Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  When the guests began to arrive, Liv watched Lauren slip effortlessly into character. Her little sister did not require ironic distance to carry trays, or listen attentively to the bland and diplomatic answers that were produced by her bland and diplomatic questions. Lauren was good. And on this day, Liv knew she ought to be good, too.

  From one of the caterers she received a platter of pickled baby octopus and was revolted and amused by the piles of tiny rubbery pink bodies, which she thought would make rather good novelty nose-plugs. She congratulated herself on resisting the urge to shove one up each nostril before venturing out onto the lawns for her first tour of duty. Instead she just fixed her mouth into a slightly manic smile, and sashayed out into the gardens.

  ‘And how is Josephine?’ Liv asked. And, ‘Have you been making the most of the lovely weather?’ and, ‘Will you ski, this winter?’ When one of her father’s colleagues peeked down her cleavage while his fat fingers hovered over the octopus plate, she was beset with an urge to drop the plate, tear open her perfectly pressed bodice, unhook the centre clasp of her bra to reveal her trim little breasts and say, ‘Have a proper look, why don’t you, George?’ Instead, she just held her platter a little higher where it obscured George’s view.

  Toby Bourke was not a person of especial interest to Liv. If you had mentioned his name to her, she would have thought of the very little boy he had once been, and remembered how she and his older brother scared him during a game of hide and seek, locking themselves in the bungalow to play a game of doctors and nurses that left them both with smelly fingers and racing hearts. And yet here he was, wishing her a happy birthday and leaning over the baby octopus to kiss her on the cheek, having somehow morphed into a fifteen-year-old young man who knew how to flirt. She smelt his overdosed aftershave, felt his ever-so-slightly raspy cheek-skin against hers. She scanned the lean length of his torso through the fabric of his pale blue shirt (new, obviously, without the packaging creases ironed out of it), but reminded herself that, today, she was going to be good.

  Liv had heard of a thing called Tourette syndrome and sometimes she wondered if she had it. Or at least a touch of it. She was always thinking of doing strange things. Strange, stupid, childish things, like reaching out and sticking her finger up somebody else’s nose. Back in the kitchen to collect a fresh platter, she caught sight of her birthday cake and thought about scratching something obscene into its smooth blanket of royal icing. While she was standing with ladle in hand behind the punch bowl, lifting the dainty crystal cups off the hooks around its circumference, she imagined herself lowering her face right into the sweet liquid and blowing bubbles, coming up with a mouthful of punch and squirting it in a high pink plume over her head. When the adults started playing croquet (croquet, for fuck’s sake, could her mother have dreamed of anything more affected?), Liv wanted to leap out onto the pitch, drop her daks and lay a colossal turd, rotating her hips in big round circles so that the shit would come out like soft-serve on a Mr Whippy cone.

  It wasn’t that Liv exactly wanted to do any of these things; it was more that she worried that she might. To be on the safe side, Liv took a break from serving duties and took herself off towards the bottom of the garden, where a wrought-iron bench had been positioned in a secluded spot behind a screen of young pines. On this bench sat her grandmother—her mother’s mother—smoking. Liv sat down beside her and, without asking, helped herself to one of the Alpine cigarettes that Babs had transferred from their cardboard packet to a white Glomesh case. Babs gave her granddaughter the disapproving look that was an essential part of this transaction, then lit Liv’s cigarette with the slender flame from a silver-cased lighter.

  ‘Why thank you, Grandmamma.’

  ‘All the better to kill you with.’

  When Liv was born, Babs—whose actual name was Cath—had not wanted to be Nanna or Granny, so June had chosen ‘Nanette’ as a sensible approximation. But Liv had called her Babs. For at least a couple of years, June tried to stick to the original plan, asking ‘Where’s Nanette?’, saying ‘Go to your Nanette’, writing ‘With Nanette’ in the photograph albums, and ‘From Nanette’ in the front covers of books given at Christmas-time. But to Liv, for no particular reason that anyone could discern, her grandmother was Babs, and never anything else but Babs, and these days she was Babs to virtually everyone.

