Chosen Page 14

  ‘OK.’ I patted her arm. I had to do my homework and get changed and put the washing on. There were LPs all over the floor and little bits of torn-up cardboard. Bogart wouldn’t let the others come round, except sometimes Celia and Bruce, but he never let them stay over. He was a funny mixture of looking after us and then filling us with drugs and screwing me every night.

  I think it started then, with Stella. Her illness, I mean. Bogart told me later that he’d put Red Leb in the cake and she ate so much, and then smoked – but then she was already turning into a mixed-up kid without his help.

  †

  On Saturday Bogart got up early and brought me a cup of tea. I sat up against the pillows and he pulled the curtains back so I could see the window of the house opposite, curtains still drawn, which is what Mum must have looked at in the morning too.

  ‘What are we doing then?’ I said. It was already a hot day and the dust whirled about in the air. Stella never cleaned in Mum’s room and there were cobwebs in the corners full of colourless trapped flies.

  ‘Out,’ he said. He had a mysterious gleam about him. I watched his olive skin disappear into his clothes. He leaned forward to kiss me before he left the room and his breath was sour and smoky. I managed to get Stella up and we all – even Stella – ate Rice Krispies before we set out. It was a golden melting September day, hot but threaded with a ripple of the chill that would be coming soon. We walked along the prom to the point and then carried on along the beach, climbing over the breakwaters and jumping down onto the shingle. The holiday-makers had all gone and there was only the occasional dog-walker, and someone fishing from the beach. When we reached the golf course, Bogart stopped.

  He took something from his wallet, a little strip of paper with bumps like cap-gun caps, and he tore it in three. He put one on his tongue and told us to do the same.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Acid,’ he said. ‘It’s time for your first trip.’

  ‘What will it do?’

  ‘Blow your little mind,’ he sang.

  ‘Stell?’ I said, but she had already taken hers and was grinning.

  Bogart took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. ‘Honey?’ he said and when he called me that it made me glow in the place where my ribs divide.

  I swallowed the tab. We carried on walking towards the ferry. Nothing was happening and I was relieved. We took the ferry across to Bawdsey. The old ferryman took our money happily enough, but eyed us suspiciously – especially Bogart – as he puttered us across the estuary. The patterns on the water were amazing; I was getting lost in the swirl of ripples and the flat shiny bits and it was taking on the pattern of paisley. We stepped out of the boat and walked round the steep shingly banks. The sea was rougher here and there was a deep grumbling sound where the shingle shifted in the waves.

  ‘OK, Stell?’ I said, and when she looked at me I saw her eyes were turning in her head and I had to look away quick to stop my own eyes disappearing.

  Bogart flopped down on his back. Stella crouched and I lay beside them. Words had turned to lizards in my mouth and they didn’t want to move, only the tails were uncomfortable around my teeth. I didn’t want to bite them off, although lizards can grow new tails, but still.

  ‘Man,’ Bogart said, ‘far out, eh?’ He was smiling at the sky and I felt tremendous love for him and the sky and everything. The clouds were lined up in a grid and that seemed obvious. Stella was humming something, I don’t know what. The two people I loved were there and the sun shone and the sky was orderly and the shingly growling seemed contented, as if the earth was purring. Something opened up, or fell away, like blinkers and it felt so right, so perfect, so beautiful. The world came together like a properly done sum. The lizards leaped out in a stream and the way I talked made them dance and Bogart and Stella smiled at me and kept on smiling till I had to look away again in case the smiles would split their heads right open.

  And then there was a roaring in the sky. It wasn’t gradual, but suddenly there, and a flapping shadow over us.

  ‘Shit, man,’ Bogart said, ‘what a bummer.’ It roared and scrabbled at the air like a gigantic metal budgie and it hung above us, blotting out the sun. Bogart put his arm around my shoulders and I put mine round Stella’s. I couldn’t bear to look at the tons of metal just above us – it could have dropped at any moment and flattened us to nothing – but Stella had her face tilted up and open like a fairground flower with the great big grin and the revolving eyes.

