by Lucy Wadham
She wanted to call Astrid but did not dare use the phone in case he should call. She climbed out of bed and went to the window and drew the curtains. Astrid hated it when she stood naked like this in the window.
What if there’s some pervert watching?
I don’t care if there is.
Astrid was never naked.
Lola looked out over the railway lines and the glazed canopy of the Gare du Nord, glowing orange in the dawn. Lola was never awake at this time and she knew why; it was so sad. Astrid was up every morning in this. Lola imagined her moving through the empty streets on her way to work, her heels echoing too loudly on the pavement, passing the zombie folk who functioned at this hour and to whom the world, in spite of the saying, definitely did not belong.
Lola turned away, baring her magnificent bottom to the thankless dawn, looked again at the mute phone and went into the kitchen. She remembered that Astrid was sometimes naked, but her nakedness had a terrible, vulnerable quality to it that was the opposite of sex: naked as a worm, their mother would say. Lola opened the fridge but it was too early to eat so she went back into the bedroom and turned on the tape recorder. As the tape hissed, Lola positioned herself in preparation for the opening bar.
THREE
Astrid watched the open rat’s beating heart. She was accustomed to being in control. Unlike Lola she did not like narcotics or alcohol. Her personality was organised in such a way that she was rarely taken by surprise. She was rational but not rigid, she had taught herself to expect variations. Nothing however had prepared her for the first time she saw a team of surgeons wilfully stop a human heart for the purposes of transplantation. She knew the protocol, she had learned every step but she was not prepared to see that great, red muscle slow and stop its beating, lose its colour and turn pale as the preservation fluid flowed in and replaced the blood.
Astrid ran to her phone and picked it up.
Yes, Lola. Yes. Speak slowly Lola. Oh my Lolita no. Don’t cry. Please.
Astrid held her hand over her mouth and listened.
It was 8.53 and Mikel hadn’t called her.
Astrid listened to Lola sobbing.
The lab assistant walked past her to the fridge, averting his eyes. She clicked her fingers at him and he stared blankly at her for a moment, then understood and left the room on squeaking shoes.
I’m coming over now. I’m taking off my lab coat now and I’m coming over. Don’t move. I’m coming now. Keep talking. It’s alright, I’m on my way. I’m leaving right now. Hush Lola. Don’t cry, my heart. I’m coming.
Astrid yelled, Vincent!
He came to the door, his tired eyes wide. Lend me your car. Please. It’s an emergency.
I can’t.
What?
I would but I didn’t bring it today.
Shit. I’m sorry. I’m taking the day off. It’s OK. I’ll call Chastel. Don’t worry. I’ll tell him myself.
The lab technician smiled with relief.
I’ll help you get a cab, Mademoiselle Arnaga.
It’s OK, Vincent. Put my rat on ice. I’ll finish tomorrow.
She ran out.
The assistant, who loved the way she pronounced his name, with a soft ‘sh’ sound in place of the ‘c’, closed the door behind her.
*
It was already hot. When Astrid wound down the window of the cab the driver glanced remonstratively at her in the mirror. Perhaps this was why he decided to take the périphérique, Astrid thought, watching helplessly as he pulled up behind the congested traffic.
I’m in a hurry. Do you think we should cut through Paris?
The taxi driver huffed out a sarcastic laugh.
You must be joking. At this time of day? He paused, letting her take stock of the absurdity of her idea. Then he added, What do you want to do? Take the Grands Boulevards, L’Opéra maybe? He smiled bitterly at her in the mirror. After another pause he added with disgust, La Madeleine?
I just thought. It’s not moving here.
The driver shook his head, deciding that this was not even worth an answer. Instead he turned on the radio. Canned laughter tumbled out. A French comedian with a smoker’s voice was telling an elaborate joke about a gorilla and a barmaid. Soon the driver was in a state of weeping hilarity.
