Black Vodka

by Deborah Levy

  ‘Sometimes you get a choking feeling at night,’ she replies. ‘It makes you want a drink nearby, just in case.’

  ‘You don’t feel like you’re choking, do you?’

  ‘No. I don’t feel like I’m choking.’ She kisses his fingers.

  ‘Do you know, when I was a little girl, I was so light I could stand on my father’s hand and he would lift me up to the ceiling?’

  Pavel passes her his cigarette. Ducados. Autentico Tabaco Negro. A cheap Spanish cigarette they both like, especially after sex in a hotel bed made with clean cotton sheets and never enough blankets in spring.

  Earlier, they had spent their last evening in Barcelona walking up and down the Ramblas, stopping to look at four grey rabbits for sale in a kiosk under the plane trees.

  ‘Would you eat this rabbit?’ Ella stroked the baby of the batch, rubbing her fingers against the soft strip of fur between its ears.

  ‘Sure. I’m Czech. We’re like the Chinese, we eat anything that moves.’

  A tall North African man selling jewellery from an orange blanket on the pavement made shhp-shhp noises to get their attention, and then offered (in a low whisper) to sell them hashish. Ella bought a watch studded with rubies instead and told Pavel the time.

  ‘It’s nine o’clock. Let’s eat.’

  All around them people had finished work and were now sitting in cafes tucking into plates of meatballs, calamares and tortilla, wiping their hands on thin tissue napkins with Gracias Por la Visita printed in blue ink on every one.

  ‘Why do people always say “I love you” in a sad voice?’ Pavel smiles in the special way that shows his gold tooth.

  ‘I’ve never understood why,’ Ella replies.

  Surname. Given names. Nationality. Date of birth. Sex. Place of birth. Date of issue. Date of expiry.

  Pavel, who was born in what used to be called Czechoslovakia, has two passports. Ella, who was born in Jamaica but has lived in the UK since she was three years old, has a British passport. When the airport official, a man who is barely five foot tall and whose side parting is so straight it looks like it’s been drawn on with a felt-tip, frowns at their documents, their hearts beat a little faster on the other side of the perspex barrier. What if he asks them to explain where they are from? What would they say? ‘A bit from here, a bit from there.’ Would this be enough information for the small guy whose bright eyes spin such a hostile glare over their faces? When the official finally nods and at last hands them back their passports, they walk straight into the Duty Free shop. Pavel wants to buy Ella the perfume he likes best. The one in the ribbed glass bottle that reminds him of old-fashioned European hotels with marble floors and red velvet sofas. Hotels that are dark rather than light, all the better for flirting with a stranger under crystal chandeliers, for sharing a bed that is home for a few nights only, a bed for sex rather than sleeping in. He hands over his credit card and tells the woman not to bother wrapping the perfume because he has twelve minutes to find his way to Gate 24. When Ella kisses him thank you, he knows it’s a bitter, sweet kiss. Tomorrow he has an interview in Dublin with a firm of architects, and if he gets the job it means he will have to live far away from her.

  Another airport. Another country. Another hotel.

  Pavel turns left into a pub he knows well, just opposite Trinity College Dublin, and orders a pint of Guinness. The interview, he suspects, was a disaster. Every time he replied to a question asked by the Japanese director of the firm, a man with gleaming black shoes on his tiny feet, Mr Kymoto lowered his eyes.

  He searches for his cigarettes and finds the battered pack of Ducados. When he discovers there is only one broken cigarette inside it, a woman sitting alone at a nearby table offers him one of hers.

  ‘Thank you.’ Preoccupied with his failure to charm Mr Kymoto, he takes the cigarette without looking at her.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Ceský Krumlov.’

  ‘Where?’

  He glances first at the magazine she’s reading and then at her face. Beauty is a shock to the nervous system, he thinks while she passes him her lighter, especially when he’s not expecting it. Not expecting glass-green eyes and long chestnut hair piled on top of her head in the casual way he likes. She tells him she grew up in County Cork but now works in the box office of a theatre. It’s great, she says, not too bad really, better to be on the phone all day in a theatre than an office; she gets to meet actors and to see all the shows for free. But she misses her friends. He must miss, um, what was it called, Ceský Krumlov, mustn’t he? Pavel shrugs.

