For me to think about when I’m older, she’d decided.
And now older was what she was.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And. .’
He gathered her into his arms. She didn’t feel as safe there as she imagined she would when it all started. There was something ghostly about him — he was eerily elongated in body as well as face, as though he had grown too much as a consequence of a childhood illness equivalent to those that stopped people growing at all, bony, with a big wet vertical mouth that hung open despite the attempted camouflage of the beard, showing tombstone teeth. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him with the skin stripped from his bones.
Why am I doing this, she asked herself. Why am I here? I don’t even like him.
‘She would have been about the age you are now, had she lived,’ he said.
‘She?’
‘The girl. .’
She waited.
‘The girl I killed.’
‘You killed a girl?’
‘Come to bed,’ he said.
She shook her head. She wasn’t afraid. She just thought he was trying to impress her again. And maybe frighten or arouse her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
‘How do you mean you killed a girl?’
‘How did I do it?’
That wasn’t really her question, but all right, how did he do it?
‘Not with my bare hands if that’s what you think. I left it to others. I stood by and let it happen.’
She released herself. ‘What others?’
‘Does that matter?’
She pulled the face she and all her girlfriends pulled to denote they were talking to a moron. ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Does that matter?’
He reached for her cheek. ‘What matters is that I loved and killed for the same reason.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction. Was he expecting her to tell him it was all right. There, there — I forgive you. ‘What attracted me,’ he went on, as though he was working out his motives for the first time, ‘repelled me.’
‘You killed because you were repelled?’
‘No, I killed because I was attracted.’
She wanted to go home now.
‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Please stay.’
Rhoda stared into his ugly wet mouth and remembered a skull that had gone round the class during an anatomy lesson. Its mouth, too, though it had once been wired, fell open when the skull was passed from girl to girl.
‘You mustn’t think I’m going to be violent with you,’ he said.
‘She probably didn’t think you were going to be violent with her.’
‘I had no choice with her.’
She might only have been a schoolgirl but she knew everyone had a choice. ‘That’s your excuse,’ she said, knotting her tie.
‘No, I’m not making an excuse. It just is what it is. Sometimes you have to do something — you can’t help yourself — you are drawn into it. You will understand when you’re older. You have to destroy to survive. While they live, you can’t. Most times it doesn’t come to that, but when the opportunity presents itself. .’
‘The opportunity?’
‘That’s what it was.’
‘And she was how old?’
‘The girl? I’ve told you. She’d be about your age now, so then she would have been nine or ten.’
‘You went with a girl of nine?’
He had the shakes again, she noticed. ‘No, I didn’t “go” with her. She was the daughter.’
‘Whose daughter?’
‘The daughter of the woman I was “going” with. It was the mother who attracted me.’
This was getting worse by the second, Rhoda thought. At sixteen, if the words you like to use don’t express contempt, they express disgust. Rhoda allowed her teacher to see her rehearsing all of them in her head.
‘Wait a minute. Just listen. Let me tell you how it was before you judge me. The mother went for me, not the other way round. I met her at a print shop where I’d gone to get an invitation printed. She was doing the same, only she was arguing over the invitations they’d done for her. They were for the private view of a painter at a gallery I assumed was hers. She wanted me to agree that they’d botched the job. “Look at the colours!” she said. “Did you ever see a woman’s breasts that colour?” They looked all right to me, but I agreed because I thought she was genuinely upset—’
‘And because you hoped you’d get a look at the colour of hers.’
‘No, yes, maybe. That’s cheeky of you, but I deserve it. But that’s not the point. I was being supportive, that’s all. I didn’t know then that dissatisfaction was her hallmark, that arguing with tradespeople was just something she did. Like throwing parties. There was a gallery opening or an engagement party or a ruby wedding every week in her world and she paid for most of them. All lavish affairs. Champagne and lobster canapés. She had money to burn. She had everything to burn. She would have burned me had I let her. So it was poetic justice in the end. If you think I lost my mind you’d be right. I lost my mind from the moment I saw her shouting about her invitations. I’d never been with anybody like her. She was older and knew more of the world than I did. A woman with her own art gallery. She was my opposite in every way — unreserved, voluptuous, selfish, faithless, as wild as a cat. She laughed more than anybody I’d ever met, too, but when she wasn’t laughing her face would become a mask of tragedy. She had these great, dark, over-painted, sorrowful eyes, as though they told the whole mournful history of her people. That was her explanation, anyway. “We have experienced too much,” she would tell me, holding me to her breast, and ten minutes later she was doing a seating plan. “Does nothing mean anything to you for long?” I’d ask her, and she’d say, “Yes, you,” or “Yes, my daughter,” and once she even said, “Yes, God.” She told me she prayed but when I asked her what she prayed for it was always something material — good weather for the opening, the continued absence of her husband (“So that I can have my way with you all weekend” — as though God would help with that), a lightning bolt to destroy the boycotters who milled outside her gallery, chanting against the country whose best painters she represented — though in their presence she merely guffawed her contempt and called them sanctimonious ghouls. “They’ll go when they find some other no-hope cause,” she told me in front of their faces. There was no guilt or conscience in her. No beauty or inspiration. Don’t get me wrong, she was beautiful to look at herself. Dark and soft. Bewitching. Sometimes when I held her I thought she had no bones, her body was so yielding. Though she was obstinate in all our conversations and fought me over everything, in bed she would be anything I wanted her to be. But there was no spiritual beauty. She gave money to charity but the impulse never seemed charitable to me. It was too easy, too automatic. Before my parents ever gave money they would sit around and discuss it for weeks. Should we make a donation here or would it be better spent there? She just wrote a cheque and never thought about it again. She would go to concerts and openings of shows at other art galleries but I never saw her moved. My music she hated. “Caterwauling about fishermen and bumpkins,” she called it. I doubt she’d ever eaten a fish. I doubt she’d ever seen the sea, come to that. Or been out into the country. She looked down on people, imitated the accents of the poor, jeered at me even, sometimes, for not having her advantages. And that included a dinner jacket. “You can’t come to one of my family events looking like that,” she said the first time she saw me in my corduroy suit.