Weird Sister (21 page)

Karen stares as Agnes removes the cigarette carefully and places it between her own lips. She drags on it, exhales smoke through her nose into Martin’s grey face. She puts the cigarette between his lips again. The gesture is intimate and controlled, as though part of a well-worn routine.

Karen straightens her back. She speaks quickly. ‘What do you think you are doing?’

Agnes looks up. She smiles pleasantly. ‘He wanted a smoke.’

‘He can’t smoke,’ Karen says. ‘Some days he can hardly breathe.’

‘It’s the little pleasures that make life worth living,’ says Agnes. She looks at Martin. ‘Isn’t that right, darling?’

Karen moves away from the sink abruptly. She goes into the sitting room. ‘Graeme.’ Her voice is too shrill so she starts again, ‘Graeme,’ more softly.

He doesn’t look up. Both the boys look at their mother expectantly.

‘Agnes is in the kitchen with Martin. They are smoking.’

The little boys’ eyes widen. They stand up. Andrew makes a beeline for the kitchen with Francis following right behind. Graeme lowers his paper. ‘They’re what?’

‘Agnes is force-feeding your father a fag.’

Graeme takes hold of his cane and hauls himself out of his chair. ‘This I’ve got to see.’

He stops in the doorway of the kitchen. Karen stands on her toes and peers around his shoulders. Andrew has pulled out the kitchen drawers to form a set of steps and is climbing toward the jar of biscuits. Francis waits patiently. Martin is sitting on his own next to the cooker. The window is still wide open, the room smells of damp fenland air. There is no cigarette, no tell-tale odour, no ash dropped on the stone tiles. Agnes has disappeared.

‘Karen,’ says Graeme and she hears a whine in his voice. She knows he is thinking, you stupid bitch, and he’d say it if the boys weren’t here. He doesn’t believe her story, thinks she is mad, a mad woman. She looks at Martin, around the kitchen, and feels the muscles in her neck knot. Defend me Martin, she thinks, but of course he does not. Why should Graeme believe anything I say? Why would anyone believe me?

Jenny tells Lolly a story

Agnes continues to tell Jenny stories. Strange stories, brief, violent and gory. They are not like anything Jenny has read or seen, but she leads a sheltered life. The Throckmortons do not own a video player; Graeme and Robert watch sport on the old 14” colour television occasionally, half-heartedly, but otherwise, it’s not often on. They have no objections to telly, they simply aren’t in the habit of watching. And it’s not because they are bookish or musical or absorbed in hobbies – they are not. Jenny used to try and watch
Top of the Pops
but she was always forgetting when it was on, always switching on the set as the programme was finishing. Now she doesn’t care, she’s got used to being resolutely uninformed about popular culture, the stuff that other kids at school live and breathe. It is part of what makes Jenny weird and everyone, including Jenny, is used to it.

She is lying on her bed with Lolly. They are sharing a bar of chocolate. Lolly is wearing a black fright-wig she bought with her allowance last week, her black Glastonbury dress, and a ring with an enormous black stone that her mother gave her for Christmas.

‘I love your house,’ says Lolly.

‘You do?’

‘It’s so . . . gothic. Creepy.’

Jenny isn’t sure she knows what Lolly means. ‘Thanks.’

‘And this room,’ she indicates the windows on three sides – Jenny’s room is long and thin, at the end of the corridor, and from it she can view not only the front drive and the back garden, but over the field toward the cottages as well – ‘all these windows, it’s like a castle watchtower. It’s fantastic.’

Jenny rolls over and looks around. ‘I’m the Queen of all my Domain.’

‘Don’t you think Nigel Ross is cute?’

Jenny is reluctant. ‘He’s all right.’

‘Just all right? I’m going to sleep with him. I’m going to roger him stupid. Fuck his brains out.’

Jenny laughs. Lolly’s always announcing who her next conquest will be; as far as Jenny knows her talk is fiction.

‘What do you bet that he’s a cherry?’ asks Lolly. She is fond of American slang.

‘Yes,’ says Jenny. ‘Definitely.’ She lies back on the pillow. ‘Shall I tell you a story?’

‘Okay,’ says Lolly, a little reluctant. Usually she is the teller of tales.

‘Once upon a time, there was a young woman called Jenny Throckmorton –’

Lolly snorts.

