The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  In some frames of mind, this notion was not unpleasing to her. It allowed her to sit and watch, and, the truth was, she really didn’t like things happening, not things she wasn’t expecting. She hoped for a middle and old age without surprises.

  Nonetheless, she was sitting at the kitchen table with three cigarette papers, trying to remember how they were supposed to fit together.

  “Let me have a go.”

  This was a reasonable request as Rosie was much better at spatial stuff. One of the benefits of having brought her into the world was that Constance no longer had to wrap Christmas presents. Rosie always did it for her and was much more economical and neat about it.

  Constance had never rolled a joint in her life. She had always got someone else to do it because she was incapable of making one that even remotely resembled something that could be smoked. She didn’t think it was a necessary skill to have since, in 1968, there had been plenty of talented joint rollers around, and in the last twenty years, though she kept a little hash about, she never found herself needing a smoke so urgently that if there wasn’t anyone around she suffered for the lack of it. The hash on the table was eighteen months old. She wondered if it had gone off.

  But now, in these circumstances, she felt the need for rolling skills because she thought she ought to be in charge of the process. However, working out the ought of these circumstances was precisely her problem, for the only ought that she could be sure of was that these circumstances ought not to have arisen. And yet they had, with an inexorability that confirmed her theory of spiral time. The laughter had already started.

  She pushed the papers across the table to her thirteen-year-old daughter and busied herself with tearing off the underside of the lid of the cigarette packet, rolling it into a compact cylinder to make a tip.

  “What a talent we have for organisation,” she said, knowing that the only way to forestall the laughter was to nail down the absurdity out loud. “We should go into business together.”

  Rosie was too busy concentrating on the cigarette-paper puzzle to answer. Anyway, for her it was a serious business.

  “Why can’t you use just one paper?” she muttered, although she had just got the hang of it.

  A good question. In the days when she was doing this stuff she hadn’t thought to wonder.

  “It’s traditional,” Constance said, cutting off another protoplasmic chuckle from on high.

  This arm of the spiral began when Rosie came home from school and asked, “What’s a spliff?”

  Answering people’s questions as nearly truthfully as possible had become a habit with Constance. It wasn’t a question of morality; more that it was easier and less confusing in the long run. On these grounds Constance had always answered Rosie’s questions truthfully whenever possible. The first signs that this might bring a difficulty all of its own had occurred the previous year while Rosie was leafing through a woman’s magazine. She looked up.

  “It tells you how to do blow jobs,” she said, astonished, her upper lip contracting with distaste.

  Constance blinked at her twelve-year-old. “What do you know about blow jobs?”

  Rosie was dismissive. “Everyone knows what blow jobs are.” Very sophisticated. “It’s disgusting.” Not so sophisticated. And a question, “Isn’t it disgusting?”

  Constance felt like dirty bathwater swirling down a plughole. She could see what was coming, but what was to be done about it? She switched to the evasion principle of child-rearing.

  “Well,” she said with a shrug that did nothing to relieve the sudden tension in her neck, “it’s a normal part of sexual activity.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Rosie insisted. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  Now Constance was in the very centre of the whirlpool.

  “It’s a normal part of sexual activity,” she repeated without hope.

  Rosie stared at her mother in disbelief. Constance felt trapped for both of them. She was certain that children didn’t want to know about their mother’s sex lives. Why had Rosie asked? A wave of anger went through her, aimed at Rosie, who she felt should have known better. Telling the truth depended on the good sense of people not to ask the questions they didn’t want to know the answers to.

  Rosie began to cry and raced upstairs to her bedroom. She wouldn’t let Constance kiss her goodnight. The next day she came home from school eating a Mars Bar. Constance welcomed her at the door and bent down for a bite. Rosie snapped the Mars Bar from Constance’s reach.

  “Get your own. I know where your mouth’s been.”

  They’d got over it. It hadn’t been mentioned again, but Constance had heard hoots of laughter squeezing into the space that was left between Rosie’s Mars Bar and herself at twelve, trying, but being unable, to imagine her parents, her parents, doing it. Very funny.

  So when Rosie asked, “What’s a spliff?” Constance was prepared for the spinning in her head to start.

  “You mean dope?”

  “I don’t know. You smoke it or make brownies out of it.”

  “You mean dope,” Constance sighed. “Who smokes it or makes brownies out of it?”

  Rosie’s friends did, or some of them said they did and suggested that the others try. There was talk of acid, too. In a panic Constance tried to remember being thirteen. She smoked in the school boilerhouse—Black Russian, because style was of the essence—but no dope. There wasn’t any around then. She didn’t have her first joint until she was fifteen. After that, for a while, there was no stopping her: no substance that she wouldn’t put into her body; no risk she wouldn’t take. But that, she remembered, as if she were watching archive film, was because she had been terminally angry at the time and dedicated to the task of self-destruction.

