Limestone and Clay (22 page)

‘Hello,' she replies. She struggles into her dressing gown. The room is full of bright, sharp, tricky light.

‘Everything all right?' Iris asks. Nadia goes to meet her in the hall.

‘Wow,' she says, remembering the glimpse of Iris through the window through the rain. Before. It feels like weeks ago. Iris's hair is piled in a glistening lopsided mound. She wears her red and black shawl, giant gold hoop ear-rings and scarlet lipstick.

‘The door was open,' Iris says. ‘Thought you'd been burgularised. Thought I'd look in, make sure nothing was up. Do you like it?' She touches her lips. ‘Bee-Sting, it's called, a sample actually, but no bugger was interested.'

Nadia laughs weakly. ‘I'll make coffee,' she says. Her eyes will not focus properly. The texture of Iris's hair is complex, and glistens fuzzily like black candy-floss. ‘Your hair,' she says.

‘Oh not mine, sweetheart,' Iris says. ‘Polyester. Look.' She whips it off. Her own grey hair is flattened to her head with a gold net. ‘Debenhams sale,' she says, putting it on the kitchen table.

‘Lovely,' Nadia says and finds herself giggling feebly at the sight of Iris with her hairnet and lipstick and ear-rings.

‘Part of the new image,' Iris says. ‘I'll just leave it off for a mo.' She scrabbles her fingers scratchily over her scalp.

Nadia's eyes leak from the laughter and the sunshine. She wipes them on her dressing-gown sleeve. ‘Sorry to laugh,' she says. ‘It's not you really, it's …'

‘Amazon,' Iris says, indicating the flat package that she's also put on the table, ‘£3.75 but no hurry. So, what's been going off?' She sits down. Nadia spoons coffee into two cups.

‘Well,' she says, and flounders. Where can she possibly start?

‘I saw you rushing away,' Iris prompts, ‘on your bike. “Like a bat out of hell,” I said to Derek. Thought you might need your eyeshadow, that's why I waved.'

‘No,' Nadia says. ‘I didn't need it.'

‘Have you done your sculpture?'

‘Well, yes, sort of.' Iris looks expectant. ‘Want to see?'

‘I'd like to see what you made of me.'

‘It's not
you
exactly,' Nadia warns, leading Iris through into her studio. She pulls the cloth off the object. Iris screws up her nose. ‘It's not directly representational,' Nadia says, ‘I mean …'

‘I know what you mean.'

‘Sorry.'

‘God,' Iris says. ‘Looks like it's about to jump right off that bench. It's got, something. Energy or something.'

Nadia is delighted. ‘Really? Do you really think so?'

‘What d'you call it?'

‘I don't know. I hadn't thought.'

‘So will you be wanting me again? To model.'

‘Oh … not just now though. I'm feeling … it's been a rough couple of days.' Rough! She laughs at her own understatement. She is full of laughter today, silly bubbles of it like pressure escaping.

In the kitchen, Nadia hands Iris her coffee and sits down. For an instant she thinks Iris is Simon, preposterously, and shakes her head. Soon she will see him, in his hospital bed with his vulnerable heart beating. She is afraid to see him. If she had waited to confront him, waited until he was strong … but she cannot think about that now, not with Iris in her glistening hairnet sitting there, waiting.

Looking not at Iris but at the light dancing on the surface of her coffee and at the elliptical reflection flittering across the ceiling when she moves her cup, she tells Iris about Simon, about the rescue, about the heart attack. Iris listens with her mouth open. ‘Bleeding hell, Nadia,' she says intermittently.

‘So you were right,' Nadia finishes.

‘Right? Me? In what way?'

‘You saw danger in the tea-leaves.'

‘Listen,' Iris says, leaning forward urgently. ‘It's a load of cobblers. Really. This fortune business. I make it all up.' Nadia frowns, disbelievingly. ‘Oh I'm quite telepathic. I pick things up. But otherwise …'

‘You're a fraud,' Nadia says, sitting back.

‘Not a fraud, no. I wouldn't say a fraud.'

‘But if it's all lies …'

‘Intuition. But sometimes – if I can't, well, intuit anything, then I make it up. It's what the punters want.'

‘So you made it up about Simon's danger?'

‘Well no. I mean the sign
was
there, and near the rim of the cup – that means the near future. Anyone can do that, you only have to look it up in a book. But I don't believe it. myself. I mean, how can it be related to anything? How can it?'

‘I know,' Nadia says. ‘That's what I think, but … well, how can you do it then? Take people in?'

