Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (9 page)

BOOK: Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle
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‘Oh yeah?’ he said neutrally.

‘I thought, if you’re polling every passing dog, it’s time to call in an expert.’

‘Rod’s an expert,’ Leroy pointed out.

‘No he’s not; he’s just some guy who happens to paint houses for a living. Décor is Timothy’s business.’

‘Interiors,’ said Leroy, aware he was quibbling. ‘He’ll probably suggest pistachio or cerise.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ She mouthed the swearword, so Africa wouldn’t hear it. ‘You have got to get over your gay thing.’

‘Since when have I had a gay thing?’

‘Since forever. You get all sulky like some rapper thug.’

Leroy chewed his lip.

‘Timothy’s in the business; he knows about colour. We’ve got so stuck on this, I thought we could do with an objective opinion.’

But there was no such thing as objectivity, Leroy was coming to realize. Colours were private passions and weaselly turncoats, bland-faced losers and enemies in disguise. His head ached from pursuing, through a forest of azures and cornflowers, cyans and midnights, the perfect slate blue.

On Monday he was sitting waiting for Rod on the gritty primed porch. ‘Hey,’ said the painter, getting out of his van. ‘You picked a colour?’

‘I think so.’ He scanned the strip in his hand nervously, checked that he’d folded it so the right one showed. ‘It’s not absolutely what we had in mind, but it seems the nearest to it, at least as far as we can tell.’ The
we
was a lie; the last time he’d brought out the brochures for a discussion, Shorelle had screamed and said she was going to put them down the Garburator.

The painter adjusted his baseball cap.

‘It’s called Distant Haze,’ said Leroy as he handed it over, immediately wishing he’d used its number instead.

Roy glanced at it and put it in his back pocket.

Was that it? No endorsement, after all this work? Leroy heard a car door open and looked over at the slim guy getting out of a black PT Roadster convertible. ‘Timothy!’ he called, over-doing the enthusiasm. ‘Friend of Shorelle’s,’ he told the painter in an apologetic undertone. ‘This’ll only take a second—’

‘Rod, my man!’ Timothy and Rod were embracing.

Leroy blinked. Well, it was a bear hug, he supposed. ‘You know each other.’

‘Rod’s done a lot of great work for me over the years. Looking good, man,’ said Timothy, giving the painter’s shoulder something between a whack and a rub. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Busy,’ said Rod, with a brief grin.

Leroy hadn’t known the painter was capable of cracking a smile.

‘I’ve got half an hour, you want to grab a coffee?’

‘Why not,’ said Rod, heading for the convertible.

Leroy’s jaw was throbbing. They weren’t even going to ask him along. ‘Hey, what about the house, Tim?’ He knew the guy hated to be called Tim. ‘That’s the colour Shorelle likes,’ he added mockingly, pointing at the upper section of paintwork.

Timothy shook his head. ‘Stylish in itself, but not on a west-facing street.’

Leroy should have felt vindicated.

Rod produced the folded chip from his back pocket. ‘That’s their latest.’

Timothy tilted it to the light. ‘Grey?’

Leroy stalked over. ‘It’s slate blue; it’s called Distant Haze. If you put it up against real grey – against the pavement, even – you can see how blue it is.’

‘OK,’ said Timothy, as if humouring a child. ‘Listen, tell Shorelle I’ll call her later?’ He made that annoying finger-and-thumb-spread gesture that meant a phone.

‘So Tim, what would you do?’ Leroy was leaning on the hood, aware he was holding them up, trying to sound casual.

‘With this house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Cream, probably,’ said Timothy.

‘Can’t go wrong,’ said Rod.

‘Classic.’

Leroy waved them off with a rictus smile. He shut his eyes, saw hot and red.

The Cost of Things

Cleopatra was exactly the same age as their relationship. They found this very funny and always told the story at dinner parties. Liz would mention the coincidence a little awkwardly, then Sophie, laughing as she scraped back her curls in her hands, would persuade her to spit out the details. Or sometimes it would be the other way round. They prided themselves on not being stuck in patterns. They each had things the other hadn’t – Liz’s triceps, say, and Sophie’s antique rings – but so what? Friends would probably have said that Sophie was the great romantic, who’d do anything for love, whereas Liz was the quiet dependable type, loyal to the end. But then, what did friends know – what could friends imagine of the life that went on in a house after the guests had gone home? Liz and Sophie knew that roles could be shed as easily as clothes; they were sure that none of their differences mattered.

