Sean Dixon - The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

To Romy, who was the perfect Lacuna Cabal member, this was a blow.

‘No, Missy, we’re not.’

‘Oh, Romy, you’re not? You’re speaking of more serious things?’

‘Yes we are.’

‘Could you share them with the group?’

‘Uh.’

‘Books suck, Missy, essentially, is what I was saying. Okay? Happy?’

This from Emmy, who opted in her newfound self-destructive manner to deflect attention from Romy – possibly the only kind thing she will ever do for anyone in this story. She went on. ‘Because for me they don’t do what they’re supposed to do when they need to do them most.’

Missy, shocked, spluttered something about how books, in fact, ‘have no needs, Emmy’.

‘All I know is,’ Emmy continued, ‘and this is what I was telling the poor embarrassed Romy, all I know is, I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cosy little book, but I can’t read them any more, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.’

Missy, trying to affect a sympathetic tone, began to assure Emmy that we all knew about her ‘circumstances’, an ir resistibly vague term that prompted Priya to lean over and ask Romy, whisperingly, what those ‘circumstances’ might be.

‘Priya here doesn’t,’ corrected Emmy. ‘But you were saying?’

‘Emmy, if you’re not available for the necessary suspension of disbelief through these tragic circumstances of –’

‘Missy, I’m not saying my circumstances are tragic. God forbid thinking they’re tragic. I know they’re common, they’re so common that, who knows, they might even happen to you one day.’

To Emmy, Missy presented the image of manless perfection.

‘Can we get down to the next book?’

‘Sure, shit, whatever, shit, sure.’

But it was not as easy as all that. Missy had let loose the Id, and it wasn’t going to be so easy to allow it to slip back into the dark crevice from whence it had come.

Priya spoke up now – lovely, sunny Priya – suggesting helpfully that Missy ‘say what the book is going to be so we can get it over with’. To Missy’s explosion of protest, Priya countered that, ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle will vote for whatever you want them to, Missy … ’

Missy, mining a deep-core reserve of calm, asked, ‘What is this, a mutiny?’

‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ said Priya.

‘But it’s not even true,’ countered Missy. ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle can vote however they wish, and besides, it’s not my fault that our resident maverick, Runner Coghill, is missing today.’

Romy said, ‘Runner Coghill is always missing on decision days. It’s because she can’t stand the Final Indulgence. She thinks it’s stupid.’

Missy fixed Romy with a very frank look. ‘Well, I don’t have any sympathy for her then.’

‘Missy, she just lost her sister.’

‘What does that have to do with anything? Anyway, that was six months ago!’

‘It’s harder when it’s your twin.’

‘Oh, is it now?’

‘Yes!’

‘That’s just a crutch.’

Missy did say those words: ‘That’s just a crutch.’ It is recorded in the Book of Days. 12But she only said them because she didn’t want to lose control of the argument, and that depended entirely on her belittling Runner’s intentions. Romy was shocked and silenced by the monstrous assertion, and Missy’s work was done. 13

And so there followed a moment or two when it seemed like the dark cloud of the Lacuna Id had passed. Until Romy, moving on, suggested they take up The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, a book about elephants.

12When an actress in Emmy’s play about the Lacuna Cabal (which, last time we checked, bore the overblown title, The Girls Who Saw Everything ) was asked to speak a line just like that one presented above, she protested that no one would ever be so cruel as to say such a thing: no one would ever claim that the expression of pure grief for the loss of a sister could be described as ‘just a crutch’. The actress reportedly demanded a line-change, which Emmy, to her credit, refused to grant, and the whole rehearsal ground to a halt, never to be recovered. The actors weren’t getting paid anyway and, since they were running on their own steam, felt they had the moral right to say lines or not say lines as they pleased. Only a well-paid actor, they all agreed, could be expected to spout lines that were not properly aligned with her own heart and conscience. The bigger the paycheque, the greater the possibility for emotional investment in garbage. Emmy reportedly had to spend two weeks after that filing down a shiny new set of horns that had popped out of her forehead.

13Also, for the record, a vote by Runner with Romy, Priya and Emmy against Missy, Aline, Jennifer and Danielle would bring about a tie. Since the deciding vote in a tie goes to the executive and Missy was the execu tive, the power came in the end right back around to her. This she knew, perfectly well.

This was unfortunate. Not only was Missy against reading a book about elephants or any other animals, but she was also, for the moment at least, against Romy. So in her argument against ‘the elephant book’, she matter-of-factly revealed some private information about how Romy had become distraught over the deaths of some rabbits in Watership Down , a book she’d read outside the auspices of the club. The deaths in this elephant book, she pointed out, were much worse than the rabbit deaths: they were harrowing, terrible, horrible deaths, and the entire, like, herd was always aware of it. ‘It’s a really depressing book.’

‘Wow, dead elephants,’ said Romy, mortified by Missy’s public revelations. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she wished that something would occur that might annihilate the memory of her suggestion.

And then something did. Miraculously, from the other end of the floor there came a most welcome interruption: a voice, high, piercing and clear: ‘Either I’m delirious or the essence of my vulva is filling the warehouse!’

(!)

(Well, that’s what she said!)

Runner would not have minded what we have written here. In fact she would have approved of our informing the reader that she had a great interest in gynaecological terminology, specifically those words relating to the menstrual cycle. She was obsessed with the idea of the streamlined cycle among women who worked together in groups for any length of time. Her enthusiasm over such matters was embarrassing but also understandable, since her frailty was such that there was probably nothing much going on down there. She had told Romy once that she hadn’t had any real activity since well before Ruby had died, 14and even then there had never been much. More of a trickle than a torrent. For her, PMS meant paltry month’s supply.

In other words, the scent of Runner’s vulva was most assuredly not filling the warehouse, though the scent of her language surely was. Before we had a chance to turn around, she had already moved on to the dreaded question.

‘How many have gotten their periods today?’

But then we saw. With Runner there was a man. A grown man. Neil was there too, but Neil was always there, by his sister’s side. No one, not even Missy, would have invoked the no-boys rule against Neil. But this was different. There was a grown man, and he was holding Runner in his arms, as if he were a combat soldier. Either Runner was engaged in some kind of elaborate practical joke that would take the rest of the evening to unfold, or she was seriously hurt. The man had a kind of half-embarrassed, half-apologetic look on his face, which would have been a very satisfying expression to observe if we weren’t all so totally freaked.