The Looking-Glass Sisters (2 page)

‘You’ve got to go.’

She’s standing over me, it’s morning and she says it before I’m completely awake.

‘You’ve got to go,’ she repeats, and slams the door behind her.

I’ve got to go. It’s final, she’s said it, and it means that she’s decided she can’t put up with having me around any longer. How far have things actually gone, I ask myself? Does she gag when she turns aside the duvet and sees my limp, thin legs? Does she burn inside when she serves me food, washes my clothes? Is she a walking vacuum, a soundless roar; is she absent from her own life because I make demands on her the whole time? And has the situation got worse since she met Johan?

She wants to put me in a nursing home in the village, that’s where she wants to park me; she’s threatened to do it before. I’m not very old, just partially paralysed. I’ve always lived here and I will never leave this house. Admittedly, this is a place where I’m invisible and away from the world, but I’m also part of everything: every splinter in the floor,
every knot in the wooden boards – I know each one. Here, where the sun moves unceasingly across the sky all summer, I am more than I can dream of. And I smoulder like old firewood when the sun is below the horizon all winter. I have a special ability to cling on, to live in what is there.

The threat of being sent away comes after one of our lesser confrontations, after a mild summer evening when I go to bed early and settle comfortably among the pillows. I leaf through an old book, note a couple of thoughts in the margin, as I always do before going to sleep. The window’s ajar; it’s impossible to prevent a mosquito or two from getting in, despite the netting in the window frame. On my bedside table I’ve lit a mosquito coil and the smoke is spiralling round in gentle circles, right across to Ragna, who is standing in the doorway, wrinkling her nose. She shoves the door open with her foot, goes over to the bedside table, fumbles under the lampshade with a shaking hand and turns off the light.

‘No,’ I say. ‘No,’ I say again. ‘Can’t you see I’m reading?’

She doesn’t answer, but takes the mosquito coil, which comes away from its foot, presses the glowing end into the saucer and crushes it into small, smoking pieces that are quickly extinguished. She waves her hand in front of her mouth, which is compressed into a thin streak.

‘I’ve told you before,’ she says, emphasizing each word. ‘The smell makes me feel ill!’

I don’t answer and switch the light back on. I like to have the lamp lit, even when the sun shines all night; it’s got something to do with how the shadows fall in the
room. Ragna breathes heavily and stretches out her arm to turn it off again, but I stop her in mid-air by grabbing her wrist. She turns away, pulls her arm out of my grasp, straightens up.

My sister, Ragna: for a moment I consider her from a place many years previously, stare at her from there towards this now, where she stands quivering with resentment, from the time when her hair was long and deep copper, and her slender neck bore the broad face with ease and a certain elegance. The point in our history where I can feel a reluctant touch of tenderness for what she was and what she became: her hair now thin wisps, her head craning out into the world on a neck of stringy sinews, the taut muscles, always ready to slash and hack.

Maybe she senses this light breeze of tenderness that moves through me, for she chews her lip and stares at me with narrowed eyes before turning and leaving the room.

I’m asleep, dreaming uneasily. When I wake I call out immediately for Ragna.

‘Ragna,’ I shout from the bed. ‘You must come. I’ve got cramp!’

It’s silent for a long while. She never comes at once; I always have to call out a few times. That’s why I shout at the slightest suspicion of a problem with my legs: if I wait too long the pain might become unbearable before she finally gets to the door. I twist and turn under the duvet, puff and pant and moan. ‘Hurry up. Come quickly. What are you waiting for?’ I grab hold of her nightdress when it sweeps across my arm as she shuffles forward
and pulls out the drawer of the bedside table to fetch the cream. Her face contracted, eyes closed, she fumbles blindly, mechanically, sits down on the side of the bed. I call out, ‘Hurry up!’ and tug at her nightdress while she spreads the cream over her hands, then finally lifts the duvet and starts to massage my thighs and lower legs, up and down, rhythmically, lazily. Her face is still blank; she grunts in time with the movements, faint snorts rising from the slumped body.

