by Stuart Evers
Maria should be thinking about Gwen, about the house they shared and the promises they made; but instead she is thinking about distance, about why some things feel near and some far away, and about the kind of person who would want Only God Can Judge Me tattooed on his arm; and how the moments you tell yourself always to remember are just as easily forgotten as those you don’t.
She opens her eyes and sees the wine glass and the mirrored glimpse of the tattooist at work, then closes them again and thinks of Gwen – thankfully, finally – and the time they hired a pedalo with the last of their money, and in the darkening pond drove that boat in furious circles.
Gwen had come to stay, a few days no more, and had remained there for a couple of years. Four years younger, not the sense she was born with, according to their father, just twenty then and working in a clothes shop by day, out on the town in the evening. Maria was in and out of work, a supply cover here, a maternity cover there, never quite getting the nod to stay on, never quite holding on.
‘Fuck ’em,’ Gwen would say. ‘Fuck ’em all.’ And her plan would be a night out, a bar, a club, a place that Maria would wish to leave early, wanting only to head for her sofa, for her bed, to sleep, to rest. Gwen would insist, she was persuasive in a way that was impossible to resist. The pedalo had been her idea. Never mind the money. Money always sorts itself out. Her long hair with the jagged fringe, protruding hips, wide angry mouth. Leather jacket and short skirts, cigarettes and eyeliner, pub breath and a stare that invited all manner of interpretations.
The four-year difference in age was acute when they were young, Maria calling Gwen her little teddy bear until Gwen was six. Gwen though grew quickly, in height, in demeanour, in personality. She could darken a room with entry, or lighten it, depending on mood. The house they shared – though nominally Maria’s – became her space, her domain. When eventually Maria moved out to be with Tom, Gwen stayed on, a co-worker from the shop taking the vacant room. Maria found visiting difficult, like looking into her unlived life.
When the diagnosis came, it was Maria who needed the calming, the support. Gwen leapt the five stages and headed straight to acceptance. Gwen would not move out of the flat. Gwen still headed out into the city night, still told her sister to lighten up. And then she was in the hospital, her family surrounding her, facing it all down with smiles and flashes of her stained, small teeth.
As the hum and buzz and wipe finishes, Maria is thinking of the conversation about tattoos. They were sitting in the lounge, Maria out of work again, two bottles of cheap red wine on the cracked coffee table. She can hear her sister, but she’s only watching her. The way she paces, the way she wrinkles her nose sometimes, the sheer annoyed-joy of being in the same room as her, of appearing in the same frame. She thinks of blowing out a single candle in an individual Bakewell tart. Make a wish. That birthday smell of extinguished wick. Make a wish.
‘All done,’ the tattooist says. ‘You can take a look now.’
Maria bunches the towel to her chest as she gets up, sore and feeling the burn of the needle and ink. She allows the tattooist to position her so she can see his work. On her shoulder blades, she has wings. Light, delicate, almost moth-like wings. She can feel them pulling at her, ready to flutter and flap.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
The tattooist asks her questions, but she looks only at her back, at the wings newly there. She watches her wings spread stiffly in the cold afternoon light. The tattooist asks more questions, but she does not answer them.
‘They’re perfect,’ is all she says. ‘They’re just perfect.’
During the first week she dresses and undresses in the dark, the wings safely hidden beneath pyjamas or working clothes. When people touch her, however briefly, she feels the pulse of their suspicion. Seven days of discomfort in Tom’s morning clinch, of short temper with the girls, of quickly closed doors. In the bathroom, as often as she can, she removes her clothes and examines the wings, pulls the skin taut over her shoulder blades. She does not think of Gwen as she does this. Not at all. Reflected in a mirror, her wings look bigger, more complicated.
On the fifteenth day she is teaching a year-eleven class. It is the opening lesson of the day, normally the best time for getting through unscathed, but that morning they are already restless. She has moved Chas to the front and he sits there looking at her, in his face something she has not seen before.
‘What’s that?’ Maria says as something is passed from Dre to Sandip.
