“Come.”
She grabbed Sophy’s wrist, but she resisted.
“What—?”
“I need you!”
Sophy was so astonished she allowed herself to be led. Toni went quickly up the garden path and into the hall. She stood outside the door of the column room and put her hair straight. She held on to Sophy’s wrist and opened the door. Daddy was there, looking at a chess set. The Anglepoise light was switched on and lowered over it, though the sun was shining outside.
“What do you two want?”
Sophy saw that Toni had gone bright red for the first time in memory. She gave a little gasp, then spoke in her faint, colourless voice.
“Uncle Jim is having sexual relationships with Winnie in the aunties’ bedroom.”
Daddy stood up very slowly.
“I—you—”
There was a pause of a kind of woollen silence, prickly, hot, uncomfortable. Daddy went quickly to the door, then across the hall. They heard him on the other stairs.
“Winnie? Where are you?”
The twins ran, Toni white now, ran to the glass door down into the garden, Sophy leading. Sophy ran all the way down to the stables again, she hardly knew why or why she was excited and frightened and scared and triumphant. She was up in the room before she saw that Toni had not come with her. It was perhaps ten minutes before she came, slowly and still even whiter than usual.
“What happened? Is he angry? Were they doing that? Like in the lectures? Toni! Why did you say ‘I need you?’ Did you hear them? Did you hear him? Daddy? What did he say?”
Toni was lying on her tummy, her forehead on the backs of her hands.
“Nothing. He shut the door and came down again.”
After that, there was a pause of about three days; and then when the twins came back from school in the afternoon they walked through a furious grown-up row. It was high above their heads and Sophy walked away from it down the garden path, half hoping that weirdness was working but wondering in a gloomy sort of way if all that really worked was what Toni had done, in letting Daddy know a secret. But whichever it was, that was the day it was all done with. Winnie and Uncle Jim went away that very evening. Toni—who did not, it appeared, concern herself with the idea of being weird at a distance—had stayed as close to the grown-ups as she could and reported helpfully to Sophy what she had heard without trying to explain it. She said Winnie had gone with Uncle Jim because he was a digger and she was sick of fucking Poms it had all been a mistake anyway Daddy was too fucking old and the kids were a consideration and she hoped there were no hard feelings. Sophy was half-sorry and half-glad to know that she had not got rid of Winnie by being weird. But Uncle Jim was a real loss. Toni dropped one piece of information which did show Sophy how carefully her twin had planned and gone about the whole scheme.
“She had a passport. She was a foreigner. Her real name wasn’t ‘Winnie’. It was ‘Winsome’.”
This struck the twins as so funny they were happy with each other for quite a while.
There were no more aunties after Winnie, and Daddy spent regular times in London at a club and doing his chess broadcasts. There was a long series of cleaning ladies who did the bit of the house that wasn’t occupied by the solicitors and the Bells. There was also a sort of cousin of Daddy’s who stayed every now and then, overhauled their clothes, told them about periods and God. But she was a colourless character not worth being friends with or tormenting.
In fact, after the disposal of Winnie time stopped. It was as if after climbing a slope they had both come to a plateau, the edges of which were out of sight. Perhaps this was partly because their twelfth birthday went unnoticed by Daddy, there being no Winnie or other auntie to remind him. Both twins were made aware in the course of that year that they had phenomenal intelligence, but this was no news, really, except that it did explain why all other children seemed so dim. To Sophy the phrase “phenomenal intelligence” was a useless bit of junk lying in her mind and not really connected to anything that would be worth having or doing. Toni seemed the same, unless you knew her the way that Sophy did. It showed, perhaps, in the way that they quickly found themselves in different classes for certain subjects, though not all. It showed itself more subtly in the way that Toni would sometimes say things offhand that settled a question for good. You could tell then that long thought had preceded the words; but there was no other evidence for it.
Periods, when they happened, hurt Sophy and enraged her. Toni seemed indifferent to them, as if she could leave her body to get on with its job and be away somewhere herself, out of the whole business of feeling. Sophy knew that she herself had these long, still times; but she knew they weren’t thinking, they were brooding. It was when she had a period and it hurt that she began to brood again—for the first time since Winnie—on the whole business of being weird and what there was in it. She found herself doing some strange things too. Once, near Christmas, she went into the deserted aunties’ room and then had to think—why did I come here? She brooded some more—standing by the head of the stripped single bed on which the ancient electric blanket, creased and stained with iron mould, seemed ugly as a surgical appliance—brooded on the why and decided that she had had some vague wish to find out what an auntie was and what they had in common; and then, with a shiver of a kind of dirty excitement and also disgust she knew that she wanted to find out what there was about them that made Daddy summon them to his bed. While she was thinking that, she heard him come out of the column room and run up the stairs two at a time if not more, slam the bathroom door—and then there was running water and all that. She thought of the duck’s egg by his bed and wondered why no one had ever said anything about it; but with him in the bathroom there was no chance of going in his bedroom to see. She stood there by the single bed and waited for him to go down.