What does Ragna know about pain? She who never says anything if she hits her finger with a hammer, or traps her toe in the door, or gets stung on the cheek by a wasp. At worst, she lets out a little gasp. Ragna is armour-plated, protected against attack, impressions and impulses, despite her thin, almost transparent skin. Ragna is a person you instinctively talk loudly to, long and hard, so as to be heard through the thick layer of resistance.

‘A bit harder!’ I shout out into the room. ‘Can’t you do it a bit harder?’ I yell as loudly as I can. I fling myself forward and grab her arm. She gives a start, a sleepy gasp for air escaping from her mouth. She doesn’t look at me, but squeezes her fingers round my thighs, starts to rub with the firmness that may ease the cramp. When her hands have reached my lower legs, round my ankles, I think I can hear her muttering. I sense that she is completely awake, though she still doesn’t look at me; there is something vigilant about her. I know that she will now toss and turn in her bed, unable to sleep, for the rest of the night.

I sink down into the pillows. There are red marks on my skin from Ragna’s hands, but the cramp has gone. She pulls down my nightdress with a rapid movement, throws the duvet over me, hard and demonstratively. ‘That’s enough! You’re not getting any more!’ her face says, her entire body says, and then she stands up while breathing through her nose in that powerful, uneven way of hers that reveals she is trying to keep control of herself.

My glass is empty. I’m thirsty and would like something to drink. The water she places on the bedside table in the evening I’ve often drunk before the night is over. It’s no real trouble for her, as I’ve got a washbasin with hot and cold water in my room. But I don’t dare say anything, staring fixedly at the glass as she replaces the cream. She ignores my gaze, slams the drawer shut and leaves.

I hear her throw herself on to her bed with a groan in the bedroom across the corridor.

Is she lying there with her brown-green eyes open? I think I can sense her awake, her heart that pounds away in her thin body, that ever-present rage at the loss of her own life.

I imagine her lying like a black seashell in her bed, hollow but with a hard outer covering over the convoluted path to the emptiness deep inside. If I place an ear to her mouth, I won’t hear anything except the distant murmur of nothing.

A nothing that sucks so strongly that when Ragna wakes up the following morning she has no other thought than to move her sister out.

‘Have we got the strength for this?’ my parents probably thought when they sat by the bed and stared at the sick child who had come to them so late in life. Until that day, they had thought of her as a guest you don’t have to pay any particular attention to, a guest who takes care of her own welfare via her quite unique dependency. The daughter was almost four years old and had perhaps been a bit pale of late, but she grew and was, generally speaking, a pleasure to have around. Later, when she could hardly move her legs, her parents whispered quietly to each other that she had complained about headaches and muscle pains, but not so much that they needed to react and they had forgotten about it immediately afterwards. Children often dramatize.

She ran a high temperature and whimpered that her body felt so queer. Her old parents looked at each other, didn’t know what to believe, and told her sister, who was five years older, to sit with her – they had such a lot to do themselves. The days passed as in a fog. Or was it a matter of hours? She doesn’t know, she’s never been given a proper answer; they always avoided the issue, went vague and speechless later when she asked them: How long? How long did I lie in bed at home before going to the hospital? She’s pretty sure it was at least twenty-four hours, for she has a vague memory of her sister sitting by the bed staring at her with gleaming eyes, while the autumn sky outside changed from light to dark.

At the hospital, tens of miles away and down by the coast, her head, back and legs were examined for several weeks – perhaps months. No one remembers how long she was
away and all she can recall is the absence that tingled and stiffened in her chest. Her parents couldn’t stay with her, those were the rules, and they weren’t allowed to come and visit her either, those were the rules too. And anyway, who would take care of the sister, the house or the sheep they owned back then? That was their excuse, at any rate, when as an adult she confronted them with her own recollection that they had simply left her behind in the hospital.

