Metro Winds (4 page)

The girl was thinking about her dream, for it seemed to her that she had seen something in the tunnels just before the old beggar woman appeared. Something huge and white.

Their hosts' apartment was stylish, with blond leather furniture and chilly, gleaming, marble floors. There were clear vases of yellow irises, heavy cream silk curtains and paintings in muted colours, but also many blank walls which had their own beauty. Most of all, there was empty space filled with shafts of sunlight.

Privately the aunt thought the apartment ostentatiously bare, though of course she admired her hosts' exquisite taste. She preened when they insisted that her own apartment was much nicer, for this was exactly her own opinion.

Their host appeared with the daughter of the house and the girl was introduced to them both. As the man took her hand, an odour arose from him as if he carried something old and musky in his pocket. Instinctively the girl pulled her hand from his fingers when he made to press it to his lips. The other girl reached out a slender white hand and bobbed slightly, her eyes amused.

‘My daughter is just returning from her piano lesson,' their hostess explained. The daughter smiled at the aunt and her niece and asked questions prettily, tossing a head of radiant honey curls adorned with a pink ribbon. The three adults smiled.

It became clear that the visit had been arranged in order that the two girls, who were the same age, could become friends, but though the girl answered the daughter of the house gravely, both understood at once that they had nothing in common. Under different circumstances, one would become the victim of the other.

The aunt regretfully compared the pink and gold feminine flirtatiousness of her friend's daughter with her sister's solemn child. Out of loyalty, she murmured to her hosts that the girl was very shy, having lived in isolation with only her parents for company.

As they ate a crumbly dark fruitcake and drank raspberry sirop, the girl was subjected to a smiling inquisition by their hosts. Her responses dissatisfied because she would only answer what she was asked. She could not be persuaded to elaborate on the one thing the adults wished to know but could not openly ask: what had caused her parents to part.

‘She is delightfully unspoiled,' the friend murmured to the aunt when they were preparing to leave. The aunt smiled but took this as the criticism it was, and on the way home spoke disapprovingly about her friend's husband, who was the president of a firm that had lately been accused in the newspapers of bribing a politician to secure a government contract.
She
might acknowledge the girl's deficiencies, she thought to herself wrathfully, as was her familial right, but other people should be more restrained. She was now glad she had not followed her initial impulse and issued an invitation to the small party she had planned in honour of the girl's birthday, which was two weeks away. Given the girl's limitations, a party could only be a social disaster.

A fortnight later, a box arrived from the girl's father and also a parcel from her mother. They had been sent separately, but perversely, the same carrier brought them to the apartment. They were a day early, but the aunt suggested the girl open them in case they contained something perishable.

The parcel contained a sleeveless shift of white silk with small leaves sewn in white satin thread around the hem and neckline, beaded with seed pearls. It was far too young, the aunt thought. Worse, the card from her sister specifically bade the girl wear the dress on her birthday because the mother had dreamed of her in it. The aunt thought this a ludicrous and even irresponsible thing to confide, but only admired the needlework in a lukewarm voice.

The girl fingered the dress, wondering what her mother had dreamed.

The box from her father contained roses. Not long-stemmed roses with tender pink buds, which the aunt would have deemed appropriate for a young girl, but a dense tangle of crimson buds nestled amongst dark green leaves, with stems that curled impossibly in on themselves and fairly bristled with thorns. The colour of them as well as their barbaric confusion confirmed the foolishness of her sister's choice in a husband.

At first the roses seemed to have no scent, but that afternoon, when they returned from an exhibition at a gallery, the whole apartment was filled with their perfume.

The following morning, the aunt woke in fright from a dream in which she had been running naked through a forest of wild red roses, pursued by some sort of animal. Wrapped in a soft lace nightgown under chaste pink linen, she patted her plump belly and told herself she ought not to have drunk coffee so late in the evening. But when she opened her bedroom door, the smell of the roses was so powerful that she blamed them for her dreams. Panting, she broke her own rules and struggled to open some windows.

Later, as she set a dainty birthday breakfast table, she glanced from time to time with real loathing at the roses, which had opened during the night and now gaped in a way that struck her as frankly carnal. She nibbled at the haunch of a marzipan mouse as she set its companions on a small glass platter, consoling herself that at this rate the petals would be dropping by midday and the flowers could reasonably be disposed of by evening. Beheading the mouse with a neat, sharp bite, she thought of the pictures she had seen of her sister's husband and reflected that she had always known there was something wrong with him. A doctor should look ascetic and have slender, white pianist's fingers and soft, limp, blond hair, but the man was swarthy and his hands were as big and rough as those of a village butcher.

