The Bad Sister (10 page)

‘Maybe.'

Again I felt another voice had answered. Our enjoyment died away. I suddenly saw very clearly the sea on the South coast, when Stephen and I had gone on a daytrip once: a sea with blue ruled lines like a child's exercise book, not the sea I wanted, very short grass on the cliffs, flowers too painfully small, birds chirping. Stephen had brought the picnic. There were thick sandwiches, with slices of tongue. We had talked about nothing much. This would never happen again.

‘Do you think I'm mad?' I said.

Stephen sighed.

‘No, I don't. But I don't think you have any idea – either of what's going to happen to you or of what you're really looking for. Do you think the world is that bad? Do you really feel you must leave it?'

‘I'm not going to leave it. I'm just going to understand it in another way.'

‘And another thing, Jane. You don't know what Meg is going to exact from you. You must be prepared to think about that carefully.'

‘My soul?' I smiled. ‘I haven't got much of a soul, Stephen, but she's welcome to it.'

‘Jane! That's a terrible thing to say.'

All Stephen's recent conversion appeared on his face at that point. His eyes went upwards, his cheeks went a deeper
pink, in his martyrdom, cake in hand, he gazed at the ceiling. I got up, fighting back a smile.

‘I must go, Stephen. Thank you for the tea. That was nice.'

‘But you know it wasn't!' Stephen was on his feet, very agitated. ‘You've never been like this with me, Jane. You seem quite … you seem totally translated!'

Translated! It may have been a slip of the tongue. But that was what was happening to me. I was being translated into another state, without death to intervene. I was going from the known state to the unknown. I went up to Stephen very contrite and kissed his soft cheek. ‘I'm sorry,' I whispered at him. ‘I'll see you soon. It'll be better then.'

‘Wait a minute!'

Stephen went to a cupboard in the corner of the sitting room. He rummaged about inside, his back large and womanly in the white robe. There were boxes of stationery and rolls of gift wrapping paper. He pulled something out and turned to come towards me with it.

Soon I saw what it was, although at first I couldn't make it out. It seemed to look like a rhinoceros's horn. But it was a crucifix, of course. It was made of imitation ivory and a small, faintly coloured-in Christ hung from its arms. There was a gold chain attached.

‘Put it round your neck,' Stephen said. He put the chain over my head. The crucifix dived down the front of my shirt and came to rest between my breasts. The coldness brought a shudder through my body. I looked down and saw the tiny Christ jigging there, cupped by mammary flesh.

‘If … if you're frightened, Jane … why not use it?'

‘Thank you, Stephen. You're very sweet.'

We kissed. I walked down the blue hall to the door. I looked back once, for I knew Stephen would be standing there, his eyes rushing upwards and back again in anxiety. He gave a pretence of a light-hearted wave when he saw me turn. But he couldn't keep up the façade. By the time I had opened the front door, he was safely inside his sitting room
again, wrapped in the wings of his robe, in his favourite chair by the cakes.

The air is very bright and pale outside Stephen's door. There are his front door steps, which have been scrubbed and rained on until they look like slabs of hard, dirty sugar. The bottom one dips in the middle. The maid-servants in their long black skirts wore it down as they trudged, in and out, out and in, the black pendulum of their labour and their unrequited lives, the pall-bearers wore it down as they carried them out, the householders in their stiff hats pressed down firmly on the step: it was the boundary of their territory: it might go down under them but it would not move.

And yet the step is not so respectful as it was. The cement is cracked at the side, which makes the step unsteady, no longer so firmly anchored to the black railings, and this seesawing has in turn cracked the step itself. The fissure runs with violent twists and turns the length of the step. It's not very wide, but moisture has gathered there from past rains. I put both my feet over it and feel the tilt. The thin lips of the fissure are directly beneath me, and the globules of moisture like spit. I imagine that if I were sucked down into this aperture I would sink into the centre of the earth. There, in the hot brown earth along with the bowler hats and the dead maids and the starched aprons laid out in boxes, I would wander forever. I can see the labyrinth of passages, none more than a foot wide: like buried Rome, no elevation of the spirit after death but a dragging down into the bowels, a narrowing amongst the broken games and smashed mosaics and balloons hanging like young boys' painted faces in the leaning streets. I would go down into the world that had produced Stephen and his kind. The people and the prayers and the secret lives, layers of rich coal under the decaying house. From this hell there would be no escape. I would brush the earth walls of those terrible subterranean streets with wide skirts, bleeding onto discreet rags, giving birth in agony in mud caves hung with
rich hangings, dying with my child on linen bedding – I would never rise away from it. I would be remodelled when I was needed again – prostitute or maid or wife with bombazine and keys. There was little sound down there. No one would hear my cries.