  He knows that he offended the Japanese boss but he doesn’t know why. Was it a major or minor offence? When he left the Czech Republic, the last exhibition he saw, before it was closed for recon­struction, was at the Police Museum. It was called Road and Traffic Offences. Some were minor and others major but he couldn’t remember why.

  In the morning, Pavel strokes his new lover’s hair, his thin white legs wrapped around her freckled, fleshier legs. He glances at a photograph of a man pinned to her bedroom wall, a man who resembles himself, but is definitely someone else. There is something about the love beaming through the man’s eyes that makes Pavel feel ashamed.

  ‘Shall we go for a coffee in Grafton Street?’

  ‘Don’t you want breakfast?’ She is tired and slow, taking her time to start the day.

  He shakes his head. Sharing breakfast feels more intimate to him than making love to a stranger. Pavel wants to go straight to the airport but he doesn’t know how to tell that to the woman with long curls and glass-green eyes.

  ‘I’m going to miss my plane,’ he says.

  ‘Do you want to meet again?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pavel looks down at his bare feet. ‘But, um, I’ve got a girlfriend in London.’

  She smiles when he asks her for the number of a taxi company and suggests he call a helicopter instead. And then he realises he has spent all his euros and will not be able to pay the driver. He’s only got an English twenty-pound note. The woman has turned her back on him and disappears into the kitchen to make coffee for herself. At the same time a message on his answerphone tells him that last night, Ella lost her front door keys. Her voice sounds stressed. ‘I can’t get into my house.’

  ‘So you found your keys?’ Pavel’s voice is different. He sounds to Ella as if he is drowning.

  ‘Someone else found them.’

  ‘Where were they?’

  ‘I dropped them in the bookshop.’

  ‘Who gave them back to you?’

  ‘That French man who works there. We dis­covered we were wearing identical shoes.’

  ‘What kind of shoes?’

  ‘Scottish dancing shoes.’

  ‘I’m jealous.’

  ‘But you had an affair in Dublin.’

  Pavel says, ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t set out to have an affair.’

  Ella walks away. Probably, Pavel thinks, to the bookshop where the French man who wears the same shoes is waiting for her. He will suggest they take the Eurostar to Paris, straight to the Gare du Nord, and of course he will tell her that the best way to discover Paris is by walking the city in their identical Scottish shoes. He will show her the Parisian parks with their terraces and octagonal fountains and they will kiss under every tree and then he’ll take her to a hotel in the Marais where she will punish Pavel by having the most exciting sex she’s ever had in her life. In fact Ella rings him from work to tell him to pack his shirts and move out. And then his phone rings again. It is Mr Kymoto, calling from Dublin. He tells Pavel they liked his ideas, his qualifications were impeccable, but unfortunately they did not feel he had long-term loyalty to the firm.

  ‘I’m not going to move out.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’

  Pavel is lying on his side of the bed and his girlfriend won’t let him touch her. After a while Ella turns towards Pavel and pulls his ponytail, hard.

  ‘You look fucking ridiculous.’

 
‘I know.’

  ‘Cut it off.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I want you to be someone else.’

  ‘Who do you want me to be?’

  ‘I want you to be kind and wise. I want you to be a father who loves his children. I want you to be attentive to me and faithful for ever. I want you to always fancy me and respect and admire me and I want you to be older and more confident.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ Pavel says. ‘I’m not a father. I’m not very wise.’

  ‘I know.’ Ella turns away from him.

  Pavel’s hands are not just white. They are the ala­baster white of Catholic saints. Ella’s father had wide, dark brown hands. But he was not wise. He left the house one night and never came back to tell her mother why. He left home to make another home and other children and then he left that home as well. Her father had many homes but no home. He was not wise. Only in his hands. His hands were strong and in a way, they were wise. When he held her in his arms, she could feel his love for her. And when she was three years old she stood on his hands and he’d lift her up into the air until she touched the ceiling.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Pavel risks kissing the back of her neck.