The heaviness in her heart and stomach: not the pains, the examinations, the fever and the strange people, but the nights when she woke up in a bed with high bars, when in confusion she called out for her sister and parents and nobody came, apart from the exhaustion and emptiness that gradually filled the absence of those she missed.

She started to study her fingers. She saw that there were just as many on each hand, and when she stretched them up in the air, she saw that they reached just as far as each other into the room. Her legs were withered, not yet completely numb, not two dead landscapes outside herself. If she wanted to, she could move her toes. She paid attention to the houses outside the window, the various colours, the shapes. She noticed the plank missing from a veranda, the foundation wall that was peeling, the irregular row of house roofs along the horizon and, when she lifted the duvet, the contours of her toes, the lines along her feet and up her legs, the weak curve from the iliac crest to her stomach. She sucked in everything that was firm and sure, opened herself to the surfaces, forms, lines, contours, while inside her that which breathed and sensed and moved contracted and shrank.

Her little heart. Shrivelled, like the animal hearts in the larder that her sister cooks with cream.

Just how shrivelled, how hard am I? The tears that don’t come, that have to be wrung out of my eyes? The steep boundaries between what I want and don’t want? The sharpness of the words?

Lies. All the lies, and I who get so worked up, ill at the thought of being sent away from this place, I who am overwhelmed by the presence of precisely these walls, who am moved by the faint murmur of the wind through precisely this crack in the window, who am moved by observing the world from precisely this room, the vast open spaces outside from precisely this spot in the world.

Our parents died early, one shortly after the other, and so my sister and I were left to fend for ourselves at the ages of nineteen and twenty-four. Or from Ragna’s point of view: she was left with me. Or as I see it: she and I in this house, two stationary people in a constantly shifting world, the two of us holding on tight to each other. While the seasons change, the birch trees grow, while the scrub around the house thickens and the old cart road gets overgrown, our lives remain unchanged. The daily rhythm of cleaning and meals, the annual cycle with the quiet observance of midsummer and Christmas – everything had a sleep-inducing sameness about it for twenty-nine years, right up until that day in May when Johan came to our door.

Of course our day-to-day lives have always been full of a certain drama. Seemingly ordinary events can weaken or intensify the never-ending power struggle between us. These events resemble each other and recur at regular intervals (even after Johan’s appearance on the scene). They are actually so regular that I can easily describe the average one, or rather the average plot, the average course of events.

This is how things might take place between us any morning:

The crows are cawing, a wind sweeping past. I am gazing at the birch tree outside the window while Ragna is preparing breakfast in the kitchen.

‘If I’m not a good sister, well, I don’t know what a good sister is!’ I can imagine her long, slender neck bobbing forward as she chunters on. She hasn’t come into my room yet. I have shifted myself to the toilet and back; it took at least half an hour, and she didn’t help me either. Back in my bed at last, I wait exhausted and impatient for something to eat, but Ragna always has a thousand things to do before starting breakfast.

‘What would you like on your bread, sister dear?’ she asks, using the voice she adopts when she wants to feign a certain warmth and consideration.

‘Cheese.’

‘Cheese it is. Cheese is good for you. Isn’t it a good thing I bought the cheese you’re so fond of?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly she’s in the room, carrying a tray.

‘Eat up, then. I’m busy. I’m going to smoke the hearts today. No point in waiting.’

She’s standing in front of my bed, watching me pick up the slice of bread, open my mouth and bite.

‘Well, what are you waiting for? Eat! It’s cheese. And I’m busy!’

‘You don’t have to stand there,’ I say between bites. It’s difficult to chew, as I have hardly any saliva in my mouth after drinking much too little during the night.

‘I want to wash up before I leave. The worktop has to be clean and ready for when I get back with the hearts. I need the space before I hang them up in the cupboard.’

I chew and chew – it’s impossible to move the bread inside my mouth unless there’s enough saliva to soften it and send it down to my stomach. Ragna, wearing her outdoor clothes, now fidgets by the window, staring with clenched jaws at the heather outside, but I know that her attention is fixed on my mouth, which is trying to keep shut over my teeth and the bread.