What Are You Like Page 4

  Because this is a colour picture. All pictures are taken in colour. Some of them come out in black and white. This, finally, has come out in the colours it was taken in, though they are not the same colours as Maria’s house.

  This is the other girl. Maybe it is the girl in the communion dress that she saw with Berts. She lives somewhere else, in Mrs Quinlan’s house maybe. Or she lives in America, or England, where they have colour cameras all the time.

  The girl stands beside a high, narrow table; with a vase of flowers elaborately pink. She rests her hand on the wood and looks coolly, a little bloodily, out of the picture, where her mouth is crayoned red. It is hard to say what she is looking at. There is a different room in front of her, with a purple carpet and different people. It has jugs full of clotted cream, perhaps, and bowls full of floating rose petals.

  Maria decides to scribble on her face and then does not. There is a woman watching, who wears a hat, even in her own sitting room, and is full of pity.

  Maria rubs the colours until the girl is grey again, looking out through a blur of crayon. She looks sad now, so Maria tears the photo, very gently, and puts the pieces under her mattress, for later.

  Her Own Smile

  New York, 1985

  MARIA HAD NEVER seen herself so clearly. She looked like a perfect stranger, like a girl you would pass on the street.

  She crouched on the floor and went through Anton’s notebook again, looking for more clues: a ticket for The Clash in the Lewisham Odeon; a ticket that said ‘Welcome to Yellowstone National Park’, a receipt for a bar in New Jersey that listed ‘Cocktails $2.50’ seven times in a row, a piece of paper scrawled with the words ‘I O U my entire life’.

  She looked at the photo. Anton and herself in a sunny garden, with two people standing on the other side of him. They looked like parents, but it was hard to tell. There was a paddling pool behind them, shaped into a duck’s head at one end.

  It took her a second to realise that the boy was Anton. Though when you looked at it, no other face was possible for him now. As for herself? She had changed. She tried to extract her own face form this girl’s face, but when it came down to it, she could have grown up sixteen different ways.

  In the photo she was wearing a blue grandad shirt and white jeans. She was wearing red espadrilles. She was wearing her own smile. There was something sinister about it – happy and cruel at the same time.

  Maria did not have a grandad shirt when she was twelve, though she remembered wanting one. Maria had never worn white jeans, not even once. And the espadrilles she had, the summer she was fourteen, not twelve, were denimblue.

  But, more than all this, there was the fact that she looked different, even though she was the same. It was hard to put your finger on it. She had the right mouth, but the wrong voice might come out of it. She had the same eyes, but they had seen other things. Her hair was the same, but the parting was on the other side.

  Maria looked at her and wanted to laugh. She had always felt like someone else. She had always felt like the wrong girl.

  Anton slept on, his face delicious, like a child’s.

  She knew nothing about him. She knew that he used to like The Clash. She knew he could whistle without moving his lips, that he chewed his fingernails, that he always went into the bathroom before sex. She knew that he did not believe in birthdays, that he was afraid of drowning, that he wanted to hurt her sometimes. She knew what he felt, but not what he was thinking. She knew nothing about him at all.

  ‘What was the best thing you ever ate?’

  When he was fourteen, Anton said, he ran away from home. He ended up walking along the side of a motorway with his thumb stuck out. In a petrol station a man in a white MG had pulled over and given him a lift. He changed gear a lot, hitting Anton’s knee with the side of his hand. After an hour or so, they pulled into a layby and Anton jumped out of the car, ran up a bank and disappeared into a field. He walked along hedges and ditches for the rest of the day. He nicked some old man’s clothes and a pair of wellington boots from an outhouse, and walked on, and slept in a barn.

  In the morning he was so desperate he knocked on the door of a house. The woman who answered did not question him, or ask who he was. She brought him into her kitchen, which was just an ordinary kitchen, and gave him ham sandwiches. He had never tasted anything like them in his life; white sliced pan, butter, cooked ham and mustard. He did not remember the woman speaking much, or even smiling. She was just deliberate. He remembered her breasts, he said, and a cloud of sweet pea along the wall when he left.

  Soon after, he hit the sea. At first he thought the noise was another motorway, but he walked up a slope and, just before he reached the top, realised what he would see on the other side.

  He talked about a Kilburn squat, about buying kif in Morocco, he talked about the housing estate outside Dagenham where he grew up, his father sitting in the window, drinking, while the kids ran wild outside. She could picture him playing Cowboys and Indians on a piece of waste ground; the kind of place where the bulldozer tracks froze and softened from winter to summer, and still the estate was neither built nor healed.

  His father was a refugee, he said, from Czechoslovakia. The only women he could meet were public women, so he had married a barmaid, because no one else would let him in. She let him in as best she could, but he still hit her. And his English children, he wept over and thumped, as though they were history itself. He could not bear the distance between people in this country, he said. We are a family, he said. He said it to them in English, and also in Czech. He said it to the team of social workers who tried to stop him pouring a bottle of vodka over himself and setting it alight, as they took the children away. The kids sat in the car, staring at the waste of alcohol, wondering which one of them would get the blame when he realised it was gone.

