The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  The next day I didn’t say anything about the drugs, because the last time I had she lied to me, and I had decided then that I wouldn’t ask her about it again.

  Instead I suggested she go back to Evendon. “London clearly isn’t good for you, Theo. This can’t go on. You should go back home until you can get yourself sorted out.”

  Theo looked at me with alarm. “No! I don’t want to go back. I’m fine. I’m okay now. I don’t need to be there. I can sort myself out here. I’m sorry I’ve been so much trouble. Please don’t tell Eve.”

  “Fine, I won’t.” I was stern now, the fright of last night over. “Not this time.”

  Theo, responsive to disapproval, dropped her eyes. “You don’t love me anymore,” she whispered.

  “Of course I love you,” I said. But it was more complicated than that. My love for Theo had become a wary thing; watching her I often felt as if I were crossing my fingers for an amateur aerialist, swinging past lurid and frightened. It was a lot to ask to send love out to accompany her, where it could get hurt. So I loved her, but she was too risky—too uncontrolled—for me to do it without reservation, without holding my breath.

  I didn’t trust that Theo would sort herself out, but I didn’t call Eve either. Then Theo lost the data entry job (“Apparently they do notice what numbers I type in”) and her housemate Lucy decided she couldn’t live with her anymore. She said Theo had given her bed to a prostitute who “looked cold,” and slept on the sofa herself. Then when Theo and Lucy woke up, the prostitute was gone and so was Lucy’s television and my laptop, which Theo had borrowed without asking the day before. I called Eve after that.

  “She obviously isn’t equipped to live alone,” Eve said, businesslike. “I agree—she had better come back here.”

  “I think that’s best,” I said, with the uncomfortable feeling that I was betraying Theo, a feeling that wasn’t helped by Theo’s reaction to the news that she was to go back to Evendon: she wept silently and profusely, as if someone had died. She stayed at my flat that night and fell asleep in a chair, her tipped, frowsy head protected by her crooked arm.

  The next morning the driver came for Theo while I was at work, and I was relieved not to have to go through with saying good-bye. By the afternoon I was able to speculate pleasantly that after a week or two at Evendon, she would feel more settled, more cheerful, and might be grateful for my intervention. I hoped that with distance from drugs, parties, and bad influences, she would be transformed, ready to return to the city sober and sensible, without the need for rehab clinics or anything so extreme. I avoided her calls in the meantime. “She’ll only want to come back to London if she talks to me now,” I said to Eve. I repeated, “It’s for the best,” but it tasted false in my mouth; like chewing on plastic, foam stuffing.

  After the fortnight I had allotted for Theo to cheer up had passed, I went down to Evendon for the weekend. I had missed Nick and Emily’s wedding because I was in Germany talking to the lawyers of the restaurateur arrested for murder, so I told him we’d meet him that Saturday.

  When I arrived back at the house Mrs. Wynne Jones let me in. “Eve’s in Dubai,” she said accusingly. “Your sister went for a walk somewhere and then your guests arrived. Your mother is entertaining them.” I had a brief vision of Alicia being entertaining (juggling, riding a miniature bicycle?) but when I found her she was sitting in the morning room, straight-backed and bored as usual, with Nick and Maria.

  “Maria?” I said, staring.

  Maria laughed. “Surprise! I hope it’s a nice surprise. . . . Oh, Jonathan, you look disappointed.”

  “Disappointed!” I repeated. My face felt stupid with sudden happiness. I noticed her hair was lighter; the color of tanned pine.

  “Congratulations, Nick,” said Nick, becoming impatient.

  “Sorry. How was the wedding?”

  “Horrific,” he said. “A dove shat on Emily’s dress—she was fuming. Then some child obliterated the cake. It was running for a ball apparently. I did say we shouldn’t invite children, but Emily insisted on flower girls. So this fucking flower girl just smashed into the cake and it went everywhere.”

  Maria started smiling. “Sorry, Nick,” she said. “It’s not funny really.”

  “Just don’t laugh about it in front of Emily,” Nick warned her.

