Guilt

by Amanda Robson

  Sometimes her mind clears for a while and she steps back in time.

  Walking hand in hand with her sister down Fisherman’s Path in Tidebury. The silence of the sandy walkway pressing towards her. No footfall here. Her sister’s palm hot against hers. The sweet smell of the pine trees. The wind from the sea whispering across her cheek. For a few seconds, she forgets. For a few seconds, she feels her sister with her as if she’s still alive. But then she remembers and heaviness engulfs her.

  Sometimes her mind reaches back still further. She is a child again, sitting with her sister on her mother’s knee. Her mother smells of vanilla and lavender. Her mother is wearing her favourite mohair sweater: the one that feels so comforting when she rests her head on her breast.

  It doesn’t last long. Her mother and her sister fade. Searing loneliness invades again. Locked up in solitude from 5:45 p.m. until breakfast. The pain of loneliness is sharp. But sometimes, just sometimes, the pain pushes the grey away.

  THE PAST

  24

  Zara

  I return from my late-night photographic workshop to find you lying on the sofa, flat on your back, a half-cooked stir-fry on top of the oven. The flat is eerily quiet.

  ‘What’s happened? Where’s Sebastian?’

  You open your eyes and sit up. Your eyes are red and swollen. ‘We had an argument. He stormed off.’

  ‘An argument? What about?’

  You look away from me. Your chin wobbles. You swallow hard to stop yourself from crying. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Please ask him.’

  ‘But you are my sister. I want to know what’s upset you.’

  You reach for my hand and squeeze it. ‘I really think it’s best if you ask him.’

  I give up. I know of old when you are in a mood like this I won’t be able to get you to talk.

  I text Sebastian. He is waiting for me on Harbourside. I step back out into the sharp October night, drizzle on the wind. Out of your beautiful flat with its brand-new kitchen, brown leather sofas, and 50-inch TV. Miranda, I know Sebastian and I have invaded your home. Your life. I know that by upsetting you we are skating on thin ice. But I need to live with you. I can’t afford to live anywhere else, and I need to be with Sebastian too. He’s saving up for a deposit to buy a flat for us. When he does we will both move out. Please, Miranda, keep your patience with us; soon we will both be gone.

  I find Sebastian pacing up and down outside a noisy bar, smoking a cigarette. He must be upset. He hardly ever smokes. As soon as he sees me he throws it to the ground and stubs it out.

  ‘Come on, let’s go inside, have a drink.’

  The pub smells of chips and stale beer. The stench punches into my nostrils, making me feel nauseous. But drizzle has turned to heavy rain, so we decide to stay put rather than get drenched trying to find anywhere else. I head for a table in the corner. Sebastian goes to the bar. He buys a glass of wine for me, and a pint of beer for himself. As he is putting my drink in front of me, I ask him what he and Miranda argued about, shouting above the house music, which is pumping out at high volume.

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’ He pauses as he sits down. He takes a sip of his drink. ‘Your sister is tetchy. Touchy and difficult.’

  ‘That’s usually how I’ve been described. Are you sure you’ve got it the right way round?’ I pause for a sip of wine.

  ‘I was only trying to help with the cooking. She got very ratty and asked me to get out,’ Sebastian says.

  ‘Is that all? How ridiculous. I’m worried about her. She’s not acting herself. Maybe her job is stressing her out.’

  I think back to how well you have always coped. The look on your face when you opened the envelope containing your A level results. Ecstatic, jubilant. Knowing you were off to Bristol to study maths. I knew you’d end up with a hot-shot career. You were always a bit of a know-it-all. Always winning an argument. Do you remember the heated discussion we had a few years ago, as to whether China was a communist country or not? I thought it was, but you knew better, didn’t you, Miranda? You always know better. Your clever argument that it wasn’t really communist as they recognised the concept of private property. You always know best. That’s why you got the top first in your degree. Why you slipped so easily into a job at Harrison Goddard. Why you have a mortgage on a flat, even though Mother coughed up the money for the deposit. Tell me the truth, Miranda, is your demanding life finally catching up with you?

