by Jane Healey
The other girls had gone on ahead, Joan and Linda still ignoring each other, and by some unspoken agreement, Camille and I had been slow to get out of the river and dry ourselves with a scarf and a jumper, slow to shake out our legs so we had enough feeling to walk from the clearing as the sounds of the others drifted away.
‘I’m going to miss the river,’ I said, reaching out to touch a low-hanging branch, cupping the leaves, careful not to pull any off.
‘Me too.’
The empty camera was slung around my neck; I had almost forgotten it. I wished that I had just one more film, that I could lift up my camera and stare at her through the lens, that I could record every change of her expression, every angle of her face.
‘Thank you for the silk nightgown and the tea dress,’ she said, stepping over a root, ‘I still haven’t paid you back.’
‘They were a gift.’
‘But I didn’t get you anything.’
‘Did you really fall down the stairs?’ I asked, watching the way the dappled light hid and then revealed the mark on her face. ‘You can tell me.’ There was something forlorn about Camille even with her quiet strength, something she held back.
She studied my face, opened her mouth and then closed it, looked away. ‘I really did. I was reading a book and I missed a step.’
‘I don’t like to see you hurt,’ I said. I felt chivalrous towards her, protective. In the woods with my hair tucked into my hat I thought of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of Twelfth Night, of a girl played by a youth and a boy playing a girl playing a boy.
‘I’ve always been clumsy,’ she said, and then proved her point by tripping over her own feet.
I caught her hands as she threw them out and we broke into laughter, our bodies loose with it, with the afternoon’s alcohol, and she wobbled again. We stumbled sideways off the path past a dry prickly bush that sheltered us from the rest of the woods. I pressed her shoulders back against a broad tree trunk for balance, my diaphragm aching.
‘Ouch,’ she said, gasping for breath and touching her face. ‘It hurts my jaw to laugh.’
‘You’re sure it isn’t broken?’ I touched my thumb to it, felt the heat of her skin again, the softness.
She shook her head and my thumb slipped along her jaw. I kissed it, the bruise, a soft peck. And then kissed the edge of it, closer to her mouth. I let the corner of my mouth meet the opposite corner of hers, feeling her quick exhale searing hot on my chin. Then she pulled me towards her by my neck, knocking my hat off, and kissed me properly.
I was shaking as her hands roamed over me. Everything was so much, every touch and sound and taste. This was awful, I thought, and wonderful, and I wanted her so much I felt my jaw go tight, knocked my teeth against hers as we kissed. I slid a hand down her back, the bark of the tree rough against my knuckles, and then across her backside, tugging her hips towards mine. Her fingernail caught on my stomach as she fumbled for the button of the jeans I had cut up to make shorts. The fabric of her skirt pleated in my hands, slipped away from her skin so that I could feel the short hairs of her thighs against my palm. My hands went inside her knickers; I felt the first touch of her, like dipping a finger into the molten centre of a candle, and I jerked back and turned away.
It was bright suddenly and I was frozen. I watched the wind rattle a dry twig along the ground, refusing to look at her, to see the disorder of her hair that I had tumbled out of place, to see her – blame me? To see her look at me as if I had done this to her?
‘Your hat,’ she said and bent to pick it up, dusting it off. She held it out to me.
‘Thanks,’ I said but it took me a moment, a sharp breath, to reach out my hand, to glance up as I took it back.
There was a fervour in her eyes that terrified me. ‘I knew you felt the same,’ she said. Was this worse or better than her hatred? Her lips were swollen, looked soft.
‘It’s nothing,’ I insisted, moving away. ‘It’s just the gin, just a game.’
‘OK,’ Camille said. But I could tell she didn’t believe me.
It’s just the booze, the sun, the heat, the river, I told myself. It’s just a moment of madness that won’t ever happen again.
*
Four days into the heatwave and the air feels like an oven, the leaves in the garden are crisping yellow, the nights never cool down and I can’t get any sleep – I feel as though my breath might evaporate, that the hot air might rush into my mouth and muffle me as I lie in bed with all the windows wide open and the curtains perfectly still.
