I LIKE TO LOOK (from “As In Music”)

I hadn’t seen or heard of her for fifteen years. No one had. We sat in the garden, spaced equally around the circular table: she to my right and Bill, the man who brought her, to the left; in the middle a jug of lemonade. Their big red car gleamed in the drive. I wouldn’t let them inside the house.

“I’ve been all around the world, some of it in a very small boat and some of it I even swam,” said my sister Dee, folding her sunglasses away and examining the garden: walled, thick with shrubs and so much smaller than the world. “Listen. I’ve been in an army. I’ve lived with pigmies and Eskimos. I’ve -- “

She was thinner than I remembered her, her skin darker, drier. Her ears had been pierced and she wore studs that looked like pearls and real gold, but it was her all right: her eyebrows still scattered across the bridge of her nose, her nails were still bitten close. I could see the right thumb, pointed from too much sucking as a child, the scar on her forefinger from the time she’d thrust it experimentally into a light socket. Me, Dee, Mother and our brother: once we all lived here. Now Dee and I sat side by side in the garden of the yellow-stone house which she left, in which I still live. The window-panes are wartime glass, faulted so that the whole world can seem drunken-strange; on stormy days sea-spray lands on them, dulling my sight, like cataracts.

“I performed an appendectomy with a penknife,” she continued. “I can speak eight languages. I’ve made love to nine people simultaneously - the men were all tied up and gagged. But best to begin at the beginning: I started off picking avocados, then I was on one of those trawlers that freeze the fish then and there. Herring. Once we were caught in the ice --”

“You always said that travel was what you’d like to do,” I interrupted. “You always did like getting about.”

“You ...” She faltered, as if she couln’t quite remember me. “You didn’t. You were odd. You used to sit and just stare into space.”

“You’ve not been there then?” I asked.

“Listen,” said Dee, drawing herself up straight, “I just thought I’d look you up. The rest of them can go to hell, but you, I thought you’d be interested -- “ The man called Bill leaned over suddenly and kissed my sister on the lips. The pores around his nose were large and open. He had purple flecks on his cheeks and even on the lids of his eyes. His hair had been artificially streaked. Their lips squirmed wetly. My sister closed her eyes. A cobweb of saliva stretched between them, then suddenly broke as they pulled apart.

“What are you looking at?” Bill asked me angrily, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. I thought it was obvious. I saw that one of his teeth was chipped, and a line was beginning to cross the bridge of his nose, the flesh plumping up to either side of it.

“You’re still doing it!” he said.

“I like to look,” I replied. And then I thought: yes, that’s what I do. Looking. I can look at anything, at a carpet: the patterns, repeats or complex geometry all stemming from a single point; even on a plain one the fibres sometimes lean all one way and other times they’re a trampled chaos. I like to look, even at that. So I kept on looking at Bill, and saw how the ridge of his jaw was patchily shaved, the stiff hairs, just grey, growing through in clumps.

“For God’s sake!” he said, turning his face away.

“Don’t mind my sister,” said Dee. “Listen. Bill’s a director and he’s going to make a film about me, the story of my life and my adventures. Aren’t you? I dived for these pearls myself. There’s so much to tell.

“I spent twenty-nine days alone in the Gobi desert; I’ve got a pilot’s licence; I’ve tickled the soles of the feet of the Dalai Llama for nearly an hour and, believe me, he didn’t move a muscle. I’ve been in three movies, but you won’t have seen them -- it was in Turkey. I lost half a million dollars at cards -- wasn’t mine, but it would have been if I hadn’t lost it. Easy come, easy go. Look at my arm, see? It was done in Hong Kong by a bearded lady. Took over forty hours. And look at the muscle too. I took cyanide in a hijack death-pact and came to just as they were about to bury me. I’ve got three passports. I didn’t do much in the antipodes -- too burnt out. Lived in a cave, had a baby, got it adopted, joined a theatre group. Then I met the Sheik --”

Bill refilled our glasses. The ice had melted into small shivers; it was old and made the drink taste faintly of metal. Dee paused to swallow.

“What about you, er --” Bill said, “do you share your sister’s passion for adventure?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but --”

“She was always the quiet one,” Dee cut in. “It was the Sheik, you see, who gave me the half a million. He wanted to marry me, but I slipped out one morning and left for Canada. Now this might have got back: I killed someone in a bar in Montreal. Self-defence. I was tried, but I got off, of course. You didn’t hear? After that, I went to the Soviet Union, in the summer, mind you. Left, my jacket padded with manuscripts, just before they kicked me out --”