‘– who comes home one evening to find that her flat-mate and her flat-mate’s boyfriend have been murdered by someone who – it turns out – was trying to kill Jenny. He’s killed two other women that evening and they are both called Jenny Throckmorton.’

‘Ugh,’ says Lolly, ‘gross. I didn’t know it was that common a name.’

‘Shut up,’ says Jenny. ‘Anyway, this person obviously intended to kill her. She must get away. She calls the police from a crowded bar – they tell her to stay where she is, they will come and find her. There are only three Jenny Throckmortons in the phone book. Just then a man comes crashing through the bar toward her. Jenny runs and finds herself hemmed in by him. She is terrified, but this guy turns out to be on her side. He is trying to help her. He has been sent from the future to protect her. He tells her that one day Jenny is going to have a baby and that that baby boy will be a great leader – in the future – and that the man trying to kill her has come from the future as well. There are people who don’t want the baby to ever be born –’

Lolly interrupts. ‘
The Terminator
.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the plot of
The Terminator
.’

‘It is?’

‘Haven’t you . . . oh yeah, I forgot, you haven’t seen a movie since
The Wizard of Oz.’

Jenny is looking at Lolly. ‘The plot of a movie?’

‘Yes.’ Lolly feigns annoyance. ‘Let me think. She and the guy go on the run with the big guy – that’s Arnie – following them wherever they try to hide and they fall in love and fuck and then they destroy the big guy in an epic battle involving a burning lorry and a machine factory and the guy helping her gets killed but she is pregnant with his baby and that’s the baby who is going to be the future leader after the apocalypse or whatever.’

‘That’s right,’ says Jenny, subdued now.

‘It’s fantastic!’ says Lolly with sudden enthusiasm. ‘I love that movie. I’d like to watch it right now. Let’s go rent it – Barbara will have it. We can watch it at my house.’ She springs up from the bed, her wig askew.

‘No,’ says Jenny, shaking her head.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t like it.’

‘Oh come on Jenny . . .’

‘No. Shut up.’

Lolly shuts up.

That evening Agnes comes into Jenny’s room after Lolly is gone. ‘Do you want a story?’ she asks.

Jenny is in bed. She turns her face toward the wall; she feels petulant, self-righteous and betrayed. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No thank you.’

Agnes stops and stares at Jenny’s huddled shape. After a moment a smile spreads across her face. She turns and walks down the hallway.

Into her pillow Jenny mutters: ‘Go away.’

Agnes hears her.

Robert

The night noises were very strange. A kind of low wailing, a weeping. I’ll admit that it scared me. It never failed to scare the shit out of me.

At first all I could hear was an indiscriminate moaning. It was like the wind, except with a human twist at the end of each dying rise, like a sob catching in someone’s throat. I told myself it was the wind. After all, that part of the house was full of holes and missing windows. And the wind can sweep through Warboys, it runs straight off the North Sea and across the fens without mercy, especially in winter.

It took me a while to realize it, but the noise would always start once Agnes was no longer in the room. I see the pattern clearly now. Most nights at some point she’d get up to go to the loo and her movement away from the bed would invariably wake me. She’d go without turning on any lights and once she was gone the darkness would enclose me. And the noises would start. Sometimes it was as though they had been there all along but it wasn’t until Agnes had left that I would hear them. Other times it seemed more deliberate – Agnes closed the door and, moments later, they began. I say ‘they’ because that’s what it sounded like, several voices intertwined. Three voices. I don’t know why I thought that, why that was what I began to hear. I can be quite specific about those voices: an old man, an old woman, and a young woman. Often you can tell the age of a person by the timbre of their voice, especially if they are very old, or young, and that was how it was with these. It got so I would almost expect them. And I’d grow more and more frightened and I’d attempt to control my breathing and my heart-rate, stop myself from spiralling way out by trying to trace the pattern of each voice except that wouldn’t work and I’d get more and more frightened until finally, it was as though they overwhelmed me, and I’d sink into the bed as though I was dying, as though I had died. The next thing I would wake up, and it would be morning, and Agnes would be sleeping beside me.

One morning I mentioned the voices to Agnes.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s probably me you are hearing.’

‘I don’t think so –’

‘I hum a little. I walk down the corridor and I sing.’

‘You do?’

‘It’s the middle of the night. I’ve got to do something to keep myself company.’

