Calendar Girl (4 page)

French windows, too cold to have migrated this far north, looked out on a morning moor. Bleak and blue in the faint half light. The landlady left us and we made love on the kitchen floor, 1960s cold lino, 1990s hot sex. She,
exhausted from the drive and more, fell asleep naked in my arms. I half dragged her body to the bed and we slept through the morning. We stayed in bed for the rest of the day. The curtains stayed apart to let the moor in. We stayed together to keep our lust in. The wind played on my emotions and I called her Cathy for the rest of the week. She, halfway through Jane Eyre, called me Helen. I, having read the book three times before I was fourteen, hadn’t the heart to tell her it was a bad choice. We slept soundly in our red room and the next day made the pilgrimage to the parsonage. I cried because she wouldn’t come with me to Top Withins, nor would she let me walk alone. She said it was too cold and too far and might get dangerous. I said what if they’d said that to Emily? That you could never be sure that anything might not turn out to be dangerous eventually. She said I was being swept along with the passion of it all and not being sensible. That I was being melodramatic.

I wasn’t. You never can be sure.

She cried at Charlotte’s tiny slippers. Cried both because her own feet were too big and because Charlotte was long dead and her feet were long cold.

The Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body has very cold feet today.

We walked through the parsonage hushed and excited, trying to catch inspiration. But genius is not a contagious disease and neither she nor I died of consumption on the moors.

We drank in The Black Bull imagining the stocky and talent-free Branwell wasting himself at the bar. Wasting
his sisters at the bar. I wanted to waste myself at the bar but she said there were places to see. She drove me to York Minster where I lit a candle and she muttered Hebrew to protect herself from the cult of the Messiah. We ate in teashops, stopped to buy pottery and drove back across Ilkley Moor at midnight as a full moon rose above us.

All this really happened. It was such magic and yet now, as I ask her to remember those first few days, she will not even answer me. She cannot even answer me.

I sent Dolores a postcard of the slippers and Esther one of other people’s gravestones.

We ate at a just-opened first class hotel on a deserted moor with a heated swimming pool and no guests. We had drinks with three of the staff and were the only patrons until 10.30pm. She ate pheasant and tore the flesh from the dead bird’s bones. That night she tore the flesh from mine and sucked on the marrow of my heart. I was in lust and love and impatient.

I am impatient.

From the Brontë Parsonage to Sylvia Plath’s grave. I like my writers dead before forty. Over a hundred years of literature in a five-minute car ride. I asked at the Haworth Tourist Information Centre about Sylvia. They sold lovely plastic models of the Brontë sisters and delightful group portraits of the three of them clustered around Branwell but they’d never heard of Sylvia Plath. The girl at the desk had to go and ask her boss. Apparently he could read. She came back to me.

“Was she married to a poet?”

I turned white “Mmm.”

“Well yes, we do have a note here. Under Hughes. He’s a poet, don’t know about her. A Mrs Hughes buried in the Old Church – is that the one you mean?”

I turned red. “Her name was Sylvia Plath. She was a great poet. A very great poet in her own right. You illiterate cow.”

The Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body led me, blind with rage, from the office.

I was livid. Red, white and blue for the America Sylvia had left and the distant sky was black for the shoes of the man listed instead of her.

We took the long road across the moor and some very tight hairpin bends.

We trawled through about four cemeteries – Catholic, Methodist, Baptist – Jewish hackles rising at my side. Then we found the ruined churchyard. Two churches stood side by side. One dark and locked. The other an open ruin. In it about six cats played, two older and the others only just grown from kittens. Each one with nine times to die. One attached itself to us, it purred around her legs until the Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body pushed it away.

She hates cats. She said she was allergic to them. She made me leave my cat behind when we moved in together. She’s allergic to feathers and pollen and dust too. But I’m leaning against a feather pillow now and she’s not sneezing at all.

It was 6pm and dusk and I was nervous. Thick banks of cloud and the ruined church doing their best Hammer horror impression. My Christianity-sensitive Jewess was positively scared. I wanted to go back for her. She wanted to go on for me. We followed the cat.

This really happened.