Alex says the trains are hellish, that by the time they reach London the tension has boiled to fever-pitch and arguments kick off at the turnstiles. The twins are simmering with frustration; the sprinklers aren’t enough for them, the cool baths I give them make them cry, they don’t want to eat dinner. Maeve doesn’t want dinner either; she stays in her room with the door closed, and when I call through and say that she needs to let the air flow in, that it’s cooler downstairs, there is either no reply or later I see her slipping down the stairs and out of the door in a short sundress and no shoes and returning hours later, her cheeks so red from the heat they looked slapped. She skips lunch and refused to come down for dinner yesterday, and I would be worried about her following her friend Georgia except that when I open the fridge or the bin the next morning I see evidence of her late-night feasts.
‘She’s just being a teenager,’ Alex says, his voice slow with exhaustion when I tell him I’m worried.
Alex arrives home hours late for dinner and the act of saving him leftovers, heaping them up on a plate so he doesn’t even have to serve himself, makes me feel that I am some 1950s wife and exactly what I swore I’d never be.
I keep thinking of what the girls would think if they saw me now, what Camille would think, and it makes me feel a trembling pinch of shame. I picture them following me around the house, leaving wet footprints on the carpet, trailing damp hands on the wallpaper, peering at me with an insolent sneer, or worse, a deep sadness, as I pick up dirty clothes and make beds and wash dishes and scrub the bathroom.
One morning, overheated, jumpy and dry-mouthed from lack of sleep, I imagine that the dripping sound isn’t from the broken tap but from a wet plait swung over a shoulder or soaked curls heavy on a shivering girl’s back, and I turn around expecting to see a younger version of myself among the ghosts, looking at me in horror, as if I am the spectral presence haunting her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maeve had two blissful nights with Stuart, slipping out into the warm breath of the night air and across the path to the annexe, the moon her only witness. Inside, the space was lit by a lamp that Stuart moved to the bedside table when he took her to bed, and the blue dial of the radio that crackled and hummed, Stuart turning it up to share a song with her and then Maeve padding across naked to turn it back down when the distracting voices of the DJs returned, turning to find Stuart watching her. After she left the annexe, she pulled her hair across her face to smell the scent of cigarettes and aftershave, wondering if he was doing the same with his hands.
But then Stuart said he had to leave for a week.
‘It’s a favour for an old friend, he’s got some horrible virus and he needs me to cover his shoot,’ Stuart told her at the bottom of the garden as the overgrown grass throbbed with crickets. He had ventured upstairs in the house to find her, knocking on her door so softly she knew it was him, telling her to find him in the garden in a few minutes’ time.
‘Can’t you say no?’
‘Only if I want to burn bridges, and besides, it pays more than double what I usually get, money that we can use, you and I, in London.’
‘It feels like you’re leaving me.’
‘Oh, Maeve. It’s just a week. And you can call me. I have my mobile phone with me, I’ll give you my number. You can call me anytime. Here.’ He tore a piece of paper off his notebook from his bag and wrote a string of numbers. She hadn’t seen his handwriting before; maybe she had seen his notes b
ut she had been too distracted to focus. There are so many things she has left to learn about him – habits, stories, skills. Perhaps he feels the same way about her.
He leaves her with his number, with five photographs of her, and with a kiss stolen against the back wall of the house, just out of view of the windows, the bricks scraping her shoulder through her t-shirt.
At first it’s fine, the ache of missing him, the anticipation of his return, its own kind of pleasure. She goes to the annexe, rifles through the things he left behind in his haste. Notes about photography, the settings on his camera and for the developer – numbers and strange symbols. To be able to look at an image and know how to make it better – brighter, darker, louder, quieter, more beautiful – would be a wonderful skill to have. She avoids his books of photographs, all those images of destruction and death; it doesn’t seem right to scoop them into her self-indulgence. She puts on one of his t-shirts and shoves her feet in the pair of shoes he left, marvelling at how much larger they are than hers, and then she lies on the bed whose sheets smell of sweat and – she can tell the scent now – sex, and pictures them here as they were, feeling mildly, recklessly regretful that he didn’t take any photos of that.
