The Chrysalis Read online

  “Probably.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know you better than you know yourself.”

  Zac exhales audibly, as if he’s been winded.

  “I doubt it,” he says, trying to retain control.

  “It’s the consolation of old age,” I say. “Don’t grudge me it.”

  Another gust of wind, cooler this time, ripples over us and I shiver.

  “Let’s go in,” I say. “But keep me away from the bloody crow’s choir.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Zac

  Zac stares into the dark, eyes wide open. He cannot sleep. Sometimes, it gets this way when he cannot stop memories, feelings, sensations bombarding him. A good day is when he falls asleep instantly, preferably before Abbie has come to bed. He turns from his back onto his side and Abbie stirs, flipping over in her sleep and curling into his back. He listens intently but her breathing steadies. The duvet feels suffocating and he uses his toes to lift it gently back and create a draught over himself. Like the breeze in the garden today. He closes his eyes trying to rid himself of the way the old woman looked at him. The way she saw through him. It always feels like Marianne sees through him.

  The dress. He sees the dress again. He hates this memory, but loves it too. He gets the same kick of adrenaline every time, a rush of excitement and fear. Sometimes just the memory makes him tremble and a wave of heat breaks over him. A narrow escape. A liberation. A death. A birth. An awakening.

  Silk. It was peach silk. His sister Elicia was to be a bridesmaid and the dress hung on the outside door of her wardrobe because it was too long for the inside; the hem would get crushed inside. It had a plastic covering over it and when he first unzipped it, top to bottom, it was only to run his hand over the cool softness of it. He imagined, then, what it would feel like to wear such soft fabric next to your skin.

  It wasn’t deliberate. Not really. The door to Elicia’s room had been half open. He passed by, saw the light hitting the dress so that the colour looked alive, luminous. The house was empty save for him and he hesitated out there on the landing. The floorboards creaked. His senses were so heightened, so alive with possibilities, that the creak made him jump. He laughed nervously at himself, pushed open the door a little more. Peach, silk, light, softness… it was seductive. He stood for a full minute trying to work out what this was that he was feeling.

  He had taken a step into the room. The noise of the zip on the protective cover seemed loud in the stillness. Only a few inches at first, just enough to access the shoulder of it, run his fingers over the fabric. The neckline was studded with small creamy flowers with peachy inner petals. He wanted, instead, to run his fingers over the full length of the satin skirt so he ran the zip right to the bottom. What would it be like to wear such a thing next to your skin, he wondered. The thought that he might find out, that he might lift out the dress and try it on, was suppressed at first. It was a betrayal to creep into Alicia’s room this way, he thought shamefacedly.

  But perhaps she wouldn’t mind, he thought then. He tried out that thought, examining it. Certainly she would mind her fifteen year old brother wearing a girl’s dress. Everybody minds that. But in terms of him, Zac, wearing something of hers… no, that she would not mind, he thought. They were close, after all. It made the betrayal seem less. There was only one aspect to it then. The idea that as a boy, he should not wear a girl’s dress. And she would never know that, would she?

  His heart was hammering as he carefully lifted the dress out, held it up against himself to look in the wardrobe mirror. The peach colour was flattering even for a boy, he realised. It lit his face, made his skin seem creamier and brighter. But what would the silk feel like if he put it on properly? He had slipped his jeans and tee-shirt off, kicking them over towards the door. The petticoat of the dress rustled coolly under the silk as he removed it from the cover. God, what if he marked it? If the zip got stuck? For a moment he imagined the shame of being caught and hesitated, but he had come too far. He stepped into the skirt quickly before he could change his mind and pulled the bodice up to his shoulders. It wrinkled over his flat chest but he did not dare try to zip it.

