Sisters

My sister leans against the worktop, in front of where the washing machine lurks in the gloom.

I am grilling cheese and boiling pasta. Halloumi, sheep’s milk sent to curds and pressed, all salty in its briny whey, sitting on the grill pan, hissing and spitting beneath the red hot glow of the element. I turn the pieces and imagine the cheese squeaking against my teeth as I chew it.

My sister leans and does nothing; says nothing. Her long legs are encased in denim, the jeans held up by a pink leather belt. Her arms are folded across her chest and her long dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

The pasta is bubbling. The pasta is done. I lift it from the water and place it onto our plates. The halloumi hisses on the grill. My sister does not move.

“Do you want a drink?” I ask, and reach the rum down from the cupboard.

Rum tastes like autumn, like Christmas, like the promise of gifts or wrapping up in a too-thick jumper. I pour two measures into glasses. I top up with cola.

“Here you go,” I say, handing one of the drinks to my sister, although she didn’t say yes to my question.

She takes the glass from my hand and continues to stand there.

I check the halloumi. It is golden brown and sizzling. I lift the pieces from the grill pan and share them between our plates.

My sister sips her drink.

Handing her a plate, I think of how I started a story today, and how quickly its nascent form was chased away by the doings and goings and listenings of the day.

My husband is at work, and then will be at squash. My children are at after school clubs, and later will be at friends’. My sister has arrived unannounced and unspeaking, and although I welcome the diversion, I wish that she would say something.

She is as curved and wordless as my teenage daughter. She sits at the dining table, half on the chair, half off. She pushes the pasta and halloumi around the plate with her fork. I eat. I am ravenous. The halloumi squeaks. It doesn’t let me down.

My sister sips her drink again.

Her silence breaks.

“I shouldn’t be drinking this,” she says. A pause, a pushing of food on plate, then, “Is this cheese pasteurised?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Why?”

I know full well why, but I’m not about to do her the service of guessing correctly straight away. Besides which, she has dropped these hints before, and their distant rumour has borne no fruit.

She eats a piece of pasta, followed by another, and one more. Halloumi squeaks in my mouth. I pause to take a swig of rum. I pretend to myself that I am a pirate. It amuses me to play these games.

I eat pasta and think about all the stories I have begun and never completed; never set down on paper or computer screen; never allowed my fingers to create in sparse black on soulless white.

I am paused in thought, my fork poised in mid-air, pasta cooling on its tines.

“What are you doing?” my sister says. Her face is lip-curlingly incredulous. Her mad sister has disappeared, her eyes gone distant, her face remote.

I pull myself back.

“Thinking,” I say. “Just thinking.” I place the now cold pasta into my mouth and chew. My mouth still full, my jaw still working, I break one of the cardinal rules of good table manners.

“So you think you’re pregnant again?” I say.

I am suddenly bored of the game.

My sister sighs and pushes her plate away from her. She turns her face away from me, placing her hand on the back of her neck and squeezing.

She sighs again and continues to look away, over her shoulder, away from me, from the room, from the disinterested question and the disinterested way in which I asked it.

“I don’t know,” she says to nothing and no-one in particular.

I finish the food on my plate. The yellow knots of egg and flour, filled with tomato and cheese paste, gone forever, leaving behind an oleaginous sea, and my fork lying silver across the white expanse of the plate.

“You should take a test, then,” I say and pull another round mouthful of rum from the glass into my mouth. I am like a fish, pulling oxygen-rich pond swill across my gills.

“Where’s Tony?” my sister asks, turning to face me, changing the subject.

“Work and then squash,” I reply.

She plays with the cold food on her plate, keeping it at arms’ length, never threatening to resume eating. I watch her fork, like a hoe, or a rake, pushing and pulling a single piece of pasta to and fro.

“Don’t play with your food,” I say, as though I am her mother. The fork clatters from her hand and in the same moment I am on my feet, gathering up the plates and carrying them to the sink. I use the clattered fork to push the redundant meal from her plate into the waste-disposal unit. It grinds away the food until there is nothing left to be seen.