  ‘Do you think she’s starting to suffer from stress, like me?’ I ask.

  ‘She certainly works very hard,’ Sebastian says as he sips his pint. ‘I see her every day at work. She barely has time to smile. She hardly ever lifts her eyes from her desk.’ He smiles at me with his eyes. ‘Maybe she just needs to learn to chill.’

  Maybe. Maybe that’s it. She just needs to learn to chill. After all that’s always been the problem with me. I need to help her. I need to hold this together.

  ‘Sebastian. I love you very much. And I love my sister. Do you think we could just both go to see her and you could apologise?’ I pause. ‘Please. Just to keep the peace?’

  25

  Miranda

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sebastian says, ‘for getting in your way while you were cooking.’

  My stomach tightens. My teeth clamp together. Getting in the way while I was cooking. But I manage to smile sweetly and pretend to forgive him for the time being, for your sake, Zara. But I can assure you, in the long run, there is no way I will let this man destroy you. And I won’t let him destroy me.

  26

  Sebastian

  What a fuss about nothing, Jude. The lightest of touches on Miranda’s breast, when she was fretting over the stir-fry. Why are women so sanctimonious about their breasts? It’s only body tissue. Miranda will never forgive me. I see that. In the flash of her eyes. The turn of her head. Miranda. A woman with a mouth almost permanently pointing downwards. A woman who gravitates towards darkness. A woman Zara needs to step away from. I need my beautiful Zara. I need her to myself.

  27

  Miranda

  Relationships at our age are an emotional battle. Winners and losers. So much to play for. Sebastian must lose, and you must win, Zara. No other outcome is acceptable for your mental health.

  Saturday morning. Sebastian is out jogging. You are washing your hair in the shower. I pad towards the kitchen to make coffee. I hear running water and humming. You always hum when you are happy. Pulsing water relaxes you. You’ve always loved moving water. You’ve always loved the sea. All those walks, along Fisherman’s Path to the beach, almost every Saturday. From when we were small with Mother. For years when I came back at weekends.

  I push my memories away.

  Coffee in hand, I flop onto the sofa and start to drink, Saturday stretching relentlessly in front of me. Nowadays I never seem to know what to do with myself when I’m not at work. I think of you and Sebastian clinging together as you do on my sofa, like ivy, and panic rises inside me. Zara, can’t you see him for what he is?

  Your purse is on the arm of the easy chair. You must have left it there last night and forgotten about it. Your small leather change purse. I put my coffee down and lean across to pick it up. Three cards, a few receipts, some loose change, and a twenty-pound note, rammed in. I remove the twenty-pound note, zip up the purse and slowly, slowly, tiptoe past the bathroom. The shower has stopped but I can still hear humming. Tiptoeing into my guest bedroom where you both live.

  The room is dishevelled. The duvet needs straightening. Piles of clothes nestle either side of the bed, random and scattered as if they’ve been pulled off in a hurry. The chest of drawers is coated in bottles of perfume and make-up. Not like my room, which is antiseptically tidy. I place the twenty-pound note in the pocket of Sebastian’s favourite weekend jacket.

  Just as I step back past the bathroom, you appear, head and body towel-wrapped. Face flushed from your piping hot shower.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Mor
ning,’ I reply.

  There is nothing good about Saturday morning any more. Not now we both have to put up with Sebastian.

  28

  Zara

  ‘What was going on between you and Miranda this morning?’ Sebastian asks. ‘You were shouting as I returned from my jog.’

  I sit on our bed nursing a mug of coffee, watching him peel off his Lycra.

  ‘I was a bit worked up because I’d lost twenty quid.’ I pause. ‘I found it in your jacket pocket.’

  He stiffens. ‘I didn’t take it.’

  ‘I never said you did.’

  He leans towards me, mouth in a line. ‘I guess your sister implied it.’