Iris laces her hands together and clicks her knuckles. ‘It's a service,' she says. ‘People only come if they want to be taken in.' Nadia opens her mouth to object. ‘And it's a job,' Iris continues. ‘I'm going for it now – new image, see. Given up the selling. “You have to believe in your product,” that's what the silly bitch area sales manager said, reeking of bleeding Addiction, sneering at my “so-called sales record”. So I packed it in. Kept the samples though.' She smears her lips together, tasting the Bee-Sting.

‘What about Leonard?' Nadia says. ‘You said you saw in his palm that he'd die young.'

‘And then he went and got himself killed by a load of haddock.'

‘Cod, you said.'

‘Never was sure of the species. That's true. But I didn't see it, not before. Good story though.'

‘So it's all stories, lies?' Nadia touches the bruise on her head and winces.

‘Not lies. Things come to me, or they don't. Not a lot to do with the tea-leaves, or whatever … can't pick and choose.' Iris narrows her eyes, and Nadia notices again the odd intensity that their different colours gives her. With her hair flattened to her head she has a witchy look. ‘I
can
tell,' she says, ‘that something's wrong. Something apart from – before – last night. Have you lost a child?'

Nadia gasps. It is as if someone has stroked a raw nerve. She bites the rough corner of her thumbnail.

‘It hurts, I know,' Iris says.

‘You don't know …' Nadia wails. She half stands but Iris continues, ‘When I was twenty I had my first baby. A boy. Stillborn.'

Nadia sits down.

‘And since then I've had three more, full-term still births. No explanation. And over twenty miscarriages.'

‘My God,' Nadia says. ‘Twenty.'

‘So how many little souls is that who trail behind me?'

Nadia gasps. ‘Iris … I'm sorry.' She squeezes her eyes against the vision of a cloud of little filmy wraiths around Iris's head.

Iris shrugs. She picks up her wig and puts it on, becoming at once grand. ‘You survive,' she says. ‘It's a case of having to.'

Nadia watches Iris get up to leave. ‘I'm sorry I was so … I just didn't think.'

‘Why
should
you, my duck? Old fart like me.' Her eyes shine, she whisks her shawl dramatically over her shoulders: ‘£3.75 for the eye-compact, remember. But no rush.'

Nadia follows her to the door. ‘I'll drop it in later. I'm going to see Simon.'

‘Send him my best,' Iris says. ‘Poor sod. He'll be all right. I feel
that
, for definite.'

‘Thanks.'

Iris opens the door and then turns back. ‘Listen,' she says. ‘If you want my advice, don't give up hope of a baby – but don't
pin
your hopes on it either. Understand? There's more to life … talented girl like you.'

When she has left, Nadia goes back into the kitchen. She must eat something and then she must go to the hospital. Why does her heart sink at the thought? On the chair where Iris has been sitting there is something dark. She picks it up. It is the feather of a crow. She shudders as she drops it in the bin.

Bitter

Simon is sleeping. Since the accident he has slept deeply, almost dreamlessly he claims, although Nadia, lying awake beside him, hears him groan and feels him struggle and sometimes clutch her as if to save himself.

Nadia puts on a short flowery dress, a gesture to summer, and then she stands beside the bed, looking down at Simon's sleeping face. He is peaceful now, flushed; the sunshine falls across his face, lighting the filaments of stubble so that they glitter like fuse wire. He is so pink and gold and alive that it is impossible to believe that he nearly died. He stirs in his sleep, turns over, and the quilt falls away from his shoulders, revealing the angry red ridges of his scars. She runs a fingertip very gently along the length of one, stretched like a grin across his shoulderblade. The scars will fade to white but they will never disappear. Apart from the scars he is better,
physically
he is better.

He wakes with a start. This is the way he wakes now, always, his body stiffening, his eyes wide with fear. She watches the flaring of his pupils as he turns over. When he sees past whatever is in his head, sees her, his face relaxes and he smiles.

‘Morning,' Nadia says. He reaches up for her hand but she moves away before he can touch her. ‘I'll make some tea.'

While the kettle boils, she goes into her studio. The light is pure and grey in the mornings in this room, no silly sunbeams, a clear, uniform light. The sculptures are grey, bits of Iris, bits of herself, of Simon, transmuted by her fingers and imagination into strange solid forms. The first sculpture, the foot, she has not let dry. It is not finished somehow; it remains under a damp cloth while she works on the others. Simon stared at these shapes uncomprehendingly. ‘Good,' he said, surprised by the work, as Nadia too is surprised. But she knows that this is what she's been waiting for. It has been shocked into germination by the accident perhaps. ‘Accident' is what they call it – Nadia and Simon, Celia and Dan and Iris.

