Warlight(17)
He had his ice cream in his hand and gave it to me. I took it and pressed it onto her lips. Her head pulled back, then realizing what it was took it in greedily. The two of us crouched in the dark on that filthy carpet of the Gaumont. I tried lifting her to get her out of there, but she had taken on dead weight, so I lay down on the floor and hugged her to me the way The Darter had done. She looked, in the light that fell from the screen, as if she were still witnessing something terrible. As of course she was, for whenever such episodes occurred, she would later describe to me calmly what she had seen. The voices on the screen filled the theatre, continued the plot, and we stayed there on that floor for ten minutes with my coat over her to make her feel secure. There are medications now to swerve a body away from this sort of collision, but there weren’t any then. None that we knew of, anyway.
We slipped out through a side exit and walked beyond the dark curtain towards the lit world. I got her into a Lyons Corner House. She had barely any energy. I made her eat something. She drank milk. Then we walked home. She did not speak about what had happened, as if by now it was immaterial, some deadly shore she had recently passed. It would always be the next day when she needed to discuss it—not about the embarrassment or chaos in her, but with a wish to try to define the thrill building towards what was going to happen before everything dismantled. Then she could not remember any further, the brain by then unconcerned with remembering. But I knew there had been a brief time at the Gaumont when, seeing the pilot struggling to escape, she herself, half thrilled, had moved alongside him.
If I do not speak of my sister in this story so much, it is because we have separate memories. Each of us witnessed clues about the other we did not pursue. Her secret lipstick, a boy on a motorcycle once, her crawling home late giddy with laughter, or how she’d become surprisingly fond of talking with The Moth. I suppose she must have found a confessor in him, but I held on to my secrets, kept my distance. In any case, Rachel’s version of our time at Ruvigny Gardens, though it might nestle with mine in certain ways, would be spoken of in a different tone, with an emphasis on different things. It turned out we would be close only during that early period when we shared a double life. But now, these years later, there is a separateness towards the other, and we fend for ourselves.
—
On the carpet there is food wrapped in brown butcher paper—cheese and bread, slices of ham, a bottle of cider—all stolen from the restaurant we work in. We are in another room, another house without furniture, the walls blank. Thunder fills this unlived-in building. According to her brother’s schedule this one will take a while to sell, so we have become used to camping here at the end of a day when his customers are unlikely to turn up.
“Can we open a window?”
“No, we’ll forget it.”
She is strict about her brother’s rules. He even needed to check me out, looking me up and down, saying I looked a bit too young. A strange audition. Max was his name.
We fuck where the dining room must have been. My fingers touch the dent of impressions where table legs once rested on the carpet. We would have been under the table, there would normally have been a meal over us. I say this as I look up, seeing nothing in the dark.
“You’re a strange one, aren’t you? Only you’d ever think that right now.”
The storm abandons itself over us, shattering the soup tureens, throwing spoons onto the floor. A back wall damaged by a bomb has still not been rebuilt, and the dry thunder enters loudly, searching out our nakedness. We lie defenceless, without furniture, without even an alibi for what we are doing there, where all we have is butcher paper for a plate, and an old dog bowl for water. “I had a dream I was fucking you on the weekend,” she says, “and there was something in the room, near us.” I am not used to talking about sex. But Agnes—she calls herself that now—does, charmingly. It’s natural to her. What is the best way to give her an orgasm, where specifically to touch her, how soft, how hard. “Here, let me show you. Give me your hand….” My mute response half mocked by her, her smiling at my shyness. “Boy, you have many, many more years to get used to this, to keep becoming. There’s abundance here.” A pause, then, “You know…you could teach me about you.”
By now we like each other as much as we desire each other. She talks about her sexual past. “I had this cocktail dress I borrowed for a date. I got drunk—it was the first time. I woke up in a room and no one was there. And no dress. I walked to the Tube and got home in just a raincoat.” A pause as she waits for me to say something. “Anything like that happen to you? You can tell me in French if you want. Would that be easier?”
“I failed French,” I lie.
“Bet ya didn’t.”
—
Along with the wildness of her talk I loved her voice, the thickets and rhymes of it, a sea change after the way the boys at my school talked. But something else made Agnes different from others. The Agnes I knew during that summer was not the Agnes she would be later. Even then I knew it. Was that future woman I imagined aligned with her wishfulness for herself? Just as she may have believed in something further in me? It was different with everyone else I knew at that time in my life. During that era teenagers were locked into what we thought we already were and therefore would always be. It was an English habit, the disease of the time.
The night of that first storm of summer—both of us holding each other frantically within it—I found a gift in my trouser pocket when I eventually got home. Unfolding a section of the crumpled brown butcher paper that had been our plate, I came on a charcoal drawing of the two of us on our backs, hand in hand, and above us the great unseen storm—black clouds, lightning bolts, a dangerous heaven. She loved to draw. Somewhere in the paths of my life I lost that drawing, though I had meant to save it. I still remember what it looked like, and now and then I have searched for a version, hoping to find an echo of that early sketch in some gallery. But I have never found such a thing. For so long I knew nothing more of her than “Agnes Street,” where the first house we entered together had been. During our illegal days and nights in various skeletal homes she insisted with a defensive humour on taking that as a nom de plume for herself. “Nom de Plume,” she pronounced it grandly. “You know what that means, right?”