She’s brought the photos of her with her from her room. He didn’t leave any in the annexe and not just because he doesn’t want them to be found, it’s because he’s covetous of them, of her. She looks at them – at herself in the field and submerged in the bath. The colours of the bath photos are washed with blue, or is it that the blue already there has been pulled to the surface? She doesn’t know what it’s called but the whites are bruised, there’s a bluish blush in the shadows of her neck and collarbone, and she can see a vein on her temple and on her throat. The ones in the field glow an orangey yellow, her hair brighter than it is in real life, the grass brassier. In one of the photographs in the bath his hand is touching her jaw, his skin darker than hers, his knuckles gnarled. She thinks of how one night he took her hand and traced the scars on his body with her limp fingertips. Aren’t you going to tell me the stories behind them? she whispered. Not yet, he said, we’ve got time, and then he put his own hand on her breastbone, over her heart, and she thought it was like he was a surgeon; if he pushed his palm, he could crack open her ribs tenderly and grip her heart in his fist.
It’s difficult to use the phone without her mother seeing or hearing; the signal isn’t strong enough to take it further into the gardens. She risks it the first day, swaddling herself in the blankets of her bed as her mother helps the twins with lunch, catching Stuart as he is walking down the street in London. Are you being good without me? he teases. Are you? she replies, and hides her grin at his laugh in the back of her hand like it might give her away. Returning the phone to its cradle in the hall without being seen is stressful. It’s easier to call him that night, when her parents are finally asleep, taking the phone into the living room, lying on the couch in the darkness.
There is an intimacy to talking on the phone that she hadn’t noticed before. The gust of his breath, the clearing of his throat, his rich laughter, seems to travel straight into her mind, bypassing her ears. It makes her stomach twitch, her toes curl.
I like your voice, she says into the dark of the room.
Do you? he replies.
There’s things that she feels she can’t say over the phone, words and expressions that might be whispered to him inside a room with a proper lock or hidden in the fields, but not here in the house where she keeps her other ear cocked for noise, for intruding footsteps.
Maeve is tired the next day and has a headache that the heat only worsens. She lies in the bath, watching the way the water rocks up and down the channel between her breasts, inspecting her body, pointing her feet and imagining that her photograph is being taken like some coy Hollywood starlet, hair gathered in a clip on her head, bubbles hiding her nakedness.
She slips under the water, trying to make it so her nose and mouth are the only parts of her face above the surface, but the water keeps sloshing up over her chin. Her hair feels like a cape around her shoulders, luxuriously soft in the water.
A muffled sound becomes an insistent knock on the door when she lifts up her head. ‘Don’t use all the water,’ her mother calls. ‘The twins need a bath today too.’
She knocks again and calls out her name until Maeve replies, ‘All right!’
Maeve waits a good ten minutes and then rises from the bath, the sudden shift in gravity, the weight of her body in the air, making her dizzy for a moment. She watches as the water glugs down the plughole, sucking against the sides, and wraps herself in a towel.
Her mother is in the hall, rifling through the cupboard, and turns when the door squeaks open. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ Maeve replies.
Her mother pauses with one hand on the shelf. ‘Are those bruises on your knees?’
‘I tripped.’
‘Looks painful.’
‘You know I bruise easily.’ Her hair is dripping down her back but she’s still warm. ‘It’s too hot.’
Her mother smiles. ‘You sound like the twins. Hey, wait,’ she adds as Maeve opens her bedroom door. ‘Can you try these shirts on, see if they fit for school?’
Maeve sighs, wishing she had never got out of the bath.
‘It’s not that big a chore, is it? Trying on a few shirts? You try on half your wardrobe every morning,’ her mum teases. ‘And don’t stay in your room all day, it gets too hot in there.’