The traffic was moving but very slowly. Astrid looked out of the window. She looked at Paris laid out below her and at the Sacré-Cœur, shining on a hill in a bar of sepia smog. Mikel was out. It seemed to her that the world had undergone a slight shift, leaving her unsafe. She tried to remember Mikel’s speaking voice but could not.
Accident, the taxi driver told her jauntily. The three-tone siren of an ambulance was indeed coming towards them. In its wake a black BMW threaded its way through the dispersing traffic. Filthy Arab, the taxi driver said.
I’m sorry?
Arabs in dealers’ cars.
Astrid felt herself flush red.
Where are we? Porte de Vincennes. You can let me off here.
You said, Porte de Clignancourt.
This will be fine. How much do I owe you?
The driver reached out lazily and turned off the meter.
Seventy-three, he said, checking his teeth in the mirror.
Astrid gave him a hundred-franc note.
The driver sighed as he counted out the change.
You shouldn’t assume that everyone thinks like you do, she told him.
I wouldn’t want to think like you, lady. I bet your mind’s a sewer.
Astrid climbed out as if the cab was in flames. She slammed the door hard.
Fascist!
As he drove away, nonchalantly and without turning round, he gave her the finger.
FOUR
Lola picked up the phone on the first ring.
Oh Astrid. Where are you?
Astrid’s voice was calm but Lola could hear she was upset. Astrid was no good with abusive men. Her righteous indignation just spurred them on to greater and greater obscenities.
It’s alright. I’m not going anywhere. Oh Astrid, don’t even think about it. You’re a surgeon, my love.
Lola herself could send a man crawling for cover with her insults.
I’d come but I can’t leave the flat. Just get on the Metro. Don’t talk to anyone.
Lola hung up and lay back on her unmade bed. Her back was wet from physical exertion. She had danced for twenty-five minutes without stopping, whirling around her sitting room, dripping with sweat and tears until she fell panting on the phone and summoned Astrid. She ought to make up the bed, otherwise Astrid would start tidying up as soon as she arrived. She got up and began clearing the morning’s debris off her bed; the tray with her coffee cup and her bowl of half-eaten Special K, the tape recorder, the pile of travel catalogues. She had plenty: the Jet Tours catalogues of Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, Vietnam and the Framtours magazines with pictures of the Antilles and the Seychelles. Every time Lola passed a new travel agency she went in to get catalogues so she could dream about taking Mikel to the hotels that featured in them. She smoothed the bottom sheet with her hand, making the bed as carefully as Astrid would. Poor Astrid who had never, as far as she knew, been able to dream about anything. She went to exotic places for medical conventions but never got away from the coffee machine in some modern hotel on the outskirts of town. As a child Lola had wanted to be Astrid, had wanted her black hair and the dimple that appeared on her left cheek when she smiled, had been jealous of Astrid’s qualities and the respect they brought. Now these qualities seemed only to set her apart from people.
They had fought hard all through their childhood. Astrid had a cruelty in her then, the memory of which still shocked Lola. She remembered hiding under the three stone steps that led up to the front door of their house, listening to Astrid coaxingly calling her name.
Come out Lolita. I won’t hurt you. Bring the eggs if there are any. (Because since their mother had lost her grip on things, the hens had started laying anywhere they chose.) But Astrid had Jo
su’s cattle prod in her hand and Astrid had said that one touch would fry her brains in her head.
Lola looked at the neatly made bed with the mauve counterpane crocheted by their mother. It was ugly but she liked it because crochet was about the only thing their mother could do now. In complete ignorance of her daughters’ lives, she sent them crocheted coasters and crocheted antimacassars.