So I stood on the step a while to gain my balance. It rocked gently beneath me. I closed my eyes. I could see the haunted eyes of the people as they came and went on the pavement. What happened to them? Did they go out of their houses one day and find themselves seized by eagles, carried to an eyrie from which they could look down on the wickedness and deceit of the world, see it written in the serpentine rivers and the ranges of mountains like gnashed teeth, and the swamps and rain forests that dragged you in and left you there – had they returned without their illusion, with starved eyes? I could hear a bunch of children coming in my direction along the street. At least they didn't know, or care. They were jumping over the cracks in the pavement, while I still stood on the crack in the step. Perhaps it was the origin of the game: they knew hell was waiting for them between the paving stones.

The step, very gradually, increased the seesawing motion. It was pleasant, like being in a boat going at a stately pace across a lake. The fine white light came down on my face and my upturned, closed eyelids. If only life was always like this! I had all the time in the world. When I was rested, I would go and see Meg.

I thought of my life, and the surface where I live with Tony, and the hard, bright entrances to the modern cinemas where I go to watch the mushy, coloured dreams of the future. Those mirrors aren't worth walking through. I thought of Stephen and the vision of Heaven he carries in his head. I thought of the crucifix he had given me. But I could no longer feel it against my skin: it had assimilated itself with me, and wherever I went it would have to go too. I wondered, standing there, suspended in time, what Meg would do for me when I saw her. I could feel, now, that my shadows had been removed and that I was allowed to
sample, for a while, the feeling of completeness. It was as if she had given me something else in place of the bad sister, something that made me as strong and round as the beginning of the world. For this feeling, I knew I would give her anything she asked. I was an addict already, dreaming on the white-grained step, emptiness blocked out. My sisters had been nightmares. Meg would help me to drive them away, black bats of uncertainty and loneliness and despair. I would walk on my own and in my own place so that not even the strongest wind could blow me down. I knew Meg wanted to take, in return for this, everything I had: my salvation would be paid for in blood, but never hers: she was an anti-Christ, she would take where he gave, the wooden cross on which he hung, a passive victim, she would plunge into the heart of her prey. That was the first time, as I stood swaying there on the tilting step between the two worlds, that I understood what she was and where I was going. I understood the meaning of the sacrifice, that I would be a living shadow, a walking living being without a shadow, a drinker of blood, a nightwalker in perpetual and thwarted search of day, a white skin without blood, a dark predator, a victim. I knew I would be lured to this by the promise of the journeys, and the final ecstatic completeness: I saw that Stephen and Gala both knew it and were afraid for me. But I could no more turn back now, with one foot stretched forward into the magic, invisible current of air that would carry me on, and the other on the fissure in the step, holding down the bone-meal of the past, than make myself forget the journeys I had already undertaken. I was committed. I had never been committed before. The people on the pavement, with their starved eyes and their TV, believed in nothing. Yet there was an irony in believing that I would be happier, or superior to them, when I had gone over to Meg. For my eyes would be starving too. I would hover over them in my endless quest for the feeling which Meg would occasionally allow me. A junkie with no eyes flitting behind trees. They would shrink from my touch, from my gravebreath. An upright shadow, draining
life. Still, I wanted to go on. The white light bathed my senses, in my absolute happiness I swore I would go on.

The step broke off the seesawing movement, and the abrupt stopping sent me down onto the ground. It was like walking off a merry-go-round at the fair, I felt dizzy and the ground spun as I opened my eyes.