  “Oh!” Theo said, wandering in through the French windows. “Hello, everyone.” There was a smear of mud on her cheek; she was wearing pajamas tucked into Wellington boots, holding some uprooted flowers from the garden.

  “You look awful, Theo,” Alicia observed serenely.

  “I think I lost track of time,” Theo said.

  “For Christ’s sake!” I said, more forcefully than I meant to, goaded by disappointment. “You’d better get changed. We’re meant to be going to the beach and you look like a mental patient.”

  Llansteffan beach in late September was nearly empty, despite the unusual heat of the day, the unclouded bowl of blue above us. We bought chips to eat and sat on the pressed sand. In the distance I could only see a figure walking with a small shape of a dog, leaping up beside him like a leaf in the wind. Maria rolled up her jeans and took off her jacket to sun her shoulders.

  “I can’t believe how long it’s taken us to do this,” she said. “It’s ten years since we first came to this beach. Can we really be nearly thirty?”

  She had won a research grant to work with an American psychologist at an autism center. “America’s not ideal,” she said, “but obviously Llansteffan doesn’t offer the same opportunities.”

  “Not many local autistic people.”

  She smiled. “Yes, no such luck.”

  I asked Nick how his work was going, though I didn’t really want to, and I saw he didn’t really want to be asked.

  “Oh, I’m working in the city,” he said. “My, uh, father knew someone at Goldman Sachs . . . and as I was getting married, I thought I should . . .” He played with his cuff and looked uncomfortable, then concluded defensively, “It’s not easy to get into these firms.”

  “I thought you didn’t like your father?” Theo asked.

  Nick murmured something about putting things behind him.

  “Oh, how nice,” Theo said enthusiastically. “Now you have a father.” She paused, and I waited tensely for her to continue, but all she said after that was, “I hope your job is fun. Eve finds me jobs too. When she comes back from Dubai she’ll probably try to find me another one.”

  “And how’s Emily?” I asked Nick.

  “Broody,” Nick said. “She basically wants to give up work and look after children as soon as possible.”

  “What if you wanted to look after the children?” inquired Maria.

  “Oh, I don’t want them at all. But it’ll make her happy. Anyway, it has to happen sooner or later. Everyone—well, everyone who doesn’t have much money, and that’s me now—ends up in jobs that bore them, and children that scream in supermarkets. I may as well face my future. I sense a Renault Espace out there with my name on it.”

  “Hard to see what could go wrong, when you’ve got a brilliant plan like that,” Maria said, throwing a chip at him.

  I squinted at her eyes, lushly shadowed and aureate, and tried, as usual, not to want her. This longing should have eased up by now, surely—cooled down or burned out—in the years of friendship and disappointment, but here it was again, quick and sharp and reverberating in my throat: the perpetual renewal of wanting.

  “How’s Antonia?” Nick asked.

  “Oh, we aren’t together anymore,” I said. As an announcement, this emerged rather small and flat, its importance lost in the wind.

  “Well, I bet you recovered okay,” said Nick, and they all laughed. “Are you with anyone else now?”

  “No,” I said, glancing at Maria. She was smiling faintly, which was nothing more than the embers of her laugh, and her expression showed no change as I spoke. I changed the subject, annoyed with her, annoyed with myself.

 
; After my breakup with Antonia I had thought I would be able to maintain a lifestyle of uncomplicated sex, stripped of the pink-and-white haze of intimacy; the hidden pains of intimacy. I chose women for their unavailability: tourists, strangers’ wives or girlfriends. No head lasted too long on my pillow, there were no hairbrushes in my bathroom, no unknown music played when I turned on my car stereo. But I found that sex was rarely the simple thing it had been when I was a student: it was in earnest now. More and more often sex led to drunk female recordings on the answering machine—thin high electronic voices, their resonance stolen and made threadbare—to arguments in bars, tears on the street; being turned to in the morning with a hand searching for mine, sentimental eyes, running like watercolor. I decided to stay away from sex for a while.