  Babs no longer lived in their small city but in a larger, warmer city to the north, where she had moved after her second husband died. Liv, far more often than Lauren, had been sent up north for holidays with Babs, and these were trips, full of sky and glass and sun, from which Liv always felt that she came back down, literally, to earth. Babs, who lived in an apartment on the thirteenth floor, seemed to conduct all of her socialising and shopping at a similar altitude, lowering herself to street level only in transit.

  ‘I suppose there will be a musical interlude today?’

  ‘Perfect, accomplished daughter number one, at your service,’ Liv said, making a curling gesture in smoke on the air.

  ‘And how are things, oh accomplished one, at le conservatoire?’

  ‘Actually,’ Liv said, on the drawback breath, then exhaled, ‘I’ve decided not to go back next year.’

  Liv was not certain this was true, but she thought she would try it on as a fact rather than the embryonic fancy it still was.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liv. ‘I can hardly wait to break the news to June.’

  It pleased Liv and Babs to agree that their particular personality was one that had skipped a generation and that June’s quite different one might sometimes require analysis and discussion. And she was always ‘June’ when Liv was in this mood. Liv supposed her mother was easier to talk about if stripped of her office first.

  ‘Speaking of whom,’ Liv said, ‘what did you say to her? She’s been chewing the corner of her lip ever since you came downstairs this morning.’

  ‘Well, she asked me,’ Babs said. ‘She said, “Do you like my dress?” And I told her it looked like something that might be accessorised with a commode.’

  ‘You terrible old bitch.’

  ‘Hussy. Speaking to your aged grandmother like that.’ Babs ground her spent cigarette between an elegant white wedge heel and a paving stone. ‘So, if not music, what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to do whatever one does do, nowadays, in place of running away with a circus. What would that be, do you think?’

  ‘Darling, I’m hardly up with the latest.’

  ‘What about exotic dancing?’

  ‘Quite exerting, I would have thought. Sweaty.’

  From beyond the screen of pines came the sound of a woman squealing joyfully, a man’s laughter. Perhaps he had tickled her, or spilled her drink.

  ‘I see Charlotte the harlot is here,’ Liv said.

  ‘Yes, poor love. She really must stop drawing her eyebrows on with a compass. It makes her look so terribly surprised.’

  ‘Why does June invite her?’

  ‘I suppose she thinks your father wants her here. I suppose she thinks that’s the kind of thing a Good Wife does. Perhaps she thinks it’s better if it’s right under her own nose.’

  ‘Do you reckon Lottie and Daddo, you know, at things like this . . . do you think they rendezvous somewhere in the house for a quickie?’

  ‘Olivia Wishart!’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘I can’t imagine where you learned to be so vile. I’m off to the powder room to avoid your contaminating influence.’

  Getting to her feet, Babs smiled both tartly and proudly, while Liv swung her feet up on to the seat and began to hum.

  Liv and Lauren had agreed to play Mozart’s Duo for Violin and Viola in B flat major. And, for a while, they did. On white Bentwood chairs, with the rose garden as a backdrop, within a treble-tiered semi-circle of seats that had been put out for the older guests, the sisters sat in their floral dresses, shook back their ponytails—Liv’s very fair, Lauren’s not q
uite so—lifted their instruments under haughtily held chins, and played. Not everyone chose to listen. Lauren could see little clusters of guests scattered the length of the garden, laughing and talking; she could see her father pressing the flesh at the drinks table.

  It was mostly the older ladies, their mother’s friends and the ones with season tickets for the orchestra, who gathered for the entertainment. Lauren worried about the way they swayed to the music. With their heads of sprayed hair, brittle and tacky as fairy floss, they might easily stick if they didn’t all go the same way. Lauren smiled, and Liv smiled too, as if this thought had climbed up to her on one of the staircases of notes that the viola was building for the violin to dance on. In time, pitch-perfect, they played so well together, the Wishart girls. Everyone said so.

  A few bars into the second movement, Lauren noticed Charlotte Simpson take one of the unoccupied chairs at the end of a row. Charlotte was something of a mystery to Lauren. She sometimes evened up the numbers if their mother was having a big sit-down dinner, and she always came to their parties. She wore clothes that floated a little way off her thin limbs and she made up her face the way a child might, with circles of pink on her cheeks and black mascara clotting her pale lashes. Charlotte always made Lauren think of thistledown, blowing around in the breeze and clinging to things. She was apt to be found attached to the sleeve of someone’s jumper, or—if she’d had one too many glasses of white wine—in their lap.