‘Nothing, Miss,’ Dre says.
Maria strides down the aisle and plucks the note from under the boy’s hand.
The note says I so wanna fuck Miss C so bad. It is Chas’s handwriting. Maria puts it in her pocket and returns to the whiteboard, runs through the equation and its solution, unsure whether the burn of her face or the burn from her wings is more intense. She looks at the note throughout the day to check it hasn’t changed. She has been teaching since she was twenty-two and she has never provoked such a reaction. There has always been another teacher to take the heat.
The note is in her pocket as she drives to the child-minder. Maria waves at the woman and her youngest, Amy, bundles towards the car, all bag and coat, perfectly red-round blushes on her cheeks. Chloe, twelve and still insulted she has not been entrusted with her sibling’s safety, ambles behind. They get in the car and both, today, kiss her.
‘Hello,’ Maria says. ‘You two had a good day?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ they say not quite in turn, not quite in unison.
‘Me too,’ she says.
‘You look pretty today,’ Amy says as they drive away.
‘You’re not getting a puppy,’ Maria says. ‘I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, you’re not getting a puppy.’
Amy looks slightly perplexed. The note burns shamefully in Maria’s pocket.
‘Actually, Mum, you do look good at the moment,’ says Chloe. ‘She’s right, for once.’
‘That’s very sweet of you both,’ she says and checks her reflection in the rear-view mirror. She does not see any difference, her face still too wide and plump, haircut too severe, eyes thin and heavy. She imagines the wings throbbing, or perhaps they do. All the way home she can’t decide.
Once the girls are in bed and Tom is reading Harry Potter to Amy, she lies on the sofa in front of two glasses of wine. There is a programme paused on the television and she is finishing off the last of her marking. In his exercise book, Chas’s algebraic a, b and cs remind her of the note. It has been on her mind anyway, working through the books, knowing his would be there in the stack. Gwen would have humiliated that boy. She would have made him an example, shown the girls in class that they did not need to accept this kind of behaviour. Her sister would have found it hilarious; would have asked her whether she was going to pursue it.
‘Boys are at their sexual peak at that age,’ she’d have said. ‘You should make up for your prudish youth!’
A prudish youth: yes. Even when she and Gwen lived together. Tom the first and last. Toilet-brush hair and stupid jokes and the look and sound of a posh boy. And even that first time, when it was over, he’d held her tight as swaddling. He held her all the night and into the morning. She never felt him letting go.
Tom opens the lounge door, and with the exaggerated steps of Wile E. Coyote tiptoeing away from one of his own bombs, he joins her on the sofa. Tom has long spindly legs that add to the effect. She laughs even though she has seen it a thousand times.
‘Levity? Laughter?’ he says. ‘On a Tuesday? With your reputation?’
‘You bring it out in me,’ she says and picks up her wine glass.
Something flashes, glints, and her hand freezes as she’s still holding the wine; a thought that needs to be spooled back.
Tom smiles. He rubs her feet, left and right, and she relaxes again and puts down the wine. He presses play and the programme begins with the pursuit of a young girl, the scene shot with jagged, hand-held camera work. The opening credit
s roll. She looks at the wine glass on the coffee table and realizes she hasn’t thought of Gwen once today. Not once. Always she thinks of her. Perhaps unlatching the morning door, clothed from a night out. Maybe brushing her hair, picking her toenails on the sofa. Perhaps turning channels on the television, maybe giving some sage, useless advice. But today, nothing.
Without thinking she reaches for the remote and turns off the television. She puts her hand on his and kisses deep into the crevice of his neck.
‘I want to go to bed,’ she says. His hand feels cumbersome beneath hers. As she pulls him up she can feel resistance, not a little confusion.
‘Come now,’ she says.
The bedroom is dark at her insistence; for this function it is always dark. After long kisses, she feels his hands on her back, palms on the wings, fingers massaging where the ink has stained and he does not seem to notice anything different. The ease of this deception surprises her. She lies down on the bed, sweat on her top lip, her illustrated skin sticking to the fitted bed sheet, but otherwise entirely airborne.
