When I told Glass what I had observed, I could see her pupils narrow. She clearly didn’t like what I told her, but initially her displeasure fell on me, not Dianne. I thought she considered me a sneak or a liar and was afraid I would spread the story around at school, which wouldn’t exactly enhance our dubious popularity. Then it occurred to me she might be afraid that Dianne would turn up one day with a pet, which Glass categorically forbade, being afraid of vermin. But in the days that followed I saw her watching Dianne closely, and if my sister was lying in the garden half awake or half asleep, surrounded by buzzing insects or noisy birds, Glass would immediately wake her roughly and call her in for some time-consuming household chore.
“If you don’t want any old mutts jumping up at you,” she once blurted out at Dianne roughly, “then give yourself a proper wash. It’s your stink that attracts those creatures.”
Dianne was unmoved by such remarks. She did whatever Glass asked her to do—cleaned the windows, scrubbed the floors, or washed mountains of dishes—so I soon instinctively began to imagine her in glass slippers, because she seemed like Cinderella to me. But she simply switched off; time went by without there being any change in her relationship with nature.
“What do you do to make animals come to you?” I asked her.
“I don’t do anything.”
“Well, why do they come, then?”
“To beg. And sometimes they tell stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“About summer and about nighttime.”
One evening Dianne disappeared. Glass and I didn’t miss her right away; it was only when she didn’t turn up for supper and it had long since turned dark outside that we rushed out in alarm into the garden and into the neighboring wood, calling her name. Glass had brought a torch with her. The strong beam of light shook, even when she came to a halt and flashed it around; that was how I realized she was trembling.
Dianne didn’t make a point of drawing attention to herself. After we’d already been charging about unsuccessfully for half an hour, a whirring sound coming from above the house made Glass and me look up. My sister was sitting on the roof of Visible, roughly halfway along the ridge, near an enormous chimney, where she stood out plainly, because she was wearing her white summer dress—the same dress she would have to throw away the following year when it got soaked in blood after the Battle of the Big Eye. Like a swarm of lively sparrows, dozens of bats were flocking all around her in a cloud that kept dissolving and reforming. It wasn’t till much later that I realized it wasn’t Dianne who had attracted the bats, but the mosquitoes and moths buzzing around her.
Glass had already shone the torch upward. The beam of light fanned out so wide across the distance that it scarcely reached Dianne. All the same I imagined I could see my sister’s eyes shining.
“How did you get up there?” called Glass.
“Climbed.”
It couldn’t have been too difficult. On all sides the branches of surrounding trees, solid and as thick as telegraph poles, reached out close to the roof of Visible, and even right over it in parts.
“And what in the devil’s name are you doing up there?”
“Nothing.”
“Come down this instant. The roof isn’t safe.”
“No.”
Glass gave a short nod, as if she had expected that answer. She switched off the torch and without a word marched back into the house. I presumed she would try to get to Dianne by way of the attic, and wondered whether to run after her or wait out here to see what would happen. I decided to wait. The attic was spooky. There were ghosts up there.
But nothing did happen. I counted the seconds. Five long minutes went by, but Glass didn’t reappear, either on the roof or in front of the house. The situation was creepy. I called out Dianne’s name but didn’t get an answer; she remained silent, a motionless white blob on the ridge of the roof, flickering like an illusion as soon as the black silhouettes of the bats reeled in front of her. I found Glass in the kitchen. She was standing at the stove, where she had put water on to boil for tea, as she did every evening at this time.
“If she thinks she can wear me down, she’s got another thing coming.”
As she spat these words in the air she poured boiling water into the teapot. Then she sat down at the table, lit a cigarette, and disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. She drank the tea trying to appear calm, but her gulps were too small and too hurried. I sensed that it was costing her an enormous effort of will to make me believes she was feeling a calm that she wasn’t. Quite the contrary—her anger filled the entire kitchen, spreading out from her in concentric circles like rings in water that’s had a stone thrown into it. My mouth felt dry, locked tight. I stood in the doorway, a ton weight on my shoulders—the whole of Visible, and topped off by Dianne.
“I know what I’m doing,” was all Glass said.
Her words may well have been intended as much to reassure herself as me; either way, they filled me with utter dread. Obviously I was the only person who hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on here. I just sensed that a battle was being played out—Glass and Dianne were the unequal combatants, our little family and Visible the field of battle. But why were they fighting, and what was the prize? I couldn’t really imagine that Glass cared whether Dianne got sniffed at by dogs, or cats rubbed themselves against her, or insects settled on her as if she were a honey pot. There had to be more to it than that.
Glass went to bed without going to look for Dianne or even saying good night to me. I felt I was being unjustly punished and ran outside. Dianne hadn’t stirred from the spot; she was still sitting enthroned on the roof ridge, as if she were queen of the bats holding nocturnal court up there. I wondered whether I should climb up to her but didn’t know where to start from. The dreaded attic was taboo, so all that was left to me was the route across the tree that Dianne had taken. But it was dark, and I was afraid of falling. An accident would be sure to prompt Glass into some kind of reaction; at the least it would unleash profound remorse, and if I was dead and Dianne as well, then it would serve her right. On the other hand, should I really ally myself to Dianne, who was not only every bit as stubborn as Glass and insisted on some right I knew nothing about, but was also just as self-centered as Glass and simply ignored me and my confusion?