She shuddered to think of such hands on her body and wondered how her sister had borne it. She folded pale green napkins, and remembered her own birthday at this age. There had been an elegant party to which silver-edged invitations had gone out. She had worn lavender taffeta and a matching chiffon scarf in her hair, and she had met her guests with skin as pink and cool as ice-cream waiting to be licked. But the boy she had hoped would kiss her had gone to the garden to wait, and when she had been delayed, had embraced another girl instead. The aunt had come out into the moonlight in time to understand that her moment of romance had been stolen. It seemed to her now that there was an inexorable current flowing from that night to this apartment and this day, where she stood as virginal as the girl for whom she was sugaring pink grapefruit slices.

Her eyes misted at the thought of the life of connubial bliss that had passed her by, but then the stairs creaked and the girl appeared in a sea-green nightgown. The aunt could only gape, for the pale, dull girl had become a ravishing sylph with high, flushed cheekbones and heavy slumberous eyelids fringed in sooty black lashes that drooped over eyes so dark they appeared to be all pupil. Her lips were red and swollen, as if she had spent a night of bruising passion.

‘You . . . you look . . .' the aunt began, then stopped in confusion.

‘I dreamed I was lost,' the girl murmured, rubbing at her eyes with hands balled into childish fists.

Remembering her own dream, the aunt wondered if it was possible for a dream to have wrought this astonishing change. Then common sense prevailed and she told herself the girl had a fever, that was all. Illness produced such hectic beauty; she ought not to have opened the windows.

The girl was thinking about her dream in which she had run along a wind-scoured, sea-scented tunnel. She had glimpsed a white beast running ahead of her and had followed it until she had lost herself. She had come quite suddenly to a place where all of the metro tunnels converged in one huge, barrel-vaulted cavern with many entrances and exits and much graffiti. The cold ground had been clammy under her bare toes, the walls stained by seepage that oozed from cracks and congealed on the floor in overlapping circles of sulphur yellow and livid purple. The smell of the sea had been overpowering there, and then came a drumming as if the cavern were actually under the ocean.

The man with the black dog had been standing against one of the walls, playing a mournful saxophone pitted with green warts of verdigris. The girl had listened to his music from the other side of the cavern, wishing to respect the aunt's fears, even in a dream.

She had felt a prod in the ribs, and found the pram woman behind her. The beggar woman gave a snort that could have been a sneeze or a laugh or something of both and scratched at wiry, fried-looking hair, asking, ‘You think you have come so far to obey the forbidding of a frightened aunt?'

The girl knew that she was dreaming, and that the woman and even the saxophone man knew everything she knew because they were all shapes worn by her own mind.

‘Dreams are passages,' the old woman had gone on in the manner of one confiding a vital secret. ‘The right dreamer can travel anywhere in them.'

‘Can I go to the ocean?' the girl had asked. Without warning the cavern plunged into darkness and the dream broke.

After D'lo had cleared the remnants of grapefruit, croissants and coffee, the aunt suggested they dress and go to hear a string trio in the afternoon as a treat. In the evening they had been invited to supper. She hoped the girl would choose one of her stylish new dresses, but obedient to her mother's desire, she donned the white dress that had been sent. When the aunt saw her in it, she felt the blood rise to her cheeks, for far from making the girl look too young, the dress was so soft and pale and sinuous that it caressed and outlined every muscle and curve, giving the impression of nudity.

It might have been made for just such an unearthly transformation as had occurred in the night, the aunt thought with renewed unease.

The girl noticed the fullness of her lips and the heaviness of her eyes in the hall mirror as they left, and wondered if it meant that the bleeding that she had been warned of was about to begin. Certainly her body felt heavy with some fluid that undulated and lapped inside her. She was not afraid, although when her mother had spoken of it, she had made it clear that girls were expected to fear the blood, and what it heralded: womanhood and all of the pains of heart and soul and body that flesh was heir to. She had wondered if she would be afraid, for she knew she experienced the world differently from the woman and man who were her mother and father, and also from the other people she had encountered.

The thought came to her like a whisper that the raggedy people who prowled the dank metro corridors experienced the world differently too.