  When Lauren caught a change in the sound of the violin, it was neither in the tempo nor the volume. She looked over at her sister and thought instantly of the Cheshire cat. She could almost see the tail, long and striped, curling out from beneath Liv’s backside, its tip twitching in anticipation. Liv did not return Lauren’s questioning glance, but she wasn’t looking at her sheet music either; she was watching Charlotte Simpson, pupils dilated, gaze focused in the way of a feline about to spring. The Mozart that was coming off her strings was still delicate and playful, but also edgy, faintly menacing. Lauren looked to June, but her mother had herself tightly in check, her face tucked in tight around all its edges, betraying nothing.

  Liv got to her feet, still watching poor cornered Charlotte, and whatever it was that she was playing now, it was no part of the Duo for Violin and Viola in B flat major. Lauren let her viola’s sound trail away. She laid her bow and her instrument on her lap, smiled reassuringly at the audience, and Liv—still playing her fiddle—shaped her body to a sailor’s jig, knees and elbows pumping. To the roistering tune, electric with mischief, she skipped from side to side wildly enough to pop the bottom two buttons from her new dress and Babs, beneath the broad white brim of her hat, laughed. Toby Bourke was standing at the back of the seating banks and Lauren could see that Liv’s music was pulsing through him; he might even have been tapping a toe in time. Then Liv, in the clear, true voice that for years had annually brought home a blue ribbon from each of the city’s three separate eisteddfods, began to sing:

  Charlotte the harlot lay dying, a pisspot supporting her head,

  Surrounded by horny old noblemen, she rolled on her left tit and said,

  ‘I’ve been fucked by dear George in his office, I’ve been fucked by that balding QC,

  ‘Now I’ve come over here to this party, to fuck Mr Wishart MP . . .’

  At which point Clive Wishart stepped in, the skin of his face and neck taut with blood. He took hold of the neck of the violin—Liv’s hand still upon it—and silenced her.

  Lauren could not have said who alerted or summoned him. It was not Charlotte Simpson; she had left, almost running down the side of the house, out towards the street, speaking to nobody on the way. Women were gathered around June, comforting her, collecting up details; and Lauren, not knowing what else to do, lifted her viola and launched into the Prelude of Bach’s Suite No. 1.

  Ever after, Lauren would continue to love this prelude, as she loved it then. But she would never again hear or play its stirring, see-sawing phrases without thinking of her father marching her sister past those banks of chairs, up the veranda steps and into the house, of the birthday cake that never made it out of the kitchen, and of the tense, determined way Liv’s party went on without her.

  Still in her dress, on top of the covers, hair loosed from its ponytail, the door of her bedroom untouched since her father had closed it on her with something just short of a slam, Liv slept. She slept knowing that the party would come to an end, that several mauve-haired women who had drunk too much sherry would drive slowly and dangerously home in their pug-nosed hatchbacks, that a coterie of men would linger downstairs with her father and the single malt, and that sooner or later her mother would come up to her room to administer The Talk. Resistance was futile. June could have reiterated for the nation, and Liv knew from long experience that the only way to shorten The Talk was to agree. Yes, she would say, her behaviour was appalling. Yes, she would say, she understood that the Wishart family’s reputation was money in the bank.

  Sleep has layers but Liv could not seem to get past its shallows where she could still hear sounds from the world beyond and watch how artfully they threaded themselves into her half-conscious dreams. Although Liv could not have said precisely how much time had passed, when a knock came at her door she knew it was sooner than expected. She kept her eyes closed and sent her thoughts back out in search of the sleep that might, if she was lucky, put The Talk off until tomorrow. The door opened. She felt the weight of a body on the edge of her bed: not at the end, though, where her mother would sit, but closer, right up in the foetal curve of her body.

  Somebody, with a finger that was hot and hesitant, guided a strand of her hair away from her cheek, making a clear space on which to land a light, raspy kiss.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Liv said.