  ‘Mum’s dead,’ I said suddenly, out of nowhere, and her face swung round and the smile was gone and the helicopter chopped and chopped like it was chopping the sky up and ruining the order and the harmony.

  ‘Mummy,’ Stella said, and suddenly got up and began to run up the shingle bank, but I followed and Bogart followed after me and it was like a sliding mountain of brown and grey and the words it said under our feet were in another language and then I was up and there was the flat expanse of mud with water shining in such intricate rivulets, like feathers, like paisley again, all the world opening out into a great big paisley shawl. Stella was running and running along the path that rose above the mud and I saw her nearly knock down a small child on a bike as she ran past. I couldn’t run any more. I tried but the air was too syrupy to get into my lungs.

  Bogart came panting up behind me. His skin was beady with sweat. ‘Shit,’ he said, shading his eyes to try and see her.

  ‘She went that way,’ I said. We walked because we couldn’t run. In my stomach was a bulldog clip, which I realized was the hard tension I felt about Stella. We stopped to watch a heron and it was so perfect and perfectly strange, the way it jutted its head and the secret knowing in its eyes.

  I don’t know how long it was until we found Stella. We’d gone way past the places where it was safe and easy to walk. She was up to her knees in the mud. A man with a fishing rod was sitting by her. She’d been right in, you could see, her loons were stuck to her and the beautiful velvet smock was stained and clotted. Her face and hands and the tips of her hair were green and brown and flaking.

  ‘Is she yours?’ the fisherman said.

  He was a wolf in everything but the fur. I could see the barb on the end of his hook and, in a plastic bag, a writhing knot of worms.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Bogart said. ‘Come on, Stella.’ He put his hand down for her to take.

  ‘Sister?’ she said.

  ‘Come on, Stella,’ I said. ‘She is my sister,’ I explained to the wolf, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the poor worms.

  ‘Is she defective?’ he said. ‘She was face down. If I hadn’t come along –’

  ‘Stella!’ Bogart scolded.

  We stood there, Stella growing out of the mud and the worms trying and trying to tell me something. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ the fisherwolf said at last and he stomped off, his rod shimmering and quietly whooping through the air.

  Bogart and I sat on the bank and Stella stood there for ages – I don’t know how long – but I remember it started to get cold and I got a fierce thirst.

  Eventually Bogart pulled Stella out of the mud and it was like uprooting a small tree. She came out with a squelching plop and the mud sighed back into the space she’d left.

  We got home and tried to eat but the food all seemed alive. Stella kept calling out to me in the night and in the end I went and squashed into her single bed with her. She was talking and I was scared that her mind really had been blown and would never come back to true.

  Stella calmed down as the sun came up. The birds started their racket and the pale curtains whitened and just as a blackbird had finished off a solo, she said she wanted to die. There was no point in living only to die in the end anyway. She couldn’t be bothered to go through it all. When she was a tree in the mud she could see the futility of it all. Learning in order to take exams in order to work in order to eat in order to live in order to die. And reproduction was even worse since you were setting someone else off on the sa
me futile cycle.

  ‘What about . . . the smell of honeysuckle? Or Cat Stevens? Or love?’

  She gave an almost elderly laugh. ‘Illusions,’ she said, ‘just to fool us that there is a point.’

  ‘But . . .’ I started, but there was no use arguing; her voice had that flat sound that will not be lifted. And what she said couldn’t be contradicted; her train of thought was a snake eating its own tail.

  †

  Dad came back just before Christmas. Because he gave us warning there was time for Bogart to clear out. Aunt Regina came too, with a man, Derek, who she’d met at Esperanto. She’d put the pugs in kennels, which made me think he was a good influence. He was kind and beardy and we liked him. Dad brought us presents and we had an early pretend Christmas since, of course, he had to be back with his new children for the actual day.

  Aunt Regina brought bath oil and a thousand-piece jigsaw of Mount Everest for us to share. She’d gone vegetarian in line with Derek. She moulded a sort of roadkill turkey shape out of Sosmix, and we had crackers and home-brewed beer. Dad spent most of his time on the phone to Saudi. I don’t think he really saw us at all – except as an obligation. He patted us and complained that Stella was too thin, and mended a gutter before he left.