They had met a few months before Cleopatra, but it was like a room before the light is switched on. After the party where they were introduced, Sophie decided Liz looked a bit like a younger Diane Keaton, and Liz knew Sophie reminded her of one of those French actresses but could never remember which. At first, their conversations were like anybody else’s.

Then, on one of her days off from the gardening centre, Liz had come round to Sophie’s place to help her put up some shelves in the spare bedroom. Sophie insisted she’d pay, of course she would, and Liz said she wouldn’t take a dollar, though they both knew she could do with the money. When the drill died down, they thought they heard something. Such a faint sound, Liz thought it was someone using a chain saw, several houses down, but then Sophie pointed out that it was a bit like a baby crying. Anyway, she held the second shelf against the wall for Liz to mark the holes. They were standing so close that Liz could see the different colours in each of Sophie’s rings, and Sophie could feel the heat coming off Liz’s bare shoulder. Then that sound came again, sharper.

They found the kitten under the porch, after they’d tried everywhere else. Its mother must have left it behind. Black and white, eyes still squeezed shut, it was half the size of Sophie’s cupped hand. Now, Liz would probably have made a quick call to the animal shelter and left it at that. She didn’t know then how quickly and completely Sophie could fall in love.

It knew it was on to a good thing, this kitten; it clung to Sophie’s fingers like a cactus. They said
it
for the first few days, not knowing much about feline anatomy. It was hard to give a kitten away, they found, once the vet told you she was a she, and especially once you knew her name. They hadn’t meant to name her, but it was a long hour and a half in the queue at the vet’s and it started out as a joke, what a little Cleopatra she was, said Liz, because the walnut-sized face in the corner of the shoe box was so imperious.

Sophie was clearly staggered by the bill of two hundred dollars for the various shots, but soon she was joking that it was less than she spent on shoes, most months. Liz was a little shocked to hear that, but then, Sophie did wear very nice shoes. Sophie plucked out her Visa card and asked the receptionist for a pen, it having been her porch the kitten was left under. Liz, watching her sign with one long flowing stroke, decided the woman was magnificent. Her hand moved to her own wallet and she spent ten minutes forcing a hundred-dollar bill into Sophie’s breast pocket, arguing that they had, after all, found the kitten together.

Cleopatra now belonged to both of them, Sophie joked as Liz carried the box to the car, or rather, both of them belonged to her. It was – what was the word? –
serendipitous.

That first evening they left the kitten beside the stove in her shoe box with a saucer of milk, hoping she wouldn’t drown in it, and went upstairs to unbutton each other’s clothes. So, give or take a day or two, they and Cleopatra began at the same time.

These days she was a stout, voluptuous five-year-old, her glossy black and white hairs drifting through every room of the ground-floor apartment where Liz now paid half the rent, never having meant to move in exactly but having got in the habit of coming over to see how the kitten was doing so often that before she knew it, this was home. On summer evenings, when Sophie took out the clippers to give Liz a No. 3 cut on the porch, Cleopatra would abuse the fallen tufts as if they were mice. Cleopatra had commandeered a velvet armchair in the lounge that no one else was allowed to sit on, and in the mornings if they delayed bringing her breakfast, the cat would lift the sheet and bite the nearest toe, not hard but as a warning.

They had a fabulous dinner party to celebrate their anniversary, five years being, as Liz announced, approximately ten times as long as she had ever been with anybody else. Three of their guests had brought champagne, which was just as well, considering how hard Liz and Sophie were finding it to keep their heads above water these days. Sophie’s hair salon had finally gone out of business, and Liz’s health plan didn’t stretch to same-sex partners.