  But Toby Bourke held his nerve, even smiled. ‘I found these,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want them back.’

  In his hand were two buttons. She sat up, took them from him, and then—watchful of him, curious—set them down on her bedside table.

  ‘That was pretty wild down there,’ he said.

  She considered, weighing her options. She had to admire his courage. Also, sex would help her get back to sleep. She wrapped her hand around the back of his skull and pulled his face towards hers. The suction of his kiss dragged her lips right into his mouth and made a noise a bit like straw at the bottom of a milkshake.

  ‘Jesus, watch it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Like this,’ she said, clamping his head between her hands and pulling away from him every time he got too keen.

  She couldn’t tell which was more pleasurable, the feel of his hot sweaty hands, or his delighted disbelief when she allowed him to put them wherever he liked. She pushed him gently onto his back, reefed at his belt buckle.

  ‘You do want . . . ?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You have done this before?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Liv freed the slender, bendy young stem of his cock from his pants. It reminded her, almost disgustingly, of a Vienna sausage, the skin a bit baggy and peeling at its tip. She stripped off her knickers and spread the flared skirt of her dress out over his chest and hips and thighs. Not quite, she thought, the use her mother had had in mind.

  When Liv woke again it was from a deeper kind of sleep that washed through the lobes of her brain like salt water: wave after clean, rinsing wave of it. The last of the day’s light was sliding out of the sky and from her window seat she could see her mother crossing and recrossing the lawn with trays of leftovers, fingersful of sherry glasses, a garbage bag for the emptied bottles and serviettes. The Talk was overdue by now. Also, Liv had begun to feel a little sorry.

  In bare feet she descended two flights of stairs, went out through the hall, across the veranda and down onto the lawn, her toes feeling the cool evening wetness of the thick-bladed grass. She walked in the direction of the river, near to her mother. She loitered, inviting eye contact and when it did no
t come, she dallied by a table, flicked away some spilled food, folded the soiled tablecloth neatly into sixteenths. But her mother did not speak to her, or even look at her, only continued steadily on her ant-track between lawn and house.

  ‘Mum?’

  June looked chilly even in her cardigan; the shadows under her eyes were like bruises, and for this Liv felt responsible. Liv had grown to the same height as her mother. She was too big now to lay her head against her mother’s chest and feel safe and forgiven.

  ‘There’s nothing you can say, Liv,’ June said, already walking back to the house. ‘Nothing that wouldn’t be total bullshit.’

  Liv stood for a moment watching her mother walk away, then wandered all the way down to the river’s edge, lifted the skirt of her dress and stepped into the water with both feet. It was cold and she thought of how she must look standing there: as if she had been sliced off at the ankles by the steely still water. She thought, too, of the river and how it only seemed to be standing still, while in fact it was pouring itself invisibly out to sea.

  Curses take their own sweet time and for quite a while Liv remained unaware that she had fallen beneath one. That summer, she spent her days at the waterfront, on the foredeck of a permanently anchored ketch, playing music. She and her fiddle learned new songs, forgot the old prissiness, made merry with piano accordions, tin whistles and the spoons. For the holiday crowds, Liv in her torn-off denim shorts played hard and fast, powdered resin rising in a white cloud from her strings as she sawed serrated notes through the afternoons and on until the sun set.

  ‘Isn’t that Olivia Wishart?’ people would sometimes say, but the crowds were made up mainly of tourists, and of local families briefly unhitched from the year’s school-and-work routine, not people who knew her.

  The boat never moved, tethered as it was in a concrete sea, but Liv vomited into the scuppers anyway. Her fellow buskers held back her hair, gave her water to sip and salt crackers to nibble, helped her back onto her feet, kept playing. Her accordion-playing lover sailed away in his wooden boat, after one night shaping his hands to Liv’s bare and billowing belly. Even so, that she was pregnant was not something Liv was ready to admit. For a good many weeks after the idea occurred to her, she trusted that her suspicions were nothing more than irrational fears that would pass. For all the time that she half-heartedly worried in the back of her mind, she also kicked herself for not taking more care, and for being stupid enough to think—insofar as it was actually a thought and not just an ill-formed notion—that because Toby Bourke was as harmless as a kitten that his sperm was also.