I want my sister to leave. I am tired of her presence in my house, eating away my time. I wish that she would exist somewhere else; not here; not with me; somewhere distant. Hermetically sealed in another universe.

I put the dishes and the pans, each item that I have used to prepare the meal she did not want, into the dishwasher. I close the door. There will be more to go in there later; my house is littered with unwashed cups and dishes; but for now I close the door.

“Do you want another drink?” I ask, crossing the kitchen to lift the rum bottle again from the cupboard. I look across at her, my hand frozen in its flight through the air, reaching up to the handle on the cupboard door; I look across and see that she has not drunk the first one. I drop my hand and cross the room. I finish my own drink and chase it with hers.

“I’m tired of this,” I say. “I’m tired of lies and omissions. I’m tired of pretence. I’m tired of your silences and your hints.”

Hazel eyes look back at me as I speak. They are blank. She is tired too, her eyes are telling me. Tired of what, I do not know, and do not want to ask. My tiredness competes with hers. I think we are equally matched.

“If you have something to say, you should say it,” I tell her.

“If you want me to do something, to say something, to help, you should ask,” I say.

“Are you scared of something?” I ask her.

“Is there something you need? Something I can do?”

“Do you even know why you came here tonight?”

I realise that I am standing over her, my hands gripping the back of my chair, my knuckles whiter than marble, whiter than bone bleached by the sun and the sea. I realise that my voice has been rising in pitch and volume; that I am almost screaming at her.

Her hazel eyes continue to look at me.

I sit down. I try to calm down. I try to remember that she is my sister, my flesh and blood. I remember the story I was beginning to write today, forming the words in my head. I remember that it began, “I used to want to be adopted.”

My sister sighs, breathes deeply but shortly through her nose. She stands.

“I should go,” she says.

I am tired now, remembering the story I chased away with thoughts of housework. I am tired, remembering the errands I ran rather than write.

“Are you pregnant?” I ask, all the stress on the first word of the question.

She doesn’t answer. She walks through the living room to the hallway. She pulls her coat from the coat rack.

“You don’t have to go,” I say, but she has already opened the front door and closed it behind her again.

“Do you want another drink?” I say to myself, and go over to the cupboard so that I can reach down the bottle of rum again.

“I’ll ring her later,” I tell myself, although I know that I won’t. It is another of the lies of which I am so tired.

I fix my drink and leave it on the side. I walk through the house on a dirty pots trawl, gathering up abandoned plates, mugs, glasses and cereal bowls. I drag my heavy net behind my ship and land its catch into the dishwasher. This time I start the cycle. This time I mean business.

I am on my fourth drink and snoozing on the sofa by the time my husband returns with our offspring.

“Has your sister been here?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “How do you know?”

“I can smell her perfume,” he replies. “What did she want?”

“The usual,” I tell him, because I don’t know what else to say. I am too tired, too drunk, to think of a useful description of my sister’s visit. “How was squash?” I say.

“Good,” he replies from the kitchen. “I won.”

“Good,” is my response from my slump on the sofa. “I’m glad.”

He reappears in the doorway with a beer in his hand.

“Have you eaten?” I ask.

“I’m not hungry,” he says.

“I’m drunk,” I tell him.

He smiles. “So I see.”

“She thinks she might be pregnant again,” I say. “Although her exact words when I asked were ‘I don’t know’.”

“Oh,” he says. Then a heartbeat’s pause before, “Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know.” And it’s true. I don’t. Either that she is pregnant, or that she doesn’t know. I belch. Too much gas.

“Nice,” says my husband, and comes to sit with me on the sofa. He lifts my legs over his and strokes them from knee to ankle and back again.

“She needs to be more careful,” I say.

“Mmm,” comes back the non-committal response. “Mmm.”