  ‘She did. But I know it was her.’ I take a sip of coffee. ‘I had just checked my purse for cash, after you went jogging, before I got in the shower. Just wondering whether I needed to go to the cash point. That was when it went. You were out jogging. She and I were in the flat.’ I let out a breath. ‘Why would she take money from me, and plant it on you?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s trying to come between us.’

  I shake my head. ‘But why, Sebastian, why would she want to do that?’

  He raises his eyes to the ceiling, shrugs his shoulders, and smiles. ‘She’s jealous. She’s never really been properly close to a man.’

  ‘But why would that make her resent me having you?’

  I close my eyes to think as Sebastian reaches for his dressing gown and trundles off to the shower. Sebastian is right, you have never really been close to a man even though you went out with Adam for two years, and Jonathan for nearly five. You didn’t seem sad when you split up with either of them. As if you hadn’t really connected, as if you were just stepping along together in the same time zone, for a while.

  Adam was your university boyfriend. Joint activities: going to the library, occasional coffee breaks. Were logarithms and simultaneous equations your dirty talk? Adam had looks that melted into a crowd easily. The only thing I remember about him was the lack of expression on his face. He finished with you, just after your finals. You came back to Tidebury shortly afterwards, emotionally disconnected, as if the relationship hadn’t ever happened. Perhaps that’s why he finished with you. Because your relationship never took off.

  Jonathan, your most recent boyfriend. You were an item for five years, breaking up three years ago. He was an accountant, like you. He lived in Bath. I can’t remember how you met him. You saw him every other weekend. You never varied the pattern. Whatever the weather. Whatever was going on in your lives. After you finished with him, I asked you whether you would miss him.

  ‘No. That’s why I ended it,’ you replied.

  So why did you spend five years of your life with a man who made no difference?

  I have moved on so often. But now I have Sebastian. Can’t you see, Sebastian is lightning, electricity, the eye of the hurricane?

  Why do you react against him so much?

  29

  Zara

  I come home in my own private panic to find you back before me, already sitting at the kitchen table, sorting out the mail. Most of it seems to be being thrown straight into the bin beside you. Colourful adverts for curry houses and takeaway pizza. Free magazines. Free newspapers. You look across at me and smile. I do not smile back.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ you ask.

  ‘I’ve messed up the timing on my coursework.’

  You abandon the mail and walk towards me, eyes full of concern. ‘What do you mean, Zara? By how much?’ you ask. There is a pause. ‘Will they give you an extension?’

  You have always been overly concerned about my lack of education. From the look on your face anyone would think I’d just told you I had terminal cancer.

  ‘I thought the deadline was next week, but it’s tomorrow.’ I shrug. Your shoulders widen. ‘So I’ve just got to stay up all night to finish it.’ I pause. ‘After supper could you two get out of my hair? Bugger off to the pub.’ You stiffen, reminding me that this is your flat. ‘Sorry to be so cheeky,’ I continue. ‘It’s just I really need to spread out and use the kitchen table. And any noise from the TV will distract me.’

  Sebastian appears. Standing outside my bedroom. He must have overheard. You look at him, a frown whispering across your forehead.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he says. But you still have not replied. You are watching him, eyes bursting. With dislike? With lust? But you are Miranda Cunningham. Miranda Cunningham never ever lusts.

  30

  Miranda

  After supper Sebastian and I visit the pub as requested. We sit watching a game show on the large TV in the corner. After a few drinks, we set off home. It is a cold night. The water in the harbour has turned into a mass of dappled neon because of the reflections from the streetlights and restaurant fronts. We walk along the quayside in silence watching the water, molten in the reflected light, its surface rippling in the evening breeze. Feeling a little squiffy after too much Chardonnay, I stop and stand looking at it. Sebastian stands next to me.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ he says.

  I nod. And then, after being quiet and respectful all evening, he pulls me towards him and attempts to kiss me. My body stiffens with distaste. I push him away.