  Though I didn’t like to admit it, that wasn’t the only reason. There was also the small, specific fear of waking up in an unknown bed having had one of the dreams that came now to violently shake my good night’s sleep, pick it up, and hurl it like a roof in a hurricane. Twice, maybe three times a week. The ridiculous thing was that I woke up scared of nothing. My bedroom window at Evendon. Eve’s voice, broken glass. Nothing, nothing at all.

  I looked up at the beach, briskly shaking these thoughts out—returning to the idea of the four of us, sitting on Llansteffan beach again. I couldn’t quite believe that we could all be here under the faint haze from the sea, the phosphorescent blue of the sky; it struck me as impossibly lucky somehow. Maria was lying on her back in the creamy sand, Nick was reenacting the dive into the wedding cake, Theo was laughing, her eyes half hidden under the blown chrysanthemum of her hair, white in the light. Some of the long-held heaviness in my stomach eased, looking at her now. Then Maria glanced at me, and smiled, and I had the sense that I needed to remember this moment, to save it up like a nut before the onset of winter.

  Before I went back to London I looked for Theo to say good-bye but she wasn’t in the house. One of the maids said she’d gone to Llansteffan—having forgotten that I was leaving that day—so I drove to the village to find her. I passed the beach, which was as bare as an Arctic plain, and drove slowly through the narrow high street with its row of small plain terraced houses and gray church, all silent in the evening sunlight that slanted steeply down. I peered into the windows of Mrs. Edwards’s shop and the post office, I circled the ruined castle with its winking eye, I slid through leafed tunnels and out into the green fields, and finally I had to come to a stop outside the pub, the Glas Dwr, where I had hoped not to have to look.

  Outside the pub I saw Mrs. Williams, coming out of a house. It had been a long time since I last saw her, but I recognized the sagging green coat, the unnatural fluff of yellow hair. My first thought was concern for my own escape; but it was too late. She had sensed my stare and her head began an inexorable turn toward me. Our eyes met, then she looked away, and continued walking. It wasn’t Mrs. Williams after all.

  A glance around the dim interior of the pub, with its ghost of smoke, glass-ringed dark wood, and unlit fire, was enough to ascertain that Theo was not among the five or so elderly locals who had taken up their usual placement at the tables or bar (a seating plan that I guessed had not changed in the last ten years), over whom a predictable and suspicious hush had fallen now that I had walked in.

  The landlord looked up at me with a bright and sarcastic good humor from the thick dark of the bar and called over. “You looking for your sister, Mr. Anthony?”

  “Jonathan,” I said. “Yes, have you seen her?”

  “She left just a few minutes ago to get cigarettes. Surprised you didn’t pass her. She’ll be back here in a couple of minutes, I imagine. Long enough for a drink.”

  I hesitated, which he noticed, and his white-eyebrowed look of sarcasm deepened, which stung me into pulling up a bar stool.

  “Thank you. I’ll have a pint, please,” I muttered, looking around long enough so that the gazes behind me fell away and conversation resumed. There was surprisingly little light in the pub given that it had four street-facing windows and all its chintzy little lamps were burning. I could barely make out anyone’s expression, not even that of the landlord, who had moved back and was almost invisible in the gloom. I had no idea why Theo came here.

  The landlord emerged once more, still smiling enigmatically, and put the pint down in front of me.

  “This is a rare visit, Mr. Anthony. Excuse me—Jonathan. Staying here for the weekend, is it?”

  “Yes.” I was short with him, knowing that I amused him, and not wanting to give him any extra pleasure.

  I pretended to look at my phone as I waited, but found myself thinking about Mrs. Williams again. I worked my way idly through my memories of her, but they turned out to be erratic—fragmented, missing, springing out unpredictably like elastic bands. Sitting at the table eating our way through a pack of biscuits while she blew smoke rings for us. Bandaging Theo’s stung finger. Saying to Mrs. Wynne Jones, “Them two, with no father, and now no mother. It’s shocking.” That had been a rainy summer day, I recalled; the water hissing and recoiling on the terrace, shivering warm like a monsoon. The way she said it with pity, but also enjoyment, a tone I didn’t understand back then but knew very well now. Resentment—and why not? We weren’t children to them; we were gold like the elephants in the morning room—teeth of pearls, jewel-eyed—when we spoke it was just the rustle of money. I could see how we were hateable.

