The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant Page A

in some demonstration of lack of feeling. Had he really not seen her at all? Yet I knew she was waiting there for me.

I SLEPT AND I woke. The walls of the bedroom and the humps under the covers that were our bodies and the dim piles of our clothes on tables and chairs that looked as if they had come adrift from the floor were like characters in a forgotten language: if we could understand them – the four walls which man had for so long constructed for himself, the two bodies welded together by Nature’s relentless urge, the familiar, perishable things which are kept for comfort – we would learn the world again, read the signs. But we’ve thrown down our blots. The image is more important than the real. The world swims beside its own satellite photograph, uneasily. And even in that room, where I had slept for years, there wasn’t only myself and Tony. There was the photo of the girl. It lay two inches from my nose, on the thick shadow of the bedside table. I could see its white edges: she was preserved in four walls of white, as we were. I was sleeping between them – from time to time I turned to stare at the outline of Tony on the pillow and then back at her again. I picked her up delicately, by her corners, so as not to put my thumb on her face. Even in the dark I could see her, only her face looked paler and her eyes even more profoundly obscure.
    I ached with loneliness. Tony’s reptilian movements had done nothing to stir or assuage me. I jammed my fingers up against my cunt and pressed on the soft flesh. I wanted to make a gate there, never to feel the desolate openness again. My hand made a five-barred gate over the entrance. I saw the girl in flashes, riding Tony in a sexual frenzy, her pale composure gone. I saw them at a table, eating – outside was a green river and trees, they were enclosed in their privacy.Sometimes I saw her alone, and this was worse. She was quite self-contained. There was nothing in her screaming for a wild ride through the night. She fitted in the world like a glove. It protected her as she moved through it. She was quite complete in herself.
    Jealousy. All this was quite untrue, of course. If she was half of me then she was incomplete, the half that was me she yearned for, her dreams of me were as much an invention as mine were of her. We envied and pitied each other, we begged for our fullness. Yet the joke in the whole matter was that these two halves were quite arbitrary – Tony, by needing us both, had split us in this way.
    It wasn’t a difficult thing to do. The Muse is female, and a woman who thinks must live with a demented sister. Often the two women war, and kill each other. I thought of the male Muse – or the male counterpart who is needed to make a woman complete in herself: he is yet to come. And as I lay hating the girl in the photo I wanted to expel her too, to throw her from my body. She had tormented me in childhood. She was always there, as she is now: with her secretive, slightly self-congratulatory manner that also suggests a passionate nature smugly concealed. She, my shadow who waits still in the street, is the definition of that vague thing, womanhood: a pact made with the eyes, signalled to men, that suggests women should pretend to enjoy a subservient position while ruling the men with ‘an iron hand in a velvet glove’. Men like her because she is so finite. She never dreams, there is no static around her head – this is reserved only for me, only for the other sister, and in the terrible competitiveness, it’s a battle she will always win.
    The night shifted slightly, a grey bar showed under the door, but it would stay there a long time before it advanced. My mind moved too – through dates, meetings, moods: when had Tony last seen her, why had he placed the photo in the kitchen drawer? How long had it been there? I thought of my face hanging over the kitchen table, as I was chopping, skinning,