They make love every night that week. When the pleasure comes, she feels the wings beating, taking her higher, up into darkness. Tom is excited by the freedom she allows. He touches her bottom in public, kisses her open-mouthed in front of the girls. This is what it feels like to be desired; what it is to desire.
Good fortune stalks her. Tom at last finds a job; pay okay, enough for them to breathe easier, tackle some of the debts. She receives a pay rise and a school inspection records good things about her teaching. The kids, hers and the ones in class, behave. Amy is accepted on a scholarship to the local public school and Chloe is given the kind of glowing report that the year before would have seemed impossible. In class, Maria senses trouble before it happens, hears the jokes before they are told, sees the tears before students weep. At home, the girls seem to listen to her a little more closely; do not shy away when she gathers them into her arms. Tom and Maria redecorate and have people over for dinner; both of them cook. Everyone – Kevin and Megan, Alex and Helen, John and Nick – agrees that the house looks lovely; that they have done so much with the space.
She thinks of Gwen at random moments. She is there at school – walking the corridors, red-lipsticked, bobbles on her thick black tights, legs like pipe-cleaners, a rucked-up skirt – but mostly she is there when Maria is alone, in front of the mirror.
Maria wonders whether Gwen would have forgotten about the tattoos by the time of her fortieth birthday. Wonders whether she only has such a fearsomely exact memory of the poorly carpeted flat, the wood-box television set, the garish print above the mantel salvaged from a skip, and the promise made that they would get tattoos because Gwen never even saw her thirtieth birthday. Had she lived, would Gwen have questioned it ever having happened? I said that? Really? I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. I talked the most perfect rubbish then.
The house is silent and Maria is in her bedroom, shirtless and looking over her shoulder, pulling the skin taut over her shoulder blades. The morning is bright and the windows are open, curtains too. She looks at the tattoo and is glad it is Saturday morning.
Maria woke after Tom and the girls had headed out; a cup of tea left for her on the bedside table. Every Saturday the same, Tom taking the kids swimming. He swims alone, lengths, while the girls take classes with a trained coach. Maria never swims, only occasionally watches her daughters from the observation area, high up, the chlorine stink giving her headaches. She hates swimming pools.
She is thankful for the quiet, though the argument of the previous night remains loud.
‘Won’t you think of the girls?’ he’d said. ‘Won’t you think of me?’
That night he’d come home in excitement. An old colleague had moved to Orlando and had offered him their condominium there, they could stay for free. There was a pool. Huge and blue. They could swim; they could go to Disney World. It would be the first time they’d all gone abroad.
She thought of the wings. She thought of the pool. She shook her head.
‘I’m never getting on an aeroplane,’ she said. ‘You can’t make me. You know how scared I am of flying.’
They had tried to convince her. They had failed. She said the fear was too great. The wings twitched every time she said she would not fly. They twitched with every untruth.
It is the girls she thinks of as she observes the spreading, rousant wings on her back. When eventually she tells them of the wings, they will be delighted; they will trace their fingers over them; ask to hang on to her legs as she ascends. Her wings give a small shiver; she has been busy and has neglected them: she is glad to see them now in all their strength, in all their intricacy on her shoulder blades.
The girls were born after Gwen died, though Chloe has developed a considerable interest in her namesake – Tom would not have Gwen as a first name, so they sandwiched it between Chloe and Carlton. From photograph albums, Chloe has extracted the pictures of Gwen, the unpleasant gloss of the late eighties, the bad skin and badly cropped hair, and tacked them to the noticeboard in the girls’ shared bedroom. Chloe asks Maria about her sister often, and already understands she is being given the barest minimum, only a partial truth.
In the mirror the wings look as though they have always been there. Maria thinks of Gwen, un-illustrated, and begins to heave from the stomach, crying without tears. A kind of not-crying, a sort of anti-crying. She sits down on the edge of the bed and puts her head in her hands and imagines her sister laughing. The intensity of it spangles. The wings beat and she opens her eyes to see her sister standing in the mirror, staring at her, eyes fixed and dilated. Maria smiles at her sister, and there is no Gwen, just Chloe, her daughter, with red eyes and wet hair.