I am sleepy and curl towards my husband, resting my head on his shoulder, safe within the crook of his arm.

“She needs her own you,” I murmur into his chest. “Not these nobodies she sleeps with and never sees in daylight.”

He holds me tight against him with both arms around me.

“I love you,” he says.

I am almost asleep, too stupefied by rum to remain conscious.

“How do you know her perfume?” I ask him.

He does not answer.

© J R Hargreaves March 2007

Horses

I slept on a mattress on the floor of youngest son's bedroom last night.

When I woke up this morning, he came running into the room (he is two), flung himself on the mattress and lay there, grinning up at me, as though he had fallen into the comfiest place in the world.

I suppose, to him, it was the comfiest place in the world. At that precise moment, at least.

I remember when relationships were like that. The sense of falling backwards with absolute trust into something soft yet supportive; something that would break your fall and keep you from harm.

But any insistence that love is epitomised by the story of Rapunzel is steadily eroded by experience and cynicism. There's no such thing as absolute trust between people. Falling backwards is what idiots do; idiots who end up landing flat on their backs on concrete, with all their limbs out of joint and a crushing headache to boot.

This is how it seems to me, from the perspective of a mattress on the bedroom floor of my youngest son.

The elder of our two boys is talking to his uncle, my brother, in the spare bedroom; the room in which I would normally sleep at times like this. He is ignoring the fact that I am clearly in youngest son’s room, and have been for the entire night.

Youngest son is excited that the mattress is here. He bounces and flops and giggles, looking up at me with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket clutched to the side of his face.

He looks like his mother.

I stand in the doorway to the bedroom and look across the hallway at my brother sitting on the spare bed being attacked by eldest son with his sponge sword.

“So what’s going on?” he asks.

“I’ve been stupid,” I say, and walk downstairs to the kitchen.

I grind coffee beans and make a pot of coffee. Strong and dark, I wait for the bitterness to brew so that I can scald my mouth with it and convince myself that this is not a dream.

It has been going on for two weeks now. Since she found out about my inappropriate behaviour with a student.

I look through the kitchen window at the fields behind the house. The days are growing longer, and the sun is shining on the harsh springy grass. I watch the horses moving slowly from spot to spot, seeking out the best grass, enjoying the feel of the sunshine on their backs.

My brother comes downstairs and leaves the house without a word. I hear my wife move from the bedroom to the bathroom. I hear the drum of water from the showerhead hitting the bottom of the bath. I look through the kitchen window at the horses.

Eldest son comes down the stairs, dragging his sword behind him, looking for his uncle.

“Where’s Will?” he asks me from the hallway where he stands at the foot of the stairs, just behind the front door.

“Uncle Will’s gone out,” I tell him, turning from the window and smiling.

He nods and runs at me with his sword. I withstand the battering my legs receive. He grows bored and wanders off into the living room.

I pour myself some coffee. It is strong and black and I can smell the bitterness. It will choke my breath with its sour smell and burn my stomach with its acidity.

My brother returns with the Sunday paper. He comes into the kitchen and hands the financial supplement to me.

“Look at number 85,” he says.

I take the paper.

“What?” I say, staring at the newsprint in front of me. “What am I looking at?”

“Number 85. It’s The Times’ Top 100 companies. Look at number 85.”

He is grinning and I am helpless, as though my brain can’t translate his words into the action that is expected of me.

Impatiently, he takes the paper from me, my younger brother, keen and bright and full of pride in something. He leafs through the pages until he finds the profile for company number 85. He puts the newspaper back in my hands.

I look at the page in front of me. My head is still full of horses and the loss of falling backwards into comfort and security, so it takes a moment for me to register the words in front of me.

“Oh,” I say eventually. “Your company.”

He nods.

“Yes,” I say. “Your company is number 85.” I look up at him. “Congratulations,” I tell him. “You must be proud.”

He grins and takes the paper from me again, looking at the page with pride.