  ‘Ring me any time, night or day,’ he said, pressing a fiver into each of our hands. ‘I’m still your father.’

  We stood side by side to be kissed. I was aching for Bogart. I hadn’t known how much I loved him until he wasn’t there. He was my new family and his love was making me a new person. It was fascinating to be inside the old one as the changes happened, like a conscious chrysalis. Aunt Regina and Derek stayed on for an extra day and it was Derek, who was a teacher in a Steiner school, who said he thought Stella was depressed.

  Before they left, we tipped the jigsaw puzzle out on the coffee table and all sat round, cosily, doing the edges. Derek thought jigsaws were therapeutic and had a routine – edges first, working strategically towards the centre. They left as soon as the border was completed. I lost interest once they’d driven off, but Stella loved it. As soon as they’d gone I phoned Bogart, who was staying with Celia and Bruce. It was the day before Christmas Eve and Celia was having a party.

  ‘Come,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t leave Stella. Can’t you just come home?’ I hesitated and I sensed him hesitating too, noticing that I’d said home.

  He gentled his voice. ‘Later, honey,’ he promised. I went to bed naked, which he preferred to any of my nightwear, and lay in wait. But he didn’t come back and I fell asleep. I woke when the luminous figures on the clock showed four o’clock. I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. The room was burning hot from the electric fire and Stella was still hunched over the puzzle. She looked up at me with dazed and ragged eyes.

  ‘Let’s not take drugs any more,’ I said, sitting beside her on the sofa. She nodded and slotted a piece in. The mountain was beautiful, shining and surrounded by a silvery veil of blown-off snow. She wasn’t following Derek’s method though and it was the sky that was missing.

  ‘There’s so much blue,’ I said, picking up a piece and hovering my hand around where I thought it might go. She made a funny throaty little sound.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should go to the doctor?’

  She took the piece out of my fingers and fitted it in.

  ‘Bogart will look after me and I’ll look after you,’ I said. It made me feel better to say that. She gave me a curious look, curious in both senses. ‘Everyone needs someone to look after them,’ I said, defensively. She was only fourteen and looking at me as if I was a fool.

  ‘Who is Bogart?’ she said. ‘Do you even know his real name?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said.

  ‘He should pay us rent,’ she said.

  I picked up another piece. That had never occurred to me. I made us hot milk with a spoonful of black treacle. She sipped a little of hers. It’s Christmas Eve, I realized, and the thought was like a hook in the stomach because we’d had our lame sort of celebration already and all that was left was like an empty box.

  ‘Go to bed,’ I said.

  ‘I want to finish it.’

  ‘Please, Stell,’ I said.

  To my surprise she got up and I could hear the bones in her knees and neck snapping as she got out of the hunched position.

  ‘Night night,’ she said in a lonely voice.

  Back in Mum’s bedroom I put on the light and my transistor. I thought of the blinking lights of Radio Caroline out on the night-time sea; it felt comforting that it was there. ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ was playing and I hummed along to it as I continued my secret knitting. I liked the clickety-click of the needles. It had to be ready for tomorrow.

  †

  Bogart came back at lunchtime. He was a mixture of stoned and drunk and gave me a deep, peculiar-tasting kiss.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Celia’s for lunch tomorrow. It’s far out, she’s got all the trimmings, brandy butter, you name it.’

  ‘I don’t think Stella’ll come,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll drag her,’ he said. He flopped down on the sofa and started rolling a joint, dropping specks of tobacco all over the nearly finished puzzle.

  ‘Make us a pot of tea, honey,’ he said. He put the telly on and White Christmas was showing. The house wasn’t Christmassy, except for a few cards. There was a tinsel tree in a box under the stairs, but I couldn’t bring myself to get it out.

  I put the teapot on a tray on the floor. Bogart had his feet on the table now and a corner of the puzzle had slid off and broken.