  Rosie wasn’t angry. Her interest in dope was the equivalent of Constance’s cigarettes in the boilerhouse—a matter of style. She played Constance’s gouged recordings of the Velvet Underground and Jefferson Airplane; she carried her books to school in a sack made of a remnant of mirrored, silver-threaded cloth of eastern origin; she burned incense in her room while she did her homework. But Rosie wasn’t raging against the world or looking as far afield as possible for some kind of life that made more sense than the one she’d been allocated. And Rosie didn’t want to die.

  All the things that Rosie wasn’t should have made Constance proud of the job she’d done. That her daughter wasn’t a twitching, melancholy, suicidal mess was an indication that Constance had done better than her own mother. But, as Constance pointed out to anyone who said so, to be proud of that was like coming home flushed with the day’s success because one hadn’t been run down by a lorry. Rosie made Constance uneasy, precisely because she was amiable, positive and lacked the desire to tear her world (and herself) to pieces. Constance waited, moment by moment, as if holding her breath, for the trouble to begin. The “What’s a spliff?” question was the starting pistol. Now, it would begin. Constance steadied herself with the thought that she had survived. Probably, Rosie would, too. Probably.

  And yet it wasn’t the beginning of anything that Constance recognised. Rosie wanted information. She took in Constance’s warning about acid and hard drugs and alcohol, nodding impatiently.

  “Well, of course I wouldn’t use that stuff, I don’t want to ruin my life. I was just thinking of having a spliff once a fortnight or so. At weekends,” she added.

  Constance stared at her daughter, not knowing what to say next to this orderly adolescent. Liberalism and logic came to the rescue in spite of Constance’s inner knowledge that there was something very wrong with the conversation.

  “Well, in that case, you ought to know how to use the stuff.”

  It made sense. Rosie was going to try it anyway. She’d better know how much to use and what to do with it.

  So the lesson commenced. In the bright light of the kitchen, tobacco was released from a cigarette and spread on the paper; the dark lump of hash was burned enough to make it crumble and Rosie w
atched carefully as not very much was added to the tobacco. It was not unlike the time that Constance had shown her how to separate egg yolk from the white. Rosie’s dexterous fingers rolled the paper around the mixture, pushed the tip into one end and twisted the other. There it was.

  “But I’ve never smoked,” Rosie suddenly remembered.

  Constance spread her arms wide and lifted her shoulders in a fatalistic gesture.

  “It won’t get me addicted to cigarettes, will it?”

  “Not once a fortnight at weekends, I shouldn’t think.”

  Constance lit the twisted end and inhaled a couple of times. Then she handed the joint to Rosie, who took it gingerly, holding the smoking cylinder at arm’s length as if it might explode. The look on her face suggested she was about to take some particularly nasty medicine. She craned her neck forward rather than bringing her hand to her mouth as if that would keep the smouldering joint at a safe distance, and took the tiniest puff. Immediately, she started coughing and flung the joint away from her on to the table.

  “It’s horrible!” she yelled and dashed out of the room. A few moments later she came back, having brushed her teeth to get rid of the foul smell of tobacco on her breath. But she was ready to try again, determined to get on with the learning process. Altogether, she brushed her teeth three times before the joint was finished, and inhaled almost nothing. With every inhalation, each more tentative than the last, she choked and pushed the joint towards Constance to get it out of her hands. By the third puff Constance had started laughing at their kitchen comedy; by the fourth Rosie joined in, between bouts of coughing. Constance didn’t feel much effect. It looked as if the dope had had its day.

  And wickedness seemed to have had its day, too. Comedy had taken over and Constance and Rosie’s laughter combined with another peal that didn’t come from either of them. This was how it was, then, Constance supposed, looking across at Rosie who, still giggling, had given up trying to smoke the joint and was waving it in the air, making pretty curling patterns with the smoke. Constance could see her own features in her daughter’s smiling, rueful, slightly flushed face. She watched Rosie’s eyes follow the column of smoke she had made rise and twirl in the air; they were the same eyes that stared back at Constance when she looked in the mirror. Constance followed the smoke with her own eyes until, at the top, it lost formation and wafted away to invisibility. What did the twisting coil remind her of?

  She looked back at Rosie and saw the tiny baby she had been. And before that, inside her, the foetus that had grown from an undifferentiated cell. And before that, her own chromosomes, dividing; a reduction in preparation for reproduction. But, down there in the land of chemical bases, the intertwining double helix had no interest in irony. The similarity and dissimilarity between Constance and Rosie was accidental to DNA’s essential task of ensuring its own reproduction. It was a humourless business.

  Constance looked around her and saw, not the two of them sitting at either side of the table, but the teeming, whirling millions that really inhabited the kitchen. She was stuck for a moment in the turbulence of a chaotic, microcosmic world: as real as real could be. Then she heard the laughter again, coming from she didn’t know where, but sounding close in her ear, like a booming whisper, and she was back in the place of process and repetition; held tight in the spiral of time and comedy, and grateful for both.

  Constance wiped the residual tears of her own laughter from her eyes. She took the joint from Rosie’s fingers, disrupting the pattern of smoke, and ground it out in the ashtray.

