by Paul Magrs
Iris continued to wield her expensive utensils with aplomb.
When it comes to quality, we have to wrench the best we can out of life. She couldn’t have an ill-equipped kitchen if she tried, and what point would she be proving if she did away with her six-speed blender and coffee-bean grinder? Would it make her more authentically a part of this town where, as far as she could see, salad dressing was as rare and fabulous as homosexuality?
No, there were choices to be made and decisions to be stuck to. Iris dedicated herself to being bourgeois, happy, and loyal to those closest to her with every fibre of her expansive being. Mark might think she was wrong, attempt to spread his own conscience and meagre largesse a little thinner, further afield, but she felt she must be true to her own essential self.
Peggy joined her in the kitchen as Handel’s Messiah began once more—the fourth time that day—on the radio.
“For heaven’s sake, put some clothes on. The windows are open. And isn’t it sacrilegious to prepare Christmas dinner in the nude?”
Hallelujah!
Outside it was pattering on to snow; dry flakes skittered across the box hedges and settled on the grass. The opened windows bloomed on one side with kitchen steam, the other with frost. Their house was warm and fragrant, and surely Peggy could see the bliss in preparing dinner in the nude with the joyous certainty that here she was happy and safe?
And, as the afternoon swept into an evening of a grainy matt grey, Iris took Peggy into her arms and kissed her slowly, not, as she might have liked, under traditional mistletoe, but just beside a vast blue vase of hot-pink lilies.
“You must spend a fortune on flowers,” Sam had sneered, the last pre-feud time she deigned to visit. It was true; in each corner nodded the extravagant heads of the season’s most expensive blooms.
Iris had whirled about. “Yes! I want this house to be like a living Georgia O’Keefe exhibition. Cunts everywhere you look!”
That remark hadn’t gone down at all well. Only Mark smiled politely, half understanding.
Today, outside, the dry snow was clogging the narrow paths and silting up the window ledges, where its crust was starting to melt from the heat of the oven.
IRIS IS AS OLD AS THE HILLS. EXCEPT, IN THIS LANDSCAPE, THERE ARE precious few of those. It is one brisk gallop from the North Sea in the east to the Pennines in the west. Let us say, then, that Iris feels herself to be one of the oldest standing objects in that flattish expanse.
When it comes to official documentation she is extremely cagey, avoiding personal details whenever possible. When a few particulars are required, she uncaps her gold fountain pen with an expression of disgruntlement and fabricates a pack of lies. A number of times now the cottage has been visited by besuited young men with clipboards, come to clear up the discrepancies left in Iris’s wake.
As her partner, Margaret worries about all this. She feels that somehow Iris’s statements about her date of birth, parentage, nationality and other things will land them in hot water. Iris’s insouciance when the subject is raised infuriates Peg. These games Iris plays nag at Peggy late at night, not so much for what they might bode in her own relationship with Iris, but because she fears the consequences. Surely one can’t get through life without being to some extent accounted for in official files?
Peggy imagines the baying of wolves—pencils, clipboards, twitching—all around the magic circle of their cottage. It is as if Iris is refusing, quite literally, to be penned in.
Peggy worries that apparently illegitimacy only compounds the problem of them being lovers. Because, secretly, that is still a problem for Peggy. She would never admit this, but she hopes that maybe authority would turned a blind eye if they were fully documented. Two old women living together; it’s for the company, they don’t want to end up going into sheltered accommodation. They’re supporting each other. It’s sensible, even touching; it’s a solution to the problem of single and unwanted pensioners. Peggy and Iris would agree that they do not want to be written off, but Peggy would prefer that they were both adequately written up. If only for the extra pension.