  He told her this on the third day. They were lying in bed, and Maria could not believe the distance they had travelled, each of them, to this small bed, this rectangle of space. She wanted to rip out the pages of an atlas and plaster them over the wall.

  She kissed him. Anton said that he could see her cheeks flushed out below his eyes, and the shape made him think that she was smiling, even though her mouth felt sad.

  So Anton kissed with his eyes open. He kissed with a smile on his lips. There was nothing confusing about it, but Maria was confused. She straddled him and apologised every time she came, coming and stopping and saying sorry, until she realised he was in no hurry, he could look at her all day and smile.

  It was nearly dawn. The yellow light from the lamp made her room look dingy and lost. Maria found herself standing over him as he slept, with a saucepan of water that had just come off the boil. She held the saucepan over him and tilted the water to the lip. Then she made tea with it, drinking it cup after cup, taking her hatred like a lesson and swallowing it down.

  His lashes swept down from lids that barely closed: his mouth was a smile that nearly happened. She could not believe he was really asleep. He must know she was sitting there beside him, a replica of herself. She saw the bulge of his iris move from side to side, as though checking some place out before he could dream there. And the bulge started to dance.

  Anton was dreaming, and there was such a tenderness in the sockets of his eyes, his flesh under the sheet was so warm and private, that Maria could only lean back and watch. His head was full of saxophones that turned into fish, and ordinary matchboxes filled with dread. This flat, these walls, did not exist for him, as she did not exist for him, sitting there beside the bed.

  Maria wanted to be with him in his dreams. She wanted to break him open, or slip into him, somehow. She wanted to turn towards him, smiling, Yes, it’s me. It was the kind of want, she realised, that could make you kill someone.

  She twisted in the chair and, gently, switched off the light. There was a knife in her hand. It was quite blunt – a landlord’s knife. She sat there naked and wondered which part of him she would mark. His torso was ve
ry white.

  Maria sat half-lotus, with one foot on the other thigh. She tested the knife above her ankle and, after the cut, there was a pleasure so clean it make her eyes close. When she opened them again, she could feel everything, even the pain.

  Berts’ Heart

  Dublin – Donegal, 1976

  ONE EVENING IN spring, when Maria was eleven years old – the last year she would climb the cherry blossom in front of the house, the last season of spitting contests and hide and seek, the last months in which she would prefer the dusk to night and her body would be easy to her – Berts looked out the front window and was astonished by his wife’s death.

  It was not that he had thought of her often, or even in the last years, at all, but what he had not been thinking of was finally true. She had been alive. She was not alive any more. And suddenly he loved Maria for the eyes she had, in which the generations that made her regressed like opposing mirrors and from which whatever portion of heaven there was looked out on the world, confused by the light.

  The tree was planted the year they had moved into the house: a spindly stick that put out three clumps of pink, in a row with the other trees on the road – like a TB clinic’s annual ball. His wife had such a want for it. She wanted the winds to be kind to it and the years to surround it; she wanted the blossoms to come and to fall. And Berts was caught in the bandaged light of the curtains as, out in the dusk, the children called to each other and Maria swung down from a branch, showering the grass with pink and white.

  Berts lost his breath, pushed his head against the window, and tried for air. Too much smoking. Something else as well. The cries of the children left him and the sound of the radio receded or switched off – he could not tell. You can drown in a saucer of water, he said to himself; you can drown in no water at all. He swiped the curtain away from the window, as if the clear glass would give him clear air – if he could see, he could inhale. Outside, the children were playing, and something about their dashing and twisting caught his breath and would not let it go. The colours of the dusk ticked in his eyes, from pink to grey, from violet to black, and back again. Evelyn was frying onions in the kitchen and the smell seemed to be coming from inside his head, from the very centre of his head, not from the kitchen at all.

  So this is it, he thought. No pains shooting down your right arm or your left. No rugby team sitting on your chest – just fear itself, which took your breath and waved it in front of you. Fear pulling the breath out of your mouth like a piece of chewing gum that stretched and stretched away from you and would not snap back.

  Berts rolled his eyes upwards and tried to look through the glass at the children clambering up the tree trunk and slithering back down again. He wanted to hold in his hand their small fresh hearts, wanted to lay his head on the narrow, springy chests where their pink lungs rose and fell. And he thought that children kill you just as much as anything. They get you, one way or another, and that was what they were for.

  Maria swung from the tree to the wall and balanced there. Eleven years old. She let the branch go and steadied herself, walked a few steps, then jumped down into the front garden. This big-arsed child of his, who walked walls like they were ropes wound with flowers, who jumped into the garden like it was a trench full of bones. She kicked them out of her way as she ran to the front door. Berts did not want to frighten her with his forehead pressed flat against the glass and his eyes rolling towards the last of the light. He tried to pull himself away and found that he already had. He tried to breathe and found that he already was breathing. Her steps thumped over the lino in the hall and Evelyn shouted ‘Take it easy!’ from the kitchen as she ran into the front room and stood behind him. He could feel her eye on him.

