "feelings around" before we reached a grudging compromise: yes to the Mexican blanket, no to the lampshade wrap, and OK to a laminated poster of dolphins that none of us liked.

  I'd been planning to do some weeding that afternoon because my eyes were sore from reading Dostoevsky in a Victorian edition with tiny print, but I was afraid I wouldn't hear the front door. I pottered around in my room instead, and when I heard the bell I ran downstairs to help JJ carry up her stuff. But she didn't have much in the way of stuff, it turned out: two backpacks, a duvet, and a rat.

  I backed away from the cage.

  "Ah, yeah, his name's Victor," she said nervously, clearing her throat. "I forgot to mention him at the interview."

  "Oh, I'm sure everyone'll love him," I told her, grabbing the cage by its handle and frantically thinking, Hamster, it's more or less a hamster. I managed to carry the cage all the way upstairs without looking inside.

  I was going to offer to help JJ unpack, but somehow I lost my nerve. There was something private about the way she dropped her bags in the corner beside Victor's cage and stood looking out the window. "This room gets the sun in the late afternoons," I told her; "I lived here, my first year in the co-op," but she just nodded and smiled a little, without looking back at me.

  That night we had a communal dinner in JJ's honour, even though when the nine of us sat down together there was barely elbow room to use a fork. I talked too much, ate too much of Melissa's sushi and Kay's gooseberry fool, and felt rather ill. JJ seemed to listen attentively to the conversation—which covered global warming, how to eat a lychee, the government's treachery, what we wanted done with our bodies when we died, and (the inevitable topic) female ejaculation—but she said even less than she had at her interview, though I wouldn't have thought that was possible. I wondered whether we sounded peculiar to her, or ranty, or Anglo-Saxon.

  Iona carried in the tray of coffee, chai, peppermint tea, and soy shake. "So tell us, JJ," said Carola with a sympathetic smile, "is it going to make you feel at all uncomfortable, d'you think, being the only woman of colour in the co-op?"

  Di rolled her eyes at me, but it was too awful to be funny. I stared out the window at my tomato plants, mortified.

  But JJ just shrugged and sipped her coffee.

  Carola wouldn't let it rest, of course. "How old would you say you were, like, when you first became aware of systemic racism?"

  "Carola!" Di and I groaned in unison.

  This time JJ let out a little grunt that could have been the beginning of a laugh. Then she muttered something that sounded like "Bodies are an accident."

  If I hadn't been sitting right beside her, I mightn't have caught that at all. Startled, I looked down at myself. A short, skinny, pale, post-adolescent Anglo-Saxon body; a random conglomeration of genes.

  Afterwards JJ volunteered to wash up, so I said she and I would do it and everybody else was to get out of the kitchen. Some went to bed, and some went out to smoke dope by the bonfire, and I got to stand beside JJ, watching how gently she handled the plates. I took them dripping from her big hands, one by one, and wiped them dry.

  Her hundreds of skinny plaits gleamed; I wondered how she kept them like that. Under her army surplus shirt her shoulders were wider than anyone's I knew. She had all she needed to be a total butch and didn't seem to realize it.

  "So how did you pick the name?" she asked at last, jerking me out of my daze.

  "What, Luce? Well, I was christened Lucy, but I've always—"

  "No," she interrupted softly, "the co-op's name, the Welcome."

  "Oh," I said, with an embarrassed laugh.

  "Is it, like, meant to sound like everyone's welcome?"

  "No, actually, it's named after some defunct co-op down in London, on Welcome Street," I told her. "When they folded they passed the leftover money to a group in Manchester that was just starting up. Before my time."

  "So are you really only eighteen?"

  I almost blushed as I nodded.

  JJ had to be in her twenties, herself, but she didn't specify. In fact she hadn't volunteered any information about herself yet, it occurred to me now.

  The whole time I'd lived in the Welcome—with all the guff that got talked about acceptance and non-judgmentalism—I'd never met anyone half as accepting as JJ. Her tolerance even crossed the species barrier; it didn't seem to have occurred to her, for instance, that a rat wasn't a suitable pet. (And Victor did turn out to be a total charmer.) Like a visitor from Mars, JJ displayed no fixed opinions about race, class, or any other label. Though she'd chosen to live in a women-only housing co-op, I never heard her make a single generalization about men (unlike, say, Iona, whose favourite joke that summer was "What's the best w
ay to make a man come?"—"Who the fuck cares!").

  When various of our housemates talked as if all the world was queer, JJ didn't join in, but she didn't make any objection, either. She listened with her head bent, wearing what Di called her "wary Bambi" look. At JJ's interview, I remembered, it was Rachel who'd come out with the usual uncomfortable spiel about "This co-op has members of a variety of sexualities," and instead of giving either of the two usual responses—"Oh, but I have a boyfriend" or "Fab!"—JJ had just nodded, eyes elsewhere, as if she were being told how the washing machine worked.

  Shy people annoyed Di; she thought it was too much hard work, digging conversation out of them, and the results were rarely worth it.

  "But is she or isn't she, though?" I begged Di.

  "How should I know, Luce?"

  "Didn't they teach you how to assess people at nursing school?"

  Di laughed and flicked her hair back from her soup bowl. She blew on her spoon before she answered me. "Only their health. All I can tell you is the woman seems in good shape, apart from a bit of acne and a few stone she could afford to lose."

  I felt mildly offended by that—JJ being the perfect shape, in my book—but I stuck to the point. "Yeah, but is she a dyke?"

  Di twinkled at me. "What do you care, Miss Celibate?"

  Not that I thought I had much of a chance, whatever kind of sexuality the woman had, but I needed to know anyway. Just to have some information on JJ. Just to find out whether it was worth letting her into my dreams.

  One evening when I came in after the news, JJ told me, "The government are cutting housing benefit," and before I could stop myself, I said, "The government is."

  Her thick black eyebrows contracted.

  "Sorry. It's just-"

  "Yeah?"

  "It's a collective noun," I muttered, mortified. "It takes the singular. But it doesn't matter." I suddenly heard myself: what an unbearably tedious teenager!