I realized that she was teasing me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should take up humming professionally. It is humming of exceptional quality.’

‘Thank you,’ said Agnes, and she kissed me.

But the voices did not go away.

Graeme loves Agnes

Graeme loves Agnes. Love has come over him, like the flu. It isn’t what he intended, and he hates himself for his weakness. He has an urge to talk about it, he wants to tell people, and this is how he knows this affair is different from the others. But he can’t tell anyone, of course not. Except Agnes. And telling her is out of the question. At least, that’s what he thinks before today. But he surprises himself.

‘I want to play golf.’

‘Why?’ asks Agnes, amazed.

‘I always thought that when I got older I’d play golf. I’d belong to an exclusive club somewhere and every Saturday afternoon I’d sling my clubs into the boot of the car and head off, leave everything else behind.’ Graeme likes to tell Agnes about his dreams and aspirations. She opens something up in him, something that is usually closed, locked up tight.

‘Golf’s for faggots,’ says Agnes.

‘What?’

‘Only men who don’t like women play golf.’

‘Lots of women golf.’

‘They’re all dykes.’

Graeme laughs.

‘Really,’ says Agnes. ‘Believe me.’

Graeme strokes her hair, tries to stick his tongue in her ear. She flinches and moves away.

‘I hate it here.’

‘What?’ Graeme is alarmed. Two o’clock in the afternoon. They are lying together on the stripped down bed in the cottage. ‘In Warboys?’

‘No. Warboys is fine. This bed, this cottage.’

Graeme feels as though she has dealt him a mortal blow. He loves their cottage. ‘Why?’ He tries not to whine and instead sounds very gruff.

‘It’s fucking freezing. It’s hard to stay warm anywhere, but out here it’s ridiculous.’

Graeme moves closer to her.

‘Look at you,’ she says, ‘you’re turning blue.’

Graeme looks down along his own body. He is naked, she has kept most of her clothes on. He doesn’t feel the cold, he feels desire. He realizes with a shock that, since the accident, Agnes is the only woman he has undressed in front of, apart from Karen. He fucked the others with his trousers on. And he doesn’t want his wife to look at his leg, he doesn’t want to have to look at it himself, he insists on lights out in their bedroom at night. But with Agnes – he lets Agnes touch him. He allows Agnes to run her hand along the twisted muscle, into the hollow along his thigh where the bullet blasted through. He lets her feel the pins that hold his knee together, he lets her see how they are visible just beneath his skin. She caresses him with tenderness, with openness and curiosity; it’s a kind of enchantment. She’s not squeamish. She’s not polite.

He pulls her down to him, ready to have her once again. Despite the temperature, he feels very warm, his body is suffused with light and pleasure. She touches him and he gets goosebumps. He speaks without thinking. ‘Agnes,’ he says, ‘I love you.’

‘No you don’t,’ she says, kissing him.

‘I do,’ he objects.

‘No you don’t. You love to fuck me.’

‘But I –’

‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘I’m your sister-in-law.’

‘Robert doesn’t –’

‘Robert gets this every night.’

Graeme doesn’t know what to say. He can’t see her face; her hair has fallen across it.

‘I’m just stopping by.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re temporary. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate it – you. But really Graeme,’ she pauses, moves her hand down along his belly. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

Elizabeth

Life progressed at an even, uneventful pace for a time. I got on with work at the Trevelyans, I spent time with Marlene and Geoff, I visited the Throckmorton household at least once a week. I tried to inhabit my cottage more fully. I changed things around, sold some of my parents’ heavy old furniture, cleared the rooms of their tat. I moved the sitting room into their bedroom and my bedroom into what had always been the sitting room, but it was too confusing. At night I felt like a migrating bison from a nature programme, stumbling across a new motorway. I moved it all back again.

Since I started working for the Trevelyans I had become obsessed with coffee. I used to drink coffee, ages ago, but I could take it or leave it, and I gave it up around the same time that I stopped smoking and joined a gym. But after David Trevelyan showed me how to use the cappuccino machine I became hooked almost immediately. In the morning I had to have my coffee hit, and not just any coffee; it had to have a milky froth. It had to have a splash of chocolate on top. I took it with sugar. Some days I would have one cup and then, later, I would have a second. David and I spent as much time anticipating as drinking. The task of cleaning the white enamelled Italian coffee machine fell to me; I took it on willingly.