  The net curtain fell to Berts’ shoulders and rumpled there, then fell again to the centre of his back. Maria watched him for a while – neither in the room, nor out of it. She looked at his back, made mysterious and womanly by the veil between them. Then she ran and poked him in the backside with an awkward, pointy fist and ran back to the door.

  Her father was still at the window, still behind the curtain.

  ‘What age are you?’ he said.

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Eleven, is it?’

  And she ran back and stiffed him another one, saying, ‘Eleven!’ and ran back to the door.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit old to be poking your poor Da on his backside?’

  ‘No.’

  And he turns and lifts the net curtain and says, ‘Isn’t that a bit old to be poking your poor old Da on the backside?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  And he is halfway across the room in two great strides and she has slammed the door on him; she is pushing up against the handle, while he turns the metal slowly, inexorably down, unhinging all her joints, until she abandons the door and runs out to the garden, as the door rushes open and her father strides down the hall and stands at the front door, his breath singing in his lungs.

  ‘Pax?’ she says.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he says.

  And the next day at tea he tells her that they are going down the country for a couple of days, to see her mother’s parents, and they are called Kennedy, and how does she like that?

  Maria is too old for the four stomachs of cows, or for their five teats and the last one the hind tit. She is too old to dip her fingers in the milk and let the calves suck. Though when she does, a feeling she has never had before goes straight up her arm and into her right nipple. Hello, farming.

  Most of the day she doesn’t know what she wants to do and there’s nothing to do anyway. So she lumps around the kitchen where Berts reads the paper, while her dead mother’s father sits and says nothing and her dead mother’s mother sets the table all day for her dead mother’s brothers, who might come in any minute and want their tea.

  Maria’s Uncle Ambrose is the first grown-up man to talk about her bottom. He says, ‘There’s meat and two veg,’ and he gives it a slap that might as well have been on her face, except nicer. He slaps the rumps of the cows too, as they wander into the yard looking lost, even though it’s the only yard they know. The cows’ eyes are so female, but the haunches are lean and loose under their hides, like an old man’s bottom. She hates their huge bellies, slung over the ridgepole of their spines, fit to break. She hates the muck that squeezes up between their hooves as they slip and splay. And the udders make her sick, the pink veins wriggling under the white down, and the too-low teats that squeeze out between their back legs at each step; leaky and helpless, waiting for the machine.

  So she ignores it all, ignores their gentle eyes and the power of their pissing, as they stand thinking about the suck and gasp of the machines that hang off them, and tick, and swing. And when Ambrose milks one by hand she does not see, as he eases his cheek against the huge bulb of her belly, that same thinking, unthinking, look come into his eyes as into the eyes of the cow he milks, the muscles on his forearm switching and swopping as the milk, with a pinging hiss, hits the side of the pail.

  Maria is just bored. All she wants to know is how to become less bored as she feeds the calves in the haggard, hitting them on the skull with a chair leg when they’ve had enough. All the wrongness of the farm does not strike her, the calves sucking each other’s ears, the cows who mount each other as they crush together in the gateway of the yard. She wants to know something, but it isn’t this. She doesn’t know what she wants to know. They’re just cows, that’s all. She is so bored she can hardly speak.

  It rains all the time.

  She goes over to the milking parlour.

  ‘Scat,’ says Ambrose, who is talking to a man in white wellingtons. Maria waits until they are gone, then she goes in to the lone cow that is tethered to the wall. There is a cigarette butt beside her and, in the trench behind, a clear plastic shoulder-length glove. The glove was pulled off inside out so the fingers stick back up into it. It is full of blood.

 
Maria hunkers down to take a look. There are five rings of pink where the fingers run back up themselves. The tips are squished into a pool of blood gathered in the palm. The plastic clings to itself through the pink bubbles and brown clots; a sticky map of meniscus pulling reluctantly against plastic all down the forearm. Maria reaches over to touch it and one side slides across the other. She pulls back and watches the blood turn brown, sort of interested but mostly bored. So bored she could die.

  Berts talks about bailing machines and the EEC and doesn’t seem to realise how much they despise him.

  ‘A bailer?’ says her grandfather. ‘That’s a thought.’

  They switch the radio on for the news. Then Ambrose comes in, changes the station and makes Maria dance, holding her wrists, pushing and pulling each arm forward and back. And just when her feet begin to move with them, from side to side, he falls back into his chair. Maria is left to walk to the end of the table by herself. When she sits down her grandmother runs a dry hand over her cheek and her grandfather gets up and leaves the kitchen altogether.

  Then John comes home with his knives in a leather pouch. He has a bib of chain-mail, thick with fat and blood; so clotted and greased you cannot see the links. It looks like a flap of living hide, it looks like a bit of leather ripped off a cow that is still running away from him. John shows her the scar curling around his arm, shows her how to slit a cow’s throat with her own throat to the ceiling, he calls the people at the factory ‘Fuckers’ and no one reproves him. So he says it again for her and her grandmother throws the dregs of the dishwater over him, with a fork still in it.

  At night she hears it, the same cow roaring, all four stomachs of her and her grassy breath, all half a ton of her, rump steak, round steak and gigot chop, emptying itself into the black air.