‘What?' Simon asked, with the grey forms before him. ‘I can't quite make out …'

‘That's the point,' Nadia explained, smiling at the puzzled dip of his eyebrows.

Simon gets up before Nadia has made the tea. He follows her into her studio. He is naked. ‘Watch your feet,' Nadia warns. The floor is littered with little blobs and curls of dried clay. ‘I really must sweep up.'

Simon puts his arms around her. ‘Come back to bed,' he says, nuzzling his bristly face into her neck, pressing his pelvis, his soft penis against her.

‘Not now,' she says. ‘I've got to go out.'

‘You haven't got to.'

She pulls away from him. He smells fusty, of sleepy anxious sweat. ‘Why not shower and shave?' she says. She leaves the studio and he follows her into the kitchen, watches her make the tea.

‘I do love you,' he says.

‘I know.' The love on his face bothers her, and the wistful, almost yearning look in his eyes. Now he is up he looks less rosy. He seems to have aged in just a few weeks, so that occasionally she catches glimpses of the old man he will become in the slanted set of his head on his shoulders, the lines that stretch from his nose to the corners of his mouth.

‘Do have a shower,' she urges. ‘Why don't you go out? You can't stay in on such a lovely day.' Simon's eyes flicker nervously towards the window. He nods unconvincingly. ‘See you later,' Nadia says.

‘Aren't you having breakfast?'

‘Had it.' She gestures at her empty cereal bowl.

‘You should have woken me. Where are you going?'

‘Just to see someone.' She hangs around in the kitchen until she can hear the shower and then, relieved, hurries down the stairs, out past Iris's door into the sweet sunshine. It is mid-May. The air is like warm scented sheets against her face. She stops to bury her nose in some voluptuous purple lilac. Rampant early-summer growth burgeons out through the park railings, trespassing onto the footpath, catching at her ankles as she brushes past. She hesitates at the corner of the road. She has nowhere to go but out. Soon Simon will return to work and then at least she will feel free during the day, free of his constant neediness which hangs around the flat like a cloying smell; and free of her own guilt for feeling like this. She walks past the shops, stops to buy an apple from the greengrocer's, crunches it as she walks, watching herself flicker past shop windows, running her hand through her hair. The sun is warm on her winter-white arms, an almost forgotten sensation. She feels sexy walking through the streets, damp in her armpits, conscious of the warm bell of air inside her dress. She is chafed from Simon's never-ending screwing. If she doesn't get pregnant the way they are going, she never will. She is awash with opportunities.

The trouble is, it does not feel like love that drives him into her morning and night, not even desire, but desperation. If it was not for her desire for a baby she would not tolerate it. She throws her apple core into a litter bin and wipes her juicy fingers on her skirt.

Through the streaming water, Simon hears the door bang, gets out of the shower and goes to the kitchen window to watch Nadia leave. He shivers. She has a loose bouncy walk as if she is relieved to be free. Her hair glints red in the sun. Yesterday she hennaed it and there are still clots of henna on the bathroom rug and greenish grains leaking brown around the taps. He does not like the colour. It is a false red. It is not Nadia's colour and the wiriness of her hair snags the light so that it is haloed round her head, exaggerated. She didn't consult him. The first he knew was the vegetable stench of the stuff in the bathroom, the filthy towels, the splashes she neglected to wipe up. And why the hell should she consult him? No reason, except that once she would have done.

The colour is not welcome in the flat. Not that false, ethnic, vegetable red.

Nadia vanishes round the corner and he shudders. Perhaps it is over. Perhaps that is what he has to face. She no longer treasures this naked body that shivers and catches the sunshine in slithering drips. Her adoration has been a constant in his life for five years. Not always deserved. Taken for granted. Never deserved? But he does love her. His hand cups his wet shrunken penis. He is cold right through. He can see the sun outside glittering on the roofs of cars. He can see warmth in the slowness of the people outside, the lazy trail of mothers with push-chairs to the park, but he cannot feel it in himself. Nadia is right, there is no reason why he shouldn't go out. He could take his newspaper to the park, laze on the grass, listen to the wood-pigeons cooing in the trees, the ducks quacking on the pond. He could do that. He could even go out into the countryside. The car is there, parked below him, undriven for weeks, dull with a patina of rained-on dust. All he has to do is take his.keys and go. He could drive out to a pub for lunch. If Nadia was here he would suggest it.