She doesn’t know how old Iris is and daren’t ask in any way other than jokily. And jokily always get the reply, “Four hundred and seventy-three years exactly.” She knows that her partner must be of pensionable age. Iris’s flesh bears the signs of a dignified depreciation. Like wood that has been refined with continuous use into an elegant, very nearly baroque, curvature. A wood strengthened by the giving and taking of bodily oils; a tensile strength lovingly transmitted. Her skin has the texture of vellum so expensive that you could ponder your opening sentence for ever. Touching this is a luxurious possibility, endlessly deferred, richly indulged. Its mature flawlessness brazenly exhibits a zero degree of writing; Iris reclining naked presents her lover with a fabulous display, a promise of an experience beyond words, beyond language. This is why the pair of them—at least, while at home and with the windows on winter mornings shut—are nudists. Peggy’s body is not quite so smooth and inarticulate. Wrinkles, stretch marks and various scarrings speak volumes. Although it is as brazen a body as Iris’s, it speaks a very different story.
So, how old is Iris?
HALLELUJAH…
She is still holding her in the kitchen on the morning of Christmas Eve.
She is still holding her. Iris mulls this phrase over as she continued to hold Peggy, rocking gently back and forth to Handel.
When Iris used to be a novelist, many, many moons ago, she never really hit upon this problem of pronouns and representation because of the simple fact that she never wrote explicitly about lesbian relationships. And in fiction, especially when documenting something more casual than carnal knowledge, it is easy to separate the pronouns out—like sifting flour—and not to let them clash in ambiguity.
It might prove a problem, should she take up the pen again some day and, in this much more enlightened age, dabble with a spot of authentic realism. She might relish the quandary of pronoun etiquette.
She finds herself stroking the flesh of Peggy’s forearm. She hadn’t realised she was doing it, and when she does she starts to consider the elasticity, the durability of flesh and how it will decide what it fancies doing. Her own has seen her through a great number of scrapes.
As if in response, Peggy starts up the old, jokey conversation.
“How old are you tomorrow then, Iris?”
She murmurs this into Iris’s shoulder. Her skin smells of brandy as if she has been using it as a scent.
Christmas Day is Iris’s birthday. Even this sounds implausible to Peggy, though she submits to it as a mutually convenient fiction.
“Let me see. Well, I believe I’m four hundred and seventy-four this time.”
“I thought you might be. And when do I get a proper answer?”
“Was mine improper?”
“I mean, true.”
Iris looks at her with a frown. Concernedly she asks, “Have you ever read Orlando?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, prepare yourself for a shock.”
Peggy read Orlando a couple of years ago because Iris told her to. All her reading has been directed by Iris these past few years, and Iris knows it.
“I’m like Orlando,” Iris declares, and Peggy is embarrassed by her earnestness.
“You mean heterosexual?”
“No.”
“You mean transsexual?”
“No. Yes. I mean…I’m four hundred and seventy-four years old.”
“Is that how old Orlando was, then?”
“That’s beside the point,” Iris snaps. “What I mean is, I’m very, very old.”
“I see,” Peggy says flatly.
Iris asks gently, “Is that what you wanted to know?”
“I suppose so. Yes.”
“Why now?”
“Oh.” Peggy buries herself in their embrace once more. “The census people have been around. We’re going to have a hellish council-tax bill.”
“Oh.”
The hallelujahs on the radio have petered out by now.
“Iris?”
“Yes?”
“Have you changed sex, too? Like in the novel?”
Iris nods solemnly. “Four—no, five times.”
We’ll leave them for a little while. As I said earlier, Iris knows all about the multiplicitious choices available in a lifetime, the absolute terror of the roads not taken. The reason she knows is that, on the whole, she has taken most of them.
Let us draw a veil of darkening air and random clots of wet sleet to allow Peggy to digest the idea of so many decisions in one, terribly prolonged lifetime. Or, alternatively, to digest the fact that her lover is insane. There is a lot to take in.
In any event, whether old or mad, Iris has abruptly declared her seniority.
Imagine Peggy in this situation.
When your lover is so much older than you, older than the hills, and really, you had no idea, no conception, that you had been hoodwinked by a flesh that is vellum and rich in a manner you thought only youth could possibly be, you feel, perhaps, a little dwarfed in the complex shadows cast by these hypothetical hills.
