Read Online The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online

of armoured men glinting like fish scales under the foreign sun. Once home, he could enjoy his tomb, and the placid skies of Southern England beyond the crypt. But now, poor Tony, with his script conferences in Rome and Zurich and the rubber corridors of the airport: he was always setting off and returning, to no avail.
    Tony’s eyes opened. It was a melancholy sight, for as the lids lifted I felt his uncertainty, and his depression with the world, and his puzzlement at the wall opposite, as if he had never been here in his life before. Then I felt annoyed. I had been a long way, further than him. I even despised his dreams. Yet his foolish frown at the wall, with its Victorian oil of a pig he had bought in the market a year ago and a Paris May ’68 poster I had once put up (it was a dark bilious yellow, de Gaulle’s powersaw nose had been ripped at the edge), suggested he had no real desire to be here at all. Itwas as if he had come for a one-night stand and stayed two years, after a drugged potion, an uneasy sleep.
    â€˜Do you want coffee?’
    I always address Tony as a guest, although we share the bills of the flat. In fact, he has made almost no impression on the flat, which is as hard and gloomy – in the ridiculous red brick building with the artificially grand hall, the syringa bush outside and the irritating unmown grass by the gate where cuckoo spit collects in summer and brushes my bare legs, and then is gone again – as before he arrived here. What difference could he have made? Sometimes I think, although Tony may imagine he’s returning from these journeys to me, it’s really his mother he yearns for. Ah, Mrs Marten! When will her next visitation be? Her thin legs, her jerking arms. The flat is mine in name only, she is the white magnet that draws him and me and the rooms we live in, she controls us and burns us dry. He leaps like a mouse to the sound of her voice. Yet, as if it’s too unbearable to marry a son and mother in this way, I often think instead of his past life, in another flat, with another girlfriend. I imagine him transformed, radiant: the girl is pliable and dark. What do these words mean? That I want him to have been capable once, at least, of being the other side of himself? And is my vision of the girl just another escape from my own skin into the opposite? I suppose so. Tony and I – as we are – are not very convincing.
    He noticed my hair. He asked me what the hell I’d done that for.
    â€˜I don’t know. I just did it. Last night.’
    â€˜Obviously. It wasn’t like that at the Berrings.’
    â€˜Why? Does it look so awful?’
    â€˜Of course it does.’
    â€˜But men cut their hair off like that. Why shouldn’t I?’
    â€˜Suit yourself.’
    I went into the bathroom. What was the point of going on like this? Certainly my face looked odd, but it was what I felt like at the moment rather than a picture to please someone else. I was in a transitional stage. The strawyspikes standing on my head announced my state of siege. I brushed my teeth and looked around for the jeans and denim jacket on the floor. There was no sign of them. My heart sank.
    â€˜I’m making scrambled eggs,’ Tony said from the bedroom.
    I heard him walk past on his way to the kitchen and I stared at myself intensely in the mirror. Sometimes his movements in the flat were like the stealings-up of an enemy spy, sometimes an outright military takeover. I could never tell where he would be next. I dreaded meeting him in the passage, as if our passing there only underlined our meaningless lives in which we were anyway going in the opposite direction to each other.
    â€˜Do you want scrambled eggs or not?’
    â€˜Have you by any chance seen a pair of jeans anywhere?’
    I had given myself away. If they weren’t there I didn’t know what I could do. I thought of the outside of the building where I lived, the pretentious