Any reasonable auntie would have been glad to get out of that room. There was an old rug by the bed, a chair, a dressing-table and large wardrobe and nothing else. She tiptoed to the window and looked down the garden path to the dormers of the stabling. She opened the top drawer of the dressing-table and there was Winnie’s little transistor lying in the corner. Sophy took it out and examined it with a comfortable feeling of security from Winnie. She felt a bit of triumph as she switched on the set. The battery was still live so that a miniature pop group began to perform miniature music. The door opened behind her.
It was Daddy, standing in the door. She looked at him and saw why Toni had such a white skin. There was a long silence between them. She was the first to speak.
“Can I keep it?”
He looked down at the little leather-sheathed case in her hands. He nodded, swallowed, then went away as swiftly as he had come, down the stairs. Triumph triumph, triumph! It was like capturing Winnie and keeping her caged and never letting her out—Sophy sniffed the case carefully and decided that none of Winnie’s scent had clung to it. She took it away, back to the stables. She lay on her divan bed and thought of a tiny Winnie shut there in the box. It was silly of course, to think that—but as she said that to herself she had a thought to go with it; having a period is silly! Silly! Silly! It deserves to have a duck’s egg, a stink, some dirt.
After that Sophy became addicted to the transistor with Winnie inside it. She thought it likely that all transistors had their owners inside them and so it was lucky this one was already tenanted. She listened often, sometimes with her ear against the fairing of the speaker, sometimes pulling the earplug out of its niche and being private to herself. It was that way she heard two talks which spoke not to the little girl with her smiling face (little friend of all the world) but directly to the Sophy-thing that sat inside at the mouth of its private tunnel. One was about the universe running down and she understood that she had always known that, it explained so much it was obvious, it was why fools were fools and why there were so many of them. The other talk was about some people being able to guess the colour of a greater percentage of cards than they sh
ould be able to, statistically speaking. Sophy listened enthralled to the man who spoke about this nonsense, as he called it. He said there was no magic and how if people could guess these so-called cards more than they ought, statistically speaking, then fiercely, oh so very fiercely, the man’s eyes must be popping out, statistics must be re-examined. This made even the Sophy-creature giggle because she could swim in numbers when she wanted. She remembered the duck’s egg and the little Sophy-child walking through those areas of inattention; and she saw that what they missed out of their experiments in magic which gave them no or little result, was just the stinky-poo bit, the breaking of rules, the using of people, the well-deep wish, the piercingness, the—the what? The other end of the tunnel, where surely it joined on.
In the evening when these things came together, she jumped clean out of bed and the desire to be weird was like a taste in the mouth, a hunger and thirst after weirdness. It seemed to her then that unless she did what had never been done, saw something that she never ought to see, she would be lost for ever and rum into a young girl. Something pushed her, shoved her, craved. She tried to get the rusty dormer open and did so, just a crack; then more than a crack as if the door of a vault were grinding on its hinge. But all she could see in the evening light was the canal shining. But then there were footsteps on the towpath. She did a violence to her head, thrusting it sideways in the crack and yes, she could see now what was never before oh not by living people seen from this angle, not just the towpath and the canal but along the towpath to the Old Bridge, yes, more of the Old Bridge and yes, the filthy old stinky-poo urinal, whiff whiff; and there was the old man who stole books from Mr Goodchild going in and she kept him there she did! She willed him to stay in the dirty place, like Winnie in the transistor, would not let him come out, she bent her mind, frowning, teeth gritted, she brought everything down to one point where he was in the dirty place and kept him there; and a man in a black hat went cycling primly out over the Old Bridge into the country and a bus heaved this way over it and she kept him there! But she could not hold on. The man in the black hat went cycling out into the country, the bus went on into Greenfield High Street. Her mind inside her let go so that she could not tell whether she was keeping the old man in the dirty place or not. All the same, she thought as she turned away from the dormer, he stayed in there and if I can’t be sure I kept him in, I can’t be sure I didn’t. Then all at once because she had let go of her mind and become the Sophy-child again in her pyjamas out in the centre of the moony room, fear descended over her like a magician’s tall hat and froze her flesh so that she cried out in panic.
“Toni! Toni!”
But Toni was fast asleep and stayed that way even when shaken.
In their fifteenth year at a specific hour or even instant, Sophy felt herself come out into daylight. She was sitting in class and Toni was the only other girl of her age in the room. The rest were seniors with lumpy breasts and big bums and they were groaning as if the algebra was glue they were stuck in. Sophy was sitting back because she had finished. Toni was sitting back because she had not only finished but evaporated and left her body there with its face tilted up. That was when it happened. Sophy saw as well as knew, that there was a dimension they were moving through; and as she saw that she saw something else too. It was not that Toni was Toni the wet, though she was a wet hen and always would be, but yes, she was beautiful, a beautiful young girl—no, not beautiful with her smoke-grey hair afloat, her thin, no slim body, her face that could be seen through—she was not just beautiful. She was stunning. It was a pang clean through Sophy to see that so clearly; and after the pang, a kind of rage, that wet hen Toni of all people—
She asked to be excused, went and examined herself urgently in the grubby mirror. Yes. It was not like Toni’s beauty but it was alright. It was dark of course, and not to be seen through, not transparent, but regular, pretty, oh God, healthy, outdoor, winning, inviting, could be strong and yes that would be the best side for a photograph; in fact very satisfactory indeed if you didn’t have always at your side the wet hen for which or whom there was now no easy word—So Sophy stared into the grubby mirror at her reflection, seeing all things in the daylight that had brightened and cleared so suddenly. That evening after the French verbs and American history she lay on her divan and Toni on hers. Sophy wrenched up the volume of her new transistor so that it blared for a moment, a challenge perhaps, an insult even, or at least a rude jab at her silent twin.