Apart from routine masturbation, the bed was chaste. In the ten years she had been living here, Lola had always had sex outside the flat. She had shared the bed with no one but Astrid, who would sometimes spend the night when she needed a break from Chastel. Jacques Chastel was, Lola believed, the principal impediment to Astrid’s happiness. An angry obituary began to take shape in her mind:
Astrid Hamilton Arnaga moved to Paris when she was twenty-three. She came to join her younger sister, Lola, who was in the final year of her training with the Opéra de Paris. Against all the odds, Astrid had managed to complete the first two years of a degree in medicine; this while serving a five-year sentence in a Spanish prison for logistical support of ETA, the armed wing of the Basque separatist movement. (Lola could still not bring herself to call them terrorists.) When she was released after completing two years of her sentence, it was into a climate of euphoric camaraderie between the new socialist governments in France and Spain. This brief interlude of political idealism contributed to the decision by the examining board of the École de Médecine de Paris to accept Astrid Hamilton Arnaga, Basque political prisoner, into the second year of its course. Astrid’s beauty and her romantic background soon made her a prized curiosity for the medical establishment at their dinner parties. It was at one such evening on the thirteenth floor of the new tower overlooking the Seine at Grenelle, during a dinner organised by the very short cardiologist, known as much for his voracious sexual appetite as for his considerable talent with paediatric cases, that Professor Jacques Chastel, the famous liver surgeon, had first met the lovely Astrid Arnaga. She already knew of him, of course, and deeply admired his work … (Lola remembered Astrid reading out bits of an early paper of Chastel’s on the magical difference between the blood running through the vena cava and the portal veins. They had been sitting together, on a bright winter Sunday, in one of the love seats in the Jardin de Luxembourg. I swear I’ll work for that man, Astrid had said, tapping the article with her finger. He’s a poet of medicine.) Jacques Chastel (with luck, long dead at the time of writing) must have sensed that Astrid Arnaga would never be interested in stealing his light. With her past she would always be content to live in his shadow. At the end of her six-month internship in his department and before moving on to A & E at La Pitié, Astrid and he began their long affair. From that moment she became his eminence grise. She moved out of the flat she was sharing with her sister on the Place de Clichy and set herself up in a miserably functional unit near Chastel’s hospital in the eighteenth arrondissement. Astrid spent long hours in the laboratory for Chastel, tested new medication, attempted new surgical techniques, hooked rats to equipment that she invented and stayed up all night writing articles in his name for the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Soon she started accompanying him to conventions in foreign cities to coach him on her ideas in his hotel room so that the next morning he could shine before the greatest in his field …
Lola stamped into the kitchen and pulled up the roller blind, letting the sun flood through the dusty window. The old man munched Astrid’s brain and made summary use of her body, fucking her sporadically and Lola suspected, badly. Lola dreamed of revenge but Chastel was untouchable. Sometimes the three of them had dinner together and Lola would watch him eat, his big jaws crunching, the veins standing out on his great lion’s head as he chewed and she would search her mind for words to devastate him. Chastel thought her picturesque and stupid, Lola knew this. But Mikel would cut him down to size. Mikel was afraid of no one. A man who had no fear of anything, not even death, cut a man like Chastel down to size by his very presence.
Call me. Lola said aloud. Call me please.
She opened the cupboard in time to see a small cockroach disappear into a hairline crack behind the Nesquik. Once she had called in the fumigator. Never again. For some reason the insects had crawled out in their thousands to render up their lives in a pile on the kitchen floor. Lola had been unable to bear it. She had called Astrid who had come round and swept them up.
There was no coffee but Lola would not leave the flat. In a saucepan on the stove was some coffee from the night before, already reheated from that morning. Lola inspected the pearly meniscus that was breaking up into platelets. Then she turned on the gas and heated it a third time. She was just transferring it into the glass jug of the coffee machine when Astrid rang the doorbell. It was not just the subterfuge with the coffee but habitual guilt that made Lola jump out of her skin.
FIVE
Lola cried in Astrid’s arms. This done, they sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. Lola looked at Astrid over the rim of her mug.
I’ve always done this, haven’t I? Spilled myself all over you. There’s never any room for your feelings.
Astrid put down her mug.
It suits me. I don’t know what to do with feelings when I have them.
How are you? Lola asked, looking about her for cigarettes. Wait.
