Chosen (18 page)

It was a melting golden afternoon when we came out of school. An ice-cream van was tinkling Brahms' ‘Lullaby' and Marion was waiting for me. She wanted me to come to hers, but I had to go to the chemist and get my pills.

‘Mum says you should come to tea, both of you,' Marion said. ‘She doesn't think it right you living on your own. You could come once a week.'

‘Tell your mum we're fine,' I said, and I think she was relieved. I watched her walk off down the road, satchel bumping against her hip.

Bogart's cake was not the pink and white confection of my imagination – it was dark brown and shaped like a brick. I'd bought and blown up a few balloons and wrapped presents – a velvet smock and a copy of
Bonjour Tristesse
, which I'd read carefully, so I didn't mark the pages. Bogart gave her
Siddhartha
and I felt jealous. He'd never given me a present – but then it hadn't been my birthday yet. Dad sent her a cheque, and Aunt Regina a nightie.

‘There's something else. A present for us all,' Bogart said.

‘Where?' Stella asked.

‘You'll have to wait till Saturday.'

‘What?' I said.

He tapped the side of his nose and grinned.

I put a night-light on top of the cake and we sang ‘Happy Birthday'. A balloon fell off the lampshade and popped on the candle flame, making Bogart say, ‘Holy shit.' Stella did look pleased with our effortful celebrations. She even smiled at Bogart before she took the bread knife to the cake and sawed three slices. It was amazing to see her eat. She just took a bite as if this was quite an everyday thing to do. When she saw me staring she said, ‘What?'

‘Nothing.' I took a bite myself. It was made with molasses and wholemeal stuff, quite dry and hard to chew. Why did Stella eat it? To be polite? Or was she starting to get better? Would she have got better? She opened her presents and held the smock against her; it was maroon, beaded, bought from the Indian shop on the seafront.

Bogart rolled a joint and made a pot of tea. I was petrified the police or the social worker would burst in, but why should they? My new timetable was in my satchel and my first homework: read
A Passage to India
. I wanted something plain to eat, something with mashed potato, and then to do my homework and go to bed early.

Stella, to my amazement, continued picking at the cake, cramming crumbs in her mouth and giggling. She reached for the joint and Bogart let her.

‘Hey,' I said.

‘It's my birthday,' Stella said, just as he was saying, ‘It's her birthday,' their voices sliding into a collision that they found funny. Suddenly I needed to throw up. I got to the bathroom in time and stayed there for ages, my cheek on the seat of the toilet, which thanks to Stella was spotless. I put my lips around the end of the tap and drank water, swilling it round my mouth. I looked in the mirror at my cheeks, white where they were usually pink, and at the shadows under my eyes.

Downstairs, Stella was puffing away and nibbling at the cake. Bogart had his feet – bare and yellow-soled – up on the table.

I looked in the cupboard. ‘Shall we have spaghetti?' I said. Stella put the joint in a saucer and Bogart quickly snatched it up and filled his lungs. Stella got up and stared past me. Her widened eyes looked pink and rabbity.

‘What?' I said. ‘I know
you
don't want spaghetti.'

She pointed towards the door.

‘What?'

Her lips had gone white. Her pointing finger shook. ‘Mum,' she mouthed.

‘Woah there,' Bogart said. ‘Take it easy.'

‘No,' she said, ‘no, can't you see her?' Her mouth tried to form a smile, a smile for Mum.

Bogart frowned at me as if there was something I could do.

‘Let's watch telly,' I said.

‘She's gone,' she said. She closed her eyes and swayed and then she opened them and started to giggle.

‘You monkey,' Bogart said. ‘She was having us on.'

‘She
was
there,' Stella insisted, ‘but she was wearing, I don't know . . .'

‘Telly,' I said, and steered her into the sitting room. I turned it on and it was
The Clangers
, Granny Clanger knitting tinsel out of frost. When Mother Clanger came on, fussing about and making Small and Tiny go into the warm cave, Stella started to cry.

‘They're just puppets,' I said, but I was fighting against the urge myself, the sweet whistling creature was nothing like our mother, of course, who, even if she was still alive, would probably be sneaking vodka into her tea.

A smell of burning curry powder drifted from the kitchen and my mouth filled with the taste of sick.

‘Don't cry,' I said, ‘it's your birthday.'

‘It
was
Mum,' she said. ‘I wouldn't lie about a thing like that.'

‘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 same 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.