Stephen's street had disappeared. I was in a forest, which was dappled with light and shade, so much so that the proportions of darkness and light seemed exactly right: small clouds raced over the portions of the sky that were visible, exactly corresponding with the delicious patches of shade on the ground under the trees; pale gold and green grass was as light as wheat in the sunlight, and cushions and banks of moss as deep green as if they had been saturated with water from an underground spring. Birds were flying about in the forest. They were black and bright blue and their song was harsh. Where they flew the forest changed, into a blue metal forest, without the light and the shade. In those parts of the forest where they flew I could see wolves, and sometimes a movement like a figure in the trees. In that part of the forest the trees were as straight as metal, and without shadow. The wolves never stopped pacing, under a sun unfiltered by leaves.

Where I was, however, seemed to me the most beautiful place I had ever seen. The black and blue birds never flew into the part of the forest where I was standing – they stopped short, always, on the other side of a small round clearing, a kind of fairy ring, some distance away. There was a stream a few feet in front of me, and it too was dappled evenly, like tortoiseshell. White flowers – Solomon's Seal and Star of Bethlehem – grew under the light, graceful trees, which had bark spotted dark and light as a leopard's back.

I sat down by the stream and picked some of the white, bloodless flowers. I felt balanced, contained by the shade as if this place, this forest, was the most perfect combination of the world's beauties, at the same time bright and obscure, warm and cold, concrete and hallucinatory, like the
forest on the other side of the clearing, the hard minerals at the core of the world, and the hunger and evil walking the streets. The world was all around me, in its unchangeable balance. I looked down at my body, and saw how the chameleon dappling moved to accommodate the white flowers I held against my dress, and the dark shadow made by my head tilting down. The light and shade flowed endlessly, like film, the essence of illusion, positive and negative light.

When I looked up again I looked directly at the clearing. There was something there. The sun and the leaves had become agitated in their patterns on the ground. The symmetry of the carpet was disturbed. And the walls of the clearing, the silver birches tainted with gold, knobbles protruding on the bark like bruises on the moving, swaying trunks, seemed to have closed ranks behind the clearing, to be shutting out the hard forest beyond. I rose and walked slowly towards the clearing.

The figure in the middle of the ring was hard to see, for the light and the goldness and the darkness played over him continually. He seemed to be wearing a coat made of shadow and light, of reflected leaves and pinstripe of bark, a patchwork of sylvan colours. His head, blindingly clear at one moment in the flashes from the sun, would vanish, and then change again. He was tall, but only as tall as the bolt of the sun that fell over him – when the leaves overhead rustled and changed he disintegrated into an autumnal chaos before reassembling in the mossy ring.

I walked up to the edge of the circle. A thin haze of light like a mesh wall kept me from going any further. I saw him as he stood before me, as he melted into striped and filmy air and came back into split-second focus. He was extraordinarily like me. I felt that sense of recognition and disbelief which jars at the sight of an unexpected mirror: the thing before you that is too familiar and too strange. But I knew him. I reached out my hand, and the light and shadow fell evenly on my arm, making gold bars on the dusky, dim skin. He smiled: I saw him clearly then. But before I could speak a wind that
soughed like an evening wind came down over the trees around us. The branches were tossed as if a hand had come up from below and squeezed them into a broom to scour the sky. They sighed and rattled, and as they divided, the evenness of the light and shadow was gone, and he disappeared. He might have flown up one of the shafts of white air in the parted trees. Or he might have gone into the ground, like a fox. The light in the ring was flat, and tired – round a tree stump there was a slight enhancement, from the dying goldaness of the day, and a sense of shadow on the moss. I went to sit there. I was disconsolate.

Some time passed, which could be seen as a gradual blindness, for as I sat on in the abandoned circle the range of what was visible grew less and less, and I felt the light as it faded was coming directly from my eyes. It was twilight: the balance of two lights – the grey surrender of the day to the pounce of the night – but the balance I had known in the bright gold of the forest was gone. I felt completely alone. Where had he gone? What had he meant? And how would I ever reach Meg, now that strips of black cloud as wide as shawls were coming down on the deepening grey over the trees? The silver birches were becoming white. The bruise patches on the trunks looked like the faces of small animals, tucked into their sides for the night. My body ached with loneliness. My fingers and toes tingled like quicksilver, as if some message from somewhere were urging me to run before it was too late.