Over coffee and liqueurs they were prevailed upon to tell the old story of finding the kitten the very day they got together, and then Sophie showed their guests the marks Cleopatra had left on her hands over the years. Sophie had bought appallingly expensive steel claw clippers at a pet shop downtown, but the cat would never let anyone touch her feet. Her Highness was picky that way, said Liz, scratching her under her milk-white chin.

They knew they shouldn’t have let her lick the plates after the smoked salmon linguini, but she looked so wonderfully decadent, tonguing up traces of pink cream. That night when they had gone to bed to celebrate the best way they knew how, the cat threw up on the Iranian carpet Liz’s mother had lent them. It was Sophie who cleaned it up the next morning, before she brought Liz her coffee. Cleopatra wasn’t touching her food bowl, she reported. ‘She must still be stuffed with salmon, the beast,’ said Liz, clicking her tongue to invite Cleopatra through the bedroom door.

The next day she still wasn’t eating more than a mouthful. Liz said it was just as well, really – Cleopatra could do with losing a few pounds – but Sophie picked up the cat and said that wasn’t funny.

They’d been planning to take her to the new cat clinic down the road to have her claws clipped at some point anyway. It took a while to get her into the wicker travel basket; Liz had to pull her paws off the rim one by one while Sophie pressed down the lid an inch at a time, nervous of trapping her tail. The cat turned her mutinous face from the window so all they could see was a square of ruffled black fur.

The clinic was a much more swish place than the other vet’s, and Liz thought maybe they should have asked for a list of prices in advance, but the receptionist left them alone in the examining room before she thought of it. Cleopatra could obviously smell the ghost aromas of a thousand other cats. She sank down and tucked everything under her except her thumping tail. The place was too much like a dentist’s waiting room, but Liz, who knew that Sophie relied on her to be calm, read the posters aloud and pretended to find them funny. WHY YOUR FURRY FRIEND LOVES YOU, said one poster on the wall. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH, began another. The two of them whispered to each other and gave the cat little tickles, as if this sterile shelf was some kind of playground.

Dr McGraw came in then, spoke to the cat as if he was her best friend but stroked her in the wrong place, above her tail, which flapped like an enemy flag. When he took hold of her face, her paw came round so fast that she left a red line down the inside of his wrist. Liz and Sophie apologized over and over, like the parents of a delinquent child. Dr McGraw, dabbing himself with disinfectant, told them to think nothing of it. Then he called in Rosalita to wrap the cat in a towel.

Swaddled in flannel, Cleopatra stared at the doctor’s face as if memorizing it for the purposes of revenge. He put a sort of gun in her ear to take her temperature and bared her gums in an artificial smile to see if they were dehydrated. He squeezed her stomach and kidneys and bladder, and she made a sound they’d never heard before, in a high voice like a five-year-old girl’s, but it was hard to tell if she was tender in the areas he was pressing, or just enraged.

Liz had to make out the check for fifty dollars as Sophie was already up to her Visa limit. They carried the basket to the car, Cleopatra’s weight lurching from side to side. They joked on the way home that the vet wouldn’t try calling her Sweetums next time.

That night on the couch Sophie yawned as she put down her book, let her head drop into Liz’s lap, and asked in a lazy murmur what she was thinking. In fact, Liz had been fretting over her overdraft and wondering whether they could cancel cable as they hardly ever watched it anyway, but she knew that was not what Sophie wanted to hear, so she grinned down at her and said, ‘Guess.’ Which wasn’t a lie. Sophie smiled back and pulled Liz down until her shirt covered Sophie’s face, then they didn’t need to say anything.

Cleopatra still wasn’t eating much the next day, but she seemed bright-eyed. Sophie said the clinic had rung, and wasn’t that thoughtful?

The following evening when Liz came home the cat wasn’t stirring from her chair. Liz began to let herself worry. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told Sophie as she dropped her work clothes in the laundry basket. ‘Cats can live off their fat for a good while.’

The two of them were tangled up in the bath, rubbing lavender oil into each other’s feet, when the phone rang. It was Rosalita from the clinic. Liz felt guilty for the cheerful way she’d answered the phone and made her voice sadder at once.

Rosalita was concerned about little Cleo, how was she doing?