Chloe is open-mouthed. Maria wants to say something but does not.
‘Holy shit,’ Chloe says. ‘Holy shit. Dad!’
Chloe stares at the wings, Maria closes her eyes. Soon Tom is at the door, paternal hands on Chloe’s shoulders, turning her away and onto the small landing.
‘Go to your room,’ he says quietly and Chloe does as she’s told, though her mouth is open, desperate to speak. Tom walks back into their bedroom and closes the door. It is a small room, a double bed that doesn’t quite stretch as far as his legs, a wardrobe badly bolted to the wall, an inherited dressing table: far from the room he’d imagined for them. He looks at Maria’s wings, looks at the room. They will need money to move.
The conversation they should be having is about this. About affording a new house, giving the girls a room each now Chloe’s first period announced itself at the pool. He should be saying: We knew this day was coming soon. He should be saying to her now: We knew they couldn’t share a room for ever. It should be the conversation for which they’d once prepared themselves, laughing at what it would be like with teenagers when both of them felt like teenagers themselves. He should be saying: We’ll get through this.
Her shoulders are rounded, the tattooed wings lithe. He sits at a right angle to her; his hand on her back, just below the ink.
‘I see you’ve been hiding something from me,’ he says.
The wings are huge. Angels’, he thinks, with licks of what might be flame, though without colour it’s hard to be sure. They look large enough to support flight.
‘It’s almost funny,’ Tom says. ‘I could laugh. Seriously, I could laugh.’
He starts to trace the outline of the wings, then stops.
‘What else have you been hiding from me?’ he says. ‘What else have you got tattooed? You haven’t got a T and an M, one on each buttock, have you?’
In her class she’s seen how laughter can soon become the baying of a mob. She hears the same keening in Tom’s voice now, feels the people behind him, pointing where he points.
She sees him in the dressing-table mirrors; the three panels showing different aspects of his face: thin and greyly pinched. She can smell the pool on him, a scent that gathers as he gets up quickly from the bed. He is looking at the
door, the pillows, the rug.
‘Are you not going to say anything?’ he says. ‘Are you not going to say anything at all?’
‘I won’t apologize,’ she says. ‘I made a promise. I made a promise to Gwen.’
She looks at him in defiance: yes. He is shaking his head and staring at the wings’ reflection. He kneels down and his hands come for her face, her cheeks between penitent hands.
‘You told me you wouldn’t do anything like this again,’ Tom says. ‘You swore it to me, remember?’
‘I said I’d never do anything that affects us all without telling you beforehand,’ she says. ‘This is about me. Me and no one else.’
There is a kind of pleading, but for what she cannot say. Her breath is fast and shallow. He shakes his head and removes his hands from her face. He stands and looks down on her until she’s standing too. She holds out her hands, come now. He lists for a moment and then folds his arms around her. In the mirror, he can see his hands on her wings. His fingers on the tips, palms small against their span. He can hear the girls talking and fighting; Chloe is saying terrible things. Chloe is saying things that are making Amy cry.
‘It’s only my body,’ Maria says. ‘That’s all, it’s only my body. My body, isn’t it?’
‘We’ll get through this,’ Tom says. ‘We will.’
‘It’s only my body,’ she says. ‘It’s only my body, isn’t it?’ she says.
The two girls are fighting. Tom looks at the wings. He holds them as they shake, as they shrug from the tears.
‘Yes, Maria,’ he says. ‘Yes, it’s only your body.’
SOMETHING ELSE TO SAY
The Tap has twenty-seven beers on draught. Twenty-seven beers on draught and only one toilet. This is something to say. Yes. And the toilet is upstairs, at the top of a spiral staircase. This is something else to say. A follow-up. There is a third thing to say, too: you wouldn’t have thought it would be allowed, what with Health & Safety and all that. And the beer, of course. Twenty-seven different kinds to sample and discuss. Four, then. Four things to say.