The cat took us to a cemetery on the other side of the standing church. Graves were arranged in orderly rows. The sun was nearly set and we followed the cat to Sylvia. Again my sensibilities were stormed, in the dusk-light the tombstone wording read “Sylvia Plath-Hughes”.

I thought I was the first person to have been offended by it.

We both cried this time. I left a wildflower and the Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body left two stones. One for herself and one for Sylvia’s Jewish-identified pain.

We drove back to London the next day. It was Friday and she had to be back to make it to her parents’ for dinner. She went every week without fail. I’ve never met them. They hate the idea of me. A woman and not Jewish. I’m not sure which sin they hate more.

She hasn’t been to them for two weeks in a row now, I wonder when they’ll get up the courage to ring me and ask how she is?

We drove without stopping. She fucked me twice with her left hand as she drove. Car in fifth gear, me in tenth. Safe sex, unsafe driving. I came three times on the motorway. She dropped me off at my house and my flatmates were, unusually, out. I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, of not sleeping with her and made sweetly violent, soft, harsh love to her on the couch in front of the gas fire.

She kissed me and drove north again. I cried from exhaustion and loneliness. She called me from a phone box on her
way home and said “I want to live with you. I don’t want to live apart from you.”

I promised she’d never have to.

I went to bed ecstatic. Finally a lover who took me as seriously as I took her. Finally a lover who loved me back.

We vowed never to sleep apart again.

And we never have. Even now I cuddle up beside her. But although she’s wearing a warm jumper and it’s not Yorkshire, she’s very, very cold.

Saz spilled out of the rush hour tube and went straight to the gym. Concentrating hard to ignore the beautiful glistening bodies, she started to work. Nothing like adrenalin flowing through the body to get the brain working clearly. Half an hour later and sweating herself, she walked straight past her usual Tuesday night flirtation and downstairs to the pool. After thirty lengths she was exhausted and had a nearly formulated plan of action. She showered, dressed and hurried out into the evening. The slow walk home through Brixton gave her time to both dry her hair and order her thoughts.

In her flat she made for the phone and called Gary. Her sister’s ex-boyfriend of twelve years ago. Then a radical and angst-ridden biology student, now a part-time actor and full time office worker at St Catherine’s House, Registrar of Deaths Division. Cassie and Gary were no longer in touch, but Saz bought him tickets to the National occasionally and a lot of coffee afterwards so he could tell her what a lot of pretentious crap went on in the theatre. Except when it was performed by his company, in which case it was ground-breaking but severely underfunded. And about once a year Gary was able to help Saz.

“Yes, Gary, it is a long shot, but see what you can do. If you can’t be bothered going through the names yourself, just
give me the list and I’ll peruse them at my leisure. Thanks babe, I owe you one.”

Having requested a list of the names of all the women in the twenty-five to thirty-five age bracket who had died in London in the past six weeks, Saz put down the phone. She well knew that despite Gary’s protests she would have the list by the day after tomorrow, she also knew this favour would cost a little more than the National. A night in Stratford more like.

She then called Helen and Judith, old friends, coupled for five years – a minor record in Saz’s eyes and that of the two policewomen. They agreed to meet her when Judith came off duty.

Saz went to bed for an hour to give her brain a chance to catch up.

Ten thirty saw her wide awake, washed and looking forward to a night out. Her black lycra body threading its way through a similarly dressed crowd to the corner table where Helen and Judith sat. Helen dark, Judith fair, both bowing to the muggy, damp summer evening by wearing as little as possible under their matching cropped black leather jackets and above their heavy DMs.

“I’ll get them,” Saz called when she was within shouting distance.

“Too late,” answered Helen, pointing to the three double gin and tonics sitting on the table before her.

Saz kissed the women, picked up her glass and tapped it against theirs, the three of them shouting, “To Plato!”