  He looked in the mirror. It felt wonderful the way the full skirt hung, swung, moved with him. His eyes were on the dress until he suddenly caught sight of his face, black eyes shining back at him, lit from within. He almost didn’t recognise himself. A little gasp of a laugh exploded from deep inside him. What would it be like to wear high heels with this dress, to walk regally, to feel eyes on you? His feet were too big to wear Elicia’s shoes. But he walked in front of the mirror on his tiptoes, felt the sway of the fabric. He swirled round, as if dancing, felt a burst of happiness explode inside him, the way sherbet explodes on your tongue, sweet and sharp and tingling, full of fizz.

  There was a lipstick on the dressing table. He lifted it, opened it, gazed at it. It was a burnt orange colour and in a sudden rush before he changed his mind, he painted the outline of his lips, a little shakily, before placing it carefully back in the exact spot from which he’d lifted it. The pearlised texture felt strange on his lips and he ran his tongue over them. It was extraordinary the way the lipstick made him feel. On the one hand it felt a little alien and uncomfortable, heavy and sticky like jam, and yet, on the other it made him feel provocative, smouldering. He narrowed his eyes as he looked in the mirror, softening his outline, trying to see only a female form looking back. He realised suddenly how alive he felt and he swirled away from the mirror in a sudden surge of euphoria.

  Mid swirl, Zac froze suddenly. The crunch of wheels on gravel. Shit. Heart thumping, he dived to the side of the window and squinted out, pulling his arms out of the bodice of the dress as he did so. His parents and Elicia were home. He ran to the bed, falling against it in his haste to step out of the dress. A car door slammed. Footsteps on the path. Fingers trembling, he pulled the dress over the hanger and did up the zip. There was a key in the lock now, voices. Shit, shit, shit! The dress was twisting in the plastic cover.

  “Zac?”

  The voice rose up the stairwell.

  Zac clunked the hanger over the wardrobe door in panic and ran to the door sweeping up his jeans and tee shirt in his hand.

  “Zac? Are you home?”

  Clutching his clothes, Zac ran towards the bathroom.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” he shouted, and slammed the door of the bathroom behind him. He leant his back against the door and breathed deeply.

  He heard footsteps running on the stairs. Elicia. She went into her room but quickly came out again.

  “Hey Zac!”

  His heart thumped.

  “What?”

  “Result. Persuaded the old dears to bring in a takeaway.”

  “Nice one, sis.”

  “And the Brit Awards are starting in five minutes. Hurry up!”

  “Cool.”

  Zac sat on the edge of the bath and put his face in his hands, suddenly overwhelmed. What was that all about? So close. He would never do it again. Never. What had made him do such a crazy thing in the first place? He stepped into his jeans, put on his tee-shirt and as he unlocked the door, turned to check in the mirror.

  “Shit!” he said aloud and pulled the lock back quickly.

  He had forgotten the lipstick. His lips looked grotesque to him now, like a drag queen’s. He was foolish, ugly.

  “C’mon Zac!” shouted Elicia, disappearing downstairs again.

  He heard the thump as she jumped the bottom few stairs. Elicia always made the house alive with her noise and her energy. She made the veneer of normality that hid their dysfunction seem thicker, more cushioned. The thought surprised him as soon as it came into his head. Dysfunction? Were they really a dysfunctional family? From the outside they looked pretty normal, successful even. Two parents who owned their own home and weren’t divorced. A father who was a policeman and a coach for the local boys’ football team, and a mother who devoted herself to her family. Then there was E
licia, who was pretty and lively. Everyone loved her. Wasn’t that ‘normal’?

  So what was their family’s dysfunction? Zac asked himself. Well of course it was him. Zac was the reason his father mooched morosely through life, silent and surly, spilling beads of disappointment or disapproval constantly as he went. That, in turn, was the reason his mother was in a permanent spiral of anxiety which annoyed his father more. Conchetta’s desire to make everyone happy, instead of simply her husband, made his father feel unsupported. His father, he suspected, wanted her to take a hard line with their son, ‘stamp out’ Zac’s silly, ‘soft’ ways.