That afternoon, while going through a box of things from London she had yet to unpack, Maeve finds an old card from her mother that went with a present of a pair of pearl earrings. She gave it to Maeve when she had completed her chemo and before the complications that sent her back to hospital. We’re so proud of you, her mother wrote, although her dad had only signed the card, not composed the message. We’re so proud of you, you’re the bravest person we know, our warrior.
Reading the message, seeing her mum’s love and hope, her jangling nerves, makes Maeve cry silently, her mouth an ugly grimace, her head throbbing as she wipes her cheeks. There is something about knowing that after this card Maeve got more ill than she had been before, so ill she would have welcomed death. She wasn’t a warrior then, just a tired girl. There is something too about the love of her mother set against the way Maeve feels irritated with her now, frustrated, scornful. Her parents do love her, but Maeve can’t stay their little girl and she can’t stay here with their fighting, her mother’s stifling attention. Leaving with Stuart might be an acceleration of things, an abrupt rupture, but it’s only natural that she grows up.
On the second night, she creeps down at 1 a.m. to phone him. The twins were awake late with the heat, and her parents argued about whether Alex should bring an electric fan back from London. To spend that much for only one week in a blue moon is ridiculous, her mother had said.
We can’t afford to buy a fan? You’re being over-dramatic, he had replied.
In the afternoon, Maeve had picked a rose from the garden and stroked its petals until her fingertips felt buzzy and oversensitive, but when she tried to plait it into her hair the brambles only snagged and scratched at her neck. She’s plucked the petals off now, is cupping them in her spare hand as she dials him.
How was your day? she asks, the teasing ‘darling’ implied.
Swell, he says, long. I got through it by knowing I’d be speaking to you tonight. How was yours?
A little sad.
Sad?
I don’t know.
Are you looking forward to the river photoshoot when I’m back?
We’re still doing that?
Of course we are, Maeve.
On the third night, Stuart takes twelve rings to answer and he has to shout to be heard over the noise. He’s at a party, he says, he’ll go outside, Call me back in a moment.
She holds the phone to her chest and counts to a hundred, staring at the dark ceiling, feeling a shiver despite the heat of the ni
ght.
Am I selfish? she asks him after the opening pleasantries are over. Every bad thought about herself is swirling in close now he isn’t here for her to focus on, to tell her she’s OK, that she’s good.
You are, but I like it that way.
Sex, he’s talking about sex and the way they are together. You can tell me, you know, she says, dropping her voice to a whisper, bringing the phone tight to her mouth, what you want me to do.
Yeah?
She likes that it feels daring, a little wrong, but afterwards she seems even more aware of her loneliness, the quiet of the house, all the empty rooms, her family fast asleep. Her body feels so small, unanchored.
You are my one good thing, do you know that? Stuart says. He’s been drinking; she can tell by the shape of his words, the rise and fall in volume.
I am?
Yes. I went through so much shit, you don’t even know the half of it. I walked through hell and then I come back home, tail between my legs, and there you are, waiting for me, and you’re perfect.
On the fourth night he doesn’t answer. The automated voice tells her that his number is unavailable. She calls four times but the answer is the same.
Back upstairs, she can’t sleep; her body feels hotter than ever, her breath tight. She hates the night, and the house, and her room.
She locks herself in the bathroom and gets in the shower without turning on the light, fiddling with the controls to make it too cold and then too hot. Tell me you love me, she thinks of saying to him the next time they speak. Tell me you won’t leave me, promise.
In the morning she wakes with the sheet kicked off and her t-shirt rucked up to her waist. She curls onto her side to stare at the postcards on her wall; the models and muses, the mythic heroines, the perfume adverts.
If she put her own pictures up there, would they fit?
Will Stuart’s project go on display one day, and where? She can only be so many heroines with red hair – Ophelia, Persephone, the Lady of Shalott – even with wigs she’s not sure his project can just have one model. Who will the others be? Has he already met them or will he in the future? Will they be as young as her? Or cool, composed, knowing?
