Mischief Acts, page 20
When she goes back to the living room, Lula has woken from her slumber and tossed away the sheet Carla had laid gently over her.
‘I’ll get you a nightshirt, or something,’ Carla says, alarmed again by Lula’s nakedness. She hadn’t meant for Lula to follow her into the bedroom, but she does. Carla pulls out a crumpled T-shirt from the bottom drawer. It was one of Geoff’s, and has a Grateful Dead graphic on it. She’s never worn it, because it has two swirls on the front that hang right over her breasts, but she’s glad she kept it now.
‘This will fit you.’ She holds it out. But Lula is looking at the bed. ‘You can sleep in here,’ she says, after a moment. ‘You must need a good rest.’ She hopes this in some way makes up for her failures, both as a nurse and as a host, in persuading Lula to eat anything or talk about her ordeal. But when she takes a pillow back to the couch to make herself a bed for the night, she finds that the seat cushions, the back and the arms are all soaking wet. Not just damp, as from wet skin, but dripping on to the floor, as if someone had poured water on to them deliberately. What was Lula up to, earlier, when she dozed off in the armchair?
‘I hope you don’t mind sharing,’ she says, back in the bedroom. Lula is gazing at herself in the wardrobe mirror, twisting her long hair into a thick rope, pulling the yellow T-shirt so it stretches tight around her figure, like a minidress. She is a dramatic sight, rubenesque and disconcertingly confident, looking herself in the eye. Carla wonders if, rather than traumatised, she is actually deranged, and it would be dangerous to sleep beside her. She’s out of her depth. She should have just called the police.
Lula catches her eye in the mirror and gives her that toothy smile. ‘This is so great!’ She laughs. ‘You are so great. I feel really good.’ She wiggles and looks at herself again.
What is that accent? Not quite Russian. Czech? Something Scandinavian, even? ‘Tell me your name again,’ Carla says.
‘Libellula.’ She rolls the ‘l’s off her tongue like pear drops.
‘Libellula,’ Carla repeats.
The effect is quite startling. Lula sashays round the bed to her, and gazes into her eyes. ‘Say it again,’ she says.
Carla hesitates, stymied by Lula’s face and Lula’s body, so close to hers. She takes a breath but before she can speak Lula kisses her, a long, firm press of her wide lips on to Carla’s own. They are warm, and soft. The same muscle in her abdomen that beat like a drum when Mif did this, beats again.
‘Did you see my friend, Mif, at the door earlier?’ Carla asks, swallowing hard. Perhaps Lula thinks that kissing on the lips is an everyday expression of thanks around here.
‘I don’t care about Midge,’ Lula says. ‘I like you.’
It must be the moon. Is it a full moon? Carla wonders. Something in the stars. Mif would know. Has she reached her prime, just as the zeitgeist has infected all their brains, their hormones, their lips? It is not just her mouth that is humming, though. She recognises this feeling, from the first time she slept with Geoff, from the all-too-brief period when Felix came to her pottery classes and she had to watch his fantastically deft hands caressing clay for two hours at a time, while she breathed in the tangy scent he gave off.
‘Okay,’ Carla says. ‘I guess I like you too.’ Lula pulls her down on to the bed and squeezes her waist. ‘Slowly,’ Carla manages to say, but when they kiss again, it is not slow but urgent, almost aggressive. Don’t overthink it, she tells herself. Just go with it. But she finds that her body, so underused of late, gives her no choice.
*
When Carla wakes to the uncurtained dawn, it is to a few moments of perfect peace. She cannot remember feeling this serene for a long time. It is followed by a plummet of dread, and then the full impact of horror. A half-drowned woman, in shock, in a state, and she has behaved like – well, how a man might behave. Not a woman. Not a feminist. It’s almost as if she was drunk, yesterday, or worse. She can’t bear to believe it. But there is Lula next to her, gazing at the ceiling, unperturbed.
Carla feels guilty little twitches of pleasure, memories in her skin. She should be scolding herself for taking advantage of someone unstable, but it didn’t feel like that. She didn’t seduce Lula, did she? Quite the reverse.