  Zac grabbed a piece of toilet paper and scrubbed at his lips in disgust, so hard it hurt. Turning on the tap, he threw cold water over his face before chucking the paper into the toilet. The water rushed, and he watched the orange stained tissue swirl into the vortex before disappearing. He had to make sure it had really gone and he stood staring into the toilet, overcome by a sudden rush of deep self-loathing.

  Zac turned his face into the pillow at the memory. Of course, he had done it again but that first time was sharpest in his memory. There was always a trigger. The next time, it had been his mother’s tights in the washing basket, sheer evening tights with a light sheen. There was invariably something sensuous as well as sensual about these secret episodes, something to do with light and colour and texture, the feeling on his skin and then the feeling in his soul when he looked in the mirror. A simultaneous experience of fear and of peace. He could look in the mirror and see a strange hybrid creature looking back at him with scarlet lips, and dark manly hairs sticking through sheer stockings on his legs, and he would feel ugly and beautiful at the same time. But the most important thing was that he felt more strongly himself, more closely ‘Zac,’ than at any other time in his life.

  The pattern was always the same. Temptation, resistance, submission, euphoria, guilt, self-loathing. Temptation, resistance, submission, euphoria, guilt, self-loathing. Round and round and round…

  In her sleep, Abbie wrapped her leg round him and it felt like a chain. He longed to disentangle himself. In every way, really. To be free. To be Zac again. It was building into a pressure that he felt would one day explode inside him. He had tried to put it behind him, to tell himself that those old experiences were just normal, adolescent experimentation. They were in the past. But he found himself running his hands over Abbie’s things when she wasn’t there. He turned in bed to look at her face. Even scrubbed of make-up, she was lovely. Short, ditzy blonde curls. A pert little nose and full, cupid’s bow mouth. Her long lashes quivered momentarily and then her eyelids opened.

  “Hello,” she said, smiling sleepily. “Are you watching me?”

  “Go back to sleep,” murmured Zac, and he reached out a finger and closed her eyelids gently, like blinds. He leant forward and kissed her head and her breathing quickly steadied into a sleeping pattern.

  He cared about her, he really did.

  Face the truth, a voice inside his head urged.

  He closed his eyes as if closing them would make the voice stop.

  Face it.

  He ran a finger down her cheek. Her skin was so soft, childlike almost. He loved her but he suspected not in the way he should. It felt almost like the way he loved Elicia. That wasn’t enough. Not enough for him and not enough for Abbie. He looked at her face in repose and felt a stab of guilt. Abbie was a way of conforming, of pretending that everything was all right. That HE was all right. But he wasn’t. And she couldn’t make him all right.

  He was just using her.

  He remembered his father’s reaction when he first brought her home. His shock. The glimmer of relief that perhaps his son with the silly, floppy hair and the gentle manner was a chip off the old block after all. It had all been worth it for that look. Then there was the way his father had looked at Abbie. She had walked over to shake hands with Conchetta and he caught a fleeting glance from his father at her retreating figure. A flick of the eyes. My God, his father was watching his girlfriend’s ass! Zac felt torn between discomfort and amusement. He hoped Conchetta hadn’t noticed.

  “Do you want a beer?” his father had asked and a bubble of laughter rose in Zac’s throat. His father never offered him beer. The grudging respect in the tone held the promise of something he had looked for all his life but which had never quite arrived: acceptance if not approval. It had once seemed unachievable but perhaps he could be a proper man after all. Strange, Zac mused, how he didn’t need to like his father to want his approval.

  Conchetta loved him unreservedly. He had no doubt of that. He didn’t even need to try. But that look that his father had given him when he saw Abbie, that thin, delicate thread of something, felt so very hard to give up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Marianne

  Raymond was quiet for a long time after we returned from France. There was no outlet for him anymore, I understood that. I was foolishly glad that Saint Estelle was behind us – as if no outlet meant ‘it’ would not come out. How stupid I was!

  Raymond returned to the school where he taught art but this time, he did not have his French trip to look forward to in the autumn break, as he would normally have had.