“Do you mind, Sophy!”
“Doesn’t make any difference to you does it?”
Toni half knelt, changing her position. With her new, daylight eyes, Sophy saw the impossible curve alter and flow, from the line of the forehead under the smoky hair, down, round the curve of the long neck, the shoulder, include the suggestion of a breast, sweep round and end back there where a toe moved and pushed off a sandal.
“It does as a matter of fact.”
“Well you’ll have to go on minding then, my deah, deah Toni.”
“I’m not Toni any more. I’m Antonia.”
Sophy burst out laughing.
“And I’m Sophia.”
“If you like.”
And the strange creature drifted away again, leaving her body to lie there, as it were, untenanted. Sophy had a mind to blow the roof off with the radio but it seemed an action out of that childhood which they had so suddenly left behind. She lay back instead, looking at the ceiling with the big spot of damp. With another jolt of awareness she saw that this new daylight made the dark direction at the back of her head all the more incredible yet all the more evident; because there it was!
“I’ve got eyes in the back of my head!”
She sat up with a jerk, conscious of the words spoken aloud, then the turn of the other girl’s head and the long look.
“Oh?”
Neither of them said anything after that and presently Toni turned away. It was impossible that Toni should know. Yet Toni did.
There are eyes in the back of my head. The angle is still there, wider, the thing called Sophy can sit looking out through the eyes, the thing which really is nameless. It can choose either to go out into the daylight or to lie in this private segment of infinite depth, distance, this ambushed separateness from which comes all strength—
She shut her eyes with sudden excitement. She made a connection that seemed exact between this new feeling and an old one, the one of the rotten egg, the passionate desire to be weird, to be on the other side, desire for the impossibilities of the darkness and the bringing of them into being to disrupt the placid normalities of the daylight world. With her front eyes shut it was as if those other eyes opened in the back of her head and stared into a darkness that stretched away infinitely, a cone of black light.
She came up out of this contemplation and opened her daylight eyes. There the other figure was, curled on the other divan, child and woman—and surely expression too, not of the futile pinpricks of light with its bursting and efflorescence, but of the darkness and running down?
It was from that moment that Sophy ceased to make many of the gestures that the world required of her. She found a measuring rod in her hand. Look at “ought” and “must” and “want” and “need”. If they were not appropriate at the moment to the sweet-faced girl with the optional eyes at the back of her head, then she touched them with her wand and they vanished. Hey presto.
When they were fifteen-and-a-bit, the staff said Toni should go to a college but Toni wasn’t certain and said she might prefer to model. Sophy didn’t know what she would do but saw no point in going to college or loading your body with someone else’s clothes day after day. It was while she was still in the position of not really believing that it would come to the point of living in the outside world that Toni went off to London and was away quite a time, which infuriated the school and Daddy. The thing was that after a few days, girls being supposed to be a fragile commodity, Toni became a genuine missing person and listed by Interpol, as on
the telly. The next anybody knew was that she turned up in Afghanistan of all places, and in deep trouble because the people she had accepted a lift from were running drugs. It seemed for a while that Toni might have to stay in jail for years. Sophy was astonished by Toni’s daring and a bit jealous, and decided to get on with her own further education. The first thing she did, being certain that by now Toni must have got rid of her virginity, was to examine her own by means of a strategically placed mirror. She was not impressed. She tried a couple of boys who proved incompetent and their mechanisms ridiculous. But they did teach her the astonishing power her prettiness could wield over men. She examined the traffic situation in Greenfield and saw the best place, by the pillar-box a hundred yards beyond the Old Bridge. She waited there, refused a truck and a man on a motorbike and chose the third one.
He drove a small van, not a car, he was dark and attractive and he said he was going to Wales. Sophy allowed him to pick her up by the post-box because she thought he was very likely telling the truth and never seeing him again would be that much easier if it was what she wanted. Ten miles out of Greenfield he drove down a side road, parked in the skirts of a wood and enveloped her, breathing heavily. It was she who suggested they should go into the wood and there she found there was no doubt about his competence at all. He hurt her more than she had thought possible. When he had ended his part of the affair he pulled out, wiped himself, zipped himself and looked down at her with a mixture of triumph and caution.
“Now don’t you go telling anyone. See?”
Sophy was faintly surprised.
“Why should I?”
He looked at her with less caution and more triumph.
“You were a virgin. Well. You aren’t, now. I’ve had you, see?”
Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher Page 15