  ‘What are you doing? Leave me alone. Stop it.’

  ‘I don’t want to stop.’

  ‘But,’ I stammer, ‘what’s going on? What’s the matter with you? Are you just playing with my sister?’

  ‘Zara and I were not meant to be together forever.’

  ‘Does she know that?’

  ‘If she doesn’t she should.’

  He smiles. ‘Do you fancy me, Miranda?’

  ‘No. You know I don’t. And even if I did, it’s not relevant.’

  ‘Nothing could be more relevant.’

  He pulls me towards him and tries to kiss me again, but I fight against him, harder this time, pinching him, thumping him. He stands back calmly and raises his eyebrows.

  ‘So you love Zara more than you love me.’

  ‘You know I don’t love you, Sebastian.’

  He laughs. A hollow laugh, like a pantomime baddie. I march angrily back to my flat with my nemesis following me.

  31

  Zara

  After a rather turgid, conversation-less supper, you have both gone out for a drink, to get out of my hair, leaving me alone to finish my puppet theatre. My coursework. I nearly had a complete meltdown when my tutor asked to see me to discuss it because he hadn’t seen its plan. And it’s due in tomorrow. I don’t know how it happened but I’d got the date mixed up by a month. I will lose ten per cent automatically because I haven’t handed in a plan.

  Ten per cent. Fuck.

  So sitting in my tutor’s office, walls plastered with his speciality – photographs of moving water – my body and my brain started to go into exam-style panic. But I managed to pull myself back from the brink. I went to the toilets and cut. That energised me. Then I went and sat in the park. Art and photography are very different from when I fluffed academic exams, so long ago now. I am in tune with photography. I have creativity in my heart. I knew if I took some amphetamine and stayed up all night I would be all right.

  Amphetamine. I knew I had some that Sebastian had given me, stashed in my knickers drawer in the flat. So I came home, with the framework of my theatre and its contents, and hid it in the bedroom. I didn’t want you to see it, Miranda – not yet. You try to be interested in my photography, but I know from the way your voice slows a little when you talk to me about it that you have to make a concerted effort. I swallowed a few tablets before supper.

  Now you have both gone out, I feel even more positive. Full of creative energy. I take an extra amphetamine for good luck, open a bottle of white wine from Tesco, pump up the music in the flat, and get cracking. I cover the kitchen table with newspaper. I fetch my cardboard box theatre from the bedroom, and my three papier-mâché puppets: two girls, one man. They lie limply on the bed. I pull on t
heir sticks and strings to breathe life into them, then I fetch my folder of photographs of us. The theatre’s wall and stage will be plastered with them. The puppets’ faces, hair, and clothes will be made of ripped parts of our photographs.

  The point of it is: we are all puppets controlled by the circumstances of our lives. Clever isn’t it? But you won’t get it, Miranda. Your mind is mathematical, logical. One plus one always makes two. No amount of creativity or optimism could turn it into three.

  I dance around the table, drinking and buzzing, sticking photographs to cardboard and papier-mâché, having a blast. Really, really, enjoying myself. Really making progress. Dance trance music pumping out.

  Until, finally, after an hour or so, I am interrupted by you two coming back.

  ‘Hey for heaven’s sake, turn the music down. What will the neighbours say?’ you ask.

  ‘OK. OK. Cool it, Miranda.’

  I turn it down, but I get some glue on the remote.

  ‘Are you pissed?’ you ask.

  ‘I’m creating,’ I tell you. ‘I’m in flow.’

  Your eyes narrow in disapproval.

  Sebastian looks flushed. He walks towards me and kisses me, lips lingering on mine playfully, trying to tempt me to abandon my work.

  ‘I’ll wait for you in bed,’ he whispers.

  ‘Don’t wait for me. Go to sleep. I’ll be up all night. I’m determined to finish this. To hand it in on time.’

  ‘Clever, clever, clever,’ he says, eyes twinkling at me as he disappears into the bedroom. ‘I’ll just dream of you then.’