  ‘We can walk by the Thames to that Portuguese place and have coffee.’

  When Ella kneels down and ties the laces of her shoes, Pavel glares at them. It’s quite unusual for a woman to own the same shoes as a man. Especially Scottish dancing shoes, men’s dancing shoes with long laces that criss-cross up the shins. They walk on the paved bank of the Thames, cold and silent, listening to a busker play the bagpipes while two huge industrial barges sway on the oily churning water.

  ‘Look, he’s also got the same shoes as you!’ Pavel points at the busker. He laughs now, squeezing Ella’s hand. ‘They must be very common, this kind of shoe.’

  ‘Not really,’ Ella replies, trying not to smile. ‘It’s not common for women to wear men’s dancing shoes and to find a bookseller who wears them too. Specially as he’s not Scottish and neither am I.’

  They walk into the Portuguese cafe and kiss the owner’s new baby, who was born last week and is now the star of the establishment.

  ‘Good evening, your royal highness,’ Pavel says when she is passed into his arms.

  Later, when Pavel and Ella, now too tired to walk home, wait by the bus stop, he tells her he did not get the job in Dublin. The word ‘Dublin’ makes his girlfriend stiffen and move away from him. Pavel touches his throat. More than anything he wants a glass of water.

  ‘Have you ever had that weird feeling in an airport when you panic and don’t know what to do? One screen says Departures and another screen says Arrivals and for a moment you don’t know which one you are. You think, am I an arrival or am I a departure?’

  Ella is frowning, looking out for the bus.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’ Ella’s voice is suddenly angry. ‘Do you mean you don’t know whether you’re staying or leaving . . . is that what you’re trying to say to me?’

  ‘I’m sorry about Dublin,’ Pavel murmurs into her hostile brown ear.

  The bus arrives and they step inside, fumbling for change. Not knowing if everything is all right between them, they glance at the passengers in their scarves and hats and overcoats. Some of them are drinking fizzy cold drinks from cans. They hold the drink to their lips, eyes half shut, tense and concentrated as they gulp down the liquid, briefly stopping to catch their breath before lifting the can once more to their lips.

  Cave Girl

  My sister Cass thinks that ice cubes in the shape of hearts will change her life. Cass is a Stone Age girl. She hopes hearts will bring her love in the same way the Ancients thought dancing for the Gods would bring rain. She does the whole atmosphere business: turns off all the lights in the house and burns up a bargain pack of Tesco night-lights to make fake moonlight in her bedroom. After a while she makes herself what she calls a Piña Colada (some sort of milkshake), lies on the bed and sobs to a CD. It’s hard to believe that that small silver disc can spin her to the other side and back. Cass wants to be somewhere else. She has been abducted by visions of paradise that are not here, and to punish me for being happy, she twisted her hair into a tight plait and cut the whole lot off. I used to be scared of open spaces until I realised it was indoors that was the most frightening.

  At night the satellite dishes on the roofs and walls throw spectral shadows across the tamed gardens. I have grown to love the bronze doorknobs in the shape of jungle beasts: a lion’s head, a tiger, a snake. These seem to me to be caveman icons on the doors of the bankers and dentists who live here, a way of keeping in touch with The Divine. Sometimes I lie flat out on the gravel under one of the new shrubs and feel the electricity charge me up. The TV repeats. The CD players and video hires, personal computers, microwaves, dishwashers and hairdryers. It gives me a thrill because I know the world is very old. At night, I sometimes hope that an Ancient will find me shivering in front of the TV eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. He will teach me how to sharpen flint and I won’t know what to teach him because I don’t know how to make antibiotics.

  And then one night Cass told me her secret. Unburdened her confidence on my white-boy shoulders. She said she wants a sex change.

  ‘What, into a man?’

  ‘No, into a woman.’

  ‘But you are a woman.’

  ‘I want to be another kind of woman.’

  ‘What does that mean, Cass?’