‘This is lovely,’ Lula says, rolling the ‘l’s around, and then rolling towards Carla. She is an amazing creature, Carla thinks, and wonders if that is something a man would think, too. But it’s true. She feels, not tenderness, not the maternal instinct mixed with insecurity that she felt with Geoff, but a kind of awe. She kisses Lula’s collarbone, her long wide neck, finding the slightly stagnant watery smell she had gulped in last night, and gives way to it again.
‘What is it?’ Lula asks when Carla offers her a piece of rye toast and peanut butter. Carla’s mouth is full, she is ravenous. Lula shrugs and takes a bite from the slice in Carla’s hand. ‘So good,’ she says, between chews, and they are both munching, in silence, when the phone rings.
‘Did you find it?’ Mif’s voice asks, down the line. ‘I didn’t want to knock in case – you know.’
Carla feels herself blushing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I had a lie-in, after yesterday. I was tired. I bet you were, too.’
Mif is silent for several long seconds. ‘There’s an invitation inside. Let me know if you can’t make it.’ She sighs. ‘I’m so grateful, for what you did. You know what I’m like about water. And Shell’s grateful too. We want to thank you properly. See you later?’
Outside the door of her flat is a rose plant in a green ceramic pot Mif made in her class. Its tiny blooms are pink. Guilt floods through her. She hadn’t done nearly enough. Sure, she got in the pond, but she’d forgotten Shell completely the minute she’d found Lula.
The card tucked into the plant pot reads, in Shell’s round writing, Please come to our party tonight. Just bring yourself (and a friend if you want!). Mif has added the part in brackets.
‘How do you feel about socialising?’ she asks Lula, who has come up behind her and is tugging on her hair. ‘Just a flat upstairs. Probably all girls.’ She blushes again. ‘If it’s too much for you, I’ll understand.’ She is hoping Lula will say that it is, that they should shut the door and stay at home.
‘Don’t be crazy,’ Lula says. ‘That would be great.’
Carla finds herself wondering again. Is Lula some sort of extreme hedonist, who was giving herself an eccentric mudbath? Perhaps this is just what is going on around her, in these open-minded times, and she hasn’t kept up. But what will Lula do in the presence of beautiful Mif, and her innocent, if boyish, daughter?
*
The door of Mif’s flat stands ajar. Pale pink light and the sweet shouts of Aretha Franklin spill out into the hallway. It would have been so much easier if Lula had just come with her, now. But it’s nearly eight o’clock, and Lula had insisted from beyond the bathroom door that she needed longer.
Without Lula there to glow intimidatingly beside her, Carla’s outfit looks showy, attention-seeking. She tugs the swingy neckline of her dress up, and the clingy hem down, and enters, wine bottle clutched across her body.
Mif has draped pink napkins over the lamps. There is a mixing bowl of punch, with strawberries floating in it, on the coffee table. Shell comes pelting from the kitchen, laughter following her, and swiftly turns their collision into a hug.
‘She’s here!’ Shell calls. Smiling faces emerge. Carla wishes they weren’t all so familiar, these nice people her friend has invited and who will have to be introduced to the extraordinary Lula. Nice is not a word you could use about her. It would be like calling the Amazon River nice.
But here is Mif, a walking swirl of raspberry ripple, holding out her golden, jangling arms to Carla. ‘We tie-dyed it,’ she grins, between kissing Carla’s cheeks. She twirls, and the white muslin kaftan with its cerise streaks blows out around her. Carla can see straight through it to Mif’s knickers.
‘My friend is coming,’ Carla begins. ‘She’s a bit, well—’
‘Welcome! Any friend of yours,’ Mif trills. She is flushed; she gets drunk easily, Carla knows from their occasional dips into that ouzo bottle.
‘She should be here soon. Sorry. And Mif, do you know an Effra around here? She asked—’ says Carla, but Mif is drawing her to greet everyone, and in turn she clasps Lucy, who lives in the next block and teaches Shell how to identify birds, then Stef and Astrid, who run market stalls next to Mif’s. Between them all, something fizzes: repressed laughter, some secret light. It cheers Carla up a bit. They might have their own surprises to share. Lula might not seem as unlikely, as shocking, as she actually is.
Mif shrieks as the music changes and begins to sway as she tries to ladle punch into a glass. ‘Here’s to you,’ she gulps, once Carla has hold of her drink. ‘Pond-diver extraordinaire. Best brave friend.’