Maybe it was best just to wait. I sat down under one of the trees, closed my eyes, and pressed my hands down on the grass. I pushed my back into the bark of the tree trunk, a silent, watchful, black emptiness inside me. I listened. 1 wanted to hear what Dianne was hearing, to feel what she felt, but all I heard was the soft whirring of bats’ wings beating, the whispering of the wind passing through the branches of the trees, and all I felt was the pounding of my heart. At some point I fell asleep.
I was woken by something tugging at my hand. I opened my eyes. It was still dark, and for an annoying moment I thought I was dreaming because I wasn’t in my bed but still in the garden.
“You’re covered in spiderwebs,” I heard Dianne saying. “You look all silver.”
She pulled me to my feet, which were damp and stiff and seemed barely able to support me, and led me into the house, into our bedroom, where she immediately got undressed and slipped into bed.
“Will you come and sleep in my bed, Phil?”
“Yes.”
I got undressed as well and crawled into her bed. She snuggled up to me. Her body was icy. I wrapped myself around her, rubbing her arms and legs with my hands to warm them, then her back, then her bum, chest, stomach. I planted little kisses all over her, as Glass sometimes did after she bathed us because she found the fresh smell of our skin irresistible. My lips burned against Dianne’s icy cold skin, which tasted of salty milk.
“Dianne,” I whispered. “Why did you do it?”
She snuggled up even closer. I waited. A few seconds later I heard the sound of her regular breathing. A little later, as the gray fingers of dawn crept across the windows and the sound of Dianne’s
breathing yielded to the first muted twitterings of the dawn chorus, I finally fell asleep.
Glass let us sleep late. When we got up toward midday and pattered into the kitchen, she was on the spot immediately. She made us hot chocolate, which she never normally did, and sandwiches cut into bite-sized pieces—equally unusual—and amused us with lighthearted meaningless chatter. Dianne drank her chocolate and grinned at me triumphantly over the rim of her mug.
And that was that. After this incident I never saw Dianne surrounded by animals again, neither by insects nor by dogs or cats. Whatever it was that went on that night between her and Glass, it seemed to have destroyed my sister’s power over living nature, and Dianne didn’t give the impression that it particularly mattered to her or that she missed anything.
Yet a few years later when Kat informed me in a whisper that she had seen Dianne talking to a lizard, and made this her excuse for wanting to keep away from my sister, it gave me a start. Dianne hadn’t forgotten. She was only pretending.
“You didn’t understand then, did you?” says Glass. She’s lit a cigarette, drawing on it far too quickly and too often.
“How could I?” I ask in reply. “I was a child. We were both children! To be honest, I don’t understand to this day.”
The car glides through the night, the engine a soft spooky sound. It isn’t far from the hospital to the police station, but we’re stopped twice by red lights, and I wonder why they keep on working at night, as apart from us there’s no one about. I see Michael cast a brief glance at Glass before looking at me in the rearview mirror. I shrug.
“There isn’t much to understand,” Glass explains. “I wasn’t bothered by any old animals, creepy-crawly creatures, and all that. It was … I don’t know—this exaggerated empathy that Dianne had at the time.”
“In what way?”
“For heaven’s sake, Phil, are you blind?” Glass winds down the window, flicks the glowing cigarette end out into the night; the wind sweeps through her hair. Then she winds the window up again. “Don’t you see what happens to such people? You listen closely to your inner self, or worse still, you listen to everything around you. And this is how you stagger through the world at large, head in the clouds, trusting everything and everyone, and then …” She stops for a moment. “And then things start to happen.”
“What sort of things?”
Even as I ask the question, I know I’m not going to get an answer. Glass turns her head and looks out of the window.
We drive past a small bunch of rowdy drunks propping each other up. They wave at us. One of them is standing by the wall of a house, supported by one hand, his body bent into an absurd question mark, his trousers hanging round his knees. Urine runs across the pavement. A street lamp casts a sharp circle of light over part of the man, positively cutting him in half. I shiver.
“Where were you, Phil?” asks Glass.
For days she didn’t ask how my date with the boy went, on account of which I had drummed her out of her sleep. I answer her reluctantly.
“With my friend.”
“What’s his name?”
“Nicholas.”
“You haven’t told Kat about him yet, have you?”
It’s the second time today that I’ve heard this question. Only when it came from Nicholas as we sat on the bench by the river, I was less tense than now. And also less tired.
“What makes you say that?”
“She called. Wanted to come by and watch some TV movie with you.”
“Did you tell her where I was?”
Glass casts a thoughtful glance at me over her shoulder. “I didn’t even know where you were, darling. I said you were spending the night at Tereza’s.”
I listen to the comforting purr of the engine. My body is quivering. I want to be with Nicholas.
“What you’re doing isn’t fair to Kat,” says Glass after a while.
