‘We never said this was serious,’ he said. ‘Not going to a wedding serious anyhow.’
How serious did we have to be to watch other people cut cake? Seriouser, apparently.
‘No biggie. Weddings are boring anyway,’ I said.
I recalled my mother’s weddings: his side, her side, nervous smiles, glances across the divide. I didn’t want to go to a wedding — I just didn’t want to be someone he didn’t want to take to one. Washing my hair, I pictured the beggar woman’s cap. Is this the sort of shit she thought? Did this shit make her wind up where she was? God, I was nothing like her. I wasn’t. The bath fizzed with raspberry bath-bombs. I had decent shampoo. Drying my hands, I picked up the phone and hit Christian. Thinking of you. God no. Backspace. Delete. The beggar woman’s laugh rattled in my soapy ears. I started typing again. How are you? Delete. Boring. I miss you. Delete. In the bath, thinking of you. That’d do it, dilute the sentiment with nakedness. Send. Count to sixty. One elephant. Two elephant. Christian replied when I got to fifty-one elephants.
Yeah? What you thinking? What you doing?
Pumicing my feet. I put down the stone and typed what he’d like to hear. Somewhere he was reading it. For minutes, the other numbers on his phone didn’t exist.
I didn’t have to go there, but I did. I took clothes off the radiator and pictured the other me outside. Freezing. If I left her out in the cold, I could be killing myself. I buttoned my coat and stepped outside. The road sparkled with frost. Everything looked sharp, metallic. I got in the car and drove.
I found myself outside the pawnbroker’s in town. She was curled under a purple blanket in the doorway. I cranked the car window down.
‘Get in,’ I yelled.
She didn’t move.
‘Get in.’
The blanket twitched. She turned around.
‘What?’
She sounded like I’d caught her in the middle of something, like she had a hundred and one things to dream.
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
She knotted her bag and rustled to the car. The seatbelt stretched over woman and bag. I drove, sniffing fries on her hair, vinegary fingers and the warm stale smell of beer fermenting under her skin.
I opened my door and she marched straight to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and took out the cereal. She ate from the box, shovelling Rice Krispies in her mouth.
‘Milk?’ I asked.
She shrugged the way I did when I was thirteen, so articulately, a whatever tilt of her head. I sat the milk down. She poured and lowered her ear, listening to the snap, crackle and pop.
‘Would you like something hot?’ I said. ‘I could make soup.’
I opened a can of tomato and slugged it in a pan. ‘Take off your coat.’
I wouldn’t ask her to make herself at home. No. Don’t. She cuddled into her coat like I was planning to steal it. I wondered how many layers she had, if she was fat or just dressed all-terrain.
‘Cut the crap,’ she said.
I expected the other me to be grateful I’d let her in, but my only thanks was a belch that billowed from her milk-covered mouth.
‘How many shite cans of soup you gonna try to feed me till you ask what you want? Soup? That’s why you brought me here? Who you fucking kidding?’
She took a hanky from her pocket and made a raking sound in her throat. There was so much I had to ask her. Where did I go wrong? Why am I you? But I was damned if I’d ask now and prove she knew what I was thinking. I poured the soup, glancing sideways. She had that small mole on her chin and, looking close, that tiny hole from an old piercing under her lip.
‘When did you start swearing all the time?’ I asked.
She spoke nothing like me, I was sure of that at least. I’d turned down the music on the party in my mouth for my first job. I couldn’t imagine why I’d let it blare up again, all those conversational shits and fucks.
‘That’s for me to know,’ she said. ‘No bread? Typical. Why do you have a shiny toaster when you never have bread?’
She sprinkled Rice Krispies onto her soup. Slurped. I could see this wasn’t going to be easy. Now the other me was here I didn’t know how to talk to her.
‘How did this happen? You know, you ending up…’
‘A manky old ragbag?’ she said.
‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘Course not, you’d have pussyfooted around, full of shit.’
She laughed again, the ghost of the laugh I had stealing my stepsister’s doll when I was eight and throwing it onto the shed roof.
‘Well? How did you get like this?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said, licking drips off the bowl, red soupy trails.
‘Of course. I’ll get some blankets and make up the couch.’
‘You have a spare room.’
‘Well, yeah, but it’s a mess, it would take me too long to sort it.’
‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want me stinking up your snazzy new sheets.’
She knew me way too fucking well.
I lay in bed, rubbing in moisturiser. ‘Vanishing cream’, my mother used to call it. I wondered if she had met herself too, if she’d had a crazy old woman of her own to make disappear. I listened to downstairs, I could hear snoring. The other me didn’t seem to need the TV on to get to sleep. Did I snore? I sounded like a motorbike revving up to drive through the house, knock down the paper-thin walls.
The blankets were gone from the couch in the morning. The bitch robbed me, I bet. I pictured her filling her sack, stealing all my stuff, like some sort of anti-Santa. I didn’t know her well. Who knows what they’re capable of? I rushed to my bag — cash cards intact, nothing missing that I could see. I opened the front door. She was stood on my path, the white wool throw off the couch poking out of her bag.
‘Spare change?’ she said, hand out to the neighbours.
The couple next door looked away, turning back to give me a look. Bastards. You can’t tell who’s a good person by whether or not they recycle. How you do tell? I still didn’t know — the other me wouldn’t say.
I tugged her begging arm. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re my neighbours. I see them everyday. It looks bad.’
‘Ah, yeah, I forgot. It’s so important how everything looks.’
Inside, I made porridge. The woman clawed through the cupboard, tossing glazed cherries into her bowl like bombs.
‘How can you do it?’ I asked.
‘Do what?’
‘Beg. I’d never do that.’
‘You sure?’
She grinned missing teeth. Beep. Christian. Can’t make tonight. No biggie. Catch you next week? The woman sniffed.
‘Do you remember Christian?’ I said. ‘Did you love him?’
She folded her arms, saying nothing. I wondered how to make her to leave.
‘You can have a bath before you go if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you some clean clothes.’
I wasn’t sure I had anything that might fit. Maybe sweatpants, or the cardigan I’d bought for my mother that last Christmas. I went upstairs, brushed my teeth again and brought it down.