‘It’s funny you should mention the pond,’ Carla begins. ‘A funny thing happened.’
Mif has a way of opening her face, inviting you into her pool of golden light, and she does it now. Carla smiles in response, takes a deep breath, ready to tell all. But Shell is tugging at the striated kaftan, practically winding herself into it, as if she were five years old again, not ten. She mumbles something into Mif’s ribs, and they both turn to look.
There in the doorway stands Lula. ‘It’s okay?’ she asks Carla, and Carla thinks she means the dress she is wearing, because it is what everyone in the room is staring at; because it is shimmering, sky blue, falling in waves to the floor, so that Lula resembles a goddess metamorphosing into a waterfall. Or vice versa.
Where on earth has it come from, Carla wonders, but she manages a nod. At which Lula breaks into that huge, toothy grin and steps forward, ushering in behind her two more women, as striking and luminous as she is. ‘It’s okay,’ she says to them. Carla can feel Mif’s eyes on her, asking. But she has no satisfactory explanation, for Lula, for the dress, for the two women with her, who seem to take up the whole room now they are rustling around it. She keeps expecting things to get knocked from shelves, snagged by all that gleam.
‘It’s okay!’ says Mif brightly. ‘Mercury is in retrograde. And I did say, any friend of yours. Could we?’ she gestures.
‘This is Libellula,’ says Carla. That instant effect, like a magnet. Lula comes and curls an arm around Carla.
‘Hello Midge,’ she says, eyeing the kaftan with curiosity. ‘Your dress is nice.’ It sounds like an insult.
‘And who’s this?’ Mif points now to the others.
Carla grabs her shoulder and whispers, ‘I need to talk to you. They might be escapees, or refugees. They might be confused.’
Lula’s arm tugs her back to crinkle against the pale blue of her hip. ‘This is Demoiselle. This is Puella,’ she says, rolling their ‘l’s just as she does her own.
The two women beam as if spotlit. Carla winces. Those names. They sound like stage names, and yet there’s a flicker of recognition in her at the sound of them. And those frocks, like glamorous pantomime costumes almost, yet they look so beautiful and wear them so naturally. As flamboyant and ludicrous as Lula’s; one a glossy panelled concoction of black and green stripes, the other a sheath of what must be shot silk, viridescent bronze. Where did they get them?
Shell is staring, with an expression of bemusement too mature for her young face. Carla fights back the urge to apologise again. But she doesn’t need to, because everyone else – Mif and Lucy and Stef and Astrid – is welcoming these garish interlopers like old friends, enfolding them, finding them space on a sofa or stool to gleam in the clashing pink lamplight.
It is almost as though everyone but her was expecting them. Or are these women just bigger of heart than her, more accepting, altogether less timid? She has that feeling again, that she has missed something, that this weird zeitgeist has blown in and carried everyone else up with it, leaving her floundering below. She must keep up.
So she does. She slurps down the sweet punch, and helps Stef replenish the bowl with sloshes from each of the bottles they find in the kitchen. She sings along to Aretha, and then the Beatles, as if she gets this new music just as much as Astrid seems to, miming with aplomb. All the while, she tries not to glance too often at Lula and her miraculous companions. Nobody else is asking where they came from, who they are, so neither will she.
When Mif says it’s time Shell went to bed, Carla volunteers to tuck her in. She’s a little unsteady on her feet by now; the flat is so warm, filled with all these merry bodies.
‘Is that who you met in the pond?’ Shell asks, sleepily.
‘Is that what she told you?’ Carla sweeps Shell’s hair back from her forehead and gives it a sticky kiss.
‘No. It was a deduction,’ says Shell and, for a fraction of a second, Carla thinks she said ‘seduction’.
She stands outside the bedroom door, gathering herself. Seduction. It’s this conscience, guilty, strait-laced, that is keeping her from letting go. She had rolled her eyes at it all: turn on, tune in, drop out. She has responsibilities. But Lula, resplendent, casting her spell on everyone here, doesn’t seem to need her protection. She has actual friends. So come on, she tells herself. One night, at least. Stop worrying. Think of Eustacia Vye, that wild soul, hungry for a party, any party, and here is one being thrown in your honour.
Carla watches with curiosity as Lucy rolls a joint, not because she’s never seen one before, but because this one is particularly large.