“You know what she’s like. She gets jealous so easily.” To tell her now that I had made up my mind to speak to Kat tomorrow about Nicholas would sound like a cheap excuse, if not an outright lie.
“She’s your friend, Phil.”
I bend a forward a little. “So what? Tereza’s your friend, and does that mean you’ve ever told her about my father?”
From the backseat I can see Glass only in profile, but that’s more than I need to sense her total resistance. “Phil, I thought we’d discussed this subject more than enough.”
“Discussed? We’ve never discussed anything! All you’ve ever said a hundred times over is that there’s nothing to discuss.”
“And that’s the way it is. I consider this discussion terminated.”
“Fine, and I consider it postponed! You can’t avoid the issue forever.”
Naturally she doesn’t answer. I sink back in my seat. It’s not just Glass but myself that I’ve driven into a corner. I feel hot, I feel dazed. I wish I could get out of the wretched car. Michael has listened to our short dispute without saying anything. I’m grateful to him that he doesn’t try to ease the tension with stupid jokes, but grateful too that he doesn’t take sides, for he could easily now touch Glass, take her hand, put an arm round her, and make me feel excluded as a result. But he doesn’t do any of this. Goodness knows what he must think of us. Maybe he thinks I’m selfish. It’s supposed to be about Dianne, not about me and Number Three. But that has to do with Dianne as well. It’s all connected: somewhere in America there’s a man I don’t know, who has no idea that his daughter gets up to wild midnight antics—who doesn’t even he know has a daughter, and who, even if he did know, probably wouldn’t give a damn, and if he had ever set eyes on her would care equally little whether his daughter was acting up the way she does.
Asshole.
“Your Nicholas,” Glass pipes up from the front. “Why don’t you bring him along to Visible one day?”
I sit up in surprise. This is something new. Giving in isn’t usually her style. I wonder whether it’s thanks to Michael that she’s turned placatory so quickly, whether he has some magic touch that can tame her temperament and deflect her defensive rages. And I’m too tired to reject her peace overture.
“OK. If he wants to.”
I breathe a sigh of relief as we finally arrive and Michael parks the car in front of the police station.
If there’s one thing I won’t forget about this night, I already know that it’s the quality of the light. In the hospital it filled the air like a cold blue fog; here in the office we now enter it torments you and wraps itself around you like a slow-moving stream of yellow water. It’s enough to suffocate you.
Wearing one of her dun-colored dresses, Dianne is standing in front of a painfully neat desk. Perched behind it, hunching his back, is a gangling young police officer, in the process of trying to fit a sheet of paper into a manual typewriter. I recognize him instantly. It’s Acer, the policeman who turned up at Visible two years ago on account of the graffiti on the office walls of the UFO’s gynecologist. He must surely remember us just as well as we do him. Wonderful.
The other girl, Kora, is sitting on a wooden chair. She looks gaunt and tired. I don’t know whether it’s Dianne’s own choice or whether Acer has elected to make my sister the spokesman for the two. Neither do I know where on earth Kora’s parents have got to, and whether they are likely to turn up here at all. Dianne smiles when she sees us. Acer himself only looks up briefly, signals us to wait, then finishes putting the paper into the typewriter and turns to Dianne.
“What were you doing by the river?”
“But I’ve already explained.”
“I need it again for the report.” Acer’s gaze is firmly glued to the typewriter. He doesn’t notice how beautiful Dianne is, that as she speaks she gently moves her arms up and down and how as she does so her hands slowly flutter as if around a flame.
“We were swimming. Is that against the law?”
“Wasn’t it a bit dark for swimming?”
“There’s a full moon.”
“Were you wearing swimsuits?”
“What for?”
Clack, clickety-clack, clack. One of the typewriter keys sticks each time it’s struck. Acer has to pry it up awkwardly with his fingers.
“Do you often meet to do this? Swim at night?”
“Yes.”
“When did you notice that you were being watched?”
“We didn’t. The guy was crouching in the bushes somewhere jerking off.”
“According to you.”
“No, I know. His pants were still down when we found him.”
“Where was the dog at this time?”
“How should I know? It’s his bloody dog.” Dianne is still moving her hands about; now it’s as if she’s winding thread, her fingers fluttering. “The creature was probably just crouching in the reeds, watching his little master wanking.”
The blond girl, Kora, sniggers. Acer raises his head; a single glance from him, not angry, not warning, just a glance, is enough to silence the girl. He is no longer the novice I encountered two years ago. At least there is no more of the nervous hiccuping that nearly made him choke in the kitchen at Visible, or maybe it’s just a territorial issue, as he’s on home ground in his police station.
And Dianne isn’t Dianne. I’ve never seen her like this—so self-assured and potentially aggressive, and certainly not so gross as this in her choice of vocabulary. In her own use of language Glass has never been particularly restrained, but it’s the first time I’ve heard Dianne using coarse language.
“What happened then?” asks Acer.
“We heard growling. Well, a kind of growling … At first I thought there was another storm coming—after all, it had been raining during the day. Then there was a cracking sound somewhere in the bushes. We climbed out of the water—”
“At that point you were in the water?”
“Yes.”
The Center of the World Page 20