Liz didn’t like people who nicknamed without permission; she’d never let anyone call her Lizzy, except Sophie, sometimes. Not bad, she supposed, she told Rosalita; hard to tell, about the same really.

By the time she could put the phone down, her nipples were stiff with cold. She’d left lavender-scented footprints all the way down the stairs. When she got back to the bathroom, Sophie had let all the water out and was painting her nails purple. What did she mean, the cat was not bad? Sophie wanted to know. The cat was obviously not well.

Liz said she knew. But they could hardly take her for daily checkups at fifty dollars a go, and surely they could find a cheaper vet in the Yellow Pages.

No way, said Sophie, because Cleopatra had already begun a course of treatment with the clinic and they were being wonderful.

Liz thought it was all a bit suspect, these follow-up calls. The clinic stood to make a lot of money from exaggerating every little symptom, didn’t they?

Sophie said one of the things she’d never found remotely attractive about Liz was her cynicism. She went down to make herself a cup of chamomile and didn’t even offer to put on the milk for Liz’s hot chocolate. When Liz came down, Sophie was curled up on the sofa with the cat on her lap, the two of them doing their telepathy thing.

Sophie was probably premenstrual, Liz thought, but she didn’t like to say so, knowing what an irritating thing it was to be told, especially if you were.

She knew she was right about that the next day when Sophie came in from a pointless interview at a salon downtown and started vacuuming at once. In five years Liz had learned to leave Sophie to it, but Liz was only halfway down the front page of the paper when she heard her name being called, so loudly that she thought there must be an emergency.

Sophie, her foot on the vacuum’s off switch, had dragged the velvet armchair out from the wall and was pointing. What did Liz call that? she wanted to know.

‘Vomit, I guess,’ said Liz.

Why hadn’t she said something?

‘Because I didn’t know about it,’ said Liz, feeling absurdly like a suspect. Yes, she’d been home all day, but she hadn’t heard anything. A cat being sick was not that loud. Yes, she cared, of course she cared, what did Sophie mean didn’t she care?

That night Sophie didn’t come to bed at all. Liz sat up reading a home improvement magazine and fell asleep with the light on.

The next day Rosalita called at eight in the morning when Liz was opening a fresh batch of bills, before she’d had her coffee. Nerves jangling, Liz was very tempted to tell Rosalita to get lost. She wondered whether the clinic was planning to charge her for phone consultations. ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back.’ She went into the kitchen to look at Cleopatra, who was lying on her side by the fridge like a beached whale and hadn’t touched her water, even. Sophie was kneeling beside her on the cold tiles. Liz wanted to touch Sophie, but instead she stroked the cat, just how she usually liked it, one long combing from skull to hips, but there was no response.

Sophie went out to the phone and asked Rosalita for an appointment. ‘Please,’ Liz heard her say, her voice getting rather high, and then, after a minute, ‘Thanks, thank you, thanks a lot.’

Liz took the afternoon off work and brought the car home by two, as promised.

That afternoon the two of them stood in the examining room at the clinic, staring at the neatly printed estimate. Rosalita had left them alone for a few minutes, to talk it all over, she had said with a sympathetic smile. The disinfected walls of the little white room seemed to close in around them. Cleopatra crouched between Sophie’s arms. Liz was reading the list for the third time as if it were a difficult poem.

After a minute she said, ‘I still don’t really get it.’

Sophie, staring into the green ovals of Cleopatra’s eyes, said nothing.

‘I know she’s sick. But surely she can’t be as sick as all that,’ Liz went on. ‘Like, she still purrs.’

Sophie scratched behind the cat’s right ear. Cleopatra shook her head vehemently, then subsided again.

‘It’s not that I’m not worried.’ Liz’s voice sounded stiff and theatrical in the tiny room. She went on, a little lower, ‘But eleven hundred dollars?’

It sounded even worse out loud.

‘That’s an extraordinary amount of money,’ said Liz, ‘and number one we haven’t got it—’

At last Sophie’s head turned. ‘I can’t believe we’re even having this discussion,’ she said in a whisper.

BOOK: Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle
10.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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