mitts. Belinda has always been the same: my little sister, she was older than her years by my two; but whenever she moved forward with me (finding a boyfriend, gaining an allowance, drinking Snowballs), she stuck. With make-up, even: she began young and daring, choosing eyeshadows which reminded me of the underside of leaves, but then she stuck with them. Her eyelids are still like leaves switched and splayed in the wind when she settles for the evening with a TV dinner in her lap.
Sometimes I have to go home for some reason or other, and when I was last there, I took a detour from the bathroom to peep into her bedroom. I was shocked by what I saw: gonks, a colony on her windowsill. I was shocked, even, that I knew what they were, that I knew the name for them. Listening for her heavy tread on the stairs, I crossed the room in a few quick paces and peered down onto their forced smiles, the smiles that had been forced into the plastic to make their faces. I did not fondle their hair, which was nylon, lurid, and frayed, although I was fairly sure that part of the point of gonks was to fondle their hair. I had had a gonk or two when I was a child, when everyone had had a few, so I knew that the main point of them was to bring luck. During exams, our gonks stood on guard by the obsolete inkwells of our old desks. But in exams they failed Belinda badly, her teachers failed her badly, her reports were jagged with Es and Fs. Not that this caused trouble for her, because Mum and Dad would tell her that what mattered was happiness. Now Belinda’s gonks have another use: they occupy the void on the sill which, for twelve years, had displayed the faces of the happy couple in frames. The grinning gonks manage fair impressions of the two missing faces and even of Belinda’s yellow hair which has sometimes been only faintly real.
Because she had had Freddie for twelve years, she seemed to have lost track of her childhood friends, and made no new ones. A neighbour’s child played the role of bridesmaid. Because Dad had died, Belinda arranged for Freddie’s father to give her away, which made less than no sense. I wonder if he gave her back, I wonder if he drove her home when the marriage was over, because how else did she cross town with her belongings? She and Freddie had no car, and Mum has never learned to drive. Back home, there is a portable television in her bedroom; this is the extent of her independence, now. Which she never seems to use. Because Mum likes her company. Belinda likes home comforts and Mum likes company: this is how the situation works. The only change in their relationship happened ten years ago, when Belinda started work: the allowance switched, no longer paid by Mum and Dad to Belinda but by Belinda to Mum and Dad. Belinda has had the same job for ten years: receptionist at the local leisure centre. Leisure is ironic: even the entrance hall is hard work, with the machine-gun fire of the turnstiles, the echoes of pot shots from the squash courts, and the chemical warfare of chlorine. Presumably she earns very little, but apart from Mum’s allowance to cover food and bills, she has no expenses: no house, no car. So, she has always had money for the pictures, for pizzas, for presents, for exactly the expenses which I have always found a strain. Sufficient for holidays, even: her talk was always of booking holidays, my talk has always been of saving for holidays.
Here in the kitchen are several unpaid bills, dumped in the fruit bowl until they turn red. In this darkness, they are as luminous as the moon. Christie and I share the bills, but he covers our other expenses: everything for the house and the car, meals in restaurants, drinks with friends, the eventual holidays. He paid for this freezer. I can survive, I have managed to keep my business running through the recession when the trade in old clocks, antique clocks, has been slow – a trade which took years to learn, a business which took years to build, and which my parents considered as an odd choice for a woman because, in their opinion, the only clock which should concern a woman is the biological one. But there is no way that I could afford to live alone, or not to live like this. None of my friends lives alone, now. And lately most of them have married. Even my best friend Sarah has a shrine on her mantelpiece: three framed photos, close-ups of bride and groom on backdrops of Rolls-Royce and cake. She took a year to plan the details of her wedding, down to her underwear. To his underwear, too, probably. The low point was the fuss over the colour of the napkins, but she told me that, ‘Napkins have to be a colour, a decision has to be made, someone has to make the decision, and I’m determined that the someone should be me.’ Her three photos are talismans and whenever I go around to see her, to try to talk to her, I see those photos and I am cowed.
My problem seems so simple. Why is there no simple solution? The problem is that whenever I see Christie, nothing happens to me. And, once upon a time, something would have happened. Something has stopped. I have a memory from school, from a chemistry or biology lesson, something biochemical and messy and unlike my beloved physics: a diagram on the blackboard, a row of molecules or cells or something, made of heads on stems; and the heads switched towards water, they strained towards water. The teacher told us that they were hydrophilous: ‘Hydro, water; philous, loving.’ I know that I am no longer drawn to Christie, I have stopped being moved by him, I am no longer in love with him. What I do not know is if this matters: is love a luxury? Can I stay, loveless like this? Faint-hearted? Or should I leave? But if I leave, I lose him, he loses me, we lose the life that we live so well together. But if I stay, is this a life? Am I living a lie? Am I lying to him?
An old, old story: I have everything, but something is missing. What is missing in me is tenderness: the heads of my cells have stopped turning on their stems, but still, there should be tenderness; a little give in those stems, a wry incline of those heads. A sway to echo the punch-drunkenness of that initial passion. How ironic: the illicit lovers, more like brother and sister. Sometimes when I am alone, I wind my way around this house, from room to room finding furniture, appliances, ornaments for which we planned, or which we tried to deny ourselves, or saved hard to afford; and those that were impulses, or argued over, or mistakes. These memories pinch, surprise me sometimes to tears, but they fail to move me. There seems to be no way forward, and I know that there is no going back.
Now I hear the kisses of Christie’s soles on the tiles behind me. They stop, and the blankets seem to limbo up from the floor where I had laid them, one of them nestling around my shoulders. He turns me around to him, into the warmth of him, and with him, back into darkness, back to bed. Presumably he thinks that I am sleepwalking, as I have done on several occasions now. Jokingly, he has referred to my nocturnal restlessness as failing to sleep off your late, louche lunches. Sometimes I wish that I could sleep off my whole life. As he leads me away from the thawing freezer, I want to tell him, but I am so very tired and no words come.
For Katy Rensten
For hours, the moon has been rolling around the windows of this minibus like a pin-ball. And now we are passing roofs which are slick with moonshine. These roofs are new to our journey: for hours we were on a motorway, in the middle of nowhere, overtaken by vehicles with unblinking yellow eyes and snappy indicators. In the headlamp-splashed darkness, my friends’ faces were dilated to pitch and catch conversation over the noise of the engine, the rolling tide of tyres. For a while, now, though, everyone has been quiet; even Mr Stanford, whose busy eyes, in his high narrow mirror, have become smaller and more level. The only other open eyes are those of the only other boy on this field trip, Lawrence; the view from one of the windows licks through the shiny surface of them. With the appearance of the roofs, I realize that we are nearly there, and my heart sinks. What is it that they say, in planes? We are commencing our descent.
Hours and hours of engine vibration have drummed my thighs into the wooden slats of the bench, but I am further pinned down by Rachel, who is slumped asleep on me. A hairsprayed sprig of her hair lisps into my ear with every bump and turn of the minibus. One of her hands has dropped between her thigh and mine, and lies on both, open. On the tops of her upwardly-curled fingers, the thin crescent moons of her nails are oddly shadowed: she has painted them, because we are away from school, where nail polish is forbidden. Mr Stanford brakes, pauses behind a badly-parked car for a chain of oncoming traffic to pass; Rachel presses harder onto my