  ‘I want to be light-hearted,’ she begins, and already the worry lines on her forehead come into focus. ‘I want to be airy.’ My sister is whispering this to me under the new shrub in the dark. Her sad girl breath makes me dizzy. She says, ‘I want to have blue eyes for a start, that’s the trick. Blue eyes are the gentlest, sexiest, most ambivalent eyes. My blue eyes will cut out, but they will also be very much there.’ When Cass says ‘very much there’, a thrill jolts through my stomach. She chews her nails for a while and then says, ‘I want to be a pretend woman.’

  I’m glad the gravel is clean and all the cats well fed here. I hate the way butchers display the insides of animals on silver trays.

  Cass continues talking, her eyes shut tight and the light from the little lamp post chuffing over her shorn black hair. I’ve found a surgeon to do the op, she says in a flat voice. I can already see him drilling a hole in my sister’s forehead with a rusty nail. I don’t want to talk to her any more.

  There’s been a pile-up on the motorway nearby. A furniture van collided with a baker’s truck. The drivers crawled out of their vehicles streaked in blood to find a load of chocolate éclairs and cream cakes splattered on leather sofas and office chairs. I don’t want to see anything shocking ever again.

  So this woman walks up the gravel drive, long legs, wearing sandals even though it’s raining. Sandals with little heels and criss-cross straps over the instep. Dragging her bag with limp wrists, smiling under a dirty blond fringe, and the bluest eyes, kind of flat eyes, can’t get inside ’em but she’s got energy in her body and she says, ‘Hi Bruv. Do you like my fake snake?’ I don’t know who she is or what she’s talking about and then I see she’s pointing to her fake snakeskin sandals.

  ‘I’m Cass,’ she smiles, dimpling her cheek.

  Cass doesn’t have dimples. And she never wears sandals with little spiky heels. And her hair’s not blond.

  There’s something about this woman’s voice, it just twinkles over me, cool and easygoing like a best friend in a great mood.

  ‘Let’s sit outside even though it’s raining.’ She smiles and takes out a wedge of Swiss cheese from her bag – sets about effortlessly slicing it, whooshing her fringe out of her eyes with her long fingers, nibbling at the cheese like she’s got a bit of an appetite but doesn’t want to hog the whole lot.

  ‘I like Swiss cheese because of the holes,’ she says airily, and then when she sees I’m freaked out her voice goes gentle and low.

  ‘Hey, you’ll get used to the
new me. Don’t look so frightened.’

  She makes a shivering noise with her breath as we drag our chairs out into the garden, her little heels sinking into the grass, poking holes in the lawn, just like in the Swiss cheese.

  ‘I like the rain.’ She dimples again. ‘No sun to damage our skin structure.’

  When she speaks it’s like she’s trailing the tips of her fingers across the surface of a swimming pool, no gloomy silences or deep breaths before saying something truly hideous. And she smells of soap and deodorant. The old Cass never used deodorant. She used to say it was a trick to make her feel dirty so she would use something she didn’t need. This Cass laughs with her eyes and she is all here, but she’s also far away, admiring the rose bush like she’s never seen it before, noticing there are bugs on the leaves and thinking aloud about how to spray them away. My sister would do something gross like eat the bugs rather than use a pesticide. This Cass leans back in her chair, dusts the crumbs of Swiss cheese off her white linen dress and suggests we plan some pleasure outings. Should we go to the cinema and see something light-hearted? What do I think? Cass never used to ask me what I think.

  This is the unhappiest day of my life. I think I’m in love with my new sister. I want to find out who she is. I want to stare into her pretend blue eyes. I want to write my phone number across her hand and brag about her to my friends. I want to play with her hair and lift her onto my new bicycle and lie in the dark with her and show her my new computer game.

  Something has just been massacred. There’s a pile of bloody feathers on the gravel. A cat has caught Dickie, the neighbour’s budgie, named after the famous cricket umpire. Dickie Bird’s eyes have been gouged out and his head chewed up. His intestines are lying under the new rose bush.

  I tell Cass what’s on my mind because she seems to want to know.

  ‘Well . . . ’ She bends her head to one side so her long hair falls over her shoulder. ‘See, you are my brother and I am your sister.’ Then she says, ‘You’ll find a girlfriend soon, and anyhow, why don’t we go inside and watch that stoopid sitcom we like?’