  But Theo still went to visit Mrs. Williams, for months after she left. Theo never learned the unique buzz of sourness in a voice, a crimped lip, a dropped eyebrow. She didn’t understand how she could be the subject of someone else’s ill-wishing; she could never identify what might cause her harm. Theo came to this pub, where everyone would have heard Mrs. Williams’s stories—about how she was wrongly sacked, about how Alicia was crazy and tried to kill herself, about how our father had vanished then died and Eve was a bitch and I was up my own arse and Theo was good-natured but simple—and she sat here anyway and felt that she was welcome.

  “Got a lot on your mind?” I looked up, startled, to see the landlord leaning across the bar from me, hands spread on the wood as if to say, “Just your friendly local landlord.” Which, perhaps, he was. I remembered that he was the uncle of Maria’s former boyfriend David, whom I remembered with affection now that he was no longer her boyfriend.

  “Not especially.” I made the effort to smile at him. He took this as an invitation and sat down just across from me. The odd lack of light fell over his face again, so it was hard to see much beyond the decaying glimmer of his eyes, the ironic mouth.

  “Reminds me of when I had your father sitting across from me one night,” he said, speaking quietly. I looked up, startled.

  “What?”

  “He was drunk,” the man continued, ignoring my stare, looking up into the dirty corners of the pub as if my father hovered there, urging him on. “And angry. Came in here silent at first, then after a few more drinks he had a lot to say. This was nearly thirty years ago. He was married to your mother but she’d moved back here. He came here after her.”

  I felt a lurch of dread that kept me from getting up, made me still and quiet.

  “Angry at Mrs. Anthony, he was. Eve. Said he had something on her, and wasn’t going to be kept quiet any longer. I’ve no idea what he was talking about.”

  The man paused, shifted, and the light slipped back onto his narrow face, which looked both sympathetic and grim, with a vinegar dash of mockery. I couldn’t understand what I saw, but seeing it allowed me to move again, like an unhooded bird. I got up, pushing my stool back harshly, so that it clattered and all the old men looked up frowning.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “It’s your family,” the man answered simply. “Thought you’d like to know.”

  “Well you’re wrong,” I snapped.

  He shrugged and moved away along the bar, sliding out of direct opposition to me, smiling to himself infuriatingly.
r />   “So is this what you tell my sister?” I demanded.

  “No,” he replied slowly, and he looked irritated now. “Your sister’s a sensitive soul. We try to cheer her up. She’s not so tough as you.”

  He made the word tough into an insult, so to insult him back I dropped several pound coins onto the bar, where they reeled and spun, and walked out into the cool dead light of the street.

  “Jonathan!” Theo was walking back up the road, on the sunlit side, waving at me. “How funny to see you! Why are you here? Were you in the pub?”

  “I just put my head around the door to look for you,” I said, smiling at her. “So, do you want a lift home or would you rather walk back up the hill?”

  “Lift! Lift!” cried Theo, laughing, diving into the car as if I might change my mind.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Eve visited me a few days later in London when she got back from Dubai, arriving in an emerald suit and diamond earrings, straight from another meeting. When she kissed me I could catch her perfume, which always reminded me of her study when I was young; lying on the sofa and listening to her speaking on the telephone and writing emails. Her steady voice and steady hand, her smile fixed and clear as a photograph, holding the measurable present. After my encounter with the landlord of the Glas Dwr, floating in his strange lightlessness like a pike, it was a relief to see her now. I had already decided I wouldn’t mention what the landlord had said about my father, not wanting to allow his malicious story another undeserved repetition—or worse—make it look as if I believed it.

  “I’m so sorry about Sam,” I said. For it seemed the trip Sam wanted us all to make was to have been a deathbed visit, rather than a reunion. He died from cancer only a few months after I saw him.

  “I know, it was very sad,” Eve said. “I feel privileged to have shared at least some of my life with him. I’ll always remember him fondly.”

  I couldn’t help but think of how Sam’s absolute difference from Eve had startled me in Los Angeles. Love, I supposed, was a strange and inexplicable thing.