‘To tide us over,’ Lucy says, smoke streaming from her nostrils as she passes it to Mif. Both smile at Lula, and at Demoiselle, and Puella.
‘Perfect,’ says Puella.
‘Boss,’ says Demoiselle, and wriggles deeper into the sofa cushions between Stef and Astrid.
When it’s her turn, Carla coughs, manages to laugh it off, tries again, and passes it on. She’s got away with it, she thinks, but it’s better than that. She actually feels good. She relaxes into Lula’s warm side, squeezes her lovely round arm and rests her head against it.
‘Have a drink,’ says Lula, pushing a full cup of punch into her palm. ‘It’s great.’ And Carla watches as she downs her own and begins serving more to everyone else. There’s a sense of anticipation amongst them, that suppressed laughter that was there before but enhanced, somehow. She watches Mif, smiling at everyone, toasting her daughter, safe in bed next door. She watches Astrid, toasting their new friends, and Stef, toasting the punch itself. Everyone laughs.
‘What’s funny?’ she asks.
‘We add to it,’ says Lula, and kisses her ear.
‘Add what?’
‘Magic.’
Which could mean anything. Or nothing. But she’s not going to worry about it, here in this warm pink room with these mysteriously unfazed people. It seems to be a game, now, to empty the punchbowl, and it tastes so much better after a mouthful of smoke. Mif has put on the Doors, and as Jim Morrison exhorts them all to break on through to the other side, Mif comes swaying round to perch beside Carla. She looks at Carla for a long time, not smiling but not serious. Then she stands and announces, ‘Let’s go out. Into the woods.’
This is letting go, Carla thinks. Mif, who has been afraid of those woods since she’s known her, is shaking off her own constraints, embracing the world. She watches the raspberry swirl of Mif’s kaftan as it sends out little pink trails behind her. Her pulse shifts to match the music. In an effortless dance they all flow towards the door, out into the corridor, her hands held in other silken ones. Someone slams the flat door shut and they drift like thistledown to the ground floor, through the hall, and into the sweet, fragrant night.
This is what Carla remembers. The cunning tessellation of leaves, yellow and green, as they slid across the earth. Trees that leaned in when they heard her think of them, tuning their aerial limbs. Music that followed her, that she knew but could not sing, a sound like cinnamon, fur and smoke. The wood, tiny and endless, soft and echoing, laying down paths for them, leading them in. Lula, Puella and Demoiselle turned goddesses, shining impossibly in the dark, their shimmers pulling in cobweb strands of light from the far-off estate lamps. A fox, black velvet, sniffing at their hems. And everywhere, in every molecule of air, that presence that Mif had sensed and Carla had not believed in now thrummed, not malevolent but irresistible, the delightful orchestrator of the wood, of this, of Carla’s heartbeat, of every cause and coincidence that had brought them here.
Lula, Puella and Demoiselle dancing, kicking up leaves, and the trees, some stern, some laughing, watching it all, the whole insignificant speck of a night, as Carla’s feet with the others tickled the earth and felt it tickle them back. Lula lifting her up, swinging her round, so the air slid in ribbons through her hair and held it, twirled in time. And everywhere, in every molecule of air, that laughing presence, exulting at their exultation, triumphant at their joy.
A race, women streaming through the wood like deer, their skips turning to leaps, warmth through Carla’s limbs like a rising chord as Lula, Puella and Demoiselle spun further away from her, spots of light bobbing between the trees.
Stars, circling and embracing, swimming into patterns that Mif would know, and should explain to her. Realising that Mif was not there, had not been with them in the woods at all. Gathering then around the Dewy Pond, leaning to find the stars’ reflection in its black glass and seeing, lit by a spotlight of moon, a gleeful, beguiling face looking back at her, a reflected spirit, and in gratitude bending to stroke the magnificent horns that sprung from his head. Her fingers rippling the water, scattering stars, so that the horned head fragmented and there rose instead a woman, hair in coils and skin like weathered silk, who held out her majestic arms to Lula, Puella and Demoiselle and beckoned them home.
It had not mattered that she found herself alone, gazing at the sun rising over Sydenham, the trees no longer listening, the music drained away, because she had realised something. She had understood, it all made sense, and all she had to do was tell Mif.