  ‘Careful,’ I said, quite strictly. It was the nearest I’d come to telling him off. He quirked his eyebrows as he blew out smoke and offered me the joint, but I declined. Stella was still asleep so I brought my knitting down and sat with him, trying not to breathe in smoke as I half watched the film. The phone rang and it was Marion. She’d got really into drugs and hanging round at Celia’s and I hadn’t seen her since breaking up from school. She came round with a bottle of ginger wine and I did have some of that. I finished off Stella’s present and wrapped it before she came down.

  Stella gave me my present – a puzzle ring – and I gave her mine: Mother Clanger. I was pleased with the way she’d come out, ears perked up with pipe cleaners and shiny black buttons for the eyes. Stella’s face went soft when she saw it and she snuggled it against her neck. Bogart laughed in a fond way, shaking his head at the two of us.

  ‘I keep forgetting you’re such baby chicks,’ he said.

  His present to me was patchouli oil and joss sticks with a starry holder; and for Stella a little wooden elephant, carved out of sandalwood. He’d wrapped them up in newspaper.

  †

  On the morning of Boxing Day I woke with the most terrible pain in my side. It was such agony; I couldn’t believe it was true. I’d never been in agony before. It was the wrong side for appendicitis, the only thing I could think that it could be. It was so bad I had to stay in bed. Bogart brought tea up and Stella came in to see what was up with me. I couldn’t drink the tea; the pain was making me feel sick. It was like a knife digging in and twisting.

  ‘Probably period pains,’ Bogart said, which made me realize I hadn’t had a period for ages. I’d lost track of when I should and when I shouldn’t take the pill so I just took it every day. Except when I forgot. Bogart still wanted me to go to Celia’s with him, but I was too ill so he went off alone. Stella stayed behind with me. I did manage to crawl downstairs and we watched TV. She broke up the puzzle and started it again, darting worried looks at me between fitting in the pieces.

  After a while I stopped being able to talk or even think. The pain got too big to fit inside me and oozed out, filling all the room, squashing the lampshade against the ceiling. I was cold and sweating. I had to be sick and Stella fetched me a bowl because I couldn’t move. She held my hair back while I vomited. I felt a bit better for a while and
then the pain came roaring in like a high-speed train.

  ‘Mum’s here,’ Stella said, looking at the empty doorway. ‘She says I have to phone an ambulance.’

  I looked where she was looking. Everything was cloudy and in the cloudiness Mum might have been there. I couldn’t say for sure if she wasn’t or if she was.

  ‘Shall I?’ Stella said.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but all that came out was dribble.

  Stella dialed 999 and soon I was carried away by paramedics whose voices came from inside a tunnel, saying, ‘Good girl, Melanie, there’s a girl.’ Stella came with me in the ambulance and next thing I knew I was waking up.

  ‘Melanie,’ someone was saying and it felt like a long strip of bacon was being ripped out of my throat. ‘Cough for me, there’s a girl,’ and I coughed and opened my eyes to see a long plastic tube slithering away. I was wheeled into a ward all decorated with cards and streamers, and Stella waiting for me with a bleached face and huge eyes and at that moment she reminded me of someone from a charity appeal.

  A doctor came and explained to me that I’d had an ectop ic pregnancy. It was caused by a bad infection in my Fallopian tubes, which was sexually transmitted. I’d had one tube removed and it was likely that the other was badly blocked and scarred. I also had a malformation of the womb, so all in all, it didn’t look as if I’d ever have a baby.

  That didn’t matter to me then.

  ‘Do you know where you might have contracted the infection?’ the doctor asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, the gentleman’ – she leaned on the word – ‘will need treatment. Could you ask him to phone this number?’ She gave me a card.

  ‘Is it the clap?’ I asked, and her face twitched before she shook her head.

  ‘Nothing so dramatic,’ she said. ‘It’s a tedious and rather common infection, which is largely symptomless in men but does have this occasional unfortunate effect in women. But’ – she lay her hand comfortingly on my arm – ‘due to the shape of your uterus it’s unlikely you could ever have achieved a normal conception anyway, so look on the bright side, at least you know.’