“I suppose.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot, you don’t notice these things.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Yes? How long is it since you went out with a bloke then, tell me that?”
Shifting the knife and fork together on her plate, Lynn shrugged.
“How long since you …” Lamb bone between her lips, Sharon mimed a gesture that made Lynn blush.
“Is everything finished here?” the waiter inquired, hovering at Sharon’s shoulder.
“Almost,” Sharon said, deftly tweaking away the last scrap of sweet meat between her teeth.
“Shall I bring the dessert menu?”
“Not for me.” Lynn shook her head.
“Yes,” said Sharon.
“Any coffees?”
“Black,” said Lynn.
“Later,” said Sharon.
They split the bill down the middle and ordered a cab to take Sharon home; Lynn could walk to her flat in the Lace Market in a matter of minutes.
“Seriously,” Sharon said, her taxi at the curb. “You haven’t got any doubts?”
“Not really, only …”
“Only what?”
“Helen Siddons.”
“What about her?”
“I’m just not sure; working under her, I mean.”
“She’s keen enough on you.”
“I know, I know, but …”
“It’s not because she’s a woman? You’re not one of those who doesn’t like taking orders from other women?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t think it’s that, no. It’s just … all the time she was talking to me, Siddons, trying to persuade me, buttering me up, I never quite believed what she was saying.”
The taxi-driver gave a short blast of the horn and Sharon shot him a look that stilled his impatience. “That’s not Siddons,” she said, “that’s you. You’re just not good at taking praise. Anyone tells you how good you are and you think they must be lying.”
Lynn took a step out onto the pavement. “Anyway, I promised her an answer, first thing tomorrow.”
“Okay, don’t let me down.” Sharon gave Lynn a hug and left a faint smear of lipstick across her cheek. “Either way, you’ve got to let me know, right?”
“Right.”
Lynn waited while Sharon climbed into the back of the cab, gave the driver his instructions, and then settled back, waving through the glass. Then she walked briskly down toward Goose Gate, heading home.
Lynn recognized Resnick’s car before she saw him, leaning in the half-shadow of the courtyard around which the flats were built. Her first reaction was that it was trouble, an emergency, something serious, work. But seeing his face as he moved toward her, she was less sure: Resnick, hands in pockets, the faint beginnings of a smile, which quickly changed into something more apologetic.
“Good night?”
“Fine, yes, why …?”
“Kevin said something about you going out for a bit of a do, celebration.”
Lynn’s hand wafted air vaguely. “It was just me and Sharon. Anything more, I’d’ve invited everyone.”
Resnick nodded. They stood there in the half-light, the evening humming round them, the ground, Lynn thought, tilting beneath her feet.
“You are taking the job?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good.”
“Is that really what you think?”
“Of course.”
“Before, when I was trying to get into Family Support …”
“Not the same.”
“No.”
Foolishly, Resnick looked at his watch. “I just wanted to be sure. Didn’t want to think there was any reason, anything to do with me, you and me, why you wouldn’t agree.”
“No. No. I don’t even think … I mean why …?”
Resnick didn’t know either. What was he doing there? “You’re going to accept, then?” he asked for the second time.
Lynn blinked. “Yes.”
Resnick shuffled his weight from one foot to the other, a step he’d forgotten how to make.
“Do you want to come up?” Lynn asked. “Coffee or something?”
He was almost too quick to shake his head. “No. No, thanks.”
Lynn hunched her shoulders, suddenly aware that she was standing there with just a linen coat over her short black dress. “Okay,” she said.
“Yes,” Resnick said. “Okay.”
By the time she had climbed the double flight of stairs to her landing, his car was reversing round, red brake lights flaring for an instant, before heading forward beneath the brick archway and away from sight.
Lynn opened the door and double-locked it fast behind her, sliding home the bolt. Kicking off her shoes and shucking her coat onto the nearest chair, she padded into the bathroom and began to run the shower. Three more days and then she would be reporting for duty at the far end of the Ropewalk, close to where she had been based these past four years. Almost five. Slipping the catch at the back of her dress, she pulled down the zip and let the dress fall to the floor. Moments later, naked, she looked at herself in the mirror, never quite liking what she saw. Breasts too small, hips too large. As if, she thought, it mattered, stepping into the gathering steam. As if it mattered any more.
Twenty-two
They started the day with the shower scene. Poor Janet, a good girl really, regular and law-abiding, though not above the occasional sex and tumble with a married man in her lunch hour, succumbing to a momentary temptation and stealing forty thousand dollars. Pursued, suspected, she clings to her last vestiges of calm and is almost clean away. Then in the storm she takes a wrong turn and checks into the Bates Motel.
The day school audience responded the way audiences were programmed to do: the insistent, keening music, stabbing at the ears, the slash and cut of blade, the absurd figure of the attacker, all-powerful, unreal; shot after shot of the woman’s body, naked, falling, cut after cut; blood on the shower curtain, blood on the tiles; her face, unmoving, the open, staring eye; blood merging with the flow of water, running away.
Poor Janet.
The lights came up on sixty, seventy people sitting there, the smaller auditorium; some with notebooks opened on their laps, some with cups of coffee cooling in their hands. Mostly women, young to early middle-age, a scattering of men: teachers, media students, specialists from the caring professions, academics, a phalanx of hard-core lesbian feminists, the obligatory few crazies, lost already in their own impenetrable agendas, a shaven-headed young woman exhibiting a fetishistic interest in body piercing and tattoos, a nun.
“What we’ve just been watching,” the first speaker pronounced, “is the classic scene of ritual punishment, ritual cleansing. The female protagonist has transgressed the laws of her male-dominated world. The camera, while delighting in her sexuality-remember the first shots in the film, almost like a contemporary advertisement for Wonderbra, the way they emphasize her wantonness, the size and shape of her breasts, lying there on the bed while her lover gets dressed-the camera still punishes her for it. And us, as audience. Having pried on her, involved us in her secret activity, aroused us with her sexuality, it becomes her attacker, the movements of the camera becoming those of the knife, taking us, whether we want to or not, deep down into the cut.
“But Hitchcock being Hitchcock, extreme chauvinist that he was, these extremes of punishment that we witness, and in which we are forced to participate, are not carried out by a man. As the end of the film makes clear, it is only when Norman Bates is taken over by the other half of his divided personality, the mother half, that these murderous impulses come to the surface. Norman didn’t kill the Janet Leigh figure, Norman’s mother did. It is the female, the feminine side of our nature that is the site of evil here, the blood is on our hands.”
It was some seven minutes short of eleven o’clock. Before the first break at noon, they would see brief extracts from Hellraiser, Dressed to Kill, and Hallowe’en. In the afternoon there were separate seminars, running simultaneously, one on women’s fiction-In the Cut, The End of Alice, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Zombie-the other devoted to sado-masochism and the fetishization of the female body in high fashion. Everyone would come back together at the end of the day for a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, followed by a final question and answer session and discussion.