The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online

address on the piece of paper he had handed me, and wondered if I would ever see him again. Then he turned the corner and was gone. Somehow I knew he hadn’t told me where he really lived. And when I looked for him it turned out I was right. The address I’d been given, at the end of a wide street in Battersea, was that of an abandoned and boarded-up church.
    I now present the strange ‘journal’ of the girl Jane. The poem printed overleaf was found among the pages of the journal, and I presume must have been copied out by her: what it signified to her I don’t know. I will make no comment on the pages which follow, except to say there can seldom have been so forceful an example of the effect a fanatical mind can have on an impressionable one.
    Edinburgh, July 1986

INSOMNIA
    by Marina Tsvetayeva
    In my enormous city it is         night
    as from my sleeping house I go          out
    and people think perhaps I’m a daughter or wife
    but in my mind is one thought only          night.
    Â Â Â 
    Â The July wind now sweeps a way for          me,
    From somewhere, some window, music though          faint.
    The wind can blow until the dawn          today,
    in through the fine walls of the breast rib-cage.
    Â Â Â 
    Black poplars, windows, filled with          light.
    Music from high buildings, in my hand a flower.
    Look at my steps          following         nobody
    Look at my shadow, nothing’s here of me.
    Â Â Â 
    The lights          are like threads of golden beads
    in my mouth is the taste of the night          leaf.
    Liberate me from the bonds of          day,
    my friends, understand: I’m nothing but your dream.

I’LL HAVE TO tell you now of the night I first went on my travels … the night, most of all, that Meg gave me further signs of her power.
    I left the Berrings’ party and walked home through the streets where it looked as if it had never rained, I walked fast in front of the dust gardens and the brick walls to keep people in, I sent cats up trees to perch heavy as fruit in the foggy grey leaves. As I walked on I could feel myself falling apart. I was in a frenzy of impatience to become another person. My rump was soft and divided under my clinging silk dress as men photographers would have it divide: ripe, ready for a mouthful to be taken out. My legs were thin and perched in high-heeled sandals, the pale tights making them all the more ridiculous and vulnerable. My breasts, unshielded, nosed the air for potential attacks like glowworms swimming always a few inches in front of me. And yet – somehow – I got home! The streets had been very silent; tonight the menace hadn’t come out in a humped back in grey gaberdine, or a gaggle of youths flying low like crows; it had lurked there, the urban forest, waiting for something impossible to come about.
    I let myself into the house-converted-into-flats where I live and think every year will be the last. Look at the lino! That purple and cream scum whirling and foul smelling on the floor, dead blood and feathers. And the walls! Who made this elephantine pattern of chandeliers on a mango background, what grandeur did they think they were instilling there? As always, it is chilly in the hall and on the stairs. The overhead light, resplendent though it is, goes out after a minute with a popping sound from an odiousblack plastic button by my door. I am never at my door on time. I have to fondle this excrescence, caress it into being, so it will click on again and let me in through total darkness to my flat.
    There are all the signs in the flat of Tony and I having gone out to the party in a bad mood. Once up the three stairs