  “You can do this?” I asked him one day. I did not even have to explain what “this” was.

  He shrugged.

  “I have no choice.”

  “I can be enough for you?”

  He smiled, a little sadly I thought, and opened his arms to me. I walked into them and buried my head in his shoulder.

  He did not say yes, though. He did not say, “Yes Marianne, you can be enough.”

  “Everything that has happened,” he murmured against my head. “It is my fault.”

  I did not contradict him, not least because I knew that the guilt he felt tied him to me. As long as he felt it, he would remain in his cage.

  After a few months, I talked to him about selling our flat in France. I made the mistake of doing it in his studio when he was working.

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “Raymond, we cannot go back there.”

  “For God’s sake Marianne, I know that!” he said, and he lashed out with his closed fist so violently that he swept everything from his desk: tubes of paint and brushes and pencils and notepads. A final paper fluttered down in the ensuing silence. His venom shocked me. Fury was so out of character.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he repeated quietly, bitterly. “Don’t you?”

  I looked at the debris on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  “We all get angry,” I said.

  His eyes flashed darkly at me.

  “Yes.”

  “What is the point of keeping the flat?” I asked.

  He leant his head forward into his hands, fingers gripping his dark hair. I sensed that the anger and despair were caused by me rather than simply the situation.

  “I am not ready,” he said.

  He would never be ready, I realised. I knew he felt as if selling the flat would be selling himself. It would be acknowledging that life was over, that Patrice was gone, that he would never find peace. There were moments, and this was one, when I fully glimpsed the torment that Raymond endured.

  I think for many years, there was a fantasy inside his head. He did not know how it was going to happen but he thought eventually there was going to be a moment of transformation, that he would emerge finally from the chrysalis and become this beautiful winged creature. Leaving France, never going back, was like admitting that he would always be an ugly, hairy caterpillar.

  “Besides,” Raymond had added, suddenly lifting his head from the desk. “We cannot draw attention to ourselves by selling up quickly.”

  He tried to put a practical spin on it, but I knew. For many years afterwards, he dealt with arrangements for the flat, not secretly exactly, but never bothering me with the details. I think perhaps he hired someone – I suspected Jasmine - to go in once or twice a year. Th
e place had been locked up the day we left, the shutters closed over and the rooms left in sombre darkness. When I thought of it, I imagined dust falling through the silent interior like debris through space. A pregnant pause in its history while it waited for someone to come in and throw open the shutters again, and let light spill onto its wooden floors.

  The key to the flat was in my jewellery box for many years. Still is. We never sold it. Strangely, I think of the flat more now than ever. Sometimes, when I look in the box for a string of pearls, or a pair of earrings, my fingers stumble upon the hard key at the bottom and I finger it for a moment and imagine. It was Raymond’s escape then and sometimes, I imagine it to be mine now. I pretend that I leave this place and go to the flat again, stopping at the pâtisserie on my way upstairs. A box with lilac ribbon. The way I imagine it, I am me again, able to walk up the stairs unaided. I fix myself some lunch, a little plate with smooth pâté and crusty bread and rocket salad with tomatoes, glistening with olive oil. I sit and eat, with the windows open, in shimmering light. It is all pretence, of course. But I have always been very good at pretending.

  I sense that in some way, Zac and I are both trapped. Perhaps that is another reason I feel drawn to him. He is tired today. I sit by the window in the lounge but I watch him as he gives out the afternoon medication. What else is there to do? He is patient and gentle as usual but I sense his tension. His skin has a greyish pallor and there are dark circles round his beautiful, inky eyes. Our eyes accidentally meet and he smiles wanly but I flick my eyes away as if I was not deliberately looking.

  “What’s wrong?” I say when he reaches me.

  “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong, Marianne. Why should there be?”

  “Hm,” I say.

  Zac turns to the trolley.

  “And you can take those away with you,” I tell him. “I’m not having them.”

  “Come on, Marianne,” he coaxes. “You know they have been prescribed for you.”