She stood up and went next door to retrieve the pack from beside her bed. Astrid sat alone, her face raised to the frosted window that gave on to a blind courtyard. She noticed the filth surrounding the extractor fan high up in the wall.
So, Lola said, sitting down. She drew deep on her cigarette. Tell me.
What?
Are you OK? The memory thing.
Fine. Everything’s fine. I’m a little tired.
Come with me. Lola smiled broadly, leaning across the table. Come down with me. Take a holiday. Spend some time at home. She took another drag.
I can’t.
Why not?
I’ve got a convention.
When?
Early September.
Come until then. Prepare for it down there.
I can’t.
You haven’t taken a holiday since Mummy came out of the clinic and that wasn’t a holiday.
Lola stood up and leaned against the sink, watching Astrid, one arm folded across her chest, the other occupied with the business of smoking.
I can’t go home, Lola. I’m not ready.
I think Chastel’s making you ill. He’s responsible for the ictus. He’s made you so unhappy, Astrid.
Astrid looked at her sister’s knees, purple with cold. She smiled at her.
Oh Lola. Have you ever considered the possibility that I’ve chosen my life? I chose Chastel. It may be that I’m not interested in happiness.
That’s rubbish. You want happiness as much as I do. You’re just not very good at it. But you could be.
Lola turned and threw her cigarette into the aluminium sink. It hissed out. She stepped over to her sister and enfolded her head in her arms, pulling Astrid’s cheek to her stomach. To Astrid Lola always smelt like towels soaked in milk. She relaxed a moment, closing her eyes.
I’m so scared, Lola said.
Astrid pulled away.
Why?
Lola looked down at her.
It’s been such a long time.
You haven’t changed, Lola.
But he has. Why did he ask me not to come? Why would he not want me there when he came out?
He’s afraid for your safety. He thinks he might be a target. It’s obvious.
Lola gave her the unseeing look she sometimes gave when she was thinking.
I’m not scared of the organisation. I’m not even scared of being killed. What I’m scared of is that he stops loving me. Lola stepped back and leaned against the sink. She raised a hand to her throat. Her eyes filled with tears. He’s changed, Astrid. Hasn’t he? You changed in prison.
Astrid looked down at Lola’s poor, battered dancer’s feet.
A
strid?
Astrid did not want to discuss how Mikel had changed. She leaned forward and picked up a curled cornflake from the floor. Lola held out her hand for it. Astrid watched Lola drop the cornflake into the sink. Lola would never be tidy. Perhaps, Astrid thought, she had tidied up after her too much when they were children.
Tell me, Astrid.
You know he’s changed, Lola. You’ve seen it happening. For a start, he doesn’t believe in all that shit that he used to believe in.
I’m not talking about his ideas.
Astrid could not meet Lola’s eye. She looked at the scar on the bridge of Lola’s foot. She had caught it on a barbed-wire fence near their village as Astrid was lifting her over.
What is it, Astrid? Aren’t you happy for me?
I’m happy if you’re happy.
I think I am. She looked at her sister and her face brightened. Come with me, she said suddenly. We’ll find him together. He always speaks so fondly of you, Astrid. He knows you don’t like him but he loves you.
I don’t dislike him.
You think he’s bad for me.
He was.
Lola smiled.
Do you want some more coffee?
No thanks. I should go.
Please don’t. Tell me how you think you were changed by prison.
Astrid disliked talking about prison only a little less than she disliked talking about Mikel.
I suppose I learned how not to be affected by my environment, how to cut myself off.
Lola pointed at her:
That’s what scares me.
I meant cut myself off in order to work.
But Lola wasn’t listening.
I’m so scared, Astrid. Please come with me. I need you there. She covered her eyes with her hand, ashamed of her tears.
Astrid stood up and faced Lola. She wiped her sister’s tears away then gathered her thick blonde hair into a ponytail and held it tightly.
Listen to me. Mikel is free. Soon you’re going to be in his arms again. Focus on that.
Lola nodded.