  “Well, there it is,” Constance said to her daughter, with a smile. “That’s drugs. Now, about sex . . .”

  The Old Princess

  Long ago the old princess had stopped the clocks in her tower. First, in the early hours of one sleepless dawn, the one in her room at the top of the winding stairs, and then, some years later, when she realised the door was no longer secured (had it ever been?), the big chiming clock down on the lowest landing. What was the point of saving herself from having to hear the seconds tick-tocking away in her room, like raindrops on a window, or tears down a cheek, if every hour, on the hour, the chimes downstairs rang out?

  Once both clocks had been stilled, the passage of time was marked only in large, slow movements of the seasons; though she had noticed lately how rapidly even the seasons had taken to coming around. She would look out of her turret window and think, “Is it spring already?” as the greening trees in the forest surrounding the tower told her it was. And then, hardly a few days later, it seemed, she would wonder that winter and its stark, frozen branches had arrived so soon and unexpectedly. When spring came round again, the greenness was renewed, but her heart no longer leapt with ancient relief at the coming alive of the world so reliably once more.

  She had been waiting, after all, for a very long time; for as long as she could remember, and possibly longer than that. So long, in fact, that she had almost forgotten what it was she was waiting for.

  In many ways, she had been fortunate. Her keepers, whom she never saw, provided food which appeared through a small flap of the great oak door of her tower room at regular intervals, as did clean laundry, washing equipment and towels. She lacked for nothing to keep herself clean and healthy. In addition, every week, for as far back as memory went, a parcel of books appeared through the flap, which she would read and then (after she’d read a book on the history of library catalogues) arrange alphabetically by author or subject, depending on whether they were fiction or nonfiction, on the shelves covering the walls of her room.

  Once, on her tenth birthday, a kitten arrived, mewling through the flap with a label round its neck saying: Happy Eleventh Birthday. That week, the parcel of books included one about what happens to the bodies of young girls at puberty, so she wasn’t altogether surprised when her first period arrived. Neither, it seemed, were her keepers, who from then on provided sanitary towels once a month with the clean laundry. Some pages had been torn out of the book, and what she read failed to explain why the changes were occurring, only that it was completely normal. Later, she understood that princesses in waiting had to remain innocent, even if their bodies were obliged to conform to nonregal standards.

  She called the kitten Dinah after a cat in a book she had read. It came and curled up, purring, on her lap and she enjoyed its company. After that, cat food arrived along with her own through the flap. Nothing else came, but she seemed to have everything she needed while she waited. The princess knew she was waiting because she had read in her books, which were a motley but comprehensive selection, about princesses in towers, and knew that waiting was what they did. I’m a princess in waiting, she told herself, stroking Dinah thoughtfully.

  For a long time she was perfectly content. But once her sixteenth birthday had passed, a certain restlessness came over her. She had been half expecting something to happen. One morning, she supposed, she would find the door to her room open and during her investigation of the castle she would discover a turret room with an old woman in it, spinning cloth. But her door never opened, and no sharp instrument appeared on which she might prick her finger and thus set the wheels of her destiny in motion. The princess and Dinah grew into young woman– and cat-hood quite undisturbed by the world outside.

  When the restlessness came over her, the princess would confide to Dinah with a sigh that she wished something would happen. Dinah would merely purr her contentment back to her mistress. “It’s all very well for you,” the princess would say tetchily. “You’re not a princess.” She had never read a story of a cat with a destiny (Puss in Boots not having come through the doorflap), but every single story about princesses was, so far as she could see, deeply concerned with the subject of their destiny.

  After the eleventh birthday there were no further birthday presents, and eventually the princess lost count of her years, though she noticed changes in herself. Her flesh became rounder, her bones less prominent, as her hips widened and her breasts grew. When she look
ed at herself in the polished brass plate on the wall, she hardly recognised the little girl she used to see—and in any case, she didn’t have to stand on the wooden stool now. Of course, these changes were gradual, and her self-inspection an almost daily habit, so she was not under the impression that someone quite different had come along and taken her, or the other person’s, place. It was only when her memory took large jumps into the past that she realised that she had been at least two people while waiting in her tower. And then, later still, there were three. The rounded flesh loosened and lost its tone, her bones became, once again, more prominent, her face narrower and more angular. Her bright blonde hair faded to a colour that was more like the dust hanging on to the cobwebs in the corners and her eyes failed to light up the polished brass with their sparkle as once they had.

  It was then that she stopped the clock in her room. She found herself waking in the early hours, her lips tingling with the touch of warm alien flesh, only to discover she was alone as usual and the clock was ticking with an insistent loudness in the silence of the night. Dinah continued to purr, though she was older and scrawnier, too. It came upon her that, in spite of all the books telling her about princesses in towers and other waiting areas, and their eventual discovery, she was a princess to whom nothing was going to happen. There had not been a single story about such a princess, and she was wholly unprepared for such a special destiny. It seemed to her extraordinary—in the sense of outrageous—that she should be the exception to such a universal rule among princesses. Why was it that she was different? Why her?