Wolves by Simon Ings Read Free Book Online Page B

meet like-minded women. She believed that friendships struck up around late night tea-brewing sessions were the soil in which her full potential would bloom, after so many false starts and wrong turnings.
    She explained all this to us with a strange mixture of assertiveness, enthusiasm and sullenness, drawing us in and locking us out in the same breath. The camp. Its emergent structure. Its spontaneous spirituality. Its rejection of paternalistic hierarchies.
    The camp became the site of an annual pilgrimage.
    Dad was never able to visit Mum at the camp. Men were not welcome. The women of the camp believed that patriarchy was imbued with violence – that all men were rapists. These were the kind of things Mum would say to Dad as she packed for the camp – in the weeks of her euphoria, before the next bite of her dog.
    Was it for better or for worse that Dad and I were forbidden to witness her first flame-outs, and the hours of her descent? Dad waited for her call. Her confused directions (‘I’m in a phone box.’). Her declarations of defiance and need. He would tell me to ‘look after the fort’ while he drove over and gathered up the wreckage. The camp wasn’t far. An hour by car. Two hours on train and bus, if you were clever with the connections.
    At last, provoked and frustrated by Mum’s accounts of the camp, concerned for her and jealous of this other life she hankered after so much – though it had yet to do her any good – I decided I would visit her. I would do it without Dad’s knowledge, or the camp’s, or Mum’s for that matter. It would be, I told myself, a surprise for her.
    Because of his work with blinded servicemen, Dad was invited to speak at conferences. These sometimes required an overnight stay. The next time I was on my own over the weekend, I put my plan into action.
    Mum’s rooms smelled close and sweet. In the corner opposite her daybed was the mirror-clad make-up table. I turned on the lights framing the central mirror and sat on Mum’s plush-upholstered piano stool. The time had come for Mum’s mannequin to prove herself: to strut her stuff in the real world, she who had been for so long trapped between mirrors.
    The big central looking glass was the only part of the table Mum ever kept clean. The table’s mirrored top was dusty and greasy, hidden under empty jewellery boxes, old Mother’s Day cards, tissues, a big plastic tub of all-purpose moisturiser. I piled this junk to the sides, clearing a space to work. I pulled open mirrored drawers, discovering foundations, eyeliners, shadows, gels. Not just Mum’s home-mades – real products. I laid them out. I knew what I was looking for. I knew what I was doing. Mum had taught me well. She had awoken these dark and liquid eyes. She had put this slim and swaying figure into motion. Now her creature sought her own life, through me.
    I dipped a small, semicircular sponge in a bowl of water and squeezed it out, and again, until the water ran clear through my fingers. I picked up a compact and ran the sponge in circles through the foundation. The stuff was cold and clinging, tightening as it dried. I leant forward as I worked, dipping, wringing, dabbing, smoothing. My reflection entered the yellow cloud cast by the bulbs around the mirror. My face was as smooth as a doll’s. I ran a little purplish powder along my cheekbones, sculpting them. With brush and pencil I refashioned the sockets of my eyes, adding and subtracting shadows. I closed my eyes and ran blues in layers over my eyelids. When I was done my eyes were set like jewels. I drew a little kohl along the inside of my eyelids, behind the lashes, and leant forward, staring into my mother’s eyes.
    I looked exactly like her. You could not have told us apart.
    An hour by car. Two hours by train and bus. Around 4.30 on Saturday afternoon the bus dropped me off on a stretch of main road, woods to my left, fields on my right. There was a lane here the bus couldn’t negotiate,