“Isn’t it great?” he says.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Yes it is. I’m pleased for you, Will.”

He leaves the other sections of the paper on the work surface beside me and reads his way to the living room.

“Do you want breakfast?” I call after him.

“Please,” I hear him reply.

I take bagels from the freezer and slice them open. I drop them into the toaster and push down the handle. I pick up my coffee and the magazine from the pile of supplements and walk into the conservatory.

The sun is falling onto one of the chairs, so I sit in that one and let the warmth from the sun heat up my body. I read about The Police reuniting for a tour. A journalist asking them questions about why they are doing it; each band member not really answering. Youngest son comes downstairs and climbs up onto my lap, his blanket again clutched to his face, his thumb jammed into his mouth.

I place my hand against his head. He feels hot.

“I’m not tired,” he tells me. “I’m just resting.”

I let him rest and read the magazine around him.

Sundays are slow.

The bagels pop up out of the toaster, but I am helpless; youngest son is sleeping in my lap.

“Will?” I call. “Will?”

Eldest son appears in the doorway. He is four.

“Will’s reading,” he says. “Is Petey sleeping?”

“I think Peter’s not well,” I tell my son. “Please ask Uncle Will to come and sort out the bagels.”

My brother appears behind eldest son.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. The newspaper trails from his hand.

My wife comes down the stairs.

“The bagels need taking out of the toaster,” I say, to either of them, I don’t mind. I just don’t want to disturb my son, who feels hot and needs to sleep.

Will goes to the toaster. My wife is already unloading the dishwasher, dressed in jeans and a long blue cardigan that reaches to her ankles. Eldest son comes over to give his brother a hug as he sleeps on my lap. Peter kicks him away. Eldest son begins to cry. My wife swoops in to take him in her arms.

“Shhh, Mikey,” she says. “Petey’s not feeling well, that’s all.”

“What’s wrong with him?” she says to me.

“I don’t know,” I say. “He feels hot and he climbed up so he could have a rest.”

She continues to cuddle our eldest boy. Michael peeps out of the circle of her arms at his younger brother and at me. He knows there is something wrong.

My brother is buttering bagels in the kitchen. Everything seems normal, but that is far from the case.

I look at my wife, whose eyes are closed. She is kissing the top of Michael’s head, burying her nose into his thick brown hair. He is the child who looks like me.

“We will work this out, won’t we?” I ask her, quietly.

She doesn’t look at me. “We’ll have to,” she says, then pulls back from her son and says to him, “Is that better now?”

He nods solemnly, then runs off to continue whatever game he was playing in the living room.

My wife bends down to take Peter from my lap. He mutters and grizzles and clings to his mother. She carries him over to the sofa and investigates his body.

There is a rash, apparently. Nothing alarming, but a rash all the same.

“I’ll take him to the doctor’s tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll ring work and explain.” She looks at me. “I’ll probably have to work Thursday to make up the time, though.”

“That’s okay,” I say. Any sort of conversation is good at the moment, even if it is only practical stuff about the care of our sick child. “I can rearrange things at work so I can be at home on Thursday.”

I want to say sorry. Over and over and over again. I want to apologise for my stupidity, for the hurt that I have caused her. I want to tell her that, at thirty nine years old, I am a fool and an idiot. She knows this. She has the evidence of the returned gifts, pushed through our letterbox with no stamp, no postmark. She has the evidence of the note slipped in with the book, the last gift to be returned.

“The cds, the dvds, the jewellery,” it read, “all mean nothing. The book meant the world to me, and I no longer want it in my house. You knew what you were doing all along.”

The book that arrived a day before I returned from giving a lecture in London. The book that had been the first thing I gave to her, that night when I lied about going for a drink with Paul. My old college-mate Paul; back, I had told her, from his latest stint in the States. I had carried that book hidden in the inside pocket of my jacket. I had known that she would understand what it meant; that she would understand that the weeks of making eyes, of talking in corridors and in my office with the door open, was about to become something more. And she had.

