though, because it isn’t Natty’s place in life to give – she’s a taker. She’ll take any man’s heart, or wallet, and nowadays his credit cards and mobile phone too. Yup, I wonder if it’s this ability she has – to solicit the answer ‘Yes’ before she’s even posed the question – that has made her so incapable of resisting her own inner voices, her own charming demons. ‘Have some heroin, Natty?’ they sweet-talk her; and she replies, ‘Sure, why not?’ She says she’s a painter – and it’s true that she went to art school. Unfortunately, she’s not well-to-do enough to be one of those girls-who-paint, so she has to be a woman who daubs on walls. She was doing a ‘Muriel’–as she terms it – for some community centre, but judging from the bicker that’s history.
‘The dogs, how suitable,’ says Charlotte. ‘It’ll be easy for you to get there, you know the way already.’
‘Oh fuck off, you materialist bitch. If you don’t want to lend me twenty quid – don’t. Spend it on a pedicure, or a massage. Go and get your bourgeois bum sluiced out at the Sanctuary see if I fucking care.’
‘Twenty pounds is quite a lot of money.’ How like Charlotte to say ‘twenty pounds’ like that. Deadpan. She knows the value of the words that are money. I peel up an eyelid to regard them both. Natty is standing by the sharply arched triptych of mouldering Gothic window. My bed’s in a bay-I’m in abeyance. It suits her – the combination of grime and the ecclesiastical. It’s easy to imagine her as the Madonna of grunge. Charlotte has taken Dr Steel’s place on the chair by the bedside table. She’s brought flowers and a bottle of barley water. I asked her for the barley water yesterday afternoon when this was what I desired more than anything else in the world; more than light, more than life, more than love. That was yesterday afternoon – now I’d sooner vomit again than drink the muck.
It’s a bit like Charlotte, the barley water – both are things the anticipation of which far surpasses their actuality. No, worse than that – both are things you only want when they aren’t there. Charlotte is one of those women – she is a woman, not a girl, although she’s only thirty as against Natty’s arrested twenty-seven – who make it their business to maximise what nature has given them. She’s a big, blonde, lumpy thing, like me. Sometimes she reminds me so much of the gaucheness of my own youth that I can hardly bear it. Yup, she looks like me: five-ten, carrying at least a hundred and fifty pounds; big, dirigible tits, still firm; high hips; thick hair. A no-messing, big, blonde woman. She’d be able to carry it off – just as I did – given the nose, but she doesn’t have the nose, not the prominent keel that has guided me through life’s seas. Oh no. Where it should’ve been sunk is her father’s little blob, David Yaws’s button nose. ‘Retroussé’, his mother used to call it. ‘Porcine is what you mean,’ I’d reply.
So, she’s got Yaws’s nose and the rest of his face too. At times like these, as I bleary at her, it looks to me as if a snapshot of Yaws’s face has been Scotch-taped on to hers. It might seem wrong of me to dislike my elder daughter on the grounds of her close resemblance to her father, but hell, it’ll do. What other grounds should I dislike her on? That she’s taken the place of the brother who died before she was born? Yeah – that’ll do fine too. How about the fact that she’s precise, neat and efficient – all those things I never managed. Mm – complementary, I’d say. Poor Charlotte, with her middle-aged, middle-class, quintessentially English face, all scrunched up with the effort of dealing simultaneously with her junky sister and her dying mother. Lucky she has Mr Elvers to rely on. Not that her husband is in evidence – he’ll be in the day room using the payphone, or his mobile phone, or leaning out the window so he can
‘The dogs, how suitable,’ says Charlotte. ‘It’ll be easy for you to get there, you know the way already.’
‘Oh fuck off, you materialist bitch. If you don’t want to lend me twenty quid – don’t. Spend it on a pedicure, or a massage. Go and get your bourgeois bum sluiced out at the Sanctuary see if I fucking care.’
‘Twenty pounds is quite a lot of money.’ How like Charlotte to say ‘twenty pounds’ like that. Deadpan. She knows the value of the words that are money. I peel up an eyelid to regard them both. Natty is standing by the sharply arched triptych of mouldering Gothic window. My bed’s in a bay-I’m in abeyance. It suits her – the combination of grime and the ecclesiastical. It’s easy to imagine her as the Madonna of grunge. Charlotte has taken Dr Steel’s place on the chair by the bedside table. She’s brought flowers and a bottle of barley water. I asked her for the barley water yesterday afternoon when this was what I desired more than anything else in the world; more than light, more than life, more than love. That was yesterday afternoon – now I’d sooner vomit again than drink the muck.
It’s a bit like Charlotte, the barley water – both are things the anticipation of which far surpasses their actuality. No, worse than that – both are things you only want when they aren’t there. Charlotte is one of those women – she is a woman, not a girl, although she’s only thirty as against Natty’s arrested twenty-seven – who make it their business to maximise what nature has given them. She’s a big, blonde, lumpy thing, like me. Sometimes she reminds me so much of the gaucheness of my own youth that I can hardly bear it. Yup, she looks like me: five-ten, carrying at least a hundred and fifty pounds; big, dirigible tits, still firm; high hips; thick hair. A no-messing, big, blonde woman. She’d be able to carry it off – just as I did – given the nose, but she doesn’t have the nose, not the prominent keel that has guided me through life’s seas. Oh no. Where it should’ve been sunk is her father’s little blob, David Yaws’s button nose. ‘Retroussé’, his mother used to call it. ‘Porcine is what you mean,’ I’d reply.
So, she’s got Yaws’s nose and the rest of his face too. At times like these, as I bleary at her, it looks to me as if a snapshot of Yaws’s face has been Scotch-taped on to hers. It might seem wrong of me to dislike my elder daughter on the grounds of her close resemblance to her father, but hell, it’ll do. What other grounds should I dislike her on? That she’s taken the place of the brother who died before she was born? Yeah – that’ll do fine too. How about the fact that she’s precise, neat and efficient – all those things I never managed. Mm – complementary, I’d say. Poor Charlotte, with her middle-aged, middle-class, quintessentially English face, all scrunched up with the effort of dealing simultaneously with her junky sister and her dying mother. Lucky she has Mr Elvers to rely on. Not that her husband is in evidence – he’ll be in the day room using the payphone, or his mobile phone, or leaning out the window so he can
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