NINE
CHRISTMAS EVE AFTERNOON SAW MARK WITH A GLASS OF GIN IN ONE hand, watching a rerun of Rebecca on Channel Four. A pale orange light, refracted through the messy weather outside, shone off each of the living room’s mirrors in turn and, for a good half-hour, rendered the TV screen opaque. Mark stared at the grey cube, listened to the voices, and waited for the light to die. He sipped his drink and dangled his other hand in a carton of Turkish delight. The powdered pink and yellow sweets rubbed icing sugar onto what now seemed to him startlingly blue, mimeographed hands.
Only at particular moments did he remember his blueness. Not that he was wholly blue; closer inspection revealed him to be intricately multi-coloured, as a number of people had found. However, from a distance, Mark read as simply blue.
He was worried about getting tonight’s dinner ready in time. Not that it was his responsibility. Sam had taken over the whole affair and was insisting on dealing with it by herself. He was pleased, really, but time was creeping on and the kitchen was still clean-smelling and dark. Sam was in the bathroom and, to judge by the periodical squawk of Sellotape, wrapping her presents. Her manner today was one of grim efficiency, a mood Mark had learned to slink away from. He had consented wordlessly to her supplying him with the Radio Times, the gin bottle and the best seat in the house for the afternoon’s duration. His wife was set on getting things together at her own pace, and Mark knew his place in that scheme. So did Sally, usually. But Sally was with her mother.
SAM WINCED AS SHE STOOD UP, LISTENING TO HER KNEES CRACK, WATCHING the black circles give her momentary tunnel vision for rising too quickly, and gripped the cistern for support. The toilet flushed by accident. She was a bit shocked by her sudden apparent decrepitude, but she had, after all, spent a full hour kneeling on the bathroom floor, stooped forward in concentration in a mound of crumpled wrapping paper. Enough to give anyone tunnel vision. She rubbed her cold nose.
“Who is it?” she asked, and the knocking came again.
Rapid, impatient knocking; a child’s, but that could mean Sally or Mark, really. Sam had been enjoying her peace. The heating had just come on, shuddering through the old radiator, seeping in waves through the carpet. The only carpet with decent pile in the whole flat. The heat brought out a faint aroma of piss. Why can’t men aim properly? she wondered.
“Mam, it’s me.”
Sam opened the door and Sally shot in, slamming it behind her.
“He didn’t hear me come in, I don’t think.”
Sitting back on the carpet, Sam rested herself against the side of the bath. “What have you got there?” she asked.
Sam detested that tone in her own voice when she spoke to Sally, whenever mother and daughter were together. It was part parodic baby talk, part wearied rhetoric, as if she could barely conceive of this being before her as capable of replying. Indeed the logic of it seemed absurd; it was like addressing one of her own hands or feet and expecting an answer. This set up a tension whenever they were on their own together. A tension that Sally responded to by casting down her eyes and mumbling. Not shyness, exactly, but in sympathetic appreciation of the absurdity of her speaking.
“I need help. Wrapping this for Dad.”
And she held up for Sam’s inspection a cellophane bar of pink soap from the Body Shop. Sam sniffed. Strawberries.
“Do you think he’s dirty?” Sam asked with a laugh, pleased with the easy naturalness of her question, but thinking at the same time, Has she bought me something too? Is this where Sally declares her allegiances?
“We can’t tell if he’s dirty or not,” Sally said. “Because of his make-up.”
“Tattoos,” Sam corrected, reaching for an appropriate scrap of paper and the roll of tape.
“Do tattoos mean you don’t have to wash?”
Biting tape, Sam shook her head. “Your dad is the most obsessively clean person I’ve met. It’s a wonder he hasn’t washed himself white again. But you would never be able to tell if he was dirty, would you?”
“Turtles are dirty. They bask in mud at school.”
Sam was about to ask one of those adult-to-child questions which flatter the child with a semblance of genuine interest. She was going to ask, “Would you like to be a turtle, Sally?” but she ditched this and asked instead, “Would you like to have tattoos when you grow up?”