I want to say sorry for that first false move and for all the subsequent false moves, but I know that sorry is just a word. It won’t undo the year of lies that I thought I had packaged up so well; the year of secrets that, two weeks ago, came bursting out of the package that contained the book.

The sun is shining through the conservatory window. It bathes my wife and our youngest child in its glow. My brother brings a plate in from the kitchen; on it sits my bagel, buttered and still warm; the butter is melting into the dense bread, leaving islands of unmelted yellow, rich and golden like sand.

Will sits on a chair at the dining table and silence momentarily falls on the room, broken eventually by the sound of bagels being eaten.

Our awkwardness is interrupted by the telephone ringing. I get up out of my chair to answer it, taking the half-read magazine with me; it feels stuck to my left hand.

“Hello?” I say into the handset.

It is Helen. She is calling to find out whether Michael wants to go over to play with Simon. I walk into the living room to ask Mikey, who nods solemnly.

“I’ll bring him over after lunch,” I say.

“Bring him now,” she says. “He can have lunch here.”

I hang up and tell Mikey to get his shoes on and his coat. I walk into the kitchen and, standing in the doorway, tell the silence in the conservatory where I am going.

“I’ll come with you,” Will says. “I could do with a walk.”

“I was going to take the car,” I say.

“We’ll walk,” he says. “You’ll like that, won’t you Mikey?”

We walk.

“Not now,” I say. “On the way back.”

My brother knows what I mean. Not in front of my son. Small ears take in everything, and he already knows that all is not well in his world. I don’t want to be responsible for it becoming worse. I don’t want what I have to say being repeated by a four year old.

We keep an eye out for bears lurking in people’s gardens. Mikey carries his sword, just in case a bear decides to leap out on us. He holds my hand tightly for the same reason.

I try to find words ready for the walk back to the house. I try to work out the best way of explaining things to my brother. When it comes down to it, when we have deposited Michael with Helen for the day, all I can do is say it.

“I had an affair.”

My brother doesn’t speak, so I continue.

“One of my students.”

Again the silence, neither judgmental nor encouraging. Just a non-committal silence into which my painful words fall. The sound of my words makes me cringe; the stupidity of what I did still fresh enough to embarrass me when I hear myself say it out loud.

There is no explanation that I can give, so I deliver the bare facts. I tell him about the flirting. I tell him that I was the one who moved things on, that she contributed by not resisting, that one thing led to another and a night when my wife was out of town with the children, visiting her parents. I brought the student, I brought Lucy, back to the house and I fucked her on the living room carpet. Her back was scratched by the hard fibres of the seagrass. She liked it. She laughed about it. I brought her back the next night and the night after that.

I told her that nothing would happen. I told her that I was married, that I liked my life, that I wouldn’t leave my family for her. I told her these things and she smiled at me across the dining room table. I told her these things as she lay naked on the living room floor, and still she smiled. I told her each time we made love, had sex, whatever you want to call it. Each time she smiled. Each time we took it a little further. Each time I enjoyed it more.

We are almost back at the house.

“I don’t know why I did it,” I say. “I ended it a month ago.”

We are standing at the bottom of the drive.

“I thought I’d got away with it. I thought that she understood the position I am in.”

My brother remains silent.

“I was wrong,” I say, and start to walk up the drive to the door. My brother follows.

Inside the house is silent. My wife is sitting in the living room, reading Will’s newspaper. She looks up as we walk into the room. She looks at Will, not at me.

“Has he told you, then?” she asks.

Will nods.

“He’s told me,” he says.

My wife looks at me.

“Fucking idiot,” she says.

Will nods again, sitting down in the armchair.

“Yep,” is all he says. Then, “Have you got the sports supplement there, Susan?”

My wife passes another section of the newspaper to her brother-in-law across the living room.

I walk into the kitchen and stare at the horses through the window.

© J R Hargreaves March 2007