The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online Page B

stroking a pig’sback. For the first time since childhood I could see by looking straight ahead, instead of shaking my fringe to one side, a gesture which, over the years, had become apologetic and feminine, as if I had to admit it wasn’t my right to contemplate the world. I laid the scissors on the sill and looked down into the street – for the last time, I thought. A sort of rage came over me, and the night air, with an abrupt coldness, gave me the sensation my body had shrunk.
    Down on the right, near the junction with the High Street, is the house run by the kind woman with big brown eyes, the house for the battered women of the neighbourhood and their children; but the most successful lesbian nightclub in London, Paradise Island, is next door to them, and the men who pass smile and shift uncomfortably at the mixture of misfits: the women who had the foolishness not to stop themselves from being beaten up, the great lakes of blue bruise on their faces and arms an unacceptable disfigurement, and the women who want each other, whose breasts meet like soft pillows as they dance. In the mornings the bottles come out on the pavement in front of Paradise Island. They look desolate: empty tonic, empty bitter lemon, hundreds of empty litre bottles of wine. Somewhere, scattered in their different flats, the women are sleeping it off. But when it’s hot in the street, and the old man further down away from the High Street puts his parrot out on the doorstep, and the parrot calls out with a sound so alien that you feel there is no chance, ever, of one human being understanding another, and the smart young Persians opposite turn up their record players in their sunflower-papered rooms, then it’s time to wonder what happened, to shut the window before you fall, and make, as far as possible, a construction of a day.
    Now I did close the window, for some of my fear was still with me. I went back to the bathroom and re-examined my appearance. Women and mirrors; mirrors and women. My face seemed to have grown much smaller and my eyes were round and rimmed with exhaustion, black as the underside of a moth. My hair stood in tufts all over my head. I wouldhave smiled but my mouth, which looked thinner, was clamped together. I wondered if my teeth were different underneath.
    I could see the foot of the bed in the mirror. My heart missed a beat: a pair of legs in blue jeans was lying there! Then I saw that it was blue jeans alone. And a straight jacket, also made of denim. I went towards them. I looked down at my body before I pulled off the silk party dress. My breasts were tiny now, and the bra that had once contained them looked large and empty. Like a shroud, I thought, as I stood there paralysed a moment, unable to move. Although it was ordinary modern gear that lay there on the bed, to pull on these trousers from an unknown world was like stepping into death.
    The first thing that happened as I changed my clothes was a complete reconstruction of the party I had just been to with Tony – it flashed before my eyes, colours muted, but with cast complete. First I saw the people I liked there: Gala, Stephen. Then I saw Tony, being patronizing with a literary agent, frowning down into his glass as if an important truth was to be found at the bottom, like those mugs with a frog. I saw the hostess, rich, American: her walls hung with brown silk, shit silk money. Her hair was rich brown curls; her head was tilted back; she liked mixing people. There was a man who ran a famous gambling club talking to an ex-socialist historian. A Chinese-American hooker who said she had just come from Brando. Then I saw Meg. Meg’s eyes were fixed on me. I felt the floor moving under my feet and the hostess’s splendid pink candelabra went dim.
    By this time I was ready. I was narrow-hipped, not too tall. There was a gun in the pocket of the denim jacket. I went out of the flat, shoved the black plastic button and was over the