Yes, I thought, I like to look. In trains, buses, gardens, at films, even those in languages I don’t understand, on pavements and curbstones, in mirrors and water there’s much to see and I look. I look at faces, the folds round eyes, the sculpture of flesh that grows with time to reflect habits of thought and feeling, the many textures and colours of skin. I look at litter, wet paper, September leaves. I look at the sea: sometimes the sky is darker than the water, a negative. Sometimes the beach is smooth and damp, and as the sun sets the sand blazes brazen-gold. On the rocks, mussels build themselves into tight black bouquets. I like to look at the fossils, exposed in shale that softens, blurring in a matter of hours the sharp record of past millennia, dissolving them within a day. I like to look at the shadows of twigs mingled with clots of leaves, just stirring in the wind. At sand blown round grasses and debris, at frost on windows, at gulls landing like a scattering of crumbs on the sea. I like to look at the wind seen through glass, at the flow of traffic, its motorway lights tailing into the ditance, red retreat, oncoming white.

“Miles away,” Dee said to Bill, meaning me. “We’re twins, you know.”

“You’re not at all alike!” Bill said to Dee conspiratorially.

No, we’re not. She left, I stayed put. She has a story to tell; I sit and stare, look and see. While she was away I saw some sights. I saw our mother shrink. Her skin grew yellow, a damp envelope. A tumour burgeoned on her breast: it looked like a purple bubble but felt hard as iron. Layers of skin peeled away like tissue. I saw our brother eat his own shit and handprint it on the walls. I saw the snowdrops each spring. I saw a last breath, and the skin growing luminously pale. I pulled back the sheet and looked upon our mother’s bones, seemingly wrapped in bleached and shrunken cloth. I saw our brother, taller than any of us and fitter too, trying to catch sparrows in his useless hands. I looked at rainbows in soapsuds stretching and bursting, at a tangle of earthworms, wet, glistening; saw the scars where their ends had grown back. I saw the yellow stone of our house obscured by ivy, how the small dry roots pushed themselves into its pores and cracks. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt that it would break; I looked longer and the feeling went away.

Dee leaned closer towards me over the table.

“I spent three months in the Pacific Basin, stuck because of storms. I got married to an island chieftain, not that it counts now I’m back. Free as a bird --” She threw her head back and laughed. Dee, I thought, if I had been around the world, I would have seen a great deal more than you. That’s but one of my bitternesses.

“I’ve dined with kings,” she continued, “with shamans, beggars, gods incarnate, lunatics and transvestites. I’ve had more diseases than I can remember, unnamed fevers, various malarias, malnutrition, amoebic dysentery; in Nepal my liver grew so huge that it threatened to squash my lungs. My skin turned orange. I thought I would lose a leg ...”

Looking. It isn’t only a passive pleasure, a drinking in. Looking can be hard. Looking can vanquish time. Looking can change water to wine. It can wipe fear clean away: I have looked at entrails on the road until my gorge no longer rose and choked me, and now I can distinguish them and their circumstances. Looking can turn another’s eyes away. Looking can strip skins, drain blood. Looking can abolish the other. There’s a power in looking. I’ve discovered it over the years, and that day in the garden was the first day when I realised what I had, and the only time I dared its use.

Dee’s glass was empty. She sighed, and smiled at us both. White flecks had collected at the corners of her mouth. Bill was sweating, the top of his collar grey and damp.

“Why did you come back here?” I said.

“To see you, of course,” she lied, “and the house.”

“Yes,” said Bill, pushing back his chair, “I’d like to see the house.”

“You can’t film this house. It’s mine until our brother dies.” I spoke without turning to look at him. “Perhaps you’d like to see him? Seeing as the garden is so secluded, I let him go naked in the summer. He can’t speak. His face is slack, his body going the same way. He’ll eat anything.”

“Will you stop staring at me,” snapped Dee, glancing down at the bracelet of pearls which she had dived for herself through a world of impossible colour, blue and yellow fish, purple corals shimmering with refracted light. She was growing very pale. I looked, I looked hard for a very long time.

“I used to think you were beautiful,” I said softly. She was about to continue her account of places been, not seen. And then she would have made her request again, more forcefully. Her eyes were glancing offside, to check that Bill was listening; her grainy tongue-tip poked through parted lips, moist with bitter lemonade. I looked.

“Dee?” Bill leaned forward, touched her arm, grasped her wrist. His fingers left no mark. Then he ran from the garden, and the red car sped off down the coast road, clashing with the sea and sky.

Those lips are dry now, Dee. Leaves whirl around your legs. Dirt collects in the crook of your arm. Rain runs clean tracks over your face. Salt spray ages you, scouring at the sharpness of your features. Sometimes our brother pisses on you when I’ve locked him out; at other times he picks flowers and lays them at your feet. He at least, I think, can do what he wants. Dee, I am all eyes, and you are still and home at last, for ever in the garden: not flesh, nor bone, but stone.

Copyright © 1992, 2004 Kathy Page