Saz had met Helen and Judith three years earlier on a women’s poetry course. Held deep in the wilds of West Yorkshire, all three had eagerly signed up for what was billed as a ‘Wild Weekend for Women – Greek poetry as you’ve never known it before! Discover your soul before it discovers you! Women Only!’ Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the weekend of Sapphic abandonment they’d been hoping for. The poetry was definitely Greek but none of the three women had ever anticipated wanting to read Plato – in the original – with thirteen Philosophy dons before. Sensing a kindred spirit (and one without a car) Judith and Helen had offered Saz a ride back to London on the Saturday morning and all three had done a bunk just as the other women settled down to three hours on ‘Plato – The Soul – Where Is It Located?’ During the ride back, Saz transformed her idea of ‘pigs’ (or at least of sows) and discovered more about the hidden life of the lesbian community than she’d learnt in ten years on ‘the scene’.

“So, girls, how’s life in the sty?”

“Not bad, sweetheart, not bad. How’s life in Camberwell? Still celibate?”

“As ever, Hells, you can’t manage to say ‘hello’ without enquiring after my sex life, God knows why you work in the police when an ‘investigative journalist’ post at
The Sun
would suit you far better.”

“Can’t help myself, Saz. If I know whether you’re doing it or not at this moment, then I won’t have to worry about putting my foot in it unnecessarily later.”

“Can you put a foot in necessarily?” Judith asked her lover.

“No darling, not unless it’s the boot. But if you don’t trot off to the bar and get us all another gin, you won’t be allowed to wear mine ever again.”

Judith made her way to the bar and Saz filled Helen in on the details of her non-existent sex life. By the time Helen had given Saz the details of her and Judith’s extremely existent sex life, Judith had clawed her way to the front of the bar and had made it back with the drinks. Sex talk over, Saz told them everything about the John Clark story adding that, though it sounded ludicrous, she did believe him and that she’d enrolled Gary’s help, though with a lot less background information.

Judith rolled her eyes when Saz had finished and let out a gasp of disbelief.

“No, he’s just got to be an ex-husband or a pimp or some kind of sleaze-bag. This story is just too silly. I mean it’s the 1990s, what sort of woman calls herself September for God’s sake?”

“Come on babe,” countered Helen, “What sort of woman calls her lover her flatmate? What sort of woman lied only last night to her mother about the nature of her sexuality?”

“Oh please don’t start again, that’s not fair. Anyway, surely you’re not suggesting that January’s mother is such a harridan that though she’s really a lesbian she has dinner twice a month with a man she won’t tell her name to, and she wants to get sixteen thousand quid out of?”

“No, but if sixteen thousand quid would get you brave enough to finally come out to your family, I’d find a way of getting it …”

Seeing an all too familiar argument about to begin, Saz jumped in.

“Actually, I expect she’s straight and married, with no parents and she’s exceedingly dull which is why a date
with John Clark, secret jazz fiend, is her idea of excitement and that’s why she chose such a stupid pseudonym. But isn’t there some kind of missing persons file you could check for me?”

Helen vocalised an apology to Saz and stroked one on Judith’s hand.

“All right, get us a physical description and approximate dates of disappearance and I’ll see what I can come up with. I’ll get someone to check any unidentified floaters too, but she’s probably too recent to be any of the bodies they’ve had washed up in the past month.”

“Thanks Hell. I’d rather she wasn’t dead really. She’s got me interested, I really want to know why she chose the months … and what she did the rest of the weekend.”

Helen burst out laughing.

“Sorry Saz, but that’s what our argument’s about. Judith’s mother keeps asking me to ‘come down’ for the weekend – you know, the whole middle-class happy family at the country ‘cottage’ bit, but I’ve told Jude I won’t go as a flatmate, only as her lover.”

“And that my darling, is impossible. Because a) we’re not middle class, we’re upper middle and b) in the case of you coming home as my lover she wouldn’t let me in the house either. Actually she probably wouldn’t let me within a six mile radius of anyone from the Townswomen’s Guild.”

“Aren’t there any dyke Townswomen?”

“What’s a Townswoman?”

“It doesn’t matter Saz. Just Helen’s way of deflecting the conversation back to our own problems.”

“She might be fine. She’s always very nice when I speak to her on the phone.”

“Helen! Leave it. You don’t know my mother. She’s very nice to the rubbish collecting man too – but she wouldn’t want him sharing my bed either. Anyway, it helps Saz not at all to know that her April or May might or might not be off to the country for the weekend after a night out on the town with this John bloke.”