“Do girls have tattoos?”
“Some girls do. They don’t show them off as much, I don’t think, as men do.”
“Dad has them all over.”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t like that. He stands out.”
Sally was looking past her mother now, at the carefully stacked wrapped presents. She said, “I like that idea. The bows. Making them out of toilet paper.”
Surprised, Sam looked at the bows she had spent ages fiddling with, folding and securing with tape. Now they looked tatty and, where they had been somehow splashed with water, ripped through.
“Oh, it was just an idea I had.” She shrugged.
Turning to her mother, Sally smiled. “I’ve got a very clever mam,” she said, stepped forward and hugged Sam. A chill ran through the mother, as if she had bumped into something fragile, realising too late.
PEGGY WAS REASSURED BY THE FACT THAT SHE AND IRIS WERE WALKING in step, although wordlessly. The brisk scrape of their heels sounded on the tarmac. They both knew the way to Sam’s flat, even though the paths on the estate twisted, turned, doubled back, and they had only come this way a handful of times. It was as if they had separately rehearsed this walk in their minds’ eyes and now when it came to it, the evening of reconciliation, their feet carried them firmly, deftly, almost instinctively. Peggy stole the occasional glance backwards, to see their footprints etched black in the sleet. This feeble deposit was both the colour and texture of pepper. As the council streetlights popped on, one by one, the air changed to the shade of bruised lemons.
Their footsteps carried out a calm and measured conversation, it seemed to Peggy. Iris’s, of course, resounded more earnestly, as if her reverberations were felt more deeply into the earth beneath the tarmac, as if her musing simply went further down. Was this because she really was, as she claimed, about nine times as old as Peggy? Or was it because her shoes were patent leather? Peggy’s had rubber soles.
But this was ridiculous. Peggy was all for a little mystery, a little light romance to perk up life together. Iris had gone too far, though, this time. She had had her joke, made herself a tad glamorous with all that talk of Orlando, but ever since then she had been sunk in what seemed to Peggy suspiciously like gloom. The atmosphere between them sagged with an indulgence on Iris’s part. Since that particular conversation they hadn’t touched at all. Iris had swanned off upstairs, leaving Peggy to finish chopping tomorrow’s veg, then returned swathed in layers of violet and ostri
ch feathers. She had sat about the place until it was time to leave, silent, like a fagged-out Isadora Duncan.
Right now Peggy was nervous about the impending interview with Sam. She was about to enter a fortress barbed and set by her daughter at her most duplicitously welcoming. Peggy had to be calm in her mind and, above all, alert and undistracted. With Iris’s funny mood pressing in, she would have a hell of a job on and already she could picture the resultant scene, should a foot be put wrong tonight.
“Why are you so quiet, Iris?”
Iris stopped for one moment in her tracks, her mouth pulled down in scorn as she looked at the black windows of the council houses. The streets were quite silent, aside from a distant, frenzied barking. Where had everyone gone? They seemed to have crept away, turned their lights off, hidden behind their settees, as if Christmas Eve were an alarming visitor, best avoided. When Iris walked on, Peggy notice she had fallen out of step. Iris’s words were punctuated by their dissonance.
“At the moment I’m thinking about my parents’ land. The land here used to be a bit of a bleak pasture. Christmas Eves past, say in the thirties, the grass would stand high and hard as the branches of trees. We’d have to fight out way to the frozen pond. The swans slept, those ridiculous, slender necks knuckled down onto their bodies. They looked like white fists, poking through ice. And the air smelled of clay, whitening out into bizarre shapes. Until spring the ground remained like pottery; my brothers and I walked on what we called china, sculpted by our own feet when the ground was still soft.”
“Oh,” Peggy said. “Mind the dog shit,” she said, but that was frozen too.
“They’ve ripped the heart from this land,” Iris sighed. “And replaced it with an alarm clock. Which doesn’t work because the punctured chest keeps bleeding, pumps blood to this inadequate mechanism, rusts the metal and the inauthentic ticking has stopped quite dead.”
