Nicola Griffith - Always

One hour and fifty minutes from now.

I turned my laptop on again, and opened the e-mail from Luz.

I just finished a book by Lloyd Alexander have you read any? They’re okay but not as good as Narnia I borrowed them from my friend Natalie.

Had she mentioned Natalie before?

Natalie says they’re for kids but I might like them, she’s also lent me one called Eragon that she says is excellent. I read the first page but then Aba told me to turn the light out and not read anymore tonight so I’m writing to you instead.

Perhaps I should write to Adeline about the need to explain the spirit as well as the letter of the law when making suggestions to Luz. Adeline still thought of the computer as a complicated typewriter. It wouldn’t occur to her that with the lights off, Luz could send e-mail, surf the Web, work on her LiveJournal, add to her Sims family. It was doubtful that she knew Luz and I talked to each in any other way than the stiff little thank-you notes Adeline made her write, fountain pen on lined paper— Thank you very much for paying for my new dresser and desk. They are mission style, stained medium oak, and will be very useful when I do my homework —and then included with the progress report she dutifully sent every month, a list of expenses, church events, and health or educational matters. The handwritten notes were grammatically perfect. I suspected Luz wrote a rough draft and Adeline then went over any mistakes and had Luz copy it out in her best hand. Perhaps that’s something I should be doing with these e-mails.

But it was Adeline’s role to correct Luz’s grammar and tend to her manners, not mine.

It doesn’t matter what she calls you, Mama or Tante or Aud, if legally you are her mother, somewhere inside she will one day expect you to behave as one.

But what did that mean, exactly?

IN MYmother’s suite, the afternoon sun fell against the eastern corner of the sitting room and spilled over the carpet and up the legs of the coffee table. It flashed on her wedding ring, white and yellow gold, geometric Italian design, and the enameled Norwegian flag pin in her lapel. She was talking about her day: meetings at Microsoft, a tour of the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, and an honorary marshal spot in the Syttende Mai independence day parade. She saw me looking at the flag. “I forgot to take it off,” she said, and pulled it casually from the silk. She dropped it on the table and cradled her coffee, and continued her account of all the Americans celebrating their Norwegian heritage, eating polse and ice cream, the children wearing bright red bunad, the Sons of Norway with their heavy banners and the fiddlers dancing behind them. Every now and again she would pause, and wait for me to add something, and when I didn’t, she would go on.

Every now and again, too, she tilted her head. She knew I’d come to talk to her about something.

Help me, I wanted to say. Talk to me about how it was. Tell me about family.

“…realize that today is short notice, but perhaps tomorrow? If you’re well enough.”

Dinner. “Yes, tomorrow would be fine. Thank you.”

“And your friend, would he like to come?”

“I’ll ask him.” It was quarter to four. I had to get cash. “Yes, probably.”

She put her cup down, smoothed her dress. “Good. Tomorrow it is, then. Although if you don’t have plans for tonight… ?”

“I have plans.”

She nodded, and we stood, and I was struck by how she moved. She wore a dress—not a suit, not a gown, but a dress—and she was happy. She was tired and a little tense, but underneath it all she was at home with herself in a way I’d never thought I’d see. When I was a child, I had dreamt of how she might be in a perfect world—the grin, the hug, the surprise trip to the zoo, the maternal mysterious knowledge of my innermost secret desire for a ham sandwich or chocolate biscuit—but I’d never imagined this lightness, a woman who finally had some air folded into her mix, who had risen like a fairy cake.

“I’m…” But there wasn’t time. “Thank you. I’m happy for you. It’s good to see you.”

She laid her hand on my upper arm briefly—her fingertips touched the hidden scar. “Audhumla.” The giant cow from the beginning of the world, who was made of frost, and licked the frost from stones. I had forgotten. She had first called me that when I was five, and she had found me sucking the creamy ice that had risen from a milk bottle left on the doorstep at dawn and frozen. Then she had laughed. Now she didn’t.

ROOM SERVICEhad called and left the champagne. I counted out eleven one-hundred -dollar bills, and then again, and left the two slight stacks next to each other on the sideboard. I stowed the rest in the drawer beneath the TV, with the remote. Now I had half an hour to shower, and arrange the furniture and lighting. The welcoming ambience wasn’t strictly necessary, and might not make any difference to the end result, but I wished to acknowledge that although my companion might be bought and paid for, she was a human being. It seemed only polite.

AT 4:32 ,there was a confident knock on my door.

“I’m Isabella,” she said, in a voice like myrrh, and I let her in.

She took it all in—the chilling champagne and two glasses, my bare feet and still-damp hair, the lack of underwear beneath silk shirt and trousers, the closed inner drapes in the sitting room and the bedroom door standing ajar and showing a hint of shadow and candlelight—in one sweeping glance, and said, “Thank you,” when I offered to take her wrap. It slid from her bare shoulders into my hands like an offering. Her skin smelled of heat and spice. I carried the light wrap to the closet, and took my time hanging it.

The cash was gone when I returned, both piles.

She looked out over the city while I poured the champagne, and when I sat on the sofa, she sat at my feet as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and laid her hand on my thigh.

“Aud,” she said, “it is very good to meet you,” and I wanted to believe her. Her eyes were sunlit honey. Summer eyes. Nothing to do with frost or snow or death.

“It’s very good to meet you, Isabella,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say, because her hand had started to stroke my thigh, almost absentmindedly, and she was looking at me as though I were her queen.

“Aud, it’s an unusual name.”

“Yes.”

“Are you visiting from another country?”

It felt like it.

“Aud. Am I pronouncing it right?”

“Yes. It’s Norwegian, after Aud the Deepminded. She founded Iceland.”

“Iceland,” she said. “I hear it’s a beautiful country. Contradictory. Ice and glaciers and molten lava. And hot springs.”

And so controlling of its citizens: only certain things on television, certain names legally allowed.

“You have such lovely muscle here, such strength.” She stroked down, paused thoughtfully, stroked up, ending just a fraction higher than she’d started. Her cheekbones shimmered, as though gilded. Through the thin silk of my trousers her hand was warm and alive. “Do you like to work out?”

“Um?”

“You work out?”

“Yes.”

She propped her cheek on her fist and went on stroking. “Swimming? Or perhaps some other kind of sports.” She knelt like a handmaid, eyes never leaving mine, waiting for a signal. “Tell me what kind of sports you like.”

“Competitive.” I tried to organize my thoughts but she was calling heat from me as effortlessly as flame from a lamp, and my mind was drowning.

She bent and pushed off her shoes—her scalp was white and clean, her hair smelled of attar of roses—then leaned across me for the champagne. Her breasts plumped warmly on my legs for a moment and then she topped up my glass. I should be doing that. I should be doing all sorts of things. But all I could focus on was her hand.